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.
Bristol Myers Squibb’s Zenbexus is the first FDA-approved drug in a new class of cancer drugs called CELMoDs. The pharma company is positioning this molecule as a successor to its legacy products for multiple myeloma. The post Bristol Myers Squibb Protein Degrader Wins First-in-Class FDA Nod in Multiple Myeloma appeared first on MedCity News .
Most younger professionals entering the workforce have little visibility into interoperability, digital health infrastructure, or healthcare data architecture as career pathways. The post Healthcare Keeps Buying AI. But Nobody’s Building the Workforce to Run It. appeared first on MedCity News .
The outcome-based contract model can be a good way to increase efficiency and get more bang for the edtech budget buck.
Graduate education is demanding and isolating, especially for adult learners balancing coursework, research, employment, and family responsibilities. National data show half of doctoral students leave their programs before earning their degree. The post Cohort connections matter: Strategies to help graduate students persist and succeed appeared first on eCampus News .
arXiv:2607.27539v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Exact deletion from persistent language-model memory depends on whether a record's effect remains addressable after later computation. Native Kimi Delta Attention (KDA) gives a negative result for the tested receipt interface: the corpus-pooled raw recurrent contribution changes by 12-49% with the suffix and remains 8-49% after a decay-ledger correction. Native omission also changes later transition and write terms and other active caches. Frozen-input transport succeeds on its fixed-input control; the changed terms place native omission outside the tested receipt classes. Checkpoint replay supplies the evaluated recomputation path; zero residual on final logits and all 80 audited KDA arrays verifies restoration across the declared checkpoint surface. The complementary result is constructive. We retrofit support-vector memory into frozen Gemma 3 without attention transfer, low-rank recovery, distillation, adapters, or language-m
arXiv:2606.04032v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Transformers have become the standard solution for various AI tasks, with the query, key, and value (QKV) attention formulation playing a central role. However, the individual contribution of these three projections and the impact of omitting some remain poorly understood. We systematically evaluate three projection sharing constraints: a) Q-K=V (shared key-value), b) Q=K-V (shared query-key), and c) Q=K=V (single projection). The last two variants produce symmetric attention maps; to address this, we also explore asymmetric attention via 2D positional encodings. Through experiments spanning synthetic tasks, vision (MNIST, CIFAR, TinyImageNet, anomaly), and language modeling (300M and 1.2B parameter models on 10B tokens), we discovered that our transformers perform on par or occasionally better than the QKV transformer. In language modeling, Q-K=V projection sharing achieves 50% KV cache reduction with only 3.1% perplexity degra
arXiv:2605.18852v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Selecting a final checkpoint for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is challenging when late-stage candidates are closely matched and downstream evaluation signals are noisy. Small observed differences can be comparable to variability introduced by finite evaluation samples, LLM-based judges, and ambiguous multimodal evidence, while validation loss may not identify the checkpoint preferred by downstream evaluation. We formulate late-stage checkpoint selection as a stability-aware decision problem under evaluation uncertainty and propose a progressive framework combining pointwise filtering, listwise ranking, and pairwise refinement. Repeated evaluation-set subsampling is used to characterize ranking stability, while percentile-based aggregation accounts for lower- and upper-tail behavior. Experiments show that multimodal data evaluability is critical: quality-aware curation of OCR-heavy inputs reduces ranking flip rate fro
arXiv:2604.27906v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Persistent AI memory is often reduced to a retrieval problem: store prior interactions as text, embed them, and ask the model to recover relevant context later. This design is useful for thematic recall, but it is mismatched to the kinds of memory that agents need in production: exact facts, current state, updates and deletions, aggregation, relations, negative queries, and explicit unknowns. These operations require memory to behave less like search and more like a system of record. This paper argues that reliable external AI memory must be schema-grounded. Schemas define what must be remembered, what may be ignored, and which values must never be inferred. We present an iterative, schema-aware write path that decomposes memory ingestion into object detection, field detection, and field-value extraction, with validation gates, local retries, and stateful prompt control. The result shifts interpretation from the read path to the
arXiv:2603.14501v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models excel in high-resource programming languages but struggle with low-resource ones. Existing research related to low-resource programming languages primarily focuses on Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs), leaving general-purpose languages that suffer from data scarcity underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce CangjieBench, a contamination-free benchmark for Cangjie, a representative low-resource general-purpose language. The benchmark comprises 248 high-quality samples manually translated from HumanEval and ClassEval, covering both Text-to-Code and Code-to-Code tasks. We conduct a systematic evaluation of diverse LLMs under four settings: Direct Generation, Syntax-Constrained Generation, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and Agent. Experiments reveal that Direct Generation performs poorly, whereas Syntax-Constrained Generation offers the best trade-off between accuracy and computational cost. Agent
arXiv:2601.10560v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multi-agent systems (MAS) coordinate multiple LLM-powered agents through structured workflows, gaining reasoning power but incurring high inference latency from multi-step execution and repeated model invocations. Existing orchestration methods primarily optimize task performance and inference cost, leaving latency largely unaddressed. In MAS, end-to-end latency is governed by the \textit{critical execution path}, so reducing total cost alone does not reliably reduce latency. Moreover, optimizing latency while preserving accuracy remains non-trivial: naive latency optimization can misassign operator-level credit and degrade task accuracy. To address this gap, we propose \textbf{L}atency-\textbf{A}ware \textbf{M}ulti-\textbf{a}gent \textbf{S}ystem (\textbf{LAMaS}), a latency-aware orchestration framework for learning-based multi-agent systems. LAMaS addresses this challenge at two levels: at \emph{training time}, it learns latenc
arXiv:2510.22282v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Urban socio-economic sensing plays a vital role in advancing global sustainable development goals. With the advent of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), new opportunities have emerged to address this challenge by framing it as a multi-modal perception and reasoning task. However, recent studies show that LVLMs still struggle to make accurate and interpretable socio-economic predictions from visual data. To overcome these limitations and fully exploit the potential of LVLMs, we propose CityRiSE, a novel framework for Reasoning urban Socio-Economic status in LVLMs via reinforcement learning (RL). With carefully curated multi-modal dataset and verifiable reward design, our approach guides the LVLM to focus on semantically meaningful visual cues, enabling structured and goal-oriented reasoning for generalist socio-economic status prediction. Experiments demonstrate that CityRiSE, equipped with emergent reasoning, significantly ou
arXiv:2608.09539v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Publicly available Arabic datasets for target-specific stance detection remain limited, particularly for evaluating cross-target generalization. This paper presents the Mawqif-XT, consisting of 996 manually annotated Arabic tweets collected from three public targets: Women Driving, E-Cars, and Trimester System. Each tweet is annotated with stance, sentiment, and sarcasm labels following the original Mawqif annotation scheme. The released extension is intended as a held-out evaluation set for assessing model generalization to both semantically related and previously unseen targets, while the original Mawqif dataset is used for training and development. In addition, we establish baseline results using several Arabic and multilingual transformer models, as well as zero-shot large language models (LLMs), to facilitate reproducible evaluation. Together with the original Mawqif dataset, the Mawqif-v2 Extension provides a benchmark for evalu
arXiv:2608.05154v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Rotary positional encoding (RoPE) is a core component of modern language models and has been extended to multimodal LLMs through multidimensional variants such as multimodal RoPE (M-RoPE), which split positional channels into temporal, height, and width subspaces. This report identifies two limitations of static multidimensional position assignment in interleaved multimodal contexts. First, height/width rotations may be applied to token pairs whose spatial displacement is not a well-defined geometric object, producing cross-modal and inter-instance spatial interference. Second, temporal coordinates are often treated as equal-step counters, so a text token, an image block, and a video segment can advance the temporal phase by comparable amounts despite different information density. We propose RIG-RoPE, a relation- and instance-gated RoPE mechanism with duration-aware temporal coordinates. RIG-RoPE augments each token with a modality i
arXiv:2607.28166v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion language models expose a provisional prediction at every denoising step, and on many tasks the candidate answer inside it stabilizes before the step schedule is exhausted. This creates two acceleration opportunities, leaving a block early and stopping the sequence early, but the two require different criteria because block acceleration is local whereas sequence termination is global and freezes the graded answer. Existing methods usually optimize only one axis, and existing exit gates rely on fixed-region confidence or schedule-dependent rules rather than the candidate answer itself. We present $\textbf{C}^4$, which coordinates the two axes by giving each decision its own gate. $\textbf{C}$onfidence-Verified Early Exit (CVEE) decides when the sequence may stop, requiring confidence and sustained argmax stability over a candidate span re-extracted at every step. $\textbf{C}$ommit-$\textbf{C}$ore-Then-$\textbf{C}$onfirm (CCTC)
arXiv:2605.22544v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Instruction embedding models have become common among state-of-the-art models, however are evaluated using a single prompt per task. The single-point evaluation ignores a main problem of the instruction-based approach namely: sensitivity to the phrasing of the instruction. We present an empirical study of prompt sensitivity across 6 embedding models and 11 datasets. We show that reported scores misrepresent the distribution of scores over plausible prompts. The default prompt can both systematically understate or overstate performance. Furthermore, we show that the leaderboard ranking is not robust to prompt selection: a developer improve their rank by favorably selecting prompts, and under adversarial prompt selection any model can be promoted to first place. Our findings suggest that single-prompt evaluation is insufficient for instruction-tuned embedding models and that benchmarks should incorporate prompt robustness, either by eva
arXiv:2605.03799v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This preprint presents a systematic, research-oriented practicum that guides the reader through the entire modern NLP pipeline --- from tokenisation and vectorisation to fine tuning of large language models, retrieval augmented generation, reinforcement learning from human feedback, prompt engineering, model compression, and multimodal systems. Seventeen hands-on sessions combine concise theory with detailed implementation plans, formalised evaluation metrics, and transparent assessment criteria. The work is not a conventional textbook: it is designed as a reproducible research artefact where every session requires publishing code, models, and reports in public repositories. All experiments are conducted on a single evolving corpus, and the work advocates open weight models over commercial APIs, with special attention to the Hugging Face ecosystem. The material is enriched by original research on low resource languages, incorporating
arXiv:2604.17299v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Aligning large language models with human preferences must balance two competing goals: responding helpfully to legitimate requests and reliably refusing harmful ones. Most preference-based safety alignment methods collapse safety into a single scalar that is applied uniformly to every preference pair. The result is a model that looks safe on average but stays relatively unsafe on a minority of harm categories. We cast safety alignment as a per-category constrained optimization problem and derive Cat-DPO, a direct-preference-optimization algorithm with a separate adaptive safety margin for each harm category. The margin tightens when the model still produces unsafe responses on a category and relaxes once the model catches up, so the training signal tracks each category's current difficulty rather than averaging under one global rate. Across two LLM backbones and six preference-learning baselines, Cat-DPO improves aggregate helpfulnes
arXiv:2604.11753v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study parallel test-time scaling for long-horizon agentic tasks such as agentic search and deep research, where multiple rollouts are generated in parallel and aggregated into a final response. While such scaling has proven effective for chain-of-thought reasoning, agentic tasks pose unique challenges: trajectories are long, multi-turn, and tool-augmented, and outputs are often open-ended. Aggregating only final answers discards rich information from trajectories, while concatenating all trajectories exceeds the model's context window. To address this, we propose AggAgent, an aggregation agent that treats parallel trajectories as an environment. We equip it with lightweight tools to inspect candidate solutions and search across trajectories, enabling it to navigate and synthesize information on demand. Across six benchmarks and three model families (GLM-4.7, Qwen3.5, MiniMax-M2.5), AggAgent outperforms all existing aggregation meth
arXiv:2603.25821v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present Doctorina MedBench, an evaluation framework for agent-based medical AI based on the simulation of physician-patient interactions. Unlike traditional medical benchmarks that rely on solving standardized test questions, the proposed approach models a multi-step clinical dialogue in which an AI system must collect medical history, analyze available synthetic attachments when present, formulate differential diagnoses, and provide diagnostic and management recommendations. System performance is evaluated across separate task-level domains, including diagnosis, differential diagnosis, treatment, safety-critical condition handling, and dialogue-step behavior; the broader D.O.T.S. framework is used as a supplementary summary for diagnosis, observations/investigations, treatment, and step count. The framework also supports testing and quality-monitoring workflows intended to identify changes in model behavior during development. It
arXiv:2603.05197v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion LLMs have been proposed as an alternative to autoregressive LLMs. Curiously, they are especially capable if the generation length, i.e., the number of tokens the model has to output, is set to a much higher value than the correct answer length, and the model pads its answer with end-of-sequence (EoS) tokens. We hypothesize that off-the-shelf masked diffusion LLMs use the representations of EoS tokens as additional computing capacity, which enhances their performance. We experiment with the diffusion models LLaDA1.5, LLaDA2.0-mini, and Dream-v0 on three reasoning tasks: Addition, Entity Tracking, and Sudoku. In a controlled prompting experiment, we confirm that adding EoS tokens improves the LLMs' performance. To further verify whether their representations are used for hidden computations, we perform a causal intervention and transfer the hidden states of the EoS tokens between generations, which increases the models' relati
arXiv:2602.20017v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Real-world tables often contain schema inconsistencies, heterogeneous value formats, and implicit relational structures that degrade table reasoning and question answering. Existing approaches address these issues at query time, repeating normalization and restructuring for every new question and producing representations that do not generalize to unseen queries. We introduce QuIeTT, a transform-first, query-later framework that converts each raw table into a single SQL-ready canonical representation before any evaluation query is observed, under three constraints: no evaluation query access, information preservation, and single-table reuse. QuIeTT operates through a three-stage pipeline: issue probing, where synthetic queries surface structural deficiencies such as ambiguous schemas and heterogeneous formats; plan generation; and structured execution. Experiments on four benchmarks across five model families show consistent improveme
arXiv:2602.17045v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A growing body of work attempts to evaluate the theory of mind (ToM) abilities of humans and large language models (LLMs) using static, non-interactive question-and-answer benchmarks. However, theoretical work in the field suggests that first-personal interaction is a crucial part of ToM and that such predictive, spectatorial tasks may fail to evaluate it. We address this gap with a novel ToM task that requires an agent to persuade a target to choose one of three policy proposals by strategically revealing information. Success depends on a persuader's sensitivity to a given target's knowledge states (what the target knows about the policies) and motivational states (how much the target values different outcomes). We varied whether these states were Revealed to persuaders or Hidden, in which case persuaders had to inquire about or infer them. In Experiment 1, participants persuaded a bot programmed to make only rational inferences. LLM
arXiv:2602.06854v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-turn jailbreaks capture the real threat model for safety-aligned chatbots, where single-turn attacks are merely a special case. Yet existing approaches break under exploration complexity and intent drift. We propose SEMA, a simple yet effective framework that trains a multi-turn attacker without relying on any existing strategies or external data. SEMA comprises two stages. Prefilling self-tuning enables usable rollouts by fine-tuning on non-refusal, well-structured, multi-turn adversarial prompts that are self-generated with a minimal prefix, thereby stabilizing subsequent learning. Reinforcement learning with intent-drift-aware reward trains the attacker to elicit valid multi-turn adversarial prompts while maintaining the same harmful objective. We anchor harmful intent in multi-turn jailbreaks via an intent-drift-aware reward that combines intent alignment, compliance risk, and level of detail. Our open-loop attack regime avo
arXiv:2510.05678v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While large language models (LLMs) have achieved notable progress in multilingual settings, their performance remains uneven across languages as LLMs often rely on English-centric latent representations. In this work, we introduce code-switching in-context learning (CSICL), an inference-time mechanism for cross-lingual representational alignment. Rather than relying on an abrupt translation pivot, CSICL explicitly scaffolds the reasoning trajectory by gradually transitioning from a target language to English, aligning non-English inputs with an English-centric reasoning space. Across 4 LLMs, 6 datasets, and 10 languages, CSICL consistently outperforms cross-lingual in-context learning baselines, yielding average gains of 6.0pp and 4.8pp in target and unseen languages, respectively. The improvements generalize across language families and are even more pronounced in low-resource settings, with gains of 14.7pp in target and 5.3pp in uns
arXiv:2509.17449v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Queer vernacular is rarely studied in NLP, despite advancements in resources and evaluation for other sociolects and informal language. Because of this, NLP systems often process queer language incorrectly, e.g., they misclassify it as hate speech or generate negative responses. To address this problem, we propose Slaying, the first real-world dataset of English queer slang. Slaying is community-validated, and includes over 500 queer slang terms that pertain to more than 20 queer subcommunities. We argue that queer language data resources have great potential in NLP -- e.g., as components of large pretraining corpora and as the basis for benchmarks -- and can improve queer users' experience of NLP systems. We leverage Slaying for two novel findings in support of this argument: (i) For a number of language models, we show that they are unbiased towards the queer community, but at the same time unable to process its language, i.e., abse
arXiv:2508.17905v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Unified Structured Knowledge Reasoning (USKR) aims to answer natural language questions by using structured sources such as tables, databases, and knowledge graphs in a unified way. Existing USKR methods rely on task-specific strategies or bespoke representations, which hinder their ability to dismantle barriers between different SKR tasks, thereby constraining their overall performance in cross-task scenarios. In this paper, we introduce \textsc{Pandora}, a novel USKR framework that addresses the limitations of existing methods by leveraging two key innovations. First, we propose a code-based unified knowledge representation using \textsc{Python}'s \textsc{Pandas} API, which aligns seamlessly with the pre-training of LLMs. This representation facilitates a cohesive approach to handling different structured knowledge sources. Building on this foundation, we employ knowledge transfer to bolster the unified reasoning process of LLMs by
arXiv:2508.14390v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often express verbal confidence that is poorly aligned with actual correctness, limiting their reliability in safety-critical applications. Existing prompt-based methods treat calibration largely as a one-shot inference problem, relying on either instance-level reasoning or post-hoc self-assessment. We introduce Rehearse (Experiential Rehearsal), a training-free method that instead enables models to adapt from their own scored confidence experience. In a credence-calibration game grounded in a strictly proper scoring rule, the model receives feedback on prior confidence decisions; this experience is summarized in a post-game trajectory prefix that captures systematic over- or under-confidence. At inference time, the model applies this cross-instance calibration signal to the chain-of-thought reasoning trace for each new question. Across four LLMs, three benchmarks, and five random seeds, Rehearse achieves
arXiv:2508.05803v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Human memory is fleeting. As words are processed, the exact wordforms that make up incoming sentences are rapidly lost. Cognitive scientists have long believed that this limitation of memory may, paradoxically, help in learning language - an idea supported by classic connectionist modelling work. The rise of Transformers appears to challenge this idea, as these models can learn language effectively, despite lacking memory limitations or other architectural recency biases. Here, we investigate the hypothesized benefit of fleeting memory for language learning in tightly controlled experiments on transformer language models. Training transformers with and without fleeting memory on a developmentally realistic training set, we find that fleeting memory consistently improves language learning (as quantified by both overall language modelling performance and targeted syntactic evaluation) but, unexpectedly, impairs surprisal-based predictio
arXiv:2506.06331v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: By retrieving contexts from knowledge graphs, graph-based retrieval-augmented generation (GraphRAG) enhances large language models (LLMs) to generate quality answers for user questions. Many GraphRAG methods have been proposed and reported inspiring performance in answer quality. However, we observe that the current answer evaluation framework for GraphRAG has two critical flaws, i.e., unrelated questions and evaluation biases, which may lead to biased or even wrong conclusions on performance. To tackle the two flaws, we propose an unbiased evaluation framework that uses graph-text-grounded question generation to produce questions that are more related to the underlying dataset and an unbiased evaluation procedure to eliminate the biases in LLM-based answer assessment. We apply our unbiased framework to evaluate 3 representative GraphRAG methods and find that their performance gains are much more moderate than reported previously. Alt
arXiv:2505.09662v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to be highly persuasive, but when and why they outperform humans is still an open question. We compare the persuasiveness of two LLMs (Claude 3.5 Sonnet and DeepSeek v3) against humans who had incentives to persuade, using an interactive, real-time conversational setting. We demonstrate that LLMs persuasive superiority is context-dependent: it depends on whether the persuasion attempt is truthful (towards the right answer) or deceptive (towards the wrong answer) and on the LLM model, and wanes over repeated interactions (unlike human persuasiveness). In our first large-scale experiment, humans vs LLMs (Claude 3.5 Sonnet) interacted with other humans who were completing an online quiz for a reward, attempting to persuade them toward a given (either correct or incorrect) answer. Claude was more persuasive than incentivized human persuaders both in truthful and deceptive contexts and it signif
arXiv:2501.14844v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Detecting biases in the outputs produced by generative models is essential to reduce the potential risks associated with their application in critical settings. However, the majority of existing methodologies for identifying biases in generated text consider the models in isolation and neglect their contextual applications. Specifically, the biases that may arise in multi-agent systems involving generative models remain under-researched. To address this gap, we present a framework designed to quantify biases within multi-agent systems of conversational Large Language Models (LLMs). Our approach involves simulating small echo chambers, where pairs of LLMs, initialized with aligned perspectives on a polarizing topic, engage in discussions. Contrary to expectations, we observe significant shifts in the stance expressed in the generated messages, particularly within echo chambers where all agents initially express conservative viewpoints,
arXiv:2411.16818v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: To evaluate a multi-representational framework in which large language model (LLM)-generated expert summaries of intensive care unit (ICU) notes are fused with physiology for in-hospital mortality (IHM) prediction, and to determine how much of the resulting gain is non-redundant with the notes themselves. Using MIMIC-III (19,211 first ICU stays, 12.83% mortality), we encoded 48-hour physiology, clinical notes, and LLM summaries generated under a prompt forbidding prognostication, then fused them. Redundancy was assessed by ridge recoverability, linear probes, and retrained ablations substituting a note-orthogonal residual or a patient-shuffled summary embedding. On 3,843 held-out stays, fusion reached AUPRC 0.4977/AUROC 0.8429 versus 0.3625/0.7770 for physiology alone. Ridge regression from note embeddings explained 40.8% of summary-embedding variance. The note-orthogonal residual retained a minority of the gain (+0.0258 AUPRC, 95% CI
arXiv:2401.11641v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have seen considerable advancements and have been applied in diverse fields. Built on the Transformer architecture, these models are trained on extensive datasets, enabling them to understand and generate human language effectively. In the financial domain, the deployment of LLMs is gaining momentum. These models are being utilized for automating financial report generation, forecasting market trends, analyzing investor sentiment, and offering personalized financial advice. Leveraging their natural language processing capabilities, LLMs can distill key insights from vast financial data, aiding institutions in making informed investment choices and enhancing both operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. In this study, we provide a comprehensive overview of the emerging integration of LLMs into various financial tasks. Additionally, we conducted holistic tests on multip
arXiv:2608.13560v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transforming multimodal sources into condensed and structured media outputs can be fundamentally conceptualized as a long-horizon agentic process centered on a model-harness system. While an ideal harness system should align with human design priors and accumulate reusable experience through empirical exploration to drive recursive self-improvement, existing paradigms remain static and fall short of this capability. In this paper, we present AutoDesign, a framework that aligns with human design priors, where a meta-harness optimizer guides a code agent to recursively improve harness based on rollout feedback. To instantiate and evaluate this framework, we focus on the academic paper-to-poster generation task and introduce PosterBench, comprising a 100-paper Main Track spanning five disciplines and PosterBench-mini, a shared 10-paper subset for controlled evaluation. On the PosterBench Main Track, AutoDesign achieves the highest score of
arXiv:2608.13558v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in foundation models have enabled AI scientists to automate increasingly complete research workflows, from hypothesis generation and code execution to manuscript preparation. Yet workflow coverage alone does not provide access to the full evidence on which scientific discovery depends. Existing systems typically reason over text, code, labels, or precomputed summaries, leaving scientifically decisive spatial, temporal, cross-channel, and procedural relations unavailable to the agent. We introduce OmniScientist, an end-to-end, omni-modal AI scientist that conducts multidisciplinary research directly from heterogeneous raw evidence. A perception layer and 3 autonomous agents for ideation, experiment, and writeup operate within a deterministic pipeline, allowing observations to shape research questions, experimental decisions, and final claims throughout the research lifecycle. By running idea, rigour, and claim checks in c
arXiv:2608.13505v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scientific discovery increasingly requires AI systems that can reason over scientific evidence of heterogeneous modalities, interact with scientific tools and environments, and sustain progress across long task horizons. We present Intern-S2-Preview, a series of scientific agentic foundation models designed to support multimodal scientific understanding, reasoning, generation, and long-horizon tasks. The training pipeline begins with scientific multimodal pre-training over rendered scientific documents, interleaved image-text data, and diverse scientific corpora. Starting from the pretrained checkpoint, we apply a unified post-training pipeline consisting of supervised fine-tuning, scalable multi-task reinforcement learning (RL), black- and white-box agentic RL, and on-policy distillation. This pipeline is supported by practical techniques that improve rollout and training stability and efficiency, including partial rollout with off-pol
arXiv:2608.13482v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As language-model-based AI is increasingly deployed in autonomous settings, aligning its goals and values with those of humans becomes critical. Today, alignment, and the assistant identity itself, are typically introduced only after pretraining, once behavioral priors are already established. This can make values a thin overlay, rather than deeply rooted, and facilitate subsequent misalignment. Pursuing a different paradigm, we introduce Synthetic Persona Pretraining (SPP), which installs the desired assistant persona from token zero in pretraining. First, we annotate pretraining documents with value-aligned first-person reflections derived from a normative value constitution. Second, we pretrain via the standard cross-entropy loss on standard pretraining documents as well as their reflections, which installs the desired persona among a multitude of other personas. Finally, we post-train on user-assistant dialogue data, which binds thi
arXiv:2608.13476v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present Multi-Agent Reasoning and Coordination (MARC), an open-source framework that replaces monolithic LLM prompting with deterministic multi-agent orchestration for clinical reasoning. MARC coordinates role-specialized agents for extraction, reasoning, answer generation, and evaluation, with explicit context passing and traceable intermediate outputs, enabling stage-wise failure attribution. We additionally introduce a Decomposer module that generates task-specific agent prompts from a plain-language description, eliminating manual prompt engineering. The framework supports both API-based and local CPU-compatible deployments and is entirely configurable via YAML, without code modifications. MARC is designed to be model-agnostic, interpretable, and accessible to clinical domain experts without programming expertise. The full framework is available at https://github.com/Penn-RAIL/MARC-v1.
arXiv:2608.13463v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern image classification models excel when trained on single task-specific datasets but often struggle to generalize across domains and difficulty levels. We propose ARMDIL, an Adaptive Router for Multi-Domain Image classification with LLMs. ARMDIL is an ensemble that uses a multimodal large language model (MLLM) agent to dynamically route each image to the most suitable vision backbone. Our diverse ensemble employs convolutional neural networks (ResNets), self-supervised representation learners (SSL), and vision-language models (VLMs), each trained on a unified label space constructed from multiple image datasets with differing distributions and characteristics. Empirical evaluations illuminate the distinct capabilities and vulnerabilities of each architecture across disparate visual domains. Crucially, we show that ARMDIL effectively navigates these trade-offs, performing competitively with specialized training-based routers. Furth
arXiv:2608.13426v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformer-based language models achieve strong performance but incur substantial inference cost due to repeated high-dimensional matrix multiplications. We propose Reduced Matrix Multiplication (RMM), a training-free, input-adaptive inference method that reduces Transformer matrix products by selecting informative slices along their contraction dimensions, without modifying model weights. Under a simple retention-ratio control, RMM provides a smooth and predictable accuracy-efficiency trade-off. Across language models ranging from 1B to 70B parameters, we find that reduction tolerance depends on the model family, task, component, and retention ratio, although it often improves with model scale. Under moderate reduction, RMM remains robust across the evaluated discriminative, autoregressive generation, and long-context settings. We further show that the same principle extends to multimodal vision-language inference. Mechanistic ablatio
arXiv:2608.13237v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-round retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) must decide when to stop searching as evidence accumulates. Because the deployed policy is determined by the first STOP on each trajectory, this is a sequential selection problem rather than an independent state-classification task. We adapt S2G-RAG's structured sufficiency-and-gap judgment to a frozen Search-R1 pipeline and train a Qwen3.5-2B judge on 3,009 states from 900 disjoint HotpotQA questions. Search-R1's reasoner, retriever, corpus, prompt, and search budget remain unchanged, while the judge checkpoint and stopping threshold are selected on grouped validation and frozen before confirmatory evaluation. On the confirmatory test set, the resulting policy reduces retrieval calls by 77 (3.70\%) relative to Native Search-R1, while Official Exact Match decreases by 0.625 percentage points. Thus, the trained S2G-style structured judge reduces retrieval while broadly preserving answer ac
arXiv:2608.13167v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When visual evidence is occluded or chaotic, models should abstain. In this paper, we show that Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can internally distinguish when abstention is required, but fail to express it anyway. We introduce TRAPSBench, a procedurally generated video benchmark of 1,404 matched physics pairs in which a single targeted change renders the outcome undeterminable from the visual evidence. Furthermore, we introduce Penalized Epistemic Calibration Score (PECS), a new robust metric that requires models to both answer correctly when the outcome is knowable, and abstain when the outcome is not. Across 16 VLMs spanning five families, spontaneous restraint is poor: the best PECS is 0.292. The bottleneck is expression, not perception: linear probes decode answerability from hidden states at up to 0.91 AUROC across physics domains; steering a single-layer void direction causally induces or suppresses abstention. Our results replicat
arXiv:2608.13063v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Prior work on LLM behavior under anomalous conditions asks whether a model notices anomalies. We ask a narrower question: once a model sits in a workflow with a low, controllable failure rate, does its explanatory engagement - length, specificity, self-reported confidence - change as failure grows asymptotically rarer? We built a local, zero-cost harness on three open-weight models (qwen3:8b, llama3.1:8b, mistral:7b) running a repeated tool-call task where one call fails at probability p, swept across eight rates from 0.2 to 0.0001, under five elicitation conditions from immediate prompting to none. We hypothesized a rise in engagement as failures grew rarer, then a collapse near a detectability threshold. Pooled across conditions this appeared false: length fell in a flat, monotonic pattern. Splitting by condition overturned that. Under immediate_forced, where the model must explain every failure instantly, the predicted rise is confir
arXiv:2608.13057v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In expert-parallel (EP) MoE serving, every layer synchronizes at the slowest GPU. Dispatchers balance token counts (EPLB, LPLB, UltraEP) or activated-expert counts (METRO), assuming expert time is linear in one. Measurements on two datacenter GPU generations show it is neither: below $\nstar\!\approx\!156$--$168$ tokens, HBM weight streaming dominates---cost attaches to \emph{activated replicas}, not tokens; above it, grouped GEMM rounds tokens to 128-tile $M$-tiles, so \emph{splitting} an expert adds padded compute. A max-affine profile $t=\max(a+bG,\,c+\beta N)$ captures both regimes. Realistic decode batches hold hot experts in the linear regime and cold in the flat \emph{simultaneously}; recorded batches show proxy dispatches differ by $1.4$--$1.6\times$ in modeled block time (p95 up to $1.7\times$), and \emph{which} proxy wins flips with the regime. We formalize per-batch dispatch as a fixed-charge makespan problem---NP-hard on two
arXiv:2608.13040v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Enabling agents to learn from experience and internalize it into their policy has become a central problem in self-evolving AI. On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) offers an effective pathway by using a privileged self-teacher to provide dense supervision on the student's own trajectories; however, existing methods still rely heavily on designer-specified privileged artifacts (e.g., answers, feedback, skills, or trajectories), limiting the end-to-end learnability and scalability required for continual self-improvement. In this work, we introduce Latent On-Policy Self-Distillation (LOPD), which, rather than proposing another hand-crafted OPSD variant with a newly prescribed form of privileged context, makes the teacher's privileged context itself learnable end-to-end from experience. Technically, LOPD retrieves relevant experiences and composes them into continuous latent tokens that condition a self-teacher, while the student generates t
arXiv:2608.12984v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-form research reports generated by large language models drift, contradict themselves, and lose provenance: the same metric appears with different values, and rumor is quoted as confidently as an audited filing. We present a two-tier agentic system that separates a maintained, point-in-time knowledge library from report writing. A deterministic "librarian" ingests timestamped sources into a trust-tiered ontology, layering evidence cards, an authoritative metric ledger, and a claim graph into an always-current source of truth, not per-query RAG over raw chunks. A portable multi-agent "writer" runtime then composes a contradiction-free, evidence-grounded report at any knowledge cutoff T, reading only evidence with as_of <= T (no look-ahead); red-team verdicts flow back into the librarian. We evaluate on a self-collected, public corpus of 6,130 sources yielding 555,926 evidence cards (SEC EDGAR filings across 295 issuers and 11 sector
arXiv:2608.12974v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: McCoy & Griffiths (2025, henceforth M&G) suggest that a Bayesian prior can be distilled into Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) through Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML, Finn et al., 2017). They support this empirically by showing that meta-trained networks demonstrate formal language learning abilities comparable to Yang & Piantadosi (2023)'s Bayesian learner, significantly outperforming standard ANNs. We point out that under the standard interpretation of a prior, M&G's procedure does not actually instill one; it merely initializes network weights favorably, leaving the objective function unchanged. We then consider a more permissive interpretation, where the system as a whole can be seen as implementing a Bayesian learner even without an explicit prior in the objective. We show that this interpretation faces nontrivial challenges. Finally, we assess how well MAML approximates the empirical results of Bayesian learning, showing that
arXiv:2608.12957v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) learns from reward differences within a rollout group, but receives no useful relative signal when every sampled response is incorrect. Privileged self-distillation can fill this gap with dense token supervision, yet applying it throughout training creates a different failure mode: the teacher is a biased, low-variance surrogate for the reward objective, so persistent imitation can oppose reward-improving updates after the policy becomes capable of producing successful trajectories. We introduce I-SDPO (Instance-Level Adaptive Self-Distillation Policy Optimization), which treats teacher reliance as capability-dependent. I-SDPO makes one routing decision per input instance and shares it across that instance's rollout group: all-incorrect groups use a privileged self-distillation objective, whereas any-success groups remain intact for GRPO. This design uses imitation only where group-relative rewa
arXiv:2608.12847v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval can identify a past trajectory that may matter, yet it does not specify how an acting agent should use that trajectory after users, entities, constraints, or environment state have changed. We identify this post-retrieval reuse step as a distinct bottleneck for long-horizon trajectory memory and formulate an evaluation framework that holds candidate retrieval, target state, model, decoding, and tool budget fixed while varying the support delivered to the agent. We instantiate the framework with query-conditioned reuse (QCR), a deliberately simple target-bound note that records a reusable procedure, bindings to recover, applicability conditions, and verification requirements. QCR serves to test the reuse hypothesis rather than to claim a universally preferred memory format. Across 2,391 target instances in WebArena, WorkArena, and AppWorld, QCR reaches 62.3% average Success, 10.7 points above Full Trajectory, while using 48.9%
arXiv:2608.12746v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Object hallucination in multimodal large language models arises when language priors and corpus co-occurrence bias outweigh the visual evidence, with nothing tying an individual object mention to what the image shows. Most remedies intervene at decoding time without training, yet under a unified protocol their benefit is confined to short captions;supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on a detail- rich corpus lengthens captions, but over forty percent still name absent objects. This paper proposes Dual-Stream Cross-Anchor Correction (DSCC). Unlike work that post-processes decoding, DSCC is the first to inject object-level visual anchors into the language model itself during fine- tuning: a perception stream aligns object-level hidden states at an intermediate layer to frozen text anchors by a bidirectional contrastive objective; a cognition stream lets deeper layers query those anchors by cross-attention at every generation step; and a two-stage