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:2506.01928v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion-based language models offer a compelling alternative to autoregressive (AR) models by enabling parallel and controllable generation. Within this family, Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) currently perform best but still underperform AR models in perplexity and lack key inference-time efficiency features, most notably KV caching. We introduce Eso-LMs, a new family of models that fuses AR and MDM paradigms, smoothly interpolating between their perplexities while overcoming their respective limitations. Unlike prior work, which uses transformers with bidirectional attention as MDM denoisers, we exploit the connection between MDMs and Any-Order autoregressive models and adopt causal attention. This design lets us compute the exact likelihood of MDMs for the first time and, crucially, enables us to introduce KV caching for MDMs while preserving parallel generation for the first time, significantly improving inference efficiency. Com
arXiv:2503.10367v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Edge devices host domain-specific small language models (SLMs) with limited resources, while private clouds offer larger LLMs. We propose G-Boost, an adaptive edge-cloud framework that improves a deployed SLM's task performance without parameter updates. It formulates reasoning as a tree search, choosing at each step between SLM-only inference and SLM-LLM logit fusion---which transfers domain knowledge from the SLM's adapted version to the cloud LLM without exposing private data. A process reward model guides Monte Carlo tree search to select beneficial collaboration steps dynamically. The edge runs the SLM and search controller; the cloud hosts the LLM and reward model, exchanging only current context. Evaluated on GSM8K and MATH-500 with Qwen2.5 and LLaMA2, G-Boost outperforms the SLM alone, static fusion, and fine-tuned baselines, gaining up to 8.6 and 10.7 percentage points over MCTS and Proxy-Tuning, respectively. Results confirm
arXiv:2502.19058v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Synthetic mathematical data has become an important resource for scaling the reasoning capabilities of large language models, yet errors in generated questions and solutions can substantially undermine its value. We introduce MathDebugger, a type-aware benchmark for evaluating whether models can detect and diagnose errors in synthetic mathematical data. MathDebugger contains 2,000 correct questions, 2,000 erroneous questions balanced across four error types, and 2,000 annotated solutions, including 610 erroneous solutions spanning three error types. Each instance is manually verified and labeled for correctness, with erroneous instances further assigned a fine-grained error category. Human annotation achieves substantial to near-perfect agreement, with per-type Fleiss kappa ranging from 0.69 to 0.91. We evaluate 14 representative large language models and three process reward models. The results show that even strong reasoning models
arXiv:2608.05138v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern Greek is absent from NVIDIA's Nemotron retrieval models and from major multilingual retrieval benchmarks, despite being important for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in legal, energy, financial, and medical applications. We present an end-to-end adaptation of the Nemotron retrieval stack for Modern Greek, including corpus mining, synthetic supervision, retrieval model training, reranker adaptation, reader fine-tuning, and a new benchmark called HERA. Our study shows that a parameter-free BM25 baseline outperforms several off-the-shelf multilingual dense retrieval models on specialist Greek corpora. After fine-tuning on 65,773 Greek retrieval pairs, a Nemotron 1B embedder improves nDCG@10 from 0.362 to 0.835 and substantially outperforms its unadapted counterpart. The learned language competence transfers to general-domain Greek, although the advantage over BM25 remains domain-dependent. We further adapt a cross-encoder reran
arXiv:2608.05086v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language models differ in how safely they behave and these differences are measured by safety benchmarks. But aggregated benchmark scores are hard to trust and interpret, because benchmarks duplicate one another, correlate heavily, and models may sandbag when they detect evaluation. To address these issues, we draw on Item Response Theory (IRT), a statistical toolkit for measuring these latents from performance on items with inferred psychometric properties. We fit IRT models to eight safety benchmarks across 192 language models, the largest psychometric analysis of LLM safety evaluations to date, and contribute three results. First, we find that three interpretable factors of refusal strictness, truthfulness, and contextual harm explain most of the variance between models across benchmarks. Second, psychometrically selected items recover full benchmark scores with lower error than random subsets of the same size, and roughly ten adapti
arXiv:2608.05080v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Critic-free group-based reinforcement learning has become a scalable approach for post-training large language models. However, most existing methods allocate the same number of rollouts to every task and trajectory state, even though some rollouts provide much more useful learning signals than others. Recent work has started to treat rollout generation as an adaptive decision, but two important limitations remain. First, intervention strategies are often based on fixed heuristics and therefore cannot adjust as the policy changes during training. Second, these methods usually decide only how many rollouts to generate, without explicitly controlling where and how to intervene. To address these limitations, we propose Recoverability-Aware Intervention Learning (RAIL), a training-time framework that learns how to generate rollouts based on the improvement produced by each intervention. RAIL models intervention selection as an online contex
arXiv:2608.05045v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Released aligned large language models remain vulnerable to malicious downstream finetuning. Existing defenses are largely designed for the fine-tuning-as-a-service (FTaaS) paradigm or rely on downstream users to follow additional safety procedures, and therefore do not directly address the setting we study: a provider controlled partially protected open-weight (PPOW) release setting in which most weights remain trainable while a small safety-critical component is preserved at release. We propose a Unidirectional Safety Gate (USG), instantiated as a Null Space Cubic Layer together with an Inverse Adapter inserted after the final Transformer layer. During downstream fine-tuning, the cubic layer suppresses or blocks gradients from harmful samples whose hidden states fall in a calibrated protected region, while the Inverse Adapter restores the base model's forward behavior. In practice, we calibrate a threshold using defender-held harmful
arXiv:2608.04962v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training improves the reasoning capabilities of large language models, but autoregressive rollout generation remains a major efficiency bottleneck. Speculative decoding can accelerate generation, yet applying it during RL is difficult because the target policy continually evolves: static proposers become stale, while frequent drafter updates add substantial overhead. We introduce SpecRoll, a speculative rollout engine that preserves the target model's sampling distribution while adapting at two timescales. Lightweight future-token heads generate parallel proposals, while our proposed Reflex module uses delayed verifier feedback to perform bounded, trajectory-local hidden-state corrections without backpropagation. A complementary slow path updates the head parameters only when sustained degradation is detected. SpecRoll combines these mechanisms with concurrency-aware sparse-tree verification and exact ta
arXiv:2608.04949v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unified Multimodal Relation Extraction (UMRE) aims to identify intra-modal and cross-modal relations between textual entities and visual objects. However, existing UMRE studies still encounter two critical issues: ignoring inherent aleatoric uncertainty causes noise propagation, and deep-seated heterogeneity between distinct modal distributions hinders alignment. To address these issues, we propose the Uncertainty-Guided UMRE Network (UG-UMRE). Specifically, we design an Uncertainty-Driven Unimodal Augmentation (UDUA) module, which models features as Gaussian distributions based on the Variational Information Bottleneck. By incorporating an uncertainty-aware self-supervised contrastive learning mechanism, UDUA effectively filters out noise while maintaining semantic consistency. Furthermore, we introduce the Joint Aleatoric Uncertainty Alignment (JAUA) module as a global semantic pre-calibration mechanism. JAUA leverages probabilistic d
arXiv:2608.04926v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As chart images, tabular data, and visualization code play increasingly important roles across diverse domains, cross-representation understanding across these modalities poses fundamental challenges for AI systems: the relationships across representations are inherently \textit{one-to-many}, supervision is ambiguous and costly, and model optimization lacks a principled signal that is both direction-adaptive and representation-generalizable beyond task-specific objectives. We introduce CoCoEvolve to improve consistency across chart, table, and code representations. Instead of treating cross-representation mapping as a one-to-many problem, we define explicit one-to-one correspondences and optimize models using agreement between representations, without additional annotations. During training, CoCoEvolve@Train performs co-evolution across the chart-table-code cycle, while CoCoEvolve@Test applies the same consistency objective at inference
arXiv:2608.04885v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Standard accuracy metrics for VLMs often mask significant reliability failures in sensitive domains. In this work, we utilize a histopathology-validated brain MRI dataset to systematically assess the diagnostic robustness of four VLM families under evidence-preserving perturbations. By reordering anatomical slices and swapping target label positions, we evaluate whether models maintain consistent predictions when clinical evidence remains invariant. Our results reveal significant vulnerabilities in presentation-order stability, with models exhibiting prediction flips in up to 48.9% of cases under simple sequence reversals. We further identify a textual selection bias, where label reordering triggers inconsistent diagnoses in up to 67.8% of cases despite identical visual inputs. Negative-control tests further reveal diagnostic overcommitment: models generate categorical diagnoses in up to 76.1% of cases after expert-annotated lesion slic
arXiv:2608.04788v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model agents are commonly trained through reinforcement learning with sparse trajectory-level rewards, which offer limited guidance on how strongly individual tokens should be updated. On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD) addresses this by re-scoring generated tokens under a privileged replay view to obtain dense, token-level supervision. However, we identify a confounding issue: the resulting support may reflect both the privileged information contained in the replay view and score shifts induced by the replay scaffold, making it difficult to attribute the support specifically to that information. This issue is especially pronounced when future environment observations serve as privileged information, since replaying them requires reconstructing an extended scaffold that itself perturbs token scores. To resolve this confounding, we propose Observation-Calibrated Self-Distillation (OCSD), which contrasts two structurally ma
arXiv:2608.04759v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have made substantial progress, their spatial reasoning may still produce intermediate judgments inconsistent with the input image, allowing errors to propagate through the reasoning chain and affect the final answer. Existing methods mainly improve spatial reasoning through training or additional spatial information, without considering whether the reasoning process itself is faithful to the model input. Our study shows that unfaithful reasoning chains significantly reduce final-answer accuracy. To address this issue, we propose a modular and training-free framework for spatial reasoning verification and correction. The framework constructs a Spatial Evidence Graph (SEG), which associates atomic spatial evidence extracted from Chain-of-Thought reasoning with visual entities, spatial relations, source steps, and visual evidence. Spatial Evidence Reliability Assessment (SERA) evaluates th
arXiv:2608.04750v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Similes provide a compact and expressive way to describe visual characteristics in text prompts. Recent text-to-image models (t2i models) can produce visually compelling outputs from simile prompts, yet even frontier models frequently misinterpret the metaphorical vehicle and confuse it with the object. These systematic failures reveal a gap between figurative language and object-level visual grounding in t2i models. To investigate this issue, we propose a scalable evaluation framework for simile understanding. Our framework includes (1) a controlled simile dataset in which metaphorical vehicles are drawn from a predefined set of object-detectable categories and combined with diverse templates, (2) automatic grounding metrics based on YOLO (You Only Look Once) detection, and (3) text encoder layer analysis using Diffusion Lens to track how metaphorical vehicles emerge during generation. Experiments across architecturally diverse t2i mod
arXiv:2608.04565v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based search agents are widely used for information-seeking tasks, but their reliance on external tool returns introduces a critical security risk: web content retrieved during execution is untrusted, exposing agents to prompt injection and goal hijacking. Prior work on search-agent safety primarily focuses on static web-content injection, but modern agents issue follow-up queries and cross-check competing sources, so a single injected page is often diluted or rejected. We show that the channel delivering search and page observations is a fragile security boundary: beyond exposing the agent to a single poisoned page, a mediated search interface can repeatedly steer how the agent gathers evidence and forms its final answer. Under a constrained tool-intermediary threat model, appending only one controlled result per query can substantially increase attack success when the evidence is coordinated across the agent's trajectory. We study
arXiv:2608.04519v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Benchmarking machine unlearning methods is critical to understand whether sensitive knowledge is removed from large language models (LLMs) or not. Current unlearning benchmarks include mainly single-hop questions and a narrow set of multi-hop questions. Although effective, they still face two challenges. (1) Knowledge is not isolated, whereby diverse multi-hop reasoning paths can potentially induce knowledge leakage than normal queries. (2) Unlearning may be fragile: unlearned knowledge can be partially recovered through recovery attacks such as lightweight post-unlearning adaptation, making static evaluation insufficient. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce \unlearning as a novel benchmark to understand robust LLM knowledge removal across diverse reasoning paths and recovery attacks. We experiment with this benchmark on 3 models, 6 unlearning methods, and 2 carefully curated datasets. Results show that existing methods are vulnerabl
arXiv:2608.04515v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Slice-based MLLMs leverage mature 2D encoders by representing 3D volumes as sequences of 2D slices. However, this slice-wise formulation produces thousands of visual tokens that burden the LLM backbone, many of which capture overlapping visual evidence across adjacent slices. To understand how effectively a growing visual token budget improves performance, we perform scaling analyses on two 3D medical VQA benchmarks and find diminishing returns: cost keeps rising while accuracy saturates, and improving in-plane resolution is more effective than adding slices at comparable budgets. The budget should therefore be allocated more selectively rather than simply enlarged, yet most token compression methods are designed for 2D images or videos, where redundancy arises from spatial layout or temporal motion rather than from near-duplicate content along the depth axis. We present CARVE, a training-free framework that compresses visual tokens pri
arXiv:2608.04477v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cloud-based language model services routinely process prompts containing sensitive information. Obfuscation-based defenses---including ObfusLM, SentinelLMs, TextObfuscator, and DPNR---mitigate this risk by transforming prompt representations before transmission, offering a lightweight alternative to cryptographic solutions. We show these defenses provide far less protection than previously believed. We present DeepInvert, a semi-supervised embedding inversion attack that recovers original tokens from obfuscated representations with higher accuracy than prior methods. The key insight is that unlabeled obfuscated embeddings retain exploitable semantic structure despite perturbation. DeepInvert combines supervised training on labeled shadow data with a novel unsupervised consistency objective over unlabeled target embeddings, alternating between the two via a mixed training pipeline. Defense-aware adaptations further extend the attack to d
arXiv:2608.04472v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The development of foundation models (FMs) is crucial for advancing endoscopic image analysis. However, existing endoscopy FMs mainly rely on self-supervised learning from uni-modal images or videos, overlooking the rich semantic knowledge contained in clinical reports. Furthermore, effectively leveraging these records is hindered by a fundamental modality gap: structured anatomical descriptions are not naturally mapped to specific frames within the high-redundancy, uncurated visual streams. In this paper, we present EndoVLM, a novel vision-language FM pre-trained on over 348K endoscopic examinations, each pairing a clinical report with its corresponding image collection. An Anatomy-Guided Sparse Pooling mechanism utilizes textual descriptions as queries to drive sparse attention, efficiently aggregating semantically salient frames into anatomy-specific visual representations across redundant image-sets. Next, a Progressive Semantic-Awa
arXiv:2608.04452v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-resolution pixels and crop or zoom tools give multimodal large language models the ability to inspect an image, but they do not provide a reliable task-conditioned policy for deciding where to inspect. Q-CueGraph makes this decision explicit. It maps a question and an image representation to budgeted, coordinate-level observations for a frozen reader. Text-rich images use a reusable OCR/layout graph; natural-image search instantiates query-conditioned visual nodes behind the same selection, composition, and budgeting interface. Optional utility refinement learns which candidate crops the frozen reader can use from training-answer correctness, without region-box supervision. With a frozen Qwen2.5-VL-7B reader, Q-CueGraph reaches 0.833 accuracy on V*Bench versus 0.696 for full-image inference from a 19% image-area budget, and reaches 92% of full-image ANLS on InfographicVQA from about half the image area. Across six benchmarks, expli
arXiv:2608.04426v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce Predictive State Retrieval (PSR), a task in which a model observes a short video prefix and a temporal question about an object's future state, then retrieves instances from other videos or images that depict that state. Unlike action anticipation, which predicts a label, moment retrieval, which localizes an observed event within a video, or video generation, which synthesizes pixels, PSR combines anticipation with cross-instance retrieval across multiple temporal horizons. We construct a benchmark from four datasets with graded, human-validated ground truth, difficulty tiers, and an oracle ceiling. We also propose LFTR, a lightweight retriever with frozen encoders that predicts a question- and horizon-conditioned future latent and matches it in complementary semantic and visual spaces. A ceiling decomposition reveals a clear bottleneck: the true future state is highly retrievable once specified, whereas every predictor we
arXiv:2608.04407v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Memory-efficient matrix optimizers such as Sinkhorn gradient descent remove most AdamW optimizer state for dense Transformer matrices, but direct application to Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) training is unreliable. We study this failure in a controlled 110M-parameter nanowhale DeepSeek-style MoE pretraining setting. A SAGE/Sinkhorn hybrid reduces optimizer state from 0.883GB to 0.331GB but degrades evaluation loss to 3.8265, far above the AdamW baselines observed in the same setup (3.58--3.64 across the seeds we study). We show that routed MoE expert matrices are the dominant failure point: their gradients are conditional, temporally varying, and poorly served by stateless Sinkhorn normalization. We propose MESH, a hidden-momentum Sinkhorn update for MoE experts. MESH restores a temporal first-moment signal through the gradient-buffer lifecycle, without storing the expert first moment as optimizer state. MESH is an optional block-preconditio
arXiv:2608.04405v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-context large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, yet self-attention remains a major efficiency bottleneck -- especially during decoding -- due to the necessity of repeatedly processing ever-growing key-value (KV) caches. Existing sparse attention reduce computation by attending to fewer KV pairs, but often suffer from substantial accuracy degradation, require additional training, or rely on expensive hashing. In this work, we present BinaryPC, a training-free, data-aware hashing-based sparse attention for long-context LLMs. BinaryPC constructs compact binary hash codes and corresponding hash function by computing binary principal components of data. Unlike Locality-Sensitive Hashing (LSH) with data-independent random projections or learned non-linear hashing methods, BinaryPC constructs binary codes that explicitly preserve the structural information of data without requiring gradient-based
arXiv:2608.04289v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-horizon agents increasingly use persistent memory and tools to take actions with external side effects. A central failure mode is premature commitment: an agent acts before resolving whether its memory grounding is stale, conflicting, incomplete, or corrupted. We formalize this problem as safe commitment under memory uncertainty and introduce SafeCommit, a risk controlled layer between agent reasoning and external execution. The layer constructs a calibrated set of plausible latent worlds from memory, observations, tool outputs, provenance, and policy constraints. It permits a side effectful action only when a conformal action certificate shows that the action is safe in every retained world. Otherwise, it selects a low-side-effect probe that targets the worlds blocking certification, or returns a conservative fallback. Under calibrated world coverage, the probability of an unsafe certified commit is at most the target level {\alph
arXiv:2608.04271v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Just like software and hardware, business processes are susceptible to vulnerabilities that can lead to product quality issues, delays, and increased costs. Business process vulnerabilities can arise from a variety of sources, including conflicting requirements, ambiguous documentation, invalid measurement spec-ifications, omission of quality checks, or implementations that differ from speci-fications. MIRABELLE is a system that identifies and characterizes business logic (BL) vulnerabilities from available business process representations, in-cluding ISO 9000/9001 documentation, user guides, work instructions, and pro-cess execution logs. MIRABELLE leverages recent advances in AI/ML to pro-cess available business process documentation and generate attributed graph rep-resentations of the business logic that can be processed using both graph and for-mal logic approaches for identifying potential vulnerabilities. However, extract-ing the
arXiv:2608.04244v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) make grounded predictions in real-world scenes by combining visual and textual cues, yet existing benchmarks rarely reveal how they arbitrate between these evidence sources when they conflict. We introduce SIGNPOST-Bench, a controlled counterfactual benchmark for evaluating text-vision conflict resolution. Each source image is transformed into a counterfactual quintuplet of Original, Blank, Similar, Random, and Adversarial variants. Synthetic, localized scene-text interventions are designed to preserve non-textual content, enabling paired measurements of changes in localization performance and directed shifts toward geographic targets introduced by conflicting text. SIGNPOST-Bench contains 5,111 counterfactual groups and 25,555 image variants from four datasets. We evaluate 20 MLLMs from seven providers. Compared with Original images, Adversarial variants raise median localization error from 282
arXiv:2608.04192v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Closed source agent skills may encode proprietary instructions, scripts, constants, and data. Providers may offer their capabilities as services while keeping the underlying packages hidden. Prior work focuses on prompt injection attacks that directly disclose these artifacts, and existing defenses accordingly aim to prevent such leakage. However, preventing file disclosure does not prevent users from recovering the functionality those files implement. This raises a fundamental question: can a user reconstruct a skill's functionality through ordinary use while its files remain hidden? We study behavioral skill reconstruction (BSR), in which an attacker uses valid task requests and observed responses to build a functional clone of a hidden skill. We introduce SkillClone, a black-box attack that clones a target skill by forming an interface hypothesis from its public advertisement, issuing structured benign probes, synthesizing an executa
arXiv:2608.04144v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Biomedical entity linking grounds mentions in clinical and scientific text to entities in a curated knowledge base (KB) with ontological structure, which supports downstream applications such as literature-scale information extraction and patient-record normalization. The task has several challenges at once: the KB contains large numbers of entities, mentions are often ambiguous, and gold labels follow annotation conventions specific to each corpus. To address these challenges, we propose PILOT, a three-stage framework made up of neighborhood-aware retrieval, dual reranking, and score fusion. The retriever injects ontological structure from both the query and KB side, by reformulating mentions and pooling entity embeddings. The retrieved pool is then scored from two complementary views, one over surface forms and one over context, and fused together. PILOT achieves the state of the art on average across five widely-used benchmarks and r
arXiv:2608.04111v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Can a model look at a river delta and a lightning bolt and see that they share a structure? We introduce GEB-Bench, a benchmark whose unit is an abstract structural motif--self-reference, a strange loop, a Mobius twist--in the spirit of Godel, Escher, Bach. Each motif is told in several voices: a natural scene whose composition is the structure, a folk story whose telling enacts it through a mechanically checkable form device, a mathematical theorem, and a programmatic skeleton; surface parameters are declared nuisance variables and never scored. Motifs, voices, and the structural changes between them form a small cross-modal category, and GEB-Bench's tasks are its questions. Evaluating twelve open and proprietary models, we find that abstraction failure is lawful. The central finding is a gap between recognition and cross-voice mapping: models identify a structure within one voice far better than they carry it across voices; every mode
arXiv:2608.04095v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly used as personalized assistants in high-stakes domains such as financial advising, yet it remains unclear whether they can maintain and update an individualized user model over long horizons. Existing personalized-memory benchmarks primarily test factual retention or rely on weakly constrained model-generated trajectories, leaving event-driven preference adaptation underexplored. We introduce FinPerMA, an event-grounded benchmark that evaluates personalized memory against frozen longitudinal investor trajectories. Its generation pipeline combines deterministic, theory-informed impact rules, controlled LLM narration, and automated quality screening; a Post-Shock checkpoint isolates whether an agent has integrated a material event into its persistent user model. On 2,994 questions from 276 personas, seven frontier LLMs and up to seven memory configurations remain far from saturated: no fu
arXiv:2608.04084v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mixture-of-experts (MoE) networks pursue specialization through learned routers, gates, and load-balancing losses, yet at matched total-parameter budgets learned routers can underperform equal-weight No-Routing baselines. Is the bottleneck the routing algorithm, or the alignment between training-signal granularity and the target categories? We probe the question with SpecDrop, a fixed parameter-free routing scheme: each of $K$ branches receives weight $p_a$ for its assigned category and a small leakage $p_i > 0$ otherwise, merged through a category-independent fixed denominator, with no learned routing parameters and no auxiliary losses; the category label is required at inference. On vision tasks where each image has one superclass label (CIFAR-100 on ResNet-110; ImageNet-1K on ViT-S/16), SpecDrop reaches 79.23% on CIFAR-100 and 79.89% on ImageNet-1K, exceeding parameter-matched baselines that do not use the label (+4.75 over dense on
arXiv:2608.04077v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Evaluating financial AI agents requires criteria aligned with real professional work. Existing rubric methods typically derive criteria from task prompts or model outputs, overlooking tacit standards visible only in practitioner deliverables. We introduce FinProBench, a benchmark for professional financial tasks, and Role-Grounded Rubric Construction (RGRC), a reusable pipeline that derives rubrics from deliverables produced by practitioners in the same role. RGRC comprises four stages: Deliverable Collection, Competency Extraction, Rubric Synthesis, and Validation. Its rubrics capture tacit standards, distinguish quality levels, and transfer across tasks within a role. Before analysis, we classified 57 occupations by deliverable genre into 30 prior-rich conventional roles and 27 prior-sparse role-specialized roles. Across all roles, Prompt-only nearly matches RGRC for conventional roles (89.2% vs. 90.7%), but RGRC substantially outperf
arXiv:2608.04054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal intent recognition requires understanding not only what textual, acoustic, and visual signals share, but also how they disagree. Such disagreement is frequently class-informative; for example, lexical positivity accompanied by incongruent vocal or facial behavior may indicate sarcasm or taunting, yet most fusion methods either encourage modality alignment or treat inconsistency as uncertainty to be suppressed. We propose MACH (Modality Agreement- and Conflict-aware prototype Hypergraph), a hierarchical prototype-hypergraph framework that represents multimodal agreement and conflict as distinct, recurring relational structures. MACH progressively composes unimodal representations into bimodal and trimodal abstractions. At each applicable level, modality-composition anchors activate sparse agreement prototype hypergraphs that capture reusable consensus patterns, while a separate conflict pathway maps cross-modal discrepancies t
arXiv:2608.02829v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model families train every size from scratch. Can a pretrained large model be converted into a smaller sibling? We characterize the 1.4B->410M conversion in the Pythia family end-to-end: (i) representations align strongly across sizes (ridge R^2=0.84) while parameters align weakly; (ii) dense weight projection is functionally destructive -- provably not an assembly artifact -- because basis mixing breaks rotary, per-head, GELU, and LayerNorm structure; (iii) after the best-fit linear operator, weight residuals are statistically indistinguishable from noise under shuffle controls; (iv) conversion value therefore lives in initialization. In matched-budget continued pre-training we decompose conversion into two independent levers -- least-squares compensation (function: best zero-shot) and variance-preserving rescale (dynamics: best endpoints). Compensation is a token-efficient, low-budget win rather than a universal one: at 30M tokens it
arXiv:2607.22699v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) grow more capable across diverse tasks, their (in)ability to generalize remains difficult to quantify and poorly understood beyond limited domains. In particular, LLMs are known to struggle generalizing multilingually, to languages outside of English, and that are poorly attested in their training data. To understand why this may be, and what enables some models to perform better than others, we turn to a long history of work across the cognitive sciences, arguing that successful generalization derives from appropriate representations in similarity space. We look at how well LLMs' representations capture the hierarchical similarity structure between distinct languages. Strikingly, we show LLMs' latent representations largely recover the hierarchical structure of the Indo-European language family tree -- grouping languages that are members of the same subfamily closely together in representation space. Fur
arXiv:2305.06177v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a thermodynamic analysis of a quantum engine that uses a single quantum particle as its working fluid, inspired by Szilard's classical single-particle engine. Our design is modeled after the classically-chaotic Szilard Map and involves a thermodynamic cycle of measurement, thermal-energy extraction, and memory reset. Our focus is on investigating the thermodynamic costs associated with observing and controlling the particle and comparing these costs in the quantum and classical limits. Through our study, we aim to shed light on the thermodynamic trade-offs that arise from Lindauer's Principle for information-processing-induced thermodynamic dissipation in both the quantum and classical regimes. Using machine learning methods, we demonstrate that energy analysis can be performed and the quantum engine can be simulated according to the Szilard engine based Second Law of Thermodynamics in its working condition. However, we note
arXiv:2608.05148v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Procedural generators produce useful verifiable reasoning problems at scale, but have received less attention as data for completion-supervised fine-tuning. We introduce Reasoning Core, a collection of 50 generators spanning mathematics, logic, planning, state tracking, formal languages, structured data, games, causality, and code, with semantic scorers, difficulty controls, and task evaluators. Under a matched completion-supervised protocol, we compare Reasoning Core with Procedural Warmup, Reasoning Gym, and SynLogic across four base-model settings and multiple training durations. In the primary 3B comparison, Reasoning Core achieves the highest mean scores on DROP, LogiQA, and ARC-Challenge, exceeding both the baseline without procedural data and all three alternative procedural collections. Task-level analyses show that semantic validity alone does not ensure training utility, highlighting compact targets and calibrated difficulty as
arXiv:2608.05139v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon reasoning in recent LLMs demands that the model switch between distinct skills inside a reasoning chain, such as first doing a math derivation, then using the result to plan a schedule. We call such problems cross-skill long-horizon tasks: multi-step tasks whose steps require different reasoning skills and depend on earlier outputs. Existing benchmarks often evaluate individual skills, lacking a principled way to measure how well a model switches between skills. We address this gap from both the evaluation and training sides. We introduce Skill Entropy, a measure of the difficulty of switching from one skill to another. We then propose Skill^2-Bench, a benchmark of cross-skill long-horizon tasks built over 558 skills across 9 verifiable and open-ended domains. Each task is assigned a task-level skill-entropy score and grouped into three difficulty levels. Evaluating 8 frontier and 4 open-source models on Skill^2-Bench reveals
arXiv:2608.05126v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) is the core component of task-oriented dialogue systems and a pivotal link in achieving seamless human-agent interaction. While traditional SLU can effectively extract user semantics for closed-set tasks after in-domain supervised fine-tuning, it faces significant challenges in leveraging in-context learning for open-domain tasks due to its ambiguous rule definitions. This work proposes Spoken Function Calling (SFC), a novel semantic understanding perspective that optimizes semantic understanding with structured rule definitions, to evolve beyond traditional closed-set SLU. Specifically, we curate and extend a suite of spoken functions based on traditional SLU datasets, construct a multi-agent system to synthesize the SFC-Bench dataset, evaluate the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Audio Language Models (LALMs), and enhance the SFC capabilities of LALMs through post-training. Experi
arXiv:2608.05124v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long context reasoning in large language models (LLMs) is usually constrained by the fact that a single inference trajectory has to simultaneously explore the context, store intermediate state, verify evidence, and produce the final answer. This becomes particularly difficult in tasks that require extraction, counting, ordering, or multi-hop reasoning, where an early mistake can propagate until the final response. In this work, we propose Chained Recursive Language Models (Chained RLM), an inference-time architecture, in which the same underlying model is called repeatedly as a sequence of fresh reasoning roots. Each root receives the original problem and context, but does not inherit the full conversational history. Instead, it receives a compact plain-text summary, a plain-text blackboard, and some durable task-specific artifacts written by predecessor roots. The motivation is to manage the context by chopping into partial tasks rather
arXiv:2608.05097v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning about necessity and possibility depends on assumptions about accessibility between worlds and about which objects exist at each one. The same inference may therefore hold under one modal system and fail under another. Evaluating language models on such problems requires testing whether their judgments follow the stated semantics rather than a familiar logic. We construct paired modal problems with identical premises and conjecture but different frame or domain conditions; automated reasoning verifies opposite labels. A balanced core prevents the semantic condition alone from revealing the answer. On this core, four of five recent models perform below the condition-only baseline under direct prompting. Yet enabling reasoning mode raises DeepSeek V4 Flash from 4.4% to 88.1% on unchanged prompts. Following stipulated modal semantics thus depends strongly on inference mode as well as model identity. When frame conditions are omitted
arXiv:2608.05075v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The spread of misinformation is widely perceived as a threat to democratic deliberation, yet how political elites' rhetorical commitments to truth shift alongside the rise of populist actors remains poorly understood. Analysing 4.5 million tweets and 59,170 parliamentary speeches by German political elites between 2015 and 2025, we measure evidence-based and intuition-based rhetoric using a validated distributed dictionary representation. Across both arenas, intuition-based language has become more prominent, and right-leaning actors consistently exhibit the lowest Evidence Minus Intuition (EMI) scores. The parliamentary entry of the extreme-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) in 2017 coincides with sharp downward shifts in EMI across the broader chamber, while a more gradual decline is observed on Twitter. These findings document an association between far-right visibility and a changing approach to truth in elite discourse in a multipar
arXiv:2608.05064v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Small open-weight language models increasingly run in private, offline, and cost-sensitive settings, where the key deployment question is not only what a model answers but when it should defer to a human. We study whether verbalized confidence can support risk-controlled deferral, evaluating eleven instruction-tuned models from three families, 0.5B to 14B parameters, on ARC-Challenge and TruthfulQA with 25,168 local predictions. Three theoretical results delimit what calibration can provide: strictly monotone calibration preserves the risk-coverage frontier and error-detection AUROC; temperature scaling cannot calibrate models whose confidence stays above one half while accuracy falls below it; and a Clopper-Pearson procedure converts a 200-question calibration set into a finite-sample risk certificate under an i.i.d. deployment assumption. Empirically, eight of 22 model-task pairs hit the temperature-scaling infeasibility floor within on
arXiv:2608.05028v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A central question in language acquisition is whether linguistic biases can emerge from general learning mechanisms operating over underdetermined input. Artificial Language Learning (ALL) studies have shown that human learners reliably generalize beyond the evidence provided, including by preferring scope-homomorphic noun phrase modifier orders. In this work, we investigate whether language models exhibit the same bias under similar conditions. We create a controlled learning environment in which models are trained on a corpus where all noun phrases containing multiple modifiers have been removed, eliminating direct evidence about modifier ordering, and are then evaluated on multiple modifier sentences. Across three model sizes, we find that they consistently prefer scope-homomorphic orders despite never observing them during training. These preferences vary in strength by modifier type. To investigate the source of these preferences, we
arXiv:2608.05004v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mental health professionals have raised concerns about risks of psychological harm from interaction with large language models (LLMs), including "delusional spirals" in which concerning human and LLM behaviors reinforce each other over time. With growing public use of LLM-powered chatbots, there is an urgent need to build evaluations grounded in real-world episodes of psychological harm experienced by users. We developed DelusionEval, an evaluation protocol that tests a model's tendencies to exhibit behaviors linked to promoting user delusions. We prompt each model with 589 unique conversation histories from 18 participants, comprising 12,591 messages from users who experienced delusions and psychological harm. We find that the tendency of an evaluated LLM to exhibit delusion-linked behavior does not reliably correlate with model size, release date, or the presence of test-time reasoning. However, extending the context of prior messages s
arXiv:2608.04980v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We show that tiny transformers can profitably employ a simple form of Chain of Thought, which we call protoreasoning, allowing us to study step-by-step reasoning on ~1M-parameter models and opening up opportunities for much more detailed experimentation and analysis than is feasible for larger models. Current Large Language Models exhibit impressive step-by-step reasoning, but we have yet to understand its generality, i.e., when and how LLMs learn genuinely general algorithms rather than "bags of heuristics." Such questions are hard to settle on compute-intensive frontier models trained on opaque data. To work at model scales far below the threshold for natural-language competence, we define reasoning-friendly tasks on Dyck languages (sentences of correctly nested brackets). We find that protoreasoning traces substantially close the out-of-distribution generalization gap, and ablations confirm that the trace's content, not merely its extr
arXiv:2608.04939v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Social media videos often communicate meanings that go beyond their visible actions, captions, or speech. A mundane clip may become humorous, ironic, or satire only through the interaction of multimodal cues and cultural context, making such content a difficult test case for video-language models. In this paper, we introduce \textit{DrivelHub+}, a benchmark for evaluating whether models can infer the implicit, non-linear, and rhetorically layered meanings of social media videos that appear nonsensical on the surface but convey deliberate pragmatic meanings. DrivelHub+ consists of 1,000 videos collected from social media, each annotated with a human-written implicit narrative explanation. Unlike conventional video understanding tasks focused on recognition or description, we present a benchmark that targets contextual multimodal reasoning. We evaluate current video-language models from two perspectives: explanation, where models must expla
arXiv:2608.04934v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training LLM agents commonly relies on supervised fine-tuning from expert trajectories or online reinforcement learning over human-specified tasks with handcrafted verifiers. Though effective, both remain bottlenecked by externally specified tasks and supervision signals, limiting the scalability and diversity of agent training. We study an environment learning paradigm in which agents acquire interaction and manipulation capabilities solely through environment interaction, without externally specified tasks. We propose State2State, an environment-derived mid-training method that converts explored environment states into training objectives, challenging agents to reach a specified target state. By deriving tasks from environment exploration and verifying success through rule-based state matching, State2State provides scalable and verifiable training objectives without expert supervision or manual task design. Experiments on ALFWorld and S
arXiv:2608.04928v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning offers a window into the decision-making of large language models (LLMs), which can be monitored for target behaviors by reading the reasoning trace, motivating work on CoT monitorability. Latent CoT approaches, however, replace the explicit tokens with a small number of continuous states, lowering inference costs but removing the readable trace this monitoring relies on. Monitoring then requires alternative access to the model, such as probing its activations or verbalizing the latent states back into text, but how much monitorability these alternatives preserve is unclear. We study this question with a hint-based intervention setup, a proxy for behaviors where models exploit biasing input cues, e.g., an inadvertently leaked answer or a belief stated by the user, without acknowledging them. Taking hint-reliance as the monitorability target, we compare monitors across reasoning modes, from explicit CoT to
arXiv:2608.04904v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multilingual large language models exhibit substantial performance differences across languages, while existing adaptation methods often require parameter updates and considerable multilingual training data. We propose an inference-time multilingual steering method that uses pretrained sparse autoencoders to identify and strengthen target-language-related features. Using multilingual parallel sentences, we compare SAE activations across languages and select a small number of layer-specific features associated with each target language. These features are decoded into steering signals and injected into the model's hidden states without additional training. Experiments with Gemma-3-12B-it show average accuracy improvements of 10.9 percentage points on XCOPA, 5.3 points on XNLI, and 1.9 points on MGSM.