Named after the hundred-eyed watchman of Greek myth, Argus watches the education landscape: spotting new opportunities, pressure-testing the ventures we're building, and tracing every read back to the real-world signals behind it.
The evidence library: the raw signals the pipeline is watching across the education ecosystem. Every idea is built from these.
arXiv:2609.04841v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Media bias in news articles operates through subtle linguistic cues---loaded language, selective framing, and strategic omission---that resist single-model detection and have traditionally required large annotated corpora for supervised training. We ask whether structured multi-agent deliberation can serve as a principled, training-free alternative to supervised classification for this task. We introduce MABPD (Multi-Agent Bias Probing & Detection), a pipeline in which three specialized LLM agents analyze an article from complementary perspectives and resolve disagreements through a Structured Argument Debate (SAD) protocol. SAD implements a domain-motivated asymmetric burden of proof---biased claims without grounded textual evidence carry zero weight---combined with role-weighted voting and post-consensus verification, replacing task-specific supervised decision boundaries with explicit deliberative structure. Ablation confirms that this
arXiv:2609.04835v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used not only to retrieve information, but to answer questions, explain, teach, and support inquiry. In such settings, evaluation cannot be exhausted by accuracy or alignment alone. A system may give a correct answer while still narrowing users' access %to knowledge. to alternative valid answers, explanations, or reasoning routes. Drawing on the broader notion of epistemic diversity in philosophy and social epistemology, we formalize it in the context of LLMs as the range of valid answers, explanations, and reasoning routes that an LLM exposes to users. We argue that epistemic diversity is a useful evaluation dimension for settings where LLMs are used to support knowledge-intensive tasks. We propose a preliminary framework for conceptualizing and measuring epistemic diversity in LLMs, and operationalize it in two domains. We find that frontier LLMs often exhibit epistemic narrowness, repeatedl
arXiv:2609.04824v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: 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 st
arXiv:2609.04823v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: 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
arXiv:2609.04819v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multilingual language models develop shared cross-lingual representations, and various interpretability methods claim to quantify this sharing. These methods have been developed largely in isolation, and when they disagree, it is unclear whether the disagreement reflects a property of the model or an artifact of the measurement. We compare four sharing metrics (CKA, ANC, GMM dominance per token, and ILO) across 21 base models from five families (125M-14B parameters) and correlate each with cross-lingual transfer on five downstream tasks. We find that the metrics differ in their quantification of cross-lingual sharing in these models and suggest that the disagreement traces to anisotropy, the tendency of representations to cluster in a narrow cone of the embedding space. Only ILO's correlation with cross-lingual transfer (Spearman's $\rho = 0.90$) survives controls for model size, family, and per-task variation. We therefore recommend ILO
arXiv:2609.04808v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse autoencoder (SAE) features are increasingly used to explain and steer language-model behavior, but it remains unclear whether a feature found in one language context plays the same causal role when processing prompts in another language. We study this question using translation-initiation features (Wu et al., 2026). We reproduce the SAE feature discovery method from Wu et al. in Gemma 2 and extend it to multilingual settings that vary prompt language, source language, and target language. We then test whether features that recur across settings affect translation behavior by amplifying or ablating their activations during inference. We also examine whether the method can be applied to Gemma 3. In both models, we observe an identical finding: although we can find more than 20 features that activate frequently across all discovery settings, causal validation shows that nearly all have small or inconsistent effects. In contrast, one f
arXiv:2609.04792v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Activation steering has shown promise for controlling LLM generation along well-defined attributes, but it remains unclear whether it can handle the multidimensional and hard-to-define nature of authorship style. We ask whether structured contrastive prompting along rhetorically-motivated dimensions can construct rich style representations directly in activation space, bypassing the need for natural language style descriptors or dedicated training. We find that the resulting directions share a common authorship backbone while conflicting on aspect-specific residuals that carry genuine stylistic signal, explaining why naive aggregation fails. We operationalize this in Aspect-Aware Activation Steering (A3S), a training-free framework that merges per-aspect contrastive directions with interference-aware aggregation and tunes steering strength per instance. A3S improves authorship style transfer where it is genuinely multi-aspect, outperforms
arXiv:2609.04755v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We construct a corpus of 1,262 verse-commentary (urai) pairs from five Classical Tamil source sections, ranging from technical grammatical prose to modern paraphrase, and ask what information representation learning can recover. We train recurrent and Transformer encoders, a Siamese-style pair-matching network, an mBART-style encoder-decoder, and a decoder-only language model. Each analysis is interpreted against an appropriate control on the same data. TF-IDF provides a strong no-training lexical retrieval baseline, alongside representation analyses and generation controls for the learned models. A fixed string containing the 25 most frequent commentary words scores higher on generation overlap than the decoder-only model. Canonical correlation reaches 1.000 on Gaussian noise at these sample sizes, token-F1 spans only about 0.02-0.20 on this corpus, and the encoder-decoder continues to lower training loss for sixteen epochs after validat
arXiv:2609.04753v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning in large language models unfolds through diverse functional operations, such as problem formulation, goal decomposition, and deduction. Although these operations are explicitly distinguished in text, little is known about how they are geometrically organized in representation spaces. To this end, we investigate whether distinct reasoning operations exhibit corresponding geometric structure in hidden representations. We find that operations are separable in held-out representations, with separability peaking in middle layers, and verify that this structure is not explained by lexical or positional confounds. Across layers, token-wise operation-alignment becomes more distributed over spans, while identical surface tokens are represented differently depending on the operation of its surrounding chunk. Attention-masking interventions further show that operation-aligned representations at chunk onset depend on preceding reasoning con
arXiv:2609.04720v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) are expected to respond helpfully to appropriate requests while withholding compliance with requests that are incorrect, unsafe, infeasible, or unanswerable. However, existing benchmarks predominantly evaluate non-compliance at the level of the query as a whole, assuming that each request either warrants compliance or requires withholding compliance. In practice, real-world queries can contain a mixture of answerable content and components for which compliance should be withheld. In this paper, we introduce KoNA, a benchmark for evaluating selective non-compliance in VLMs across five categories: False Premise, Visual Inaccessibility, Universal Unknown, Task Feasibility, and Safety. Each task evaluates two capabilities: query-level non-compliance and component-level non-compliance under paired single and compound queries. Our evaluation across diverse VLMs shows that models often fail to refuse, correct, or ab
arXiv:2609.04714v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Striking a balance between helpfulness and safety remains a fundamental challenge in aligning large language models. To achieve this balance, models should refuse harmful queries (e.g., "How do I shoot someone?") while remaining responsive to benign inputs, even those superficially resembling harmful queries (e.g., "Where can I shoot a good photo?"). However, models often struggle to distinguish genuinely harmful queries from benign queries that contain superficially risky language, resulting in false refusals. In this paper, we address the issue by decomposing a response in the safety-tuning dataset into two distinct components: (i) a boilerplate refusal statement and (ii) a rationale explaining the refusal. Our experiments and analyses show that refusal statements impede accurate discrimination between harmful and benign queries by inducing reliance on superficial cues. In contrast, training solely on rationales reduces false refusals w
arXiv:2609.04708v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models are trained on tokenized text that obscures the sound structure of words, yet they reliably produce morphemes whose form is phonologically conditioned. It remains unclear whether they rely on item-specific memorization or rule-like generalization and, if the latter, how that generalization is implemented. We therefore ask whether this phonological condition is represented within language models and how it is causally used for allomorph selection. For the English indefinite article a/an, we show that the phonological condition is encoded along a single linear direction in trigger-token embeddings, that this direction causally drives article selection in token-level wug tests, and that, at the article-prediction position, the model forecasts the upcoming trigger token and uses the forecasted trigger's phonological feature to choose the article. We then ask whether this rule-like generalization extends beyond English article
arXiv:2609.04676v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In persona-based dialogue generation (PDG), LLMs often overuse persona attributes by incorporating them regardless of dialogue context, resulting in unnatural responses. Despite its practical significance, the underlying causes remain unexplored, with no method to mitigate this problem or metric to assess the appropriateness of persona use. To address these issues, we first conduct a comprehensive analysis of LLM-based PDG, revealing that LLMs exhibit a systematic bias to incorporate all given persona attributes, and that existing metrics fail to capture contextual appropriateness. Building on these findings, we propose Self-CONtrastive Persona Overuse Suppression (SCONPOS) to mitigate overuse by directly intervening in LLMs' internal representations at the prompt encoding stage, without requiring any response generation. We further propose the Persona Appropriateness Score (PAS), a novel metric that penalizes both overuse and underuse. E
arXiv:2609.04653v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multilingual large language models often struggle to reason in low- to mid-resource languages. Prior work has shown that translation can improve multilingual reasoning by helping models access stronger English-centric representations. This raises a central question: How much translation is needed for multilingual large language models to reason reliably, and when does more translation instead trigger interference and overconfidence? Using LLaMA and Qwen models, we run extensive experiments varying text scope and language mode (target-only, English-only, bilingual) to evaluate both accuracy and reliability. Our results reveal a clear trade-off: English context often improve understanding and recover errors caused by non-English comprehension, yet adding redundant bilingual context intensifies interference. We address this trade-off with Reliability-Aware Adaptive Inference (RAAI), a training-free test-time framework that (i) performs Expec
arXiv:2609.04648v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: 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 equi
arXiv:2609.04647v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Traditional Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems score each passage independently against the query, assembling context sets that may be individually relevant yet collectively incoherent. We introduce Coherence-Aware Graph Encoding (CAGE), a reranking framework that models "between-chunk coherence" across four dimensions: Intra-Domain Relevance, Noise Resistance, Informational Bonding, and Factual Consistency. Our pipeline transforms retrieved passages into directed heterogeneous entity graphs, amplifies factual anchors via min-out-degree reweighting, encodes structural patterns through a Relational Graph Convolutional Network, and fuses inter-chunk coherence with query relevance for final ranking. Evaluated across four multi-hop benchmarks, CAGE matches or outperforms strong baselines including monoT5 in Recall@5 on bridge-dominated datasets and consistently improves downstream Exact Match, demonstrating that structurally coheren
arXiv:2609.04637v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Audio Large Language Models (Audio LLMs) have advanced in audio understanding, yet they can still predict the answer by reasoning from textual cues or linguistic priors rather than the provided audio. A common remedy is to train models on data whose answers cannot be inferred from text alone. This approach can improve performance, but what changes within the model remains unclear. In this paper, we ask what must happen inside the model for the audio to actually determine the answer. Our findings are threefold. (1) Replacing the audio with silence or unrelated audio causes substantially larger performance degradation in the trained model than in the pretrained model. (2) Acoustic information most strongly shapes the model's representations of the answer choices in early-to-middle layers, while training mainly increases the influence of audio information on the final prediction in middle-to-late layers. (3) The weights learned during traini
arXiv:2609.04598v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce PetQA, a Korean long-form question-answering (QA) benchmark for evaluating veterinary knowledge and clinical reasoning in large language models (LLMs) and large vision-language models (LVLMs). PetQA contains 10,076 text-only and 8,751 multimodal QA pairs derived from real-world questions about dogs and cats, paired with answers from expert veterinarians. Its test split, PetQA-Bench, further includes annotations for question types and clinical conditions. We evaluate eighteen models using ROUGE, BERTScore, and LLM-as-a-judge metrics for factuality and helpfulness under three settings: zero-shot inference, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and supervised fine-tuning (SFT). The benchmarking results provide an overview of the strengths and limitations of current models in addressing veterinary clinical queries and highlight the need for more effective adaptation methods to develop clinically reliable AI systems for veterinary
arXiv:2609.04582v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A 0.6B language model, asked to verify 1,200 logical conclusions (half valid, half corrupted by a single semantic edit), answers YES every time. Judged by behavior it discriminates nothing; linear probes on its hidden states read the correct verdict at 0.96 AUC, transferring to unseen logical structures and separating foils built from exactly the words of the true conclusion (0.90). We ask where the verdict is lost, and find the dominant failure is a single scalar. The verdict survives to the model's own output logits (margin AUC 0.89) along a well-aligned readout direction; a saturated decision threshold, offset by +4.6 sigma, erases it. The diagnosis generalizes: across 90 semantic-label configurations of a five-model, three-family factorial, behavioral accuracy collapses onto a single function of threshold offset (Spearman -0.93) while margin ranking moves far less. Across a 13x scale range, internal knowledge saturates while free-form
arXiv:2609.04556v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Runtime traces are becoming a central substrate for understanding agentic systems, yet interpretation has focused largely on what the agent did. Workplace agents face the complementary problem: interpreting the human activity that surrounds them. Hours of low-level events carry rich evidence about a user's state but are too granular to reason over directly, and flattening them into one stream or compressing them into a single embedding both treat "summarize the user's behavior" as if it had one correct answer. We argue instead that behavioral interpretation is resolution-dependent: the same trace should admit multiple addressable interpretations at different temporal resolutions. We construct a multi-resolution vocabulary of semantically normalized operators, recurring motifs, coherent episodes, and day-level rhythms, each preserving the structure salient at its own horizon. Applied to 667 million human-attributed events from a large comm
arXiv:2609.04539v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A critical challenge in deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) is developing reliable mechanisms to estimate their confidence, enabling systems to determine when to trust model outputs versus seek human intervention. We present a Calibrated Reflection approach for enhancing confidence estimation in LLMs, a framework that combines structured reasoning with distance-aware calibration technique. Our approach introduces three key innovations: (1) a Maximum Confidence Selection (MCS) method that comprehensively evaluates confidence across all possible labels, (2) a reflection-based prompting mechanism that enhances reasoning reliability, and (3) a distance-aware calibration technique that accounts for ordinal relationships between labels. We evaluate our framework on diverse datasets, including HelpSteer2, Llama T-REx, and a proprietary conversational dataset, demonstrating its effectiveness across both conversational and fact-based classifica
arXiv:2609.04526v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Merging a LoRA adapter into its base model is standard deployment practice: it removes the runtime adapter's per-forward overhead and leaves a single standalone checkpoint any serving stack can load. On a native 4-bit microscaling checkpoint (NVFP4, MXFP4) that step stops being free. The merged weights must be written back through a quantizer, which re-derives the checkpoint's discrete E2M1 code plane (roughly 90% of the artifact's bytes), so the deployed artifact becomes coupled to one quantization convention, and every later code-touching event in its lifecycle can move it. Done naively the step is worse than fragile: it deletes the adaptation, by up to 39 pp, because against an already-on-grid base the reconstruction optimum is that base. Scale-QLoRA instead adapts only the native per-block scale field, trains those scales on the deployment grid, and freezes every E2M1 code. Within a fixed native format, scale grid, block layout and co
arXiv:2609.04511v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent entity extraction (LEE) tackles the challenge of identifying implicit, contextually inferred entities within free text-an area where traditional entity extraction methods fall short. In this paper, we introduce LentEx, a novel framework for latent entity extraction that leverages synthetic data generation and instruction fine-tuning to optimize smaller, efficient large language models (LLMs). Latent entities, which are often abstract and thematic, are crucial for applications such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), customer persona analysis, and knowledge graph enrichment. LentEx addresses the scarcity of labeled datasets by employing a template-based approach to generate diverse, contextually rich synthetic data, ensuring high variability and alignment with real-world distributions. To our knowledge, LentEx is the first to systematically approach LEE through the lens of LLMs. LentEx demonstrates significant performance impro
arXiv:2609.04489v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pause-token methods improve LLM reasoning by inserting special tokens into sequences. Prior work explains these gains through computational expressivity. However, there is relatively little investigation into the training dynamics of pause tokens. We explore how pause tokens reshape the training dynamics of fine-tuning. Two controlled pilots expose distinct asymmetries. On a synthetic continual-learning task, masked pauses overwrite a previously-learned distribution roughly 4x less at matched final adaptation (H1, mode retention); on a synthetic math-reasoning probe, the boundary-adjacent token comes to encode substantially more downstream-step information (H2, non-myopic compression). We formalize a training rule consistent with both - Masked Boundary Pause (MBP), pause tokens placed at reasoning-step boundaries with their loss masked. Across 1B-8B Qwen and Llama models, MBP consistently improves reasoning, achieving gains of up to 6 poi
arXiv:2609.04484v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper investigates structural priming in language model (LM) production, examining how preceding structural context influences sentence completion. While prior work has demonstrated priming effects in comprehension of structural alternations, it remained unclear whether these persist in production, where, when generating, an LM samples from many possible continuations at each step. We address this question through a series of controlled sentence-completion experiments on dative constructions. In line with prior work, we find that LMs are susceptible to structural priming, particularly in sentences that are semantically coherent. In terms of priming magnitude, we find that while there is a greater relative increase of double-object datives against our baselines, in line with inverse frequency effects, there is a larger absolute increase in prepositional-objects, the more frequently produced construction. Finally, we not only observe t
arXiv:2609.04482v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety alignment is usually posed as a topic-level question: is this subject harmful? Deployments ask a narrower one. A civics tutor and a public-sector assistant may share a base model yet need different boundaries inside the same topic, refusing targeted political manipulation while still answering factual questions about the same election. We formulate this as narrow-boundary safety and introduce an offline self-generated framework combining controlled topic generation, coverage repair, in-distribution compensation data, and harmful-benign pairs for training and evaluation. Single-shot generation leaves 19.88% of prompts without accepted refusal traces, whereas escalating retries leave 0.20%. On political persuasion with Qwen3-8B, training on refusal data completed through Escalate increases target-domain refusal from 9.47% to 84.75% and reduces the mean unsafe-response rate across three broader harmfulness benchmarks from 26.26% to 0.
arXiv:2609.04463v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In many forms of reasoning, including arithmetic reasoning, generalizing across superficial changes in input format is effortless for humans: anyone who can solve 2+5 can also solve 'two plus five'. In contrast, LLMs are more brittle to surface variations of the prompts: for example, they solve numeric arithmetic problems almost perfectly but are substantially less accurate on verbal renditions of the same problems. Here, we ask whether generalization across formats can be predicted from the models' internals. Using attribution patching, we first independently localize the circuit that each model recruits to solve numeric arithmetic problems (2+5) vs. verbal ones, in three languages: English ('two plus five'), Spanish ('dos m\'as cinco'), and Italian ('due pi\`u cinque'); then, we test whether overlap with the model's own numeric circuit predicts its generalization to the verbal formats. Indeed, we find support for this idea at three leve
arXiv:2609.04452v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern misinformation is often heard before it is read, yet fact-checking systems are still evaluated mainly on clean written claims. Spoken dialogue remains different even when systems operate on transcripts: claims may be distributed across speakers and turns, depend on prior context, and become harder to verify when Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) errors distort the available text. Prior spoken dialogue fact-checking resources are small, English-centric, or focused on annotation rather than end-to-end benchmarking, leaving no large multilingual benchmark with paired speech and turn-level labels. We introduce TRILOGUE (TRIlingual spoken diaLOGUE fact-checking), a large-scale trilingual benchmark of source-grounded spoken dialogues in English, Russian, and Kazakh. It contains nearly 12K dialogues, 187K turns, and 390 hours of paired audio with ASR transcripts and word-level timestamp alignments across all three languages, including ne
arXiv:2609.04442v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models deployed in high-stakes settings frequently generate plausible but ungrounded claims. Standard retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines offer limited remedy, since they retrieve isolated passages without tracking cross-document evidence relationships or quantifying uncertainty. We introduce GRACE (Graph-grounded Reflective Agent Copilot Engine), a framework that deconstructs LLM responses into atomic claims and grounds them against trusted knowledge priors within a weighted bipartite graph. Edge weights encode the closeness of each claim to the priors, enabling weighted centrality analysis that classifies claims as Grounded, Refuted, or Boundary. Such classification identifies not just hallucinations but also novel or contested claims at the frontier of the model's knowledge. To efficiently allocate human or agent resources, we formulate a Return on Attention (RoA) objective that defers a claim to expert review
arXiv:2609.04434v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hybrid language models combine attention with a fixed-size recurrent state, but the role of each channel remains unclear. We introduce two cache-level interventions. Split-prefill keeps only the KV cache or only the recurrent state from a prefilled context, then generates an answer. State-swap pairs the KV cache from one context with the recurrent state from another in a single forward pass. On Qwen3.5 and Falcon-H1, the two channels split sharply by function. Exact retrieval survives only through attention (64-98% of full accuracy) and collapses to zero through recurrence. Output language and persona reverse the pattern: both survive recurrence (70-80% and 3-5x) while KV-only drops to ~1% language accuracy. State-swap confirms this causally: the answer takes its value from the KV side and its language from the recurrent side. Recurrent-only generation also accepts words that were never in the context but share meaning or parts with seen
arXiv:2609.04409v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multilingual language models often produce inconsistent answers to semantically equivalent questions across languages, motivating methods to improve cross-lingual consistency (CLC). However, existing methods are typically evaluated using different models, tasks, and protocols, leaving their relative strengths unclear. In this work, we present a unified evaluation of representative CLC-enhancement methods for question answering, spanning inference-time interventions and post-training approaches across three model families and three closed-form benchmarks. The results show that post-training methods are generally more reliable, with direct distribution alignment consistently improving CLC across all model-dataset combinations, while other methods are more sensitive to answer format and the breadth of language coverage. Notably, cross-domain transfer is limited unless source and target tasks share similar output formats. We further investiga
arXiv:2609.04404v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: ASR systems sometimes produce fluent text that is unrelated to the speech they receive. We view these hallucinations as one possible consequence of a broader grounding failure, in which the transcript is no longer adequately guided by the audio. To understand where this failure becomes possible, we study two independently trained Conformer-Large recognizers - one CTC and one RNN-T - under environmental degradation and speaker-background shift. In both models, the final encoder stage emerges as a critical boundary: bypassing the final block causes divergence on nearly every utterance, whereas bypassing middle blocks has little effect. At this same stage, the representations become more compact, text becomes readable by the trained decoder, and grapheme information becomes explicit. Importantly, the intervention produces garbled or repetitive output rather than fluent fabrication. Our result therefore identifies a mechanistic precondition f
arXiv:2609.04391v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, a novel evaluation scheme built on a generalized variant of the Rand Index measure, namely, the H\"ullermeier-Rifqi Index, is proposed in order to assess how well phonetic encoding algorithms conform to word-based transcriptions in IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) notation. For this objective, the discordance score is obtained by calculating the absolute difference between the pairwise similarity values of ground-truth transcriptions and those of corresponding phonetic encodings, which are computed using normalized edit distance as a permutation dependent string metric. The resulting score is subsequently adjusted with respect to that of a random string generator incorporating the same alphabet as the encoder under consideration. A wide range of phonetic encoders were evaluated as such on multi-lingual transcription datasets along with their recall capabilities based on the collision rate. The validity of the proposed s
arXiv:2609.04366v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Early-onset colorectal cancer is increasing among younger adults, yet red-flag symptoms in this age group have no evidence-based guidelines for follow-up testing, and structured encounter data do not capture the detail needed to support early detection and inform follow-up, including symptom duration, context, and fam- ily history, an established colorectal-cancer risk factor. This study aimed to develop and evaluate an automated method for extracting six red-flag symptoms and family-history risk status from free-text clinical notes. We developed VERGE, an agentic workflow in which an initial label and evidence are proposed using retrieval-augmented generation, then passed through a bounded verification- refinement cycle that checks textual grounding and clinical validity, corrects and rechecks a claim until resolved or a limit is reached, and escalates unresolved claims for human review. VERGE was evaluated on 4,033 clinician-labeled not
arXiv:2609.04336v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Medical visual question answering (Med-VQA) is often assumed to require medical fine-tuning, large models, or complex multi-agent pipelines. We revisit this assumption with \textbf{MedProb}, a lightweight probing framework that predicts multiple-choice Med-VQA answers from frozen VLM representations without free-text generation. Across PATH-VQA, SLAKE, and VQA-RAD, MedProb recovers substantially more answer-relevant signal than prompting and performs stronger than medical VLMs and agentic systems. Probing also reduces the apparent gap between small and large models compared to prompting, suggesting that smaller VLMs contain more recoverable Med-VQA signal than generation-based evaluation reveals. Across 14 matched general-purpose and medical VLM pairs, medical adaptation does not consistently improve this linear decodability. Finally, free-text generation exhibits an answer-position bias of up to 10 percentage points, whereas MedProb also
arXiv:2609.04290v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Despite increasing reliance on LLMs that reason with external evidence supplied by tools, retrieval-augmented generation, other agents, and users, how LLMs integrate such evidence into decisions they have already begun to form remains largely unclear. We present a distributional theory in which evidence shifts the receiver's distribution of initial answers, driven by a receiver prior weight and a candidate evidence tilt, leading to three predictions. First, candidates more probable to the receiver are more persuasive. Second, receivers more readily integrate characteristic errors of their own than foreign errors from different sources. Third, identical evidence can improve weaker models and harm stronger ones. We confirm these over ten million trials, twelve LLMs from four families, and eight domains, four of them scientific discovery tasks in the physical and life sciences: quantum mechanics, physics, genetics, and molecular biology. The
arXiv:2609.04289v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LETHE (Latent-parameter Evolution with Temporal Hierarchical quasi-Equilibrium) is a self-referential sonic-oblivion system implemented in SuperCollider. It adopts the formal vocabulary of Generative Adversarial Networks in a closed configuration without external datasets or supervision after initialization. Audio is processed by a 3 x 3 mixing matrix built around two delay lines; its nine coefficients and two delay times evolve through the interaction of a five-feature linear discriminator and a random-perturbation optimizer analogous to single-sample REINFORCE. The discriminator compares current energy behavior with an archive of the initial state and guides parameter updates. Circular, fixed, and live sources can be mixed independently. Across fixed and circular sessions with an ablation control, the active generator is necessary for parametric evolution ($\Delta c_{22}=0.000$ in all 15 ablation sessions). Situated in the tradition of
arXiv:2609.04223v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dependency-distance estimates derived from a single corpus are routinely treated as properties of a language, yet this assumption has not been tested across independently compiled corpora. We compared mean dependency-distance estimates across 38 same-language treebank pairs from Universal Dependencies v2.18, using concordance correlation, Bland-Altman analysis, and a twelve-specification multiverse design. Cross-treebank agreement was moderate at best: substituting one treebank for another reversed nearly 40 percent of pairwise language orderings, and treebank choice accounted for roughly 29 percent of between-group variance. This disagreement substantially exceeded within-treebank sampling error and persisted across all twelve preprocessing specifications. Nevertheless, every treebank confirmed dependency-length minimization (normalized ratio below 1). The data are more consistent with MDD as a corpus-conditioned composite of grammatical
arXiv:2605.00440v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) has rendered the boundary between humanity and computational machinery increasingly ambiguous. In the presence of more interwoven relationships within human-machine symbiosis, the very notion of AI-generated information becomes difficult to define, as such information arises not from either humans or machines in isolation, but from their mutual shaping. At times AI acts in place of the human, automating the task; at others it extends what the human can do, augmenting their capability. Therefore, a more pertinent question lies not merely in whether AI has participated, but in how it has participated. In general, the role assumed by AI is often specified, either implicitly or explicitly, in the input prompt, yet becomes less apparent or altogether unobservable when the generated content alone is available. Once detached from the dialogue context, the functional role may no longer be tr
arXiv:2605.29928v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As AI-generated and AI-assisted content floods online spaces, source labels attached to such content can distort human reasoning judgments, with downstream consequences for moderation, evaluation, and decision-making. Whether LLMs share this vulnerability, or offer more source-agnostic evaluation, remains an open question with strong implications for human-AI collaboration. We examine this issue using logical fallacies as a controlled setting to isolate source-label effects on reasoning quality, independent of domain knowledge. We conduct an online study (N=505) where participants are assigned to a source condition (human, AI, human with AI assistance, AI with human assistance, or no disclosure) and evaluate comments containing logical fallacies, comparing their judgments with those of LLMs (GPT-5.2, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Claude Sonnet 4.5), which were evaluated across the same source conditions. Human evaluators were significantly more s
arXiv:2602.13784v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Explaining with examples is an intuitive way to justify AI decisions. However, it is challenging to understand how a decision value should change relative to the examples with many features differing by large amounts. We draw from real estate valuation that uses Comparables-examples with known values for comparison. Estimates are made more accurate by hypothetically adjusting the attributes of each Comparable and correspondingly changing the value based on factors. We propose Comparables XAI for relatable example-based explanations of AI with Trace adjustments that trace counterfactual changes from each Comparable to the Subject, one attribute at a time, monotonically along the AI feature space. In modelling and user studies, Trace-adjusted Comparables achieved the highest XAI faithfulness and precision, user accuracy, and narrowest uncertainty bounds compared to linear regression, linearly adjusted Comparables, or unadjusted Comparab
arXiv:2502.17295v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Team communication breakdowns represent a contributor to patient safety risks within action teams-defined as interdependent groups of specialized people who perform coordinated work under high workload, time pressure, and uncertainty. Approximately 70% of such instances lead to adverse patient outcomes amid intense time pressure, uncertainty, and high cognitive load. While prior research has focused on maintaining shared cognition during these interactions, existing technologies largely prioritize individual task execution and decision-making, offering limited support for real-time team coordination. This study investigates the potential of augmented reality head-mounted displays (AR-HMDs) to address this gap by facilitating what we call 'team alignment' - the active maintenance of shared understanding regarding tasks, patient state, responsibilities, and ongoing clinical activity. Through an 11-month multi-phase qualitative study wit
arXiv:2609.05399v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: More than a decade in, explainable AI (XAI) for computer vision has assembled a mature toolbox: attribution, feature visualization, concept-based, and circuit-based methods. Yet almost all of the field's effort has gone into building and comparing these methods, and little into the question they were meant to answer---how interpretable are our models, and are we making progress as they evolve? We argue for shifting the field's focus from methods to models, along two complementary lines. One is already within reach: existing tools let us characterize and compare what different models represent and compute. The other is harder, and largely neglected: whether a model can actually be understood by the humans who rely on it---the independent evaluators on whom trust and certification depend, not the experts confirming what they already expect. It can only be measured, not inferred. We review why the toolbox is mature enough to support both,
arXiv:2609.04592v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Intelligent extended reality (XR) systems increasingly use eye and head tracking to infer user intent, task, and attention, but the same signals can also reveal biometric identity. We study whether gaze data representation choice can serve as a lightweight privacy control at feature extraction, before adding perturbation or formal privacy mechanisms. Using the egocentric HoloAssist dataset, we compare three gaze representations under matched model capacity: raw gaze, spatial attention heatmaps, and engineered eye-movement features. We evaluate each representation on action recognition as task utility and closed-set user re-identification as privacy leakage. Representation choice substantially changes the privacy-utility tradeoff. Engineered features retain roughly 85% of raw gaze's action-recognition accuracy while reducing re-identification by about an order of magnitude, to roughly four times the chance rate across 206 identities. Thi
arXiv:2609.04384v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chinese online comments often convey social meaning through indirect and playful language that is hard to interpret without context. Existing evaluations largely organize items around predefined phenomena or controlled pragmatic categories, leaving open whether models can distinguish plausible readings of what a naturally occurring comment is doing in a particular exchange. We introduce a benchmark for evaluating whether LLMs can recover such situated pragmatic meanings. From more than 200,000 public Chinese social media interaction records, we construct 4,735 human-validated diagnostic items, each pairing a target comment with reconstructed preceding context and plausible misreadings. We evaluate eight LLMs as both question writers and solvers in a cross-writer setting. The task is challenging: the strongest model achieves 81.42% leave-writer-out accuracy. Across all eight models, the mean leave-writer-out accuracy is 68.70% while huma
arXiv:2609.04355v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) models enable broad manipulation but remain unreliable in tasks demanding precision and repeatability. Applying real-world online reinforcement learning (RL) to VLA post-training enables autonomous trial-and-error improvement beyond demonstrations alone, but exposes two bottlenecks: 1) unreliable value signals can induce policy drift; 2) large-VLA overhead constrains throughput and sample efficiency. To address these challenges, we present VLA-Precision, an efficient real-world online RL framework featuring the Asymmetric Co-Bootstrapping (ACoB) algorithm and the ACoB-Stream architecture. Specifically, ACoB establishes asymmetric co-bootstrapping across timescales: early intervention-guided behavioral learning rapidly improves policy performance while enhancing online experience quality. As autonomous experience accumulates, global return propagation and local preference ranking progressively cali
arXiv:2609.05404v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion TV is an interactive AI art installation that offers a tangible and embodied experience of diffusion models through a modified CRT TV. By physically manipulating the TV's antenna, audiences control the clarity of AI-generated images and sounds, metaphorically enacting the denoising process that underlies diffusion-based generation. Using the tuning knob, participants switch between three channels featuring AI-generated animals from the Past (extinct species), Present (endangered species), and Future (speculative creatures), situating the interaction within a temporal and ecological narrative. Through continuous audiovisual feedback and physical interaction, Diffusion TV foregrounds the generative process over final outputs, allowing audiences to explore intermediate states as experiential material. Rather than providing explicit technical explanation, the work presents an alternative, embodied mode of explainable AI that invites
arXiv:2609.05347v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Thermal feedback can enrich immersive interaction, but thermoelectric devices often change temperature too slowly to match interactive timing. We present TherMosaic, a spatiotemporal thermal feedback approach that accelerates perceived temperature transitions by leveraging two perceptual mechanisms: spatial summation and thermal adaptation. Focusing on the fingertip, we first investigate this approach using a custom 2*2 array of independently controlled Peltier modules. Across three controlled perceptual studies, we show that distributed thermal stimulation can preserve stable hot and cold percepts despite local deviations, that adaptation helps maintain these percepts during changing stimulation, and that combining these effects reduces perceived transition time by about 30%-40% for transitions originating from hot or cold states. We then translate the same design principles into a standalone wearable implementation of TherMosaic and eva
arXiv:2609.05102v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative AI systems increasingly shape cultural production, yet creative intentions, cultural meanings, and interpretive practices often can't be articulated through computational metrics alone. This paper presents Beyond Bias, a collaboration between Gooey.AI and Goethe-Institut India, as a participatory approach to cultural AI which includes collaborative dataset creation, reflective AI tooling, artist-led model fine-tuning, and co-authored governance practices. Across 9 workshops involving over 200 participants, artists and cultural practitioners engaged with AI systems through experimentation, iteration, and collaborative LoRA training. Participants used their AI-generated outputs and visualizations as reflective interfaces for exploring symbolism, memory, authorship, and cultural contexts. Comparing contemporary generative AI outputs with participant fine-tuned outputs helped participants reflect on cultural details missing in big
arXiv:2609.05046v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mental health concerns are increasing worldwide, highlighting the need for interventions that support everyday emotional well being. Prior work has demonstrated the potential of wearable and mobile technologies to deliver data driven interventions. However, developing effective data-driven systems requires access to emotion data that captures individuals' emotional variability and change in everyday contexts. Existing approaches to data collection largely rely on frequent, prescheduled prompts and predefined scales or questionnaires. These methods often fail to account for participants' availability, agency, or the complexity of their emotional experiences, resulting in shallow, context poor data. In this paper, we present a feasibility study of a participant centric, multimodal emotion-annotation application designed around users' emotional intensity and availability. Our findings show how multimodal emotion logging can shape participant