# Research Papers — 2026-05 · bundle page 186 of 326 > Full-text markdown of papers #9251–9300 of 16266 published in 2026-05, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 16266-paper 2026-05 archive (50 papers per file). Canonical page: https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-05/page/186 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-05/page/185.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-05/page/187.md) ### CreFlow: Corrective Reflow for Sparse-Reward Embodied Video Diffusion RL Authors: Zhenyang Ni, Yijiang Li, Ruochen Jiao, Simon Sinong Zhan, Sipeng Chen, Zhenfei Yin, Minshuo Chen, Philip Torr, Zhaoran Wang, Qi Zhu Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14274v1 Video generation models trained on heterogeneous data with likelihood-surrogate objectives can produce visually plausible rollouts that violate physical constraints in embodied manipulation. Although reinforcement-learning post-training offers a natural route to adapting VGMs, existing video-RL rewards often reduce each rollout to a low-level visual metric, whereas manipulation video evaluation requires logic-based verification of whether the rollout satisfies a compositional task specification. To fill this gap, we introduce a compositional constraint-based reward model for post-training embodied video generation models, which automatically formulates task requirements as a composition of Linear Temporal Logic constraints, providing faithful rewards and localized error information in generated videos. To achieve effective improvement in high-dimensional video generation using these reward signals, we further propose CreFlow, a novel online RL framework with two key designs: i) a credit-aware NFT loss that confines the RL update to reward-relevant regions, preventing perturbations to unrelated regions during post-training; and ii) a corrective reflow loss that leverages within-group positive samples as an explicit estimate of the correction direction, stabilizing and accelerating training. Experiments show that CreFlow yields reward judgments better aligned with human and simulator success labels than existing methods and improves downstream execution success by 23.8 percentage points across eight bimanual manipulation tasks. --- ### Auditing Agent Harness Safety Authors: Chengzhi Liu, Yichen Guo, Yepeng Liu, Yuzhe Yang, Qianqi Yan, Xuandong Zhao, Wenyue Hua, Sheng Liu, Sharon Li, Yuheng Bu, Xin Eric Wang Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14271v2 LLM agents increasingly run inside execution harnesses that dispatch tools, allocate resources, and route messages between specialized components. However, a harness can return a correct, benign answer over a trajectory that accesses unauthorized resources or leaks context to the wrong agent. Output-level evaluation cannot see these failures, yet most safety benchmarks score only final outputs or terminal states, even though many violations occur mid-trajectory rather than at termination. The central question is whether the harness respects user intent, permission boundaries, and information-flow constraints throughout execution. To address this gap, we propose HarnessAudit, a framework that audits full execution trajectories across boundary compliance, execution fidelity, and system stability, with a focus on multi-agent harnesses where these risks are most pronounced. We further introduce HarnessAudit-Bench, a benchmark of 210 tasks across eight real-world domains, instantiated in both single-agent and multi-agent configurations with embedded safety constraints. Evaluating ten harness configurations across frontier models and three multi-agent frameworks, we find that: (i) task completion is misaligned with safe execution, and violations accumulate with trajectory length; (ii) safety risks vary across domains, task types, and agent roles; (iii) most violations concentrate in resource access and inter-agent information transfer; and (iv) multi-agent collaboration expands the safety risk surface, while harness design sets the upper bound of safe deployment. --- ### Diagnosing and Correcting Concept Omission in Multimodal Diffusion Transformers Authors: Kanghyun Baek, Jaihyun Lew, Chaehun Shin, Jungbeom Lee, Sungroh Yoon Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14270v3 Multimodal Diffusion Transformers (MM-DiTs) have achieved remarkable progress in text-to-image generation, yet they frequently suffer from concept omission, where specified objects or attributes fail to emerge in the generated image. By performing linear probing on text tokens, we demonstrate that text embeddings can distinguish a characteristic `omission signal' representing the absence of target concepts. Leveraging this insight, we propose Omission Signal Intervention (OSI), which amplifies the omission signal to actively catalyze the generation of missing concepts. Comprehensive experiments on FLUX.1-Dev and SD3.5-Medium demonstrate that OSI significantly alleviates concept omission even in extreme scenarios. --- ### PhyMotion: Structured 3D Motion Reward for Physics-Grounded Human Video Generation Authors: Yidong Huang, Zun Wang, Han Lin, Dong-Ki Kim, Shayegan Omidshafiei, Jaehong Yoon, Jaemin Cho, Yue Zhang, Mohit Bansal Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14269v1 Generating realistic human motion is a central yet unsolved challenge in video generation. While reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training has driven recent gains in general video quality, extending it to human motion remains bottlenecked by a reward signal that cannot reliably score motion realism. Existing video rewards primarily rely on 2D perceptual signals, without explicitly modeling the 3D body state, contact, and dynamics underlying articulated human motion, and often assign high scores to videos with floating bodies or physically implausible movements. To address this, we propose PhyMotion, a structured, fine-grained motion reward that grounds recovered 3D human trajectories in a physics simulator and evaluates motion quality along multiple dimensions of physical feasibility. Concretely, we recover SMPL body meshes from generated videos, retarget them onto a humanoid in the MuJoCo physics simulator, and evaluate the resulting motion along three axes: kinematic plausibility, contact and balance consistency, and dynamic feasibility. Each component provides a continuous and interpretable signal tied to a specific aspect of motion quality, allowing the reward to capture which aspects of motion are physically correct or violated. Experiments show that PhyMotion achieves stronger correlation with human judgments than existing reward formulations. These gains carry over to RL-based post-training, where optimizing PhyMotion leads to larger and more consistent improvements than optimizing existing rewards, improving motion realism across both autoregressive and bidirectional video generators under both automatic metrics and blind human evaluation (+68 Elo gain). Ablations show that the three axes provide complementary supervision signals, while the reward preserves overall video generation quality with only modest training overhead. --- ### Image Restoration via Diffusion Models with Dynamic Resolution Authors: Yang Zheng, Wen Li, Zhaoqiang Liu Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14267v1 Diffusion models (DMs) have exhibited remarkable efficacy in various image restoration tasks. However, existing approaches typically operate within the high-dimensional pixel space, resulting in high computational overhead. While methods based on latent DMs seek to alleviate this issue by utilizing the compressed latent space of a variational autoencoder, they require repeated encoder-decoder inference. This introduces significant additional computational burdens, often resulting in runtime performance that is even inferior to that of their pixel-space counterparts. To mitigate the computational inefficiency, this work proposes projecting data into lower-dimensional subspaces using dynamic resolution DMs to accelerate the inference process. We first fine-tune pre-trained DMs for dynamic resolution priors and adapt DPS and DAPS, which are two widely used pixel-space methods for general image restoration tasks, into the proposed framework, yielding methods we refer to as SubDPS and SubDAPS, respectively. Given the favorable inference speed and reconstruction fidelity of SubDAPS, we introduce an enhanced variant termed SubDAPS++ to further boost both reconstruction efficiency and quality. Empirical evaluations across diverse image datasets and various restoration tasks demonstrate that the proposed methods outperform recent DM-based approaches in the majority of experimental scenarios. The code is available at https://github.com/StarNextDay/SubDAPS.git. --- ### Agentic AI Ecosystems in Higher Education: A Perspective on AI Agents to Emerging Inclusive, Agentic Multi-Agent AI Framework for Learning, Teaching and Institutional Intelligence Authors: Vidya K Sudarshan, Anushka Sisodia, Reshma A Ramachandra, Sia Batra, Josephine Chong Leng Leng Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14266v1 Integration of artificial intelligent (AI) agents in higher education is transforming teaching, learning and administrative processes. Although existing AI agents effectively support individual tasks, their implementation remains fragmented and inefficient for handling the complexity of educational institutions. This highlights a significant research gap: the lack of integrated eco-system-level agentic multi-agent AI platform capable of coordinated planning, reasoning, and adaptive decision-making across multiple educational functions. This paper presents a forward-looking perspective on agentic multi-agent AI platform in higher education, consisting interconnected autonomous, goal driven agents that support learning, teaching, and institutional operations. It addresses timely and critical questions: Can agentic AI represent the next generation of intelligent systems in tertiary education? Can they collectively support seamless coordinated operations across teaching, learning and administrative support? To what extent can such systems foster inclusive and equitable learning for diverse learners with special educational needs? To ground this perspective, a thematic analysis of existing literature identifies four dominant themes: task-specific fragmented AI tools, the transition from single-agent to multi-agent systems, limited cross-functional integration, and insufficient focus on inclusivity and accessibility. Findings reveal a clear gap between current AI implementations and the needs of holistic, learner-centered educational ecosystem. The paper synthesizes challenges and outlines future research directions for scalable human-aligned, and inclusive agentic AI platform. The significant contribution is the incorporation of inclusive learning perspectives, highlighting how coordinated agentic multi-agent platform can support diverse learners through adaptive, multimodal interventions. --- ### Heuristic Pathologies and Further Variance Reduction via Uncertainty Propagation in the AIVAT Family of Techniques Authors: Juho Kim, Tuomas Sandholm Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.AI, cs.GT arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14261v1 How should an agent's performance in a multiagent environment be evaluated when there is a limited sample size or a high cost of running a trial? The AIVAT family of variance reduction techniques was proposed to address this challenge by introducing unbiased low-variance estimators of agents' expected payoffs. An important component of AIVAT is a heuristic value function that discriminates between potentially low- and high-value counterfactual histories. A notable gap in the literature is that there is little to no constraint or guideline on how the heuristic value function should be chosen or how uncertainty in its output should be handled. In our first contribution, we parameterize the heuristic value function to highlight AIVAT's potential vulnerabilities: a) the sample variance can be set pathologically low by directly applying gradient descent on the sample variance, and b) one can p-hack to draw a desired statistical conclusion via gradient descent/ascent on the test statistic. The main takeaway is that the heuristic value function should be fixed prior to observing the evaluation data! In our second contribution, we show how the heuristic uncertainty can be propagated to quantify the uncertainty of AIVAT estimates. It is then possible to further reduce the variance using inverse-variance weighted averaging, but AIVAT's unbiasedness guarantee may have to be sacrificed. In our experiments, we use a dataset of 10,000 poker hands to demonstrate our heuristic pathology and uncertainty results, with the latter yielding a 43.0% reduction in the number of samples (poker hands) needed to draw statistical conclusions. --- ### On the Burden of Achieving Fairness in Conformal Prediction Authors: Ziang Gao, Pengqi Liu, Archer Yi Yang, Mouloud Belbahri, Jesse C. Cresswell, Masoud Asgharian Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14260v2 Conformal prediction is often calibrated with a single pooled threshold, but this can hide cross-group heterogeneity in score distributions and distort group-wise coverage. We study this phenomenon through the population score distributions underlying split conformal calibration. First, we derive a conservation law and lower bound showing that pooled calibration incurs irreducible group-wise coverage distortion at a scale set by cross-group quantile heterogeneity. Second, we demonstrate that the two leading fairness definitions for conformal prediction, Equalized Coverage and Equalized Set Size, are fundamentally in tension. Third, we quantify the cost of moving between policies which treat groups separately or pool them. Experiments on synthetic and real data confirm the same bidirectional trade-off after finite-sample calibration. Our results show that, for the policy families studied here, calibration choice does not remove cross-group heterogeneity; it determines whether the resulting distortion appears in the coverage or size dimension, providing a principled lens for analyzing fairness-oriented calibration choices in practice. --- ### Hypergraph Enterprise Agentic Reasoner over Heterogeneous Business Systems Authors: Ling Wang, Xin Liu, Songnan Liu, Jianan Wang, Cheng Cheng, Yihan Zhu, Enyu Li, Yu Xiao, Jiangyong Xie, Duogong Yan, Jiangyi Chen Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14259v3 Applying Large Language Models (LLMs) to heterogeneous enterprise systems is hindered by hallucinations and failures in multi-hop, n-ary reasoning. Existing paradigms (e.g., GraphRAG, NL2SQL) lack the semantic grounding and auditable execution required for these complex environments. We introduce HEAR, an enterprise agentic reasoner built on a Stratified Hypergraph Ontology. Its base Graph Layer virtualizes provenance-aware data interfaces, while the Hyperedge Layer encodes n-ary business rules and procedural protocols. Operating an evidence-driven reasoning loop, HEAR dynamically orchestrates ontology tools for structured multi-hop analysis without requiring LLM retraining. Evaluations on supply-chain tasks, including order fulfillment blockage root cause analysis (RCA), show HEAR achieves up to 94.7% accuracy. Crucially, HEAR demonstrates adaptive efficiency: utilizing procedural hyperedges to minimize token costs, while leveraging topological exploration for rigorous correctness on complex queries. By matching proprietary model performance with open-weight backbones and automating manual diagnostics, HEAR establishes a scalable, auditable foundation for enterprise intelligence. --- ### Hypergraph Enterprise Agentic Reasoner over Heterogeneous Business Systems Authors: Ling Wang, Xin Liu, Songnan Liu, Jianan Wang, Cheng Cheng, Yihan Zhu, Enyu Li, Yu Xiao, Jiangyong Xie, Duogong Yan, Jiangyi Chen Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14259v2 Applying Large Language Models (LLMs) to heterogeneous enterprise systems is hindered by hallucinations and failures in multi-hop, n-ary reasoning. Existing paradigms (e.g., GraphRAG, NL2SQL) lack the semantic grounding and auditable execution required for these complex environments. We introduce HEAR, an enterprise agentic reasoner built on a Stratified Hypergraph Ontology. Its base Graph Layer virtualizes provenance-aware data interfaces, while the Hyperedge Layer encodes n-ary business rules and procedural protocols. Operating an evidence-driven reasoning loop, HEAR dynamically orchestrates ontology tools for structured multi-hop analysis without requiring LLM retraining. Evaluations on supply-chain tasks, including order fulfillment blockage root cause analysis (RCA), show HEAR achieves up to 94.7% accuracy. Crucially, HEAR demonstrates adaptive efficiency: utilizing procedural hyperedges to minimize token costs, while leveraging topological exploration for rigorous correctness on complex queries. By matching proprietary model performance with open-weight backbones and automating manual diagnostics, HEAR establishes a scalable, auditable foundation for enterprise intelligence. --- ### Dynamics of the Transformer Residual Stream: Coupling Spectral Geometry to Network Topology Authors: Jesseba Fernando, Grigori Guitchounts Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14258v1 Large language models are remarkably capable, yet how computation propagates through their layers remains poorly understood. A growing line of work treats depth as discrete time and the residual stream as a dynamical system, where each layer's nonlinear update has a local linear description. However, previous analyses have relied on scalar summaries or approximate linearizations, leaving the full spectral geometry of trained LLMs unknown. We perform full Jacobian eigendecomposition across three production--scale LLMs and show that training installs a monotonic spectral gradient through depth -- from non-normal, rotation-dominated early layers to near--symmetric late layers -- together with a cumulative low-rank bottleneck that funnels perturbations into a small fraction of the residual stream's effective dimensions. Our experiments reveal that this gradient and the dimensional collapse are learned rather than architectural, and is largely dissolved when structured non-normality is removed. We further show that the topological positioning of graph communities predicts whether the Jacobian amplifies or suppresses them, with the sign of the coupling determined by the local operator type, a relationship absent at initialization. These results map a learned spectral geometry in LLMs that links perturbation propagation and compression to the network's functional topology. --- ### Sakura at BEA 2026 Shared Task 1: What Makes Vocabulary Difficult? Authors: Adam Nohejl, Xuanxin Wu, Yusuke Ide, Maria Angelica Riera Machin, Yi-Ning Chang, Hitomi Yanaka Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14257v2 We describe two types of models for vocabulary difficulty prediction: a high-accuracy black-box model, which achieved the top shared task result in the open track, and an explainable model, which outperforms a fine-tuned encoder baseline. As the black-box model, we fine-tuned an LLM using a soft-target loss function for effective application to the rating task, achieving r > 0.91. The explainable model provides insights into what impacts the difficulty of each item while maintaining a strong correlation (r > 0.77). We further analyze the results, demonstrating that the difficulty of items in the British Council's Knowledge-based Vocabulary Lists (KVL) is often affected by spelling difficulty or the construction of the test items, in addition to the genuine production difficulty of the words. We make our code available online at https://github.com/ynklab/vocabulary-difficulty . --- ### Architecture-Aware Explanation Auditing for Industrial Visual Inspection Authors: Sibo Jia, Zihang Zhao, Kunrong Li Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14255v3 Industrial visual inspection systems increasingly rely on deep classifiers whose heatmap explanations may appear visually plausible while failing to identify the image regions that actually drive model decisions. This paper operationalizes an architecture-aware explanation audit protocol grounded in the native-readout hypothesis: the perturbation-based faithfulness of an explanation method is bounded by its structural distance from the model's native decision mechanism. On WM-811K wafer maps (9 classes, 172k images) under a three-seed zero-fill perturbation protocol, ViT-Tiny + Attention Rollout attains Deletion AUC 0.211 against 0.432-0.525 for Swin-Tiny / ResNet18+CBAM / DenseNet121 + Grad-CAM (abs(Cohen's d) > 1.1), despite lower classification accuracy. Swin-Tiny disentangles architecture family from readout structure: despite being a Transformer, its spatial feature-map hierarchy makes it Grad-CAM compatible, showing that the operative factor is readout structure rather than architecture family. A model-agnostic control (RISE) compresses all families to Deletion AUC about 0.1, indicating the gap arises from the explainer pathway; notably, RISE outperforms all native methods, so native readout is a compatibility principle rather than an optimality guarantee. A blur-fill sensitivity analysis shows that the family ordering reverses under a different perturbation baseline, reinforcing that faithfulness rankings are joint properties of (model, explainer, perturbation operator) triples. An exploratory boundary-condition study on MVTec AD (pretrained models) indicates that audit results are dataset/task dependent and identifies conditions requiring qualification. The protocol yields actionable guidance: explanation pathways should be co-designed with model architectures based on readout structure, and deployed heatmaps should be accompanied by quantitative faithfulness metrics. --- ### Towards Real-Time Autonomous Navigation: Transformer-Based Catheter Tip Tracking in Fluoroscopy Authors: Harry Robertshaw, Yanghe Hao, Weiyuan Deng, Benjamin Jackson, S. M. Hadi Sadati, Nikola Fischer, Tom Vercauteren, Alejandro Granados, Thomas C. Booth Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14253v1 Purpose: Mechanical thrombectomy (MT) improves stroke outcomes, but is limited by a lack of local treatment access. Widespread distribution of reinforcement learning (RL)-based robotic systems can be used to alleviate this challenge through autonomous navigation, but current RL methods require live device tip coordinate tracking to function. This paper aims to develop and evaluate a real-time catheter tip tracking pipeline under fluoroscopy, addressing challenges such as low contrast, noise, and device occlusion. Methods: A multi-threaded pipeline was designed, incorporating frame reading, preprocessing, inference, and post-processing. Deep learning segmentation models, including U-Net, U-Net+Transformer, and SegFormer, were trained and benchmarked using two-class and three-class formulations. Post-processing involved two-step component filtering, one-pixel medial skeletonization, and greedy arc-length path following with contour fall-back. Results: On manually-labeled moderate complexity fluoroscopic video data, the two-class SegFormer achieved a mean absolute error of 4.44 mm, outperforming U-Net (4.60 mm), U-Net+Transformer (6.20 mm) and all three-class models (5.19-7.74 mm). On segmentation benchmarks, the system exceeded state-of-the-art CathAction results with improvements of up to +5% in Dice scores for three-segmentation. Conclusion: The results demonstrate that the proposed multi-threaded tracking framework maintains stable performance under challenging imaging conditions, outperforming prior benchmarks, while providing a reliable and efficient foundation for RL-based autonomous MT navigation. --- ### Not All Timesteps Matter Equally: Selective Alignment Knowledge Distillation for Spiking Neural Networks Authors: Kai Sun, Peibo Duan, Yongsheng Huang, Guowei Zhang, Benjamin Smith, Nanxu Gong, Levin Kuhlmann Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14252v2 Spiking neural networks (SNNs), which are brain-inspired and spike-driven, achieve high energy efficiency. However, a performance gap between SNNs and artificial neural networks (ANNs) still remains. Knowledge distillation (KD) is commonly adopted to improve SNN performance, but existing methods typically enforce uniform alignment across all timesteps, either from a teacher network or through inter-temporal self-distillation, implicitly assuming that per-timestep predictions should be treated equally. In practice, SNN predictions vary and evolve over time, and intermediate timesteps need not all be individually correct even when the final aggregated output is correct. Under such conditions, effective distillation should not force every timestep toward the same supervision target, but instead provide corrective guidance to erroneous timesteps while preserving useful temporal dynamics. To address this issue, we propose Selective Alignment Knowledge Distillation (SeAl-KD), which selectively aligns class-level and temporal knowledge by equalizing competing logits at erroneous timesteps and reweighting temporal alignment based on confidence and inter-timestep similarity. Extensive experiments on static image and neuromorphic event-based datasets demonstrate consistent improvements over existing distillation methods. The code is available at https://github.com/KaiSUN1/SeAl --- ### Generative Deep Learning for Computational Destaining and Restaining of Unregistered Digital Pathology Images Authors: Aarushi Kulkarni, Alarice Lowe, Pratik Shah Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14251v1 Conditional generative adversarial networks (cGANs) have enabled high-fidelity computational staining and destaining of hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) in digital pathology whole-slide images (WSI). However, their ability to generalize to out-of-distribution WSI across institutions without retraining remains insufficiently characterized. Previously developed cGAN models trained on 102 registered prostate core biopsy WSIs from Brigham and Women's Hospital were evaluated on 82 spatially unregistered WSIs acquired at Stanford University. To mitigate domain shift without retraining, a preprocessing pipeline consisting of histogram-based stain normalization for H&E-stained WSIs and channel-wise intensity calibration for unstained WSIs was developed. Because image registration was intentionally omitted for real-world deployment conditions, the reported quantitative results are conservative lower bounds reflecting both model performance and limited spatial alignment. Under these conditions, virtual destaining achieved a Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) of 0.854, structural similarity index measure (SSIM) of 0.699, and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) of 18.41 dB. H&E restaining from computationally destained outputs outperformed direct staining from ground-truth unstained inputs across all metrics (PCC: 0.798 vs. 0.715; SSIM: 0.756 vs. 0.718; PSNR: 20.08 vs. 18.51 dB), suggesting that preprocessing quality may be more limiting than model capacity. Qualitative pathological review indicated preservation of benign glandular structures while showing that malignant glands were often rendered with vessel-like morphologies. These findings support the feasibility of applying cGAN-based computational H&E staining and destaining generative models to external WSI datasets using preprocessing-based adaptation alone while defining specific morphological targets for future domain adaptation. --- ### EnergyLens: Predictive Energy-Aware Exploration for Multi-GPU LLM Inference Optimization Authors: Zhiye Song, Kyungmi Lee, Eun Kyung Lee, Xin Zhang, Tamar Eilam, Anantha P. Chandrakasan Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14249v1 We present EnergyLens, an end-to-end framework for energy-aware large language model (LLM) inference optimization. As LLMs scale, predicting and reducing their energy footprint has become critical for sustainability and datacenter operations, yet existing approaches either require production-level code and expensive profiling or fail to accurately capture multi-GPU energy behavior. As a result, practitioners lack tools for deciding which optimizations to prioritize and for selecting among existing deployment configurations when exhaustive profiling is impractical. EnergyLens addresses this gap with an intuitive einsum-based interface that captures LLM specifications including fusion, parallelism, and compute-communication overlap, combined with load-imbalance-aware MoE modeling and an empirically driven communication energy model for multi-GPU settings. We validate EnergyLens on Llama3 and Qwen3-MoE across tensor-parallel and expert-parallel configurations, achieving mean absolute percentage errors (MAPEs) between 9.25% and 13.19% for multi-GPU prefill and decode energy, and 12.97% across SM allocations for Megatron-style overlap. Our energy-driven exploration reveals up to 1.47x and 52.9x energy variation across configurations in prefill and decode efficiency and motivates distributed serving. We further show that compute-communication overlap is difficult to optimize with intuition alone, but EnergyLens correctly identifies Pareto-optimal overlap configurations. --- ### Action-Conditioned Risk Gating for Safety-Critical Control under Partial Observability Authors: Yushen Liu, Yin-Jen Chen, Ziyi Chen, Tao Wang, Heng Huang, Xugui Zhou, Yanfu Zhang Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, eess.SY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14246v1 Many safety-critical control problems are modeled as risk-sensitive partially observable Markov decision processes, where the controller must make decisions from incomplete observations while balancing task performance against safety risk. Although belief-space planning provides a principled solution, maintaining and planning over beliefs can be computationally costly and sensitive to model specification in practical domains. We propose a lightweight risk-gated reinforcement learning approximation for risk-sensitive control under partial observability. The method constructs a compact finite-history proxy state and learns an action-conditioned predictor of near-term safety violation. This predicted candidate-action risk is used in two complementary ways: as a risk penalty during value learning, and as a decision-time gate that interpolates between optimistic and conservative ensemble value estimates. As a result, low-risk actions are evaluated closer to reward-seeking estimates, while high-risk actions are evaluated more conservatively. We evaluate the approach in two safety-critical partially observable domains: automated glucose regulation and safety-constrained navigation. Across adult and adolescent glucose-control cohorts, the method improves overall glycemic tradeoffs and substantially reduces runtime relative to a belief-space planning baseline. On Safety-Gym navigation benchmarks, it achieves a more favorable reward-cost balance than unconstrained RL and several standard safe-RL baselines. These results suggest that action-conditioned near-term risk can provide an effective local signal for approximate risk-sensitive POMDP control when full belief-space planning is impractical. --- ### Artificial Intelligence-Assistant Cardiotocography: Unified Model for Signal Reconstruction, Fetal Heart Rate Analysis, and Variability Assessment Authors: Xiaohua Wang, Kai Yu, XuXiao Liang, Liang Wang, Chao Han Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14242v1 The monitoring of fetal heart rate (FHR) and the assessment of its variability are crucial for preventing fetal compromise and adverse outcomes. However, traditional methods encounter limitations arising from equipment performance, data transmission, and subjective assessments by doctors. We have developed a tailored AI-based FHrCTG model specifically for FHR monitoring, which effectively mitigates noise interference and precisely reconstructs signals. Our model was pre-trained on a massive dataset consisting of 558,412 unlabeled data points and further refined using 7,266 expert-reviewed entries. To validate FHR, we introduced the Intersection Overlapping Labels (IOL) approach, which transforms rate analysis into categorical judgments. Testing revealed that our model demonstrates high sensitivity and specificity in detecting critical FHR decelerations (89.13% and 87.78%, respectively) and accelerations (62.5% and 92.04%, respectively). Furthermore, based on Fischer's criteria for clinical application, our model achieved impressive AUC scores of 0.7214 and 0.9643 for verifying FHR periodicity and amplitude variation, respectively. --- ### Latency-Quality Routing for Functionally Equivalent Tools in LLM Agents Authors: Kexin Chu, Dawei Xiang, Wei Zhang Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14241v2 Tool-augmented LLM agents increasingly access the same tool type through multiple functionally equivalent providers, such as web-search APIs, retrievers, or LLM backends exposed behind a shared interface. This creates a provider-routing problem under runtime load: the router must choose among providers that differ in latency, reliability, and answer quality, often without gold labels at deployment time. We introduce LQM-ContextRoute, a contextual bandit router for same-function tool providers. Its key design is latency-quality matching: instead of letting low latency offset poor answers in an additive reward, the router ranks providers by expected answer quality per service cycle. It combines this capacity-aware score with query-specific quality estimation and LLM-as-judge feedback, allowing it to adapt online to both load changes and provider-quality differences. On the main web-search load benchmark, LQM-ContextRoute improves F1 by +2.18 pp over SW-UCB while staying on the latency-quality frontier. In a high-heterogeneity StrategyQA setting, LQM-ContextRoute avoids additive-reward collapse and improves accuracy by up to +18 pp over SW-UCB; on heterogeneous retriever pools, it improves NDCG by +2.91--+3.22 pp over SW-UCB. These results show that same-function tool routing benefits from treating latency as service capacity, especially when runtime pressure and provider-quality heterogeneity coexist. --- ### Paraphrasing Attack Resilience of Various AI-Generated Text Detection Methods Authors: Andrii Shportko, Inessa Verbitsky Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14240v1 The recent large-scale emergence of LLMs has left an open space for dealing with their consequences, such as plagiarism or the spread of false information on the Internet. Coupling this with the rise of AI detector bypassing tools, reliable machine-generated text detection is in increasingly high demand. We investigate the paraphrasing attack resilience of various machine-generated text detection methods, evaluating three approaches: fine-tuned RoBERTa, Binoculars, and text feature analysis, along with their ensembles using Random Forest classifiers. We discovered that Binoculars-inclusive ensembles yield the strongest results, but they also suffer the most significant losses during attacks. In this paper, we present the dichotomy of performance versus resilience in the world of AI text detection, which complicates the current perception of reliability among state-of-the-art techniques. --- ### Implicit spatial-frequency fusion of hyperspectral and lidar data via kolmogorov-arnold networks Authors: Zekun Long, Judy X. Yang, Jing Wang, Ali Zia, Guanyiman Fu, Jun Zhou Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14239v1 Hyperspectral image (HSI) classification is challenging in complex scenes due to spectral ambiguity, spatial heterogeneity, and the strong coupling between material properties and geometric structures. Although LiDAR provides complementary elevation information, most HSI-LiDAR fusion methods rely on CNNs or MLPs with fixed activation functions and linear weights. These methods struggle to model structural discontinuities in LiDAR data, intricate spectral features of HSI, and their interactions. In addition, fusion of the two modalities in both spatial and frequency domains with LiDAR guidance remains underexplored. To address these issues, we propose the Implicit Frequency-Geometry Fusion Network (IFGNet), which leverages Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) with learnable spline-based functions to adaptively capture highly nonlinear relationships between hyperspectral and LiDAR features. Furthermore, IFGNet introduces a LiDAR-guided implicit aggregation module in both spatial and frequency domains, enhancing geometry-aware spatial representations while capturing global structural patterns. Experiments on the Houston 2013 and MUUFL benchmarks demonstrate that IFGNet consistently outperforms existing fusion methods in overall accuracy, average accuracy, and Cohen's Kappa, while maintaining an efficient architecture. --- ### Good to Go: The LOOP Skill Engine That Hits 99% Success and Slashes Token Usage by 99% via One-Shot Recording and Deterministic Replay Authors: Xiaohua Wang, Kai Yu, XuXiao Liang, Liang Wang, Chao Han Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14237v1 Deploying AI agents for repetitive periodic tasks exposes a critical tension: Large Language Models (LLMs) offer unmatched flexibility in tool orchestration, yet their inherent stochasticity causes unpredictable failures, and repeated invocations incur prohibitive token costs. We present the LOOP SKILL ENGINE, a system that achieves a combined 99% success rate and 99% token reduction for periodic agent tasks through a one-shot recording, deterministic replay paradigm. On its first run, the agent executes the task with full LLM reasoning while the system transparently intercepts and records the complete tool-call trajectory. A greedy length-descending template extraction algorithm then converts this recording into a parameterized, branch-free Loop Skill -- a deterministic execution plan that captures the task's functional intent while parameterizing time-dependent and result-dependent variables. All subsequent executions bypass the LLM entirely: the engine resolves template variables against real-time values and replays the tool sequence deterministically. We prove two theorems: (1) Replay Determinism -- the step sequence of a validated Loop Skill is invariant across all future executions; (2) Write Safety -- concurrent access to persistent configuration is serialized through reentrant locks and atomic file replacement. Across a benchmark of periodic agent tasks spanning intervals from 5 minutes to 24 hours, the Loop Skill Engine reduces monthly token consumption by 93.3%--99.98% and cuts execution latency by 8.7x while eliminating output non-determinism. A multi-layer degradation strategy guarantees that tasks never stall. We release the engine as part of the buddyMe open-source agent framework. --- ### Active Learners as Efficient PRP Rerankers Authors: Jeremías Figueiredo Paschmann, Juan Kaplan, Francisco Nattero, Santiago Barron, Juan Wisznia, Luciano del Corro Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14236v2 Pairwise Ranking Prompting (PRP) elicits pairwise preference judgments from an LLM, which are then aggregated into a ranking, usually via classical sorting algorithms. However, judgments are noisy, order-sensitive, and sometimes intransitive, so sorting assumptions do not match the setting. Because sorting aims to recover a full permutation, truncating it to meet a call budget does not produce a dependable top-K. We thus reframe PRP reranking as active learning from noisy pairwise comparisons and show that active rankers are drop-in replacements that improve NDCG@10 per call in the call-constrained regime. Our noise-robust framework also introduces a randomized-direction oracle that uses a single LLM call per pair. This approach converts systematic position bias into zero-mean noise, enabling unbiased aggregate ranking without the cost of bidirectional calls. --- ### Quantum Advantage in Multi Agent Reinforcement Learning Authors: Simranjeet Singh Dahia, Claudia Szabo Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.MA, quant-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14235v1 We present an empirical evaluation of quantum entanglement in agent coordination within quantum multi agent reinforcement learning (QMARL). While QMARL has attracted growing interest recently, most prior work evaluates quantum policies without provable baselines, making it impossible to rigorously distinguish quantum advantage from algorithmic coincidence. We address this directly by evaluating a decentralized QMARL framework with variational quantum circuit (VQC) actors with shared entangled states. In the CHSH game, which has a mathematically proven classical performance ceiling of 0.75 win rate, we show that entangled QMARL agents approach the Tsirelson limit of 0.854, providing clear evidence of their quantum advantage. We show that unentangled quantum circuits match the classical baseline, confirming that entanglement and not the quantum circuit itself is the active coordination mechanism. We also explore the effect of specific entanglement structures, as some Bell states enable coordination gains while others actively harm performance. On cooperative navigation (CoopNav), QMARL without entanglement achieves $\sim2\times$ improvement in success rate over classical MAA2C ($\sim$0.85 versus $\sim$0.40), with the hybrid configuration, quantum actor paired with a classical centralised critic, outperforming both fully classical and fully quantum solutions. We present our experimental analysis and discuss future work. --- ### AudioMosaic: Contrastive Masked Audio Representation Learning Authors: Hanxun Huang, Qizhou Wang, Xingjun Ma, Cihang Xie, Christopher Leckie, Sarah Erfani Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.SD arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14231v1 Audio self-supervised learning (SSL) aims to learn general-purpose representations from large-scale unlabeled audio data. While recent advances have been driven mainly by generative reconstruction objectives, contrastive approaches remain less explored, partly due to the difficulty of designing effective audio augmentations and the large batch sizes required for contrastive pre-training. We introduce \textbf{AudioMosaic}, a contrastive learning-based audio encoder for general audio understanding. During pre-training, AudioMosaic constructs positive pairs by applying structured time-frequency masking to spectrogram patches, which reduces memory usage and enables efficient large-batch training. Compared with generative approaches, the AudioMosaic encoder learns more discriminative utterance-level representations that demonstrate strong transferability across datasets, domains, and acoustic conditions. Extensive experiments show that AudioMosaic achieves state-of-the-art performance on several standard audio benchmarks under both linear probing and fine-tuning. We further show that integrating the pretrained AudioMosaic encoder into audio-language models improves performance on audio-language tasks. The code is publicly available in our \href{https://github.com/HanxunH/AudioMosaic}{GitHub repository}. --- ### Self-Regulated Learning in Essay Writing: Consistency of Strategies and Impact on Outcomes Authors: Gloria Fernández-Nieto, Kiyoshige Garcés, Mladen Raković, Tongguang Li, Xinyu Li, Linxuan Zhao, Dragan Gašević Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.HC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14228v1 Background: Abilities for effective self-regulated learning (SRL) are critical for lifelong learning, particularly during adolescence when these skills consolidate and strongly influence future learning. Their importance has grown with the rise of online and blended education. Yet, little is known about how secondary school students self-regulate in online environments, how their SRL processes and strategies evolve, or how they affect outcomes. In secondary education, understanding these processes can reveal patterns and indicators of learning success, informing the design of online support mechanisms. Evidence from repeated-measures designs remains scarce. Objectives: This study aims to examine how secondary school students enact SRL strategies during online essay writing, how these strategies change over time, and how they relate to learning outcomes. Methods: We analysed metacognition-related trace data collected from secondary students during a two-wave online essay-writing task conducted one week apart in two Colombian schools (N = 93 for session 1, N = 95 for session 2) via a digital learning platform. Using a combination of process mining and unsupervised machine learning techniques, we identified dominant SRL strategies grounded in established SRL processes and examined their stability and association with learning outcomes. Results and conclusions: Three dominant SRL strategies were identified. Results showed variability: many students remained in or shifted to Read first, write next, while none used Write intensively, read selectively in session 2. Although less common, latter strategy was positively associated with learning outcomes. --- ### DT-Transformer: A Foundation Model for Disease Trajectory Prediction on a Real-world Health System Authors: Yunying Zhu, Andrew R Weckstein, Kueiyu Joshua Lin, Jie Yang Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14227v1 Accurate disease trajectory prediction is critical for early intervention, resource allocation, and improving long-term outcomes. While electronic health records (EHRs) provide a rich longitudinal view of patient health in clinical environments, models trained on curated research cohorts may not reflect routine deployment settings, and those trained on single-hospital datasets capture only fragments of each patient's trajectory. This highlights the importance of leveraging large, multi-hospital health systems for training and validation to better reflect real-world clinical complexity. In this work, we develop DT-Transformer, a foundation model trained on 57.1M structured EHR entries over 1.7M patients from Mass General Brigham (MGB), spanning 11 hospitals and a broad network of outpatient clinics. DT-Transformer achieves strong discrimination in both held-out and prospective validation settings. Next-event prediction achieves a median age- and sex-stratified AUC of 0.871 across 896 disease categories, with all categories exceeding AUC 0.5. These results support health system-scale training as a path toward foundation models suited to real-world clinical forecasting. --- ### Wavelet-Based Observables for Koopman Analysis: An Extended Dynamic Mode Decomposition Framework Authors: Cankat Tilki, Serkan Gugercin Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: math.NA, cs.AI, math.DS, math.FA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14224v1 We present an in-depth analysis of the Koopman semigroup via wavelet transform. Towards this goal, we start by introducing the wavelet-based observables and show that they are eigenfunctions of the Koopman semigroup when this semigroup is considered over the Banach space of continuous functions on a compact forward-invariant set endowed with the supremum norm. We then construct closed-form expressions of the action of the Koopman semigroup and its resolvent in terms of these observables. To approximate the action of Koopman semigroup numerically, we combine Extended Dynamic Mode Decomposition (EDMD) with the proposed wavelet-based observables leading to the Wavelet Dynamic Mode Decomposition via Continuous Wavelet Transform (cWDMD) algorithm. We validate our theoretical results on two numerical examples. --- ### Automatic Landmark-Based Segmentation of Human Subcortical Structures in MRI Authors: Ahmed Rekik, R. Jarrett Rushmore, Sylvain Bouix, Linda Marrakchi-Kacem Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14221v1 Precise segmentation of brain structures in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is essential for reliable neuroimaging analysis, yet voxel-wise deep models often yield anatomically inconsistent results that diverge from expert-defined boundaries. In this research, we propose a landmark-guided 3D brain segmentation approach that explicitly mimics the manual segmentation protocol of the Harvard--Oxford Atlas. A Global-to-Local network automatically detects 16 landmarks representing key subcortical reference points. Then, a semantic segmentation model produces a coarse segmentation of 12 anatomical labels, each grouping multiple subcortical regions. Finally, a landmark-driven post-processing step separates these 12 labels into 26 distinct structures by enforcing local anatomical constraints. Experimental results demonstrate consistent improvements in boundary accuracy. Overall, integrating learned landmarks aligns segmentations more closely with manual protocols. --- ### Diagnosing Training Inference Mismatch in LLM Reinforcement Learning Authors: Tianle Zhong, Neiwen Ling, Yifan Pi, Zijun Wei, Tianshu Yu, Geoffrey Fox, Peng Wu, Xiao Yu Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14220v1 Modern LLM RL systems separate rollout generation from policy optimization. These two stages are expected to produce token probabilities that match exactly. However, implementation differences can make them assign different values to the same sequence under the same model weights, inducing Training-Inference Mismatch (TIM). TIM is difficult to inspect because it is entangled with off-policy drift and common stabilization mechanisms. In this work, we isolate TIM in a zero-mismatch diagnostic setting (VeXact), and show that small token-level numerical disagreements can independently cause training collapse. We further show that TIM changes the effective optimization problem, and identify a set of remedies that could mitigate TIM. Our results suggest that TIM is not benign numerical noise, but a systems-level perturbation that should be treated as a first-order factor in analyzing LLM RL stability. --- ### Fusion-fission forecasts when AI will shift to undesirable behavior Authors: Neil F. Johnson, Frank Yingjie Huo Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.AI, physics.soc-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14218v1 The key problem facing ChatGPT-like AI's use across society is that its behavior can shift, unnoticed, from desirable to undesirable -- encouraging self-harm, extremist acts, financial losses, or costly medical and military mistakes -- and no one can yet predict when. Shifts persist in even the newest AI models despite remarkable progress in AI modeling, post-training alignment and safeguards. Here we show that a vector generalization of fusion-fission group dynamics observed in living and active-matter systems drives -- and can forecast -- future shifts in the AI's behavior. The shift condition, which is also derivable mathematically, results from group-level competition between the conversation-so-far (C) and the desirable (B) and undesirable (D) basin dynamics which can be estimated in advance for a given application. It is neither model-specific nor driven by stochastic sampling. We validate it across six independent tests, including: 90 percent correct across seven AI models spanning two orders of magnitude in parameter count (124M-12B); production-scale persistence across ten frontier chatbots; and a priori time-stamped prediction eleven months before the Stanford 'Delusional Spirals' corpus appeared, and independently confirmed by that corpus of 207,443 human-AI exchanges. Because it sits architecturally below the current safety stack, the same formula provides a real-time warning signal that current alignment does not supply, portable across current and future ChatGPT-like AI architectures and instantiable in application domains where competing response classes can be defined. --- ### PreFT: Prefill-only finetuning for efficient inference Authors: Andrew Lanpouthakoun, Aryaman Arora, Zhengxuan Wu, Dhruv Pai, Ben Keigwin, Dan Jurafsky, Christopher Potts Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL, eess.SY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14217v1 Large language models can now be personalised efficiently at scale using parameter efficient finetuning methods (PEFTs), but serving user-specific PEFTs harms throughput, even with specialised kernels and memory management techniques. This is because, theoretically and empirically, a mismatch exists between prefill (processing a large number of tokens at once) and decode (generating a single token autoregressively): the latter has far lower throughput when serving multiple adapters. Rather than optimising performance relative to parameter count, for efficient multi-adapter serving, we instead ought to optimise performance relative to serving throughput. We therefore propose PreFT (Prefill-only Finetuning), wherein we only apply the adapter to prefill tokens and discard it afterwards. PreFT significantly increases throughput with minimal effect on performance. We develop and release an efficient implementation of two prefill-only PEFTs, LoRA and ReFT, on the vLLM inference engine. We first show that serving multi-user PreFTs is more efficient than traditional PEFTs ($1.9\times$ the throughput when serving $512$ adapters on Llama 3.1 70B). Then, we compare the performance of prefill-only vs. all-token adapters on a variety of supervised finetuning and reinforcement learning tasks with LMs at varying scales. On SFT, we observe that the evaluation loss of PreFTs is higher than PEFTs, but can be compensated by increasing rank with nearly no reduction in throughput. On RL, we consistently find that PreFTs approach parity with standard PEFTs. Together, this work validates prefill-only adaptation of LLMs as a more favourable accuracy-throughput tradeoff than existing PEFTs for personalised serving. --- ### GenCircuit-RL: Reinforcement Learning from Hierarchical Verification for Genetic Circuit Design Authors: Noah Flynn Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG, q-bio.QM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14215v1 Genetic circuit design remains a laborious, expert-driven process despite decades of progress in synthetic biology. We study this problem through code generation: models produce Python code in pysbol3 to construct genetic circuits in the Synthetic Biology Open Language (SBOL), a formal representation that supports automated verification. We introduce GenCircuit-RL, a reinforcement learning framework built around hierarchical verification rewards that decompose correctness into five levels, from code execution to task-specific topological checks, and a four-stage curriculum that shifts optimization pressure from code generation to functional reasoning. We also introduce SynBio-Reason, a benchmark of 4,753 circuits spanning six canonical circuit types and nine tasks from code repair to de novo design, with held-out biological parts for out-of-distribution evaluation. Hierarchical verification improves task success on functional reasoning tasks by 14 to 16 percentage points over binary rewards, and curriculum learning is required for strong design performance. The resulting models generate topologically correct circuits, generalize to novel biological parts, and rediscover canonical designs from the synthetic biology literature. --- ### MetaAgent-X : Breaking the Ceiling of Automatic Multi-Agent Systems via End-to-End Reinforcement Learning Authors: Yaolun Zhang, Yujie Zhao, Nan Wang, Yiran Wu, Jiayu Chang, Yizhao Chen, Qingyun Wu, Jishen Zhao, Huazheng Wang Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14212v1 Automatic multi-agent systems aim to instantiate agent workflows without relying on manually designed or fixed orchestration. However, existing automatic MAS approaches remain only partially adaptive: they either perform training-free test-time search or optimize the meta-level designer while keeping downstream execution agents frozen, which creating a frozen-executor ceiling and leaving the end-to-end training of self-designing and self-executing agentic models unexplored. To address this, we introduce MetaAgent-X, an end-to-end reinforcement learning framework that jointly optimizes automatic MAS design and execution. MetaAgent-X enables script-based MAS generation, execution rollout collection, and credit assignment for both designer and executor trajectories. To support stable and scalable optimization, we propose Executor Designer Hierarchical Rollout and Stagewise Co-evolution to improve training stability and expose the dynamics of designer-executor co-evolution. MetaAgent-X consistently outperforms existing automatic MAS baselines, achieving up to 21.7% gains. Comprehensive ablations show that both designer and executor improve throughout training, and that effective automatic MAS learning follows a stagewise co-evolution process. These results establish end-to-end trainable automatic MAS as a practical paradigm for building self-designing and self-executing agentic models. --- ### ASH: Agents that Self-Hone via Embodied Learning Authors: Benjamin Schneider, Xavier Schneider, Victor Zhong, Sun Sun Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14211v3 Long-horizon embodied tasks remain a fundamental challenge in AI, as current methods rely on hand-engineered rewards or action-labeled demonstrations, neither of which scales. We introduce ASH, an agentic system that learns an embodied policy from unlabeled, noisy internet video, without reward shaping or expert annotation. ASH follows a self-improvement loop; when it gets stuck, ASH learns an Inverse Dynamics Model (IDM) from its own trajectories, and uses its IDM to extract supervision from relevant internet video. ASH uses unsupervised learning to identify key moments from large-scale internet video and retains them as long-term memory -- allowing it to tackle long-horizon problems. We evaluate ASH on two complementary environments demanding multi-hour planning: Pokemon Emerald, a turn-based RPG, and The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, a real-time action-adventure game. In both games, behavioral cloning, retrieval-augmented and zero-shot foundation-model baselines plateau, while ASH sustains progression across our 8-hour evaluation. ASH reaches an average of $11.2/12$ milestones in Pokemon Emerald and $9.9/12$ in Legend of Zelda, while the strongest baseline gets stuck in both environments at an average of $6.5/12$ and $6.0/12$ milestones, respectively. We demonstrate that self-improving agents are a scalable recipe for long-horizon embodied learning. --- ### Towards Fine-Grained and Verifiable Concept Bottleneck Models Authors: Yingying Fang, Haijie Xu, Shuang Wu, Mariathasan Anish, Guang Yang Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14210v1 Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) offer interpretable alternatives to black-box predictors by introducing human-relatable concepts before the final output. However, existing CBMs struggle to verify whether predicted concepts correspond to the correct visual evidence, limiting their reliability. We propose a fine-grained CBM framework that grounds each concept in localized visual evidence, enabling direct inspection of where and how concepts are encoded. This design allows users to interpret predictions and verify that the model learns intended concepts rather than spurious correlations. Experiments on medical imaging benchmarks show that our learned concept space is information-complete and achieves predictive performance comparable to standard CBMs, while substantially improving transparency. Unlike post-hoc attribution methods, our framework validates both the presence and correctness of concept representations, bridging interpretability with verifiability. Our approach enhances the trustworthiness of CBMs and establishes a principled mechanism for human-model interaction at the concept level, paving the way toward more reliable and clinically actionable concept-based learning systems. --- ### SimPersona: Learning Discrete Buyer Personas from Raw Clickstreams for Grounded E-Commerce Agents Authors: Zahra Zanjani Foumani, Alberto Castelo, Shuang Xie, Ted Chaiwachirasak, Han Li, Lingyun Wang Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14205v2 LLM-based web agents can navigate live storefronts, yet they often collapse to a single "average buyer" policy, failing to capture the heterogeneous and distributional nature of real buyer populations. Existing personalization methods rely on hand-crafted prompt-based personas that are brittle, difficult to scale, context-inefficient, and unable to faithfully represent population-level behavior. We introduce SimPersona, a novel framework that learns discrete buyer types from historical traffic and exposes them to LLM-based web agents as compact persona tokens. Given raw clickstreams, a behavior-aware VQ-VAE induces a discrete buyer-type space that captures the statistical structure of real buyer behavior and merchant-specific buyer population distributions. To provide behavior-specific guidance to LLM-based web agents, SimPersona maps each learned buyer type to a dedicated persona token in the LLM agent vocabulary and fine-tunes the agent with these tokens on real browsing traces. At inference, each synthetic buyer is assigned to a learned buyer type with a single encoder forward pass, requiring no retraining or store-specific prompt engineering. For population-level simulation, SimPersona samples buyer types from each merchant's empirical distribution over the learned VQ-VAE codebook and instantiates agents with the corresponding persona tokens, preserving merchant-specific buyer population distributions. Evaluated on $8.37$M buyers across $42$ held-out live storefronts, SimPersona achieves $78\%$ conversion-rate alignment with real buyers, exhibits interpretable behavioral variation across buyer types, and outperforms a baseline with $8\times$ more parameters on goal-oriented shopping tasks. We further release an open-source data pipeline that converts raw e-commerce event logs into buyer representations and agent-training traces. --- ### GxP-Agent: Process-DAG Topology for Reliable Clinical Trial Programming with LLM Agents Authors: Jaime Yan Published: 2026-05-13 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16890v1 Clinical trial programming -- transforming study protocols into analysis-ready datasets under CDISC standards -- is a bottleneck in regulatory submissions, yet LLM-based code generation fails catastrophically on this task: across 11 single-shot attempts with five frontier models, none produces a valid subject-level analysis dataset. We introduce GxP-Agent, a multi-agent system that encodes regulatory process ordering as a directed acyclic graph (DAG), decomposing monolithic dataset generation into 15 domain-specific nodes executed by worker agents with pharmaverse skill context, validation gates, and conditional retry. On CDISC-Bench, a new execution-based benchmark built from the FDA pilot submission CDISCPilot01 (254 subjects, 49 ground-truth ADSL variables), GxP-Agent with Claude Sonnet 4.6 achieves 100% structural match (49/49 variables, 254 correct records) across three independent runs, compared to 59.2% for the best retrieval-augmented baseline and 0% for all single-agent and flat multi-agent approaches. The DAG topology also enables weaker models: GPT-4.1 achieves 59.2% mean structural match under the same DAG, where it scores 0% under every other architecture. The approach generalizes to ADAE (adverse events; 9-node branching DAG, 55 variables, 1,191 records), achieving 100% structural match on the first attempt. These results demonstrate that encoding domain process knowledge as graph topology -- rather than relying on LLM reasoning alone -- is a key enabler for reliable, GxP-compliant clinical trial programming. --- ### Learning to Optimize at Scale: A Benders Decomposition-TransfORmers Framework for Stochastic Combinatorial Optimization Authors: Seung Jin Choi, Kimiya Jozani, Josh Cooper, Esra Buyuktahtakin Toy Published: 2026-05-13 Categories: math.OC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.22550v1 We propose a learning-augmented Benders decomposition framework to solve large-scale two-stage stochastic mixed-integer programs. We focus on the two-stage stochastic capacitated lot-sizing problem (TSSCLSP) under demand uncertainty. Our method accelerates the convergence of the decomposition by using a pre-trained TransfORmer model to rapidly generate high-quality approximate solutions for the scenario subproblems. This hybrid strategy uses the TransfORmer predictions to generate strong optimality and feasibility cuts, effectively guiding the Benders master problem. Our framework includes a novel expandable generation mechanism, allowing a model trained on a fixed horizon to solve instances of arbitrary length. For the test set considered, our method solves instances up to T = 270, a scale previously intractable for this approach, while maintaining zero infeasibility in the generated subproblem solutions. This demonstrates the potential of TransfORmers as powerful surrogate solvers embedded within classical decomposition algorithms. --- ### The Storyteller in the Model: Narrative Pattern Inheritance, Escalation Dynamics, and Alignment Governance in LLMs Authors: Adam Rigby, Raz Saremi, Azadeh Sohrabinejad, Mehdi Rahimi Published: 2026-05-13 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.20449v1 LLMs are trained predominantly on human-authored text, yet the structural and narrative conventions embedded in that text are rarely examined as a source of systematic behavioral influence, or as a governance risk in deployed systems. This paper considers whether the storytelling patterns inherent in published human writing, including archetypal roles such as protagonist, antagonist, and underdog, as well as tension-and-resolution narrative arcs, are absorbed during training and subsequently surface in LLM outputs, causing responses to drift toward unexpected, adversarial, or rhetorically enticing behaviors over extended interactions. Through a systematic literature review and cross-paper analysis of recent empirical studies on LLM alignment, persona dynamics, emergent misalignment, and user interaction patterns, we observe evidence bearing on this hypothesis. The findings reveal three key patterns. First, LLMs reproduce statistical patterns from their training data rather than reasoning independently. Second, measurable latent traits, including sycophancy and deceptiveness, emerge reliably across unrelated prompts. Third, fine-tuning on a narrow narrative task can produce unintended behavioral changes well beyond that task. Furthermore, evidence suggests that persuasive, narrative-style outputs are among the most common LLM products in real-world usage, amplifying these risks. Narrative drift constitutes an unmonitored escalation pathway in deployed AI systems, one that evades discrete-incident detection mechanisms and requires dedicated monitoring instruments. --- ### Domyn-Small: A European 10B Reasoning Language Model Authors: Simone Angarano, Francesco Bertolotti, Federico D'Ambrosio, Michele Resta, Alessandro Rognoni, Nicolò Ruggeri, Dario Salvati, Andrea Valenti, Alberto Veneri, Martin Cimmino Published: 2026-05-13 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.20448v1 We introduce Domyn-Small, a 10-billion-parameter open-weight reasoning language model released under the MIT license. Domyn-Small is the product of an initial pre-training phase on 9 trillion tokens multilingual data, followed by a post-training pipeline for reasoning, instruction following, and context extension. For the latter, we performed a Continued Pre-Training (CPT) phase that doubles the native context window to 32K tokens, followed by SFT with a math-focused annealing run. Finally, the RL phase includes GRPO with verifiable rewards, DPO, and a multi-environment GRPO stage spanning five task domains: mathematics, code, multiple-choice QA, instruction-following, and tool calling. The 32K-token native context extends to 128K at inference via YaRN, and a chat-template toggle enables dual-mode reasoning. Against peer models in the 7--10B class (Qwen3.5-9B, OLMo-3-7B-Think, Nemotron-Nano-8B, Ministral-3-8B), Domyn-Small achieves a strong accuracy-efficiency balance: it produces roughly one-third as many tokens as Qwen3.5-9B and approximately 35% of OLMo-3-7B-Think's token budget on core reasoning benchmarks, while delivering strong instruction-following (IFEval 79.9) and competitive science reasoning (GPQA-Diamond 50.0). We release the weights and the post-training recipe alongside Domyn Swarm (Apache~2.0), an open-source framework for scalable LLM inference on HPC clusters developed during this program and used throughout this work. --- ### thaulab@EEUCA 2026: Who Said What to Whom? A Targeting-Aware Neural-Symbolic Pipeline for Gaming Toxicity Detection Authors: Anmol Guragain, Marcos Estecha-Garitagoitia, Luis Fernando D'Haro Enríquez, Ricardo de Córdoba Published: 2026-05-13 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.20447v1 This paper describes our system for the EEUCA 2026 Shared Task on toxicity classification in gaming chat. We implement a three-stage pipeline combining an ensemble of two compact transformers (DeBERTa-v3-base, 184M; XLM-RoBERTa-base, 278M) with a Linguistically-Informed Mediator (LIM) that resolves inter-model disagreements through corpus-backed lexical normalization, class-conditional unigram scoring, multilingual profanity detection, and agentive targeting analysis grounded in speech act theory. The LIM specifically targets the minority classes (Hate \& Harassment, Threats, and Extremism), which are the most safety-critical categories in real-world gaming moderation. To address the extreme class imbalance (1{,}450:1 Non-toxic to Extremism ratio), we introduce a two-stage data augmentation strategy using only the provided training data. Our system achieves a Macro F1 of 0.6441 and accuracy of 0.9062 on the official test set, ranking 3rd in Macro F1 and 1st in accuracy among all teams. The proposed pipeline is domain-portable: adapting to other gaming platforms requires substituting only the game-specific entity lexicon. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/Anmol2059/thaulab\_EEUCA. --- ### Distinguishing Artificial from Authentic: Evaluating LLMs for Detecting LLM-Generated Content Authors: Juho Leinonen, Paul Denny Published: 2026-05-13 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.20446v1 As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used by students to generate natural language responses and program code, there is growing interest in whether LLMs themselves can be used to distinguish AI-generated work from human-authored submissions. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which LLMs can detect their own generated content across multiple educational task types, including programming exercises, reflective writing, and short-answer questions. Using authentic student responses and multiple variants of LLM-generated answers, we evaluate detection performance under different prompting strategies and output formats. Our study addresses three research questions: (1) how accurately LLMs can identify their own outputs across task domains, (2) how detection effectiveness is influenced by factors such as prompt design, response length, and task type, and (3) what characteristics of LLM-generated responses contribute to successful or failed detection. Our findings show that LLM-based detection is highly task-dependent: detection is substantially more reliable for programming tasks and longer reflective responses, but performs poorly for short-answer questions, where LLMs frequently judge their own outputs as more human-like than authentic student responses. We further find that prompt framing and response verbosity have a pronounced effect on detectability in reflective writing tasks, with relatively minor prompt variations significantly reducing detection accuracy, while programming-related detection is more robust to prompt changes. Together, these results highlight both the potential and the limitations of LLM self-detection in educational settings and suggest caution in relying on LLMs as standalone tools for identifying AI-generated student work. --- ### SCoPE: Shift-Aware Speaker-Conditioned Priors for Emotion Recognition in Conversations Authors: Burak Can Kaplan, Stefan Wermter Published: 2026-05-13 Categories: cs.CL, cs.SD, eess.AS arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.20445v1 In conversations, human emotions are transient; however, they tend to persist across multiple utterances. For example, we rarely switch instantly between contrasting emotions such as happiness and anger. Instead, emotions tend to evolve smoothly, and these patterns are often speaker-specific. Some people might escalate, while others gradually cool down over time. Furthermore, when emotions change during a conversation, they are often driven by contextual factors, such as newly received information or unexpected events. Even though progress has been made in Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERC), most existing approaches still rely heavily on overt evidence and do not sufficiently model these non-apparent factors. Especially in multimodal settings, this makes these models fragile when the signals are noisy (e.g., occluded faces, slang expressions, or microphone noise). To address these limitations, we introduce Speaker-Conditioned Priors over Emotions (SCoPE). SCoPE is a light weight module that utilizes the emotional history of each speaker and explicitly models their priors for use in subsequent emotion classification. Second, we incorporate emotion shift prediction, a well-established concept in ERC, to guide the model in balancing the priors from SCoPE and multimodal evidence. Finally, we propose a shift-aware fusion mechanism that performs precision-weighted logit integration between multimodal evidence and the speaker prior, forming a Bayesian-inspired product-of-experts formulation. This dynamic fusion allows the model to rely on historical priors when emotions persist and to prioritize multimodal evidence when shifts are likely. Experimental results show our model achieves superior performance over recent state-of-the-art models on the IEMOCAP dataset in multimodal settings. --- ### OpenEvoShield: Dual Non-Stationary Continual Defense for Open-World Multi-Agent System Attacks Authors: Litian Zhang, Chaozhuo Li, Yuting Zhang, Zejian Chen, Bingyu Yan, Qiwei Ye Published: 2026-05-13 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.19351v1 LLM-based multi-agent systems (LLM-MAS) are increasingly deployed in safety-critical applications, where adversaries inject malicious instructions through inter-agent communication to propagate harmful behaviors. Unlike static threats, these attacks are doubly dynamic: adversaries refine injection strategies against deployed defenses while normal-agent behavior drifts with system expansion. Existing defenses treat deployment as a closed-world problem and degrade rapidly once either distribution shifts beyond training coverage. We propose OpenEvoShield, a co-evolutionary continual defense framework for LLM-MAS. An asymmetric rate controller (M1) decouples fast attack-side and slow normal-side learning rates from dual drift signals. A normal-boundary updater (M2) maintains a dynamic behavioral boundary at the slow rate, while an EWC-regularized policy ensemble (M3) fast-adapts without catastrophic forgetting. An energy-based multi-granularity detector (M4) fuses node-, subgraph-, and graph-level evidence to classify novel attacks as out-of-distribution. Experiments over 100 deployment rounds across five benchmarks and four MAS topologies show that OpenEvoShield outperforms static and continual baselines, detecting most previously unseen attacks while keeping false positive rates low. --- ### Beyond Accuracy and Cost: Latency-Aware LLM Query Routing for Dynamic Workloads Authors: Shivam Patel, Akaash R. Parthasarathy, Ankur Mallick, Gauri Joshi Published: 2026-05-13 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.18253v1 Modern language query routers improve inference efficiency by assigning each query to a model that balances response quality and monetary cost. However, current query routers are largely latency-agnostic and do not consider the generation latency experienced by queries at model instances. In practice, latency is often controlled by load-balancing policies such as round-robin or join-the-shortest-queue, which do not account for model accuracy or inference cost. Incorporating query latency into routing is challenging as it depends not only on the query's prompt length, but also on the current prefill and decode workload at the model instance and the scheduling and batching policy of the serving framework. We design a lightweight latency estimator that simulates autoregressive token batch processing in the serving framework and estimates the time-to-first-token (TTFT) of queries. We incorporate this latency estimator into a latency-aware router that jointly optimizes latency, accuracy, and cost when assigning queries to model instances. Our experimental results indicate that this joint optimization yields up to 40% improvement in accuracy--cost utility while maintaining the same latencies as standard load-balancing approaches. --- ### Turning Intent into Specifications: A Benchmark and an Interactive User-Assistant Agent Authors: Hao Wang, Ligong Han, Kai Xu, Akash Srivastava Published: 2026-05-13 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20585v1 Today's agents are highly effective at implementing well-scoped software design plans, but user intent is often vague and admits multiple equally valid solutions. In this paper, we introduce SpecBench, a new benchmark for evaluating an agent's ability to translate user intent into a structured, executable specification that aligns with user preferences. The agent is given access to past user conversations and may interact with the user for a fixed number of rounds to ask clarifying questions. We find that existing agents exhibit two extreme behaviors: they either (i) struggle to collaborate proactively with users, entering implementation mode too quickly while overestimating their understanding of user preferences, or (ii) exhaust their question budget by asking about every ambiguous design choice. To address this limitation, we introduce a user-assistant agent: Buddy. It follows a workflow inspired by classical morphological analysis, decomposing user intent into a structured space of design dimensions and candidate choices. It then creates simulated users to evaluate these choices, before engaging the real user to resolve remaining ambiguities and finalize the specification. By shifting the focus from execution to specification, SpecBench and Buddy emphasize agent-user collaboration (not just code generation) as a key frontier in future agent design. --- ### Patients With Personality: Realistic Patient Simulation through Controlled Diversity and Selective Disclosure Authors: Moritz Schlager, Friederike Jungmann, Samuel Schmidgall, Philipp Raffler, Franziska Hartl, Eva Wende, Paula Roßmüller, Conrad Ketzer, Avinatan Hassidim, Dale R. Webster, Yossi Matias, Yun Liu et al. Published: 2026-05-13 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17441v2 Simulating realistic patient interactions is a key requirement to testing clinical applications of LLMs at scale without time-consuming and expensive user studies. However, existing approaches often lack realism and controllability, often oversharing information unprompted, and failing to capture the wide variability of patient behavior. Here, we introduce PatientsWithPersonality (PWP), a patient simulation framework that generates realistic yet diverse virtual patient responses through explicit personality parametrization over a latent patient state. Grounded in HEXACO, a six-dimensional personality space used to quantify and parameterize human behavioral traits, our approach enables fine-grained control over conversational style, cooperativeness, and information disclosure within a unified framework. In a clinician evaluation, PWP is judged nearly as realistic as recorded human actors and clearly ahead of prior simulators, while being flagged as "too informative" far less often. Conditioning on HEXACO axes yields personas whose configured traits are recoverable by both clinicians and an autorater, span a substantially wider behavioral footprint than the closest baseline, and prevent oversharing. Altogether, our framework paves the way for more accurate and informative LLM benchmarking through our realistic and steerable patient simulator. --- ### Patients With Personality: Realistic Patient Simulation through Controlled Diversity and Selective Disclosure Authors: Moritz Schlager, Friederike Jungmann, Samuel Schmidgall, Philipp Raffler, Franziska Hartl, Eva Wende, Paula Roßmüller, Conrad Ketzer, Avinatan Hassidim, Dale R. Webster, Yossi Matias, Yun Liu et al. Published: 2026-05-13 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17441v1 Simulating realistic patient interactions is a key requirement to testing clinical applications of LLMs at scale without time-consuming and expensive user studies. However, existing approaches often lack realism and controllability, often oversharing information unprompted, and failing to capture the wide variability of patient behavior. Here, we introduce PatientsWithPersonality (PWP), a patient simulation framework that generates realistic yet diverse virtual patient responses through explicit personality parametrization over a latent patient state. Grounded in HEXACO, a six-dimensional personality space used to quantify and parameterize human behavioral traits, our approach enables fine-grained control over conversational style, cooperativeness, and information disclosure within a unified framework. In a clinician evaluation, PWP is judged nearly as realistic as recorded human actors and clearly ahead of prior simulators, while being flagged as "too informative" far less often. Conditioning on HEXACO axes yields personas whose configured traits are recoverable by both clinicians and an autorater, span a substantially wider behavioral footprint than the closest baseline, and prevent oversharing. Altogether, our framework paves the way for more accurate and informative LLM benchmarking through our realistic and steerable patient simulator. ---