How To Build A Modern Diffusion Language Model

2 horas 51 minutos ago
arXiv:2610.33391v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The frontier of large language model (LLM) performance has advanced rapidly in recent years, fueled by scaling laws for pretraining on large text corpora. However, mainstream LLMs have fundamental limitations: they generate text autoregressively, producing outputs sequentially from left to right one token at a time. This sequential process leaves parallel GPU hardware underutilized during inference--a bottleneck that has grown acute as progress shifts toward scaling post-training and inference-time compute--and commits irreversibly to each token without the ability to revise earlier mistakes. Discrete diffusion models address these limitations by generating tokens in parallel, starting from a noisy or masked sequence and iteratively refining the entire output over a series of denoising steps. This parallel generative process enables speeds of thousands of tokens per second, provides a new axis of inference-time compute scaling, and supports built-in error correction and controllable generation. Over the past two years, discrete diffusion has scaled to billions of parameters across biological sequence modeling and natural language, with open-weights and commercial releases from leading labs. This article provides a survey of key ideas in discrete diffusion and a high-level introduction to how modern diffusion LLMs are built, covering their foundations, core algorithmic and architectural building blocks, applications in biology and language, and implications for future LLM scaling laws.
Volodymyr Kuleshov, Marianne Arriola, Yair Schiff, Gilad Turok, Guanghan Wang

AgentOrch: How Close Can Global Orchestration Come to Step-by-Step Interaction?

2 horas 51 minutos ago
arXiv:2610.33375v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Enterprise workflow agents typically rely on step-by-step interaction (Step-by-Step): the agent executes an action, observes its result, and invokes a large language model (LLM) again to decide the next step. Global orchestration (Global) instead generates a complete executable workflow in advance and executes it without further LLM calls, substantially reducing inference overhead, but it remains less accurate than Step-by-Step. We study how close Global can come to Step-by-Step and what narrows the remaining gap. We introduce AgentOrch, a benchmark that directly compares global orchestration with step-by-step interaction on 650 enterprise SOPs and 3,220 runtime variants under matched tools, environments, and evaluation. Step-by-Step remains more accurate for every evaluated model, but the gap has shrunk by about 79% from early models to the strongest recent model. We identify three routes to further narrowing this gap. Incremental workflow construction improves Global accuracy by an average of 9.98 percentage points (pp) without runtime execution feedback. Revising complete workflows with execution feedback improves all evaluated models, including 6.13 pp on held-out runtime variants. Targeted training on complete workflows improves accuracy by an average of 12.18 pp across all five trained models. Although a gap remains, global orchestration offers a promising path toward enterprise agents that deliver higher accuracy with fewer LLM calls.
Zijie Liu, Qi Yang Huang, Jinhao Duan, Yueh Che Lee, Thomas A. Joseph, Zayne Turner, Adam Seligman, Tianlong Chen, Zhaozhuo Xu

BenchBench-Cloning: Evaluating Molecular Cloning Design and Protocol Development

2 horas 51 minutos ago
arXiv:2610.33355v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Molecular cloning is one of the most routine wet-lab workflows, yet existing evaluations of language models in biology mostly test knowledge recall or isolated steps rather than end-to-end experimental planning. We introduce BenchBench-Cloning, a benchmark for large language models comprising 65 molecular cloning tasks grounded in sequence records, laboratory notebooks, and published experimental studies. Planning a molecular cloning experiment requires defining a set of constructs needed for a scientific objective and a construction route to produce them. BenchBench-Cloning contains 50 protocol-development tasks, in which agents produce an executable protocol for a specified construct, and 15 construct-design tasks, in which agents determine the constructs a scientific objective calls for. Protocol-development tasks are evaluated by execution in a cloning simulator; construct-design tasks are evaluated with task-specific deterministic checks and, where needed, rubric-based LLM-as-a-judge evaluation. Across eight systems with repeated attempts per task, GPT-6 Astra scores highest at 30.6%, with the others between 8.6% and 22.2%, and the benchmark remains unsaturated under best-of-ten sampling. As integrating individual cloning decisions into complete, valid plans remains challenging even for frontier models, we expect BenchBench-Cloning to serve as a useful benchmark for tracking progress in experimental planning.
Aditya Sivakumar, Peter Ciaccia, Hassaan Qadir, Ian Hsu, Ashu Singhal

TempShap: When and How Much a Feature Matters in Time-Series Forecasting

2 horas 51 minutos ago
arXiv:2610.33330v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Attribution for a time-series forecaster should answer two questions that a feature-level scalar cannot: when in the input window a feature acts, and how much its influence changes across the forecast horizon. Most existing Shapley explainers treat each feature as one player and therefore collapse both axes. We propose TempShap, a retrospective, loss-based Shapley framework whose players are the individual input cells $(t,i)$. Its attribution tensor yields temporal-localization and horizon-impact profiles. We validate these against planted temporal structures, a tractable exact cell game, and a closed-form attribution oracle for a real linear forecaster. Permutation sharing estimates the cell-level game at localized perturbation cost. Under redundant inputs, one-at-a-time scores under-credit substitutable information, whereas the signed Shapley decomposition preserves total value and yields more reliable held-out deletion rankings under mean masking. A planted counterexample isolates the redundancy mechanism. Experiments show a deletion-ranking advantage across Shapley estimators, forecasting benchmarks, and model families. TempShap therefore makes fine-grained Shapley attribution both practical and operationally useful.
Chi Zhao, Anastasiia Chelnokova, Jing Liu, Elena Parilina

AI Teaches Humans to Handle Complexity in the Game of Go

2 horas 51 minutos ago
arXiv:2610.33323v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Strategic decision-making in complex environments requires balancing local stability against global coordination. Using the game of Go as a bounded empirical testbed, we investigate how biological and artificial agents navigate this trade-off by formalizing a network-derived metric of strategic tension defined via the spectral radius of spatial dependency matrices. Across human skill progression, tension systematically decays from novices to masters as uncoordinated tactical skirmishes give way to disciplined territorial stabilization. However, a longitudinal analysis of professional play spanning 1980--2026 reveals a striking historical paradox: following the superhuman breakthrough of AlphaGo in 2016, elite human matches display a marked surge in sustained tension. A two-dimensional projection based on move distance and captures places modern professionals close to neural engines, separating their tension from the local contact fighting of novices and from random noise. Consequently, strategic tension acts as a macroscopic order parameter for decision paradigms rather than raw computational strength. Beyond the game of Go, these findings establish a constructive paradigm for human-AI interaction, indicating how artificial systems can act as cognitive scaffolding that expands biological heuristics and elevates human capacity to navigate higher-order complexity across professional training and decision-making domains.
Adamo Cerioli, Vito D. P. Servedio, Gabriele Cerioli, Antonio Villani, Carlo Metta

Estimation of Propagated Risk in LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems

2 horas 51 minutos ago
arXiv:2610.33282v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) based multi-agent systems introduce a distinctive reliability challenge in which actions taken by upstream agents can affect the correctness of downstream agents. While prior work has investigated error propagation and developed methods for estimating uncertainty inherited from upstream agents, existing approaches do not explicitly model how realized sender-receiver interactions contribute to downstream error risk under different sender correctness states. In this work, we study agent-level error-risk estimation from multi-agent execution traces. We propose Interaction-Effect Propagation (IE-Prop), an interaction-conditioned model that learns separate effects for correct and incorrect upstream agents. For each sender-receiver interaction, the model combines these conditional effects using the sender's estimated error risk, and recursively propagates the resulting risk estimates through the execution graph. We evaluate our approach across three multi-agent architectures and three benchmarks. Across all evaluated architectures, our approach raises the final-node AUROC over the established baseline by approximately 0.05 points on average. Furthermore, tracking risk across multiple agent steps contributes a distinct +0.03 AUROC gain in sequential systems. These results show that realized inter-agent interactions provide predictive information beyond receiver-local evidence, while the value of multi-step risk tracking depends on the system's information-flow structure.
Shreyan Ganguly, Souradeep Chattopadhyay, Qisai Liu, Soumik Sarkar

GEMS-RAG: Graph-grounded Engineering Multimodal Standards Retrieval-Augmented Generation

2 horas 51 minutos ago
arXiv:2610.33277v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Engineering standards are challenging knowledge sources for large language models (LLMs) because they are hierarchical, multimodal, and densely connected through figures, tables, cross-references, and normative rules. Existing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) methods often rely on unstructured text retrieval and struggle with questions requiring joint reasoning over textual provisions, visual specifications, and document structure. We propose GEMS-RAG (Graph-grounded Engineering Multimodal Standards Retrieval-Augmented Generation), a framework for grounded reasoning over engineering standards. GEMS-RAG combines hierarchical parsing, fine-grained visual entity extraction, multimodal knowledge graph construction, and graph-grounded hybrid retrieval. Instead of treating figures as monolithic images, it decomposes them into meaningful visual entities linked to textual provisions, engineering concepts, and regulatory rules. During inference, dense, sparse, and visual retrieval are combined with graph expansion to identify relevant evidence across text, figures, and document structure. We evaluate GEMS-RAG on the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), a large engineering standard containing egulations, technical drawings, and standardized traffic-control devices. Results show that graph-grounded multimodal retrieval improves retrieval effectiveness and question-answering performance over text-only, multimodal, and graph-based RAG baselines. Beyond MUTCD, GEMS-RAG offers a general framework for reasoning over engineering codes, technical manuals, regulatory documents, and scientific standards in safety-critical applications.
Abdul Hannan Azad, Irvin Wang, Jiwan Jiang, Chenchen Kuai, Bofeng Cao, Keshu Wu, Yuzhou Wang, Xiaopeng Li, Yang Zhou

Scoped Semantic Invariance as a Foundation for LLM Reliability

2 horas 51 minutos ago
arXiv:2610.33267v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLMs often answer semantically equivalent queries inconsistently, even when the underlying facts are known. We formalize consistency as semantic invariance over equivalence classes of queries and show that invariance under arbitrary meaning-preserving transformations is undecidable in general. This motivates scoped semantic invariance, where model behavior is evaluated relative to bounded semantic domains. We operationalize this framework using knowledge graphs (KGs), which act as explicit semantic control structures defining local semantic constraints and grounding contexts. Across the MITRE D3FEND ontology and eight Wikidata- derived domains, we show that inconsistencies are structured rather than random, concentrating in localized hotspot subgraphs organized around recurring TREE, STAR, and CYCLE patterns that remain stable across models and domains. We further show that selective graph grounding improves correctness and cross-model consistency, while indiscriminate grounding introduces regressions. A layered grounding strategy achieves the strongest monotonicity profile, preserving correct knowledge while reducing inconsistency. Finally, we show that hotspot structures discovered from simple consistency probes transfer to more realistic compositional reasoning tasks.
Rosario Uceda-Sosa, Maria Chang, Karthikeyan Natesan Ramamurthy, Moninder Singh

AdaPRA: Process Reward Agents with Adaptive Rubrics for Data Science

2 horas 51 minutos ago
arXiv:2610.33245v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data science agents can automate end-to-end machine learning workflows, yet they remain far from competitive on human leaderboards. Agents make process errors such as insufficient exploration, unsound validation, coding bugs, and poor use of a fixed budget (re-running the same exploratory data analysis and baseline models in every attempt). We propose AdaPRA to address these issues: a persistent coding agent harness that accumulates knowledge across attempts on the same task, with rubric-guided process supervision that identifies and corrects errors. Our process reward agent audits the agent's trajectory and workspace by executing checks, and adapts its rubrics to each task. We find that rubrics seeded from easier tasks generalize to harder tasks, with rubric adaptation further improving performance. With five attempts per task, AdaPRA improves an 80B Qwen model's leaderboard percentile by 24.5 points on DSPredict-Easy and 14.8 points on DSPredict-Hard while reducing process errors. We also show that supervision with rubrics mined from one base model's runs improves another (DeepSeek-V3.2), and that AdaPRA beats DataPRM, a competitive PRM for data science. We also share our code for reproducibility.
Atharva Naik, Vivek Chari, Pol Llado, Daniel Fried, Carolyn Ros\'e, Benjamin Van Durme, Sam Thomson, Justin Svegliato

NewsBench: Expert-Grounded Evaluation of Epistemic Quality in AI News Reporting

2 horas 51 minutos ago
arXiv:2610.33240v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As frontier AI systems increasingly serve as sources of political and current-events information, evaluating the epistemic quality of their responses is now especially consequential. Existing evaluations often focus narrowly on ideological alignment, rely on measures not validated for this setting, or depend on reference labels derived from public opinion or non-expert annotation, potentially producing misleading or miscalibrated results. To address these limitations, we introduce NewsBench, an expert-grounded benchmark that reframes evaluation around editorial standards developed by senior practitioners in journalism, policy, and intelligence analysis. NewsBench operationalizes quality across three dimensions, source quality, factuality, and neutrality, using a two-phase pipeline in which domain experts first define and calibrate evaluation guidelines, which are then transferred to automated AI judges validated against expert-adjudicated gold labels. The benchmark includes approximately $3,000$ evaluation prompts, with roughly $500$ refreshed monthly to capture emerging current events, roughly $2,500$ human expert-annotated items for calibration and validation, and a suite of AI judges designed to enable scalable evaluation. To validate our methodology, we report both inter-rater reliability among human experts and AI judge--human agreement across all three dimensions. Finally, we apply NewsBench to four frontier models, revealing distinct and non-overlapping failure profiles in sourcing, factuality, and neutrality.
Matt Wilde, Jillian Fisher, Andrew B. Hall, Kathryn Salam, Robbie Goldfarb