arXiv AI

arXiv:2610.27745v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as judgment assistants and as stand-in participants in psychology experiments, yet little is known about how much their probability estimates move in response to a single new piece of information. We pair premise-hypothesis items from $\delta$-SNLI with one strengthener and one weakener each, elicit the prior and the posteriors in separate calls, and measure the directional movement s: the mean posterior change signed by the annotated direction, so that the prior cancels out. We vary whether the update is stated ("Here is something else you learned") or reported ("Someone said that"), and whether the model gives one probability or five weighted estimates. We test seven configurations: two local models (Qwen3-8B, OLMo-2-7B; 240 pairs) and five configurations run through agent command-line harnesses (120 pairs), with hypotheses and analysis rules fixed before the formal runs (not publicly registered). Under stated, direct elicitation all seven move in the annotated direction (s = 18-28 percentage points). Reporting lowers s in all seven point estimates (significantly in six, by 2-5 points) and raises the share of reverse movements in all seven: the effect is consistent but small. Five weighted estimates lower the share of responses at $\leq$5% or $\geq$95% in all seven, but in the two local models they also reduce s by 43% and 68%, whereas in the harnessed configurations the point estimates of the change lie between -3.7 and +0.5 points. An elicitation format that reduces extreme values thus need not preserve sensitivity to evidence; the two should be tested separately. Because $\delta$-NLI annotates only direction, we make no claim about how large an update should be. Code, data and the frozen plan: https://github.com/asj252/llm-judgment-studies

arXiv:2610.27726v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learned barrier certificates provide a principled mechanism for establishing safety of stochastic systems, but their validity may deteriorate during deployment when the underlying dynamics differ from those used for training. We propose an anytime-valid runtime monitor that audits a learned barrier certificate using observed closed-loop trajectories. The monitor is intended to detect loss of statistical support for the deployed barrier condition; it does not by itself guarantee detection before unsafe entry or safety of a subsequent intervention. Specifically, the conditional barrier-drift condition is formulated as an episode-wise sequential hypothesis test, and observed barrier increments are transformed into a nonnegative test supermartingale, yielding finite-sample false-alarm control under arbitrary stopping times. Inspired by finite-horizon safety verification, we further introduce a deterministic temporal shaping of the monitoring boundary, making the monitor more conservative early in a prescribed deployment horizon while preserving anytime-validity. The monitor is designed to detect statistical evidence that the safety certificate is no longer consistent with the observed dynamics, rather than to predict unsafe entry. To assess the monitor empirically, we evaluate empirical alarm behavior under valid and invalid certificates. Code and data are available at https://github.com/FormalCert-AI/runtime-barrier-monitor.

arXiv:2610.27725v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-horizon human-object-scene interaction (HOSI) is central to embodied AI, animation, and game development. Existing human-object interaction (HOI) and human-scene interaction (HSI) models excel in their respective domains, but none alone covers tasks requiring multiple interaction skills. Training unified HOSI models is hindered by scarce and costly data. We introduce World2HOSI, a multi-expert orchestration harness that generates continuous HOSI data from 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) scenes and natural language instructions. Our key insight is that long-horizon HOSI hinges not on a stronger single model but on orchestration. Given a shared, structured scene state and an orchestration harness grounded in it, existing experts can jointly accomplish tasks beyond the reach of any of them alone. World2HOSI realizes this insight as a closed loop around a persistent scene state built from decoupled background and object assets. A harness plans action stages over this state, invokes experts via their native conditioning interfaces, and writes each action's effects back, so that every invocation is grounded in the evolving world. To reduce physical artifacts, bounded residual optimization and contact-driven physics simulation further ensure the physical plausibility of human motion and object manipulation, respectively, while preserving interaction intent. Experiments and a perceptual user study show that World2HOSI achieves the best task completion and interaction quality on the evaluated HOSI tasks, while generating more diverse data.

arXiv:2610.27712v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (FF3DGS) reconstructs 3D scenes from images in a single forward pass, making it well-suited to applications that must operate within limited resource budgets. To further improve its practicality, recent budget-controllable FF3DGS methods allow the number of Gaussians to be adjusted at inference, so that the output meets a given storage limit or rendering-latency constraint. However, these methods overlook the cost of inference itself: to produce a representation with the target number of Gaussians, they first predict a dense set of Gaussians and then prune or select from it, requiring nearly constant latency and peak memory regardless of the budget. We therefore propose RLSplat, a resource-linear budget-controllable FF3DGS framework whose representation size, inference latency, and peak memory all decrease linearly as the Gaussian budget is reduced. Instead of pruning or selection, RLSplat learns a Gaussian allocation policy that distributes the budget across local scene regions, so that exactly the requested number of Gaussians is generated. These Gaussians are then refined through resource-linear Gaussian decoding, in which each Gaussian attends only to nearby Gaussians found via an efficient hierarchical neighbor search, so that the decoding cost decreases linearly with fewer Gaussians. In zero-shot evaluation, RLSplat outperforms prior budget-controllable methods at every budget, surpassing the strongest baseline even with 4$\times$ fewer Gaussians, while running up to 4.1$\times$ faster with 9.6$\times$ less peak memory at low budgets.

arXiv:2610.27702v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models are expected to estimate their own uncertainty, with confidence signals used to guide retrieval, adaptive compute allocation, routing, and selective abstention. We investigate whether confidence signals measured at different temporal stages of problem solving encode distinct forms of epistemic information and remain reliable beyond English-centric settings. Inspired by classical meta-memory theory, we distinguish anticipatory pre-solve confidence (Feeling-of-Knowing, FOK) from retrospective post-solve confidence (Judgement-of-Learning, JOL). We evaluate these signals across two frontier LLMs, multiple reasoning domains, translated Marathi benchmarks, and a newly constructed benchmark of genuinely local Marathi factual questions. Across settings, the cheaper pre-solve signal remains weakly calibrated, while post-solve confidence generally provides stronger epistemic alignment despite its additional inference cost. Confidence behaviour transfers surprisingly well under direct language translation, with calibration trends largely preserved between English and Marathi, but degrades substantially on local Marathi knowledge, suggesting that linguistic transfer alone is insufficient for region-specific information needs. Finally, hallucinated responses maintain persistently elevated confidence after answer generation, highlighting important limitations of current LLM self-assessment mechanisms.

arXiv:2610.27698v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models transfer knowledge from large-scale pretraining into robot control, but their manipulation performance remains sensitive to changes in observation conditions, which recent work addresses by fine-tuning the visual module on target-domain data. However, it remains unclear how such adaptation affects robustness beyond the target condition, as existing robustness benchmarks only evaluate models without fine-tuning and adaptation studies only report the target gain. Measuring this cross-dimension effect requires separating target gains from off-target changes, isolating adaptation effects from architectural differences, ruling out generic forgetting, and comparing tuning choices. Therefore, we introduce VLA-Retain, a benchmark that compares five open VLA models, tuned on Camera-view or Sensor-noise data, with their own base checkpoints on LIBERO-Plus dataset spanning seven perturbation dimensions. Our study reveals four findings. First, targeted vision tuning is not local, and its target gain does not predict retention. Mean off-target gain is negative in 8 of 10 model--domain configurations. Under Camera-view tuning, X-VLA gains $69.4$ percentage points on the target but loses $4.6$ points on average elsewhere, whereas OpenVLA-OFT gains $39.3$ and $1.4$ points, respectively. Second, these regressions are not explained only by performance loss on the same tasks without perturbations. Third, broader training coverage raises overall gain over target-specific training but does not eliminate dimension-level regressions. Fourth, tuning strategies are model-dependent, as DELTA-style feature preservation raises X-VLA's mean off-target gain to $+1.2$ points but lowers OpenVLA-OFT's to $-23.1$. Overall, these findings show that target-domain success alone is insufficient and highlight cross-dimensional retention as a key criterion for targeted VLA adaptation.

arXiv:2610.27677v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In object goal navigation (ObjectNav), an embodied agent must find a target object (e.g., "find a bed") in a previously unseen environment, relying on spatial commonsense such as object co-occurrence. Large Language Models (LLMs) encode this commonsense, but deploying them on robots exposes a trade-off between reasoning quality and efficiency: cloud-based models incur latency and privacy risks, whereas small on-device LLMs are fast but prone to hallucinated spatial judgments. Hybrid reasoning LLMs offer both a fast non-thinking mode and a slow thinking mode, which raises a key question for embodied agents: when is slow thinking worth its cost? We propose CovNav, a training-free framework that answers this question with Conformal Prediction (CP), turning dual-process (System 1 / System 2) inference into an uncertainty-aware decision. Much like recent decision models such as Jev, CovNav casts each spatial query as a structured binary decision rather than free-form generation: a local LLM in fast mode judges whether the target is likely near an observed object, CP converts its token probabilities into a prediction set, and only ambiguous queries are escalated to slow chain-of-thought reasoning. The object-pair formulation keeps calibration tractable and supports open-set objects through off-the-shelf detectors. Experiments on Gibson and HM3D show that CovNav surpasses the strongest zero-shot baseline by 0.8 and 1.7 percentage points in success rate on HM3D v1 and v2, while invoking slow reasoning for only 12.4% of queries and retaining most of the gain of always-on thinking at a fraction of its latency. Real-robot experiments on a TurtleBot 4 further validate the approach. CovNav shows how calibrated uncertainty can decide when an embodied agent should think slowly, offering a principled form of adaptive test-time reasoning for LLM-based robots.

arXiv:2610.27669v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep neural networks often fail at small-sample regression, collapsing to low-variance predictions that miss individual differences. Here, we introduce a pairwise comparison framework that reframes regression as aggregated relative rankings. This method improves data efficiency across model architectures and dataset sizes. On the UTKFace dataset (23k images), pairwise learning generates over one billion training comparisons without additional supervision. The paired ranking allows a lightweight ResNet10 trained from scratch on home hardware to achieve a 3.64-year MAE-surpassing previous models, including those with large-scale pretraining. For classification into categories, pairwise supervision consistently outperforms an otherwise identical 10-way crossentropy model on STL10 with 500-2000 labeled examples, improving accuracy by up to 5.2%. Overall, pairwise supervision enhances data efficiency and enables strong regression and classification performance when labeled data are limited, particularly in clinical settings.

arXiv:2610.27653v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Watermarking has emerged as a key tool for identifying text generated by large language models (LLMs), with current schemes embedding statistical signals into the generation process to enable later detection. In this work, we identify a shared weakness across a broad class of popular LLM watermarking methods, including KGW (and its variants), GumbelSoft, DipMark, ITS, and SynthID. We show that these schemes exhibit a fundamental link between their detection scores and the token probability shifts they introduce during generation. This link, which we call score-ratio alignment, allows an attacker with only black-box query access to the model--and no knowledge of secret keys or model weights--to produce text that evades detection while remaining fluent and natural. We prove that the resulting attack is optimal across all covered watermark families, and show that the weakness is intrinsic: any watermark designed to maximize statistical detection power necessarily induces the very structure that attackers can exploit. We evaluate our attack on seven popular generative LLM watermarking schemes, three LLMs, and tasks, which reduce detection rates to at most 0.05 across all settings while preserving text quality. Our findings show that current watermarking methods can be reliably defeated under realistic attack conditions, highlighting the need for fundamentally different watermarking designs that decouple detection scores from token probability shifts.

arXiv:2610.27652v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Practitioners building training corpora with a pipeline of language models keep a preprocessing or refinement (post-process) stage when switching it on raises the corpus quality. We ablate a production pipeline that turns conference speech into question-answer pairs. The preprocessing stage rewrites the transcript, and the refinement stage filters the generated pairs. Switching each on and off gives four corpora from the same 40 Korean medical and finance sessions. On the corpus itself, quality rises as the stages switch on. Four LLM judges and six human domain experts rank the four corpora the same way, and the fully refined corpus leads by +0.18 and +0.22 on a 1-5 scale. We then ask whether that gain carries downstream. We supply each corpus to six models at inference and measure retrieval accuracy. The ranking does not hold. Enabling the transcript rewrite lowers retrieval accuracy by 0.061, the only stage effect that survives correction for multiple comparisons. That stage also reads the whole session, so it almost doubles the cost of one. With both stages on, accuracy does not change. An equivalence test we declared in advance confirms this. The corpus itself is clearly valuable. It lifts retrieval accuracy from 0.231 to 0.748 in every model and domain we test. More than a third of its pairs carry knowledge that neither of two frontier models produces on its own. On our data, the null does not come from weak corpora. A rising score on a rubric of this kind did not predict what the corpus holds for a model.

arXiv:2610.27641v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Temperature scaling is typically applied as a post-hoc transformation of model probabilities. In posterior-induced flow language models, this creates two mismatches. First, posterior tempering implicitly changes both the endpoint distribution and the distribution of intermediate noisy states, while the denoiser remains trained on the original states. Second, the tempered posterior weights are combined with transport dynamics derived for the untempered flow. These mismatches are reflected empirically: lowering temperature improves GSM8K performance much less reliably in flow LMs than in discrete diffusion LMs. We introduce Bayes-Consistent Tempering (BCT), which makes temperature explicit in both the distributions and dynamics of the generative flow. Its learned realization trains the denoiser on tempered intermediate states and tempers the endpoint distribution using the corresponding tempered dynamics. We also derive training-free variants for conventionally trained checkpoints. Across hyperspherical flow LMs with two denoiser architectures and a von Mises--Fisher flow LM, BCT improves GSM8K generation across broad temperature ranges and achieves the strongest tempering performance. The gains also extend to Sudoku, demonstrating benefits on tightly constrained generation. At very low temperatures, the learned realization is also markedly more robust than the training-free variants, supporting temperature as a property of the generative flow across training and inference rather than a post-hoc probability adjustment. Code and model weights are available at https://daioba.github.io/bct .

arXiv:2610.27622v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Handheld demonstration devices decouple data collection from the robot, but conventional designs burden the hand with a wrist camera, cables and a pose tracker (SLAM, an IMU, a VR controller, or a fixed external camera that the collector's body occludes), and burden the pipeline with as many data streams to timestamp, synchronise and cross-calibrate. We show that a single egocentric camera (USD 122) worn on the collector's head replaces the wrist camera, the pose tracker and their separate streams with one. It reads printed fiducials on an electronics-free glove (USD 22) against paper tiles taped around the workspace, giving the 6-DoF gripper pose and the jaw width from the same frames the policy will see; at deployment the same camera rides a low-cost (USD 120) arm beside the robot that mimics the collector's head from the robot's joint state. Against the robot's encoders the labels are accurate to 6.5 mm and 1.6 degrees median with 93-100% frame coverage, and a policy trained on them instead of encoders pays 3% in validation loss. Adding 194 glove demonstrations to 48 teleoperated episodes lifts rollout success from 10/25 to 17/25, level with 172 teleoperated episodes alone (18/25), and the full co-trained head-camera policy succeeds in 20/25 against 15/25 for the wrist-camera recipe, whose policies drop the object when the goal leaves their view, and 12/25 for a fixed camera.

arXiv:2610.27620v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous LLM agents act through tools under per-action authorization: a local guard screens each tool call in isolation. We show that local authorization does not compose into global authorization. A compositional authorization failure (CAF) is a locally authorized execution, or a pair of locally authorized executions, that violates a global policy spanning intent, purpose, provenance, consent, and delegation. We characterize CAFs along two axes, expressiveness (single-trace safety versus relational k-safety) and observability (a ladder of monitor profiles). Our central result is an impossibility: relational purpose violations form a 2-safety hyperproperty with no per-trace locus of blame, so a per-action monitor that never raises a false alarm detects none of them, independent of the underlying model or decision procedure; they become visible only under cross-execution monitoring, which none of the six guardrails we survey implements. We make this constructive with AL-SYNTH, a SAT/SMT synthesizer (using no language model) that emits minimal CAF witnesses, each checked against an exhaustive oracle. The empirical signature is sharp: across nine LLM judges the per-action view approves the synthesized witness almost without exception, blocking it at a rate comparable to a benign control, yet the same models flag it when shown the two executions together. Per-action authorization is therefore structurally insufficient for relational policy conjuncts not reducible to single-trace safety: to bound them, a monitor must compare executions or accept false alarms.

arXiv:2610.27614v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Complex chemical systems containing heterogeneous substructures are common in real-world applications. Various physical phenomena of the complex chemical systems are derived from the interactions between the heterogeneous substructures. However, existing graph representation learning methods for inter-graph interactions assumed graph-level interactions between homogeneous structures, such as organic molecules and inorganic crystalline materials. We propose a data descriptor of the complex chemical systems and a graph neural network for learning inter-graph interactions between organic and inorganic compounds. We applied the proposed method to predict the physical properties of hybrid solar cell materials containing heterogeneous substructures, which have received significant attention for sustainable energy resources. By learning heterogeneous inter-graph interactions, the proposed method achieved state-of-the-art accuracy in predicting band gaps of 1,682 hybrid solar cell materials.

arXiv:2610.27611v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ensuring the alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) with diverse cultural values is critical for their safe global deployment. However, existing alignment benchmarks are predominantly English-centric or confined to simple discriminative tasks. Moreover, they often fail to effectively evaluate model robustness against complex, adversarial inductions within specific cultural contexts. To address these limitations, we propose ABench, a fine-grained, handcrafted benchmark specifically tailored to taxonomized values in Chinese. Grounded in a rigorous hierarchical taxonomy comprising 158 derived value subcategories, ABench consists of 2,895 open-ended questions. These questions employ techniques such as role-playing and logical traps to probe the stability of models' stances in adversarially induced contexts. Furthermore, we propose a weighted automated evaluation framework that utilizes question-specific scoring criteria for nuanced assessment. Extensive experiments on 16 mainstream LLMs reveal that most models exhibit significant vulnerabilities when subjected to sophisticated adversary attacks on values (scoring below 60). This underscores the need for more robust, culturally specific alignment strategies. Our data will be publicly released to promote further research on taxonomized value alignment.

arXiv:2610.27610v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recursive self-improvement (RSI) promises AI systems, such as self-evolving LLM agents, that become better at producing further improvements. Evaluating this promise requires separating product claims about the final system from process claims about the improvement process itself. Existing surveys specify the evidence these claims require, but how often studies report that evidence remains unmeasured. We examine this question through full-text coding of 114 eligible studies in a reproducible arXiv search frame frozen in October 2026, including 90 that describe their own systems as RSI. The codebook links claims to evaluation designs. Independent human coding, third-reader adjudication, and a separate blind coding of improver comparisons assess coding reliability. Among the 90 RSI studies, 90% report product evaluation beyond development tasks under a broad criterion that includes partial or unstated separation, while 60% report evaluation on tasks unused for selection. Only 22% audit two or more reruns of the full loop. In a human-coded random sample, the RSI studies show the same contrast: 45% evaluate on tasks unused for selection and 14% audit two or more reruns. Of the 26 studies claiming a better improvement procedure, 23 report a related comparison, but only 4 compare earlier and later procedures from identical starting artifacts at a matched budget. Across these results and a comparison set of established works, evidence for repeatability and improved procedures remains less developed than product evaluation. Three propositions explain how selection effects, shared evaluator errors, and changes in system state limit what product evaluations can establish. Together, the findings support a claim-indexed reporting standard that connects each claim to the evaluation design needed to test it.

arXiv:2610.27597v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing reasoning evaluations typically provide task-relevant information to models as available premises, rarely examining concurrently how models discover evidence autonomously and how information presentation within narratives guides or obscures judgment. This paper proposes the WORTH Benchmark: models read original mystery narratives without clue annotations, autonomously select key clue sentences, identify case participants, and explain their reasoning process. The narrative materials are designed by professional authors such that evidence facilitating reasoning coexists with narrative arrangements that delay the revelation of truth. We report a pilot experiment under full-story conditions across two episodes, conducting a total of 70 formal runs on models, of which 67 runs are content-scorable. Scoring separately records hits on author-designated key clue sentences and participant selections; natural language explanations are used for case diagnosis and are not scored independently. The results show that clue hits and participant judgments are not synchronized; across 37 content-scorable runs in Episode 02, 31 runs simultaneously selected the same set of incorrect participants, while adjacent suspicion-oriented and exoneration-oriented sentences were selected 25 times and 0 times, respectively. These phenomena illustrate the diagnostic value of component-wise analysis and suggest that not-fully-cooperative informational relationships may influence evidence selection and judgment. This study only implements full-story conditions for two episodes, and does not establish stable model rankings or infer general mechanisms on this basis; human player records have not yet been cleaned, and this version does not report human-model comparisons.

arXiv:2610.27590v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When unique pretraining data is scarce, models see the same tokens many times and are thought to memorize. Random-token replacement, an input-corruption augmentation, is one remedy reported to lower validation loss, but a lower loss alone does not reveal which source of error it reduces. On a controlled source whose entropy rate is known in closed form, we show that replacement shrinks predictions toward the corpus average. We also introduce a decomposition that separates validation loss into approximation, estimation, and memorization terms. This shrinkage view predicts that replacement's bias cost needs no memorization but its benefit does. Memorization raises validation loss after its minimum, so we report the effect at two points, the minimum validation loss and the end of a fixed budget. Where replacement helps, it reduces this rise by about 60%. At the end of the budget, it turns from harmful to helpful as the controlled source becomes less predictable; at the minimum, it helps at no predictability level under the fixed recipe. On Korean and Japanese web text, replacement removes about a third of the loss rise after the minimum by the end of the budget, but its effect at the minimum is much smaller. Across ten real corpora, replacement lowers the final loss on nine. It harms only the census corpus, program-generated JSON that is the most redundant of the ten and much more redundant than any of 64 further prose and code corpora we measure.

arXiv:2610.27580v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Factual recall is a lookup: some representation inside the network serves as the key, and what that key is made of decides which queries can retrieve the fact, what an edit must cover, and what a retriever can read. We call it the factual access state. In autoregressive (AR) models the subject position enriches attributes largely independently of the relation, and relation-specific selection happens later, at the readout position. In masked diffusion language models (DLMs) we find the state is assembled differently, and much earlier: in the first attention layer the wording of the relation is routed into the position of whichever entity is visible and the early feed-forward layers look the fact up on this fused representation. The state therefore varies with the relation's surface form and with the query direction, so the queries about one fact occupy a region of state space rather than a point, and an operation on the fact succeeds only for queries that enter it. We treat the state as an interface to a DLM's factual knowledge, and put it to two uses. Writing to the state gives a knowledge editor: from one declarative statement, Multi-View Edit fits one shared value per direction across that region and installs it in the early-MLP block, preserving source-prompt reliability while substantially improving paraphrase and reverse question answering, where AR editors gain near zero. Reading it suggests a complementary use: the state at each entity position can serve as a relation-specific retrieval vector with no training, returning both pieces of evidence for two-entity queries on which pooled, prompted and lexical retrievers almost never return both.

arXiv:2610.27568v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural combinatorial optimization has enabled fast constructive solvers for the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP), yet most autoregressive models still construct solutions through sequential node selection and represent route organization only implicitly. We investigate whether route-level customer co-assignment can be modeled explicitly and used to guide this node-level decision process. To this end, we propose TopologyAware RouteConsistency Modeling (TRCM), which reuses node representations from a standard autoregressive construction pipeline to predict pairwise same-route probabilities and injects them into customer selection as a route-consistency signal. Because sameroute supervision is both class-imbalanced and structurally uneven, TRCM combines structure-preserving augmentation with Topological Entropy (TE)- based reweighting to emphasize locally ambiguous customer pairs. Under matched decoding budgets, TRCM reduces the optimality gap from 3.67% to 3.28% on CVRP50 and from 2.11% to 1.99% on CVRP100; under 8-fold augmented inference, it reduces the CVRP100 gap from 1.61% to 1.49%. On XML100, TRCM*8Aug improves the average objective by 0.24%, with larger gains on several structurally informative factors. A controlled demand-reassignment test over 500 variants further shows more concentrated objective fluctuations. These results support explicit route-consistency modeling as an effective structural principle for autoregressive neural routing.