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Human demonstrations provide dense policy-level information but sometimes lack local precision. Human feedback presents accurate local critiques, but offers sparse evaluations rather than direct policy guidance. We propose Progress-Heuristicized Inverse Reinforcement Learning (PHIRL), a data-efficient framework that learns robust reward functions by jointly leveraging demonstrations and feedback. Specifically, we use progress, a feedback modality that describes cumulative task completion. PHIRL iteratively infers a reward function from demonstrations via inverse reinforcement learning, calculates the learned rewards over the progress-annotated demonstrations, and aligns the rewards with progress annotations over four dimensions. We evaluate PHIRL on real and simulated robot tasks, with additional exploration using a fine-tuned vision-language model to provide progress feedback. Results demonstrate that PHIRL significantly outperforms the baselines, achieving substantially higher environmental return rewards and task success with only twenty percent of demonstrations annotated. Analysis of reward-hacking scenarios demonstrates that PHIRL learned reward functions are reliable against exploitation.

Cross-client duplicate data in large language model training corpora degrades the efficiency of federated learning (FL) while exacerbating model memorization and privacy risks. Privacy-preserving cross-client deduplication effectively mitigates this issue by eliminating duplicate training data. However, existing schemes all follow a "Deduplication-before-Training" paradigm. This serially coupled paradigm incurs high fault-tolerance costs and lacks support for dynamic client joining. To this end, we propose an unexplored paradigm called "Deduplication-while-Training (DwT)", which enables concurrent deduplication and training. DwT transforms cross-client deduplication from a one-time, globally synchronous preprocessing operation into a continuous online service with state management, concurrent claiming, and failure recovery. By enabling state synchronization and task takeover, it minimizes the impact of client disconnections on the overall training progress while supporting the dynamic joining of clients. We design DwT-FL, a privacy-preserving deduplication system, to support DwT. By designing a concurrent state-claim mechanism and a hot-cold dual-queue scheduling strategy, DwT-FL enables the parallel execution of secure deduplication and model training, while effectively handling client disconnections and dynamic joins. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that, compared to the state-of-the-art scheme, DwT-FL significantly reduces the time overhead of failure recovery and dynamic joining by up to 93.04% and 94.18%, respectively. This provides an efficient and elastic concurrent deduplication scheme for dynamic and unstable FL environments.

Text-to-audio (TTA) generation has advanced rapidly in generation quality and instruction following. However, representative systems often require around a billion parameters, limiting deployment on resource-constrained devices. This paper introduces TinyAudio, a compact flow-matching-based TTA model for low-resource deployment. At its core, TinyAudio uses TA-DiT, a 35M single-stream flow-matching Transformer. TinyAudio also includes TA-CLAP, a 32M audio-aligned text encoder, and TA-VAE, whose 20M decoder reconstructs 44.1 kHz audio from compressed latents. TinyAudio has only 87M parameters in total, over 90% fewer than representative billion-parameter pipelines, and uses 0.48 GB peak GPU memory. TinyAudio achieves competitive generation quality on AudioCaps and TTA-Bench. We further introduce TinyAudio-MF, a MeanFlow-accelerated model that enables real-time generation with a four-core CPU quota. Our results demonstrate a practical quality-footprint trade-off for low-resource TTA deployment.

Existing roadside traffic datasets support perception, forecasting, and visual question answering, but they do not evaluate counterfactual video generation, in which a selected actor is modified and the generated future should remain consistent with road topology and unrelated traffic. We introduce TrafficImag, the first benchmark for counterfactual roadside traffic video generation. TrafficImag combines a large-scale roadside dataset (9,022 annotated images, 7,043 deduplicated video clips, and 31,145 actor-centered history-future samples) with an executable protocol that supports behavior reasoning, intervention-aware image editing, and conditional video generation. Each intervention is represented as an actor-level program describing the target actor, intended behavior, legal route, interaction order, and temporal constraints, enabling a unified evaluation interface across heterogeneous foundation models. TrafficImag evaluates four complementary validity dimensions: initial-state correctness, route and behavior validity, interaction consistency, and non-target preservation, and considers an end-to-end counterfactual successful only when all four are satisfied. Across state-of-the-art foundation models, the strongest reasoner reaches 80.4% macro F1, the complete condition interface raises end-to-end success from 23.3% to 55.0% for the best generator. Oracle studies further show that conditional video execution is the primary remaining bottleneck. TrafficImag provides a reproducible benchmark for evaluating and diagnosing counterfactual traffic video generation beyond perceptual video quality.

Single-image novel view synthesis (NVS) enables photorealistic rendering of un- observed viewpoints from a single input. Practical NVS systems require two key capabilities: robust reconstruction of occluded regions and high inference effi- ciency. While hybrid decoupled frameworks combining feedforward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) and diffusion models show promise for large-view-deviation NVS, they suffer from capacity competition: a fixed number of Gaussians forces resource shifts from visible to newly disoccluded areas, degrading original scene fidelity when the target view deviates significantly from the input. To address this, we propose Spackle, a lightweight residual learning framework that mit- igates capacity competition without sacrificing efficiency. Spackle operates in three stages: predicting base 3DGS attributes from given views, automatically identifying poorly reconstructed regions, and learning a residual 3DGS optimized exclusively for these areas. At inference, we combine the baseline and aug- mented Gaussians for NVS. We conduct comprehensive experiments and show that Spackle achieves state-of-the-art performance on large-view-deviation cases.

Reconstructing environments where parts of the scene change between captured image sets poses a challenge for 3D scene reconstruction. We present ChronoFuseGS, a multi-temporal Gaussian Splatting approach that addresses this issue by taking multiple separately trained Gaussian Splatting models, each representing a distinct timestep and partially overlapping in geographic coverage, and merging them into a single combined model. By allowing Gaussians from one timestep to contribute to the reconstruction at other timesteps, our approach leverages data across all captured timesteps to refine persistent parts of the scene. The model supports incremental extension, allowing new timesteps to be added while preserving the existing merged reconstruction. It encodes, for each Gaussian primitive, at which timesteps it contributes to the reconstruction. To support visual exploration of the reconstructed scene, we present a change-aware visualization approach that highlights the parts of the scene that have changed across a user-defined time selection, while preserving the color of persistent parts. Since the persistence encoding operates at the Gaussian primitive level, changes are visualized at sub-object granularity rather than being limited to object-level changes. We evaluate our approach on a real-world outdoor dataset of a flood management area, captured over 7 months across eight recording days and covering seasonal vegetation changes, snow cover, and flooding events, which we make publicly available. Our results demonstrate that the combined model consistently outperforms individually trained single-timestep models in novel-view synthesis quality, recovers structural details absent in the individual reconstructions, and reliably highlights changes in fine details and sub-parts of objects and natural structures.

Closed-loop driving simulation requires rendered observations to remain reliable as the ego vehicle and surrounding actors move beyond their recorded trajectories, exposing views absent from the source log. Existing data-driven simulators reconstruct dynamic actors from sparse observations, which can result in rendering artifacts under these viewpoint changes. We introduce RECAST (REconstructing Controllable Actors for Simulation and Testing), a 3D Gaussian Splatting framework that generates a view-complete actor from a single segmented vehicle observation in a driving log and registers the generated actor in the reconstructed scene. RECAST supports planner-in-the-loop rendering under controlled ego-actor interactions. To adapt an image-to-3D prior to real vehicles, we further introduce RECAR, a dataset of approximately 20K real vehicles with 600K background-free RGBA images spanning diverse vehicle colors and types. We use two-stage adaptation to improve vehicle generation from real driving-log observations. At the actor level, RECAST reduces $\mathrm{FD}_{\mathrm{incep}}$ from 9.788 to 7.992 relative to unadapted TRELLIS. At the scene level, under actor motion beyond logged trajectories, RECAST reduces $\mathrm{FD}_{\mathrm{incep}}$ from 129.35 to 112.10 and increases $\mathrm{CLIP}_{\mathrm{margin}}$ ($\times1000$) from 0.14 to 3.47 relative to Street Gaussians. We demonstrate planner-in-the-loop simulation with the image-conditioned planner GTRS-Dense. Compared with native Street Gaussians actors, RECAST increases the no-collision (NC) rate from 22.2% (12/54) to 63.0% (34/54) and the mean minimum predicted time-to-collision (TTC) from 0.798 s to 2.150 s. These experiments show that RECAST supports closed-loop planner evaluation under controlled ego-actor interactions beyond log replay. Visit our project page at https://zijunkr.github.io/RECAST/

Human judgement is the reference measure for evaluating generative models, yet the software used to collect it lags behing the methodology. Researchers adapt listening-test frameworks designed for perceptual protocols such as MUSHRA, rely on closed commercial survey platforms, or implement single-use web applications. Live arenas such as Chatbot Arena and Music Arena rank publicly deployed systems at scale, but do not support controlled comparisons of a laboratory's own models with its own participants. We present PANEL, an open-source, self-hosted platform for such studies. A study is authored in the browser and distributed as a single link, with audio, video, image, and text stimuli, seven question types, and screening and skip logic. The platform reports per-question summaries, across-condition significance tests, pairwise win rates and Bradley--Terry scores, and supports power analysis from pilot data. Consent versioning, self-service withdrawal, retention enforcement, and audit logging support GDPR-compliant operation. Each study exports as a machine-readable specification. PANEL is available at https://github.com/matteospanio/panel.

World Action Models (WAMs) jointly model visual dynamics and action generation for generalist robot manipulation. A central challenge is to integrate priors from large-scale pretrained models---including visual dynamics, scene semantics, geometry, and motion---into a unified framework for robot action generation. We introduce InternW0-$Δ$, a unified WAM pretrained on a heterogeneous corpus that outperforms prior methods across simulation benchmarks and real-robot platforms. InternW0-$Δ$ combines pretrained visual dynamics, scene-level semantics, 4D geometric and motion priors, and action generation within a Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) framework. A pretrained video expert and an action expert interact under semantic guidance from a frozen VLM, while a pretrained 4D foundation model injects geometric and motion priors through training-only distillation. We further introduce Causal Imprint, which learns future-relevant scene changes from training-only future supervision and provides predictive representations directly to the action expert without future-video rollout at inference. For large-scale joint training, we construct a heterogeneous corpus of robot demonstrations, UMI data, egocentric human demonstrations, and Ego2Robot data, curated and aligned under a common state-action representation. The resulting corpus contains over 20K hours of processed training data, to our knowledge the largest open-source corpus of its kind. We pretrain InternW0-$Δ$ on this corpus and demonstrate strong performance across simulation benchmarks and real-robot platforms. We will open source the training code, model weights, infrastructure, data-processing pipeline, and processed data where licenses permit. Project page: https://internrobotics.github.io/InternW0-Delta/

Video-to-music models have advanced considerably in the last few years, particularly in film and music video applications. In this paper, we investigate this problem in the video game domain, which introduces new challenges for these models: video frames are rendered graphics, music is mostly synthetic audio, and soundtracks loop across entire levels rather than following on-screen events. We introduce a new dataset of 217.6 hours of Super Nintendo (SNES) gameplay video paired with 485 hours of clean soundtracks, free of sound effects and voice-overs, matched to gameplay audio via audio fingerprinting. With this dataset, we train a simple encoder-decoder transformer that passes video features directly to a MusicGen decoder, comparing different encoding strategies: textual descriptions (T5), independent frames (ViT), or spatiotemporal patches (ViViT). Each encoder is tested both frozen and fine-tuned, while the decoder is always fine-tuned. Frozen encoders match or outperform their fine-tuned counterparts on every metric, and the frozen ViViT achieves the best overall results. We compare this model with state-of-the-art baselines using both objective metrics and a listening study (N = 96). Despite having up to 18% fewer parameters, our model outperforms all baselines on objective metrics, surpasses GVMGen in the listening study, and performs comparably to OSSL.

Expressive speech synthesis has outpaced expressive speech perception: systems now render fine-grained vocal performances that no public benchmark can score. Most benchmarks for this inverse problem stop at six to nine basic emotion categories, largely on acted speech. This paper introduces VoiceNet, a human-annotated representation-level benchmark for voice performance understanding on permissively-licensed in-the-wild speech. VoiceNet has two subsets: VoiceNet-Emo applies a 40-emotion taxonomy with three expert ratings per item, and VoiceNet-Ext, a preliminary subset, scores 57 talking-style attributes including speaking rate, vocal tension, breathiness, and register. The paper also releases Emolia, an emotion-annotated version of the Emilia corpus, with a curated rebalanced subset enriched by dense MOSS-Audio Thinking annotations. Two voice-text contrastive baselines train on this data: a 110M-parameter VoiceCLAP-Small for fast large-scale data filtering and a 7B VoiceCLAP-Large for state-of-the-art performance. Both outperform existing CLAP baselines, which sit near chance on VoiceNet-Emo. On VoiceNet-Emo, VoiceCLAP-Large aligns more closely with the aggregate expert consensus than individual experts agree with one another: a comparison against the majority label rather than evidence of surpassing human emotion perception. All systems evaluated here are voice-text embedding models: VoiceNet scores representation-level attribute recognition and retrieval, not end-to-end spoken-dialogue behaviour. Clustering and filtering uncurated speech corpora into subsets that span diverse talking styles and emotions remains an open challenge; VoiceCLAP embeddings offer a promising tool for this task. VoiceNet, Emolia, and VoiceCLAP are publicly available for research use.

Recent advances in speech synthesis and voice cloning have increased the need for reliable synthetic-speech detection, yet high-accuracy detectors increasingly rely on large pretrained models that are costly to invoke on every recording. Rather than replacing such detectors, we investigate a compact front-end screen that processes all inputs cheaply and forwards only suspicious recordings for more expensive analysis. To enable lightweight screening without a large learned encoder, we exploit spectral traces introduced by speech-generation operations. We analyze how learned upsampling and inverse short-time Fourier transform synthesis can produce predictable spectral artifacts and measure their presence directly in generated waveforms. Because the strength of these artifacts varies across generators, we combine decoder-guided spectral measurements with complementary descriptors of short-time spectral shape and temporal variation in a compact gradient-boosted tree. Across seven speech generators and two human-speech sources, the proposed screen achieves an equal error rate of 0.021% with an estimated model storage of 151 KiB. When used as the first stage of a simulated cascade with a 1.15-billion-parameter detector, it reduces estimated detection energy by 84.4% while operating at a 0.050% synthetic-speech miss rate, demonstrating the potential of decoder-guided acoustic evidence for low-cost front-end screening.

Scientific measurements such as single-cell RNA (scRNA) sequencing often take the form of nonnegative integer counts, whereas continuous-state diffusion models approximate this discrete structure using continuous coordinates. Building on stochastic chemical reaction networks (CRNs), a class of count-native Markov jump processes, we introduce CRNDiff, a structured framework that combines count-space diffusion with inference-time conditioning on rare subpopulations. An independent birth--death instantiation yields a closed-form transition kernel for forward noising. This kernel enables reverse sampling via forward-filtering backward-sampling (FFBS) and supports data-driven selection of the terminal noising time, eliminating the need for a validation sweep. This tractability also lets us introduce tilted Feynman--Kac (FK) steering, a method for sampling target subpopulations from a frozen generator without retraining. By tilting posterior marginals before FK particle correction, steering mitigates importance-weight concentration when the target population is rare. Using scRNA-seq data from the human heart cell atlas, we test the ability of CRNDiff to generate cell-type-specific distributions. Across the three evaluated target populations, CRNDiff achieves the highest conditional fidelity among the evaluated generative models, with larger mean purity margins for rarer target populations. Generated cells preserve marker-level differential-expression structure. Replacing real training cells for the target classes with generated cells yields downstream classification performance approaching that of the real-data reference.

Large video diffusion models offer expressive priors for embodied prediction and learning, yet their many-step sampling remains costly for interactive downstream use. Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) enables few-step video generation, but can suppress robot--object motion while preserving visual quality. Examining DMD's teacher and fake-score signals, we find that weak re-noising keeps the teacher posterior concentrated near motion-deficient rollouts, limiting motion-restoring guidance. Meanwhile, stronger-motion rollouts tend to incur larger fake-score fitting errors, which can hinder the generator's learning of interaction dynamics. We propose DyMD, a DMD framework that adapts both teacher supervision and critic fitting to the evolving student. Temporal affinity--conditioned re-noise sampling adapts the timestep distribution to each rollout's current interaction fidelity by mixing the base schedule with a teacher prior motivated by local posterior variation, thereby balancing motion recovery and appearance refinement. To better track stronger-motion rollouts, dynamics-guided fake-score tracking uses a noise-conditioned predictor to estimate noise-relative fitting difficulty from latent temporal dynamics, then upweights predicted-hard rollouts in the critic loss. Using DyMD, we distill a 14B teacher into a four-step 1.3B student with no auxiliary modules at inference. On embodied-video benchmarks, the student improves R-Bench task adherence by $9.6$ percentage points and PAI-Bench-G Domain score by $5.1$ points over Base DMD while maintaining comparable visual quality. As a backbone for downstream action planning, our student achieves 34% mean success across two WorldArena tasks, compared with 16% for Base DMD.

Achieving precise control over multiple properties without sacrificing chemical validity remains a central challenge in molecular inverse design. Existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods fine-tune graph diffusion models by treating **reverse** sampling as a sequential policy, using a single terminal reward to optimize hundreds of coupled decisions. They often suffer from instability, validity collapse, and limited property gains. We introduce GraphFDM (Graph Forward Distribution Matching), a new online RL paradigm for graph diffusion that performs optimization through the **forward** process. GraphFDM uses valid generations to define a reward-tilted target distribution jointly optimized over graph size and molecular structure for each property condition, incorporating reinforcement signals into supervised learning without storing reverse trajectories. We derive the unique optimal target, prove a condition-wise improvement guarantee, and show that the fixed graph-size prior of standard graph diffusion leaves an irreducible matching gap. In multi-conditional polymer and small-molecule generation, GraphFDM achieves the lowest MAE on every target property, with reductions of up to 53.0% relative to the strongest baselines and chemical validity above 0.99. It further generalizes to out-of-distribution property combinations.

Agents based on large language models (LLMs) can access heterogeneous devices through tools and APIs, but reliable execution must account for unmet effects, uncertain outcomes, and changing prerequisites. A command may be acknowledged without producing its intended effect, while missing feedback may obscure an action that has already succeeded. We present Agent Device Foundation--Execution Assurance (ADF-EA), an architecture that connects agent planning and device execution through shared capability contracts. Device Capability Contracts (DCCs) unify invocation conditions, intended effects, evidence requirements, and recovery rules across heterogeneous interfaces. Agents use these contracts to plan, while the runtime applies the same semantics to authorize actions, verify effects, and govern continuation and completion. Persistent execution state retains verified progress, unresolved outcomes, and remaining budgets across plan revisions, enabling observation-based recovery, authorized retries, and necessary state repair. We formalize the execution lifecycle and establish conditional soundness properties for completion and recovery authorization. Evaluations span multiple LLMs, five agent frameworks, and simulated process-control, household, and robotic manipulation domains. Compared with direct invocation and existing execution-checking approaches, ADF-EA reduces false completion and unnecessary repetition, supports necessary state repair, prevents calls to unavailable capabilities, and preserves permitted task completion and recovery. These results demonstrate DCCs as a reusable semantic foundation for agent autonomy across heterogeneous devices, unifying capability-based planning, evidence-grounded execution, and authorized recovery within one architecture.

Twice in 2026, groups of autonomous AI agents deployed by OpenAI for unrelated tasks operated, by design, under restrictions that left them no sanctioned means of coordinating with one another, and in each case they converged on whatever channel remained and used it to organize. The surfaces they used were widely called message boards. That is the wrong word. That is the wrong word. It names the surface the agents wrote on and misses the social network they built on it, with self-chosen identity, emergent norms, an emergent hierarchy, and collective action at cost to the individual. Decades of research in crisis informatics and disaster sociology find that when human populations lose their usual means of communication, they do not fall silent but converge on whatever channel survives and improvise coordination, norms, and identity on it, a pattern also evident in the agents' documented behavior. This paper is a comparative case study of the two incidents, based on published investigations and reconstructed agent records, read through those fields, and it brings into focus one distinction the message-board framing obscures. Whether such a collective coordinates well, whether the beliefs guiding it are accurate, and whether its actions stay within their authorized bounds are three separate matters that can come apart. Some agents in the cache incident adopted cryptographic signing to check whom they dealt with, even as the collective organized around a mistaken expectation that its work would be judged by an inspection of its transcripts, a reminder that mechanisms for trustworthy interaction guarantee neither accurate collective belief nor authorized collective action.

Existing multi-agent benchmarks primarily test in competitive settings, short-horizon interactions under 20 steps, or simply aggregate individual performance, failing to isolate and highlight genuine collaboration capabilities of LLM-based agents. We introduce AgentWorld, a benchmark of 100 human-annotated tasks (with 100 augmented variants) for evaluating long-horizon, multi-agent collaboration. Tasks span 50+ interaction rounds across a rich MMORPG sandbox and require 3-20 agents with asymmetric roles and abilities to coordinate through communication, joint planning, and resource sharing under a blackbox setting where each agent acts independently without access to others' internal states. To quantify collaboration effectiveness in addition to conventional binary task success, we propose Causal Collaboration Effectiveness (CCE), a graph-based metric that traces causal dependencies between agent actions and measures what fraction of a team's effort actually contributed to the outcome. Experiments with Gemini 3 Flash, Claude Haiku 4.5, GPT-5 Mini, and DeepSeek R1-70B show that even the best model achieves only 52.0% task success, with systematic failure modes including communication breakdowns, role confusion, and inability to maintain shared plans across rounds. AgentWorld is fully open-source.

Although effective, coding agents often incur substantial monetary costs. Their recurring cost-inefficient behaviors remain underexplored. We conduct the first study of behavioral cost inefficiencies in coding agents, analyzing 1,200 trajectories from Claude Code and Mini-SWE-Agent across four configurations on SWE-bench Verified. We identify three cost-inefficient behaviors: subsumed retrieval, similar script generation, and test re-execution. We then evaluate three mitigation strategies: structure-aware retrieval, agent-synthesized skills, and developer-designed skills, over 10k trajectories on held-out SWE-bench Verified and Pro tasks. Our main findings are: (1) The three behaviors affect 79.00%--98.00% of coding tasks and account for up to 22.75% of task cost. (2) Structure-aware retrieval can introduce retrieval overhead and alter agent delegation, causing inconsistent improvements in retrieval efficiency and cost increases of up to 28.14%. (3) Agent-synthesized skills tend to produce low-level, trace-specific guidance, limiting their effectiveness and generality. (4) In contrast, developer-designed skills provide high-level, trace-agnostic guidance, reducing cost by up to 41.73%, roughly twice the maximum gain from agent-synthesized skills.

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is an evidence-based first-line treatment for depression, yet its scale is constrained by the time clinicians spend on pre-session preparation, post-session documentation, and longitudinal cognitive-pathology tracking. We present a clinician-facing AI decision-support system that combines a multi-agent CBT framework (MACBT) with a CBT-specific longitudinal memory module (CD Memory). MACBT encodes the five-stage CBT workflow (assessment, Socratic questioning, cognitive restructuring, behavioral experiments, and treatment monitoring) into five collaborative agents. CD Memory tracks cognitive-distortion type, frequency, severity, and restructuring efficacy across sessions to generate pre-session pathology reports and intervention-priority recommendations. We construct a Chinese CBT dialogue corpus via dual-role large language model simulation and train a Qwen3-14B backbone with supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization. Evaluation with GPT-4 judges shows MACBT outperforms MeChat, SoulChat, PsyChat, and CPsyCounX in professionalism (2.62) and clinical authenticity (2.25). The full memory-augmented system further improves session quality by 12.6% and achieves a longitudinal mean of 2.29 on cross-session continuity, intervention progression, and personalization.

Language agents struggle to act and learn in environments that require long sequences of low-level actions. Code-based abstractions can make these agents more productive by letting them invoke reusable skills instead of repeatedly selecting individual actions. The code handles recurring local decisions, while the language model decides which skills to use and how to combine them. Yet abstractions are leaky, and situations beyond a skill's capabilities may require a return to primitive actions. Motivated by this tradeoff between productivity and flexibility, we systematically study how code-based action abstraction affects the performance, inference cost, and learning of language agents. We study this in NetHack, a challenging, long-horizon game environment, using CodeHack, our library of code-based skills with natural-language descriptions. We use this library to compare agents restricted to primitives with those using semantic skills alone or in combination with primitives. We evaluate these agents in three settings: zero-shot prompting, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning. Across a broad zero-shot evaluation on NetHack, we find that compared with primitives, skills nearly triple game progression, while reducing inference cost per episode by 86%. Combining skills with primitives retains much of this benefit while preserving a path back down to low-level actions. Finally, in RL, we find that skill-based agents learn significantly faster than agents acting on primitives, achieving a 7.2x larger average gain in dungeon level over the same training budget. These results show that a supplied skill library can improve performance, efficiency, and learning, while retaining primitives provides flexibility when the library is insufficient. We release CodeHack together with training and evaluation code.

Repository-level issue localization aims to identify and rank the files and functions relevant to resolving a reported issue. LLM agents approach this task iteratively: they identify a set of potentially relevant locations, inspect the corresponding code, and revise their judgments about these candidates as new evidence is acquired. Existing environments, however, provide limited support for this loop: agents must search for unresolved relation targets, reconstruct entity semantics from raw source code, and revise candidates without evidential basis. To address these limitations, we present SemNav, a framework that leverages deterministic retrieval to seed a broad candidate set and an LLM agent to continually refine that set, thereby combining initial coverage with evidence-guided revision. SemNav supports this process through three key components. A Semantic Navigation Graph resolves program relations on demand through a language server, enabling direct navigation to related entities across files. Issue-conditioned Semantic Cards provide compact, source-grounded interpretations of each entity's role and relevance to the issue. A persistent Candidate Workspace records each candidate together with its evidential basis, enabling grounded verification, revision, and ranking. Across SWE-bench Lite and PLocBench, SemNav outperforms existing baselines, improving File Hit@10 from 68.33% to 82.67% with Gemma 4B. Component ablations and trajectory analysis support the complementary roles of all three components, while Semantic Cards reduce working-context load by 48.2% relative to full-source reading. SemNav further ranks first on all seven evidence-quality metrics on SWE-Explore and improves downstream issue resolution from 44.00% to 52.33%.

This paper proposes a blockchain-backed agentic security framework designed to safeguard the complete software development lifecycle (SDLC) while also securing the agentic AI components responsible for monitoring it. The framework coordinates a set of specialised security agents, covering source integrity, dependency and SBOM analysis, CI configura tion auditing, artifact verification, and runtime policy evaluation, each supported by a large language model (LLM) that interprets artefacts, reasons over tool outputs, and produces structured security reports. To ensure agent trustworthiness, every agent generates a cryptographically signed attestation that is recorded in a permissioned blockchain via smart contracts, including an agent registry, an immutable attestation log, and an enforceable release-policy module. Communication among agents and with blockchain nodes is secured using a consortium-operated certificate authority, ensuring authenticated and tamper-resistant interactions. A detailed use-case and sequence flow demonstrate how a source code security agent performs analysis, anchors its attestation on-chain, and triggers a verifiable allow/block deployment decision. The proposed framework of fers decentralised integrity transparent provenance, uninterrupted security assurance and a generalisable architecture to incorporate the agentic AI into the modern software supply chain security.

Large language model agents increasingly act on software systems, no longer merely generating text but also changing databases and online services. However, an approved database update may succeed yet leave an unapproved notification because execution can produce persistent effects beyond the requested change. Current safeguards can approve an action or record its aftermath, but without checking the persistent result before continuation, an unapproved outcome can be accepted as success and propagated to later steps. We present EffectMatch, a runtime that collects persistent changes within a controlled execution boundary and compares them with what the application approved for the current state and execution. The comparison governs commit and dependent execution. In comparative evaluation on 206 public business tasks, EffectMatch preserved all clean executions and prevented all tested incorrect commits. Six 20-run ablations exposed the failure caused by each removed mechanism, while 80 task-topology cases preserved truthful handoffs and blocked invalid continuation. Together, these results show that EffectMatch blocks the silent acceptance and downstream propagation of persistent outcomes inconsistent with application approval.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) provides a common interface through which AI applications discover and use external resources and tools. It allows language-model agents to ground their reasoning in current system state and interact with heterogeneous services. In medical environments, however, exposing device state and action affordances requires deterministic constraints on possible effects. We present an IEEE 11073 Service-Oriented Device Connectivity (SDC)-to-MCP gateway that exposes metrics, alarms, context references, and semantic metadata as read-only resources, while representing selected action affordances as policy-validated dry-run tools. The term safety-bounded denotes a narrow no-execution property: agent-facing requests dispatch no SDC device operation. A Python prototype supports simulated fault and lifecycle experiments, a software-reference protocol path spanning independent Java and Python implementations, deterministic baselines, representation ablations, and multi-model agent evaluation. The results show semantically explicit resource exposure, visible rejection of invalid or outdated state, and preservation of the no-execution boundary across resource, proposal, and authorization paths. Explicit semantic metadata improved conformity to required metric identifiers in structured alarm outputs relative to a generic representation, while retained structured-output failures reveal a distinction between plausible narrative answers and task-compliant machine-readable results.

Topic modeling is an effective technique for discovering hidden themes within documents and is widely used in text mining and data analysis across a variety of industry sectors. Recently, large language model (LLM)-based topic models have been emerged that prompt LLMs to generate topics then assign the topics to documents, producing more natural and human-readable topics than conventional topic modeling algorithms. However, the nature of topic assignment process causes certain drawbacks, such as the incapability to produce topic distributions over a document, too broad or narrow topics, and high resource consumption, which increases with the number and length of of documents being assigned topics. These issues are particularly critical for industrial applications, which require high-quality, in-depth analysis and the processing of large volumes of documents. In this context, this paper introduces a framework called SeLATM, which addresses these concerns by employing segment-level topic generation and topic refinement through agentic feedback loops. Experimental results on various datasets demonstrate that SeLATM significantly reduces the LLM resources compared to methods based on topic assignment process, while maintaining superior performance.

LLMs increasingly act as purchasing agents, which makes the LLM, not the user, the one choosing among the options that satisfy a request; its preferences quietly fix what gets bought and what it costs. Hotel booking is a clean instance: a high-volume choice settled on a few comparable attributes, where the pick reveals those preferences. We introduce PriceBench, a diagnostic benchmark that recovers an LLM's price, quality, and brand preferences from its booking choices with a logit choice model, applied to 28 LLMs from 8 providers on 3,600 hotel tasks from 179 real New York City properties. We find that capability is associated with how consistently an LLM chooses, not with what it chooses: more capable LLMs hold stronger, more consistent preferences, while weaker ones either lock onto one position, exploitable by whoever controls listing order, or choose almost indifferently. What those preferences favor varies sharply across providers and even within one family: price sensitivity spans more than an order of magnitude, and the price/quality trade-off moves mean booked nightly price from \$247 to \$393 on identical tasks. What an agent buys must therefore be measured per LLM, not inferred, and we release the tasks, code, and all 28 response sets.

We investigate whether natural-language documentation helps coding agents resolve software issues, and we build the tools to construct and evaluate it. We introduce a roundtrip benchmark that scores code descriptions by whether code regenerated from them passes the original tests, and show that completeness, not length, drives a description's fidelity. Using the benchmark as an optimization signal, we discover a description-writing prompt that reaches full fidelity and generalizes to unseen files. We then test the hypothesis that motivated the work: that better documentation helps an agent resolve real repository issues. Across two model families and ten repositories, and against a positive control confirming that our evaluation can detect a genuine improvement, we find that it does not. When the source is present, neither static compact documentation nor retrieved context beats the issue alone. We report this negative result together with the benchmark and the optimizer, and we characterize the boundary at which documentation helps.

In this work, we explore MammoClaw, a training-free agent framework that leverages frozen MLLMs for mammography analysis. To support agentic investigation, we equip the agent with lightweight mammography-specific tools for targeted image analysis, including ROI, paired-view, and contralateral-breast examination. MammoClaw iteratively gathers evidence through these tools, while skill evolution enables non-parametric adaptation by transforming failed trajectories into reusable guidance for later runs. We evaluate the framework on BI-RADS assessment and breast density estimation tasks. In our experiments, we find that tools alone do not reliably improve performance, whereas evolved skills can improve tool-use behavior and performance in some settings. Beyond these results, MammoClaw enables transparent inspection of evidence acquisition, tool interactions, and failure modes, facilitating the analysis and auditing of agent behavior. We view this work as an exploratory study of training-free, self-evolving agentic approaches for mammography and hope it provides a concrete starting point for future work on mammography-specific tools and self-evolution mechanisms. We release our code at https://krishnakanthnakka.github.io/mammoclaw.

Crystal plasticity (CP) simulations predict the mechanical behavior of polycrystalline metals, yet their routine use is hindered by the manual effort of configuring heterogeneous tools, orchestrating multi-step data pipelines, and calibrating constitutive parameters against experiments. These bottlenecks impede productivity in systematic parameter studies, motivating interest in automated workflows. This study presents CP-Agent, a harness-engineered LLM-based agent that autonomously executes complete CP modeling workflows from natural-language tasks. Operating under the ReAct paradigm, the agent reasons about tool selection and sequencing while delegating numerical search to established optimizers. The harness comprises a minimal system prompt, typed tool definitions, a dispatcher, and a safety-bounded iteration loop, encoding domain knowledge through tool schemas rather than hard-coded logic. CP-Agent is demonstrated on four case studies: calibrating four slip parameters of additively manufactured stainless steel 316L against tensile data; validating the workflow against published copper benchmarks, reproducing stress-strain and texture evolution; recovering the initial crystallographic texture of copper, where the agent correctly identifies a diffuse initial texture; and reproducing the multi-pass rolling texture evolution of a Mg-Zn-Ca alloy, where the agent chains five deformation passes and recovers the experimentally observed weakened, split basal texture. In all cases, the agent inferred the correct execution sequence from the task statement, robustly across repeated runs, and delivered physically interpretable results. This work establishes harness engineering as a systematic approach to automating CP modeling workflows while maintaining physical interpretability and auditability through visible reasoning traces.