A Theoretical Analysis of Why Masked Diffusion Models Mitigate the Reversal Curse

2 días 15 horas ago
arXiv:2602.02133v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autoregressive language models (ARMs) suffer from the reversal curse: after learning ''$A$ is $B$,'' they often fail on the reverse query ''$B$ is $A$.'' Masked diffusion language models (MDMs) exhibit this failure in a much weaker form, but the underlying reason has remained unclear. A common explanation attributes this mitigation to their any-order masked training objective. However, observing ''$[\mathbf{M}]$ is $B$'' during training teaches recovery of $A$ from $B$ in one positional configuration, and does not by itself explain why the learned evidence should transfer to the reverse prompt ''$B$ is $[\mathbf{M}]$.'' We provide a theoretical analysis showing that this transfer arises from a parameter-level coupling between forward and reverse positional conditionals: shared Transformer parameters store token-pair evidence, while relative positional encodings route attention through queries and keys without changing the value-side evidence being retrieved. In a one-layer MDM, we prove that forward masked training strengthens evidence that is reusable in reverse queries, induces correlated forward--reverse attention routes, and yields a positively aligned shared-storage gradient component that decreases the reverse loss to first order. Controlled one-layer experiments and large-scale LLaDA/Dream experiments verify these signatures and show that they translate into improved reverse prediction.
Moongyu Jeon, Sangwoo Shin, BumJun Kim, Kyelim Lee, Albert No

Replayable Financial Agents: A Determinism-Faithfulness Assurance Harness for Tool-Using LLM Agents

2 días 15 horas ago
arXiv:2601.15322v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Replaying a financial agent requires specifying the conditions of a rerun, preserving its execution record, and deciding which parts of its behavior to compare. We introduce the Determinism-Faithfulness Assurance Harness (DFAH), a framework and practical protocol for organizing these choices. The framework distinguishes comparisons of final decisions, tool-name sets, and ordered tool names, while treating support from available evidence as a separate evaluation target. We illustrate the framework using 2,957 recorded executions in synthetic compliance-triage and data-operations tasks. One data-operations configuration repeated its recorded decision across all trials on 84% of cases, while its ordered tool-name sequence repeated on 26%. Conversely, some compliance cases retained the same tool sequence while recorded decisions changed. A case-level example shows how repeated labels accompanied different lookups and escalation calls. These observations demonstrate how the comparison level changes the description of repeated behavior. The resulting protocol connects configuration control, preservation of each attempt, comparison of records, and inspection of changed cases. DFAH provides a practical foundation for designing replay experiments and locating execution differences during the development and evaluation of financial agents.
Raffi Khatchadourian

Synthesis and Verification of Register Automata over Data Sequences (Technical Report)

2 días 15 horas ago
arXiv:2511.19100v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Data sequences, such as time series, traces, and sensor streams, are words over large or infinite data domains. Their properties often depend on comparisons between values at different positions, which finite automata cannot express directly. We study synthesis and verification for Deterministic Register Automata (DRAs) over ordered data sequences. DRAs combine finite control with registers for remembered data values, providing compact symbolic descriptions of quantitative sequence languages. Our technical core is a local-search synthesis procedure and an exact robustness checker for DRAs. We fix the alphabet theory to ordered rationals $(\Q;<,=)$ with rational guard constants and use non-negative affine accumulator costs. For a fixed number of DRA registers, the checker runs in polynomial time; its dependence on that number is exponential. It reduces robustness to coverability and then to a shortest-path problem. Since the search ranges over $\Q^+$, it produces variable-length witnesses and, for RAA-definable alignment costs such as DTW, explores a counterexample space with no a priori length bound. As an application, we use learned DRAs as interpretable surrogates for queried neural sequence classifiers. A probably approximately correct (PAC) validation loop refines rejected candidates, returns genuine non-robustness witnesses for the classifier when found, and accepts a surrogate only with statistical guarantees for fidelity and local stability. We implement the framework in $\textsc{RAExc}$, enabling the synthesis of interpretable automata and the verification of their robustness. We evaluate the approach on benchmark languages and sequentialized MNIST, demonstrating high accuracy while verifying the robustness of the learned automata.
Chih-Duo Hong, Hongjian Jiang, Anthony W. Lin, Oliver Markgraf, Julian Parsert, Tony Tan

PRISM: Prompt-Refined In-Context System Modelling for Financial Retrieval

2 días 15 horas ago
arXiv:2511.14130v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deploying LLMs for financial information retrieval demands accuracy, cost efficiency, and reproducibility, yet most approaches require expensive fine-tuning. PRISM is a training-free framework that composes three deployable modules (prompt engineering, in-context learning, and a candidate refinement module) with a boundary-condition study of multi-agent coordination for financial document retrieval. On FiQA-2018, stacked reranking and $k$-reciprocal encoding raise Recall@100 from 0.7783 to 0.8326. On FinAgentBench, a Cohere-refined top-50 pool yields a higher observed end-to-end NDCG@5, below this evaluation's minimum detectable effect, while cutting per-query cost by about 35%. Added complexity does not always pay off: $k$-reciprocal encoding stops helping once the upstream stage is already high-recall, and multi-agent coordination is not a default for fine-grained chunk ranking. Matched pairs that hold prompt, model, and exemplars fixed lose 0.0702 and 0.0681 combined NDCG@5 to their single-path controls, and the whole gap sits at the chunk stage. We release an expert-annotated FinAgentBench evaluation set, together with a label-robustness sweep over 16 alternative ground-truth constructions, restoring a reproducible evaluation path after the original evaluator went offline. Without fine-tuning, PRISM placed third on the official FinAgentBench private leaderboard (leaderboard basis, NDCG@5 0.71181), reaches NDCG@10 0.6197 on FiQA-2018, and 98% accuracy on FinanceBench. We report per-query latency, token, and dollar accounting across roughly 40 configurations, present the quality-cost-latency Pareto frontier, and introduce FACET, a transparent SLA-specific scalarization for choosing among non-dominated configurations. Code and dataset are released at https://bit.ly/prism-ailens.
Chun Chet Ng, Jia Yu Lim, Zhen Hao Chu, Yixi Zhou, Wei Zeng Low

Generative Artificial Intelligence for Internet of Things Computing: A Systematic Survey

2 días 15 horas ago
arXiv:2504.07635v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The integration of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) within the Internet of Things (IoT) is garnering considerable interest. This growing attention stems from the continuous evolution and widespread adoption they are both having individually, enough to spontaneously reshape numerous sectors, including Healthcare, Manufacturing, and Smart Cities. Hence, their increasing popularity has catalyzed further extensive research for understanding the potential of the duo GenAI-IoT, how they interplay, and to which extent their synergy can innovate the state-of-the-art in their individual scenarios. However, despite the increasing prominence of GenAI for IoT Computing, much of the existing research remains focused on specific, narrowly scoped applications. This fragmented approach highlights the need for a more comprehensive analysis of the potential, challenges, and implications of GenAI integration within the broader IoT ecosystem. This survey exactly aims to address this gap by providing a holistic overview of the opportunities, issues, and considerations arising from the convergence of these mainstream paradigms. Our contribution is realized through a systematic literature review following the PRISMA methodology. A comparison framework is presented, and well-defined research questions are outlined to comprehensively explore the past, present, and future directions of GenAI integration with IoT Computing, offering valuable insights for both experts and newcomers.
Fabrizio Mangione, Claudio Savaglio, Giancarlo Fortino

Think Harder Where It Matters: Item-Level Adaptive Recursion for Sequential Recommendation

2 días 15 horas ago
arXiv:2610.30128v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing sequential recommenders usually allocate a fixed computational budget to every item in a user's interaction history, regardless of the item's contribution to the final prediction. We challenge this de facto design with two diagnostic findings. (1) Non-uniform computational need: items within the same sequence vary drastically in how much computation they require. Most converge after shallow processing while a critical minority only stabilizes at full depth. (2) Suboptimality of fixed allocation: given oracle access to the target item, a non-uniform depth assignment consistently outranks the fixed one, indicating that existing uniform computation both wastes capacity on already-converged items and sacrifices overall recommendation quality. These observations motivate a shift from fixed-depth computation to item-level adaptive reasoning. To this end, we propose LoopRec. LoopRec recursively applies a single weight-shared block and introduces a lightweight gate at each recursion boundary that makes a binary exit-or-continue decision for every item independently. Items whose representations have sufficiently matured exit early, while those requiring deeper reasoning continue to subsequent recursions. This design converts the fixed global depth into a learned, per-item property without auxiliary depth labels, and is readily adaptable to diverse backbone architectures. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks with four backbone families demonstrate that LoopRec consistently outperforms matched fixed-depth counterparts. Further analysis reveals that LoopRec's learned allocation exhibits interpretable patterns aligned with our post-hoc oracle analysis: lower-frequency items and more recent interactions naturally receive deeper computation. Our code is available at https://github.com/Elpmis117/LoopRec.
Zhanshuo Cao, Jiakai Tang, Yuqi Zhou, Sunhao Dai, Jun Xu

PhysiCalWorld: In-Context Physics Calibration for World Models

2 días 15 horas ago
arXiv:2610.30125v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing world models typically perceive a scene through current visual frame or a narrow history window. However, these observations may not reveal the physics properties that determine transition dynamics, such as an object's mass distribution, joint damping, or surface friction. Without calibrating these physics factors for world models, predictions tend to regress toward an empirical prior and induce severe drift in novel test scenes. To this end, we propose PhysiCalWorld, which calibrates action-conditioned world models to the instance-specific dynamics via in-context prompting, without fine-tuning or analytical physics modeling. Our method encodes an exploratory interaction clip collected within the test scene into a compact physics descriptor token, which grounds subsequent predictions in the scene's actual physical behavior. PhysiCalWorld is trained end-to-end with the latent prediction loss alone, without physics labels. At inference time, the descriptor token is extracted once and can be reused across rollouts with negligible compute overhead. We evaluate PhysiCalWorld across four environments covering diverse physics variations and show that it substantially improves rollout prediction accuracy and visual planning success rate. The learned descriptors also form a physically structured latent space and generalize beyond the physics ranges seen during training.
Yunhao Luo, Wentao He, Yinpei Dai, Hyelin Nam, Hongze Fu, Joyce Chai, Nima Fazeli, Jeong Joon Park

Environment Duels: A Microcosm of LLM Co-Evolution

2 días 15 horas ago
arXiv:2610.30116v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Through a tangle of real-world interactions, from synthetic training pipelines to data shared on the open web, frontier LLMs absorb what their predecessors and competitors create. How well does each model play its role in this ecosystem, as a creator and as a solver? We introduce Environment Duels, a dynamic agentic benchmark that evaluates both capabilities on interactive environments. Each model writes environments, each with a privileged hint, aiming for tasks that capable solvers fail without the hint and pass with it. Across nine frontier LLMs, solving and authoring prove to be distinct skills: the strongest solvers are not the strongest authors, while smaller models learn more from how others played and write the hardest environments and the most useful hints. Beyond the scores, the pairwise interactions form a microcosm of how models affect one another. Head-to-head outcomes are transitive and so yield a stable ranking; independent authors converge on the same designs; and in a reinforcement-learning study with Qwen3.8-27B, the learner's hint lift on an author's environments tracks how much training on those environments improves it on held-out reasoning and agentic benchmarks, whether the environments are its own or another model's. Each of these patterns has a counterpart in how models shape one another outside the duel. By staging these interactions under controlled conditions, Environment Duels offers a window onto how LLMs teach, challenge and learn from one another. Code is available at https://github.com/LLM-Duels/EnvDuels.
Shibo Jin, Zhiqiu Xu, Yiling Zou, Shangyu Gong, Mayur Naik

The End of Consensus Research?

2 días 15 horas ago
arXiv:2610.30114v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Consensus is a fundamental problem in distributed computing and at the core of state machine replication (SMR). Despite decades of active human research, discovering practical low-latency solutions to the problem is still open, as it requires combining protocol knowledge, correctness reasoning, implementation, and experimental evaluation. We report on how AI helped us discover A-greement, a new consensus protocol for geo-replicated state machines that significantly outperforms state-of-the-art solutions. Averaged across six deployments with 5 or 9 replicas, A-greement reduces the mean latency of a geo-distributed key-value store over the fastest baseline by 12.2% and 33.3% on write-heavy and read-heavy workloads, respectively, and matches the fastest baseline on read-only workloads. A-greement combines lease-authorized local reads, direct client learning for leader-ordered writes, and a fast fixed-quorum per-key write path, selected according to network topology and workload. At the heart of our discovery lies AI-greement, an agent harness for the "autonomous" discovery, implementation, experimentation, and verification of candidate protocols. AI-greement integrates (1) a concept-oriented protocol knowledge base, (2) a modular implementation skeleton, and (3) a Lean-based verification framework with reusable safety definitions, reference specifications, and proofs. AI-greement is of independent interest: its Lean formalization uncovers several previously unreported vulnerabilities in existing consensus protocols, and it provides guidelines on how domain-specific harnesses can turn general-purpose coding agents into effective tools for (distributed) computing research. Yet we argue that human consensus experts remain essential before, during, and after the search: agents reshape the researcher's role rather than end consensus research.
Cl\'ement Burgelin, Rachid Guerraoui, Zicong Hong, Yinan Hu, Anne-Marie Kermarrec, Rafael Pires, Rasmus Moorits Veski, Martijn de Vos

Quant-Arena: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Quantitative Trading Research

2 días 15 horas ago
arXiv:2610.30113v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantitative research is an iterative loop: a researcher proposes a market hypothesis, implements it as an executable signal, tests it on historical data, and decides what to keep. Existing benchmarks score formulas, code, or individual trading decisions, leaving open whether large language models (LLMs) can complete this loop and produce strategies that work beyond the research period. We introduce Quant-Arena, a benchmark and public leaderboard for end-to-end quantitative research on real A-share market data. A model constructs features and stock-scoring code, receives feedback only on 2022--2023, and freezes one strategy for assessment on the sealed year 2024. A cash-account evaluator applies trading constraints and costs, including market impact estimated from a simulated order book. Scores are dominated by realized excess return and complemented by signal quality and the diversity of features used by the strategy. We evaluate nine frontier models, among which GPT-6 Astra scores highest; yet no model beats the equal-weight market in 2024. Quant-Arena is open to submissions from any model or agent harness.
Houde Qian, Zheng Jiang, Wenyi Li, Chenxi Xu, Xinjie Lin, Yuzhao Peng, Ruoyu Han, Youjie Zheng, Kaisen Yang, Qinhuai Na, You Fu, Calvin Xiao