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:2604.21334v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Do large language models (LLMs) exhibit systematic ideological bias when reasoning about economic causal effects? As LLMs are increasingly used in policy analysis and economic reporting, where directionally correct causal judgments are essential, this question has direct practical stakes. We present a systematic evaluation by extending the EconCausal benchmark with ideology-contested cases - instances where intervention-oriented (pro-government) and market-oriented (pro-market) perspectives predict divergent causal signs. From 10,490 causal triplets (treatment-outcome pairs with empirically verified effect directions) derived from top-tier economics and finance journals, we identify 1,056 ideology-contested instances and evaluate 20 state-of-the-art LLMs on their ability to predict empirically supported causal directions. We find that ideology-contested items are consistently harder than non-contested ones, and that across 18 of
arXiv:2604.19753v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a feature-free approach to algorithm selection: instead of hand-crafted instance features, we use pretrained text embeddings. Our method, ZeroFolio, proceeds in three steps. First, it reads the raw instance file as plain text. Second, it embeds it with a pretrained embedding model. Third, it selects an algorithm via weighted k-nearest neighbors. The key to our approach is the fact that pretrained embeddings can distinguish problem instances without any domain knowledge or task-specific training. Hence, we can apply the same three-step pipeline (serialize, embed, select) across any problem domain with text-based instance formats. We evaluate our approach on 11 ASlib scenarios spanning 7 domains (SAT, MaxSAT, QBF, ASP, CSP, MIP, and graph problems). Our experiments show that this approach outperforms a random forest trained on hand-crafted features in 9 of 11 scenarios, robustly across serialization seeds (every seed, n
arXiv:2603.16883v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inertial measurement unit-based online handwriting recognition enables the recognition of input signals collected across different writing surfaces but remains challenged by uneven character distributions and inter-writer variability. In this work, we systematically investigate two strategies to address these issues: subword tokenization and concatenation-based data augmentation. Our experiments on the OnHW-Words500 dataset reveal a clear dichotomy between handling inter-writer and intra-writer variance. On the writer-independent split, structural abstraction via Bigram tokenization significantly improves generalization to unseen writing styles, reducing the word error rate (WER) from 15.40% to 12.99%. In contrast, on the writer-dependent split, tokenization degrades performance due to vocabulary distribution shifts between the training and validation sets. Instead, our proposed concatenation-based data augmentation acts as a po
arXiv:2603.09714v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While multi-audio understanding is critical for large audio-language models (LALMs), it remains underexplored. We introduce MUGEN, a comprehensive benchmark evaluating this capability across speech, general audio, and music. Our experiments reveal consistent weaknesses in multi-audio settings, and performance degrades sharply as the number of concurrent audio inputs increases, identifying input scaling as a fundamental bottleneck. We further investigate training-free strategies and observe that Audio-Permutational Self-Consistency, which diversifies the order of audio candidates, helps models form more robust aggregated predictions, yielding up to 6.28% accuracy gains. Combining this permutation strategy with Chain-of-Thought further improves performance to 6.74%. These results expose blind spots in current LALMs and provide a foundation for evaluating complex auditory comprehension.
arXiv:2601.07533v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Tracing connections between historical texts is an important part of intertextual research, enabling scholars to reconstruct the virtual library of a writer and identify the sources influencing their creative process. These intertextual links manifest in diverse forms, ranging from direct verbatim quotations to subtle allusions and paraphrases disguised by morphological variation. Language models offer a promising path forward due to their capability of capturing semantic similarity beyond lexical overlap. However, the development of new methods for this task is held back by the scarcity of standardized benchmarks and easy-to-use datasets. We address this gap by introducing Loci Similes, a benchmark for Latin intertextuality detection comprising of a curated dataset of ~172k text segments containing 545 expert-verified parallels linking Late Antique authors to a corpus of classical authors. Using this data, we establish baseline
arXiv:2601.06896v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present TagSpeech, a unified LLM-based framework that utilizes Temporal Anchor Grounding for joint multi-speaker ASR and diarization. The framework is built on two key designs: (1) decoupled semantic and speaker streams fine-tuned via Serialized Output Training (SOT) to learn turn-taking dynamics; and (2) an interleaved time anchor mechanism that not only supports fine-grained timestamp prediction but also acts as a synchronization signal between semantic understanding and speaker tracking. Compared to previous works that primarily focus on speaker-attributed ASR or implicit diarization, TagSpeech addresses the challenge of fine-grained speaker-content alignment and explicitly models "who spoke what and when" in an end-to-end manner. Experiments on AMI and AliMeeting benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves consistent improvements in Diarization Error Rate (DER) over strong end-to-end baselines, including Qwen-Omni and
arXiv:2601.06401v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models are becoming increasingly significant in financial applications. Nevertheless, prevailing benchmarks are largely dependent on simulated or generic data, which leads to a significant gap between reported performance and actual efficacy in real-world scenarios. To tackle this challenge, we present BizFinBench.v2, the first integrated offline and online benchmark built upon authentic user query-response data from both Chinese and U.S. equity markets. It comprises 28,860 questions across eight offline and two online tasks. Experimental results show that GPT-5 achieves a mere 61.5% accuracy, still failing to meet the practical business requirement (84.8%). Among the evaluated commercial models, DeepSeek-R1 exhibits superior investment efficacy. Error analysis grounded in real financial practice reveals persistent limitations in existing models. By overcoming the constraints of prior benchmarks, BizFinBench.v2 pr
arXiv:2512.15376v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recognition of signers' emotions suffers from one theoretical challenge and one practical challenge, namely, the overlap between grammatical and affective facial expressions and the scarcity of data for model training. This paper addresses these two challenges in a cross-lingual setting using our eJSL dataset, a new benchmark dataset for emotion recognition in Japanese Sign Language signers, and BOBSL, a large British Sign Language dataset with subtitles. In eJSL, two signers expressed 78 distinct utterances with each of seven different emotional states, resulting in 1,092 video clips. We empirically demonstrate that 1) textual emotion recognition in spoken language mitigates data scarcity in sign language, 2) temporal segment selection has a significant impact, and 3) incorporating hand motion enhances emotion recognition in signers. Finally we establish a stronger baseline than spoken language LLMs.
arXiv:2508.10123v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Advanced reasoning in LLMs on challenging domains like mathematical reasoning can be tackled using verifiable rewards based reinforced fine-tuning (ReFT). In standard ReFT frameworks, a behavior model generates multiple completions with answers per problem, for the answer to be then scored by a reward function. While such RL post-training methods demonstrate significant performance improvements across challenging reasoning domains, the computational cost of generating completions during training with multiple inference steps makes the training cost non-trivial. To address this, we draw inspiration from off-policy RL, and speculative decoding to introduce a novel ReFT framework, dubbed Nested-ReFT, where a subset of layers of the target model acts as the behavior model to generate off-policy completions during training. The behavior model configured with dynamic layer skipping per batch during training decreases the inference cos
arXiv:2508.02091v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Approximate nearest-neighbor search (ANNS) algorithms have become increasingly critical for recent AI applications, particularly in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and agent-based LLM applications. In this paper, we present CRINN, a new paradigm for ANNS algorithms. CRINN treats ANNS optimization as a reinforcement learning problem where execution speed serves as the reward signal. This approach enables the automatic generation of progressively faster ANNS implementations while maintaining accuracy constraints. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates CRINN's effectiveness across six widely-used NNS benchmark datasets. When compared against state-of-the-art open-source ANNS algorithms, CRINN achieves best performance on three of them (GIST-960-Euclidean, MNIST-784-Euclidean, and GloVe-25-angular), and tied for first place on two of them (SIFT-128-Euclidean and GloVe-25-angular). The implications of CRINN's success reach wel
arXiv:2507.11059v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) in software engineering has revealed critical limitations in existing benchmarks, particularly the widely used SWE-bench dataset. Recent studies have uncovered severe data contamination issues, e.g., SWE-bench reports 32.67% of successful patches involve direct solution leakage and 31.08% pass due to inadequate test cases. We introduce SWE-MERA, a dynamic, continuously updated benchmark designed to address these fundamental challenges through an automated collection of real-world GitHub issues and rigorous quality validation. Our approach implements a reliable pipeline that ensures quality while minimizing contamination risks, resulting in approximately 10,000 potential tasks with 728 samples currently available. Evaluation using the Aider coding agent demonstrates strong discriminative power in state-of-the-art models. We report performance across a dozen recent LLMs evaluat
arXiv:2507.01042v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly used in industry VLM applications such as retrieval systems, content generation platforms, and decision-support workflows, where model selection is commonly guided by benchmark rankings. These rankings are largely determined by retrieval, captioning, and reasoning downstream tasks; however, models with similar task performance often show substantially different behavior across datasets. This creates a Capability-Reliability Gap between benchmark performance and observed model stability. We present ARGUS-EVAL, a capability-reliability-oriented evaluation framework for VLMs that characterizes model behavior through Benchmark Capability P(M), Cross-Dataset Consistency CDC(M), Robustness Retention RR(M), and Efficiency E(M). We evaluate CLIP, BLIP, LXMERT, Gemma-3-4B, and Qwen-2.5VL-3B-Instruct across retrieval, captioning, and reasoning downstream tasks. The results reveal notable diff
arXiv:2503.08884v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unimodal vision models are known to rely on spurious correlations, but it remains unclear to what extent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit similar biases despite language supervision. In this paper, we investigate spurious bias in MLLMs and introduce SpurLens, a pipeline that leverages GPT-4 and open-set object detectors to automatically identify spurious visual cues without human supervision. Our findings reveal that spurious correlations cause two major failure modes in MLLMs: (1) over-reliance on spurious cues for object recognition, where removing these cues reduces accuracy, and (2) object hallucination, where spurious cues amplify the hallucination by over 10x. We validate our findings in various MLLMs and datasets. Beyond diagnosing these failures, we explore potential mitigation strategies, such as prompt ensembling and reasoning-based prompting, and conduct ablation studies to examine the root causes of s
arXiv:2607.09576v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present an interpretable network-based framework for representing idiomatic and figurative meaning across eight typologically diverse languages, totaling 160 conventional expressions, the large majority of which are idiomatic. Each expression is annotated with binary conceptual features (containment, concealment, emotional, social, etc.) derived from cognitive-linguistic theory, and pairwise Jaccard similarities define a weighted graph. Community detection reveals that idioms cluster by conceptual schema rather than by language, producing a structure consistent with cognitive-linguistic predictions. The conceptual network captures unique semantic information not present in distributional embeddings, can be scaled via automatic annotation with LLMs, improves downstream idiom detection, and remains robust when enriched with corpus frequencies. Cross-lingual transfer experiments show that conceptual proximity alone can identify accept
arXiv:2606.23525v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Long agent traces composed of chains of thought and tool calls accumulate stale content that anchor subsequent generations, and eventually outgrow the context window. Existing scaffolds mitigate it with fixed-interval compaction triggered at a token threshold. Such triggers pay no heed to trajectory structure, risking discard of partial results mid-derivation or mid-search. We propose SelfCompact, a scaffold that allows the model itself to decide when and how to compact. Specifically, it pairs two inference-time elements: (i) a compaction tool the model invokes to summarize the accumulated context, and (ii) a lightweight rubric specifying when to fire (a sub-task has resolved, or the trajectory is converging) and when to suppress (mid-derivation, or when stuck). Both are needed. The tool alone is unevenly used across open-weight models, often invoked at unhelpful moments or not at all; the rubric alone cannot act. Together, they elici
arXiv:2606.17034v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Post-hoc context erasing over the KV cache is challenging because a local edit has a global consequence: once a span has been processed, its influence propagates into the cached states of all subsequent tokens. This issue arises naturally in long-context LLM applications, where stale retrieved facts, incorrect tool observations, retracted user preferences, or harmful prompt injections may be identified only after prefill. Exact erasing must then recompute all tokens after the deleted span, making its computational cost depend on suffix length rather than erased-span length. We introduce KVEraser, a learned KV-cache editing method for efficient localized context erasing. Given a processed context and a span to remove, KVEraser replaces only the KV states of the erased interval with learned steering states while reusing the remaining cache unchanged. To learn a transferable erasing mechanism, we build a two-stage training pipeline: gene
arXiv:2606.11678v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Problem, Research Strategy, and Findings: The rise of large language models (LLMs) raises a key question for urban planning: which forms of professional planning knowledge can AI replicate, and which still require human judgment? Although AI tools are increasingly used in planning practice, there is still no systematic framework for testing whether they can reason with the contextual sensitivity, value awareness, and institutional literacy central to planning expertise. This paper introduces Urban Planning Bench (UPBench), a domain-specific evaluation framework that assesses LLM reasoning through a 4x5 matrix of four knowledge pillars and five cognitive levels adapted from Bloom's revised taxonomy. Evaluating 25 LLMs with automated scoring and expert review, we find a non-monotonic cognitive curve: models perform better on higher-order analytical tasks than on factual recall and integrative judgment. This suggests that planning knowle
arXiv:2606.11520v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Training capable OS agents requires data that simultaneously captures structured user intents, multi-turn task delegation, and grounded tool execution--properties absent from existing datasets. We propose ISE (Intent -> Simulate -> Execute), a three-stage synthesis paradigm that addresses these gaps jointly. Stage 1 constructs roughly 50000 structured intents via a 4D framework (Persona x Domain x Task x Complexity); after deduplication the pool contains 43956 unique intents and attains a Vendi Score of 61.57 over the entire pool on mpnet-base-v2 embeddings (cosine kernel, q=1). Stage 2 drives multi-turn user-agent interaction through a role-locked user simulator that grounds each user turn in actual execution outcomes, producing 23132 complete trajectories averaging 8.12 user turns and 68.24 total dialogue turns. Stage 3 runs every tool call inside a live, isolated OS workspace, generating authentic failure-recovery dynamics instead
arXiv:2606.08878v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Real-world LLM applications are moving beyond single-agent workflows toward orchestrated multi-agent systems, yet current models still struggle to determine what each sub-agent needs to know. To measure this, we introduce PerspectiveGap, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs' ability to compose orchestration prompts for multi-agent systems. PerspectiveGap contains 110 scenarios, each evaluated through two distractor-mixed task formats: role-fragment assignment and free-form prompt writing. These scenarios are organized into 10 topologies, which are distilled from the authors' real-world engineering practice and framed by the Prompt Economy principle: building loop-centered orchestrations that maximize utility with minimal role and engineering overhead. In experiments with 33 commercial models from 10 companies, GPT-5.5 substantially outperforms all competitors, whereas Opus 4.8 shows a notable weakness in orchestration prompting despite its
arXiv:2606.06065v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Second-language (L2) speech recognition often requires transcriptions of pronunciations and intended meanings. Multi-task learning (MTL) is a natural approach because it assumes that shared representations benefit both outputs. However, this paper shows that this assumption does not hold across Korean and English. MTL improves meaning but degrades surface transcription, especially in English, where the degradation scales with surface-meaning divergence measured by Levenshtein edit distance. Encoder analysis links these patterns to encoder-level entanglement, with Korean preserving disentangled representations while English produces nearly identical ones. Cross-output decoder analysis shows that the meaning dual-output decoder adapts with a unique representation, while the surface dual-output decoder remains constrained by the encoder. These findings motivate the design of MTL frameworks that mitigate encoder-level entanglement to redu
arXiv:2606.05494v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Automatic text summarization has become increasingly important due to the rapid growth of digital textual information. This paper presents a Multi-Model Summarization Framework designed to improve the robustness and quality of abstractive text summarization. Relying on a single model often leads to inconsistent summarization quality across articles with varying structures and topics. To address this limitation, the proposed framework integrates multiple fine-tuned transformer-based summarization models and introduces a metric-based selection mechanism. In this framework, each model independently generates a candidate summary for the same input article. The generated summaries are then evaluated using automatic evaluation metrics that capture both lexical similarity and semantic relevance. Based on these scores, the framework selects the highest-quality summary as the final output. The models are fine-tuned and evaluated on the widely
arXiv:2605.27905v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI research agents now support large-scale AI-assisted scientific discovery. We examine whether AI-generated ideas broaden scientific exploration or primarily reinforce existing work. Using five agent frameworks and five large language models, we generate 219,655 ideas for different scientific fields. Across experiments, four consistent patterns emerge. First, AI-generated ideas are more concentrated than human-authored papers within the same research area. Second, they remain much closer to starting literature than later human follow-on work does. Third, AI-generated ideas align less with future human research. Last, AI-generated ideas are located in lower-impact regions of the historical scientific landscape. Overall, current AI research agents appear better suited to local elaboration than to broadening scientific exploration.
arXiv:2605.23328v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Emotion Recognition in Conversation is a core component of affective computing, while current sign language emotion datasets primarily focus on isolated sentences and lack conversational context. Models trained exclusively on these isolated utterances demonstrate degraded performance in real world scenarios because they cannot utilize historical dialogue flow. To address this structural limitation, we introduce the ERC task to sign language video analysis and propose the eJSL Dialog dataset. Constructed using the scripts from the STUDIES corpus, the dataset contains 1,920 video samples organized into 480 unique dialogues. We conduct systematic benchmarking on this dataset using models ranging from isolated visual networks to multimodal conversational architectures. The results reveal a domain gap when applying generic multimodal conversational emotion recognition models to sign language. These findings demonstrate the explicit need fo
arXiv:2605.17932v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Prompt compression reduces inference cost and context length in large language models, but prior evaluations focus mainly on autoregressive architectures. This study examines whether LLMLingua-2 transfers effectively to diffusion large language models (DLLMs), specifically LLaDA-8B-Instruct. We evaluate GSM8K, DUC2004, and ShareGPT using 250 prompts per dataset at an approximate 50\% compression ratio, covering mathematical reasoning, prompt reconstruction, and summarization. Outputs from original, compressed, and reconstructed prompts are compared using exact-match accuracy, BLEU, ROUGE, and BERTScore. Results show that high semantic preservation does not necessarily ensure stable downstream behavior in diffusion models. Summarization remains relatively robust, while mathematical reasoning degrades substantially despite high semantic similarity. Reconstruction further shows that semantically similar prompts may omit reasoning-critica
arXiv:2604.19274v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as co-authors in collaborative writing, where users begin with rough drafts and rely on LLMs to complete, revise, and refine their content. However, this capability poses a serious safety risk: malicious users could jailbreak the models-filling incomplete drafts with dangerous content-to force them into generating harmful outputs. In this paper, we identify the vulnerability of current LLMs to such draft-based co-authoring jailbreak attacks and introduce HarDBench, a systematic benchmark designed to evaluate the robustness of LLMs against this emerging threat. HarDBench spans a range of high-risk domains-including Explosives, Drugs, Weapons, and Cyberattacks-and features prompts with realistic structure and domain-specific cues to assess the model susceptibility to harmful completions. To mitigate this risk, we introduce a safety-utility balanced alignment approach based on preference
arXiv:2604.11996v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Should we trust Large Language Models (LLMs) with high accuracy? LLMs achieve high accuracy on reasoning benchmarks, but correctness alone does not reveal the quality of the reasoning used to produce it. This highlights a fundamental limitation of outcome-based evaluation: models may arrive at correct answers through flawed reasoning, and models with substantially different reasoning capabilities can nevertheless exhibit similar benchmark accuracy, for example due to memorization or over-optimization. In this paper, we ask: given existing benchmarks, can we move beyond outcome-based evaluation to assess the quality of reasoning itself? We seek metrics that (1) differentiate models with similar accuracy and (2) are robust to variations in input prompts and generation configurations. To this end, we propose a reasoning score that evaluates reasoning traces along dimensions such as faithfulness, coherence, utility, and factuality. A rema
arXiv:2604.06205v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The growth of online platforms and user content requires strong content moderation systems that can handle complex inputs from various media types. While large language models (LLMs) are effective, their high computational cost and latency present significant challenges for scalable deployment. To address this, we introduce Tool-MCoT, a small language model (SLM) fine-tuned for content safety moderation leveraging external framework. By training our model on tool-augmented chain-of-thought data generated by LLM, we demonstrate that the SLM can learn to effectively utilize these tools to improve its reasoning and decision-making. Our experiments show that the fine-tuned SLM achieves significant performance gains. Furthermore, we show that the model can learn to use these tools selectively, achieving a balance between moderation accuracy and inference efficiency by calling tools only when necessary.
arXiv:2604.02951v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Human data annotation, especially when involving experts, is often treated as an objective reference. However, many annotation tasks are inherently subjective, and annotators' judgments may evolve over time. This study investigates changes in the quality of annotators' work from a competence perspective during a process of social influence recognition. The study involved 25 annotators from five different groups, including both experts and non-experts, who annotated a dataset of 1,021 dialogues with 20 social influence techniques, along with intentions, reactions, and consequences. An initial subset of 150 texts was annotated twice - before and after the main annotation process - to enable comparison. To measure competence shifts, we combined qualitative and quantitative analyses of the annotated data, semi-structured interviews with annotators, self-assessment surveys, and Large Language Model training and evaluation on the comparison
arXiv:2604.00878v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Actor-level stance detection aims to determine an author expressed position toward specific geopolitical actors mentioned or implicated in a text. Although transformer-based models have achieved relatively good performance in stance classification, they typically rely on unified representations that may not sufficiently capture heterogeneous linguistic signals, such as contrastive discourse structures, framing cues, and salient lexical indicators. This motivates the need for adaptive architectures that explicitly model diverse stance-expressive patterns. In this paper, we propose StanceMoE, a context-enhanced Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture built upon a fine-tuned BERT encoder for actor-level stance detection. Our model integrates six expert modules designed to capture complementary linguistic signals, including global semantic orientation, salient lexical cues, clause-level focus, phrase-level patterns, framing indicators, and
arXiv:2603.29042v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Phone recognition (PR) is a key enabler of multilingual and low-resource speech processing tasks, yet robust performance remains elusive. Highly performant English-focused models do not generalize across languages, while multilingual models underutilize pretrained representations. It also remains unclear how data scale, architecture, and training objective contribute to multilingual PR. We present PhoneticXEUS -- trained on large-scale multilingual data and achieving state-of-the-art performance on both multilingual (17.7% PFER) and accented English speech (10.6% PFER). Through controlled ablations with evaluations across 100+ languages under a unified scheme, we empirically establish our training recipe and quantify the impact of SSL representations, data scale, and loss objectives. In addition, we analyze error patterns across language families, accented speech, and articulatory features. All data and code are released openly at htt
arXiv:2603.23750v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models are increasingly consulted for Islamic knowledge, yet no comprehensive benchmark evaluates their performance across core Islamic disciplines. We introduce IslamicMMLU, a benchmark of 10,013 multiple-choice questions spanning three tracks: Quran (2,013 questions), Hadith (4,000 questions), and Fiqh (jurisprudence, 4,000 questions). Each track is formed of multiple types of questions to examine LLMs capabilities handling different aspects of Islamic knowledge. The benchmark is used to create the IslamicMMLU public leaderboard for evaluating LLMs, and we initially evaluate 26 LLMs, where their averaged accuracy across the three tracks varied between 39.8% to 93.8% (by Gemini 3 Flash). The Quran track shows the widest span (99.3% to 32.4%), while the Fiqh track includes a novel madhab (Islamic school of jurisprudence) bias detection task revealing variable school-of-thought preferences across models. Arabic-specific
arXiv:2603.12572v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Memory embeddings are crucial for memory-augmented systems, such as OpenClaw, but their evaluation is underexplored in current text embedding benchmarks, which narrowly focus on traditional passage retrieval and fail to assess models' ability to handle long-horizon memory retrieval tasks involving fragmented, context-dependent, and temporally distant information. To address this gap, we introduce the Long-horizon Memory Embedding Benchmark (LMEB), a comprehensive framework for evaluating embedding models on complex, long-horizon memory retrieval. LMEB comprises 22 datasets and 193 zero-shot retrieval tasks spanning four memory types: episodic, dialogue, semantic, and procedural. These memory types differ in terms of level of abstraction and temporal dependency, capturing distinct aspects of memory retrieval that reflect the diverse challenges of the real world. We evaluate 15 widely used embedding models, ranging from hundreds of mill
arXiv:2603.04419v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We characterize the phenomenon of context-dependent affordance computation in vision-language models (VLMs). Our primary study uses Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B ($n = 3{,}213$ scene-context pairs from COCO-2017: 479 images under 7 agentic personas), with a cross-model replication on LLaVA-1.5-13B. We demonstrate substantial affordance drift: mean Jaccard similarity between context conditions is $0.095$ (95% CI $[0.092, 0.097]$ across $N = 479$ images; $9{,}244$ prime pairs; $p < 0.0001$), indicating that more than 90% of lexical scene description is context-dependent; the LLaVA replication reproduces the effect (mean $J = 0.160$, 84% context-dependent). Sentence-level cosine similarity confirms drift at the semantic level (mean $= 0.415$, 58.5% context-dependent). Stochastic baseline experiments ($2{,}384$ inference runs across 4 temperatures and 5 seeds) confirm this reflects genuine context effects rather than generation noise: within-prime var
arXiv:2603.01331v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Discrete diffusion language models (dLLMs) generate text by iteratively denoising a masked sequence. However, standard dLLMs condition each denoising step solely on the current hard-masked sequence, while intermediate continuous representations are discarded after sampling and remasking. We term this bottleneck the \textbf{Information Island} issue: continuous information remains isolated within individual denoising steps and fails to propagate across the trajectory. This bottleneck is especially harmful for reasoning, which requires intermediate reasoning state to be preserved and updated across many denoising steps. To address this limitation, we introduce \textbf{MetaState}, a lightweight recurrent augmentation that equips a frozen dLLM backbone with persistent, fixed-size working memory. MetaState comprises three modules with a shared time conditioner: a cross-attention \textbf{Mixer} that reads backbone activations into memory sl
arXiv:2602.23993v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present gradiend, an open-source Python package that operationalizes the GRADIEND method for learning feature directions from factual-counterfactual MLM and CLM gradients in language models. The package provides a unified workflow for feature-related data creation, training, evaluation, visualization, persistent model rewriting via controlled weight updates, and multi-feature comparison. We demonstrate gradiend through an English pronoun running example, a semantic sentiment use case that evaluates lexical generalization to held-out target words, and a large-scale feature comparison.
arXiv:2602.19598v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Eye-tracking-while-reading corpora are a valuable resource for many different disciplines and use cases. Use cases range from studying the cognitive processes underlying reading to machine-learning-based applications, such as gaze-based assessments of reading comprehension. The past decades have seen an increase in the number and size of eye-tracking-while-reading datasets as well as increasing diversity with regard to the stimulus languages covered, the linguistic background of the participants, or accompanying psychometric or demographic data. The spread of data across different disciplines and the lack of data sharing standards across the communities lead to many existing datasets that cannot be easily reused due to a lack of interoperability. In this work, we aim at creating more transparency and clarity with regards to existing datasets and their features across different disciplines by i) presenting an extensive overview of exis
arXiv:2602.05235v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) enhances Large Language Models (LLMs) by grounding generation in external knowledge to improve factuality and reduce hallucinations. Yet most deployments assume a centralized corpus, which is infeasible in privacy aware domains where knowledge remains siloed. This motivates federated RAG (FedRAG), where a central LLM server collaborates with distributed silos without sharing raw documents. In context RAG violates this requirement by transmitting verbatim documents, whereas parametric RAG encodes documents into lightweight adapters that merge with a frozen LLM at inference, avoiding raw-text exchange. We adopt the parametric approach but face two unique challenges induced by FedRAG: high storage and communication from per-document adapters, and destructive aggregation caused by indiscriminately merging multiple adapters. We present FedMosaic, the first federated RAG framework built on parametric ada
arXiv:2601.22146v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Due to limited supervised training data, large language models (LLMs) are typically pre-trained via a self-supervised "predict the next word" objective on a vast amount of unstructured text data. To make the resulting model useful to users, it is further trained on a far smaller amount of "instruction-tuning" data comprised of supervised training examples of instructions and responses. To overcome the limited amount of supervised data, we propose a procedure that can transform the knowledge in internet-scale pre-training documents into billions of synthetic instruction and answer training pairs. The resulting dataset, called FineInstructions, uses ~18M instruction templates created from real user-written queries and prompts. These instruction templates are matched to and instantiated with human-written source documents from unstructured pre-training corpora. With "supervised" synthetic training data generated at this scale, an LLM can
arXiv:2601.14046v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Phone recognition (PR) serves as the atomic interface for language-agnostic modeling for cross-lingual speech processing and phonetic analysis. Despite prolonged efforts in developing PR systems, current evaluations only measure surface-level transcription accuracy. We introduce PRiSM, the first open-source benchmark designed to expose blind spots in phonetic perception through intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation of PR systems. PRiSM standardizes transcription-based evaluation and assesses downstream utility in clinical, educational, and multilingual settings with transcription and representation probes. We find that diverse language exposure during training is key to PR performance, encoder-CTC models are the most stable, and specialized PR models still outperform Large Audio Language Models. PRiSM releases code, recipes, and datasets to move the field toward multilingual speech models with robust phonetic ability: https://github.com/
arXiv:2601.13330v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Across the social and medical sciences, researchers recognize that specifying planned research activities (i.e., 'registration') prior to the commencement of research has benefits for both the transparency and rigour of science. Despite this, evidence suggests that study registrations frequently go unexamined, minimizing their effectiveness. In a way this is no surprise: manually checking registrations against papers is labour- and time-intensive, requiring careful reading across formats and expertise across domains. The advent of AI unlocks new possibilities in facilitating this activity. We present RegCheck, a modular LLM-assisted tool designed to help researchers, reviewers, and editors from across scientific disciplines compare study registrations with their corresponding papers. Importantly, RegCheck keeps human expertise and judgement in the loop by (i) ensuring that users are the ones who determine which features should be comp
arXiv:2601.07372v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) scales capacity via conditional computation, Transformers lack a native primitive for knowledge lookup, forcing them to inefficiently simulate retrieval through computation. To address this, we introduce conditional memory as a complementary sparsity axis, instantiated via Engram, a module that modernizes classic $N$-gram embedding for O(1) lookup. By formulating the Sparsity Allocation problem, we uncover a U-shaped scaling law that optimizes the trade-off between neural computation (MoE) and static memory (Engram). Guided by this law, we scale Engram to 27B parameters, achieving superior performance over a strictly iso-parameter and iso-FLOPs MoE baseline. Most notably, while the memory module is expected to aid knowledge retrieval (e.g., MMLU +3.4; CMMLU +4.0), we observe even larger gains in general reasoning (e.g., BBH +5.0; ARC-Challenge +3.7) and code/math domains~(HumanEval +3.0; MATH +2.4). Mech
arXiv:2601.06861v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Background: Large language models (LLMs) harbor systematic biases that are particularly consequential in workplace and HR contexts, where their outputs increasingly influence hiring, job design, and organizational decisions. Existing bias-evaluation approaches remain methodologically fragmented, limiting practitioners' ability to assess deployment risks. Objective: This study introduces BiasLab, a multilingual dual-framing framework to quantify and compare directional output-level bias in LLMs, demonstrated across six workplace and HR-relevant topics. Methods: BiasLab combines mirrored affirmative and reverse prompt pairs, randomized wrapper perturbations, fixed-choice response constraints, and polarity-aligned scoring. Ten LLMs were evaluated across six topics (gender in leadership, employment gap candidates, age in hiring, remote versus office work, four-day versus five-day work weeks, and AI-assisted versus human-only hiring), span
arXiv:2512.17776v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent advances in large language models have enabled deep research systems that generate expert-level reports through multi-step reasoning and evidence-based synthesis. However, evaluating such reports remains challenging: report quality is multifaceted, making it difficult to determine what to assess and which criteria to use; LLM-based judges may miss errors that require domain expertise to identify; and because deep research relies on retrieved evidence, report-wide claim verification is also necessary. To address these issues, we propose DEER, a benchmark for evaluating expert-level deep research reports. DEER systematizes evaluation criteria with an expert-developed taxonomy (7 dimensions, 25 subdimensions) operationalized as 101 fine-grained rubric items. We also provide task-specific Expert Evaluation Guidance to support LLM-based judging. In addition to rubric-based assessment, we propose a claim verification architecture tha
arXiv:2511.18850v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Discovering effective predictive signals, or "alphas," from financial data with high dimensionality and extremely low signal-to-noise ratio remains a difficult open problem. Despite progress in deep learning, genetic programming, and, more recently, large language model (LLM)-based factor generation, existing approaches still explore only a narrow region of the vast alpha search space. Neural models tend to produce opaque and fragile patterns, while symbolic or formula-based methods often yield redundant or economically ungrounded expressions that generalize poorly. Although different in form, these paradigms share a key limitation: none can conduct broad, structured, and human-like exploration that balances logical consistency with creative leaps. To address this gap, we introduce the Cognitive Alpha Mining Framework (CogAlpha), which combines code-level alpha representation with LLM-driven reasoning and evolutionary search. Treating
arXiv:2511.11309v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transformer-based transfer models now dominate Bangla sentiment classification, yet their adversarial robustness remains largely unexamined, and no prior study pairs a Bangla attack suite with a defense that measurably recovers robustness. We address this gap with destroR, a unified pipeline for evaluating and hardening Bangla text classifiers. First, we introduce three meaning-preserving Bangla attack recipes a paraphrase attack, a back-translation attack, and a one-hot word-swap attack that perturb inputs while regenerating fluent, semantically faithful sentences, inducing model prediction perplexity rather than input noise. Second, we construct a robustness benchmark that evaluates five transfer models (BanglaBERT, BanglishBERT, XLM-RoBERTa, MuRIL, and IndicBERTv2) across four datasets against five attacks, placing our recipes against two strong word-substitution baselines, TextFooler and BAE, under an identical protocol. Third, we
arXiv:2510.18908v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Social media platforms such as Twitter (now X) provide rich data for analyzing public discourse, especially during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the brevity, informality, and noise of social media short texts often hinder the effectiveness of traditional topic modeling, producing incoherent or redundant topics that are often difficult to interpret. To address these challenges, we have developed \emph{TM-Rephrase}, a model-agnostic framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to rephrase raw tweets into more standardized and formal language prior to topic modeling. Using a dataset of 25,027 COVID-19-related Twitter posts, we investigate the effects of two rephrasing strategies, general- and colloquial-to-formal-rephrasing, on multiple topic modeling methods. Results demonstrate that \emph{TM-Rephrase} improves three metrics measuring topic modeling performance (i.e., topic coherence, topic uniqueness, and topi
arXiv:2508.21787v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Best-of-n sampling improves the accuracy of large language models (LLMs) and large reasoning models (LRMs) by generating multiple candidate solutions and selecting the one with the highest reward. The key challenge for reasoning tasks is designing a scoring function that can identify correct reasoning chains without access to ground-truth answers. We propose Probabilistic Confidence Selection And Ranking (PiCSAR): a simple, training-free method that scores each candidate generation using the joint log-likelihood of the reasoning and final answer. The joint log-likelihood of the reasoning and final answer naturally decomposes into reasoning confidence and answer confidence. PiCSAR achieves substantial gains across diverse benchmarks (+10.18 on MATH500, +9.81 on AIME2025), outperforming baselines with at least 2x fewer samples in 16 out of 20 comparisons. Our analysis reveals that correct reasoning chains exhibit significantly higher re
arXiv:2506.08359v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Inference-time steering aims to alter a large language model's (LLM's) responses without changing its parameters, but a central challenge is identifying the internal modules that most strongly govern the target behavior. Existing approaches often rely on simplistic cues or ad hoc heuristics, leading to suboptimal or unintended effects. We introduce REAL, a framework for identifying behavior-relevant modules (attention heads or layers) in Transformer models. For each module, REAL trains a vector-quantized autoencoder (VQ-AE) on its hidden activations and uses a shared, learnable codebook to partition the latent space into behavior-relevant and behavior-irrelevant subspaces. REAL quantifies a module's behavioral relevance by how well its VQ-AE encodings discriminate behavior-aligned from behavior-violating responses via a binary classification metric; this score guides both module selection and steering strength. We evaluate REAL across
arXiv:2505.18610v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recently, significant progress has been made in developing reasoning-capable Large Language Models (LLMs) through long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) techniques. However, this long-CoT reasoning process imposes substantial memory overhead due to the large Key-Value (KV) Cache memory overhead. Post-training KV Cache quantization has emerged as a promising compression technique and has been extensively studied in short-context scenarios. However, directly applying existing methods to long-CoT LLMs causes significant performance degradation due to the following two reasons: (1) Large cumulative error: Existing methods fail to adequately leverage available memory, and they directly quantize the KV Cache during each decoding step, leading to large cumulative quantization error. (2) Short-context calibration: Due to Rotary Positional Embedding (RoPE), the use of short-context data during calibration fails to account for the distribution of less fre
arXiv:2505.13353v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for understanding large codebases, but whether they understand operational semantics of long code context or rely on pattern matching shortcuts remains unclear. We distinguish between lexical recall (retrieving code verbatim) and semantic recall (understanding operational semantics). Evaluating 10 state-of-the-art LLMs, we find that while frontier models achieve near-perfect, position-independent lexical recall, semantic recall degrades severely when code is centrally positioned in long contexts. We introduce semantic recall sensitivity to measure whether tasks require understanding of code's operational semantics vs. permit pattern matching shortcuts. Through a novel counterfactual measurement method, we show that models rely heavily on pattern matching shortcuts to solve existing code understanding benchmarks. We propose a new task SemTrace, which achieves high semantic recall s