Ontology-guided multi-agent reasoning for explainable differential diagnosis

3 días 5 horas ago
arXiv:2610.36325v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Effective differential diagnosis depends on well structured and unambiguous patient case descriptions, since incomplete or ambiguous clinical information readily leads to diagnostic errors and inconsistent reasoning. Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown promising capabilities in medical question answering and clinical reasoning; however, even when achieving competitive performance on medical benchmarks, they often rely on pattern recognition learned from training data rather than grounded clinical evidence, and can generate plausible yet unsupported diagnostic conclusions. Their reasoning remains largely opaque, making it difficult for clinicians to assess the evidence and rationale behind a given recommendation. To address this gap, we propose an ontology-guided, multiagent differential diagnosis framework that replicates the iterative reasoning process of physicians. The framework grounds diagnostic inference in a structured, expert-curated medical knowledge base, enabling interpretation of symptoms, clinical findings, or disease relationships, while decomposing diagnosis into explicit, auditable reasoning steps. This ontology-based grounding constrains inference to evidence-backed associations, reducing hallucination and improving diagnostic transparency, traceability, and consistency. The system then identifies the most discriminative missing symptoms and generates targeted follow-up questions to reduce uncertainty through a process that mirrors to clinical inquiry. Together, these components improve the reliability, explainability, and diagnostic accuracy of AI-assisted differential diagnosis. The source code is publicly available.
Roxana Ramona Szomiu, George Ursu, Adrian Groza

When Retrieval Is Not Enough: Obsolete Facts in Agent Memory

3 días 5 horas ago
arXiv:2610.36308v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Memory-agent benchmarks often collapse retrieval and answer generation into one score, making it hard to tell whether a failure comes from missing an update or from not using an update that was already retrieved. We examine this distinction on the single-hop FactConsolidation task of MemoryAgentBench. With Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct on 6K-history BM25 accuracy drops from 45% to 32% when the retrieved evidence budget grows from 64 to 512 tokens, even though a gold-assisted post-hoc audit finds the newest statement in every retrieved set. Most of the errors occur on questions that also contain an obsolete statement version. Under a frozen prompt and equal four-statement evidence size, replacing one unrelated statement with the obsolete competing statement reduces accuracy from 100% to 44.6% for Qwen2.5 and from 100% to 87.8% for Qwen3-14B, with all 50 harmful paired flips classified as stale. A 32K-history replication likewise favors BM25-64 over BM25-512 (69% versus 58%). These results suggest that retrieving the correct fact is not enough. An obsolete competing statement can be more harmful than an unrelated piece of evidence of the same size.
Oleeviya Babu Poikarayil, Tony Basil Babu, Abdulrahman Nahhas, Het Darshan Mehta, Jawid Ahmad Baktash, Ernesto William De Luca, Klaus Turowski

Spiking Neural Networks Are Harder to Steal: A Benchmark Study of Model Stealing Attacks

3 días 5 horas ago
arXiv:2610.36298v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine learning models deployed behind query interfaces expose more than their predictions, because an adversary can use those predictions to rebuild the model itself. Model stealing attacks (MSAs) exploit this exposure by training a surrogate model that replicates the decision behavior of a target through black-box queries alone, without access to its parameters or training data. These attacks are well characterized for conventional artificial neural networks (ANNs), yet spiking neural networks (SNNs) process information in a fundamentally different way. SNNs communicate through sparse, discrete spikes, and their outputs depend on membrane potentials that evolve over time rather than on a static mapping from input to output. This temporal mode of computation suggests that the decision behavior of an SNN may be harder to reconstruct from its responses. This work tests that possibility by benchmarking four representative MSAs, namely the Papernot, Tram\`er, T-RND, and color perturbation attacks, against SNNs and their ANN counterparts on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CIFAR-10. Across every attack and dataset, SNNs prove consistently more difficult to steal. Surrogates of SNNs achieve 10% to 20% lower agreement with the target model and 15% to 25% lower adversarial transferability than surrogates of ANNs. We attribute this resistance to the way SNNs compute, as their spike-based and time-dependent dynamics yield decision boundaries that ANN-based surrogates struggle to approximate, even under large query budgets. These findings extend the known resilience of SNNs beyond attacks on training data to the replication of model functionality, strengthening the case for neuromorphic architectures in security-sensitive applications.
Ayana Moshruba, Maryam Parsa

A Smart Instant Book Filter Model based on Dual-Objective Optimization

3 días 5 horas ago
arXiv:2610.36287v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hospitality service in online marketplaces has become increasingly popular over the past few years, not only because it helps people easily rent short-term lodging but also because it empowers travelers to connect with locals and feel belonging. A typical pattern of these industries is a central platform mediating the economic interactions between guests and hosts, where a successful booking experience is the key to user satisfaction. However, one of the biggest challenges is the possible delay of response and chance of rejection when guests try to book a request-to-book listing. Previously, we enabled the instant book feature to allow hosts to instantly accept qualified guests and guests to confirm bookings immediately. Yet the symptom has not been alleviated given mixed request-to-book and instant book listing supply in search results. One possible solution is to promote all instant book listings in search results; however, booking rate will be damaged due to some improperly promoted low quality listings. In this paper, we present a novel smart instant book filter system that applies the instant book filter intelligently and shifts request-to-book to instant book without hurting booking rate. Compared with traditional two-sided markets research that targets finding strategies to maximize a single overall social welfare goal, our proposed system aims to maximize the instant book rate with the constraint that booking rate should not decrease, forming a dual-objective optimization problem. We show A/B testing results for our system exposed to global users, demonstrating that our model performs better than previous human-expert-tuned models in terms of both instant book rate and overall booking rate. We also achieved improved metrics such as the host instant book adoption rate. The proposed system has been deployed to production and is serving millions of users every day.
Yi Hou, Li Fan, Huizhong Duan

BehaveRec: When Does Long-Term Behavioral History Help Sequential Recommendation? A Study with Session, History, and Community Signals

3 días 5 horas ago
arXiv:2610.36239v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sequential recommendation models typically predict a user's next action from recent session interactions, which limits personalization when short-term signals are weak or ambiguous. Rather than assuming that incorporating longer-term history and community signals is universally beneficial, we study when it actually helps. We propose BehaveRec, a three-signal framework combining a causal session transformer, a bidirectional User History Encoder over a 90-day window, and a GraphSAGE module over a user-user graph built from behavioral embedding similarity rather than item co-occurrence; a learned gate blends the three signals per user. On an industrial dataset of 137M sequences from 12.6M users, BehaveRec improves R@5 by +3.2% over SASRec, with a larger-capacity SASRec baseline (more parameters than BehaveRec) still trailing by +2.5%, ruling out capacity as the explanation. More importantly, a user-level stratification by history length reveals a clear dose-response relationship: BehaveRec's advantage is negligible below roughly 10 interactions and grows monotonically with history richness, reaching +0.017 R@5 for users with 101+ events. This pattern is corroborated across one industrial and three public datasets spanning history-rich to history-sparse regimes, where session-only models remain preferable. These headline results, and the resulting deployment threshold, are established for category-level intent prediction; a preliminary, single-run check on the full item-level vocabulary yields a directionally mixed result and is scoped as an open question rather than a claim. We use these results to derive a practical deployment rule -- roughly 20 interactions per user -- for when long-term history and behavioral-graph signals are worth their added complexity. Despite this added complexity, BehaveRec remains lightweight: it uses 5.67M parameters and trains on a single GPU in under two days.
Aysenur Inan, Reza Yousefi Maragheh, Jayesh Uddhav Kudase, Selene Xu, Kaushiki Nag, Jianpeng Xu, Sushant Kumar

MARQ: A Modular, LLM-Agnostic Requirement Quality Assessor Infused with Systems Engineering Knowledge

3 días 5 horas ago
arXiv:2610.36234v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Requirements engineering (RE) is foundational to systems engineering (SE), as requirement defects can propagate downstream and adversely affect development outcomes. Although large language models (LLMs) are promising for requirement quality assessment, prior work shows that off-the-shelf models miss a large share of expert-identified defects, perform unevenly across quality criteria, and vary across executions. This study investigates whether infusing expert-derived SE knowledge can improve LLM-based requirement quality evaluation beyond off-the-shelf capability. We present MARQ, a modular, LLM-agnostic prototype that supplements LLMs with a criterion-specific knowledge stack operationalizing INCOSE requirement quality criteria and evaluated against off-the-shelf baselines on an expert-labeled NASA requirement set using Claude Opus 5, GPT-5.6 Sol, and the open-weight Gemma 3 12B, with 100 executions per model. MARQ achieves median F1 scores of 0.80 for Claude Opus 5, 0.62 for GPT-5.6 Sol, and 0.53 for Gemma 3 12B, compared with off-the-shelf baselines of 0.55, 0.52, and 0.18, respectively. However, the nature of these gains is model-dependent. Claude Opus 5 improves defect detection and false-alarm control; GPT-5.6 Sol gains detection and better execution-level consistency at the cost of more false alarms; and Gemma 3 12B reaches the performance of off-the-shelf proprietary models, although it remains highly variable. Criterion-level analysis shows gains concentrated in Correctness and Conformance, trade-offs between misses and false alarms within individual criteria, and model-dependent responses across several criteria. These findings position SE knowledge infusion as a promising model-agnostic pathway for strengthening trustworthy LLM-based RE support while underscoring the need for criterion-specific interventions and human-in-the-loop review.
Jannatul Shefa, Alejandro Salado, Paul Wach, Taylan G. Topcu

Skill Dreaming: Evolving Repository Skills through Pull Request Streams

3 días 5 horas ago
arXiv:2610.36188v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on reusable skills for complex software engineering tasks, making skill libraries essential for repository development and maintenance. However, repository-specific skills must evolve with changing code structures, implementation conventions, and maintenance requirements. Pull requests (PRs) provide a natural source of such knowledge by recording how repositories evolve through implementation and review. Meanwhile, new PRs must follow repository-specific implementation patterns, modify related components consistently, and ensure that existing tests continue to pass while adding coverage for new functionality. This creates a mutually reinforcing cycle: PRs provide knowledge for updating skills, while these skills improve future PRs, maintain repositories, and support further skill evolution. To enable this co-evolution of PRs, repositories, and skills, we propose Skill Dreaming, a framework that learns from PR streams to guide continuous repository development and maintenance. Given a repository and its PR history, Skill Dreaming builds a repository-specific skill library by extracting executable knowledge from validated PRs and continuously refines the skills as new PR information becomes available. These skills guide coding agents not only in implementing requested features but also in maintaining associated tests, documentation, compatibility, and repository conventions. By integrating PR analysis, skill management, code execution, and continuous integration, Skill Dreaming provides an end-to-end workflow for applying learned skills to repository changes and incorporating subsequent PR outcomes into future skill updates.
Xinyuan Song, Hasibul Haque, Jay Somasundaram, Ryan Turner, Bowen Zhu, Liang Zhao

Learning Human Sports Motion Feasibility via Quantile Regression on Tracking Data

3 días 5 horas ago
arXiv:2610.36183v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study time-to-arrival (TTA) in sports: the shortest plausible time a player needs to reach an arbitrary location on the pitch given their current kinematic state, estimated as the lower envelope of observed locomotion times. Rather than modeling space ownership through position density estimation or closed-form physics-based models, we cast TTA as a conditional quantile regression problem, estimating the lower quantile of locomotion time so the model learns a player's lower-envelope arrival time. We train the model on optical tracking data from all 64 matches of the PFF FC FIFA World Cup 2022 dataset, and evaluate a lightweight multilayer perceptron against six player-motion models from the literature, re-expressed as TTA predictors, and a learned reachable- hull baseline. Across our evaluation metrics, the MLP consistently outperforms every physics-based baseline. To probe the generality of the learned locomotion model, we further evaluate it on basketball tracking data and a single-game NFL tracking dataset, analyzing the transferability of player motion dynamics across sports. Our project is available at https://github.com/mguti97/TTA-Quantile.
Marc Guti\'errez-P\'erez, Antonio Agudo

Don't Pick a Winner: Knowledge Conflicts Need a Prior, Not a Rule

3 días 5 horas ago
arXiv:2610.36169v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A retrieval-augmented language model answers from two sources, the retrieved context and its own knowledge, and the two disagree whenever the context is incomplete or wrong. Existing methods settle the disagreement with a rule fixed at design time: follow the context, amplify it in proportion to how far it moves the model, or trust the model's memory. Each rule is confidently wrong in some deployment. In a decision-theoretic model of two sources, the score of any fixed rule is linear in the share of reliable contexts while the best attainable score is convex, so every fixed rule is beaten wherever it is not exactly optimal; and a symmetric divergence between the two sources, the signal adaptive decoding uses, carries no information about which one is right. Resolving a conflict therefore needs two inputs that no existing method keeps: evidence about each source separately, and a prior on how often the context is right. We test these claims on GRACE, a benchmark that intervenes on the knowledge-graph context of a fixed question, so that what the model knows, what the context says and what is true are measured separately. There, every baseline from four families is strong on right contexts or on wrong ones, never on both. We then build the two inputs: the model states its knowledge as notes, a small policy voices each note with a calibrated confidence, a reader answers in two voices, and a selector commits or abstains under a prior $\pi$ applied as an exact prior shift. With $\pi$ set to the true share of right contexts, the system is above the best baseline at every mixture of GRACE contexts, by up to 26 points. Its overall score is 45.3 and 35.0 (Qwen3.5-35B-A3B, Llama-3.1-8B), against 29.4 and 27.5 for the best baseline. On preregistered ClashEval it beats same-backbone CK-PLUG and TCR by 12 and 26 points. Where the model lacks the knowledge, the gains vanish, as the theory predicts.
Minh Pham Van, Cong Tran

From Structural Feedback to Prompt Policies: Learning Faithful Text-to-Image Prompt Editors

3 días 5 horas ago
arXiv:2610.36146v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prompt optimization should improve the image a user receives without changing the scene the user requested. Yet stylistic rewriting can weaken object attributes and relations even when global text--image similarity remains high. We propose StruPO, a structure-aware prompt editor that uses a calibrated scene graph as a shared representation for policy conditioning and image-grounded supervision. The graph exposes what should be preserved, while deletion, reordering, and insertion provide a token-aligned way to modify the prompt. This turns structural feedback from an external critique into a training signal for a reusable editing policy. Learning from that signal requires handling both uncertain grounding and stochastic image generation. StruPO retains grounding confidence through smooth reward shaping and averages multiple images for each edit before computing group-relative advantages. Experiments span three disjoint 2K-prompt test sets and four frozen generation backbones, with comparisons to learned prompt optimizers, iterative structural feedback, diffusion-model fine-tuning, and inference-time attention control. StruPO improves the faithfulness--aesthetics trade-off, with consistent gains in relational fidelity. Independent automatic evaluators and a 15-annotator study provide complementary evidence, and human preference margins increase with relation complexity. Controlled ablations connect these gains to graph conditioning, local editing, and image-grounded learning. The resulting policy produces reusable optimized text in one pass after graph calibration, without an iterative critique--rewrite loop.
Wentao Ye, Yali Ye, Zhiqing Xiao, Ru Peng, Xinpeng Ti, Liyao Li, Zhanming Shen, Peng Lu, Jie Zhang, Haobo Wang