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KV-cache quantizers usually optimize storage-space reconstruction, even though attention reads keys through logits and values through attention-weighted readout. We argue that persistent cache error should be measured in model-visible coordinates. For keys, the visible object is score error modulo constant shifts; this yields HeadQ, a key-side method that stores a low-rank residual side code in a calibration-learned query basis and applies it as an additive logit correction. For values, fixed-attention readout gives an $A^2$-weighted token-distortion surrogate. Across six models, Fisher/score-space error predicts attention KL far better than raw key MSE; same-budget counterexamples, null-space interventions, query-PCA controls, and wrong-sign HeadQ falsify storage-MSE alternatives. Matched Pythia checkpoints localize the main anomaly to a small-model low-entropy route-flip boundary. In K-only WikiText-103 decode experiments with dense values, HeadQ removes roughly $84$--$94%$ of the excess perplexity on the strongest 2-bit rows; in an auxiliary full-KV 2-bit composition, HeadQ plus an $A^2$ value policy improves all six models.

Many-Shot In-Context Learning (ICL) has emerged as a promising paradigm, leveraging extensive examples to unlock the reasoning potential of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing methods typically rely on a predetermined, fixed number of shots. This static approach often fails to adapt to the varying difficulty of different queries, leading to either insufficient context or interference from noise. Furthermore, the prohibitive computational and memory costs of long contexts severely limit Many-Shot's feasibility. To address the above limitations, we propose AdapShot, which dynamically optimizes shot counts and leverages KV cache reuse for efficient inference. Specifically, we design a probe-based evaluation mechanism that utilizes output entropy to determine the optimal number of shots. To bypass the redundant prefilling computation during both the probing and inference phases, we incorporate a semantics-aware KV cache reuse strategy. Within this reuse strategy, to address positional encoding incompatibilities, we introduce a decoupling and re-encoding method that enables the flexible reordering of cached key-value pairs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AdapShot achieves an average performance gain of around 10% and a 4.64x speedup compared to state-of-the-art DBSA.

Video Temporal Grounding (VTG) faces a cross-modal semantic gap that often leads to background features being incorrectly aligned with the query, while directly matching the query to moments results in insufficient discriminability and consistency of temporal semantics. To address this issue, we propose MLLM-Assisted Semantic-Relational Consistent Alignment (MASRA), a training-time MLLM-based optimization framework for VTG. MASRA leverages an MLLM during training to produce two forms of textual priors, namely event-level descriptions with temporal spans and clip-level captions, and instantiates two MLLM-assisted alignments. Event Semantic Temporal Alignment (ESTA) aligns temporal context with event semantics to explicitly strengthen the correspondence between semantics and temporal events and improve span-level separability. Local Relational Consistency Alignment (LRCA) constructs a textual relation matrix derived from clip-level captions and aligns it with the temporal feature similarity matrix in the model, enhancing temporal consistency while capturing local structural information. MASRA includes two simple supporting modules, semantic-guided enhancement and second-order relational attention, to better utilize the learned semantic context and relational structure. Moreover, we introduce Decoupled Alignment Interaction (DAI) with a context-aware codebook to adaptively absorb query-irrelevant semantics and alleviate the cross-modal gap. The MLLM is only invoked during training and is not used at inference. Extensive experiments show that MASRA outperforms existing methods, and ablation studies validate its effectiveness.

Most evaluations of autonomous driving policies under adversarial conditions are conducted in simulation, due to cost efficiency and the absence of physical risk. However, purely virtual testing fails to capture structural inconsistencies, supervision constraints, and state-representation effects that arise in real-world data and fundamentally shape policy robustness. This work presents an offline trajectory-learning and adversarial robustness evaluation framework grounded in real-world intersection driving data. Within a controlled data contract, we train and compare three trajectory-learning paradigms: Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP)-based Behavior Cloning (BC), Transformer-based object-tokenized BC, and inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) formulated within a Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning (GAIL) framework. Models are evaluated using Average Displacement Error (ADE) and Final Displacement Error (FDE). Inference-time robustness is assessed by subjecting trained policies to gradient-based adversarial perturbations across multiple intersection scenarios, yielding a structured robustness evaluation matrix. Results show that state-structure design and architectural inductive biases critically influence adversarial stability, leading to markedly different robustness profiles despite comparable nominal prediction accuracy (ADE < 0.08). Inference-time Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) attacks induce final displacement errors of up to approximately 8 meters. The proposed framework establishes a scalable benchmark for studying offline trajectory learning and adversarial robustness in real-world autonomous driving settings.

Engagement estimation from face video remains challenging because facial evidence is often incomplete, labeled data are limited, and engagement annotations are subjective. We present PriorNet, a prior-guided framework that injects task-relevant priors at three stages of the pipeline: preprocessing, model adaptation, and objective design. PriorNet converts face-detection failures into explicit zero-frame placeholders so that missing-face events remain represented in the input sequence, adapts a frozen Self-supervised Video Facial Affect Perceiver (SVFAP) backbone through a Prior-guided Low-Rank Adaptation module (Prior-LoRA) for parameter-efficient specialization, and trains with a Dirichlet-evidential, uncertainty-weighted objective under hard-label supervision. We evaluate PriorNet on EngageNet, DAiSEE, DREAMS, and PAFE using each dataset's native evaluation protocol. Across these benchmarks, PriorNet improves over the strongest listed prior reference within each dataset's evaluation framing, while component ablations on EngageNet and DAiSEE indicate that the gains arise from complementary contributions of preprocessing, adaptation, and objective-level priors. These results support explicit prior injection as a useful design principle for face-video engagement estimation under the benchmark conditions studied in this work.

The de facto approach in video object-centric learning maintains temporal consistency through learned dynamics modules that predict future object representations, called slots. We demonstrate that these predictors function as expensive approximations of discrete correspondence problems. Modern self-supervised vision backbones already encode instance-discriminative features that distinguish objects reliably. Exploiting these features eliminates the need for learned temporal prediction. We introduce Grounded Correspondence, a framework that replaces learned transition functions with deterministic bipartite matching. Slots initialize from salient regions in frozen backbone features. Frame-to-frame identity is maintained through Hungarian matching on slot representations. The approach requires zero learnable parameters for temporal modeling yet achieves competitive performance on MOVi-D, MOVi-E, and YouTube-VIS. Project page: https://magenta-sherbet-85b101.netlify.app/

Robotic Mobile Fulfillment Systems (RMFS) rely on mobile robots for automated inventory transportation, coordinating order allocation and robot scheduling to enhance warehousing efficiency. However, optimizing RMFS is challenging due to strict real-time constraints and the strong coupling of multi-phase decisions. Existing methods either decompose the problem into isolated sub-tasks to guarantee responsiveness at the cost of global optimality, or rely on computationally expensive global optimization models that are unsuitable for dynamic industrial environments. To bridge this gap, we propose SOAR, a unified Deep Reinforcement Learning framework for real-time joint optimization. SOAR transforms order allocation and robot scheduling into a unified process by utilizing soft order allocations as observations. We formulate this as an Event-Driven Markov Decision Process, enabling the agent to perform simultaneous scheduling in response to asynchronous system events. Technically, we employ a Heterogeneous Graph Transformer to encode the warehouse state and integrate phased domain knowledge. Additionally, we incorporate a reward shaping strategy to address sparse feedback in long-horizon tasks. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world industrial datasets, in collaboration with Geekplus, demonstrate that SOAR reduces global makespan by 7.5% and average order completion time by 15.4% with sub-100ms latency. Furthermore, sim-to-real deployment confirms its practical viability and significant performance gains in production environments. The code is available at https://github.com/200815147/SOAR.

Video vision-language models (VLMs) keep paying for visual state the stream already told us was stable. The factory wall did not move, but most VLM pipelines still hand the model dense RGB frames or a fresh prefix again. We study that waste as training-free anti-recomputation: reuse state when validation says it survives, and buy fresh evidence when the scene, query, or cache topology requires it. The largest measured win is after ingest. On frozen Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct-4bit, adaptive same-video follow-up reuse preserves paired choices and correctness on a 93-query VideoMME breadth setting while reducing follow-up latency by 14.90-35.92x. The first query is still cold; the win starts when later questions reuse the same video state. Stress tests bound the result: repeated-question schedules hold through 50 turns, while dense-answer-anchored prompt variation separates conservative fixed K=1 repair from faster aggressive policies that drift. Fresh-video pruning is smaller but real. C-VISION skips timed vision-tower work before the first answer is generated. On Gemma 4-E4B-4bit, the clean 32f short cell reaches 1.316x first-query speedup with no paired drift or parse failures on 20 items; Qwen shows the fidelity/speed boundary. Stage-share ceiling (C-CEILING) is the accounting guardrail: a component speedup becomes an end-to-end speedup only in proportion to the wall-clock share it accelerates, so C-VISION and after-ingest follow-up reuse do not multiply. Candidate C-STREAM remains a native-rate target, not a headline result here. The broader direction is VLM-native media that expose change, motion, uncertainty, object state, sensor time, and active tiles directly, so models do not have to rediscover the world from dense RGB every frame.

Learning robotic manipulation from human videos is a promising solution to the data bottleneck in robotics, but the distribution shift between humans and robots remains a critical challenge. Existing approaches often produce entangled representations, where task-relevant information is coupled with human-specific kinematics, limiting their adaptability. We propose a generative framework for cross-embodiment video editing that directly addresses this by learning explicitly disentangled task and embodiment representations. Our method factorizes a demonstration video into two orthogonal latent spaces by enforcing a dual contrastive objective: it minimizes mutual information between the spaces to ensure independence while maximizing intra-space consistency to create stable representations. A parameter-efficient adapter injects these latent codes into a frozen video diffusion model, enabling the synthesis of a coherent robot execution video from a single human demonstration, without requiring paired cross-embodiment data. Experiments show our approach generates temporally consistent and morphologically accurate robot demonstrations, offering a scalable solution to leverage internet-scale human video for robot learning.

Video generation models internalize physical realism as their prior. Anime deliberately violates physics: smears, impact frames, chibi shifts; and its thousands of coexisting artistic conventions yield no single "physics of anime" a model can absorb. Physics-biased models therefore flatten the artistry that defines the medium or collapse under its stylistic variance. We present AniMatrix, a video generation model that targets artistic rather than physical correctness through a dual-channel conditioning mechanism and a three-step transition: redefine correctness, override the physics prior, and distinguish art from failure. First, a Production Knowledge System encodes anime as a structured taxonomy of controllable production variables (Style, Motion, Camera, VFX), and AniCaption infers these variables from pixels as directorial directives. A trainable tag encoder preserves the field-value structure of this taxonomy while a frozen T5 encoder handles free-form narrative; dual-path injection (cross-attention for fine-grained control, AdaLN modulation for global enforcement) ensures categorical directives are never diluted by open-ended text. Second, a style-motion-deformation curriculum transitions the model from near-physical motion to full anime expressiveness. Third, deformation-aware preference optimization with a domain-specific reward model separates intentional artistry from pathological collapse. On an anime-specific human evaluation with five production dimensions scored by professional animators, AniMatrix ranks first on four of five, with the largest gains over Seedance-Pro 1.0 on Prompt Understanding (+0.70, +22.4 percent) and Artistic Motion (+0.55, +16.9 percent). We will publicly release the AniMatrix model weights and inference code.

Distillation-based acceleration has become foundational for making autoregressive streaming video diffusion models practical, with distribution matching distillation (DMD) as the de facto choice. Existing methods, however, train the student to match the teacher's output indiscriminately, treating every rollout, frame, and pixel as equally reliable supervision. We argue that this caps distilled quality, since it overlooks two complementary axes of variance in DMD supervision: Inter-Reliability across student rollouts whose supervision varies in reliability, and Intra-Perplexity across spatial regions and temporal frames that contribute unequally to where quality can still be improved. The objective thus conflates two questions under a uniform weight: whether to learn from each rollout, and where to concentrate optimization within it. To address this, we propose Stream-R1, a Reliability-Perplexity Aware Reward Distillation framework that adaptively reweights the distillation objective at both rollout and spatiotemporal-element levels through a single shared reward-guided mechanism. At the Inter-Reliability level, Stream-R1 rescales each rollout's loss by an exponential of a pretrained video reward score, so that rollouts with reliable supervision dominate optimization. At the Intra-Perplexity level, it back-propagates the same reward model to extract per-pixel gradient saliency, which is factored into spatial and temporal weights that concentrate optimization pressure on regions and frames where refinement yields the largest expected gain. An adaptive balancing mechanism prevents any single quality axis from dominating across visual quality, motion quality, and text alignment. Stream-R1 attains consistent improvements on all three dimensions over distillation baselines on standard streaming video generation benchmarks, without architectural modification or additional inference cost.

Existing robot video world models are typically trained with low-level objectives such as reconstruction and perceptual similarity, which are poorly aligned with the capabilities that matter most for robot decision making, including instruction following, manipulation success, and physical plausibility. They also suffer from error accumulation in long-horizon autoregressive prediction. We present RoboAlign-R1, a framework that combines reward-aligned post-training with stabilized long-horizon inference for robot video world models. We construct RobotWorldBench, a benchmark of 10,000 annotated video-instruction pairs collected from four robot data sources, and train a multimodal teacher judge, RoboAlign-Judge, to provide fine-grained six-dimensional evaluation of generated videos. We then distill the teacher into a lightweight student reward model for efficient reinforcement-learning-based post-training. To reduce long-horizon rollout drift, we further introduce Sliding Window Re-encoding (SWR), a training-free inference strategy that periodically refreshes the generation context. Under our in-domain evaluation protocol, RoboAlign-R1 improves the aggregate six-dimension score by 10.1% over the strongest baseline, including gains of 7.5% on Manipulation Accuracy and 4.6% on Instruction Following; these ranking improvements are further supported by an external VLM-based cross-check and a blinded human study. Meanwhile, SWR improves long-horizon prediction quality with only about 1% additional latency, yielding a 2.8% gain in SSIM and a 9.8% reduction in LPIPS. Together, these results show that reward-aligned post-training and stabilized long-horizon decoding improve task consistency, physical realism, and long-horizon prediction quality in robot video world models.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have broad potential in privacy-sensitive domains such as healthcare and finance, yet strict data-sharing constraints render centralized training infeasible. Federated Learning mitigates this issue by enabling decentralized training, but practical deployments face challenges due to client heterogeneity in computational resources, application requirements, and model architectures. Under extreme model and data heterogeneity, replacing parameter aggregation with preference-based collaboration offers a more suitable interface, as it eliminates the need for direct parameter or data exchange. Motivated by this, we propose MoR, a federated alignment framework that combines GRPO with Mixture-of-Rewards for heterogeneous VLMs. In MoR, each client locally trains a reward model from local preference annotations, capturing specific evaluation signals without exposing raw data. To combine these heterogeneous supervision signals, MoR introduces a Mixture-of-Rewards mechanism with learned routing, which adaptively fuses client reward models according to the input and alignment objective. The server then optimizes a base VLM using GRPO with a KL penalty to a reference model, enabling preference alignment without requiring client models to share architectures or parameters. Experiments on diverse public vision-language benchmarks demonstrate that MoR consistently outperforms federated alignment baselines in generalization and cross-client adaptability. Our approach provides a scalable solution for privacy-preserving alignment of heterogeneous VLMs under federated settings.

Large language models (LLMs) employ safety mechanisms to prevent harmful outputs, yet these defenses primarily rely on semantic pattern matching. We show that encoding harmful prompts as coherent mathematical problems — using formalisms such as set theory, formal logic, and quantum mechanics — bypasses these filters at high rates, achieving 46%--56% average attack success across eight target models and two established benchmarks. Crucially, the effectiveness depends not on mathematical notation itself, but on whether a helper LLM deeply reformulates the harmful content into a genuine mathematical problem: rule-based encodings that apply mathematical formatting without such reformulation perform no better than unencoded baselines. We introduce a novel Formal Logic encoding that achieves attack success comparable to Set Theory, demonstrating that this vulnerability generalizes across mathematical formalisms. Additional experiments with repeat post-processing confirm that these attacks are robust to simple prompt augmentation. Notably, newer models (GPT-5, GPT-5-Mini) show substantially greater robustness than older models, though they remain vulnerable. Our findings highlight fundamental gaps in current safety frameworks and motivate defenses that reason about mathematical structure rather than surface-level semantics.

As quantum computing transitions from theoretical experimentation to its practical application, the reliability of quantum software has become a critical bottleneck. Traditional static analysis techniques for quantum programs, primarily rule-based linters, are increasingly inadequate; they struggle to keep pace with rapidly evolving APIs and fail to capture complex, context-dependent quantum programming problems. This results in high maintenance overhead and limited detection capabilities. In this paper, we introduce LintQ-LLM+CoT and LintQ-LLM+RAG, novel approaches that redefine the detection of quantum programming problems by employing Large Language Models (LLMs) specialized, respectively, via Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting and a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system that grounds the model's reasoning in a curated knowledge base of verified quantum programming problems and best practices. We conducted a rigorous and manual comparative evaluation against the state-of-the-art rule-based tool, LintQ, using a corpus of 55 Qiskit programs. Our results show that LLM-based approaches, with and without RAG, outperform LintQ in terms of quantum programming problems detection correctness (precision) and completeness (recall). Overall, LLM-based approaches were more effective than LintQ (F1-score equal to 0.70 and 0.68 vs. 0.41). Furthermore, the RAG-enhanced variant demonstrated a slightly superior precision, effectively reducing false positives. Our findings suggest that LLMs provide a scalable and adaptive foundation for the next generation of linters in quantum software engineering.

Representation alignment has recently emerged as an effective paradigm for accelerating Diffusion Transformer training. Despite their success, existing alignment methods typically impose a fixed supervision target or a fixed alignment granularity throughout the entire denoising trajectory, whether the guidance is provided by external vision encoders, internal self-representations, or VAE-derived features. We argue that such timestep-agnostic alignment is suboptimal because the useful granularity of representation supervision changes systematically with the signal-to-noise ratio. In high-noise regimes, diffusion models benefit more from coarse semantic and layout-level anchoring, whereas in low-noise regimes, the training signal should emphasize spatially detailed and structurally faithful refinement. This non-stationary alignment behavior creates a representational mismatch for static single-level supervisors. To address this issue, we propose Adaptive Hierarchical Prior Alignment (AHPA), a lightweight alignment framework that exploits the hierarchical representations naturally embedded in the frozen VAE encoder. Instead of using only a single compressed latent as the alignment target, AHPA extracts multi-level VAE features that provide complementary priors ranging from local geometry and spatial topology to coarse semantic layout. A timestep-conditioned Dynamic Router adaptively selects and weights these hierarchical priors along the denoising trajectory, thereby synchronizing the alignment granularity with the model's evolving training needs. Extensive experiments show that AHPA improves convergence and generation quality over baselines and incurs no additional inference cost while avoiding external encoder supervision during training.

In quantum machine learning (QML), classical data are often encoded as quantum pure states and processed directly as quantum representations, motivating representation-level generative modeling that samples new quantum states from an underlying pure-state ensemble rather than re-preparing them from perturbed classical inputs. However, extending score-based diffusion models with well-defined reverse-time samplers to quantum pure-state ensembles remains challenging, due to the non-Euclidean geometry of the complex projective space $\mathbb{CP}^{d-1}$ and the intractability of transition densities. We propose Stochastic Schrödinger Diffusion Models (SSDMs), an intrinsic score-based generative framework on $\mathbb{CP}^{d-1}$ endowed with the Fubini--Study (FS) metric. SSDMs formulate a forward Riemannian diffusion with a stochastic Schrödinger equation (SSE) realization, and derive reverse-time dynamics driven by the Riemannian score $\nabla_{\mathrm{FS}} \log p_t$. To enable training without analytic transition densities, we introduce a local-time objective based on a local Euclidean Ornstein--Uhlenbeck approximation in FS normal coordinates, yielding an analytic teacher score mapped back to the manifold. Experiments show that SSDMs faithfully capture target pure-state ensemble statistics, including observable moments, overlap-kernel MMD, and entanglement measures, and that SSDM-generated quantum representations improve downstream QML generalization via representation-level data augmentation.

Cross-lingual topic modeling aims to discover shared semantic structures across languages, yet existing models depend on sparse bilingual resources and often yield incoherent or weakly aligned topics. Recent LLM-based refinements improve interpretability but are costly, document-level, and prone to hallucination, with prior white-box approaches requiring inaccessible token probabilities. We propose LLM-XTM, a framework that integrates LLM-guided topic refinement with self-consistency uncertainty quantification, enabling black-box, stable, and scalable enhancement of cross-lingual topic models. Experiments on multilingual corpora show that LLM-XTM achieves superior topic coherence and alignment while reducing reliance on bilingual dictionaries and expensive LLM calls.

Evaluating autonomous data analysis agents requires testing their ability to perform exploratory analysis in underexplored data environments. However, many existing benchmarks emphasize final answer accuracy in prior-guided data settings and provide limited support for reasoning process evaluation. We introduce DataClaw, a process-oriented benchmark for exploratory real-world data analysis. DataClaw contains approximately 2.06 million real-world records across enterprise, industry and policy domains, with native data noise preserved. It further includes 492 cross-domain tasks derived from think-tank consulting scenarios, each annotated with intermediate milestones for process-level evaluation. These annotations allow DataClaw to measure how far an agent progresses and where its reasoning breaks down. Experiments with eight advanced LLMs show that current agents remain far from reliable in this setting, with seven models achieving below 50% overall accuracy. Process analysis further reveals partial progress hidden behind wrong answers and distinct exploration strategies across models. Overall, DataClaw provides a less data constrained diagnostic testbed for probing the capability boundaries of autonomous data-analysis agents.

Healthcare automation is shaped by local procedures and organizational constraints, so agent capabilities rarely transfer unchanged across settings. Agent skills, self-contained directories that package reusable procedures for AI agents, are emerging as a procedural layer for adapting healthcare agents across diverse healthcare settings. We present the first empirical analysis of healthcare agent skills, drawing on 557 healthcare-related skills filtered from 58,159 public skills on ClawHub and annotated along ten dimensions covering function, deployment context, autonomy, and safety. We find that public healthcare skills emphasize patient-facing workflow automation and monitoring rather than the diagnostic and treatment-oriented tasks foregrounded in healthcare-agent research; coverage of the healthcare lifecycle and specialized clinical inputs remains uneven; and general technical risk does not reliably capture clinical risk. These findings position healthcare skills as a procedural layer not yet addressed by current benchmarks and risk frameworks.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed agent-agent and human-agent interaction by enabling software, physical, and simulation agents to communicate and deliberate through natural language. Yet fluent language use does not by itself yield socially intelligible behaviour. Most current systems remain weakly grounded in roles, norms, intentions, and contextual constraints, limiting their capacity for meaningful participation in social environments. This paper develops a conceptual baseline for LLM-enabled social agents by arguing that they should be grounded in role definitions operationalized through persona descriptions. On this basis, we outline research directions for representation, hybrid control, and evaluation. The paper concludes that persona-based role definitions are a necessary foundation for turning language competence into social behaviour.

A semantic gap separates how users describe tasks from how tools are documented. As API ecosystems scale to tens of thousands of endpoints, static retrieval from the initial query alone cannot bridge this gap: the agent's understanding of what it needs evolves during execution, but its tool set does not. We introduce FitText, a training-free framework that makes retrieval dynamic by embedding it directly in the agent's reasoning loop. FitText generates natural-language pseudo-tool descriptions as retrieval probes, refines them iteratively using retrieval feedback, and explores diverse alternatives through stochastic generation. Memetic Retrieval adds evolutionary selection pressure over candidate descriptions, guided by a tool memory that avoids redundant search. On ToolRet (43k tools, 4 domains), FitText improves average retrieval rank from 8.81 to 2.78; on StableToolBench (16,464 APIs), it achieves a 0.73 average pass rate--a 24-point absolute gain over static query retrieval. The gains transfer across base models capable of acting as competent semantic operators; under weaker base models, Memetic's evolutionary search inverts--amplifying noise rather than refining signal--surfacing model capacity as a prerequisite for evolutionary tool exploration.

Multi-agent LLM systems are increasingly used to solve complex tasks through decomposition, debate, specialization, and ensemble reasoning. However, these systems are usually evaluated in terms of robustness: whether performance is preserved under perturbation. This paper studies a different question: whether semantic stress exposes structured variation that could support future antifragile learning. We introduce CAFE, a statistical framework for detecting antifragility-compatible regimes in multi-agent architectures. CAFE models a controlled expected distribution of semantic stressors, reconstructs an architecture-specific observed effective stress distribution from multi-dimensional judge signals, and compares both distributions using a distributional Jensen Gap under a convex stress potential. A positive gap does not imply immediate performance improvement; instead, it indicates a convex-expansive deformation of the observed stress distribution, suggesting that the architecture exposes learnable stress structure. We evaluate CAFE on a banking-risk analysis benchmark with five multi-agent architectures: flat, hierarchical, debate, meta-adaptive, and ensemble. Across all architectures, semantic stress reduces average judged quality by roughly one third. Yet all architectures exhibit positive distributional Jensen Gaps with bootstrap confidence intervals above zero. These results show that immediate quality degradation can coexist with statistically detectable antifragility-compatible stress geometry. CAFE is therefore not an antifragile learner itself, but a measurement layer for identifying when and where antifragility learning may be worth applying.

Text-to-SQL over large analytical databases requires navigating complex schemas, resolving ambiguous queries, and grounding decisions in actual data. Most current systems follow a fixed pipeline where schema elements are retrieved once upfront and the database is only revisited for post-hoc repair, limiting recovery from early mistakes. We present FlexSQL, a text-to-SQL agent whose core design principle is flexible database interaction: the agent can explore schema structure, inspect data values, and run verification queries at any point during reasoning. FlexSQL generates diverse execution plans to cover multiple query interpretations, implements each plan in either SQL or Python depending on the task, and uses a two-tiered repair mechanism that can backtrack from code-level errors to plan-level revisions. On Spider2-Snow, using gpt-oss-120b, FlexSQL achieves a 65.4% score, outperforming strong open-source baselines that use stronger, larger models such as gpt-o3 and DeepSeek-R1. When integrated into a general-purpose coding agent (as skills in Claude Code), our approach yields over 10% relative improvement on Spider2-Snow. Further analysis shows that flexible exploration and flexible execution jointly contribute to the effectiveness of our approach, highlighting flexibility as a key design principle. Our code is available at: https://github.com/StringNLPLAB/FlexSQL

As the ecosystem of Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents expands rapidly, efficient and accurate Agent Discovery becomes a critical bottleneck for large-scale multi-agent collaboration. Existing approaches typically face a dichotomy: either relying on heavy-weight LLMs for intent parsing, leading to prohibitive latency (often exceeding 30 seconds), or using monolithic vector retrieval that sacrifices semantic precision for speed. To bridge this gap, we propose GRAIL (Granular Resonance-based Agent/AI Link), a novel framework achieving sub-400ms discovery latency without compromising accuracy. GRAIL introduces three key innovations: (1) SLM-Enhanced Prediction, replacing the generalized LLM parser with a specialized, fine-tuned Small Language Model (SLM) for millisecond-level capability tag prediction; (2) Pseudo-Document Expansion, augmenting agent descriptions with synthetic queries to enhance semantic density for robust dense retrieval; and (3) MaxSim Resonance, a fine-grained matching mechanism computing maximum similarity between user queries and discrete agent usage examples, effectively mitigating semantic dilution. Validated on AgentTaxo-9K, our new large-scale dataset of 9,240 agents, GRAIL reduces end-to-end discovery latency by over 79$\times$ compared to LLM-parsing baselines, while significantly outperforming traditional vector search in Recall@10. This framework offers a scalable, industrial-grade solution for the real-time ``Internet of Agents."

The promise of Large Language Models in automated software engineering is often measured by functional correctness, overlooking the critical issue of long term maintainability. This paper presents a systematic audit of technical debt in AI-generated software, revealing that AI does not eliminate flaws but rather introduces a distinct machine signature of defects. Our multi-scale analysis, spanning single-file algorithmic tasks and complex, agent generated systems, identifies a fundamental Reasoning-Complexity Trade-off: as models become more capable, they generate increasingly bloated and coupled code. This architectural decay is so pronounced that we establish a Volume-Quality Inverse Law, where code volume is a near perfect predictor of structural degradation. Crucially, we demonstrate that neither functional correctness nor detailed prompting mitigates this decay. These findings challenge the current paradigm of prompt-driven generation, reframing the central problem of AI-based software engineering from one of code generation to one of architectural complexity management. We conclude that future progress depends on equipping agents with explicit architectural foresight to ensure the software they build is not just functional, but also maintainable.

As large language model (LLM)-powered agents are increasingly deployed to perform complex, real-world tasks, they face a growing class of attacks that exploit extended user-agent-environment interactions to pursue malicious objectives improbable in single-turn settings. Such long-horizon threats pose significant risks to the safe deployment of LLM agents in critical domains. In this paper, we present MAGE (Memory As Guardrail Enforcement), a novel defensive framework designed to counter a wide range of long-horizon threats. Inspired by the "shadow stack" abstraction in systems security, MAGE maintains a dedicated, safety-focused agentic memory that distills and retains safety-critical context across the agent's full execution trajectory, leveraging this shadow memory to proactively assess the risk of pending actions prior to their execution. Extensive evaluation demonstrates that MAGE substantially outperforms existing defenses across diverse long-horizon threats in detection accuracy, achieves early-stage detection for the majority of attacks, and introduces only negligible overhead to agent utility. To our best knowledge, MAGE represents the first framework to detect and mitigate long-horizon threats using an agentic memory approach, establishing a new paradigm for this critical challenge and opening promising directions for future research.

Research funding discovery remains fundamentally fragmented: researchers navigate disparate agency portals (e.g., in the United States, NSF, NIH, DARPA, Grants.gov, and many others) with heterogeneous interfaces, search capabilities, and data schemas. We present a compound AI system that unifies this landscape through two tightly coupled components: (1) an aggregation layer that autonomously collects, normalizes, and indexes almost 12,000 federal and nonprofit opportunities from fragmented sources via LLM-equipped browser agents, maintaining a biweekly-updated unified database; and (2) an agentic ReAct-based query processing layer that interprets research context (including from PDF documents) and employs hybrid search combining a structured index with selective web search to retrieve relevant opportunities - while avoiding LLM hallucination. The conversational interface supports iterative refinement through multi-turn interactions, allowing researchers to progressively apply constraints without reformulating their core research description. Results stream in real time with full transparency of intermediate reasoning, enabling appropriate calibration of user trust. Currently used by almost 3,000+ users, our approach demonstrates the feasibility of compound AI in reducing grant discovery time from 30--45 minutes (manual, fragmented portal searches) to under 10 minutes (unified, conversational search).

Modern searches for physics beyond the Standard Model produce rapidly expanding literature containing heterogeneous information, including textual analyses, numerical datasets, and graphical exclusion limits. Integrating these distributed sources remains a time-consuming and manual process for physicists. We present HEP-CoPilot, a retrieval-augmented multi-agent AI framework for the exploration and interpretation of high-energy physics literature. The system unifies textual information from publications, structured experimental data from HEPData, and reconstructed physics plots within a multimodal retrieval and reasoning architecture. By combining retrieval-augmented language models with coordinated agent workflows, it enables evidence-grounded reasoning over experimental analyses and structured interpretation of collider results. We evaluate the framework on recent CMS searches for physics beyond the Standard Model. Case studies show that HEP-CoPilot can retrieve relevant measurements, reconstruct exclusion limits directly from HEPData records, and perform cross-paper comparisons of experimental constraints. This enables consistent, physics-aware comparison across analyses without manual data integration. These results demonstrate that retrieval-augmented AI systems can function as scientific co-pilots for particle physics, facilitating navigation of complex literature, structuring heterogeneous evidence, and accelerating the interpretation pipeline for new physics searches.

Foundation models, particularly large language models, are increasingly integrated into agent architectures for industrial tasks such as decision support, process monitoring, and engineering automation. Yet evidence on their purposes, capabilities, and limitations remains fragmented across domains. This work examines how mature foundation-model-based agent systems are in industrial contexts, how their functional profile differs from conventional agent systems, and which limitations persist. A systematic literature survey following the PRISMA 2020 guideline is presented, screening 2,341 publications and synthesising a corpus of 88 publications through a structured coding scheme. The results show that reported systems are predominantly at prototype and early validation stages (75.0% at TRL 4-6), with deployment-oriented evidence remaining rare (9.1%). Operational goals are most frequently positioned in user assistance, monitoring, and process optimisation, while conventional production-control purposes such as planning and scheduling are less prominent. Compared with an established baseline for industrial agent systems, the capability profile reveals substantial gains in human interaction (+37%) and dealing with uncertainty (+35%), but a pronounced deficit in negotiation (-39%). The most widely reported limitations concern lack of generalization, hallucination and output instability, data scarcity, and inference latency. A working definition of foundation-model-based industrial agents is also proposed, bridging conventional agent theory, automation-engineering standards, and the foundation-model paradigm.