Toward Recursive Self-Improvement in Physical AI

2 días 23 horas ago
arXiv:2610.29677v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recursive self-improvement (RSI) describes a system that improves not only its behavior but also the process by which it improves. Recent digital agents test this idea by rewriting their own code and checking each version with executable tests. Bringing these mechanisms into the physical world requires learning from partial observations through costly trials, while accounting for changing operating conditions and potentially irreversible consequences. We position RSI within robot learning and trace pathways from improving robot capabilities to improving the processes that generate them. We examine how physical experience can strengthen these improvement mechanisms and when the resulting gains can support further self-improvement of the mechanisms themselves. Gains carry forward only when feedback addresses remaining learning needs, the receiving component can use the change, its value survives changes in tasks or hardware, and continued practice remains safe and affordable. Existing studies, concentrated in manipulation, support behavioral improvement, benefits to later learning, and procedure improvement. Some systems also change the improver's knowledge or tools, but the physical studies reviewed here have yet to isolate gains attributable to recursion. We synthesize these findings into evaluation principles and research directions for machines that, trial by trial, safely improve the way they improve.
Meng Luo, Zechen Bai, Shanqing Xu, Yanlin Li, Kaixin Li, Mengchen Qian, Weifeng Lu, Ran Zhang, Yingtian Zou, Ziyang Luo, Wei Chen, Hongzhan Lin

Conflicted Records: Typed Adversarial Contracts for Auditable LLM Output Quality Enforcement

2 días 23 horas ago
arXiv:2610.29669v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-generated records increasingly populate production information systems where they are treated as data assets subject to the same quality expectations as records from operational databases. A single such record can simultaneously satisfy and violate a quality rule: a grounded fact adjacent to a hallucination, a useful answer adjacent to a stereotype. Classical data cleaning cannot resolve this because the two judgments are incompatible over the same span; a single LLM judge cannot either, since it shares the training biases that produced the conflict. Existing interventions such as prompt engineering, chain-of-thought, and RLHF reduce surface error rates but provide no audit trail and cannot distinguish genuine remediation from blanket suppression. The question is whether a deterministic check over structured inter-agent records can catch the defects that referential checks alone miss. We present BiasGuard-D: two adversarial roles drawn from distinct model families exchange typed claim documents, a three-model quorum adjudicates by majority vote, and a combined referential-plus-semantic invariant validates the verdict. The semantic component fires on verdicts referential checks miss; removing the iterative loop drops invariant satisfaction sharply. The deliberation layer transfers from stereotype to hallucination remediation on HaluEval QA with only role-framing changes, raising right-answer recovery by 49 percentage points; the triage gate required a cross-family second auditor to maintain recall on objective hallucination. Every claim, vote, and instruction is stored as a typed record giving operators a provenance trail auditable under emerging AI regulations.
Kardelen Subasi, Jaros{\l}aw A. Chudziak

Lineage-Aware Search Control for LLM-Based Evolutionary Factor Mining

2 días 23 horas ago
arXiv:2610.29663v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Formulaic alpha factor mining searches for symbolic expressions that transform market data into predictive signals. Recent LLM-based evolutionary factor mining methods use large language models as semantic variation operators. Under the conventional LLM-EA paradigm, stochastic variation and fitness-based selection can leave the search weakly directed and concentrated around a narrow set of structurally similar factors. We argue that these limitations arise because current methods mainly organize search at the individual and population levels, leaving lineage-level control underused. A lineage connects successive factor variants through evolutionary descent. We propose LineageEvo, which uses lineage in two coupled forms of search control: (1) lineage-conditioned LLM variation, which distills Lineage-Scoped Search Experience into operator-specific priors and fuses them with global operator priors, providing persistent, lineage-relevant guidance for LLM generation; and (2) lineage-stratified search allocation, which balances factor quality against lineage concentration by distributing the search budget across lineages during evolutionary search. Together, these mechanisms make semantic variation more direction aware and prevent branches from dominating the evolution, thereby promoting the discovery of predictive and diverse factors. We evaluate LineageEvo on CSI 500 and S&P 500 in terms of factor predictiveness, portfolio performance, search efficiency, and lineage- and expression-level diversity. LineageEvo achieves the strongest predictive performance on both markets, while LSPS produces a more balanced lineage distribution and a structurally broader factor pool. The results support lineage as a useful intermediate unit for controlling LLM-based evolutionary factor search.
Xintong Liu, Chenkai Zhang, Yanzhao Ma, Peng Yang

Formalizing Cooperation and Competition: An AI-Assisted Mathematical Addendum to a 2018 Planning Thesis

2 días 23 horas ago
arXiv:2610.29637v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present an AI-assisted mathematical addendum to Strategic Trip Planning: Striking a Balance Between Competition and Cooperation (Amar, 2018). We reconstruct selected relationships between strategic choice, cooperative stability, participant approval and enforcement. The thesis's Nash-to-core proposition is under-specified until outsider opportunities are stated. We verify two-person implications under fixed outsiders and explicit efficiency conditions. Under isolation, the original example has an empty TU core; its funded counterpart uses an explicit external subsidy. For a monotone resource model we characterize the exact financing gap. A finite negotiation procedure implemented in Lean is proved to terminate with participant approval, joint-cost non-worsening and local optimality against permitted approved moves. Supporting formalizations address bargaining geometry and regret-based efficiency. A resource-game counterinstance shows why monotonicity alone provides no uniform price-of-anarchy bound. Reproducible computations compare a documented heuristic reconstruction with the verified procedure on 44 source-based instances and 96 starting cases from four additional synthetic network families. Acceptance-matched heuristic and randomized pairwise-search controls contextualize the optimization results. The mathematical ingredients are established results; the contribution is a traceable reconstruction linking source statements, explicit assumptions, checked proofs, executable code and retained counterinstances. The study illustrates how AI-assisted investigation can turn engineering intuitions from legacy research into precise mathematical claims whose conditions and computational consequences can be inspected and reproduced.
Haitham Masaud Amar

FogTTA: Online Test-Time Adaptation for Robust Transformer-based Object Detection in Foggy Weather

2 días 23 horas ago
arXiv:2610.29618v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Object detection models for autonomous driving commonly experience substantial performance drops when deployed under adverse weather due to the domain shift between training data and real-world operating conditions. This degradation is especially evident when models trained on clear-weather images encounter foggy environments with reduced visibility and contrast. To address this challenge, we introduce FogTTA, an online test-time adaptation framework designed to improve the robustness of Transformer-based object detectors in fog. Using RF-DETR as the underlying object detector, FogTTA enables real-time adaptation to the streaming target domain without requiring source data or retraining. The framework follows a teacher-student design, where the deployed model serves as the teacher and generates pseudo labels from weakly augmented target inputs. These predictions are subsequently refined through non-maximum suppression and confidence filtering. The student model then learns from strongly augmented target sample using the Varifocal loss to mitigate pseudo-label noise. The teacher is updated via exponential moving averaging to ensure stable and continuous adaptation. Experiments show that FogTTA outperforms prior baselines, delivering improved detection accuracy and stability while maintaining real-time performance.
Ali Abedi, Q. M. Jonathan Wu, Ning Zhang, Shiqi Tian

An interpretable deep learning method for early hepatocellular carcinoma diagnosis on multiphase CT

2 días 23 horas ago
arXiv:2610.29616v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Early diagnosis of hepatocellular carcinoma is critical to preserve access to curative treatment options. The Liver Imaging Reporting and Data System (LI-RADS) provides a standardized framework for non-invasive diagnosis on multiphase computed tomography, based on major visual imaging features. However, these features may be difficult to assess consistently, particularly in small liver lesions. We developed dLI-RADS, an interpretable artificial intelligence method designed to estimate the probability of hepatocellular carcinoma from multiphase computed tomography images of manually segmented liver lesions, while remaining aligned with LI-RADS-related imaging concepts. dLI-RADS combines neural network-derived predictions with handcrafted quantitative imaging measurements reflecting LI-RADS major features and integrates these inputs using logistic regression. In this multicenter retrospective study, patients with multiphase computed tomography and at least one liver lesion were included, while lesions larger than 40 mm were excluded. Histology served as the reference standard for hepatocellular carcinoma, and a composite reference standard was used for non-hepatocellular carcinoma lesions. The lesion-level accuracy of dLI-RADS and LI-RADS were compared on the internal evaluation set using 10,000-repetition bootstrap non-inferiority tests, with 5% margins and significance levels. On the external test set, sensitivities were similarly compared. dLI-RADS was non-inferior to LI-RADS for lesion-level accuracy in the internal evaluation set, achieving 80% accuracy compared with 74% for LI-RADS (p = 0.04)...
Emma Sarfati, Alexandre B\^one, Pietro Gori, Sisi Yang, Marc-Michel Roh\'e, Fran\c{c}ois Nicolas, Jeong-Min Lee, Jeong Hee Yoon, Maxime Ronot, Isabelle Bloch, Christophe Aub\'e

Overview of CHIP 2026 Shared Task 1: Patient-Specific Phenotype Concept Recognition in Full-Text Biomedical Literature

2 días 23 horas ago
arXiv:2610.29606v2 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automatic phenotype information extraction plays an important role in rare disease diagnosis, genotype-phenotype analysis, and precision medicine. However, accurately identifying phenotype concepts and determining their associations with specific patients remain challenging, particularly in full-text biomedical articles involving multiple patients and complex clinical descriptions. This paper presents an overview of CHIP 2026 Shared Task 1, which aims to promote the development of methods for patient-specific phenotype concept recognition from full-text biomedical literature. The task consists of two subtasks: full-text phenotype concept recognition and patient-specific phenotype association. For this evaluation, we used 200 annotated full-text biomedical articles from the PatientPheX dataset, containing 506 patients, 15,193 phenotype mentions, and 5,656 patient-phenotype associations. A total of 455 teams registered for the competition, with 189 and 103 valid submissions received on the Phase A and Phase B leaderboards, respectively. The best-performing system achieved an overall score of 0.7389 on the final test set, outperforming the baseline by 8.37 percentage points. The top-performing teams explored diverse approaches combining biomedical language models, large language models (LLMs), and ensemble strategies. The evaluation results highlight both the potential of these approaches and the remaining challenges in patient attribution and phenotype normalization from full-text biomedical literature. The post-evaluation phase remains open at https://tianchi.aliyun.com/competition/entrance/532512.
Xuanlyu Zhu, Feng Tian, Yang Zhong, Pengqi Zheng, Xiwen Bi, Ling Luo, Yuanyuan Sun, Jian Wang, Hongfei Lin

Improved Training of Strong Stochastic Flow Maps

2 días 23 horas ago
arXiv:2610.29605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Stochastic flow maps promise few-step sampling of stochastic differential equations (SDEs) by learning to directly jump between times along the solution path, yet training these models to learn this solution map remains difficult. The primary obstacle is the Brownian path itself: it is an infinite-dimensional object which needs to be passed to the neural network and is nowhere differentiable, which makes the implementation of derivative-based losses that power the state-of-the-art deterministic flow maps just out of reach. We identify two core design principles which address these issues: a) represent the Brownian path with a basis which carries higher-order local information, and b) train with an objective that forces the network to use the full representation of the path, not just the first order. To address this, we leverage the shifted Legendre polynomial expansion with a Wong-Zakai styled objective, unlocking derivative-based losses. Finally, we propose a recipe for fine-tuning large pre-trained flow models into strong stochastic flow maps. We ablate through this design space on several toy problems and use our findings to transform a large flow model into a strong stochastic flow map on ImageNet, achieving roughly a three-fold improvement in FD-DINOv2 over SSFM at four NFE.
Zander W. Blasingame, Antonio Franca, Raul Minan, Christian Koke, Niklas Rindtorff, Alexander Tong

The Reflexivity Threshold: A Phase Transition for Multi-Agent Performative Prediction

2 días 23 horas ago
arXiv:2610.29577v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many learning systems are performative: once deployed, their predictions change the data distribution on which future models are trained. In multi-agent settings, this feedback is routed through a network of interacting learners, so stability depends not only on the strength of performativity but also on who affects whom. We study repeated retraining in multi-agent performative prediction and identify a spectral threshold that separates stable learning from worst-case learning obstruction. Prior work often collapses cross-agent feedback into a scalar contraction constant, missing this network structure. We instead introduce the reflexivity matrix $\Gamma$, which records how strongly one agent's deployment can move another agent's best response, defined from per-agent gradient sensitivities and curvature parameters. The threshold occurs when the spectral radius of this matrix crosses one. Below the threshold, repeated retraining converges geometrically to a unique performatively stable equilibrium, with cumulative excess loss bounded uniformly in the time horizon. Above the threshold, we construct noisy supercritical instances in which every local-information learner incurs expected cumulative excess loss growing linearly for horizons up to order $1/(\rho(\Gamma)-1)$. Together, these results characterize the threshold behavior through upper and lower bounds and recover the single-agent scalar threshold from prior work as a special case.
Ahmed Mahrous, Roberto Di Pietro

Stochastic Pruning of the DPO Computation Graph: 1.4x Faster Training and Lower Peak Memory

2 días 23 horas ago
arXiv:2610.29538v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Direct preference optimization (DPO) incurs training costs in output scoring, sequence execution, and backpropagation, so reducing supervision alone does not necessarily save computation. We introduce a unified framework for stochastic pruning of the DPO computation graph that independently samples response positions for scoring, response prefixes for execution, and preference branches for backpropagation. By making these selections before the corresponding operations, the framework omits computation at each stage of a training step. Our analysis characterizes the objective changes induced by position and sequence pruning and uses inverse-probability weighting to obtain a conditionally unbiased single-branch gradient estimator for the sampled objective. Controlled measurements show that position and sequence pruning primarily reduce peak memory, with most output-memory savings attributable to an implementation that retains full response supervision. Branch pruning yields a $1.426\times$ step-time speedup over a concatenated DPO baseline and reduces training time by about 30\% relative to stock DPO across two model families, with slightly lower mean accuracy and benchmark-dependent changes in open-ended scores. These findings relate the resource benefits of stochastic graph pruning to the computation omitted and the resulting changes in the training objective.
Yubing Wu, Wei Chen, Junmei Yang, Delu Zeng, Tiewen Pan