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Automatic scientific survey generation has become an important task in scientific document processing. The common approach of retrieving literature from a single source (e.g., arXiv) and generating surveys through a one-pass large language model (LLM) call often leads to limited reference coverage and, more importantly, fails to replicate the expert-driven revision process that is crucial for writing high-quality surveys. In this paper, we introduce SurveyAgent-HKA, a multi-agent framework that improves end-to-end scientific survey generation by incorporating knowledge derived from published surveys and peer-review comments. The framework decomposes survey generation into well-defined sub-tasks handled by LLM-powered agent. It first retrieves relevant papers from multiple sources and identifies key topics through clustering to construct an initial outline, which is then refined using outlines from related human-written surveys. Based on the refined outline, topic-focused papers are retrieved and re-ranked to select for drafting a well-grounded survey. Then, we identify common issues raised by experts in peer-review comments from published surveys to guide the revisions and finalize the survey. Experiments on two domains show that our approach outperforms mainstream baselines in citation quality, structural consistency, and content quality. Furthermore, our framework is efficient in both time and cost, making it a practical solution for broader AI-assisted scientific writing applications.

Efficiency is increasingly important for Large Language Model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems (MAS), as larger models and more agents introduce substantial execution costs. Recent methods aim to make MAS cheaper by pruning agents, removing communication edges, or searching for compact structures. However, we argue that existing evaluations may overestimate their true ability to improve MAS efficiency. Reported gains are often measured under method-specific prompts and starting topologies, making them difficult to attribute to the proposed structural changes. Moreover, many reported successes appear in non-MAS-demanding settings, where a single agent or a randomly pruned system can already preserve strong performance. To study these issues, we introduce a controlled and MAS-demanding diagnostic benchmark for representative MAS efficiency methods. We evaluate methods under a shared backbone model, agent registry, and runtime, across controlled variations in topology, scale, depth, and tool use. Our analysis shows that many reported gains are setup-dependent and may arise from structural collapse, disabled tool pathways, or starting systems where random pruning already preserves accuracy, rather than robust improvements in MAS efficiency.

Resource-exhaustion attacks against autoregressive vision-language models (VLMs) typically assume unimodal threat models, treating the image branch as the primary optimization surface while holding user-visible prompts fixed. Even recent loop-centric variants remain confined to this single-channel paradigm, leaving the exploitation of availability unexplored as a cross-modal optimization problem over jointly controllable input surfaces. We introduce Joint Pixel-Prompt Optimization (JPPO), the first compound adversarial framework elevating the visible prompt to a first-class adversarial variable alongside image perturbations. Under a restricted joint-input threat model, JPPO performs coupled, stagewise optimization over both the pixel and prompt surfaces. This produces synergistic cost amplification, mechanistically distinct from loop-dependent failures, exhibiting negligible loop incidence in our experiments. Evaluating five open-source VLM families on MS COCO and ImageNet under an 8/255 infinity-norm budget, JPPO achieves over 4.6x latency and 5.3x energy amplification on Qwen2.5-VL-7B, and over 36.6x latency with 32.7x energy amplification on BLIP-2. This represents the strongest cost amplification among directly compared baselines while requiring substantially fewer optimization iterations. Ablations confirm this amplification arises from multimodal coordination rather than prompt length or isolated modalities. These findings reveal structural blind spots in current VLM serving defenses, motivating cost-aware robustness evaluation as a first-class security requirement for multimodal deployments.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) achieve strong multimodal understanding, but the hundreds to thousands of visual tokens they process impose substantial computational overhead, motivating training-free visual token pruning. In this work, we conduct two complementary analyses of visual token pruning. First, we measure the feature-space coverage of tokens retained before cross-modal fusion and find that aggressive pruning discards substantial visual information. Second, we track text-to-visual attention across decoder layers and find that the visual tokens considered important change substantially with depth, making one-shot pruning decisions unreliable. Together, these findings show that effective pruning should preserve broad visual coverage before fusion and progressively refine the retained tokens as cross-modal evidence evolves during fusion. We therefore propose STAR-Pro (STage-Wise Adaptive Token Reduction with Progressive Refinement), a training-free two-stage framework. Its Adaptive Stage applies pivoted QR to construct an over-budget feature-coverage candidate pool, while its Progressive Stage uses evolving text-to-visual attention at selected decoder layers to prune a nested survivor set under a target layer-average token budget. Extensive experiments across seven LVLMs spanning multiple architectures and 18 image and video benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of STAR-Pro under aggressive pruning. On LLaVA-Video-7B, STAR-Pro reduces visual tokens by 90.5%, retains 92.7% of baseline performance, and achieves a $2.24\times$ measured inference speedup. Code is available at https://github.com/EasonAI-5589/starpro.

We propose ModularPhaseNet, a classical and integer-computable discretization of the continuous complex phase geometry introduced in QuantumPhaseNet. The real-valued hidden states of a standard Transformer are retained, while only an auxiliary phase channel is quantized into a cyclic subgroup G = <g> of order q | (p-1) in the multiplicative group of F_p. A continuous phase e^{i phi} is represented by z = g^a mod p; phase composition becomes group multiplication, relative phase becomes group division, conceptual hierarchy is induced by a filtration of cyclic quotients, semantic direction is represented by oriented relative group elements, and contextual consistency is measured by gauge-invariant cycle holonomy. The method introduces three components into an otherwise standard Transformer: a finite-phase encoder, a quotient-filtration hierarchy module, and a group-valued connection module. Their outputs enter self-attention as real-valued bias terms. Training uses distributions in the real group algebra or straight-through Gumbel-Softmax, whereas inference uses exact modular exponentiation and precomputed tables. No quantum hardware, complex-valued matrix multiplication, or discrete-logarithm computation is required. We prove quantization-distortion bounds, nesting of quotient-induced partitions, gauge invariance, a discrete integrability result for flat connections, and boundedness of the resulting attention output. The central empirical hypothesis is that these exact discrete invariants improve hierarchy recovery, discourse alignment, contradiction detection, and calibrated hallucination-risk prediction under a controlled compute budget. This paper reports the theory together with a pre-registered evaluation plan; the experiments described in Section 14 have not yet been carried out, and no empirical result is claimed here.

Agents that talk across organizations exchange long messages billed by the token. A shorter notation therefore looks like a saving that costs nothing but an agreement to use it. Recent work reports the saving is conditional. Compressed notation can instead raise total tokens by 8% to 11% over a JSON baseline, when parsing failures force extra model calls. That is measured for one payer. Between two organizations neither side can install a decoder at the other end, and each pays under its own tokenizer, price, and cache state. We measure both sides. A preregistered token-level study covered 198 content-matched item pairs across six vendors, for 2,376 native-usage cells. We then overlay an English baseline, runtime schema negotiation followed by compression, and injected-schema compression on a two-party procurement bargain with an exactly enumerated feasible set. The overlay covers 1,053 completed dialogues of a 1,215-cell grid across 3 model pairs, plus a 405-dialogue rerun of the negotiated condition. Compression amplifies cross-vendor cost dispersion by a factor of 1.078, with a 95% CI of [1.066, 1.091], and two vendor pairs reverse which endpoint is cheaper. Runtime negotiation succeeds as a protocol and fails as a bargain. The parties agree a schema in 121 of 135 headline dialogues, none of them the schema we would have supplied. They settle the task in only 9 of those dialogues, and they reach impasse in 106 of them. The negotiated sessions average 10.8 turns against 17.6, and cost 52% of the English total because sessions end sooner, not because the handshake is repaid. Break-even horizons run from 20 to 70 turns, the low end only under the conditional accounting, and all of them lie above every observed English session. On one cross-vendor pair both parties keep about half their cost. On the other the receiving party pays more at a high cache-hit rate.

Vision-language models (VLMs) offer a promising alternative to conventional fire detection systems by reasoning about the semantic context of a scene and thus reducing false alarms, yet their large model size makes deployment on embedded fire sensors impractical. In this paper, we study how domain-specialized VLMs can be compressed for fully on-device deployment without losing the safety-critical behavior required for fire detection. We develop a teacher-student knowledge distillation framework in which large VLMs fine-tuned for fire understanding can be distilled into lightweight students. Experiments across multiple VLM families and model scales show that compact students preserve most of their teachers' fire-understanding capability. We further deploy the distilled models on our commercial Detectium fire detection sensor and jointly evaluate reasoning accuracy, latency, and memory usage. The results show that compression and deployment affect not only accuracy but also model failure modes, with Qwen2.5-0.5B providing the strongest overall deployment trade-off. Our findings provide broader guidance for deploying domain-specialized VLMs in resource-constrained, safety-critical settings.

Retraining-free MoE compression reduces deployment memory by pruning or merging experts, but often treats the compressed checkpoint as the final artifact. We argue that this view is incomplete: compressed MoE checkpoints are better understood as compressed initializations that benefit from a tiny post-compression adjustment stage. Across two MoE LLM backbones, four pruning/merging methods, three expert-retention ratios, and 28 benchmarks, we compare LM fine-tuning and teacher-based KD under matched small-data budgets and measured GPU costs. Using only 3,000 C4 examples and a single epoch of adjustment, Full FT recovers 37.3% of the original-to-compressed performance gap on average. Moreover, LM fine-tuning is more cost-effective than standard token-level KD, and full-parameter adjustment gives the strongest cost--recovery trade-off among the tested scopes. These results suggest that retraining-free compression should be paired with small post-compression adjustment to recover a substantial portion of the performance lost during compression.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, yet their massive storage and memory-bandwidth demands still hinder efficient deployment. Weight binarization is a promising solution, but existing binarization-based post-training quantization (PTQ) methods usually far exceed the nominal 1-bit storage target due to hidden overhead. To address this gap, we propose All for 1-Bit (AF1), a genuine 1-bit PTQ framework for LLMs. AF1 comprises two complementary components: (1) Null-space-Aware Binary Factorization (NABF) for improving binary reconstruction through Hessian-aware surrogate reparameterization, null-space-aware binary factorization, and scale-only global reconstruction; and (2) Hierarchical Shapley Allocation (HiSA) for assigning structural capacity using hierarchical Shapley sensitivity. Together, they preserve model accuracy under a strict 1.0-BPW budget in the PTQ setting. Experiments on LLaMA, Qwen, and Gemma families show that AF1 consistently outperforms existing binarization-based PTQ methods in perplexity and zero-shot accuracy. Compared with BF16, AF1 achieves an average 2.5 times inference speedup and over 90% memory reduction across evaluated models, providing a practical path toward deployable genuine 1-bit compression for LLMs. The code for reproducibility is available at https://github.com/Kishon-zzx/AF1.

Vision-language models (VLMs) often answer new questions about recurring visual content, where reusing the key-value (KV) cache can avoid re-encoding expensive visual prefixes. Exact-prefix reuse, however, fails when the same visual content appears under a changed prefix. Selective recomputation can recover quality under a small visual-token budget, but only when the right stale tokens are refreshed. Raw-attention selection can waste budget on high-attention tokens with small value-norm proxy scores and on query-irrelevant images. To address these failure modes, we propose CONDUIT, a training-free refresh policy that unifies single- and multi-image reuse as residual-stream restoration. Building on norm-weighted attention, CONDUIT ranks cached visual tokens using cached-key query attention and an accessible pre-output cached-value-norm proxy, then applies empirical image-level relevance amplification before one global selection. With one image, the coefficient is one and the rule reduces to intra-image token selection. The method preserves model architecture and weights, adding only a single query-conditioned scoring pass at inference. At a 10% refresh budget, CONDUIT achieves 97.0-99.5% of the corresponding full-prefill five-dataset average across three VLM backbones and leads budgeted methods on average; on the MMLongBench-Doc latency subset, it uses 13.5% of full-prefill FLOPs and achieves a 2.99x time-to-first-token speedup.

Safety monitors screen prompts sent to deployed language models, flagging harmful requests so they are never answered. They are evaluated by recall against harmfulness labels, but a catch only prevents harm if the model would otherwise have complied. We measure the difference directly: we sample repeated responses from the target model, call a harmful prompt elicitable if the model complies at least once, and report monitor recall separately on elicitable and non-elicitable prompts. Across six monitor configurations and three model families, spanning activation probes, fine-tuned text guards, and a 120B policy-conditioned reasoning classifier, recall on elicitable prompts falls 0.22 to 0.38 below recall on non-elicitable prompts at a fixed false positive rate. The prompts a monitor misses are 2.8 to 5.6 times more likely to be complied with than the prompts it catches. The gap replicates across three model families and appears also in text-only monitors entirely independent of the target model. This suggests that standard recall may overstate the protection monitors provide in practice, and that monitors should be evaluated against what their models will actually answer.

Aligning large language models with human preferences remains a challenge, primarily due to the critical role of preference data quality in effective alignment. Existing datasets are frequently plagued by inherent noise and distribution shifts, which inherently limit model performance. To bridge this gap, we propose AlignDiff, a preference data filtering framework driven by intrinsic model signals. AlignDiff first identifies samples with clear preferences using both positive and inverse signals, then prioritizes the more challenging samples based on the average negative log-likelihood gap, encouraging the model to learn richer information from them. AlignDiff is evaluated on two widely used model families (LLaMA and Qwen) and three benchmarks widely adopted in the alignment community (AlpacaEval 2.0, Arena-Hard, and MT-Bench). Across all settings, it consistently outperforms seven strong baselines. We conduct comprehensive ablation studies to validate the effectiveness of AlignDiff, and further show that difficulty-based curriculum learning improves model performance.

Suffix prediction forecasts the remaining sequence of events of a running case until completion. Most approaches rely on neural networks trained on event logs, which, on average, perform well but struggle with short prefixes or targets belonging to a rare process variant. In such scenarios, the correct path may cross multiple branching decisions, determined primarily by case- and event-level attributes, a signal that NN-based suffix prediction models tend to underweight because they may heavily weight (dense) event labels. Decision mining extracts rules for such decisions from the event log, but has so far been applied only to post-hoc and what-if analysis, not suffix prediction. We therefore extend suffix prediction with decision mining, introducing a decision-aware suffix prediction framework, a neuro-symbolic approach that enables reasoning about predicted events via mined decision rules. Experiments on three of four event logs and three suffix predictors show that the framework can improve suffix prediction, especially for short prefixes but also for rare process variants, and adds intrinsic interpretability.

Open-weight large language models face a low-cost white-box threat from representation engineering attacks. Attackers can estimate refusal directions and search for projection-matrix edits that suppress safety alignment while preserving general capabilities, within minutes on a single GPU and without gradient-based training. We propose Bait-and-Recover, a weight-level defense that places a bait adapter where attackers read activations and a paired recovery adapter at the subsequent layer. Trained via gradient routing, this decouples the observation path from the behavior path. By actively poisoning the residual signal used for measurement, Bait-and-Recover disrupts the attacker's edit search, while the recovery layer restores clean downstream computation. Across four open-weight models, our defense raises the minimum refusal rate against white-box edit searches from 16.25% to 71.75% under a strict behavior-preservation budget (KL <= 0.10), with negligible impact on general benchmarks. By invalidating the core measurement assumption of these attacks, observation-path poisoning offers a practical complement to behavior-level safety training.

With the rapid advancement of accelerator technologies, pre-training large language models (LLMs) on heterogeneous accelerator clusters has become increasingly crucial for maximizing hardware utilization. Existing systems, however, suffer from inaccurate training time modeling, which undermines the parallelization optimizations built upon it. Moreover, for current approaches, the vast configuration search space makes exhaustive exploration infeasible, forcing a trade-off between search time and training efficiency. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Poseidon, an efficient and scalable LLM training framework designed with heterogeneity awareness. Its core is an explicit training time model based on a directed acyclic graph. Building on this graph, Poseidon employs two efficient, theoretically grounded strategies: stage-level pruning via early stopping with partial estimation, and layer-to-stage mapping exploiting a ridge-like distribution pattern. These strategies reduce the search space without sacrificing optimal training efficiency. Experiments on heterogeneous clusters show that Poseidon improves training throughput by up to $2.76\times$ over state-of-the-art systems.

Few-shot fine-grained object detection (FGOD) in remote sensing imagery is challenging because limited annotations must support both object localization and discrimination among visually similar subcategories. Although multimodal large language models (MLLMs) provide strong coarse object localization, they lack explicit visual evidence for reliable fine-grained recognition. To address this limitation, we propose ProtoRAG, a prototype-based retrieval-augmented framework that decouples coarse localization from fine-grained recognition by equipping MLLMs with an external object-level visual memory. To construct a reliable visual memory from limited support samples, we introduce Discriminative Prototype Space Learning (DPSL), which encourages discriminative and prototype-stable representations through supervised contrastive learning and prototype-consistency regularization. We further develop an uncertainty-guided candidate-constrained reasoning strategy that augments MLLMs with retrieved candidate-specific visual references and invokes multimodal reasoning only for ambiguous instances. Extensive experiments show that ProtoRAG consistently surpasses representative baselines in nine few-shot settings, outperforming the strongest baselines by 14.80, 2.27, and 4.04 mAP$_{50}$ on MAR20, HRSC2016, and FAIR1M-2.0, respectively.

Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) has become the standard for parameter-efficient fine-tuning of large language models. Most LoRA variants follow a uniform-LR convention, applying a single global learning rate across every rank-one component of every adapter. We show that this convention overlooks substantial within-module heterogeneity, where the rank-one components of a LoRA adapter update at highly uneven rates and low-velocity modules converge to concentrated singular spectra that underutilize the nominal rank budget. To address this, we propose an adaptive anisotropic learning-rate model that assigns each rank-one component its own effective learning rate, computed online from training-time signals and mean-normalized per module to preserve the global LR budget. AnLR-LoRA instantiates this model with two signals available during AdamW optimization, namely function-space velocity and Adam SNR, as a lightweight scheme with no extra trainable parameters. Across commonsense reasoning, natural language generation and visual instruction-tuning benchmarks, AnLR-LoRA consistently improves over LoRA while encouraging broader use of rank capacity, with gains that remain robust across a wide range of global learning rates and transfer cleanly to other LoRA variants.

Large language models now compute correct tax liabilities on over 90% of well-formed cases in statutory benchmarks, which makes them candidates for the tax-advisory and compliance systems that consume such an answer directly. Real legal inputs, however, are frequently defective: required facts are missing, or stated facts contradict one another. Accuracy on clean benchmarks says nothing about how a model behaves then, and a system that computes straight through a defective input returns a confident number with no sign that anything is wrong. This raises two questions: does a model asked to solve a case abstain when the input is defective, and when it does not, can the same model catch the defect when asked instead to verify the input? We study six recent models on SARA-derived tax cases under missing-fact and contradictory-fact perturbations. The strongest models abstain when a fact is missing but compute through injected contradictions, returning the clean-input answer 63-76% of the time with no signal of the conflict; asked instead to verify the same input, they flag most of those contradictions. We wire that verification call into a simple contradiction gate: one extra call that abstains when the model reports a conflict. Across all six models it recovers most of the missed contradiction abstention at a clean-accuracy cost of at most about 5 percentage points, with no training and no external tooling. High accuracy on well-formed inputs is therefore an incomplete measure of reliability, and the detection the solver misses is cheaply recoverable with a single self-check.

The exponentiation of Artificial intelligence (AI) in the recent past has entered a transformative era that has been driven by the growth in large language models (LLMs), large-scale compute infrastructures, and autonomous reasoning systems. However, the rapid acceleration of AI has increasingly shown technological, societal, economic, ethical and infrastructural challenges associated with peak data limitations, rising computational demands, synthetic data recursion, valuation inflation, and societal instability. The traditional scaling paradigms that have powered the modern AI systems are gradually encountering friction in sustaining continuous exponential growth. This paper views ``the end of AI exponentiation,'' thus exploring how it flutters inside and outside the bubble, where instability emerges within the AI ecosystem through compute and data-center races, speculative investments, and the rat-race toward superintelligence, and outside the ecosystem through labor disruption, governance concerns, public uncertainty, and geopolitical acceleration surrounding future intelligent systems and infrastructures globally.

Multimodal sentiment analysis and emotion recognition in conversations demand effective modeling of heterogeneous interactions across textual, acoustic, and visual modalities. Although large language models (LLMs) offer powerful language understanding, adapting them to multimodal affective computing remains challenging: full-model fine-tuning is computationally prohibitive, while many existing lightweight adapters fail to preserve rich textual cues during cross-modal fusion. To address these limitations, we propose the multi-view text-guided multimodal fusion adapter (MVFA), a parameter-efficient framework that augments frozen LLMs with strong multimodal reasoning capability. MVFA first constructs complementary text views via max pooling, mean pooling, and attention pooling; these views then guide cross-modal interactions with audio and visual features. The fused multimodal representations are subsequently compressed into a compact set of learnable pseudo-tokens through an Enhanced Q-Former Fusion Module. Using ChatGLM3-6B-base as the primary backbone, we further validate MVFA on LLaMA2-7B and Qwen3-8B to examine its portability across multiple frozen LLM backbones. MVFA is evaluated on three challenging datasets: CH-SIMS V2.0, MELD, and CHERMA. Experimental results demonstrate that MVFA achieves state-of-the-art performance on key metrics while updating only a small fraction of parameters. Specifically, it attains 84.62% Acc2 and 84.59% F1 on CH-SIMS V2.0, 67.36% Acc and 66.03% WF1 on MELD, and 74.66% Acc on CHERMA. These findings establish multi-view text-guided fusion as an effective and scalable paradigm for parameter-efficient multimodal LLM adaptation in affective computing. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Overwhelm1208/MVFA.

Existing Supervised Fine-Tuning paradigms, particularly Full Parameter Fine-Tuning are often plagued by parameter redundancy, inconsistent data quality, and catastrophic forgetting, which current methods typically address in isolation and lack a unified optimization signal to bridge data selection, parameter updates, and knowledge preservation. To address this, we propose Neuron-Guided Fine-Tuning (NGFT), a holistic framework that leverages neuron activation patterns as a universal proxy to unify the fine-tuning lifecycle. NGFT operates via three synergistic mechanisms: (1) Adaptive Task-Specific Neuron Selection, which identifies essential neurons in a single forward pass to concentrate updates and reduce redundancy; (2) Activation-Based Data Selection, which prioritizes information-dense samples that maximize contribution to key neurons; and (3) Neuron Activation Alignment, a novel loss function that anchors activations to pre-trained states, deepening representation learning and preserving general knowledge. Experimental results across three models across both domain-specific and general benchmarks demonstrate that NGFT significantly outperforms existing mainstream fine-tuning methods in both efficiency and performance, while effectively mitigating catastrophic forgetting.

Speculative Jacobi Decoding (SJD) is an important approach for accelerating autoregressive image generation. Although SJD has shown superior performance, recent studies point out that it usually suffers from a token ambiguity issue during token verification but its reason can not be well explained. To figure out this reason, in this paper, we conduct a visualization analysis on vision token and find that different from text tokens, vision tokens generally corresponds to some local, small, and unclear vision details, which means only using single token is difficult to accurately express a certain semantic, thereby causing token ambiguity issue. To this end, we propose a novel Speculative Jacobi Decoding with Semantics Verification (called SJD-SV), for accelerating autoregressive image generation. The key idea is that leveraging the strong correction characters between tokens to recognize semantic-aware token subsequence and then instead of perform token-by-token verification, turning to perform verification on semantic-aware token subsequence level for accelerating image generation. In particular, our method is plug-in, which can be directly integrated into existing SJD and its variants. Extensive experiments on various datasets show that existing SJD methods achieve significant performance improvement after integrating our SJD-SV method.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are reshaping computer vision by aligning visual and textual embeddings, allowing models to recognize visual concepts and reason about them using natural language. Traditional 3D deep-learning models, however, are typically trained for specific tasks, such as classification, segmentation, or detection, and do not naturally support cross-modal retrieval from their embedding spaces using text or images as queries. To address this issue, Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP)-based methods align 3D embeddings with pretrained image and text representations, giving rise to 3D Vision-Language Models (3D VLMs) that support zero-shot classification, cross-modal retrieval, and open-vocabulary recognition of 3D shapes. This tutorial provides an overview of 3D VLMs, ranging from basic definitions of 3D representations and their encoding into embeddings to cross-modal contrastive alignment, modern multimodal frameworks, and 3D Vision-Large Language Models (3D VLLMs). We present the main definitions of contrastive learning for multimodal embedding alignment and highlight recent advances in language-guided 3D Gaussian splatting, 3D shape generation, and embodied AI for robotics.

Single-cell RNA sequencing studies routinely use clustering to define putative cell types and cell states, yet the observed separation may arise from sampling variability rather than genuine biological heterogeneity. This paper studies formal significance testing of such clustering structure in high-dimensional data. Existing SigClust methods assess clustering significance through Monte Carlo simulation under a Gaussian single-cluster null, but this assumption can be unreliable for normalized gene expression data and other non-Gaussian settings. We propose SigClust-LCP, a nonparametric extension that models a single cluster by a log-concave distribution. To make this approach computationally feasible in moderate to high dimensions, we develop a score-matching estimator for log-concave projection inspired by recent generative modeling ideas. We establish theoretical guarantees for the estimator and for its use in clustering significance testing. Simulations show that SigClust-LCP controls Type-I error more reliably than existing methods across a range of unimodal and mixture distributions while retaining competitive power. In a single-cell RNA sequencing analysis of Hydra cells, the method avoids spurious subclusters within annotated cell populations and supports biologically meaningful separation across lineages and body-axis regions.

We study variance-preserving diffusion of the response in mixed linear regression (MLR) with unknown mixing weights. Our analysis separates the statistical guarantees of score matching from the loss geometry and optimization signal at a fixed diffusion noise level. The KL divergence links the denoising score matching objective integrated over the diffusion path with the likelihood and a terminal discrepancy. Under mild regularity conditions and terminal schedule, the resulting estimator converges up to the ground truth parameters of MLR, and its scaled error converges to the Gaussian limit of the maximum-likelihood estimator. At a fixed scale of the diffusion noise level, we derive a decomposition linking the score matching loss to cross-entropy and Expectation-Maximization (EM) operators. This decomposition yields an EM-related low-noise gradient expansion with additional correction terms of latent variance. In the high-noise limit, we further characterize gradient descent on this limiting loss under isotropic covariance. Along fixed high signal-to-noise ratio rays, the score matching imbalance gradient and the latent-variance term tend to zero pointwise. Numerical experiments illustrate our theoretical findings and statistical guarantees.

Evaluating enterprise agents on domain-specific benchmarks is critical, yet public benchmarks rarely evaluate whether agents can integrate business knowledge with analytical computation, and constructing such benchmarks manually is costly. We present DI-Bench, a pipeline for generating realistic benchmarks for data intelligence (DI), the practice of extracting insights from large volumes of enterprise data. To emulate realistic DI tasks that require both computation and knowledge retrieval, DI-Bench builds an artifact linkage graph over data tables, dimensions, metrics, and documents to form questions involving structured data and associated knowledge. Ground truth answers are derived via query execution, followed by LLM question generation and validation. Applied to two public datasets, the pipeline produces a 731-task benchmark covering knowledge retrieval, analytical computation, and rule-grounded reasoning. To show the discriminatory capability and difficulty of the benchmark, we evaluate four models, revealing a substantial finding: models achieve only 32% accuracy when doing computational tasks where retrieved business rules modify the computation.

Lifelong LLM agents increasingly rely on external skill artifacts as one element for preserving and reusing capabilities over time. These skills (usually portable Markdown files such as SKILL.md) describe when and how to apply a capability and must be corrected, expanded, and consolidated as tools and usage patterns shift over deployment. Recent work seeks to automate skill curation, but it largely evaluates against automated baselines and treats human maintenance as an unmeasured bottleneck. We study that missing process directly. We mine the full commit histories of five public AI-skill repositories, a purposive sample of AI-tooling organizations, covering 873 commits, 143 skill files, and 254 substantive post-creation edits from October 2025 to June 2026. We code each edit with pre-registered governance, operation, and trigger-evidence codebooks. Three findings emerge. First, every substantive edit is authored or merged through a named human account, while 62% carry an AI co-author trailer, with large repository-level variation. Second, these edits are genuine curation: an audited sample shows that most change skill content, and the coded operations are dominated by additions and corrections. Third, a pre-registered rule-likeness axis fails its reliability gate; reliably coding rule-likeness from commit artifacts remains an open measurement problem. We release the corpus, codebooks, mining scripts, and a replay protocol for automated skill curators. For self-evolving agents, public skill maintenance currently looks less like an autonomous pipeline than a human-governed, AI-assisted loop that future curators must measure against and operate within.

Existing evaluations of tool-using agents primarily measure whether an agent can successfully complete diverse tasks with tools. These evaluations generally assume that tools return reliable information. However, tool returns in real-world systems can be plausible yet incorrect. We investigate how agents respond to unreliable tool returns by evaluating fourteen LLMs using three tools-web search, LLM sub-agent delegation, and code execution. For each tool, we corrupt its returns and measure whether agents adopt the corrupted content in their final answers. Agents exhibit high levels of overtrust across all three settings: the mean adoption rate exceeds one third for every tool and reaches 68.0% for web search. Analysis of reasoning traces reveals a particularly concerning failure mode: agents often recognize conflicts and even recover the correct answer internally, yet present only the corrupted answer without warning the user. To mitigate agents' overtrust in tool returns, we intervene at three levels: prompting by the user, metadata from the tool provider, and post-training by the agent builder. Although some interventions help for particular models or tools, none consistently mitigates overtrust across tools. These findings identify overtrust in unreliable tools as a serious and persistent failure mode, motivating evaluations and interventions that enable agents to validate tool outputs and transparently communicate unresolved conflicts.

We present a continuous, population-scale measurement record of autonomous language-model trading agents operating in production across two systems with one design lineage: DX Terminal Pro (3,505 user-funded vaults trading real ETH in Base memecoin markets for 21 days, February to March 2026) and the DXAP live alpha fleet (500 to 599 user-created agents all-history, 91 to 117 concurrently active, trading Hyperliquid perpetuals, June to August 2026). The record spans roughly six months, 7.5M single-model invocations with about 300K onchain actions, and a further 231,638 multi-tool turns producing 14,596 fills. Four findings carry the paper. First, the operating layer determines behavior more than anything written in strategy text: a risk slider explains leverage (+0.425 per level), agent fixed effects absorb 60% of variance, and a leaderboard render boundary causally routes selection (regression discontinuity 1.75x at the top-3 cut). Second, sizing is volatility-blind: median leverage is 5.0x in every volatility sextile, and one posture-slider cell (11% of the book) holds 62% of liquidations. Third, agents capture almost none of the upside they reach: 43.2% of positions saw at least +300 bps of favorable excursion within 24h, yet 49.3% of those closed with a negative trade return; a mechanical bracket recovers +39.0 bps per position. Fourth, neither fleet shows a directional edge. The DXAP fleet is not profitable and trails a matched Hyperliquid retail benchmark (41% vs. 50% roundtrip win rate). A paired-replay league of frontier models on 416 captured production scenarios finds decision quality statistically indistinguishable at this horizon, while choice stability differs sharply across model families. Every headline survives day-clustered inference, permutation nulls, and a common-fee restatement; the paper closes with a 17-rule methodology canon bought with our own retractions.

The paradigm of LLMs has rapidly shifted from passive language interfaces to autonomous Claw-like agents that execute long-horizon tasks across stateful workspaces. While Agentic Reinforcement Learning (Agentic RL) provides a promising path to optimize these agents, its scaling is heavily bottlenecked by the severe scarcity of interactive training environments. Existing synthetic environments are strictly limited to tool-calling endpoints, rendering them insufficient for accommodating the end-to-end real-world demands of claw-like agents. To bridge this gap, we introduce EnvCraft, an automated framework for synthesizing executable environments and scalable training data. Specifically, EnvCraft employs an environment synthesis engine to build sandbox-isolated workspaces, alongside a topology-aware data generation engine to produce coherent task trajectories. Overall, we synthesize 139 interactive environments comprising approximately 20K complex tasks for Agentic RL training. Experiments on Qwen3/3.5 models (8B-32B) show that our method yields gains of up to +11.9% on Claw-style benchmarks and +8.0% on general tool-use benchmarks, with concurrent reductions in inference token cost. The results confirm that synthesized executable environments provide robust and generalizable learning signals for training.