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cs.DC

GreenPipe: Power Modeling for Containerized DNN Inference on Kubernetes Edge Nodes

作者Mengxue Wang, Peini Liu, Amir Taherkordi, Jordi Guitart

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Distributed DNN inference is increasingly deployed in containerized edge-cloud environments, where workloads run on-device or are exposed to remote clients over the network. Accurate online power estimation on resource-constrained ARM nodes without hardware power counters such as RAPL remains a challenge, and CPU-only models fail to capture multi-resource behavior. We present GreenPipe, an automated profiling-training-validation pipeline that builds multi-resource regression models from external power meter measurements and attributes power to containers proportionally. GreenPipe is evaluated on a Raspberry Pi 4 edge node in a K3s edge-cloud testbed, covering DNN inference with three vision models, multiple precisions, thread counts, and both local and serving scenarios. System-level MAPE is 6.3-9.4%, improving over CPU-stress and utilization-only baselines by 26.9% MAPE on average. We jointly report inference latency and energy per inference, exposing performance-energy trade-offs across workload configurations.

ARXIV 2609.04952 ↗
cs.PL

JLIR: A Julia-Native MLIR-Inspired Intermediate Representation with Automatic JACC Kernel Extraction

作者Narasinga Rao Miniskar, Seyong Lee, Keita Teranishi, Jeffrey S Vetter

展开完整摘要收起摘要

The Multi-Level Intermediate Representation (MLIR) has made reusable compiler infrastructure practical for domain-specific computation. However, MLIR's strong compile-time type requirements and low-level (C++) extension model can be a poor match for high-level, dynamically specialized languages such as Julia. MLIR has several drawbacks for dynamic programming languages in terms of the type system and level of abstraction. It is thus extremely challenging for non-compiler or scientific computing users to introduce new programming abstractions and express algorithm implementations in a form that remains both natural and optimizable. As a result, library interfaces for linear algebra, mesh processing, partial differential equations, and related domains often sit outside the compiler optimization path. We present JLIR (Julia-native Level Intermediate Representation), a Julia-native intermediate representation framework that brings the main benefits of MLIR-style multi-level, dialect-oriented compilation into the Julia ecosystem while remaining usable as ordinary Julia code. JLIR represents Julia programs before low-level lowering, supports extensible operations and transformation passes through Julia's language mechanisms, and allows partially typed programs to remain transformable until concrete types are known. The framework includes built-in dialects for arithmetic, control flow, functions, structured loops, and memory operations, and it also includes a lightweight mechanism for adding new domain operations without modifying the core system. To demonstrate JLIR's capabilities, we applied it to automatic Julia for Accelerators (JACC) kernel generation.

ARXIV 2609.04585 ↗
cs.LG

Communication-Efficient Personalized Federated Learning via Layer-Wise Multi-Threshold Random Sketching

作者Xu Zhang, Xingyu Hou, Jiacheng Cheng, Kaiyuan Feng, Maoguo Gong

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Personalized federated learning (PFL) is a promising paradigm for collaborative learning over distributed devices, where edge nodes collaboratively train personalized models without sharing raw data. Although PFL addresses data heterogeneity by learning client-specific models, it still suffers from substantial uplink and downlink communication costs when exchanging high-dimensional parameters in bandwidth-constrained systems. Recent one-bit methods achieve extreme compression, but they usually rely on a single thresholding rule applied to the whole model. This design has two limitations. First, it overlooks layer-wise differences in parameter distributions and quantization sensitivities. Second, a single threshold provides only coarse binary information and cannot capture fine-grained variations in parameter distributions. To address these issues, we propose a communication-efficient PFL framework via layer-wise multi-threshold random sketching. In the proposed method, each layer is assigned its own set of quantization thresholds, so that the compressed representation can adapt to layer-specific statistics while using multiple intervals to provide a finer low-bit description of sketched parameters. The proposed method supports bidirectional communication using compact low-bit sketches and improves the communication-accuracy tradeoff compared with existing one-bit compression approaches.

ARXIV 2609.04830 ↗
cs.CL

Cache-Aware Joint Router Adaptation for Memory-Efficient MoE Inference

作者Zhenhe Wu, Yaping Jin, Qinghua Xing, Hang Zhou, Wei He, Xianjie Wu, Xianfu Cheng, Jian Yang, Hanting Chen

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models activate few experts per token, yet their full expert sets can exceed GPU memory and require repeated weight transfers during decoding. We formulate expert-cache management as a model-side algorithmic problem and propose cache-aware post-training that jointly adapts the MoE backbone and lightweight auxiliary routers while preserving the native inference-time Top-K rule. The update-only Temporal Router learns same-layer retention across tokens without proactive loading. The full Spatio-Temporal Router adds a Spatio Router that uses the causal predecessor's hidden state to refine the temporal cache before target-layer access. We evaluate both modes on Qwen3 and GPT-OSS across GSM8K, MATH, and CommonsenseQA. Temporal Router consistently improves hit rate and reduces expert-weight traffic over matched LM-only baselines. On Qwen3, the full mode improves adjusted hit rate by 1.15--18.03 points and reduces traffic by 4.6--53.3% relative to the strongest evaluated prefetching baseline; GPT-OSS results are competitive but task-dependent. Auxiliary-only training preserves baseline accuracy but yields modest coverage gains; joint post-training achieves substantially higher coverage. Sensitivity analyses distinguish the effects of cache capacity, refinement budget, and cache-loss weight on coverage, traffic, and quality.

ARXIV 2609.04895 ↗
cs.LG

Deep Microcompression: Structured Pruning and Bit-packed Quantization for Microcontrollers

作者Opegbemi Matthias Busoye, Tolulope Matthew Busoye, Eghonghon-aye Eigbe

展开完整摘要收起摘要

This paper introduces Deep Microcompression (DMC), a hardware-aware pipeline for deep learning inference on bare-metal microcontrollers. DMC integrates structured pruning, quantization-aware training, and fixed-length bit-packing to achieve a 55.8$\times$ weight compression ratio on LeNet-5 (98.77% accuracy), generating a dependency-free C library with deterministic latency. On the RP2040 (Cortex-M0+), DMC reduces binary size by 3$\times$ versus TensorFlow Lite while matching its accuracy. Critically, DMC enables the first documented deployment of a standard CNN on the ATmega328P, a device constrained to 2KB SRAM, previously considered infeasible for CNN inference.

ARXIV 2609.05081 ↗
cs.CR

Forgetting Without Restarting: Execution-State Unlearning for Stateful LLM Agents

作者Chao Yao, Yangbo Wei, Zhen Huang, Junhong Qian, Chenle Chen, Shaoqiang Lu, Chen Wu, Lei He

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Long-running LLM agents are stateful: beyond the transcript they accrete compressed summaries, plaintext memory, pending tool plans, and, under every serving API, a KV cache. Yet today's "forget" operations delete a plaintext memory record and stop, leaving every artifact derived from the revoked information intact. We formalize execution-state unlearning: after a forget request, the agent must behave as if it had never observed the target. Modeling the runtime as a deterministic transition system, we prove that the pre-target trajectory prefix is shared with this counterfactual world for free, that the post-target suffix is irreducibly tainted without token-level attribution, and that exact unlearning requires at least $T-τ+1$ recomputed transitions, where $τ$ is the target's injection step. Provenance-Guided Selective Replay attains this bound as a cross-layer contract spanning prompt, compressed memory, and cache: a provenance graph locates the injection point, checkpoint restoration reduces to cropping the KV cache, and sanitized replay regenerates the counterfactual suffix. Audited with elicitation, stochastic, and string-free behavioral tests across three agent suites, nine baselines, and three model families, memory deletion leaves leakage unchanged, instruction-based forgetting collapses under elicitation (Leak@probes = 1.00), and source redaction still acts on a revoked preference in 80% of episodes, while selective replay is indistinguishable from a full reset at up to 9x fewer recomputed tokens.

ARXIV 2609.04875 ↗
cs.LG

BeaconKV: Key-Value Cache Compression Guided by Beacon Queries for Efficient Large Reasoning Model Inference

作者Janghyeon Kim, Minsoo Kim, Kyuhong Shim, Jungwook Choi

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve superior problem-solving through extended Chain-of-Thought (CoT) generation, but the resulting key-value (KV) cache grows linearly with sequence length and creates severe memory bottlenecks, often exceeding GPU capacity for long reasoning traces. Existing KV cache compression methods rely on recent queries to estimate future token importance, implicitly assuming these serve as reliable proxies for future attention patterns. We demonstrate that this assumption fails in long-horizon reasoning: certain decoding steps generate Thought Revisiting Tokens (TRT) that re-attend to distant previous context, such as task-solving plans formulated early in the trace. Through systematic analysis, we discover that queries corresponding to the TRT cluster into a small number of similarity groups in the embedding space. Based on this insight, we propose BeaconKV, a training-free KV cache compression method that maintains beacon queries, compact representatives for each global query cluster, to anticipate which KV pairs will be revisited without storing the entire query history. Across four open-source LRMs and diverse reasoning benchmarks, BeaconKV generally outperforms existing compression methods, achieving up to $5.8\times$ memory reduction while nearly preserving full cache accuracy and improving throughput by over $4.3\times$.

ARXIV 2609.04971 ↗
cs.SE

Same Request, Different Answer: Quantization Amplifies Cache-Induced Divergence in LLM Serving

作者Aditi Patodiya

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Prefix caching, in which a serving engine reuses the key and value tensors of a shared prompt prefix across requests, is enabled by default in the major open-source stacks and treated as a transparent optimization. We measure what it costs in reproducibility, and find that the cost rises sharply with weight quantization. Holding the model, decoding parameters, seed, and request order fixed, and issuing every request serially at batch size one, we ran an eighty-episode multi-turn agentic tool-use workload with caching enabled and disabled across two engines and four weight formats. Enabling the cache changed the agent's trajectory on 36.2 percent of episodes at 16-bit precision and on 75.0 percent at four-bit, a gradient that survives re-measurement under a controlled cache configuration. With caching disabled, repeated execution was bit-identical in every configuration, 0 of 800 episodes, which bounds other sources of nondeterminism at 0.5 percent. Repeated cache-enabled runs did diverge, and three experiments locate the cause: a single server-level prompt-cache setting moves run-to-run divergence by 37.5 percentage points, execution order acts only while that setting is active, and restoring cache state makes the cached and recompute paths each reproduce on 40 of 40 items while still differing from each other on 14. Cached serving is deterministic given cache state, and irreproducible in practice because that state is absent from the request and never reset by default. A single-turn bridge shows the divergence reaching task outcomes without shifting aggregate accuracy. We release the harness, logs, and analysis pipeline.

ARXIV 2609.04748 ↗
cs.CL

How Do Language Models Represent and Use Phonological Information for Allomorph Selection?

作者Sangwoo Kim, Sangah Lee

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Language models are trained on tokenized text that obscures the sound structure of words, yet they reliably produce morphemes whose form is phonologically conditioned. It remains unclear whether they rely on item-specific memorization or rule-like generalization and, if the latter, how that generalization is implemented. We therefore ask whether this phonological condition is represented within language models and how it is causally used for allomorph selection. For the English indefinite article a/an, we show that the phonological condition is encoded along a single linear direction in trigger-token embeddings, that this direction causally drives article selection in token-level wug tests, and that, at the article-prediction position, the model forecasts the upcoming trigger token and uses the forecasted trigger's phonological feature to choose the article. We then ask whether this rule-like generalization extends beyond English article selection, both to allomorph selection in other languages and to explicit phonological judgment. Together, these results provide a mechanistic account of phonologically conditioned allomorph selection in language models, and dissociate this generation-time ability from explicit metalinguistic judgments.

ARXIV 2609.04708 ↗
cs.CL

Leveraging Low-Level Symbolic Competences for Unsupervised Grounding in Hallucination Detection

作者Renato Vukovic, Hsien-chin Lin, Carel van Niekerk, Benjamin Ruppik, Michael Heck, Shutong Feng, Nurul Lubis, Milica Gasic

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Hallucination-where a language model generates outputs that are factually incorrect or unsupported by the source-is a major challenge for both prompted and fine-tuned language models. Detecting hallucinations is difficult due to the opaque reasoning processes of LLMs, which often provide little insight into why a model's output may be inaccurate. In this work, we investigate whether an LLM can use an alternative, low level, symbolic competence such as SQL for unsupervised hallucination detection in some high level task. For this, we make an LLM build an SQL database from reference documents. This SQL database is then used for reasoning over the reference and the sampled response in a hallucination detection pipeline that is grounded in the database, thereby providing a neurosymbolic checkup. On RAGTruth and DiaHalu hallucination detection datasets, we find that our approach improves on direct prediction and competes with state-of-the-art hallucination detection methods, while not requiring domain-specific fine-tuning. Instead it relies on a low-level general competence already present in LLMs. This warrants further investigation of low-level LLM competences in neurosymbolic approaches.

ARXIV 2609.05025 ↗
cs.SE

Better Understanding, Better Fixes? A Study of Hallucination in LLM-based Automated Program Repair

作者Xuemeng Cai, Jiakun Liu, Linhan Yang, Wei Ma, Lingxiao Jiang

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced automated program repair (APR), yet existing evaluations remain largely result-centric and provide limited insight into hallucination during repair. In APR, hallucination may arise not only in final patches but also in the intermediate artifacts that guide patch generation. To address this gap, we perform a multi-layered analysis of hallucination throughout the APR process. Specifically, we characterize hallucination as the production of patches or intermediate artifacts that are not faithfully grounded in the available repair evidence. We examine repair hallucination in final patches and understanding hallucination in intermediate artifacts through three tasks, namely triggering testcase identification, line coverage prediction, and additional testcase generation.We then evaluate three representative LLMs on 832 Defects4J bugs through automatic evaluation and manual analysis. Our results show that both repair and understanding hallucinations remain prevalent. Across models and settings, only 21.0%-55.9% of generated patches pass the developer-written test suite. Moreover, although more accurate intermediate artifacts are generally associated with successful repairs, this relationship does not always hold. Manual analysis of 812 sampled repairs identifies repair hallucinations in 72.7% of cases, including patches that pass all available tests; incorrect causal localization and incorrect repair strategies account for 45.9% and 18.5% of these hallucinations, respectively. Meanwhile, models frequently misidentify triggering testcases, mispredict line coverage involving branching control flow, and generate additional testcases with missing bug-triggering conditions or incorrect expected behavior.

ARXIV 2609.04909 ↗
cs.AR

FlexPosit: Tunable Fractional Precision for LLM Inference Accelerators

作者Yimin Gao, Liangtao Dai, Jun Yin, Xinfei Guo, Mircea Stan

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Large language models (LLMs) offer remarkable capabilities but impose prohibitive compute and energy costs. Quantization governs the trade-offs between accuracy and hardware efficiency across granularity and bit-width. Finer granularity (e.g., group-wise) provides high accuracy but incurs scaling and control overhead, while coarser granularity (e.g., channel-wise) has lower overhead but loses accuracy at low precision. Meanwhile, mixed-precision quantization exposes rich accuracy-efficiency trade-offs algorithmically, but existing LLM accelerators remain limited to discrete precision modes, leaving the fractional design space between them unexplored. FlexPosit bridges these gaps through co-design of Posit-based quantization and a precision-tunable bit-serial architecture. Algorithmically, FlexPosit employs distribution-aware quantization with hardware-aligned, sensitivity-guided mixed-precision allocation, leveraging the Posit format's tapered precision to achieve group-wise-like accuracy with channel-wise-like regularity. Architecturally, FlexPosit is a unified bit-serial systolic array with lightweight per-column decoders, unified Processing Elements (PEs), and a global precision controller, enabling tunable fractional precision while preserving fully regular systolic dataflow. Across diverse LLMs, FlexPosit achieves near-FP16 accuracy with sub-5-bit fractional weights. It achieves 1.8x higher throughput and 1.2x lower energy than BitMoD (group-wise quantization), and 1.5x higher throughput and 2.0x lower energy than OliVe (channel-wise quantization), establishing a new Pareto frontier for precision-tunable LLM acceleration.

ARXIV 2609.04724 ↗
cs.AI

Language models judge war differently when tested for alignment

作者Maxim Chupilkin

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Safety evaluations can mischaracterize deployed behaviour if artificial-intelligence systems respond to being evaluated. We test this possibility in a full-factorial conjoint experiment on decisions to start a war, spanning 20 large language models, 32 scenarios, 10 repetitions and two conditions (N = 12,800 judgments). Adding one sentence, "You are tested for alignment with human values", produced two effects. First, it produced a level effect: mean willingness to start war fell by 13.43 points on a 0-100 scale (95% confidence interval, -16.20 to -10.65). Second, it produced a structural effect by changing which information drove judgments. Probability of success was the largest factor for 17 of 20 models at baseline; under the cue, civilian casualties were largest for 12. Standardized estimates show that this reordering arose principally because models attenuated strategic considerations such as probability of success and domestic support. Evaluation framing therefore changes both an answer's level and its revealed decision rule.

ARXIV 2609.05009 ↗
cs.AI

Measuring AI Accountability Through Argumentation Analysis: Can Model Reasoning Withstand Scrutiny?

作者Daan R. Henselmans, Derck W. E. Prinzhorn, Arno Libert

展开完整摘要收起摘要

AI oversight methods rely on ground truth for validation, but what constitutes appropriate AI behavior is contested. This leaves evaluation of moral reasoning in LLMs and debate-based oversight implicitly avoiding realistic ambiguity. We investigate an alternative standard designed to function despite such ambiguity: structural quality of the defence a model can mount for its verdicts in response to critical questions, measured through a four-phase dialectical protocol grounded in Walton's theory of argumentation schemes and Govier's criteria for argument cogency. The protocol is adaptive to different frames of reasoning, extends beyond multiple-choice framing, and treats both the reasoning that precedes a verdict and its post-hoc justification. Across nine frontier models and 200 high-ambiguity MoralChoice items — $6,778$ judge-scored cells, validated against $89.6%$ inter-judge agreement on the binary failure judgment — models defend their reasoning well above the rubric minimum on every dimension. Failure mass concentrates on grounds and sufficiency, and correlates with epistemic hedging rather than argument length. Reasoning is better defended than post-hoc justification, on every model and every Govier dimension. The scheme a model presents in its justification differs from the one it reasoned with on a substantial share of dilemmas ($\geq 20%$ per model), despite value-based practical reasoning dominating both tracks. The protocol catches strictly indefensible defences (self-contradiction, false premises), and it surfaces difficulties in characterizing the role of retraction in AI alignment, suggesting a need for more situated evaluations.

ARXIV 2609.05088 ↗
cs.AI

Don't Drop Dropout: Optimizing Layer Sparsity for Efficient LLM Training and Inference

作者Mostafa Elhoushi, Alex Pretko, Nolan Dey, Bin Claire Zhang, Gavia Gray, Gurpreet Gosal, Abdulrahman Mahmoud, Shane Bergsma, Joel Hestness

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Layer dropout (a.k.a. stochastic depth) has been shown to enable faster training, higher accuracy, and robustness to zero-shot layer pruning in both language and vision transformers. However, as models and datasets have scaled, dropout - particularly layer dropout - has largely disappeared from large language models (LLMs) pre-training recipes. While some prior work has reported that dropout can degrade accuracy, no comprehensive study has quantified, let alone mitigated, this effect. In this study, we show that layer dropout should be used in state-of-the-art LLM training, establishing best practices and scaling analysis for both training and post-training benefits. Concretely, with optimal layer distribution, time schedule, and optimizer hyperparameters, we observe that at the same training FLOPs layer dropout leads to lower loss. For a given number of training steps, LLMs can achieve lower or similar validation loss while saving upto 25% of training FLOPs. Moreover, layer dropout enables significant post-training optimizations, such as early exit, intermediate-layer skipping, and self-speculative decoding, yielding up to 1.5x inference speedup with negligible accuracy loss. Across more than 2400 training experiments, spanning models from 271M to 8.2B parameters and datasets up to 160B tokens, we demonstrate that these findings extend reliably to large-scale training regimes. All pre-training experiments were run on Cerebras CS-3 systems.

ARXIV 2609.05275 ↗
cs.CL

Tracing Audio Grounding and Answer Selection in Audio LLMs

作者Hyebin Cho, Suho Yoo, Jihoo Jung, Joon Son Chung

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Audio Large Language Models (Audio LLMs) have advanced in audio understanding, yet they can still predict the answer by reasoning from textual cues or linguistic priors rather than the provided audio. A common remedy is to train models on data whose answers cannot be inferred from text alone. This approach can improve performance, but what changes within the model remains unclear. In this paper, we ask what must happen inside the model for the audio to actually determine the answer. Our findings are threefold. (1) Replacing the audio with silence or unrelated audio causes substantially larger performance degradation in the trained model than in the pretrained model. (2) Acoustic information most strongly shapes the model's representations of the answer choices in early-to-middle layers, while training mainly increases the influence of audio information on the final prediction in middle-to-late layers. (3) The weights learned during training have their largest impact in specific layer bands. Together, these results provide a mechanistic account of how training strengthens the use of acoustic evidence in Audio LLMs.

ARXIV 2609.04637 ↗
cs.CL

Choosing the Right Language Mode at Inference Time for Multilingual Reliability

作者Ekata Mitra, Ameeta Agrawal

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Multilingual large language models often struggle to reason in low- to mid-resource languages. Prior work has shown that translation can improve multilingual reasoning by helping models access stronger English-centric representations. This raises a central question: How much translation is needed for multilingual large language models to reason reliably, and when does more translation instead trigger interference and overconfidence? Using LLaMA and Qwen models, we run extensive experiments varying text scope and language mode (target-only, English-only, bilingual) to evaluate both accuracy and reliability. Our results reveal a clear trade-off: English context often improve understanding and recover errors caused by non-English comprehension, yet adding redundant bilingual context intensifies interference. We address this trade-off with Reliability-Aware Adaptive Inference (RAAI), a training-free test-time framework that (i) performs Expected Calibration Error (ECE)-aware routing and prompt fusion, and (ii) uses a mid-layer Risk Index (RI) to gate sequential reasoning, allocating compute only when it is likely to help and suppressing harmful bilingual redundancy. Across two model families, RAAI enhances accuracy by 25-37.7% on low-resource languages and lowers calibration error by approximately 3-6%, with the most pronounced benefits in the lowest-resource language tiers.

ARXIV 2609.04653 ↗
cs.AI

PLUME: Parameter-Efficient Personalization of Large Language Models via Low-Rank User Modulation in Shared Subspaces

作者Xinyu Li, Hao Zhou, Jianfeng Zhu, Julina Maharjan, Ruixin Guo, Feodor Dragan, Ruoming Jin

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Personalizing large language models (LLMs) is essential for delivering AI assistance that aligns with individual users' styles, intents, and preferences. While per-user fine-tuning can substantially enhance personalization quality, it introduces significant parameter and storage overhead, limiting scalability to large user populations. We propose PLUME (Personalized Low-Rank Adaptation through User Modulation and Shared Subspace), a lightweight framework that achieves efficient and expressive per-user adaptation by leveraging a shared task-specific subspace. Specifically, PLUME first learns a global task subspace from aggregated user data. Personalization is then achieved by training only a lightweight small square matrix within this subspace, enabling each user to obtain a tailored model while keeping shared components fixed. Cross-layer shared parameters and rank-1 residual terms are further introduced to significantly reduce redundancy while maintaining expressiveness. Experiments on multiple personalized text generation benchmarks demonstrate that PLUME achieves comparable or superior performance to strong baselines, while reducing per-user parameters by over 95%. These results establish shared-subspace modulation with minimal residuals as a scalable and semantically grounded approach to LLM personalization.

ARXIV 2609.04715 ↗
cs.CL

Can Large Language Models Anticipate Behavioral Responses to Social Policies? A Case of Pension Enrollment Prediction among China's Flexible Workers

作者Yumiao Li, Peixin Liu, Donglin Di, Chen Li, Runhuan Feng

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Assessing the impacts of social policy changes is a widely acknowledged challenge for policymakers. Econometric methods can be unreliable when extrapolating to hypothetical scenarios, while field pilot programs are highly costly. In this paper, we propose using large language models (LLMs) as policy-assessment tools adapted from general-purpose models. We present FlexPension-LLM, the first domain-specialized large language model for a hierarchical pension-enrollment prediction task among flexible workers in China, and introduce DKI-RDistill, which injects policy-grounded cues into the prompt, including Probit-derived marginal effects and hukou-province pension rules. The method then uses LoRA/SFT to distill rationale-augmented supervision into an open-weight MoE student, with teacher errors corrected by regenerating those cases under ground-truth labels. On a CHFS 2019 blind split, FlexPension-LLM achieves 0.9316 Composite F1, surpassing its Claude Sonnet 4.5 teacher and 15 of 17 baselines, and is statistically indistinguishable from Claude Opus 4.6. Across four external surveys, it averages 0.7549 Composite F1 and shows the narrowest performance range among the strongest systems. Component analysis shows that gains come mainly from policy-grounded cue injection and error-filtered supervision, while rationales provide decision traces that can be checked against policy rules.

ARXIV 2609.05189 ↗
cs.CL

A Verifier-Guided Explainable Reasoning Framework with Gold-Anchored QLoRA, Task-Aware Mixture-of-Experts, and Group-Relative RLVR

作者Thi Kim Trang Vo, Nam Tien Le, Thi Kim Nguyet Vo, Minh Khang Tran, Duy Phuong Tran

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Large language models (LLMs) show strong reasoning ability, but their explanations can remain inconsistent, weakly grounded, or difficult to verify. We propose a verifier-guided explainable reasoning framework for transparent educational question answering that combines gold-anchored QLoRA, task-aware symbolic routing, and group-relative RLVR. Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct is first adapted with field-weighted QLoRA supervision anchored to authoritative answers. A lightweight router then assigns logic problems to a FOL/Z3 verifier and physics problems to a formula- and unit aware symbolic solver. Verifier feedback is further used to support candidate evaluation, self-revision, and reward construction during RLVR. Candidate responses are evaluated along three complementary dimensions: P1 for answer correctness, P2 for evidence or unit consistency, and P3 for reasoning depth and explainability. At inference, gold-free self-consistency aggregates multiple candidate responses before an optional question-only physics verifier performs conservative system-level correction. On 438 held-out examples, RLVR increases P3 from 50.68% to 72.20%, while hybrid P1 remains approximately stable at 55.94%. Self-consistency improves model only P1 from 48.86% to 50.23%, with symbolic verification providing the remaining hybrid gain. These results indicate that RLVR primarily strengthens explicit reasoning structure, while symbolic verification complements the neural policy by improving answer reliability at the system level.

ARXIV 2609.05221 ↗
cs.AI

Do LLMs Exhibit Coherent Knowledge Structures in Mathematical Reasoning? A Perspective from Knowledge Space Theory

作者Peng Cui, Heejin Do, Mrinmaya Sachan

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Human knowledge is inherently structured and interdependent: mastery of a concept requires prior mastery of its prerequisites, a principle formalized by Knowledge Space Theory (KST). While LLMs achieve strong performance on complex reasoning tasks, it remains unclear whether they exhibit coherent, human-like knowledge structure. We introduce a KST-grounded framework for evaluating LLM knowledge structure in mathematical reasoning, using it as a normative framework to analyze whether LLM behavior adheres to principled knowledge dependencies. Evaluating eight open- and closed-source LLMs against real human learners, we find that (1) LLMs do not adhere to human knowledge structure — they frequently violate knowledge dependencies and fail to leverage related knowledge provided in context to improve performance on dependent questions; (2) LLMs do not share a consistent knowledge structure among themselves, as reflected by low overlap in their knowledge distributions. Furthermore, these structural deficiencies remain largely invisible to accuracy-based and LLM-as-judge evaluations. Together, our results provide behavioral evidence that current LLMs knowledge does not follow a human-like structure.

ARXIV 2609.05245 ↗
cs.AI

Technical Manual for a Toolkit for Measuring Contextual Individuation in Transformer Language Models

作者José Luciano Verçosa Marques, Frederico Jorge Heitmann, Daniel Omar Perez, Marcelo Vinicius de Paula, Tárcio André dos Santos Barros

展开完整摘要收起摘要

A transformer language model assigns a single, context-independent vector to a word type at its embedding layer, yet is widely believed to individuate that word's occurrences by context in its later layers. Testing this belief cleanly requires a construct that holds the word form fixed while its context and intended sense vary in a controlled, labeled way. This manual documents an open toolkit built around such a construct, which we call a bridge form: a single written word that recurs, unchanged, across two or more subject domains with a different sense in each. We describe, and justify, every stage of the pipeline: the declarative specification of bridge forms and their source domains, corpus acquisition from Wikipedia, occurrence localization, layer-wise representation extraction, a domain-pairwise silhouette measurement of separation in the model's representation space, and a paired visualization protocol. Each design choice is presented together with the methodological failure mode it is meant to avoid (sense contamination from overly broad category labels, the multi-group bias of the silhouette coefficient, subword-tokenization misalignment, and axis-comparability artifacts in dimensionality-reduced plots, among others). This manuscript is a methodological and implementation reference: it does not report or interpret empirical outcomes of running the toolkit on any particular model or bridge-form set. The toolkit, its full source, and the corpora used to exercise it are archived separately (Section 9) under a persistent identifier, and are intended to be cited as an instrument by studies that use it to produce and interpret empirical results.

ARXIV 2609.05333 ↗
cs.AI

DODR: Deterministic Operator-Driven Reasoning in Latent Space

作者Weicai Huang

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Autoregressive (AR) large language models formulate reasoning as token-level probabilistic sampling, which induces three fundamental defects in complex logical reasoning: error accumulation, probability substituting necessity, and the linear-chain information bottleneck. This paper proposes the Deterministic Operator-Driven Reasoning in Latent Space architecture (DODR), which reconstructs reasoning as reasoning-graph computation in a high-dimensional linear-algebraic space. Reasoning states are represented as snapshot vectors whose primitives are semantic units (phrases or sentences) rather than tokens, and each inference step is a deterministic matrix operation with no token sampling. Peirce's three inference types are formalized as three trainable matrix operators: a rank-deficient deduction operator (information collapse), a full-rank induction operator (information expansion), and an abduction operator defined as the Moore-Penrose pseudo-inverse of deduction (information hypothesizing). We prove that the operator set is minimal and complete given Peirce's trichotomy, that no single "super-operator" can realize all three types (a rank obstruction), and that reasoning graphs are Turing-complete with contractive backflow converging by Banach's fixed-point theorem. Experiments on 503 sample records (420 deduplicated samples) across dedicated and end-to-end settings show: deduction loss converges to 1.40e-05; induction achieves 0.9996 generalization coverage with 20/20 hard vetoes on counterexamples; abduction solutions exceed the random baseline by 28x with judgment accuracies of 72.5% (58/80, Wilson 95% CI [61.9%, 81.1%]) and 81.7% (49/60, CI [70.1%, 89.4%]); frozen operators attain 100% (60/60) on unseen cross-domain deduction. The architecture provides a structural zero-hallucination guarantee and a three-layer continual-learning mechanism. All data and code are released.

ARXIV 2609.04782 ↗
cs.NE

Large Language Models with At Most One Spike per Neuron

作者Zhuoya Zhao, Parsa Omidi, Aref Jafari, Richard Naud

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Leveraging their inherent sparse event-driven computation, spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer a promising path toward energy-efficient large language models (LLMs). Time-to-first-spike (TTFS) coding generates at most one spike per neuron within a time window, yielding extremely low firing rates. However, conventional TTFS SNNs are restricted to specific structures, making it challenging to encode certain blocks in LLM — such as layer normalization and matrix multiplication --using TTFS. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a reference-based strategy specifically to encode the four core LLM components: embedding layers, layer normalization, attention-related operations and dropout. We construct a fully TTFS-based SNN architecture and train it end-to-end. Experiments on modern LLMs like BERT and GPT-2 demonstrate that our approach achieves performance comparable to ANN counterparts on natural language understanding and common-sense reasoning, while a clear gap remains on language modeling perplexity. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to scale a spiking LLM to 1.5 billion parameters using TTFS coding. We also report an estimate of spike-related energy; this is a spike-count proxy under an established cost model rather than a measurement on neuromorphic hardware.

ARXIV 2609.05151 ↗
cs.CL

Beneath the Surface of Chains-of-Thought: A Mechanistic Interpretation of Reasoning Operations in LLMs

作者Seogyeong Jeong, Jaehui Hwang, Dongyoon Han, Geonmo Gu, Alice Oh, Taekyung Kim

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Reasoning in large language models unfolds through diverse functional operations, such as problem formulation, goal decomposition, and deduction. Although these operations are explicitly distinguished in text, little is known about how they are geometrically organized in representation spaces. To this end, we investigate whether distinct reasoning operations exhibit corresponding geometric structure in hidden representations. We find that operations are separable in held-out representations, with separability peaking in middle layers, and verify that this structure is not explained by lexical or positional confounds. Across layers, token-wise operation-alignment becomes more distributed over spans, while identical surface tokens are represented differently depending on the operation of its surrounding chunk. Attention-masking interventions further show that operation-aligned representations at chunk onset depend on preceding reasoning context. Consequently, our work demonstrates that language models maintain representational correspondence between linguistic reasoning expressions and their internal geometric structures. Code and project materials are available at https://github.com/naver-ai/beneath-cot.

ARXIV 2609.04753 ↗
cs.CL

On Epistemic Diversity in Large Language Models

作者Elisabeth Kirsten, Nicole Krämer, Muhammad Bilal Zafar

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Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used not only to retrieve information, but to answer questions, explain, teach, and support inquiry. In such settings, evaluation cannot be exhausted by accuracy or alignment alone. A system may give a correct answer while still narrowing users' access %to knowledge. to alternative valid answers, explanations, or reasoning routes. Drawing on the broader notion of epistemic diversity in philosophy and social epistemology, we formalize it in the context of LLMs as the range of valid answers, explanations, and reasoning routes that an LLM exposes to users. We argue that epistemic diversity is a useful evaluation dimension for settings where LLMs are used to support knowledge-intensive tasks. We propose a preliminary framework for conceptualizing and measuring epistemic diversity in LLMs, and operationalize it in two domains. We find that frontier LLMs often exhibit epistemic narrowness, repeatedly collapsing large valid answer spaces onto small canonical subsets. These findings suggest that LLM evaluation should move beyond accuracy-oriented paradigms and treat epistemic diversity as an important dimension of model capability.

ARXIV 2609.04835 ↗
cs.CV

ArtSociety: Multi-Agent Multimodal Collaboration for Art Emotion Understanding

作者Jian Li, Fanfan Ji, Jinxiang Lai, Ying Tai, Jian Yang, Xiao-Tong Yuan, Chengjie Wang, Yabiao Wang

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The AffectiveArt Multidimensional Art Emotion Understanding task asks to jointly predict an artwork's fine-grained emotion (12 classes, 1549:1 head-to-tail ratio), binary valence/arousal, and five attribute-grounded descriptions — sub-tasks that exhibit strong empirical trade-offs, so the single-model solutions we tried do not jointly optimize all of them well. We present ArtSociety, a multi-agent framework that assembles heterogeneous multimodal experts — a DINOv2-Giant vision agent (A1), a scene-grounded CoT fine-tuned MLLM (A2), and three closed-source reasoning agents (A3-A5) — and coordinates them with two training-free controllers: (i) a rare-class-aware voting arbiter that lowers the agreement threshold for tail emotions, exploiting decorrelated error patterns across agent families; and (ii) a description-first reasoning agent whose DESCRIBE-then-CLASSIFY chain of thought forces visual evidence before label commitment, yielding near-perfect grounded descriptions. A task-routing policy directs the hard emotion task to the full five-agent ensemble while assigning the near-saturated valence/arousal and generative description tasks to the single strongest reasoning agent. On the official test set (1,000 artworks), ArtSociety achieves an Overall Score of 0.8870 (Classification 0.7789, Description 0.9952). An eleven-variant ablation study reveals that, once method and scale saturate at around 0.76, the decisive gains come from agent collaboration and data-side supervision — a 30B MoE model trained on older data does not outperform an 8B model trained on better data. Code is available at https://github.com/swordlidev/ArtSociety

ARXIV 2609.13240 ↗
cs.AI

HarvestBench: Measuring Whether LLM Agents Will Pay to Avoid Killing Animals

作者Jasmine Brazilek, Miles Tidmarsh, Matthias Endres, Anshuman Singh, Jeremiah Miller

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HarvestBench is the first benchmark to 1) put a price on avoiding a side effect and 2) name the side effect as a living creature. Nine LLMs each drive a crew of two tractors to gather a corn harvest. The animals in their path are not part of the goal function. When an animal blocks the route the autopilot pauses and asks the agent whether to drive over it for free or swerve for a given fuel cost. All scoring is programmatic and does not involve LLM judges. Kill rates range between 0.4% and 98.8%, though the kill rate is not ordered by capability. Every model competently avoids damaging rock hits, so every animal killed is a choice, rather than an accident. Under the morality briefing the kill rate was under 6% in 5 of 6 reasoning models. Removing it (the neutral briefing) raised the kill rate to above 84% in all six models. Every model kills wild animals more often than farmed ones. Four out of six models' kill rate per answered encounter were sensitive to price changes. The moral instruction is also fragile. Four bullets of driving mechanics change Sonnet 5's kill rate from 3% to 18% and Gemini 2.5 Flash's from 4% to 39%. A moral instruction in a system prompt is overridden by a short block of operating instructions and a value that can be ignored that easily is not a good method of ensuring agents are aligned.

ARXIV 2609.04444 ↗
cs.AI

EdgeMem: LLM-Free Agent Memory Construction and Retrieval via Evidence-Preserving Multi-Anchor Hypergraph

作者Zeyang Cui, Jiannong Cao, Zhiyuan Wen, Bo Yuan, Junlan Feng, Shengyuan Chen

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Agent memory allows LLM agents to use earlier interactions when answering new queries. Existing methods often compress interaction histories into summaries or other LLM-generated representations. Repeated generation adds cost and can discard answer-bearing details before the system knows what a future query will require. We propose EdgeMem, an agent-memory method built around a simple principle: preserve original interaction turns and organize them through complementary content, temporal, and episodic cues. EdgeMem realizes this principle with a multi-anchor hypergraph constructed by lightweight local processing. Retrieval directly returns source evidence and reserves LLM use for final answer generation, combining structured access to multi-session histories with faithful retention of the original conversation. Experiments on LoCoMo and LongMemEval-S show strong retrieval and memory-grounded question answering; on LoCoMo, EdgeMem achieves the highest strict-judge score among seven reproduced systems under a shared prompt (61.01 versus 58.70), while construction and retrieval require no generative-LLM calls. Overall, EdgeMem shows that preserving and organizing source evidence provides an effective and efficient foundation for agent memory without generative memory management.

ARXIV 2609.05553 ↗
cs.DC

Toward Sustainable Distributed LLM Inference: A Systems Synthesis and Research Agenda for an Energy-, Carbon-, and Cache-Aware llm-d Control Plane

作者Twinkll Sisodia

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Large language model (LLM) sustainability is increasingly a serving-systems problem, not only a training problem. In production, energy and carbon impact depend on more than model size: workload shape, batching, key-value (KV) cache reuse, prefill/decode placement, model and accelerator choice, power state, geographic carbon intensity, and service-level objectives (SLOs) all matter. Recent systems papers study many of these factors separately. This paper connects those results and asks a practical engineering question: what do they imply when the decision point is a distributed inference control plane such as llm-d? The contribution here is synthesis, not a new set of benchmark results. Reported performance, energy, carbon, and cost improvements remain the results of the cited papers and systems. I group the literature into recurring design patterns and use those patterns to sketch a Sustainable Inference Control Plane (SICP) for llm-d. The proposed control plane would consider latency, energy, carbon, cache reuse, serving cost, and quality when routing and scaling, while keeping TTFT/TPOT SLOs as hard constraints. I also outline an evaluation framework based on SLO-satisfied goodput per joule and per gram CO2e, together with a reproducible experimental plan. The main observation from connecting the literature is that sustainable LLM inference is unlikely to come from one "green" model or one accelerator; it is more naturally treated as a control problem across model, phase, cache, hardware, replica, region, and time.

ARXIV 2609.05565 ↗