Hierarchical Cooperative GFlowNets

1 día 11 horas ago
arXiv:2610.33968v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are trained to sample objects from compositional spaces with probability proportional to a reward function, but ineffective exploration can cause learned samplers to concentrate on a few high-reward regions. An intuitive remedy is to train multiple GFlowNets independently in parallel and combine their samples. However, this does not prevent multiple models from collapsing onto the same high-reward areas, leaving large regions of the state space unexplored. With this in mind, we propose Hierarchical Cooperative GFlowNets (HCG), an approach that dynamically partitions the search space to coordinate discovery without relying on hand-crafted boundaries. HCG imposes an ordering in which the highest-ranked model may explore the entire space, while lower-ranked models are progressively pushed toward regions not covered by higher-ranked ones. We provide a theoretical characterization of how specific learning objectives can shift probability mass away from designated areas, instantiating this mechanism within our architecture. A shared classifier coordinates the hierarchy by partitioning the search space, keeping the GFlowNets independently parameterized and enabling asynchronous training. Furthermore, we derive a normalizer-weighted aggregation rule for the ensemble and prove that it recovers the target reward-proportional distribution under the stated assumptions. Finally, experiments across multimodal distributions, sequence generation, combinatorial optimization, and biological sequence design show that HCG improves mode coverage and target approximation, translating increases in the number of coordinated samplers into broader, complementary exploration.
Pedro Dall'Antonia, Juan Belieni, Ana Carolina Erthal, Saullo H. G. de Oliveira, Eliezer de Souza da Silva, Diego Mesquita

QECGBERT: A Scalable ECG Foundation Model Based on Self-Supervised Language Learning via VQ-VAE Waveform Tokenization

1 día 11 horas ago
arXiv:2610.33964v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI foundation models play a pivotal role in advancing heart disease diagnosis from electrocardiogram (ECG) data, particularly for rare diseases where the lack of sufficient labeled data hinders supervised learning. However, most self-supervised learning methods treat ECGs as generic sequence or image data without exploiting underlying physiological structure. To address this limitation, we propose QECGBERT, a self-supervised ECG language model that explicitly encodes physiological semantics by tokenizing the P, QRS, T, and isoelectric background waveforms. Vector-quantized variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE) tokenization is applied to each 12-lead ECG, with tokens enriched by continuous waveform features to preserve morphology lost during quantization without increasing sequence length. This design enables compact BERT masked language modeling with short sequences, improving scalability and reducing computational cost relative to long-sequence approaches. QECGBERT applies BERT pre-training to the MIMIC-IV dataset containing over 800,000 unlabeled ECG recordings, and fine-tuning on labeled PTB-XL, CPSC2018, and Chapman--Shaoxing--Ningbo datasets for evaluation. The results demonstrate that QECGBERT achieves comparable or superior performance to published benchmarks, offering a scalable, physiologically aware approach to ECG foundation modeling for cardiac diagnosis.
Aruna Mohan, Burcu Ozek, Or Zilbershot, Fatemeh Afghah

Beyond Belief: Evaluating and Mitigating LLM Susceptibility to Misinformation

1 día 11 horas ago
arXiv:2610.33962v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tool-using large language models (LLMs) must decide whether external information warrants action. We investigate whether their expressed credibility judgments reliably indicate behavioral resistance to misinformation. We evaluate five LLMs on 196 constructed false notices paired with legitimate counterparts and 204 archived attacks adapted to simulated tool use. When asked to act on the constructed notices, models issue harmful tool calls in 27%--99% of cases they have rated untrustworthy. Removing the preliminary rating step increases harmful execution by 15 percentage points on average, showing that credibility elicitation itself changes the behavior being evaluated. Interventions that improve credibility discrimination do not consistently yield safer actions. A simple forewarning significantly reduces harmful execution in four of five models, but neither tested generated-example prebunk outperforms it in the main evaluation. These reductions can also compromise legitimate task completion. Supervised fine-tuning on generated false notices reduces harmful execution on held-out archived attacks under the rating-first protocol, with model-dependent utility costs and weaker protection without rating elicitation. Our findings motivate evaluating misinformation defenses through both harmful actions and legitimate task completion, while accounting for the behavioral effects of the evaluation protocol.
Emran Kanaan, Jiho Lee, Ibrahim Odat, Soroush Vosoughi, Weicheng Ma

Continual Learning Exam: Benchmarking Long-Horizon RSI and Experiential Learning in LLM Agents

1 día 11 horas ago
arXiv:2610.33956v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Continual learning is the ability of LLM agents to improve over time by acquiring, refining, and applying knowledge from experience while retaining useful prior knowledge. It is essential for agents learning over long time horizons, yet current evaluations largely assess individual task performance rather than improvement through accumulated experience. We introduce Continual Learning Exam (CLE), a large-scale benchmark developed by 50+ domain experts to measure experience-driven improvement in realistic professional workflows. CLE comprises 120 human-authored tasks, each organised as a five-level ladder, yielding 600 levels spanning 89 professional roles across 12 occupational domains. Agents must pass each level to unlock the next, with later levels building on experience accumulated during earlier assignments. An evaluation agent assesses each submission against human-authored rubrics. We compare a single-submission setting with one that provides diagnostic feedback after failure and allows one revision. Across 17 harness-model configurations using frontier LLMs, feedback and revision yield a median completion gain of 5.3 percentage points. Yet the best-performing system clears only 47.7% of levels and completes all five levels in just 23.3% of tasks, highlighting the difficulty of sustained learning from experience for existing frontier LLMs. As such, the dataset can also be used to post-train LLMs to strengthen their continual learning capabilities.
Haoyu Zhao, Sitian Tu, Yuxuan Huang, Huichi Zhou, Zhangyue Yin, Jiahao Huang, Jingyuan Xu, Tianmiao Shi, Jin Shi, Nianxi Zhang, Yangmiao Zhang, Zhuolang Chan, Huiyan Hu, Chenchao Sheng, Yaqing Luo, Yue Chen, Huaxiu Yao, Meng Fang, Jun Wang

What Makes a Question Curious? Measuring Model Curiosity in Human-LLM Interactions

1 día 11 horas ago
arXiv:2610.33950v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models increasingly act as partners in everyday communication. In these interactions, useful assistance may require not only answering, but also asking the right questions that surface knowledge gaps, assumptions, and alternatives. In this study, we refer to such epistemic question-asking as model curiosity, and introduce a theory-grounded taxonomy that distinguishes curiosity-oriented questions from generic model questioning. Across four conversation datasets, we find that curiosity-oriented questions remain rare (17-28% of all questions), but are associated with more exploratory and epistemically rich subsequent user responses, with varying patterns across datasets. We further conduct a human study to evaluate the usefulness of model curiosity, finding that curiosity can encourage exploration, especially in advice, creative, and research contexts. These findings have implications for building LLMs that ask more selectively to support deeper exploration and human-AI collaboration.
Angana Borah, Rachana Ramchandar, Inderjeet Nair, Rada Mihalcea

Multitask Interactions in Recurrent Dynamics across 100 Cognitive Tasks

1 día 11 horas ago
arXiv:2610.33926v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The brain continually learns tasks with very different computational demands. Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have been used as dynamical surrogates for studying task solutions, with recent work extending this approach to joint training on multitask batteries. However, it remains unclear how tasks interact as these batteries grow in scale and heterogeneity: under what conditions do they transfer or interfere with one another, and how do these effects relate to task complexity and model structure? We study this question by simultaneously training hierarchical Almost-Linear RNNs (AL-RNNs) on 100 tasks spanning a wide range of cognitive demands. AL-RNNs allow us to vary the amount of nonlinearity in the recurrence, while hierarchical task features provide a low-dimensional interface for task-specific adaptation within shared dynamics. On this task battery, performance improves with both nonlinear capacity and task-feature dimensionality, with the joint hierarchical model outperforming both individually trained models and a single unstructured joint model. Many tasks are individually solvable with linear dynamics, yet cannot be solved together by a shared linear model. Through hierarchical task features, task-specific linear region usage, and task geometry, the trained model provides several related but distinct measures of task similarity that capture how computations are separated and combined within the shared backbone. Across a series of experiments, we relate these representations to individual task complexity, joint solvability, pairwise transfer learning, and leave-one-out adaptation. Together, our experiments characterize task interactions in multitask recurrent learning while demonstrating both the potential and the challenges of reusable dynamical backbones for cognitive computation.
S\'ilvia Garc\'ia-Hern\'andez, Leema Hamid, Manuel Brenner

Rank-1 Weight-Corrected Trainable Weight Averaging for Out-of-Distribution Detection

1 día 11 horas ago
arXiv:2610.33909v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection identifies inputs outside the training distribution. Rank-based analyses such as RankFeat and RankWeight suggest that OOD overconfidence is closely related to dominant low-rank components in feature and weight spaces. Since weight averaging operates directly in parameter space and improves model generalization, we consider it for OOD detection from a dominant-component perspective. Trainable Weight Averaging (TWA) assigns a single coefficient to each checkpoint, limiting independent control of dominant weight components. We extend TWA with leading rank-one weight components extracted by Singular Value Decomposition as correction directions, whose contributions are learned through the in-distribution classification objective. On ResNet50, our method improves over fine-tuning and standard TWA across the evaluated datasets with MSP and RankWeight, both with and without Outlier Exposure. Mahalanobis-based evaluation yields mixed results, indicating that the benefit depends on the OOD scoring protocol. Target-layer analyses with MSP and Energy favor correction near the classifier.
Akito Shinohara, Hiroaki Aizawa

Counterfactual Test-Time Augmentation for Shortcut Removal in Language Models

1 día 11 horas ago
arXiv:2610.33904v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can exploit shortcuts, i.e., correlations present in training data that may not hold at test time. This can lead to poor predictions when correlations shift. Most existing solutions for removing shortcuts operate at training time, requiring labeled training data, model weight access, and significant computational resources. Here, we study the problem of test-time shortcut removal. We propose a family of counterfactual test-time augmentation (CTTA) methods: given an example, each method uses an auxiliary model to generate counterfactual edits in which the shortcut value is changed, and then takes a weighted average of the LLM's predictions across these edits. We prove that the optimal shortcut-invariant predictor is a member of this CTTA family, and we characterize its weights. The weights depend on the training distribution, and therefore are, in general, not identifiable from the trained model and unlabeled test data. However, we present assumptions under which the weights can be obtained using the token probabilities of the trained LLM, and propose tests to detect violations of these assumptions. We use these tests to develop Select-CTTA, an aggregate method that selects among CTTA methods. Empirically, we find that Select-CTTA outperforms test-time baselines and approaches the performance of models fine-tuned on shortcut-balanced data.
Katie Matton, Rosalind W. Picard, John Guttag, Maggie Makar

Intervention-Certified Amplification: A Validity Gate for $\sigma$-Weighted Post-Training

1 día 11 horas ago
arXiv:2610.33882v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hybrid post-training often mixes supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL), using training-side signals to set each sample's balance. Such signals characterize the anchor data and policy, but not whether the emphasized behavior helps in the target task and evaluation setting. This mismatch can reactivate and amplify pretrained behavior even after its literal form is removed from supervision. We demonstrate this with DIAA (Dual-Implicit Adversarial Amplification), a per-sample $\sigma$-weighted SFT/RL hybrid. With all literal Python fences removed from its anchor, DIAA emits unexecuted Tool-Integrated Reasoning (TIR) on $29%$ of MATH-500 prompts, three times vanilla GRPO. Paired interventions show $10.6$ percentage points of accuracy recovery when TIR is suppressed and comparable contributions from SFT imitation and $\sigma$-amplification; a student trained on a $0%$-TIR teacher anchor emits it at $45.8%$. Intervention-Certified Amplification (ICA) gates $\sigma$ with paired-rollout target evidence. Frozen and online ICA reduce TIR to $13.8%$ and $11.2%$, halve residual drag, improve accuracy from $47.5%$ to $48.7%$ and $49.3%$, and transfer to held-out GSM8K without retuning.
Leiyue Chen, Meng Wei, Xuefeng Hu, Wei Liu

FlashScript: Compiling Recurring Agent Workflows into Reusable Neuro-Symbolic Programs

1 día 11 horas ago
arXiv:2610.33876v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many agent tasks recur with new data or small changes, yet agents regenerate their reasoning and actions on each run, producing different results. Distilling a prior run into a skill helps the agent avoid earlier mistakes, but it still re-runs the full process each time, so runs can vary and incur that cost. We compile a successful agent run into a reusable neuro-symbolic program (NSP) with a set of guidelines we call FlashScript. Actions and data transformations become code, instance-specific values become parameters, and decisions that need model judgment become LLM calls. We identify three layers where these calls belong and three techniques that replace most of them with code. The compilation does not remove nondeterminism; it localizes it, so the deterministic program and its neural calls can be reviewed and tested separately. Across 120 WorkBench analytics tasks with Claude Haiku 4.5, the NSPs were correct and made identical tool calls on every run, using about 70 times fewer input tokens and a third of the runtime of a skill-guided agent whose runs were inconsistent. In a composite version of the tasks, the skill-guided agent's accuracy fell to 23%, and its output inconsistency increased, while the NSPs remained correct and identical across all runs. The NSPs successfully generalized to all 108 unseen instances of the same templates. Our findings suggest that NSPs from agent trajectories can be considered cumulative software assets for end-users to test, maintain, and reuse in their recurring workflows.
Sadra Sabouri, Hosein Hasanbeig, Adam Sage, Shreya Sinha, Cale Darling, Ashish Tiwari, Katie Garms, Souti Chattopadhyay, Sumit Gulwani