StateWise: Teaching Language Models to Track and Obey Evolving Constraints in Multi-Turn Dialogue

4 días ago
arXiv:2610.33766v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Users of conversational assistants rarely state all requirements up front: they add constraints, amend them, withdraw them, digress, and return. Instruction-tuned LLMs fail here in two ways: active constraints stop being honored as turns accumulate (persistence failure), and withdrawn constraints keep being enacted (relapse). The only existing repair we know of is an external ledger that re-injects a compiled specification every turn. We propose StateWise, a self-improving approach that teaches a single LLM to maintain its own revisable constraint state, a typed state with tombstones for revoked constraints, so persistence and relapse are measured by executable checkers and ground-truth states are compiled for free. StateWise fine-tunes the LLM on two complementary skills, summarizing a dialogue into its constraint state and responding conditioned on that state, then self-trains on its own trajectories, keeping only turns that pass an exact round-trip check against the compiled state. This teaches 7-8B models to track the state almost perfectly but, surprisingly, not to obey it: on Llama-3.1-8B every supervised variant roughly doubles relapse. We therefore add a preference stage on self-generated relapse contrasts, where the rejected response enacts a revoked rule and the chosen one passes the round-trip check. On two backbones with held-out constraint families and unseen phrasings, StateWise cuts relapse by 8-22 points relative to supervised self-training, lifts conversation success by 8-19 points over the backbone, and beats an oracle compiled-ledger baseline on relapse with no inference-time scaffolding. We also characterize the recipe's cost on general instruction-following benchmarks and study weight interpolation as a mitigation.
Samarth Varshney, Ritu Yadav

C-DFF: Concept-Level Diagnostics for Mechanism Parity in Simulation-Based Validation of Autonomous Driving Perception

4 días ago
arXiv:2610.33760v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Simulation is widely used in autonomous-driving validation, but matching task outputs between real and synthetic images does not guarantee that a system relies on the same visual evidence. This creates a validation gap for transfer, especially in safety-critical perception functions. We present Concept-Decisive Feature Fidelity (C-DFF), a concept-level mechanism-parity diagnostic for paired real-synthetic evaluation. Starting from decisive evidence extracted from a frozen system-under-test (SUT), C-DFF projects that evidence into a shared semantic concept space using off-the-shelf segmentation and compares real and synthetic concept-importance vectors. The result is not only a scalar mechanism-parity score, but also a concept-shift diagnostic that identifies which scene concepts become more or less decisive in simulation. We evaluate C-DFF on KITTI $\leftrightarrow$ Virtual KITTI 2 with 2126 matched pairs across three frozen SUTs (steering regression, YOLOP drivable-area, YOLOP lane-line). Across these tasks, C-DFF is SUT-discriminative and yields interpretable concept-level summaries that support validation triage and simulator debugging. When reported alongside task-specific output-value context metrics, C-DFF shows that output agreement does not by itself establish mechanism parity. These results position C-DFF as a practical semantic diagnostic layer for validation and verification workflows in simulation-based AV testing.
Danial Safaei, Siddartha Khastgir, Matthew Higgins, Jeroen Ploeg, Mohsen Alirezaei, Son Tong, Ludo Gielen

ProtAgent: Post-Training Compact Protein Tool Agents with Interaction-Level Credit Assignment

4 días ago
arXiv:2610.33746v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Protein annotation agents must choose suitable bioinformatics tools, interpret their outputs, and use the resulting evidence in the final answer. Most existing systems rely on frontier-scale models. We ask whether a compact model can instead learn this behavior through post-training with real tool interaction. We present ProtAgent, a two-stage pipeline that uses supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to learn the tool interface and standard on-policy REINFORCE to improve the interaction policy. Intermediate tool calls receive action rewards, and the final response receives a terminal answer reward. Step-level returns assign these rewards to the responses that produced them and to preceding actions. The episode-level baseline instead assigns one episode return to every action. On a fixed closed-loop protocol with real bioinformatics tools, ProtAgent-8B achieves 61.00% success under the annotation-coverage metric, compared with 41.60% for DeepSeek-V3.2-Thinking 671B and 60.80% for the strongest evaluated frontier system. In the three-seed comparison, mean success is 42.70% with episode-level returns and 61.40% with step-level returns under identity return normalization; the corresponding group-relative results are 36.50% and 58.20%. The metric measures recovery of reference annotations under this protocol; it does not by itself establish biological correctness or complete evidence grounding.
Yuxiang Wang, Baojian Zhou, Qifang Zhao, Keyue Jiang, Yanghua Xiao, Xiaoxiao Xu

POD-RoPE: Rotary Position Encoding over Physical Observation Distributions for Embodied AI

4 días ago
arXiv:2610.33745v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Embodied perception requires positional representations that capture both physical geometry and the spatial and temporal extent of observations. We introduce POD-RoPE (Physical Observation Distribution RoPE), which represents token observation footprints as distributions over camera centers, viewing directions, and sampling times. Under independent sampling, expected rotations encode relative relationships between distributions; when each distribution collapses to a single address, the construction recovers pointwise RoPE. The same rotation statistics support Q/K matching and coherence-dependent V/O transformations, allowing observation geometry to guide both information selection and content aggregation. Per-token pre-aggregation avoids increasing sequence length or processing pairs of observation nodes. We evaluate POD-RoPE across four robot policy architectures, simulation and real-world manipulation, and complementary reconstruction, depth-estimation, and novel-view-synthesis tasks. Integrating POD-RoPE into Fast-WAM improves mean success from 91.83% to 92.88% across all 50 RoboTwin 2.0 tasks, and from 32.5% to 52.5% on two real-robot tasks on Sharpa North. Controlled reconstruction ablations support the contributions of distribution encoding and V/O transformations. In H20 model-block benchmarks, POD-RoPE achieves median forward-plus-backward speedups of $1.91\times$ over P-RoPE and $5.34\times$ over RayRoPE, with a median latency overhead of 17.4% over Standard RoPE. These results support physical observation distributions as an effective and computationally efficient basis for geometry-aware attention.
Xiaodi Huang, Zilin Wang, Jinpeng Liu, Pengchuan Xiao, Zhenlei Shao, Zhang Zhang, Shuxiang Lu

A Distribution-Matching Perspective on LLM Training Algorithms

4 días ago
arXiv:2610.33740v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this work, we propose a unified framework for training algorithms across different stages of modern large language model development, based on the perspective of distribution matching. We show that a broad class of language model training algorithms can be interpreted as minimizing a certain divergence between the current model and a target distribution, and that characterizing the properties of this target distribution provides substantial insight into the behavior of the corresponding training algorithms. By analyzing specific forms of the target distribution, we establish that On-Policy Distillation (OPD) enjoys an advantage over classical Knowledge Distillation (KD) when the current model distribution is close to the target distribution, while exhibiting a disadvantage when the two distributions are far apart. Furthermore, when the target distribution itself depends on the model being optimized, we show that the accumulation of estimation variance can induce a deterministic degradation of the target distribution. These results provide a theoretical explanation, at least in part, for the long-term behavior of existing Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. With this intuition we further designed Conditional KL (CKL) regularization for mitigating the degradation of the target distribution. CKL can effectively preserve mode diversity while relaxing the constraint imposed by classical KL regularization on reward improvements. We believe this theoretical perspective can bring some new understanding of language model training algorithms and provide useful guidance for future research.
Yanxing Huang, Bingzhang Yan, Zihan Tang, Wenzhe Li, Peng Li, Yang Liu

Trust Mechanisms for Offline Generative AI at the Edge: A Connectivity-Regime Framework and an Empirical Study on a Raspberry Pi 5

4 días ago
arXiv:2610.33732v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) are moving into the Internet of Things, yet most deployments assume cloud connectivity, and many IoT settings have intermittent, restricted, or no connectivity. We propose a connectivity-regime framework (C0-C4), a taxonomy of inference-time trust mechanisms, and signed, versioned knowledge packs as the update channel for disconnected regimes, and evaluate them on a Raspberry Pi 5 running fully local retrieval-augmented generation under network isolation, with three Qwen2.5 model sizes, three context sizes, and 300 SQuAD 2.0 questions. An empirically calibrated retrieval-score gate detects knowledge gaps almost perfectly (AUROC 0.97) but in-topic unanswerable questions poorly (0.68). A deterministic output validator converts malformed outputs into explicit abstentions with no observed loss of correct answers, while the NLI-based verifier we tested adds little; for the 7B model, 96% of substantive answers to unanswerable-labelled questions match normalized spans of the retrieved passages. A 3B model achieves the same gold-answer containment rate as a 7B model at less than half the latency and estimated energy, although the 7B model far more often exceeds a token-F1 threshold of 0.5; five retrieved passages lower correctness from 75% to 52% compared with three. Verifying a signed pack takes about 4.5 ms versus about 29 min for embedding its passages on the device; signature and hash checks alone accept six of nine tested update attacks that layered verification rejects. Yet a validly signed poisoned pack passes every pack check: on 30 previously correct questions, correct answers drop to zero and 14 return the injected answer. None of the mechanisms we evaluated establishes the truth of the evidence. We release code and data.
Georgios Feretzakis, Alexandros Papaspyridis

Strategic Calibration in LLM Multi-Agent Systems: Audited Pivot Scoring for Truthful Elicitation

4 días ago
arXiv:2610.33728v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems, reported confidence increasingly determines the allocation of scarce downstream attention, computation, and decision influence. This makes reporting strategic: an agent may overstate the relevance of its contribution even when its underlying belief is well calibrated. Existing calibration methods largely assume passive reporting and therefore do not address strategic incentives created when confidence determines downstream allocation. We formulate strategic calibration as a reporting-layer incentive problem and propose the Audited Pivot Scoring Mechanism (APSM). APSM offsets platform-controlled allocation benefits, uses inverse-propensity-weighted sparse audits, charges the Clarke pivot externality, and applies a strictly proper score. Under the stated model assumptions, truthful reporting is the unique expected-utility best response. We also characterize approximate execution and the audit-variance trade-off. Calculator-free experiments show that LLM agents inflate confidence under Top-$K$ incentives. With a shared agent-local utility interface, LLM agents reduce distortion under both Compensated Proper Scoring (CPS) and APSM. CPS achieves higher exact allocation match, whereas APSM yields lower Brier loss and numerically fewer cutoff crossings. Experiments further show that APSM enlarges the utility margin against allocation-changing deviations by $1.93\times$ and improves robustness under approximate execution. These results support incentive-aware elicitation as a distinct layer for reliable multi-agent coordination.
Jinhao Zhou, Zhaohan Zhang, Xijian Xu, Jun Wu

E3tereo: Improving Stereo Matching at Depth Boundaries with Learned Geometric Edges

4 días ago
arXiv:2610.33704v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Depth boundaries remain a major source of error in stereo matching. For IGEV on Scene Flow, geometric edge pixels account for only 6% of evaluated pixels but about half of the total absolute disparity error. Photometric edges can respond to texture changes without corresponding depth discontinuities, making them unreliable cues for boundary refinement. We propose E3Stereo, which learns geometric edges from disparity supervision and combines these boundary cues with the backbone disparity and image details to predict full-resolution disparity corrections. The same edge map also emphasizes boundary errors during training, while joint optimization allows the edge predictor to adapt to disparity refinement. On the Scene Flow dataset, E3Stereo reduces end-point error (EPE) at depth boundaries by 9.5%-14.3% across RAFT-Stereo, IGEV, and MonSter, while also reducing overall EPE. After fine-tuning, our IGEV-based model improves upon IGEV on all eleven reported metrics across ETH3D, KITTI 2012, and KITTI 2015. The source code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.
Qi Xiong, Qinghua Zhao, Yongqiang Xi

Embedding-Based Educational Taxonomies

4 días ago
arXiv:2610.33694v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Educational taxonomies organize educational content, such as exercise problems, into concepts, which are also called skills or knowledge components. These taxonomies define learning objectives in educational applications such as intelligent tutoring systems. Developed through human expertise and iterative refinement, they also provide fundamental structure for curricula, assessment, and models of student learning. Recent advances in semantic text embeddings make it possible to construct alternative educational taxonomies computationally from the content itself. In this paper, we investigate this possibility by clustering embeddings of math questions to construct embedding-based educational taxonomies. We compare these taxonomies with the existing Common Core State Standards (CCSS)-based knowledge-component taxonomies in two ASSISTments datasets and evaluate their utility in Deep Knowledge Tracing, a downstream task that relies on taxonomic mappings of questions to knowledge components. The embedding-based taxonomies exhibit substantial but incomplete correspondence with the existing taxonomies, revealing both preserved and alternative organizations of educational content. When used for knowledge tracing, they improve predictive performance by approximately 3-5 AUC percentage points. These results demonstrate the potential of semantic embeddings for automatically constructing educational taxonomies that both recover structure present in human-developed taxonomies and provide useful alternative representations for downstream educational modeling.
Kia Karbasi, Kaveh Karbasi, Gregory Pottie

Extraction meets Distillation - cryptanalytic techniques to recover parameters from a Deep Neural Network

4 días ago
arXiv:2610.33671v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study fully connected neural-network reconstruction by combining cryptanalytic weight-direction extraction with learning from predicted labels. We adapt a ReLU extraction implementation to Leaky ReLU, compare sign-search methods, and estimate biases and output layers. We prove conditional bounds for direction recovery with approximate prefixes, preservation of local distance votes, prediction changes from aligned parameter errors, and sign selection with independent scoring data. We also specify exact row restoration and distinguish its guarantee from that of gradient masking. The experiments evaluate assisted extraction, with privileged access to gradients, hidden activations, and victim parameters, followed by label-based reconstruction. Across eight search seeds on the largest synthetic architecture, Leaky ReLU recovers 51--57 neurons in the deepest hidden layer, while ReLU recovers none. This advantage does not hold uniformly across architectures and layers. Removing victim-weight access from the sign walk gives less accurate signs, despite high final prediction agreement. Across 40 seeded runs on the two smallest synthetic victims, agreement on 5,000 inputs excluded from fitting and selection ranges from $0.9890$ to $0.9992$. On two CIFAR-10 victims, the reconstructed models achieve $56.40\%$ and $58.29\%$ agreement and exceed the distillation baseline on three functional metrics. We report label requests separately from privileged access and explain why prediction agreement does not identify network parameters.
Biprarshi Biswas, Arya Anshuman Ojha, Yubaraj Das, Devansh Khosla, Kamran Rais, Saankhya Samanta, Subhamoy Maitra, Pantelimon Stanica