arXiv:2610.28650v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: The CIDOC CRM family is not only a schema for museum collections. Its extensions formalise the apparatus through which research knowledge is produced and justified: CRMsci models scientific observation and measurement, CRMdig the provenance of digital processes, CRMinf inference and belief. Together they constitute a schema for research data, and the obstacle to their adoption is documentary rather than theoretical: four normative documents, four code conventions, and eighty-nine typed links crossing document boundaries. This paper presents the CIDOC CRM Periodic Table, a single-page browser rendering 131 classes and 480 property entries from CIDOC CRM 7.1.3, CRMsci 3.2, CRMdig 5.0 and CRMinf 1.2.1 as one navigable surface, with two inference facilities: a one-step triple builder admitting only the class-property combinations licensed by declared domains, ranges and the subclass closure, and a multi-step path finder enumerating property chains between two classes. Because all loaded models are merged into one code-keyed dictionary before the hierarchy closures are computed, both resolve chains that cross model boundaries; we document the addition of CRMsci and the three cross-model tests it made possible, and report preliminary uptake signals from 56 months of analytics, with the reading they support.
arXiv:2610.28649v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Generative AI's growing role in academic writing has driven a rise in fabricated references across dissertations and student reports. We present the Fabrication Severity Stack (FSS), a three-tiered framework classifying citation fabrications by detection complexity - from non-existent references to subtle content misattribution. Building on the FSS, we propose a staged heuristic verification workflow, executable through mainstream LLM interfaces. We argue that this framework offers computer science educators/examiners a practical, zero-cost basis for embedding reference verification into the assessment of dissertation and students' reports. In a pilot study on 100 citations (20% seeded with Level 1 and Level 2 fabrications), the proposed heuristic workflow enabled mainstream LLM interfaces to correctly flag 9-10 of 10 non-existent references and partially detect metadata corruption. These preliminary results suggest that freely accessible, general-purpose LLMs can achieve high recall on citation verification without reliance on proprietary detection tools.
Hazrat Ali, Mohamed Elawady
arXiv:2610.22714v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Augmenting softmax attention with forget gates typically relies on summing decay contributions along the key--query path. Because such accumulation is monotonic, these mechanisms cannot selectively erase intermediate context while preserving older, structurally relevant tokens. We propose First Passage Attention (FPA), which shifts from path summation to path extrema by lowering a key's logit proportionally to the deepest dip of a learned scalar field below that key's level over the intervening span. FPA encompasses the Forgetting Transformer (FoX) as a special case, and when the field and levels follow a shared learned walk, the alive keys with unpenalised logits naturally form a stack. We show that a constant-dimension FPA head realises any subset of keys left alive by subsequent dips, whereas softmax heads with positional biases or token-level forget gates require a head dimension linear in the number of keys. In synthetic experiments, one-layer FPA heads converge to these target sets while comparable softmax and FoX baselines fail on every seed. Scaling to a 110M-parameter language model, FPA matches FoX in perplexity and uniquely achieves perfect passkey retrieval at $8\times$ the training length, even with its key--value cache compressed to about $25\%$.
arXiv:2610.30072v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Data agents built on ReAct-style loops now execute complex analytical workflows over structured data, yet their intermediate reasoning still runs almost entirely through text. Human analysts instead move between numbers, tables, and charts, reading visual evidence to expose trends and anomalies that text summaries drop. We ask whether charts can serve as internal epistemic actions inside a data agent's reasoning loop, and how to teach an agent to use them. We first build \probe{}, a suite of 200 controlled tasks under four matched interface conditions, and find a persistent gap between what agents can read and what they choose to use. Agents score as well from self-generated charts as from numeric output, yet plotting access alone does not translate into consistent use. Task slices show that charts lead on temporal, pattern, and anomaly reasoning, while text leads on precise reading and conditional verification. We then propose \method{}, which distils two families of experience from conditioned trajectory rollouts. One family records how to select and verify analytical operations, and the other records when to invoke text, charts, or both. A trajectory judge scores outcomes and labels intermediate steps, and a validation gate admits only experience that improves held-out performance. On three held-out benchmarks with four LLM backbones, \method{} raises analytical accuracy and visual evidence quality over matched baselines, and backbones that never drew charts begin using them, all without touching model parameters.
Xinzhe Wang, Xudong Weng, Zang Li, Shaolei Zhang
arXiv:2610.30045v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Decision models map stated rules and observed states to discrete answers. Aggregate accuracy leaves unresolved which rule and information changes guide those answers. We connect controlled input changes to transfer, joint reliability, and directed information use through executable arithmetic rules. Semantic rule separation and crossed rule and state tests make transfer and joint success separately measurable. We compare equivalent wordings, calibrate joint correctness through marginal-preserving reassociation, and alter tables to define alternative answer targets. Adaptation gains increase with nearest-source answer agreement; fully conflicting quartets yield small pooled gains and different gain signs across source splits. Equivalent rewrites have opposing task-level effects, linking transfer gains to rule presentation. Joint-score departures depend on which rule and state associations the reference preserves. A decision service changes answers more across equivalent wordings than across identical-text repeats and usually follows the answer targets implied by altered table values or mappings.
Tianyou Lai, Wentao Yue, Zhiwei Zuo, Qilei Li
arXiv:2610.30042v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Harness optimization, which improves an agent's prompts, tools, and workflows, is an increasingly effective way to enhance agents built on frozen or closed-source LLMs. Leading approaches such as the Darwin--Godel Machine and the Huxley--Godel Machine (HGM) rely on recursive self-improvement and were developed mainly for coding, where the competence needed to improve the agent coincides with the competence being improved. Planning tasks, in which an agent must produce a sequence of tool calls that jointly satisfies interacting constraints, break this alignment. There, open-ended self-modification repeatedly explores ineffective changes and consumes substantial evaluation budgets. We introduce HGM-Dual, a diagnostic-guided framework for budget-efficient harness evolution for planning agents. First, HGM-Dual represents agent evolution as lineage-aware context. This context records what each ancestor changed, which behaviors improved or regressed, and which modifications were ineffective, giving the editor explicit edit-outcome attribution instead of an unstructured archive of past agents. Second, HGM-Dual introduces error-conditioned dual-path child generation. For each selected parent, it generates a general child that preserves open-ended exploration and specialized children that target the harness components most likely responsible for the parent's highest-ranked constraint violations. HGM-Dual outperforms the strongest baseline by up to 14.45% relative improvement in case accuracy while matching HGM variants' final performance with 2x-4x fewer evaluation budget.
Sudipta Paul, Pengrui Quan, Aounon Kumar, Nicholas Tzou, Vivek Kulkarni, Srinivas Chappidi
arXiv:2610.30041v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Text skills can extend the capabilities of tool-using agents, but long skill descriptions increase computational costs. Soft prompts provide a compact alternative, yet learning from entire successful trajectories may also introduce unnecessary behavioral changes. We find that the useful effect of a text skill is highly concentrated in a small subset of trajectory positions. Based on this observation, we propose Behavioral Localization, which compares the frozen agent with and without the text skill to identify positions where the skill both increases the likelihood of successful tokens and meaningfully changes the next token distribution. We use these localized positions to supervise a short soft prompt. Experiments on SpreadsheetBench with a frozen Qwen3.6-35B-A3B agent show that the top 10\% of trajectory positions capture 96.12\% of the total positive skill gain. In the shared prompt setting, selective supervision improves success from 30.36\% with full trajectory to 36.79\%. Under task-specific conditions, using the top 10\% localized positions achieves 57.38\%, outperforming both the full text skill and the on-policy OPCD baseline. These results show that a small set of behaviorally relevant trajectory positions can provide effective supervision of soft skills.
arXiv:2610.30017v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: This study introduces GuideEvolve, a self-evolving agent framework incorporating expert guidance and three autonomous regulatory mechanisms, collectively termed the 3Ts: Think Fast and Slow, Throwback, and Termination by choice. The framework addresses critical limitations in extant self-evolving agent paradigms through dual innovations: (1) a task-specific expert-evaluation-driven evolutionary pipeline, and (2) the integration of 3Ts mechanisms to facilitate cognitive optimization, performance recovery via temporal rollback, and adaptive termination protocols. Empirical validation across the MGSM and MMLU benchmarks demonstrates that GuideEvolve attains performance metrics comparable to current state-of-the-art models (89.8% accuracy versus G\"odel Agent's 90.6% on MGSM; 89.1% versus 87.9% on MMLU), while exhibiting notably reduced variance (25-59%) and enhanced robustness. Furthermore, the framework achieves a 100% evolution success rate, superior to the baseline's 82%, diminishes required optimization iterations by approximately 50% (from 30 iterations in baseline to 15.1 and 13.4 across tasks), and provides improved stability for production deployment.
Meihong Jia, Yasemin Timar, Jonathan Taws
arXiv:2610.29985v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Benchmark performance is the dominant standard for comparing large language models (LLMs), typically summarized by a single aggregate score, such as accuracy, pass rate, or rubric score. This aggregate score provides limited information about a model's underlying capabilities, yet understanding these capabilities is crucial for model development and evaluation. To this end, we propose Tree-Induced Diagnostic Evaluation (TIDE), which recasts diagnostic evaluation as behavior-driven decision-tree induction to perform fine-grained capability diagnosis. TIDE recursively builds a hierarchical capability tree from benchmark samples and model scores: at each node, an LLM judge proposes candidate splits and performs sample-to-group classification, and behavior-based information gain selects among them. We apply TIDE to five models across four benchmarks to demonstrate its effectiveness, and find fine-grained capability contrasts invisible at the aggregate level: Claude Opus 4.6 achieves 100% on microeconomic market reasoning where GPT-5.4 scores 83.3%, but trails GPT-5.4 on contract law reasoning with 77.8% versus 88.9%. We hope TIDE can be extended to past and future benchmarks so that the rich behavioral signal in evaluation results is fully leveraged for understanding model capabilities.
Jiayi Chen, Hui Li, Yujiong Shen, Qiyuan Peng, Yanxin Li, Chenhao Huang, Shaofan Liu, Guoqiang Zhang, Junjie Ye, Shihan Dou, Ming Zhang, Maxm Pan, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
arXiv:2610.29961v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Given the enormous number of claims to be checked, verifiable legal AI requires scalable, cost-effective models that answer the practical needs of law. System One decision models are built on large language models but, instead of generating text, return a calibrated probability for each option. This suits the verification of legal authority, where the question is closed: a given holding, or none of them. We test whether such models abstain when the correct authority is missing. We extend CaseHOLD with an abstention condition in which the correct holding is replaced in 1,670 of 5,314 items, and compare four decision models with six generative LLMs. When no option is correct, generative LLMs still pick one in 38-86% of items; the most cautious decision model does so in 30%. On standard CaseHOLD, a decision model matches the best generative LLM (88.1% vs. 88.2%) at 1/55 of the cost. Accepting that LLM's answer only when a decision model agrees halves its wrong citations, and distilling a decision model's probabilities into Qwen3-8B, without labels, yields a well-calibrated local model. Legal AI should be judged by its wrong citations, not by accuracy alone.
arXiv:2610.29934v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Forming an accurate theory-of-mind (ToM) is key to successful multi-agent collaboration and requires reasoning under uncertainty to capture multiple possible partner states. This is hard to do in the text representation space native to large language model (LLM) agents, which more easily describe a single partner state. To address this challenge, we introduce ToM2Vec, which learns to form abstract theories-of-mind in a rich latent space via a fixed budget of continuous reasoning tokens. During training, supervision for these tokens comes from the partner's actual thoughts, which the ToM tokens are trained to abstract and match. At test-time, ToM tokens are generated by each agent and act as conditioners for that agent's thoughts and actions. Across several environments covering collaborative, competitive, and mixed-motive settings (Overcooked-AI, multiparty negotiation, Decrypto, Hanabi, and Collab Escape/Capture), we evaluate ToM2Vec's ability to support multi-agent interactions and collaboration, finding consistent improvements over the base model and a variety of competitive trained and prompted baselines. We show that latent reasoning is critical, with performance dropping when reasoning is expressed in text. Moreover, we show that ToM2Vec training generalizes to partner model families not seen at train-time, including a proprietary model (GPT-5.4). In our analysis, we provide evidence that the latent tokens encode a ToM, rather than task-specific information: ToM2Vec's tokens improve the agent's ability to directly answer questions about partner beliefs, desires, and next actions.
Nithin Sivakumaran, Ali Payani, Hyunji Lee, Mohit Bansal, Elias Stengel-Eskin
arXiv:2610.29822v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: As coding agents become more capable, developers increasingly use them to fix bugs through multi-turn interactions. Existing benchmarks do not adequately cover this scenario. Most present a complete issue report in a single turn without interaction. Their evaluation can produce both false positives and false negatives, accepting incorrect patches or rejecting correct ones. We introduce UserSWE for evaluating coding agents' ability to fix repository-level bugs through multi-turn interactions with dynamic users and execution-grounded verdicts at every turn. Its construction pipeline turns repository history and existing single-turn benchmarks into multi-turn tasks. At each turn, information pools constrain what the simulated user can reveal, while a persona chain sampled from a transition model calibrated on 20,859 development sessions governs how it speaks. Tests run after every turn, and a pair of agents from different model families writes and gates each verdict, using test results as primary evidence and model judgment only for aspects the tests cannot resolve. We evaluate eleven agents on 72 tasks from 42 repositories and find that agent rankings change with the interaction budget. Claude Fable 5.1 resolves the most tasks in one turn, GPT-6-Astra resolves the most by the eighth turn, and Claude Opus 5 leads at most intermediate budgets. These results indicate that single-turn performance is insufficient to characterize interactive coding ability.
Zhan-Yu Wu, Ji Luo, Alyssa Wu, Junjielong Xu, Richeng Xuan, Zhichao Hu, Chongming Gao, Xinting Hu
arXiv:2610.29816v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Incorporating AI systems into safety systems requires monitoring to avoid silent faults and ensure safe and reliable operation. Single monitors often do not provide actionable information for human supervisors, who act as the system's adaptive controller. We present COMET, a coordinated multi-layer runtime monitoring framework for human-supervised AI-enabled safety systems in which each monitor is anchored in a different fault mode. Monitor outputs are combined in a coordination layer and mapped by a communication layer to a traffic-light display. In this work, COMET consists of three monitoring layers: signal integrity, physics consistency, and the AI system's competence envelope. The framework is evaluated on an open dataset of compressed-air leaks, where an AI system detects leaks from acoustic emissions, with held-out conditions simulating covariate shift, semantic shift, and sensor faults, events expected during runtime but unknown in their exact appearance. All monitors are frozen after development and tested zero-shot, and the framework is compared against no-monitoring and single-monitor setups. The bare AI system fails silently and confidently under all three shift types, whereas COMET reduces the trusted-wrong-answer rate to zero on covariate-shifted no-leak data and on three of four sensor faults, at a nominal false-alarm rate of $\approx 1\%$. Single monitors come close in detection but cannot attribute the fault mode. COMET converts their anonymous detection flags into diagnoses. Residual silent misses under semantic shift define the boundary of passive monitoring. Runtime monitoring frameworks for AI-enabled safety systems must therefore combine quantitative fault detection and isolation with qualitative, human-oriented feedback.
Niclas Flehmig, Mary Ann Lundteigen, Shen Yin
arXiv:2610.29812v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Literature-searching language agents are becoming a standard component of scientific assistants for the life sciences, yet there is little controlled evidence on which parts of their harness matter. We run a controlled ablation on biomedical claim verification (SciFact) with the live PubMed API as the only tool. Holding the backbone and output format fixed, we compare four harnesses: closed-book answering, single-shot retrieval using the claim as the query, a ReAct-style agent that writes its own PubMed queries, and an oracle given the gold abstracts, each with two efficient frontier backbones. Naive single-shot retrieval finds the gold paper for only 6% of claims and turns overconfident errors into abstentions without improving accuracy. Letting the model formulate its own queries triples gold recall and yields the best verdicts (62% accuracy vs. 49-59% for the other realistic harnesses), although these differences are not significant at our sample size and agents use fewer than half of their search budget. With gold abstracts, the same models reach 79-86% accuracy, a significant 17-24 point gap showing that retrieval, not reasoning, is the main bottleneck. Finally, a citation audit shows that closed-book models cite PubMed IDs that almost always exist (327/335) but are almost never relevant: a cross-family LLM judge rates only 3 of 327 existing citations as relevant to the claim, versus 67% for citations produced by the search agent. Existence checks are therefore insufficient safeguards for scientific agents. We release code, prompts, and all cached tool calls at https://github.com/saqlain2204/real-pmids-wrong-papers.
arXiv:2610.29680v2 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Using an LLM to generate training data for another is among the most general ways to train one, and it remains common practice. Some frontier teams have closed that route for their own models: what comes back is an answer, or a short summary, without the detailed reasoning trace behind it. That is a little ironic: they were themselves built on distilling human knowledge, and distilling an open-source model is still entirely routine; the restriction applies to their own outputs alone. Recent work recovers the hidden reasoning by replaying encrypted blocks across models. It somehow works, but it breaks the providers' terms of service, so it is not something a product can be built on long-term.
We built the alternative. We take the context and the teacher's answer as input, and generate the reasoning trace ourselves, in the style of the student's own model family. Training is two-stage, supervised and then adversarial: a generator learns to regenerate the family's own reasoning traces from their context and answer, and a critic learns how real a reasoning trace looks. Applied to a teacher's answer, the generator writes one in the family's style. An independent judge rates how likely traces are to be genuine on a scale from 0 to 1: ours average 0.68, real traces 0.66, and traces selected by the critic from four candidates 0.82. These are authenticity scores, not correctness rates.
We test the idea on five benchmarks with everything else held fixed. On general tasks the five training corpora are about the same; on coding, the generated reasoning beats Fable 5's own thinking content. With the same 5,000 questions and the same teacher answers, HumanEval+ improves by 3.7 points and MBPP+ by 7.1 at the final checkpoint, and the MBPP+ lead holds at every checkpoint. We suspect that reasoning written in the student's family style is easier for it to learn from.
arXiv:2610.29646v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Choosing among robot demonstration corpora is a ranking problem: an upstream diagnostic must preserve which candidates produce better downstream policies, not merely correlate with average performance. We study paired instruction dependence, the rate at which a demonstrator changes its first decision when only the goal changes. Across 136 independently seeded quadruped-navigation corpora, predictions developed on 56 corpora are evaluated prospectively on 80 held-out corpora. The audit is reliable and associated with downstream paired correctness, and lowers mean absolute prediction error when added to a correctness-aware baseline, but the primary proper-log-score increment is +0.059 nats (95% corpus-bootstrap CI [-0.027, 0.133]) and the prespecified top-20% comparison does not establish an incremental selection gain. An exploratory response decomposition suggests a structural source of this predictive-ranking mismatch: under the tested predictor specification, separating both-correct and both-wrong responses yields larger held-out gains than their unsigned switch statistic. Seed-to-seed agreement indicates that the held-out endpoint retains recoverable rank signal. These results show that counterfactual response structure can be reliable and predictive while providing limited incremental decision value in this setting when compressed into an unsigned statistic, motivating diagnostics that preserve outcome-relevant structure and are validated against the decisions they are intended to support.
Nurmukhambet Serikbayev, Abdul Basit, Muhammad Shafique
arXiv:2610.29501v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Parallel thinking has emerged as a promising paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by exploring multiple reasoning paths simultaneously. However, we identify that parallel thinking via Reinforcement Learning (RL) typically suffers from the mode collapse of reasoning paths, where parallel thinking trajectories degenerate into similar ones. This homogeneity undermines the fundamental motivation of parallel thinking, that is, maintaining multiple hypotheses concurrently to prevent premature loss into a suboptimal solution. In this paper, we propose Diverse Parallel Thinking (DPT), a simple yet effective RL approach for parallel thinking designed to encourage path diversity. DPT rewards the model to develop distinct reasoning strategies by penalizing the prefix similarity of parallel thinking paths, thereby enhancing a more comprehensive exploration of the reasoning space. We conduct various experiments and analyses across multiple reasoning benchmarks to demonstrate the effectiveness of DPT. Results show that DPT successfully outperforms previous parallel thinking methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance over baselines. We validate path diversity as a key element to improve parallel thinking. Our code is available at https://github.com/JiaruQian/DPT.
Jiaru Qian, Yihong Dong, Xue Jiang, Chun-Wah Hsu, Zhi Jin, Ge Li
arXiv:2610.29493v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We determine the minimum number of directional commands needed to solve alevel of Order of the Sinking Star, modeled as a crystal-exchangepuzzle on an 11*11 board. A command swapsthe player with the nearest crystal in the selected row or column, regardlessof distance; only an empty ray permits an ordinary unit walk. Two gates admitthe player to the exit exactly while all sixteen crystals occupy their targetcells. We give an explicit 93-command solution and exclude every shortersolution by an exact, cost-bounded breadth-first search. The search representsa position by its seventeen occupied cells and one active cell. Its admissibleheuristic partitions command costs between a compressed core abstraction andresidual motion, strengthened by a necessary activation detour and a cornervisit condition. The completed computation retained 605,349,215 occupied setsand 1,863,925,136 states. We prove the reductions and pruning conditions,describe the exact storage scheme, and provide source code, execution logs,and a reproduction driver. The result is a computer-assisted proof for thespecified instance, with an explicit implementation trust boundary.
arXiv:2610.29491v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: A model's failures can reveal gaps in the behavioral criteria guiding its training. We introduce RubricOpt, a framework that lets a policy revise these criteria within preference optimization. The policy diagnoses its own rubric-free outputs, retains requirements already covered by the rubric, and edits clauses that leave recurring failures unaddressed. A shared semantic representation connects task demands, preference-data contrasts, and rubric clauses, while a deterministic gate checks evidence references and fixed semantic anchors. The rubric then guides Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) during training, with preference pairs, labels, and the objective held fixed, and is removed at evaluation. Our analysis relates the local effect on rubric-free success to semantic alignment and a residual beyond the measured factors. Experiments on capability and open-ended generation benchmarks show that rubric conditioning can improve outcomes over ordinary DPO, with gains and regressions varying across models and datasets. A matched continuation isolates the contribution of revision from additional training and finds mixed incremental effects for the tested edit, whose feedback overlaps the evaluation set. RubricOpt thus brings the behavioral specification itself into the policy's feedback loop.
Wei Chen, Yubing Wu, Shigui Li, Delu Zeng, Jingfeng Liu, Junmei Yang, Zhiheng Zhou, Bo Li, Min Chen, Zhou Wang
arXiv:2610.29467v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Long-horizon dialogue agents need to keep user memories stable enough for personalization while adapting when the user genuinely changes. Existing memory systems often append every observation or overwrite old entries by heuristic rules, which makes transient noise hard to distinguish from real belief drift. We introduce PreCoMem, a memory consolidation framework inspired by predictive coding that represents memory as confidence-weighted beliefs about the user's state. Its core signal, Effective Surprisal, combines semantic deviation and contradiction evidence, then downweights this signal when retrieval is diffuse and unreliable. According to effective surprisal, a two-threshold gate maps each turn to one of three deterministic updates: MAINTAIN reinforces supported beliefs, PROFILE stores ambiguous cues as low-confidence hypotheses, and CORRECT softly decays reliably contradicted facts. The PROFILE stage acts as an explicit waiting room, preventing premature commitment to noisy evidence. Experiments on LoCoMo, LongMemEval-S, and PersonaMem-v2 show consistent state-of-the-art accuracy; our new DiMoBench confirms that PreCoMem adapts to non-stationary belief drift without over-reacting to noise. The code is available at https://github.com/ZhongWishing/PreCoMem.
Jian Zhong, Zeyu Liu, Pingchuan Cao, Rongduo Han, Shunye Tang, Guohuan Xie, Mingyuan Qin, Ran Ji, Xiao Liang, Wei Wang, Haining Zhang