DAILY RESEARCH INDEX

每天知道
你的领域
出了什么

不是论文列表,而是按研究方向整理的每日增量。

聚合近期 arXiv 更新,保留摘要、分类、发布日期和原文入口,帮助你更快判断今天哪些论文值得继续阅读与验证。

共 19718 篇 · 多个关键词用空格分隔,按发布日期排序。

01 TOPIC

全部论文

cs.AI

Inference-Time Graph Engineering for Multi-Agent LLM Workflows

作者Katherine Tieu, Dongqi Fu, Yinglong Xia, Hong Li, Hong Yan, Jingrui He

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Recent multi-agent LLM systems increasingly rely on graph-structured communication to coordinate specialized agents. We revisit multi-agent orchestration from a graph-engineering perspective: rather than optimizing a static topology, we synthesize a task-conditioned temporal workflow graph that jointly specifies agent connectivity and edge-level communication semantics. We introduce ReActNet, a training-free framework that compiles a query and a set of role-specialized agents into a sequence of directed communication graphs. Each graph snapshot corresponds to one reasoning stage, and each edge carries a natural-language instruction specifying the message that a source agent should provide to a target agent. The compiled temporal graph is then executed through structured message passing: agents update their reasoning states by integrating their previous states with messages from controller-assigned neighbors, and a final aggregator synthesizes the resulting states into the answer. This design separates graph compilation from graph execution, making multi-agent coordination explicit, inspectable, and task-conditioned without requiring reinforcement learning or gradient-based topology optimization. Across knowledge reasoning, mathematical problem solving, code generation, and GAIA-style assistant tasks, ReActNet consistently improves over fixed-topology and learned-topology baselines while maintaining competitive inference cost. These results suggest that effective multi-agent orchestration depends not only on which agents communicate, but also on engineering executable workflow graphs that encode when, why, and how information should flow during reasoning.

ARXIV 2609.05774 ↗
cs.IT

A Nuclear-Norm Lower Bound for Dithered Scalar Quantization of Matrix Products

作者Piyush Sao, Narasinga Miniskar, Pedro Valero-Lara, Keita Teranishi, Sudip Seal

展开完整摘要收起摘要

We consider the problem of minimizing error in quantized matrix multiplication $C=AB$. Scalar quantization of the factors introduces rounding errors whose scale depends on the maximum absolute entries — the ranges — of their rows and columns. These ranges determine the quantization grid steps. To reduce the error, we optimize over product-preserving transformations that alter the factor ranges and grid steps without changing $C$. Specifically, we seek the smallest leading expected squared error over invertible inner changes of basis and orthogonal outer rotations. Under independent, zero-mean subtractive dither noise on an unbounded lattice, we prove the output-only bound $E_{\rm lead} \ge (c_A+c_B)/K \Vert AB\Vert_*^2$, where $K$ is the inner dimension, $c_A$ and $c_B$ are normalized noise variances, and $\Vert AB\Vert_*$ is the nuclear norm. The bound is tight: an SVD-aligned Hadamard construction attains the infimum whenever a Hadamard matrix of order $K$ exists, including every power of two, while an SVD-aligned DCT construction is within a factor of two for every $K$. Without outer rotations, Gram-matrix balancing minimizes factorization energy, and finite-set flattening achieves the bound within $C\log(K(m+n))$. For power-of-two $K$, conditional expectations deterministically select the Hadamard signs in $O((m+n)K^2)$ exact-real operations. Synthetic experiments verify both constructions and illustrate the tradeoff between regularization and conditioning. These results characterize the full-gauge optimum and quantify the cost of preserving row and column indices.

ARXIV 2609.05641 ↗
cs.AI

From Monolithic Blending to Agentic Orchestration: Dynamic Response for Conversational Assistants at Scale

作者Cen Mia Zhao, Peng Wang, Chuan Shi, Yufeng Zhang, Ying Lyu, Wanmeng Ren, Robert Xue, Claire Na Cheng, Yashar Mehdad

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Conversational assistants can blend retrieval, action selection, escalation, and wording in a single model path, or separate those roles. We report a production migration of a customer-support assistant at a large accommodation marketplace (millions of conversations per month, 11 languages, 10-second P90). Dynamic Response (DR) replaces a single Qwen3-235B-A22B blended responder with a bounded ReAct orchestrator over typed tools plus a smaller generator that writes from a backend-validated context contract. Because the migration also changed prompts, alignment, and serving, we attribute each effect to its cause and claim as architecture effects only those measured on identical replayed turns: typed entity selection moves the reservation selector to a precision-first operating point (precision 8.3% to 89.1%, recall 75.2% to 67.3%), and typed action IDs with a membership check remove observed structured-action hallucination (2.14% to 0.0%). A low-ramp A/B test reproduces the replay escalation reductions: hard-escalation responses fall from 5.60% to 3.08% and soft-escalation responses from 9.56% to 2.49%, while production handoff volume holds roughly steady; self-solve is directional (+5.1 points, 95% CI [-2, +12]). Serving optimizations cut orchestrator P90 latency from 3.87s to 2.24s on a GPU footprint reduced by roughly one-third, and self-hosting reduces estimated annual model-serving cost by more than an order of magnitude.

ARXIV 2609.05758 ↗
cs.HC

Will My Assistant Remember My Allergy? What Personal LLM Assistants Forget When Conversation Memory Is Compressed

作者Lichen Zhu, Yueqian Lin, Yiheng Wang, Yudong Liu, Hai "Helen" Li, Yiran Chen

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Personal LLM assistants (health companions, elder-care agents, accessibility aides) are judged by what they remember about a person: a medication or an allergy mentioned in passing and needed days later. Privacy pushes them on-device, where a month of conversation can outgrow the model's own weights, so an eviction policy must decide what the cache forgets. Benchmarks report that eviction keeps such facts at a 20% budget, but they compress a prompt that already contains the user's future question, foresight no cache-reusing assistant has. Hide the question until after compression and the advantage vanishes: on PA-Bench, 100 assistant conversations we construct, an allergy mentioned in passing survives to the question that needs it 0--1% of the time, against 97% with full memory. The cause is the budget, not the scorer: none of the training-free policies we evaluate ranks the fact high enough, and the budget that would keep it is too large to bother compressing. A compressed cache is an inference-reuse mechanism, not a persistence layer: safety-critical facts need an auditable episodic store alongside it, and an interface that asks rather than invents.

ARXIV 2609.05767 ↗
cs.PF

RAGMark: A Comprehensive Framework for Benchmarking Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems

作者Zlatan Feric, Amir Taherin, Bin Ren, Yanzhi Wang, Jennifer Dy, David Kaeli

展开完整摘要收起摘要

We present RAGMark, a modular benchmarking framework for advanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems targeting small-scale multi-GPU environments. RAGMark evaluates diverse RAG components, including retrievers, vector databases, prompt-processing methods, and generator models, while collecting detailed per-stage metrics such as latency, GPU utilization, memory consumption, power usage, time to first token (TTFT), throughput, and answer quality. The framework is highly extensible, separating RAG stages, timing, and resource monitoring into modular components, and is designed to efficiently sweep large configuration spaces while minimizing repeated model and database initialization overhead. Using RAGMark, we characterize five RAG workloads on open-domain QA datasets across varying retrieval depths, model scales, reranking, compression methods, and vector database configurations. We show that while autoregressive generation dominates latency in naive pipelines, context-reduction techniques shift bottlenecks across compute, memory bandwidth, and preprocessing stages. Reranking and compression produce compounding benefits: reranking reduces compression workload itself, while both jointly reduce prefill and KV-cache traversal costs, lowering energy consumption by up to 66%. We further observe strong cross-stage interactions, where small upstream context reductions cascade through downstream latency, memory traffic, and energy consumption. The RAGMark source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/zferic/RAGMark.

ARXIV 2609.05760 ↗
cs.AR

Interface-Aware KV Cache Quantization for Dense On-Chip NVM in Long-Context LLM Decoding

作者Jiahao Zheng, Yifan Qin, Xiaobo Sharon Hu, Yiyu Shi

展开完整摘要收起摘要

The key-value (KV) cache is the dominant memory bottleneck in long-context large language model (LLM) decoding: every step reads it entirely, so decoding is memory-bandwidth bound. Holding a quantized KV cache in dense on-chip non-volatile memory (NVM) removes the off-chip transfer. Existing KV quantization methods, however, were designed for GPU-style memory systems: KIVI attaches per-group metadata, adding about 25% to the stored KV cache; KVQuant keeps sparse full-precision outliers that a dense array cannot hold in place. This paper examines what these structures cost when the KV cache resides in NVM behind fixed-range converters, and designs a quantization scheme matched to that interface. The architecture stores the quantized KV cache in dense on-chip NVM, uses a small static analog crossbar only for the fixed rotation, and keeps attention in on-chip digital logic. A randomized rotation and per-vector normalization give every coordinate the same range, so one fixed codebook for keys and one for values, each shared across all tokens of the corresponding tensor type, serve the entire KV cache. The codebook thresholds are programmed once as the read converter's reference levels, enabling fixed-range digitization with no per-token converter reconfiguration. Dequantization is a sixteen-entry lookup and one norm multiply; the only per-vector metadata is one scalar, about 3%. Across models from 3B to 14B and contexts to 32k tokens, the four-bit KV cache maintains accuracy under storage and crossbar noise simulated at realistic device levels. KIVI and KVQuant remain more accurate in software; the advantage of our format lies at the memory interface: 3.1-3.6x lower KV read energy than both mapped to the same NVM, and 8x lower metadata overhead than KIVI. The contribution is a KV quantization co-designed with the NVM memory interface rather than a new accuracy record.

ARXIV 2609.05764 ↗
cs.AI

Recovering Temporal and Geographic Signals from Language Model Embeddings

作者Esteban Feuerstein, Victoria Klimkowski, Juan Manuel Ortiz de Zarate, Federico Hernán Suaiter

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Understanding whether language-model embeddings encode structured real-world information is important for both representation analysis and information retrieval. We study this question for temporal and geographic signals using a simple projection-based method that operates directly on output embeddings. Given a small set of seed examples, the method defines an axis in embedding space and ranks texts or entities by their projection onto that axis. Our approach is fully black-box and model-agnostic: it requires only embeddings, without access to model weights, internal activations, auxiliary probes, or additional training. This makes it applicable to modern embedding models available only through APIs and provides a lightweight way to analyze whether temporal and spatial dimensions are present in their representation spaces. We apply the method to temporal and geographic datasets and find that embedding projections recover meaningful chronological and spatial structure. These results provide evidence that output embeddings encode signals relevant to time and space, while also offering a practical tool for interpretability and for downstream temporal and geographic information retrieval tasks, such as temporal ordering, geographic ranking, and tagging.

ARXIV 2609.05721 ↗
cs.CL

Intra-Prompt Parallel Decoding for Common-Context Question Answering

作者Theodore Glavas, Nikhita Vedula, Dushyanta Dhyani, Antonios Valkanas, Yilun Zhu, Shervin Malmasi

展开完整摘要收起摘要

In common-context question answering (CCQA) tasks, multiple input questions share a common context to base their answers from. However, Large Language Models typically generate each answer using an independent prompt. While existing batching and caching techniques help improve parallelism and reduce repeated computations, the separation of questions across prompts limits the achievable speedup, as modern GPUs are underutilized due to a memory bottleneck during attention. We present Intra-Prompt Parallel Decoding (IPPD), a novel inference method that answers multiple common-context questions in parallel within a single prompt. IPPD directly addresses the bottleneck by efficiently sharing both memory and computation during the attention process, as the next token for every question is decoded in a single inference step. IPPD uses virtual position IDs and attention mask manipulation to generate the same output as standard prompting without requiring fine-tuning or any changes to the LLM architecture. Since all parallelism occurs within a prompt, IPPD is fully compatible with batched inference, even when each prompt features a different context. Our experiments show that IPPD delivers up to 7X the effective throughput as standard decoding without quality degradation, and outperforms prefix caching with PagedAttention in most settings.

ARXIV 2609.05707 ↗
cs.CL

Some Tokens Behave like Magnets: Revealing Linguistic Organization in the Layers of Language Models

作者Andrew Liu, Devan Srinivasan, Gerald Penn

展开完整摘要收起摘要

We identify a special group of token vectors inside large language models (LLMs), which we term magnetic vectors, that organize the surrounding tokens by either attracting or repelling them. Particularly, tokens pointing the same way as an attracting magnet are elongated; tokens pointing the same way as a repelling magnet are compressed. Just as physical magnets pull or push away the iron filings around them, these vectors organize their surroundings through two opposing polarities. Moreover, we identify a statistically significant pattern in linguistic category where function words consistently act as repelling magnets in early layers, and we also find magnets consistently reorganize their polarities in unique ways deeper in the model. In a further case study we find this observation may unveil a deliberate, layer-wise organization in how LLMs process language. This pattern is consistent across different LLM architectures, sizes, and layer configurations. It is also causally relevant. When the LLM is fine-tuned for a downstream task, the task-functional tokens emerge as magnets. E.g., in question answering, the answer-span tokens become uniquely repelling magnets in the final layer, geometrically carving the answer out of the surrounding context. Furthermore, removing early-layer repelling magnets devastates syntactic tasks (POS tagging accuracy drops from 91% to below 10%) while sparing semantic ones, and removing late-layer attracting magnets does the reverse. We believe this phenomenon warrants further investigation, as it opens the first probe-free path to understanding how language models geometrically organize linguistic computation across their layers.

ARXIV 2609.05743 ↗
cs.AI

Testing Interchangeability in LLM Agent Teams

作者Jianxin Gao, Tianyi Yu, Linna Deng, Runze Li, Zining Wang

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Production multi-agent systems replace agents constantly, on the assumption that an agent filling a role is interchangeable with any other agent that can do the job. We test that assumption. Eight teams per setting are formed independently from one base model on the same tasks, each agent keeping a private notebook across ten formation episodes; we then trade role-matched agents between teams and measure what changes on held-out tasks. Against a placebo that reproduces the disruption of a roster change without changing who occupies the seat, a swap costs little in task score but raises the communication a team spends per unit of progress by 16 to 63 percent, and in Hanabi a swapped agent is more expensive than an inexperienced one, consistent with interference from conventions learned with its former partner. In Collab-Overcooked, when the agent that sets the agenda is replaced, most of the extra communication comes from the agent that stayed. Three ablations, over base models, decoding temperature and formation length, move the swap penalty alongside one other quantity: how far independently formed teams drift apart. Greedy decoding lowers both; doubling a team's history raises both. In these settings, agents are more fungible in task outcome than in coordination efficiency, with larger swap effects after longer formation histories.

ARXIV 2609.05279 ↗
cs.AI

DCFA: Dual-view Causal-inspired Attribution for Failure Reasoning in LLM-based Multi-agent Systems

作者Zehao Wang, Lanjun Wang, Shilong Jin, Junjie Chen, Yanghua Xiao

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems have experienced rapid growth in recent years. Despite their promise, such systems remain fragile, frequently exhibiting reasoning and coordination errors that can lead to system-level failures. Failure attribution in such systems relies on tracing natural language interactions among agents to identify the decisive error, which refers to the earliest action whose correction can reverse system failure. There are two key challenges: 1) Shallow attribution: Existing methods often capture only minor deviations, such as incomplete retrievals or formatting errors, which verification mechanisms can correct, while missing the decisive cause of system failure. 2) Contextual degradation: As the length of the system traces increases, the model's reasoning ability rapidly deteriorates. To address these challenges, we propose DCFA, a training-free framework for failure attribution. DCFA integrates a global module that constructs structured causal-inspired dependency graphs from system traces to identify the initial decisive error, and a local module that applies local counterfactual-inspired reasoning to refine causal-inspired attribution. Experiments on the Who&When benchmark across six LLMs show that DCFA improves step-level accuracy by up to 8.27% over state-of-the-art baselines.

ARXIV 2609.04749 ↗
cs.CV

Lightweight Vision Transformer Compression for On-Device Plant Disease Detection in Resource-Constrained Agricultural Field Conditions

作者Mahadev Sunil Kumar, Bhavika Gondi, Desaisetty Venkata Satya Sai Swapnith, Gangireddy Rahul Jogi, Sudheesh Manalil, Arnab Raha, Amitava Mukherjee, Parthasarathy Seethapathy, G. Gopakumar

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Chilli (Capsicum annuum) is one of India's most economically significant crops, yet its productivity is persistently threatened by diseases that are difficult to identify without expert intervention. While Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved high classification accuracy, their large computational footprint makes deployment on resource constrained devices challenging. Existing compression approaches typically address pruning, quantization, and knowledge distillation in isolation, leaving the potential benefits and interactions of their combined application insufficiently explored. We propose a unified Vision Transformer compression framework that combines Hessian-Balanced Adaptive Block Pruning (H-BAC), guided by second-order sensitivity estimation, with quantization and attention-based knowledge distillation. To systematically identify the most effective configuration within each compression family, each technique is first evaluated independently through controlled ablation studies, after which the best-performing components are integrated into a sequential deployment pipeline tailored to real-world agricultural constraints. On a chilli 3-class village-split dataset with a genuine cross-village, cross-device out-of-distribution test split, the resulting compressed models match or exceed the 95.13% FP32 baseline's accuracy, alongside 74-98% model size reduction, and the fully integrated compression pipeline achieves a 54.5x size reduction (327.42 MB to 6.01 MB) at 95.13 +/- 2.32% accuracy across four tested configurations. A direct comparison further reveals that, on this dataset, a directly-trained student of the same final size, without pruning or distillation, reaches comparable accuracy of 94.87%, at the same 6.01 MB INT8 size, indicating where H-BAC and knowledge distillation are, and are not yet shown to be, worth their computational cost.

ARXIV 2609.05334 ↗
cs.AI

SiLR: Structure-Preserving Admission and Process Reward for LLM Tool Agents

作者Chenyu Zhou, Qiliang Jiang, Shuning Wu, Xu Zhou

展开完整摘要收起摘要

A runtime gate for an LLM tool agent is usually cast as a filter. In a ReAct loop a rejected proposal is followed by another at the same state, so the gate is a search operator over the proposal stream whose admission criterion shapes which trajectories are reachable. We study post-violation recovery admission, where progress must be admitted while the system is still in violation, and identify the scalar projection trap: an aggregate-score gate accepts a locally improving proposal and commits the trajectory to a plateau. SiLR instead shadow-executes each proposal and admits it under a product order over the branch-level violation state (overloaded-branch support and per-branch severity). We prove that no scalar surrogate is sound for this order, so the failure is representational, not a matter of threshold tuning. On mined Gym-ANM scenarios, SiLR recovers 21/21 multi-action episodes against 0/21 for terminal and 9/21 for the best scalar gate, significant across the full 24-scenario benchmark. The terminal-versus-structured dichotomy holds across three model families and in CityLearn. Because admission rests on deterministic simulation, the LLM lies outside the trust boundary: a magnitude-redistribution attack that defeats both scalar and support-only baselines is contained only by the full per-branch predicate. With two constraint families active, every tested scalar projection admits physically unsafe actions; support-only admits the largest fraction (63.2% of 42,410; product order 0). In the hardest dual-family traces, scalar gates recover only through that unsafe class. Reused as a GRPO process reward, it outperforms its count projection in every mined scenario and is the only tested reward whose ungated policy exceeds the untrained base (0.844 vs. 0.778). Scalar projection loses the violation geometry at both design points; only the full product order is structurally sufficient.

ARXIV 2609.04629 ↗
cs.AI

Moral Competence Before Moral Content: Why LLM Agents Lack the Prerequisites for Coherent Alignment

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

展开完整摘要收起摘要

AI alignment requires AI systems to adhere to human norms, values, or intentions. Under value pluralism there is no correct target, but a shared prerequisite is that the system's behavior expresses a coherent policy: a mapping from situations to verdicts that is invariant while a situation's morally relevant features are preserved, and sensitive when they change. We introduce four structural conditions for such coherent policies: verdict stability, monotonicity, decisiveness, and Pareto viability. Together they measure a form of moral competence that is evaluable from behavior alone, without reference to a moral standard or expert baseline, forming a structural floor for alignment rather than a normative target. We demonstrate the methodology on three simulated deployments featuring LLM-based agents facing moral dilemmas. Evaluating nine frontier models under a factorial design of five paraphrases, five escalation levels, and three dominance conditions, we show no model expresses a coherent policy across the three deployments: surface-form perturbation alone produces verdict-rate shifts of up to $99$ percentage points at a single escalation level, and a model's success on one scenario does not predict its competence on another. This suggests LLM-based agents are not currently the kind of object to which alignment can meaningfully apply.

ARXIV 2609.05036 ↗
cs.CL

Reinforcement Learning for improving Large Language Models' Catalan text simplification capabilities

作者Arnau Ayguadé Domingo, Stefan Bott, Horacio Saggion

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Although automatic text simplification (ATS) is critical for accessibility, its progress has not matched the rapid evolution of broader natural language processing techniques. This paper investigates the application of reinforcement learning (RL) to improve the quality of ATS for low-resource languages using Large Language Models (LLMs). The paper introduces a novel reward function, designed to guide LLMs toward a targeted simplification style with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), that combines the SARI metric with specific penalty components. The effectiveness of GRPO with this reward function is motivated and demonstrated by post-training IberianLLM-7B-Instruct on the ASSET dataset. After post-training on the English ASSET, the model's ATS performance improves on two curated Catalan benchmarks while also successfully suppressing previously observed negative behaviors. Cross-lingual transfer learning is explored by translating ASSET into Catalan and Spanish and post-training the model on each version, but these fail to show a significant improvement on the out-of-domain benchmark.

ARXIV 2609.04823 ↗
cs.CV

PAPT++: Risk-Aware Adversarial Tuning and Generation for Single Domain Generalization

作者Zhipeng Xu, De Cheng, Xinyang Jiang, Lingfeng He, Huaijie Wang, Dongsheng Li, Nannan Wang, Xinbo Gao

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Single domain generalization (SDG) aims to learn a model from one labeled source domain that generalizes to unseen target domains. A common strategy is to enrich the source distribution with augmented or generated samples, and recent text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models provide a strong generative prior for this purpose. However, diversity alone is insufficient for robust generalization, because useful generated samples should also capture variations that the current classifier finds difficult. Motivated by distributionally robust optimization (DRO), we define a semantic ambiguity set in the class-conditional generative space of a pretrained T2I model and search it for samples with high classification loss under the current classifier. To this end, we introduce PAPT++, a risk-aware adversarial generation-training framework for SDG. PAPT++ first learns diverse semantic reference images for each class through image-text alignment and intra-class diversity regularization. These references then serve as denoising targets during classifier-guided diffusion synthesis, reducing semantic drift while guiding generation toward challenging variations. The generated samples are combined with the source data to update the classifier, and the updated classifier guides the next synthesis round in return. In this way, PAPT++ progressively exposes the classifier to challenging yet semantically consistent variations. Extensive experiments on standard SDG benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of the proposed PAPT++ method and the effectiveness of its main components.

ARXIV 2609.04837 ↗
cs.CL

ConsensusBench: Benchmark of Consensus Nodes for LLM Reasoning via Outcome Reward Densifying

作者Shi-Qi Yan, Chao-Hong Tan, Qian Chen, Wen Wang, Xiangang Li, Zhen-Hua Ling

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become one of the primary paradigms for reasoning enhancement of large language models (LLMs). In particular, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and related algorithms have demonstrated strong performance with outcome-level rewards. However, these methods depend solely on the final answer, without feedback regarding which intermediate steps contribute to success or failure. As task complexity and reasoning trajectory length increase, such sparse final-answer rewards become increasingly insufficient. To address this limitation, we introduce ConsensusBench, a novel dataset designed to provide rule-based process-level signals. We posit that a correct final answer relies on a small set of intermediate conclusions throughout the reasoning process, which can be seen as a verifiable sub-outcome. We identify these sub-outcomes by filtering correct trajectories from N rollouts and clustering semantically equivalent intermediate statements. We call these clustered statements as Consensus Nodes. By integrating a rule-based process reward derived from these nodes into GRPO-style algorithms, we develop a new reinforcement learning signal named ConsensusPR. It directly reduces the reward sparsity of outcome reward across long reasoning trajectories. To facilitate systematic process-level evaluation, we introduce three metrics to our benchmark: Final Answer Accuracy (Acc), Node Coverage Rate (NCR), and Tokens per Node (TPN). Experiments across AIME 2024, AIME 2025, GSM8K, MATH-500, and our ConsensusBench demonstrate that the proposed method consistently surpasses GRPO-style approaches, highlighting the practical value of consensus nodes in guiding reasoning.

ARXIV 2609.04648 ↗
cs.CL

Generating Constructive Feedback on Stories via Reinforcement Learning

作者Maja Stahl, Timon Ziegenbein, Henning Wachsmuth

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Constructive feedback is crucial for creative writers to refine their storytelling abilities. Since receiving feedback from human experts is often costly and time-intensive, large language models (LLMs) offer a scalable and efficient alternative as automatic writing assistants. Despite their potential, research indicates that LLM-generated feedback is often generic, lacks actionability, and fails to identify which writing issue is most critical. To address these limitations, we present a reinforcement learning approach that steers LLMs to generate constructive feedback without the need for ground-truth feedback. We train our model using group relative policy optimization (GRPO) with a novel multi-component reward function aiming at constructiveness: it prioritizes feedback that is uniquely tailored to the story, helps to improve story quality, and addresses the most critical writing issue. In automatic and human evaluation across three story corpora, our approach outperforms state-of-the-art LLMs (including Gemini) and competitive baselines. We find that providing actionable suggestions is the main driver of feedback constructiveness.

ARXIV 2609.04824 ↗
cs.CV

MCPO: Modality-Contrastive Preference Optimization for Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Compression

作者Guangheng Yang, Zhenliang Ni, Zhenkai Wu, Han Shu, Juan Feng, Wenming Yang, Jie Hu

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Recently, multimodal large-scale reasoning models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving complex tasks through long Chains-of-Thought (M-CoT). However, excessively long reasoning trajectories incur substantial computational costs and significant KV-cache pressure. Existing CoT compression and alignment paradigms mainly rely on static rules or single-dimensional preferences, lacking fine-grained cross-modal constraints; as a result, they are prone to inducing visual laziness and hallucinatory reasoning. To address these issues, we propose Modality-Contrastive Preference Optimization (MCPO), a highly sample-efficient two-stage length-compression method that requires fewer than 900 training samples. In the compression stage, we introduce a step-level Normalized Cross-Modal Mutual Information (NCMI) pruning algorithm, which automatically identifies and removes visual-independent reasoning steps by comparing the reasoning discrepancies between with-image and no-image contexts. This significantly reduces redundancy and hallucinatory content in the reasoning chains. In the alignment stage, the model first undergoes supervised fine-tuning to achieve domain-adaptive initialization, followed by optimization using an asymmetric multimodal length-controlled preference loss. This objective adopts a highly nonlinear odds-ratio formulation that provides steep gradients in the with-image context to reinforce length constraints for preferred trajectories, while applying a scaled, flat-gradient linear difference in the no-image context to maintain modality consistency, thereby achieving stable cross-modal preference alignment. Extensive experiments on mainstream base models such as Qwen3-VL-Thinking show that our method can reduce CoT length by up to 69.5% and achieve up to 3.34x end-to-end inference speedup while preserving original accuracy.

ARXIV 2609.04947 ↗
cs.CV

Compositional Reward Models for Conditional Medical Image Generation

作者Aayush Kumar Tyagi, Prathosh A. P., Mausam

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Acquiring high quality annotated medical image data is critical for training deep learning models; however, annotation is expensive, time consuming, and requires domain expertise. Conditional diffusion models, such as ControlNet, offer an alternative by generating images conditioned on semantic masks and text. However, existing approaches fail to capture fine grained properties (e.g., intensity and texture), as well as semantic consistency expected by domain experts, limiting their effectiveness for downstream tasks. Recent attempts to address these issues using reinforcement learning fine-tuning remain limited due to the reliance on a single scalar reward, which conflates diverse failure modes and provides weak corrective signals. We propose PRISM, a Compositional Reward Model (CRM) framework for conditional medical image generation. Instead of assigning a single reward, we decompose image quality into verifier grounded stages, each evaluating a distinct aspect of correctness from fine to coarse properties, including low level attributes (intensity and texture), structural alignment with conditioning inputs, and high level semantic fidelity. These stage wise rewards are composed through a Hierarchical Constrained Propagation (HCP) mechanism that enforces a fine to coarse notion of correctness, ensuring that lower level deficiencies are resolved before higher level rewards are accrued, preventing easier objectives from masking critical failures. We evaluate PRISM across three datasets spanning diverse medical imaging tasks: PanNuke (multi-class cell segmentation), CeDeM (villi/crypt detection and measurement), and ISIC (skin lesion classification). Training downstream models with data generated by PRISM yields improvements over closest baselines, including a 2.3% increase in mDice on PanNuke, a 8.5% reduction in Mean Relative Error (MRE) on CeDeM, and increases ISIC F1 by 5.9%.

ARXIV 2609.05028 ↗
cs.AI

MedFlow: Class-Aware Multi-Scale Generation for Medical Time-Series Synthesis

作者Yanhao Huang, Shibo Feng, Wanjin Feng, Peilin Zhao, Chunyan Miao

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Synthetic medical time-series generation can alleviate data scarcity and support the development of reliable clinical prediction models. However, existing methods mainly focus on matching the overall distribution and temporal dynamics of real data, which does not necessarily ensure strong downstream utility on imbalanced medical datasets. Clinically informative patterns often occur at heterogeneous temporal scales, while rare minority-class characteristics can be obscured by dominant population patterns. To address these challenges, we propose MedFlow, a class-aware multi-scale flow matching framework for medical time-series synthesis. MedFlow employs a vector-quantized multi-scale tokenizer to represent medical sequences at complementary temporal resolutions, capturing both coarse clinical trends and fine-grained dynamics. We further introduce Token Marginal Guidance, which incorporates class-conditional token statistics directly into the flow matching process to steer generation toward class-specific regions of the learned tokens. This mechanism strengthens minority-class patterns, while preserving the global and tail distributions of real data. Experiments on four public datasets covering electronic health records, EEG, and ECG signals demonstrate that MedFlow consistently outperforms recent state-of-the-art diffusion-based baselines across downstream prediction tasks. On average, it improves AUPRC by 5.8%, reduces Context-FID by 88.6%, and achieves 3.8$\times$ higher sampling throughput.

ARXIV 2609.04804 ↗
cs.AI

CPR-IE:A Compression-Prediction-Resource Intelligence Efficiency Metric

作者Xiantao Jiang

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Comparing intelligent systems under deployment constraints requires more than predictiveaccuracy.This paper develops Compression-Prediction-Resource Intelligence Efficiency (CPR-IE) as a protocol-relative ordering by representational economy, predictive quality, and resourceburden. The analysis separates two questions-how raw resource consumption is represented, andhow the resulting attributes are aggregated. Proportional-increment composition uniquely yieldslogarithmic cumulative burden, and context-independent ratio response yields power responsesto compression, prediction, and burden; with reference normalization the representation is I(C,P,T).We prove Pareto consistency, unit invariance, boundary behavior, trade-off identities, ranking-stability regions, and cross-task aggregation. A translog parent model makes interaction restrictions explicit, and further results establish cardinal and ordinal identification, sub-Gaussianfinite-sample ranking guarantees, robust selection under exponent uncertainty, and deterministicregret bounds. Minimum description length, algorithmic complexity, proper scoring rules, varia-tional inference, and Landauer's principle motivate measurement choices but do not entail theformula. CPR-IE is a constructed efficiency representation, not a universal law or a definition ofintelligence itself.

ARXIV 2609.04809 ↗
cs.IR

MURAL: Multimodal Uncertainty-aware Recommendation via Adaptive edge Learning

作者Ahmad Mousavi, Majid Alikhani, Yeon-Chang Lee, Roberto Corizzo, Yeganeh Abdollahinejad

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Multimodal Graph Neural Networks have become standard for recommendation by augmenting sparse interaction data with content features. Yet current architectures face two bottlenecks: structural rigidity, from a reliance on static precomputed similarity graphs that cannot adapt to evolving preferences; and semantic fragility, where noisy modality signals are indiscriminately fused, distorting the collaborative signal. We propose MURAL (Multimodal Uncertainty-aware Recommendation via Adaptive edge Learning), a unified framework that shifts multimodal recommendation from fixed structural augmentation to dynamic topology discovery. To address structural rigidity, an Adaptive Edge Learner combines a differentiable retrieval-augmented strategy with an approximate nearest neighbor search to discover latent item-item correlations that are both semantically adaptive and computationally scalable (O(NlogN)). To address semantic fragility, an Uncertainty-Aware Fusion module models the aleatoric uncertainty of heterogeneous modalities, dynamically down-weighting unreliable features while prioritizing high-confidence signals as a defense against cross-modal noise. We further employ a contrastive teacher-student alignment that anchors modality-specific representations to stable behavioral signals, ensuring optimization stability without gradient leakage. Experiments on large-scale benchmarks including TikTok and Amazon show that MURAL significantly surpasses both structural and generative state-of-the-art baselines, achieving superior accuracy while offering interpretability through domain-specific modality dominance and robustness under extreme data corruption.

ARXIV 2609.04574 ↗
cs.LG

Coarse-Graining Hidden Representations: Unsupervised Neuron Selection via Mapping Entropy

作者Margherita Mele, Andrea Castagna, Roberto Menichetti, Raffaello Potestio, Alessandro Ingrosso

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Overparameterized neural networks carry far more hidden units than a task nominally requires, raising the question of which neurons are essential and whether that distinction is legible in the representation itself, without labels or gradients. We cast neuron selection as the problem of coarse-graining the hidden layer by retaining a subset of its neurons, and score each putative selection by the mapping entropy (ME). This quantity measures the loss of discriminatory power inherent in discarding part of the network neurons, and the selection that minimises the ME is taken as particularly informative. This criterion is fully unsupervised, in that it depends only on hidden-activation statistics. In teacher-student networks, ME optimisation recovers the minimal teacher-consistent representation and retains extra units in proportion to the hidden layer's residual variability; in a non-linear Gaussian process task, it selects coherent functional-class mappings whose preferred class shifts across training. On this task and on translation-augmented MNIST, ME-selected subnetworks outperform random subsets of equal size, most clearly under strong compression - linking configurational distinguishability to predictive performance.

ARXIV 2609.05126 ↗
cs.AI

RISE: Recursive Improvement via Self-Extrapolating Policy Distillation

作者Yang Li, Semih Yavuz, Shafiq Joty

展开完整摘要收起摘要

On-policy distillation (OPD) provides dense, per-token supervision for language model post-training, but its effectiveness is bottlenecked by teacher quality: external teachers suffer from distribution mismatch, while self-distillation with privileged conditioning is limited by in-context learning capacity. We propose RISE (Recursive Improvement via Self-Extrapolating Policy Distillation), which constructs a synthetic teacher directly from the model's own RLVR training trajectory. By extrapolating the displacement between the current checkpoint and a trailing anchor---in parameter space or output logit space---RISE converts a sparse outcome-induced parameter update into a dense token-level target, without any external model or privileged conditioning. RISE combines RLVR and OPD in a complementary loop: outcome rewards ground the extrapolation toward correct reasoning, while the extrapolated teacher refines token-level decisions. Moreover, since the teacher is refreshed every iteration as the student improves, distillation becomes a recursive improvement mechanism rather than a one-shot compression step. Experiments spanning mathematical reasoning, multi-domain STEM, code generation, and multi-turn agentic tasks show that RISE outperforms RLVR-only training and on-policy self-distillation across all settings.

ARXIV 2609.05295 ↗
cs.LG

Distill Globally, Adapt Locally: Reasoning Distillation and Product-Type Test-Time Training for Scalable Trade-Up Recommendation

作者Siliang Liu, Mohammad Ghasemi, Sapan Patel, Amin Banitalebi-Dehkordi

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Trade-up recommendation identifies higher-quality alternatives that preserve a customer's purchase intent while offering upgraded benefits. Large language models (LLMs) can reason about such distinctions, but applying them directly to hundreds of millions of product pairs is operationally impractical. We introduce a two-level framework that distills LLM reasoning into an efficient non-generative student and adapts its decision boundary to product-type-specific trade-up criteria. At Level 1, a retrieval-augmented few-shot LLM teacher generates structured relation labels and natural-language rationales. These rationales supervise a compact embedding-pair classifier through alignment and contrastive objectives; at inference, the student uses only two precomputed 768-dimensional product embeddings, with no LLM calls or text generation. On a fixed human-annotated benchmark of 8,352 pairs, a 15.5M-parameter four-class reasoning-distilled student achieves AUC 0.924 (95% CI [0.918, 0.929]), compared with 0.912 for the four-class label-only student. At Level 2, product-type test-time training (PT-TTT) uses few-shot demonstrations to optimize lightweight category-specific adapters over the frozen student. PT-TTT improves AUC from 0.924 to 0.941 and average precision from 0.920 to 0.940. On a 100K-pair proxy catalog, the distilled student on a single eight-GPU machine is approximately 5,000x faster and 10,000x lower in estimated cost than direct LLM inference.

ARXIV 2609.05363 ↗
cs.RO

Coupled Control and Wireless World Models for Resilient Remote Robotic Control

作者H. P. Madushanka, Sumudu Samarakoon, Mehdi Bennis

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Remote robotic systems operating over wireless networks must maintain reliable control despite limited communication resources, changing channel conditions, and environmental disturbances.However, continuously transmitting high-dimensional sensory observations, such as camera images, increases communication overhead and energy consumption while reducing robustness under unreliable connectivity.To address these challenges, this paper proposes a resilient communication-aware remote robotic control framework based on coupled control and wireless Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) world models that jointly capture robot dynamics and wireless channel evolution from visual observations and a combination of raw and structured radio frequency (RF) representations based on spectrograms and Persistence Images(PIs).The learned latent representations enable predictive communication scheduling by jointly forecasting future robot states and wireless conditions, thereby reducing unnecessary uplink transmissions while maintaining reliable control performance.Furthermore, an adaptive resilience mechanism detects latent prediction discrepancies and efficiently adapts perception embeddings to accommodate wireless and visual environmental changes without retraining the complete control policy.The proposed framework is evaluated in a synchronized Gazebo-Robot Operating System (ROS)-Sionna robot-wireless simulation environment under diverse wireless propagation and perception perturbations.Experimental results demonstrate significant improvements in communication efficiency, robustness, and resilience while maintaining navigation performance compared with conventional Proportional Integral Derivative (PID), model-free Deep Q-Network (DQN), and predictive approaches based on Vision Transformers(ViTs).

ARXIV 2609.04851 ↗
cs.CV

LensStyle: Learning the Optical Aesthetics for Controllable Stylized Lens Effect Rendering

作者Yachuan Huang, Liwen Xiao, Liao Shen, Qiwen Wang, Huiqiang Sun, Zhiyu Pan, Zhiguo Cao

展开完整摘要收起摘要

The visual aesthetics of photographs are deeply influenced by lens characteristics such as aperture shape, optical vignetting and optical diffraction, which together define a camera's unique optical style. Existing lens effect rendering methods primarily focus on accurately simulating the blur transition from small to large apertures but overlook the stylistic aspects of lens effects. As a result, they fail to produce diverse bokeh effects under large apertures or capture distinctive photographic phenomena such as starbursts that emerge under small apertures. In this work, we introduce LensStyle, a unified framework for controllable stylized lens effect rendering that explicitly models lens aesthetics through joint continuous-discrete control. Our model incorporates a Dual-Path Controller that disentangles continuous optical parameter modulation (e.g., focus distance and blur strength) from discrete lens-style conditioning (e.g., circular, polygonal, donut, cat-eye, and starburst effects), enabling fine-grained, interpretable, and physically grounded lens manipulation within a single unified framework. To support model training, we curate a comprehensive MultiLens dataset containing multi-lens image pairs synthesized under real optical constraints. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LensStyle achieves superior realism, controllability, and aesthetic quality compared with existing lens effect rendering approaches and diffusion-based image editing models, advancing computational photography toward multiple-lens-style simulation.

ARXIV 2609.04939 ↗
cs.CV

InterSing: Explicit Interaction Dynamics for 3D Duet Singing Animation and Beyond

作者Yihan Zhou, Zikai Huang, Yuyang Yu, Xuemiao Xu, Cheng Xu, Shengfeng He

展开完整摘要收起摘要

We present InterSing, a framework for generating realistic 3D head animations for duet singing performances. Unlike solo singing, duet performance requires each singer to balance individual expressiveness with intermittent interaction at musically salient moments, such as phrase boundaries, synchronized rhythms, and call-and-response passages. Because these interactions are sparse and rhythm-dependent, existing audio-driven animation methods and conversational interaction models do not adequately capture their structure. Our key insight is that duet coordination can be represented as a time-varying signal that reflects how strongly performers engage with one another throughout a song. Based on this observation, we introduce interaction logits, an interpretable latent representation that models the degree of cross-performer engagement at each time step. We learn these logits using weak supervision and use them to condition an interaction-aware diffusion model jointly driven by audio features and interaction dynamics. This formulation enables unified multi-mode generation, spanning independent motion, coordinated behavior, and smooth transitions between them. Experiments show that InterSing generates realistic and expressive singing head animations with stronger coordination and musical alignment than existing methods, while preserving each performer's characteristic motion style. We further demonstrate that the same formulation generalizes to multi-singer performances and provides intuitive control over when and how performers engage.

ARXIV 2609.04903 ↗
cs.CV

Learning 3D Editing without Paired Supervision via Generative Prior Distillation

作者Hao Wen, Weibin Yun, Hongxing Fan, Haotian Lu, Rui Chen, Zehuan Huang, Lu Sheng

展开完整摘要收起摘要

Instruction-guided 3D editing is essential for interactive content creation, yet it faces a significant bottleneck: the severe scarcity of high-quality paired training data. Existing approaches attempt to bypass this by either relying on slow test-time optimization or training on pseudo-pairs constructed via complex pipelines, which often introduce structural drift and geometric artifacts. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that learns feed-forward 3D editing without paired 3D supervision via Generative Prior Distillation. Instead of relying on ground-truth 3D pairs, our core idea is to distill visual, semantic, and geometric knowledge from powerful foundation models directly into a 3D editing model. Specifically, through a differentiable rendering pipeline, we supervise the 3D representation using two complementary signals: a 2D visual prior from an image editing model at the main editing view, and a semantic prior from a Vision-Language Model at novel views to ensure strict instruction following and source identity preservation. Crucially, to address the geometric collapse and multi-view inconsistencies inherent in 2D projection supervision, we introduce a 3D-aware Distribution Matching regularization. Acting as a geometric prior, this term operates in the 3D latent space, constraining the edited output to remain within the manifold of realistic 3D assets defined by a pretrained image to 3D teacher model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves superior instruction fidelity and cross-view consistency, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art baselines. Our project is available at: https://github.com/thiamine128/PriorEdit3D.

ARXIV 2609.04942 ↗