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cs.CL

Alignment Forecasting: Predicting Misalignment From Training Data

作者Chen Yueh-Han, Bruce W. Lee, Ilia Sucholutsky, Tomek Korbak

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Training a language model on data with a narrow flaw can sometimes make the model broadly misaligned. Inspecting the data at face value often does not settle whether it will emerge, and today it is caught only after training, by auditing the resulting model. To complement post-hoc audits, we introduce Alignment Forecasting: the task of predicting alignment failures before training. Given a target model, a fine-tuning dataset, and a failure mode such as deception or sycophancy, a forecaster outputs the probability that fine-tuning would meaningfully increase that failure mode. To measure progress on alignment forecasting, we introduce ALIGNMENTFORECASTBENCH, a benchmark of over 5,000 forecasting questions spanning 17 target models, 32 datasets, and 16 failure modes. Frontier models prompted directly perform poorly on ALIGNMENTFORECASTBENCH. We therefore propose a forecasting scaffold in which an LLM reads the dataset and rates how strongly and broadly it pushes the model toward misbehavior, and a simple learned model combines that rating with the failure mode's base rate and the target model's prior tendency. This forecasts well above chance, and beats a model fine-tuned on the task and a simple forecaster allowed to see how weaker models behaved after fine-tuning on the same data. Its signals also flag problematic training examples that a frontier-model classifier misses. Filtering those examples out from real post-training data such as UltraChat results in more aligned models on our multiple-choice evaluation in most cases, though the benefit in open-ended conversations is unclear. More progress is needed before forecasts can reliably guide training data curation in practice, but our results suggest that forecasting many alignment failures before training can be tractable in the SFT setting.

ARXIV 2609.35805 ↗
cs.CL

Environment Steering: Using Data Flow Control to Improve Agent Utility and Safety

作者Charlie Summers, Prajwal Raghunath, Aaditya Pai, Mayur Kulkarni, Zhuo Zhang, Oliver Kennedy, Eugene Wu

展开完整摘要收起摘要

LLM agents can make unsafe tool calls even when instructed to behave safely. Existing defenses constrain agents before execution, modify tool inputs/outputs, or rely on LLM judges; these approaches may depend on model behavior or block unsafe actions without helping the agent recover. We argue that the execution environment should instead enforce safety as the agent runs and steer it toward safe alternatives when violations occur---we call this Environment Steering. We implement this by modeling the agent and harness execution state as database tables, track the record-level data flows, and check these data flows against declarative policies during runtime. When violations are detected, policy- and context-specific feedback steers the agent toward safe trajectories. On AgentDyn, this enables the agent to improve task success rate over no-defense while achieving 0% attack success rate.

ARXIV 2609.35807 ↗
cs.AI

Generative Embodied Multiple Behavior Control Systems for Human-like Agents

作者Chongyu Bao, Haokai Yang, Yuhan Wang, Zhaochong An, Kunpeng Liu, Xiaolan Liu

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Building human-like agents that reproduce human behavior in realistic 3D environments has been a longstanding objective in AI. Existing human-like agent frameworks primarily focus on modeling goal-directed behavior. However, cognitive neuroscience commonly believes that human behaviors are more likely controlled by multiple control systems, including goal-directed and habitual behavior control systems. Habitual behavior has been largely overlooked though it plays a crucial role in human daily life. In this paper, we address this gap by proposing a multiple control systems setup that jointly models goal-directed and habitual behaviors. Building on this setup, we propose GEMS, in which the Habitual Controller retrieves habitual actions from habit memory in response to relevant environmental stimuli, while the Goal-directed Controller proposes goal-directed actions and estimates their values. The Arbiter dynamically governs the relative influence of each controller and selects the final action. To construct diverse human-level behavior instructions in 3D environments, we further develop a keyframe-guided motion generation module. Extensive quantitative evaluations, human and ablation studies demonstrate that human-likeness performance is substantially improved by GEMS. The efficacy of GEMS indicates the benefits of leveraging habitual behavior and multiple behavior control system coordination for believable embodied human-like agents. The code is available at \href{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/review-video-82f4/demo.mp4}{this link}.

ARXIV 2609.22691 ↗
cs.MA

Be Careful Who You Trust: Coordination Dynamics under Corrupted Communication in LLM Multi-Agent Games

作者Xuanyi Liu, Niall Dalton, Hairi Amin, Xiyuan Yin, Lydia Lim

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Large language models are increasingly used as interacting agents, but it remains unclear how robust their coordination is when public communication is unreliable. We study this question in iterated $N$-player Stag Hunt games played by homogeneous LLM groups under controlled programmatic action inversion, which changes both the public transcript and the actions used for execution. Across an experimental grid spanning group sizes, coordination thresholds, corruption levels, and seven LLMs, we observe three main patterns. First, honest agents' pre-flip Stag choices decline as corruption increases, but the sharp fall in public success is primarily mechanical. In the focal $N=5,M=3$ setting, pre-flip success remains 78% at 80% corruption, while public success falls to 12%. Second, honest choices are associated with the public history available at decision time, particularly under high corruption. Third, three threshold-style public-report benchmarks yield similar action-match rates to the LLM agents, showing substantial descriptive agreement between LLM decisions and these benchmarks. Overall, our results show that original choices, public actions, and executed outcomes must be separated when evaluating multi-agent robustness, as corrupted communication can severely and predictably degrade mutually beneficial cooperation.

ARXIV 2609.31704 ↗
cs.AI

When Should a VLM Look? Paying Only for Visual Calls That Were Needed and Used

作者Kunyu Peng, Junming Liu, Ruiqi He, Qingzhuo Wang, Jianzhong Qi, Xianhui Liu

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Vision-language agents that crop and zoom are trained with rewards that credit a successful tool call, yet a successful call does not show that the model needed to look or used the pixels it received. On our cold-start checkpoint only 10% to 12% of visual calls were both needed and used, and released agents make spurious calls 36% to 87% of the time on individual benchmarks. Outcome rewards, judge rewards, and branch probes each observe one side of this failure, and about two thirds of what an outcome reward pays goes to calls that were neither needed nor used. CounterCredit asks both questions of every image-returning call at its realized pre-call state, using the policy's own gold-answer score. A decision value compares the realized visual branch with answering immediately; an evidence value compares the returned crop with random same-size patches substituted into the same call. A call verified on both earns cashback and every other executed call pays rent; the price is bounded so that every correct trajectory outranks every wrong one, and a dual-channel GRPO advantage keeps the price in its own units. From the same cold start, prompt pool, and budget, CounterCredit reaches 89.5% on V*, 80.2% on HR-Bench-4K, and 76.4% on HR-Bench-8K, 6.3 to 9.4 points above outcome-only GRPO at 1.78 against 1.84 calls per question, and lowers the spurious-call rate to 31% to 36%, the lowest among the agents evaluated. The same recipe lifts a Qwen3-VL-8B base from 75.4 to 80.8 on average.

ARXIV 2609.22910 ↗
cs.CV

RewardVerse: Rubric-Guided Policy Optimization for Video Reward Modeling

作者Zhenchen Tang, Yang Li, Songlin Yang, Bo Peng, Xiaotong Zhao, Shuai Li, Haotian Fan, Alan Zhao, Jing Dong

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Reinforcement learning (RL) is vital for optimizing video generation models, with a robust reward model (RM) serving as the cornerstone. However, existing video reward models often produce unstable scalar scores because they directly map complex, subjective video quality into a single score without explicit evaluation criteria. This leads to scalar drift, where the scoring scale collapses or shifts across different prompts, making the reward unreliable for RL. Drawing inspiration from professional human annotation engineering, we address this problem with RewardVerse, a rubric-based video reward framework that introduces a dynamic rubric as an intermediate representation between the evaluation query and the scorer. Instead of unconstrained direct scoring, RewardVerse first generates explicit evaluation criteria and then performs rubric-guided scoring, providing a stable semantic anchor that mitigates scalar drift. To efficiently optimize this collaborative pipeline, we propose Rubric-Guided Policy Optimization (RGPO), a two-stage training algorithm. RGPO first warms up the scorer using self-evolving seed rubrics and then jointly optimizes the rubric generator to produce query-adaptive evaluation criteria while continuously aligning the scorer with human ratings. Extensive experiments on the 16-dimensional EvalVerse benchmark and external datasets demonstrate that RewardVerse mitigates scalar drift, achieves state-of-the-art performance on both pointwise and pairwise evaluation, and provides a robust and interpretable reward signal for RL in video generation.

ARXIV 2609.22947 ↗
cs.DC

NSP: Accelerating Variable-Length LLM Training via Nested Sequence Parallelism

作者Yi'ou Wang, Xiaoyang Li, Yijie Zheng, Shouda Liu, Yuxuan Wang

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Long-context LLM training on long-tailed corpora faces a central communication--balance tradeoff. Such sequence-length heterogeneity makes any single sequence-parallelism (SP) degree a poor fit for the workload: a small degree leaves the few long sequences badly imbalanced, while a large degree forces the many short sequences that dominate the workload to pay excessive communication. Existing dynamic-SP systems mix SP degrees within a batch, but to run several groups at once they partition the GPUs into disjoint groups, which reintroduces imbalance across groups and forces costly micro-batch workarounds. We present NSP, a sequence-parallel training system that resolves this tradeoff by nesting differently sized SP groups on shared GPUs within a single training iteration. This lets long sequences use larger SP groups while keeping short sequences on smaller ones, so communication is incurred only where needed and load is balanced per GPU rather than per group. NSP realizes this idea with a tree-structured routing planner that assigns sequences under memory constraints and an executor that exploits the resulting hierarchy through inter-level phase streaming and tree-level recomputation. NSP supports common SP backends and requires no model changes. We evaluate NSP on Qwen3-MoE workloads with up to 384K-token contexts across multiple long-tail datasets on an internal production GPU cluster. Across these settings, NSP consistently improves end-to-end training throughput, outperforming Static SP by up to 1.48x and FlexSP by up to 1.16x.

ARXIV 2609.22755 ↗
cs.RO

Anatomy of a Closed-Loop Collapse: A Causal Case Study of a Compressed VLA Policy

作者Fengze Jia

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Compressed manipulation policies can pass offline evaluation while failing in closed-loop execution; this dissociation is established in prior work and is not our claim. We contribute a causal anatomy of one naturally occurring case. An 8-layer distillation of Octo-Base retains 86% of parameters, passes every offline check we applied (0.996 and 1.000 teacher-ratios on the family's own validation metrics), and collapses in closed loop: 0/72 vs. the teacher's 40/72 on a simulated WidowX pick-and-place task. The collapse is structured, not diffuse: early task stages degrade gradually (the student moves the object at 90% of the teacher's rate and grasps at 55%), while transport-to-target fails categorically, at 0% in every training variant. Paired action-trace forensics isolate the signature: a negative, late-heavy $z$ residual, roughly 10x its post-repair magnitude, and persistent across the base distillation and both continuation branches. Four standard therapies fail under matched controls: continued training and in-domain offline data leave success at zero, even though the latter measurably improves marginal action statistics; command-level compensation recovers nothing at any offset, although the same perturbations degrade healthy policies; clamping the symptom in the command channel preserves grasping, yet success stays at floor. A minimal-pair intervention that substitutes half of the training stream with deployment-distribution teacher rollouts, with every other setting held fixed, restores parity with the teacher (18/36 vs. 17/36 held-out), eliminates that signature, and recovers a teacher-like perturbation-response profile. We claim existence, not universality. Operationally, offline gates, including a family's own validation metrics, are insufficient acceptance tests for compressed policies; a few dozen closed-loop trials sufficed to find what they missed.

ARXIV 2609.23048 ↗
cs.CV

MixiMotion: One-Step Text-to-Motion Generation via Asymmetric Set Distillation

作者Hung Dinh, Binh Mai, Tran Quoc Bao Le, Lam Nguyen, Cong Tran

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Iterative text-to-motion generation delivers high-quality and semantically aligned motions but requires multiple network evaluations, resulting in substantial inference latency. We present MixiMotion, a strict one-step text-to-motion generation framework based on offline set distillation. Instead of distilling a single teacher trajectory for each text prompt, MixiMotion constructs an offline bank of multiple teacher motions and aligns teacher and student sample sets through asymmetric bidirectional matching. The teacher-to-student direction promotes coverage of diverse teacher-supported motions, while the student-to-teacher direction suppresses unsupported generations. We further introduce differentiable decoded-space kinematic supervision to complement normalized representation matching with constraints in the decoded motion space. At inference, MixiMotion generates a complete motion sequence with a single network evaluation, without teacher queries, iterative sampling, or candidate ranking. On ViMoGen, MixiMotion achieves a semantic alignment score of $0.835$, outperforming the evaluated one-step baselines and approaching the $0.858$ score of its 50-step HY-Motion-1.0-Lite teacher. In blinded human evaluation, MixiMotion obtains an overall rating of $4.33$, compared with $4.50$ for the teacher, while outperforming the evaluated one-/few-step baselines. Meanwhile, generation latency is reduced from $829.58$\,ms to $9.30$\,ms, corresponding to an $89.2\times$ speedup. These results demonstrate an effective quality--efficiency trade-off for strict one-step text-to-motion generation.

ARXIV 2609.23010 ↗
cs.CL

Measuring Behavioural Signatures of Large Language Models through Psychometric Profiling

作者Yu Sha, Junqi Tao, Dixin Zhou, Yansheng Tu, Mingyang Chen, Xiang Fan, Yang Liu, Mengquan Yang, Jie Lin, Jiahui Fu, Hua Zheng, Benwei Zhang, Zhou Kai

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly mediate human decisions and communication, yet their behavioural regularities remain difficult to characterize systematically. We develop a cross-linguistic psychometric profiling framework and evaluate nine LLMs using seven psychological instruments, with five repeated administrations per model and language in Chinese and English. Items unresolved after a prespecified retry procedure are retained as NA. Joint analysis of scored and NA responses captures response tendencies and boundaries of self-report applicability. LLMs exhibit structured, model-specific profiles despite a shared alignment-shaped pattern of higher prosocial and self-regulatory responses and lower dominance, disengagement and harmful-intent endorsement. NA responses are structured rather than uniformly distributed, indicating where outputs are treated as inapplicable, refused or cannot be mapped to valid response options. Language condition and provider origin are associated with profile configuration and answerability, whereas repeated administrations show high reproducibility and permit recovery of model identity. Human-reference and prompt-robustness analyses further indicate that these signatures are context dependent. Joint analysis of psychometric profiling and answerability offers a framework for quantifying deployment-level behavioural signatures.

ARXIV 2609.22934 ↗
cs.LG

FIRM-WM: State-factorized factual-interventional recurrent modeling for reward-free visual planning

作者Yilun Wu, Yunjian Zhang, Aobo Li, Mujiangshan Wang, Haitao Wu, Aqiang Zhang

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Reward-free latent world models can learn from offline videos and solve new image--goal tasks by optimizing actions through predicted latent futures. This setting places two demands on the planning state: its coordinates must be comparable with a goal image. Moreover, its dynamics must retain velocity, motion trend, contact, and other history--dependent information beyond those goal coordinates. Offline training creates a second mismatch: each recorded trajectory reveals one factual future, whereas a sampling--based planner compares many actions that were not taken from the same state. We introduce FIRM-WM (Factual--Interventional Recurrent World Model), a compact pixel world model designed around these two gaps. Its recurrent state separates a typed, goal--comparable configuration from a 128-dimensional dynamic fiber used for prediction but excluded from the terminal goal cost. Broad factual trajectories provide state coverage, while common--reset intervention branches provide observed outcomes for alternative action sequences. Before executing each branch, we reset the environment and restore the same recorded values exposed by the environment's state--setting interface. Under matched CEM planning and three independent full-pipeline seeds, FIRM-WM reaches 99.0$\pm$1.0% on TwoRoom, 92.7$\pm$2.1% on Reacher, and 88.0$\pm$3.0% on OGBench-Cube, compared with 89.0%, 88.0%, and 70.0% for LeWM. The deployed model uses 2.98--3.42M parameters and records 2.13--11.60$\times$ lower planning time on these tasks.

ARXIV 2609.22816 ↗
cs.RO

Verti-WM: A Physics-Aided Exteroceptive World Model for Off-Road Reinforcement Learning

作者Chenhui Pan, Tong Xu, Xuesu Xiao

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Reinforcement learning for off-road navigation requires extensive vehicle-terrain interaction data, which are costly to collect in high-fidelity simulation. World models offer a promising alternative by replacing simulator roll-outs during policy optimization. However, an off-road world model must condition state transitions on exteroceptive terrain information, which proprioception alone does not provide. This challenge is further amplified by the need to model both rigid and deformable terrain, where data-driven and physics-based approaches offer complementary strengths. We propose Verti-WM, a physics-aided exteroceptive world model that recurrently fuses a frozen Transformer for rigid terrain and a neuro-symbolic terramechanics model for deformable terrain. Elevation and semantic observations queried from a supplied map at each predicted pose condition fusion, enabling six-degree-of-freedom rollouts for policy optimization without further simulator access. Verti-WM reduces prediction error by 34.6% and 21.7% over data-driven and physics-based baselines, respectively. Policies trained entirely within Verti-WM achieve comparable task success rates while reducing computation time by 23.6X relative to direct training in the high-fidelity simulator. We further validate Verti-WM using real-world data, enabling policy optimization within learned real-world kinodynamics and achieving a 80% success rate on the Verti-4-Wheeler platform, compared with 40% for direct sim-to-real transfer.

ARXIV 2609.23118 ↗
cs.LG

Prioritized Rollouts for Efficient World Model-based Vision-Language-Action Policy Optimization

作者Yifei Sheng, Haoxiang Ren, Zhilong Zhang, Haonan Wang, Runjie Xu, Yihao Sun, Nan Tang, Zhichao Wu, Lei Yuan, Haoxin Lin, Yang Yu

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for embodied intelligence, but fine-tuning them with reinforcement learning (RL) remains constrained by the cost of real-world robot interaction. Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) reduces this cost by using a learned world model to generate rollouts for policy optimization. However, it becomes computationally expensive as VLA policies and world models scale. Existing methods typically treat states equally, overlooking substantial differences in their utility for policy improvement. In this paper, we show that policy uncertainty helps identify states with greater potential for policy improvement. The policy exhibits high uncertainty at only a small subset of states, often during decision-sensitive stages where small action differences can alter task outcomes, suggesting that policy improvements at these states could be particularly valuable. Building on these findings, we introduce U-GROW, a lightweight, plug-and-play sampling layer that directs more model rollouts to these informative states. By modifying only the branched-start distribution, U-GROW can be integrated into existing MBRL pipelines without changing the policy optimization objective. Experiments in both simulated and real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of U-GROW, supporting the use of policy uncertainty to guide experience generation.

ARXIV 2609.22879 ↗
cs.CR

When Agentic Trust Crosses Organizational Boundaries: Structural Externalization and a Reference Model for Trust Evidence

作者Huafu Li, Jia Xia

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Agentic systems increasingly invoke tools, services, data, and other agents across organizational boundaries, yet a relying party cannot assess a delegated action solely from producing-domain controls and records. This paper develops Trustworthiness as a Service (TaaS) through a synthesis of trustworthy-AI governance, agent security, distributed trust management, identity, provenance, assurance, and control-plane research. The analytical unit is a cross-domain reliance proposition that names the issuer, subject and action, relying party, administrative boundary, evidence dependencies, adverse condition, and required verification or adjudication semantics. The three-condition structural-externalization diagnostic identifies propositions that depend on multiple domains, require producer-independent reliance, and must remain reviewable after revocation, failure, conflicting records, or dispute. For such propositions, the paper specifies a trust-evidence envelope: an immutable workflow manifest linked to append-only, issuer-attributed attestations for task-scoped authority, policy and execution decisions, provenance, validity, disclosure, status, challenge, and recovery. A topology-neutral logical reference model assigns these functions to explicit roles and trust domains. Three analytical scenarios and the TaaS-Eval protocol proposal define manifests, independent consumers, hard gates, adversarial evidence tests, metrics, and reproducible artifact reporting. By composing established identity, authorization, provenance, assurance, and governance mechanisms around a bounded delegated action, TaaS provides a reusable profile for cross-domain reliance. It makes evidence dependencies, independent verification, challenge, and recovery explicit, supporting interoperable governance and future evaluation without treating producer assertions as ground truth.

ARXIV 2609.22961 ↗
cs.CV

AVTR-1: Open Stack for Real-Time Interactive Avatars

作者Artem Kravtsov, Dmitrii Ziganshin, Vsevolod Poletaev, Gleb Balitskiy, Anastasia Tikhonova, Egor Burkov, Vadim Lebedev

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Talking-head and dyadic models now achieve real-time inference, yet fast motion generation alone does not produce an interactive conversation. A live system must synchronize the model's output with speech from an external voice agent, schedule video frames for playback, and handle interruptions. We introduce AVTR-1, an open stack for real-time interactive avatar conversations, built around a compact 153M-parameter autoregressive flow-matching motion generator conditioned on both participants' audio. We adapt its audio encoder for streaming through self-distillation. The stack turns the model's chunk-based generation into a continuous, synchronized audio-video stream driven by an external voice agent, and we analytically derive its contribution to the user-facing latencies and validate the resulting bounds with two commercial voice agents. Further experiments demonstrate that AVTR-1 leads the compared dyadic systems on all reported visual-quality metrics and most conventional listening-motion metrics while remaining competitive in lip synchronization. Its inference runtime operates in real time on data-center and consumer GPUs. However, conventional listening metrics do not establish whether the paired speaker's speech contributes to generated motion. We therefore introduce the Reference-Based Directed Granger Gain (R-DGG), which measures the additional predictive information carried by speaker speech after accounting for listener history and speaker motion. R-DGG finds statistically supported predictive dependence for recorded listeners and all evaluated dyadic systems, but not for talking-head generators without paired audio or mismatched speaker-listener pairs. We release the model weights, renderer, and serving backend under component-specific licenses.

ARXIV 2609.22913 ↗
cs.CV

Planning and Rendering in Concert: DeepFusion of Autoregressive Layouts and Diffusion for Visual Text Generation

作者Guanqiao Chen, Jingru Tan, Dongxing Mao, Catherine Chen, Zijian Du, Libo Qin, Hu Jian Guo, Alex Jinpeng Wang

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Generating text-rich images from prompts requires both textual fidelity and the coherent integration of text into the surrounding image. An explicit layout can provide structured guidance about what text should appear and where, but a well-formed plan alone does not guarantee that the renderer will realize it faithfully. Existing layout-based AR-diffusion systems typically optimize planning and rendering separately, preventing the planner's representations from being adapted jointly with image synthesis. We introduce DuetGen, an autonomous visual text generator built on DeepFusion, which jointly learns autoregressive planning and continuous diffusion rendering. DeepFusion conditions a diffusion transformer on the planner's prompt and bbox-content hidden states, allowing rendering supervision to shape the representations connecting textual plans with visual outputs. Its joint objective combines autoregressive plan supervision, text-region-weighted diffusion learning, and auxiliary coordinate supervision to maintain structured planning, emphasize text-bearing regions, and improve the spatial precision of planner representations. During inference, Phase-Aware Attention Modulation strengthens the correspondence between image regions and their matched coordinate and content states, facilitating region-specific execution of the generated plan. With a 2B planner and a 4B single-stream DiT, DuetGen achieves 0.8293 word accuracy on CVTG-2K and 0.938 accuracy on LongText-Bench, closely matching the substantially larger Qwen-Image on both benchmarks. These results demonstrate the value of jointly learned planning representations and region-specific rendering for autonomous visual text generation.

ARXIV 2609.22916 ↗
cs.CV

CausalWM: Causal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Embodied World Model

作者Ziming Xu, Shuang Liang, Ruobing Han, Ziqiao Xi, Mingxing Rao, Kun Zhou, Zijun Zhang, Yuchen Yan, Yufan Wei, Junbo Huang, Yifei Shao, Fang Nan, Biwei Huang

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Embodied world models learn to predict future physical dynamics from visual observations and control signals, where physical knowledge is implicitly entangled within latent representations. We introduce CausalWM, a 16B embodied world model that performs explicit causal chain-of-thought reasoning before future video prediction. CausalWM organizes useful variables into a reasoning trajectory, allowing the model to progressively capture causal dependencies underlying physical evolution. To train CausalWM, we collect 31K hours embodied data and develop a three-stage paradigm consisting of large-scale video pre-training, causal CoT mid-training, and multi-objective RL post-training. Despite using only a limited set of supervised CoT variables, CausalWM exhibits emergent in-context learning capabilities, enabling contextual visual feature guidance and efficient few-step generation. CausalWM achieves state-of-the-art performance across language-conditioned, action-conditioned, single-view and multi-view benchmarks, including Top-1 performance on TriWorldBench leaderboard.

ARXIV 2609.23184 ↗
cs.CV

PixelART: Image-to-Layer Decomposition without Latents or Text-to-Image Pretraining

作者Zelin Jia, Zhao Zhang, Zhicong Tang, Yuhui Yuan, Shixia Liu

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Image-to-layer decomposition converts a flattened image into editable RGBA layers, enabling element-level editing in design workflows. Existing diffusion-based systems typically adapt large pretrained text-to-image (T2I) models and introduce RGBA autoencoders or variable-layer architectural modules. We revisit this design choice and ask whether layer decomposition truly requires these heavyweight components. We introduce PixelART, a pixel-space rectified-flow Transformer trained from scratch for image-to-layer (I2L) decomposition. PixelART directly denoises regional RGBA pixel patches using a single-stream multi-modal diffusion Transformer, avoiding RGBA-VAEs, pretrained T2I backbones, and layer-specific decoders. We identify a key property of the task: high-noise timesteps determine layer assignment and coarse layer organization, while low-noise timesteps mainly refine color, alpha, texture, and boundaries. Based on this observation, we propose a terminal-boosted timestep sampling strategy to increase training coverage in the high-noise layer assignment regime. Trained on 4M multi-layer design templates, PixelART achieves state-of-the-art layer decomposition and composite reconstruction on Design-Multi-Layer-Bench and LICA with over 80% fewer parameters, 98% lower latency, and 85% lower memory than the recent Qwen-Image-Layered model. Ablation experiments show that pixel-space $\mathbf{x}$-prediction, terminal-boosted timestep sampling, and data/model scaling are critical, while T2I pretraining brings marginal benefits to the I2L task.

ARXIV 2609.22789 ↗
cs.LG

Counterfactual Tool Ranking under Utility, Cost, and Privilege Constraints

作者Jiapeng Li

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Counterfactual tool evaluation must distinguish authority, historical support, and what a comparison actually estimates. We study these distinctions with eleven executable enterprise-inspired tools, exact-propensity logs, and real local Model Context Protocol transport. An initial 45-run synthetic study is retained, then challenged by 30 realized-return control runs and 15 experiments on 1,930 independently released Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard (BFCL) tasks. Full-return direct regression reverses an initially favorable doubly robust (DR) evaluation result in the linear setting: mean absolute errors are 0.0139 for direct regression and 0.0272 for DR. Under a shifted environment, DR retains an advantage, with errors 0.0227 versus 0.0948. On function-name-group-disjoint BFCL-derived splits, direct and DR selectors obtain balanced accuracies of 81.85% and 79.83%. Two pinned local Qwen2.5 models are evaluated on the same 200 held-out tasks, exposing a strong failure to abstain under the fixed prompt. We further characterize policy differences under missing support: unsupported actions shared by two policies cancel, allowing point identification of an incremental change when neither absolute value is identifiable. A disagreement-preserving fallback achieves this property in all five support-gap runs, but conservative sampling bounds do not certify deployment improvement. The contribution is a falsifiable evaluation method and independent public evidence, not a new DR estimator, official BFCL leaderboard score, or production-agent safety claim.

ARXIV 2609.22819 ↗
cs.LG

Whitening Inverts the Hierarchy: What the Norm of a Whitened Embedding Measures

作者Mohammed Ahnouch, Lotfi Elaachak

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Whitening a foundation-model embedding and using its squared norm as a training-free likelihood surrogate is motivated by the observation that whitened coordinates often appear approximately standard normal. We show that this observation follows from the projection central limit theorem and therefore does not imply a Gaussian joint distribution. Across multiple encoders and three training objectives, we find systematic over-dispersion of the whitened radius relative to the Gaussian reference, including against distributional clones with identical mean and covariance. We further show that the commonly reported agreement between empirical and theoretical norm statistics is an algebraic consequence of in-sample whitening and does not constitute evidence for Gaussianity. We identify the mechanism behind this behavior: whitening reverses the encoder's spectral hierarchy, shifting the contribution to the squared norm toward near-degenerate directions that encode predominantly noise. In these directions, the dominant variability is governed by a single input-dependent scale. We estimate this scale from two moments and use it to predict, without additional free parameters, the cross-dependence between disjoint spectral halves. These results indicate that the squared whitened norm is better interpreted as a Mahalanobis measure of semantic atypicality than as a log-likelihood. This interpretation explains both its practical effectiveness and its calibration failures: the statistic can rank and detect atypical samples consistently with nonparametric density estimates and across encoders trained with different objectives, while Gaussian tail thresholds can be inaccurate by orders of magnitude. etc.

ARXIV 2609.23117 ↗
cs.LG

When Does Adversarial Refinement Help? A Negative Result and Open Problem in Adapting R3GAN to Time Series Imputation

作者Yufeng He

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Diffusion models and transformers have supplanted GANs for multivariate time series imputation, largely on grounds of GAN training instability. R3GAN (NeurIPS 2024) removes that instability via regularized relativistic losses with provable convergence, raising a natural question: do stable, modern GANs revive adversarial imputation? We adapt R3GAN to 1D temporal data with a coarse-to-fine refinement framework and a frequency-domain discriminator, and audit 14 saved configurations across 3 datasets. Because these are heterogeneous single runs, the evidence is descriptive rather than a matched causal ablation. We report a negative result. All five saved mean/zero-start configurations improve by 48.4-70.2%. Among eight eligible non-legacy linear-start configurations, the mean change is -0.7% (range -3.0% to +1.1%); a separate -21.9% legacy logging anomaly is retained for provenance but excluded from that aggregate. In a saved Weather comparison, standalone R3GAN-1D underperforms BRITS by 5.8x. Crucially, we argue the common explanation (that GANs optimize distributional rather than point-wise objectives) cannot be the whole story, since diffusion models also optimize distributional objectives yet achieve state-of-the-art imputation. Our saved reconstruction-weight sweep is consistent with the adversarial signal being inert or harmful, but cannot identify its causal contribution; a matched discriminator-removed ablation is the key next experiment. We frame the precise reason a learned discriminator fails to provide useful refinement gradients (where a learned diffusion denoiser succeeds) as an open problem, and offer practical guidance on when adversarial refinement is worthwhile.

ARXIV 2609.23102 ↗
cs.LG

D-IMPL: A Diffusion-based Solver for Parameterized BBOs

作者Yang Hu, Na Li

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Diffusion models have demonstrated strong power in generative modeling tasks across multiple domains, exhibiting a remarkable capability of learning complex distributions from samples. In this paper, we leverage such capability to design an efficient universal diffusion-based solver for parameterized black-box optimizations (BBO), where the optimizer has only black-box access to queries of the objective function at the learning stage, yet is able to reduce the additional computational cost at the inference stage for each BBO instance while also capturing the potential multi-modal landscape of non-convex objectives. To cast our formulation as a compatible generative modeling task, we introduce the notion of minimization policy as a new solution concept, which defines a sampling distribution over the solutions that should concentrate around the minimizer set for each BBO instance. We then propose Diffusion-based Iterative Minimization Policy Learning (D-IMPL), a practical generative-model-based solver for solving parameterized BBOs that employs diffusion models to learn a minimization policy, whose density is proportional to the exponential of the negated objective values, thereby amortizing the computational costs across different BBO instances. Furthermore, we demonstrate the performance of our D-IMPL algorithm by establishing a sample complexity guarantee showing that a $δ$-approximate minimization policy can be effectively learned within $O(\log(1/δ))$ iterations, and by extensive empirical evaluations over a range of constrained and unconstrained BBO tasks.

ARXIV 2609.22752 ↗
cs.CR

From Capability to Assurance in Autonomous Penetration-Testing Harnesses: A Framework and Reference Implementation

作者Joas Antonio dos Santos Barbosa

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Research on large language model agents for penetration testing is evaluated almost entirely by capability: whether the agent captures a flag or reproduces a proof of concept. That metric suits a benchmark but is silent on the properties that decide whether an autonomous agent can be used in an authorized engagement: whether a reported finding is true, whether the agent stayed inside its authorized scope, and whether an operator can audit what it did. We call these assurance properties and argue that they belong to the harness, the runtime wrapping the model, and can be enforced in code. This paper makes three contributions. First, we define a framework of five assurance properties (evidence grounding, non destructive claim reduction, computed severity, enforced authorization, and tamper evident accountability), each with a formal model and an explicit acceptance test, connected to prior work in capability based security, tamper evident logging, and software provenance. Second, we position representative systems (PentestGPT, the Cochise reference harness, MAPTA, and the trajectory judge PentestJudge) within the framework using published coding criteria, and identify a consistent assurance gap. Third, we study one open source implementation, NeuroSploit, pinned to an exact commit, reporting its architecture, its complexity cost, and a content addressed artifact bundle from a run against a public deliberately vulnerable target. We execute the deterministic authorization and audit acceptance tests directly and find and report a real enforcement gap, which we reflect by scoring both properties as partial. We therefore claim an initial existence argument that the properties are realizable together, not a comparative performance result, and we specify the multi target, ablation, and adversarial evaluation protocol required to turn the framework obligations into measurements.

ARXIV 2609.22664 ↗
cs.CR

MATE: Policy-Aware Security Auditing for Mobile Agents via Synthesis-Driven Trajectory Learning

作者Changyue Jiang, Jiayi Wang, Xin Wen, Jiarun Dai, Geng Hong, Xudong Pan

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Mobile agents powered by foundation models now automate complex, multi-step workflows on real devices, but their trajectories can violate app-specific security policies. Existing trajectory-level defenses rely on LLM prompting or rigid rules, and thus fail to support fine-grained, natural-language policies that generalize across apps and tasks. In this work, we introduce MATE, a lightweight, policy-conditioned auditor that encodes both agent trajectories and natural-language security policies to determine whether a trajectory violates a given policy and to explain why. Treating policies as editable text rather than fixed model parameters allows MATE to handle user-defined and evolving requirements without retraining. To construct MATE, we build a knowledge base by extracting app descriptions, workflows, and policies from hundreds of popular mobile apps worldwide, and synthesizing over 140K semantically realistic, policy-conditioned trajectories with a multi-stage pipeline. We further release MATEBench, a trajectory-level auditing benchmark with two synthetic subsets and one real-world subset of manually collected trajectories. Models trained with our synthesis-driven trajectory learning achieve over 95% accuracy on MATEBench, retain strong performance on external safety benchmarks, and audit trajectories from Zhipu's AutoGLM and Alibaba's Mobile-Agent on real devices with over 95% accuracy, outperforming prior methods by over 20%. MATE shows that practical, fine-grained security auditing for heterogeneous mobile agents is both feasible and effective.

ARXIV 2609.22724 ↗
cs.AI

Trustworthy Agentic AI: Failure Modes, Mitigation Strategies, and a Lifecycle Framework for Autonomous LLM Systems

作者Fayeq Jeelani Syed, Rehan Ahmad, Ali Al Bataineh, Aakriti Adhikari

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Agentic AI systems built on large language models can plan over multiple steps, use external tools, retain information in memory, and coordinate with other agents. These capabilities make them more useful than static language models, but they also introduce new security and operational risks. Untrusted content from websites, emails, documents, and databases can enter the same context as system instructions; persistent memory can carry compromised information across sessions; and access to external tools can turn an incorrect model response into a consequential real-world action. This article reviews the trustworthiness of agentic AI across five interconnected dimensions: safety and robustness, alignment and human oversight, transparency and auditability, privacy and data governance, and regulatory compliance. It organizes key failure modes, including indirect prompt injection, backdoor triggers, goal misgeneralization, memory contamination, and cross-session data leakage, into a unified taxonomy. It also examines major mitigation approaches, such as instruction hierarchies, context isolation, spotlighting, process-based supervision, constrained tool use, and privacy-preserving memory, while distinguishing techniques supported by empirical evidence from those that remain largely conceptual. Building on this analysis, we introduce the Trustworthy Agent Development Lifecycle (TADL), a six-phase framework covering specification, design, training, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring. For each phase, TADL identifies relevant trust activities, expected evidence, and risk-based decision gates. Although TADL has not yet been empirically validated, it provides a structured foundation for developing and evaluating more secure and accountable agentic systems. The article concludes by identifying gaps in current benchmarks and outlining priorities for future research.

ARXIV 2609.22712 ↗
cs.AI

AgentRouter: Heterogeneous Model Routing for Cost-Optimal Multi-Step Agentic Workflows

作者Rudrendu Kumar Paul, Sourav Nandy

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Enterprise agentic systems that route every trajectory step to a frontier model waste 60-80% of their inference budget on subtasks that smaller models handle equally well. Existing routing solutions optimize single-turn query assignment but ignore a property unique to agentic workflows: subtask complexity varies widely within a single trajectory. A planning step may require frontier-class reasoning while a subsequent formatting step needs only a 7B model. We formalize step-level model routing as a sequential assignment problem over agent trajectories and propose AgentRouter, a lightweight classifier (12M parameters, <5ms overhead per step on an A100 GPU) that maps each trajectory step to one of four model tiers using five features extractable at routing time. Trained on 50,000 annotated agent trajectory steps spanning planning, coding, research, and data analysis tasks, AgentRouter achieves 72% cost reduction relative to frontier-only baselines, retaining 97.3% of frontier-only quality (less than 3% degradation in end-to-end task completion); per-step routing accuracy reaches 91% on minimal-complexity steps and 85% on efficient-tier steps, with 76-82% on the harder mid-range and frontier tiers. On the same benchmarks, RouteLLM and FrugalGPT (applied per-step) achieve only 31% and 44% cost reduction respectively, because their single-turn training signal misses trajectory-level quality dependencies.

ARXIV 2609.22951 ↗
cs.CR

SelfOp: An Optimization Algorithm for Self-Improving Security Agents

作者Saad Ullah, Yigitcan Kaya, Christopher Kruegel, Giovanni Vigna, Gianluca Stringhini

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LLM agents are increasingly used for security tasks: vulnerability discovery, exploit reproduction, and patch generation. Improving them at the model level demands expert demonstrations or computable rewards, which security tasks rarely offer: traces are costly, failures hard to diagnose, rewards sparse, and non-computable. Efforts thus shift to the harness and context, but manual tuning needs task-specific expertise and scales poorly, while automated methods rely on scarce ground truth, stronger optimizer models, or unguided propose-and-evaluate loops that reduce to costly trial and error. We introduce SelfOp, an algorithm that automatically improves a frozen security agent's task context (instructions, skills, and reference documents), without modifying its execution harness and model weights. SelfOp casts context optimization as chain-rule-inspired textual gradient descent: from a single instance's outcome, it propagates error signals backward through the evaluator, the agent's trajectory, and the context artifacts that shaped its behavior, yielding per-instance textual gradients. Gradients are accumulated across instances by clustering, ranking, and filtering, and committed only under cross-instance consensus. A convergence detector monitors the gradient signal itself and stops once the context has absorbed the generalizable information in the training data, without held-out validation data. We evaluate SelfOp on CyberGym, a benchmark of real-world vulnerability reproduction tasks. With fewer than 200 training examples, SelfOp yields a 17-point self-improvement for GPT-5.4-mini (with Codex), enough to surpass the frontier GPT-5.4 baseline by 6 points, and an 18.5-point self-improvement for GPT-5.4 itself. The optimized skills also transfer across models, highlighting that SelfOp-optimized skills learn generalizable task knowledge not model-specific patterns.

ARXIV 2609.22792 ↗
cs.RO

Commonsense-Grounded Path Planning from Abstract Instructions

作者Masafumi Endo, Kohei Honda, Ryo Yonetani

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We present commonsense ranked search (CoRS), a novel path planner that turns an abstract instruction into a route that follows commonsense. While existing methods respect the considerations written down in advance, a robot working among people must follow those left unstated too, as with a wet floor that a worker avoids without being told. CoRS leverages large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) as commonsense knowledge to reason about these latent considerations in its planning. Given an abstract instruction (e.g., ``move carefully'') and visual observations of each region in the environment, CoRS derives a consideration for each region, as in ``this wet floor is slippery and worth a detour.'' It then compares the considerations between regions to see which of the two the robot should avoid more, as in ``the crowd is worse than the wet floor.'' These judgments sort the regions into a commonsense ranking, whose costs drive a conventional search that always returns a valid route. We build a benchmark for planning under latent considerations, with three environments, 1350 problems, and five instructions at three levels of abstraction. Experiments show that CoRS discovers the unstated considerations and goes around the ones worth a detour while crossing the rest, a behavior that recent LLM-based planners do not achieve.

ARXIV 2609.22813 ↗
math.OC

Riemannian Density-Driven Optimal Control: Tangent-Space LQR for Second-Order Multi-Agent Systems on Curved Manifolds

作者Kooktae Lee, Ruchika Singh

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Density-Driven Optimal Control (D2OC) provides an effective framework for steering multi-agent systems toward prescribed spatial distributions. However, existing D2OC formulations are primarily developed for Euclidean domains and do not directly account for intrinsic manifold geometry. This paper extends D2OC to second-order multi-agent systems evolving on Riemannian manifolds. The proposed Riemannian D2OC (R-D2OC) constructs a local distribution objective in the tangent space of each agent through logarithmic maps and uses its weighted center as the reference for a finite-horizon LQR. The resulting control is executed on the manifold through intrinsic second-order dynamics and parallel transport within a receding-horizon scheme. We establish local curvature-dependent bounds that quantify the approximation introduced by the tangent-space reduction and characterize the resulting target bias. Furthermore, we derive a conditional discrete-descent result showing that the closed-loop objective decreases when a local velocity-alignment condition is satisfied. Numerical simulations on a 3D ellipsoidal manifold demonstrate distribution-level control and empirically support the proposed approximation and descent results.

ARXIV 2609.22678 ↗
cs.AI

CraftBench-UE: Deterministic Evaluation for Coding Agents in Unreal Engine

作者Shutong Wu, Kevin Calderone, Andy Tsen

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Building gameplay features in a game engine requires more than code, as code that compiles and runs does not necessarily implement the requested gameplay. We introduce CraftBenchUE, an evaluation harness that runs agents in an isolated Unreal Engine environment, reconstructs their saved submissions in fresh projects, and applies deterministic build, asset, and runtime checks without an LLM judge. Based on the harness, we built a benchmark consisting of 70 tasks spanning C++ source, Blueprint assets, and editor scripting. We evaluate seven models under two editor-tool configurations, with a file-and-shell baseline on C++ tasks. We further pair tasks that specify the same gameplay and use the same runtime tests, but require C++ and Blueprint as the deliverables. Across the 10 paired tasks, C++ completion rates exceed Blueprint by 30.0 and 42.9 percentage points in the two tool configurations. Among on-time Blueprint submissions in this paired set that pass asset checks, 42.2% and 50.0% fail explicit runtime assertions. These submissions satisfy asset requirements but fail the required gameplay tests. We will release the harness, task benchmark, and our trajectory findings with the report.

ARXIV 2609.23142 ↗