Recursive self-improvement (RSI) enables AI systems to turn experience and feedback into persistent changes that improve both their capabilities and the process of future improvement. We first use the Headroom-Closed Index (HCI) to reveal the problems of existing LLMs, then introduce the RSI concept and its development roadmap: from improvement-execution autonomy, improvement-strategy autonomy, experience-acquisition autonomy, and environment-adaptation autonomy, to recursive meta-improvement. Next we examine RSI across scenarios (e.g., scientific discovery, embodied intelligence, software engineering), highlighting their distinct requirements and development speeds. Drawing on diverse industry practices and preliminary empirical evidence, we connect RSI research with practical systems and identify key challenges to achieving genuine RSI.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11873
Agent-based model predictive control (AMPC) has recently been proposed as a distributed scheme that collaborates with all agents to achieve optimal holistic performance. However, its optimality highly depends on the prediction accuracy that requires all agents or their contributions to be known, which is too idealistic for actual implementation. This research proposes a novel practical hybrid control scheme - learning agent-based MPC (LAMPC), combining the model-based AMPC approach and data-based learning methods to improve the holistic vehicle performance for multi-agent systems. The Gaussian process regression (GPR) enhanced by an online data management strategy serves as the learning core to predict unknown contributions. A novel multi-step prediction mechanism leverages the GPR learning potential along the horizon. The predicted mean, representing the learned unknown contributions, completes the system model in the MPC for more accurate control. Meanwhile, a stochastic framework is formulated to guarantee control safety and feasibility using soft chance constraints based on the prediction variance. Both simulations and experiments show that, with the learning capability, LAMPC outperforms the traditional AMPC. LAMPC can achieve higher tracking performance in well-learned scenarios and always guarantee constraint satisfaction even in less-learned scenarios. Moreover, the proposed hybrid control scheme is efficient for real-time implementation and is flexible to any control agent topology.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11871
A language model normally begins training with random word embeddings: whatever 'banana' means must be learned from training corpora. I implement St. Augustine's picture of word learning, meaning by ostension, for a small masked language model (DeBERTa) trained on 10M words: before training, visually grounded tokens receive embeddings derived from the image regions they label; other tokens start random. Visual initialization leaves a measurable imprint that lasts until the end of training. At the same time, the effect remains invisible under most BabyLM benchmarks, which probe abstract grammatical knowledge: visual initialization does not affect performance there. The only zero-shot exception is object-property knowledge (COMPS, Misra et al. 2023), where seeding helps in every configuration. To follow up on this result, I build a corpus-tailored version of the Visual-Property Swap benchmark (Lin et al., 2026), which tests color, material, size, and shape knowledge, with per-item training frequency and seeded status. Here, vision-seeded models have a persistent, seed- replicated advantage, confined to the seeded words. As a causal test, I show that synthetic grounding of previously unseeded words transfers the advantage to exactly those words. Function words and abstract vocabulary also receive strong visual seeds and retain them throughout training, and the training objective draws on them: held-out mask-prediction loss falls for these words in every seed. However, no benchmark I run registers this. What evaluation would pick this up remains an open question.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11870
Truth and evidence-based communication provide important foundations for democratic governance, accountability, and collective decision-making. Prior work shows that evidence-oriented language in US congressional floor speeches has declined since the mid-1970s, alongside broader changes in legislative productivity and polarization. This study shifts the analysis from congressional sessions to individual members of Congress to examine whether epistemic orientation varies systematically across legislators and whether it relates to political behavior and legislative effectiveness. Using the Evidence-Minus-Intuition (EMI) score, we measure the relative prevalence of evidence-oriented versus intuition-oriented language in congressional floor speeches and Twitter posts. We link these measures to legislator-level data on ideology, institutional position, communication context, and Legislative Effectiveness Score (LES). The results show that more ideologically extreme members use less evidence-oriented language on the congressional floor. EMI also exhibits cross-platform consistency with members who use more evidence-oriented language in floor speeches also being more evidence-oriented on Twitter, although EMI is lower on Twitter overall. Finally, EMI in congressional speeches is positively associated with individual legislative effectiveness, even after accounting for ideology and extensive political, institutional, demographic, topical, and communication volume controls. These findings suggest that evidence-oriented language is not only an aggregate feature of congressional discourse but also a meaningful attribute of individual-level legislative communication and effectiveness.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11865
Speech large language models (SpeechLLMs) offer reduced latency and retain paralinguistic nuances that are typically lost in cascaded automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-based LM architectures. However, they continue to lag behind text-only LLMs on complex reasoning tasks, while real-time spoken interaction imposes strict latency constraints. Although prior works employ Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and concurrent reasoning to enhance reasoning capabilities without inducing prohibitive delays, an inherent accuracy-latency trade-off persists. In this paper, we investigate whether a streaming SpeechLLM can dynamically revise its reasoning traces on the fly. We introduce RetroThinker, a multi-stage post-training framework that equips the Moshi model to self-verify and forward-correct CoT steps during inference. RetroThinker combines supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on curated retrospective thinking data with length-based direct preference optimization (DPO) to optimize retrospective during early reasoning (i.e., reasoning concurrently while the user speaks). Evaluated on the GSM8K benchmark, RetroThinker significantly improves the accuracy-latency trade-off over non-retrospective baselines, achieving an 11% absolute accuracy gain at a comparable latency.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11864
Energy consumption forecasting relies on increasingly complex machine learning (ML) models, such as Genetic Programming-based symbolic regressors, whose predictions can be difficult for facility managers and building operators to interpret. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques address this opacity, but traditional XAI dashboards require substantial technical expertise and provide limited flexibility for dynamic, context-aware inquiry. Conversational XAI systems offer a promising alternative; however, previous approaches, such as TalkToModel, were constrained by rigid custom grammars and achieved only 76.8% intent-parsing accuracy. This paper introduces the Explainability Assistant, an open-source conversational XAI system that leverages the function-calling capabilities of modern Large Language Models (LLMs) to overcome these limitations. The system achieves 94% intent-parsing accuracy, supports flexible natural language interaction, and adapts to different ML problem types without task-specific fine-tuning. We present the system's architecture and report results from a comparative evaluation conducted with energy domain specialists, contrasting the Explainability Assistant with a traditional XAI dashboard. The evaluation suggests improved usability and consistent task accuracy, with all experts unanimously preferring the conversational interface for practical use.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11860
How does a language model's dependence on query-routing information and target knowledge change as it answers a question? We study this question through layerwise interventions on the hidden state at the end of the question. Across Qwen, Llama, and Gemma, we compare country-continent questions with noun, adjective, and code answers while keeping several fitted measurements distinct. A pair-conditioned request direction describes which country is queried in natural single-country questions; a global request direction describes first- versus second-country requests in paired questions; separate selection candidates test control among contents already available in the hidden state. A diagnostic reanalysis of frozen Qwen natural-question states shows that the pair-conditioned direction grows stronger before interventions on it begin to alter later fitted knowledge, with this causal window opening while answer-supporting content is still forming. The paired three-model trajectories are not uniform: Gemma shows a partially overlapping mid-layer routing-content profile, whereas Llama has no sustained routing-effect window under the same gates. In the paired protocol, dependence on the global request direction decreases from fixed earlier to later layer sets while dependence on fitted content persists. A matched Qwen comparison shows that the pair-conditioned direction retains a late effect, so this operational handoff concerns the global fitted direction rather than all request information. These results separate early readability, natural strength, causal steering, and later content dependence.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11859
Language identification in code-mixed text, largely observed in social media, is highly essential when users frequently switch between multiple languages within a single utterance. Accurately identifying the languages of code-mixed tokens becomes an urgent necessity. Traditional language identification models, designed for monolingual text, are not well suited for token-level language identification in code-mixed settings. We formulate the task as a sequence labeling problem and fine-tune contextual transformer-based models MuRIL and XLM-RoBERTa best suited for Indian languages. We evaluate these systems on three different data configurations (Hindi, Gujarati, and Bengali) to predict language labels for individual tokens. We release a benchmark for language identification in code-mixed tokens with manually annotated test sets. We propose two approaches of code-mixed generation using parallel sentences of three languages. The trained models demonstrate the effectiveness of contextual embeddings for token-level language identification in multilingual social media text. For reproducibility and to facilitate future research, we publicly release our fine-tuned models.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11851
Diffusion and flow-matching schedules control the signal and noise coefficients that mix data and noise along affine probability paths. Minimizing a kinetic action defined on coefficient paths, motivated by optimal transport, helps explain strong baselines but remains model-agnostic and ignores prediction error. Here we introduce a model-aware schedule construction based on fiberwise optimal transport. At a fixed time and state on the probability path, compatible signal/noise decompositions form an affine fiber. We define a fiberwise prediction risk by averaging optimal-transport costs between the true and predictor-induced decompositions within these fibers. On a fixed coefficient curve, combining this risk with coefficient-path kinetic action yields a closed-form optimal time allocation. This construction extends to general linear prediction targets, and the risk profile can be estimated from an early baseline checkpoint. We evaluate DDPMs and flow matching across prediction targets, training configurations, risk-estimation checkpoints, datasets, and architectures. Our model-aware schedules consistently outperform strong baselines, including a 38.6% relative FID reduction for flow matching on CIFAR-10 at 16 function evaluations. Each model-agnostic kinetic baseline determines its own kinetic reference coordinate. In these coordinates, fiberwise-risk profiles from independently trained models in different settings align closely after normalization to unit area. The resulting schedule deformations used in training also align, suggesting empirical universality across the evaluated models and settings. Pretrained-checkpoint diagnostics extend this normalized-risk agreement to larger conditional latent diffusion and 2-RF models. A frozen analytic allocation template retains most of the model-aware improvement without further risk estimation or model-specific fitting.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11842
Cardiovascular screening models trained on national health surveys routinely report areas under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) near 0.89. We asked whether that accuracy reflects learning or target leakage, whether tabular foundation models change the answer, and whether the properties deployment requires survive joint examination. We benchmarked ten classifiers spanning linear, tree-ensemble, neural, glass-box, and tabular foundation classes for prevalent myocardial infarction in 442,067 respondents of the 2022 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System across five feature tiers of decreasing leakage risk. Each was audited for discrimination, calibration, fairness at an explicit screening threshold, conformal coverage, explanation faithfulness, and inference cost, then applied -- models and thresholds frozen -- to 430,755 respondents of 2023. Removing two post-diagnostic features cost every model 0.049-0.051 AUROC, collapsing the field into a 0.0045-wide band. The glass-box explainable boosting machine was non-inferior to every alternative within a pre-specified 0.005 margin while scoring the cohort roughly 104 times faster than the strongest foundation model. One threshold detected 75.4% of women's infarctions against 89.0% of men's; editing the model's shape functions reduced the gap to 0.010. Marginal conformal prediction gave 0.86 coverage to men and 0.82 to adults over 60; Mondrian calibration repaired every stratum. Frozen models transported within 0.002 AUROC. Reported headroom in this literature is a property of the feature set, not the learner. Transparency cost nothing measurable and made fairness repair and uncertainty conditioning directly auditable. Evaluation practice, not model capacity, is the binding constraint.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11838
Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS) and AI- supported decision assistants are expected to transform maritime operations, but their safe integration depends on how maritime professionals perceive and trust such systems. This paper presents a survey study on maritime stakeholders' attitudes toward an AI-supported assistant in collision-avoidance scenarios. Participants evaluated technology anxiety, trust in automation, and explanation quality using established and adapted questionnaires, complemented by sentiment and thematic analysis of open-ended responses Results indicate a generally positive disposition toward maritime technology, no clear age-related differences in openness, stable trust across scenarios, and more scenario-sensitive, multidimensional explanation ratings. Open responses showed that participants valued support for decision-making, situation awareness, and confidence-building, while raising concerns about AI reliability, over- reliance and loss of expertise. The findings suggest that maritime AI systems should not focus solely on increasing automation or trust, but on supporting calibrated reliance through transparent, reliable, and operationally meaningful design with domain experts in the loop.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11805
Visual Autoregressive Models (VAR) generate images through next-scale prediction, producing all tokens within each scale in parallel. We show that this parallel decoding constitutes a mean-field-style approximation that discards spatial dependencies among same-scale tokens, causing locally incoherent samples regardless of backbone capacity -- a limitation of the decoding rule. Addressing this limitation, we introduce the Logit Refiner, a lightweight autoregressive module that restores intra-scale dependencies by sequentially sampling tokens conditioned on frozen backbone features. Adding only ~10% parameters and less than 5% of the base model's training compute, it plugs into any pretrained VAR checkpoint without retraining. Controlled ablations isolate joint intra-scale sampling -- rather than additional capacity or training -- as the critical ingredient. Across backbones from 310M to 2B parameters on class-conditional ImageNet 256x256, the refiner consistently improves generation quality, enabling a 1.1B-parameter model to surpass one twice its size. The approach further generalizes to text-to-image generation, confirming that the mean-field bottleneck persists across VAR variants and is effectively alleviated by our method. Project page: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11804
Humans and machines often solve harder problems by spending more time on computation. In deep learning, looped models implement this idea during inference by recurrently updating a hidden state. In practice, however, their training backpropagates through only one or a few updates, making it hard to train early updates to support future ones. We propose looped flows, an approach that sidesteps this issue by training the recurrence with local denoising objectives. By imposing temporal association across denoising objectives through progressively decreasing noise levels and shared noise, the model is incentivized to learn recurrent states that transfer useful computation over time, even when gradients cover only a few updates. We then formulate inference as integrating the velocity of a probability flow parameterized by the learned denoiser, coupled with recurrent states. This allows solving harder problems by spending more computation through a finer temporal grid and enables multiple valid predictions from different initial noise samples. Across six reasoning benchmarks including two multi-solution benchmarks, looped flows outperform prior state-of-the-art looped models overall, achieving 58.8% test accuracy on ARC-AGI-1 and 12.2% on ARC-AGI-2.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11801
Large language models are often fine-tuned, shared, or downloaded from third parties, so a deployed model may carry a hidden backdoor that behaves normally on benign inputs but switches to attacker-controlled behavior when a secret trigger appears. While backdoors can be audited before deployment, runtime monitoring remains important for models that are frequently updated. The challenge is that LLM serving is latency-sensitive: existing inference-time detectors either rely on assumptions about the trigger form, which can fail on stealthy attacks, or require extra model computation, such as input perturbations or an additional generation pass. We introduce SpecGuard, an inference-time backdoor detector that repurposes speculative decoding at zero added model-computation cost. Speculative decoding speeds up inference by using a small draft model to propose tokens and a target model to verify them. We observe that this verification process already exposes a useful signal: when a backdoor is triggered, the target model shifts toward the attacker's behavior, while a clean draft model does not predict this shift, causing the draft-token acceptance rate to change. We formalize when this signal appears and show that an attacker who suppresses it must also weaken the backdoor. Across diverse backdoor types and model families, SpecGuard reliably detects triggered behavior, including stealthy cases where input-level filters are blind, while avoiding the extra generation cost of existing runtime detectors. Speculative decoding therefore doubles as a free, always-on signal for detecting backdoored LLM behavior.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11799
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems and audio language models (audio LMs) now report low error rates on monolingual benchmarks, but their behavior on code switched speech in low resource, diacritic rich languages remains poorly characterized. We present a switch aware evaluation of eleven modern systems (six ASR models and five audio LMs) on English Yoruba code-switched speech, using a deterministic 2000 utterance evaluation set and a shared scoring pipeline. Beyond word error rate (WER), we report switch localized diagnostics: a switch entry token error rate (SETER), windowed switch point error rates, language specific error rates, and a diacritic insensitive WER. Our central finding is that aggregate WER hides code switching behavior. The best system by WER (an ASR model) is statistically indistinguishable from a leading audio LM on WER, yet the audio LM is significantly better on every switch localized metric. Across faithful systems, Yoruba token recognition collapses (error 0.97 for almost all systems) while English tokens are recognized far better, and errors concentrate sharply at switches into Yoruba. Several generative audio LMs fail as exact transcribers, producing translation, verbosity, and prompt leakage that are strongly prompt dependent. We release manifests, metric implementations, and evaluation scripts to support reproducible, switch aware benchmarking for African code switched speech.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11786
Dexterous in-hand manipulation of a grasped object with an anthropomorphic hand is an unsolved frontier for robot dexterity. The contact-richness and highly dynamic nature of object-hand interactions tend to require extensive modeling or data-collection efforts for learning-based approaches. Modern simulators used for reinforcement learning (RL) cannot fully replicate the required contact complexity, while collecting dexterous demonstrations for imitation learning (IL) remains an open problem. In this research, we present an embodied control approach based on real-time task Jacobian estimation of the combined hand and object system on the physical robot. Using only the CPU on a laptop, the proposed controller begins in-hand pen writing after approximately 18 s of initialization and continues to adapt online, without an analytic hand--object kinematic/contact model, simulation training, or precollected task demonstrations. We demonstrate that the same estimator/controller formulation works on three anthropomorphic robotic hand systems (one physical, two simulated) to show human-like, in-hand articulation of a grasped pen by an embodiment-independent formulation. Sub-millimeter in-plane precision (mean 0.6 mm across runs) is achieved across letters and shapes written in the air and on paper on a physical robot. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of an anthropomorphic hand writing arbitrary single-stroke trajectories with a grasped pen through purely in-hand motion, and it showcases an alternative to compute- and data-heavy approaches such as RL and IL for achieving dexterous manipulation through computationally simple and data-efficient algorithms.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11775
Cross-cultural understanding has become increasingly important in today's highly connected, cross-national world. The success of LLM-based technologies is now driving the development of automated tools to aid understanding for nonnative people trying to succeed in cross-cultural environments. Building such automated tools is often done by leveraging in-thewild text, audio, and video data. This paper presents techniques for improving speech recognition-based transcript creation in multiple languages from videos to better train these automated tools. The focus is on processes and speech tools that can easily be used by cross-cultural tool builders without requiring deep speech processing expertise. Using publicly available videos from YouTube and Whisper-based tools, average transcription error rate across seven languages (Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Turkish, Russian, and Hebrew) of 30% are observed. With a modest amount of fine-tuning data, the average error rate can be reduced to 20% making such output much more usable for downstream processing. Speech and metadata associated with these videos that can be used by the community to further refine these experiments are released as well.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11772
Large language models are superseded every few quarters; clinical evidence takes years. We asked whether medical research is keeping pace with the systems it evaluates. PubMed returned 11,628 records for January 2023 to June 2026 across fourteen clinical domains, growing 45-fold; 2.5% used a randomised, controlled or prospective design. Evaluation lag, from a study's newest named model release to its own publication, widened from 1.33 to 6.08 quarters. Because discontinued models age mechanically, we benchmarked this against a counterfactual holding model composition fixed: migration to newer systems offset only 56% of the drift (95% CI 50-65). Randomised trials evaluated models a median 4.6 quarters older than other designs (P = 3 x 10^-19), yet among studies naming a model still under development no design differed from any other; 62% of randomised trials evaluated a discontinued family. Rigour and currency are in tension, and that tension reflects model selection rather than research timelines.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11770
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to analyze and rewrite news, yet current framing studies mainly evaluate generation, detection, or whether rewritten text appears more neutral. They do not directly show whether a model can undo a known framing transformation while keeping the facts fixed. We introduce a controlled inversion test over three established textual realizations of framing: evaluative lexis, agency realization, and information salience. Across 60 news articles and three intervention strengths, this yields 540 paired variants with preserved atomic facts and recorded edits. Across Qwen, DeepSeek, and Kimi, factual preservation remains near 0.84, whereas intervention reversal is 0.044--0.068. Even when both framing type and direction are recognized correctly, pooled reversal reaches 0.071. These results reveal a clear separation between factual fidelity, framing recognition, and framing inversion: recognizing how an article is framed does not imply that the framing can be undone.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11769
Per-token gating of forward/reverse KL losses has become a standard technique for on-policy knowledge distillation (OPD), but existing methods such as EOPD (Jin et al., 2026) and ToDi (Jung et al., 2025) each fix a single gating signal and a single gating direction, and the two have never been compared directly. We introduce a four-coefficient parameterization lambda_t = sigma(a * h_t + b * u(x) + c + d * gap_t) in which direction-aligned proxies of EOPD and ToDi appear as one-dimensional (1D) restrictions, and which adds multi-channel composition and an explicit bias as further degrees of freedom. On TweetEval (Barbieri et al., 2020) emotion and hate, with a Qwen3-32B teacher and a Qwen3-4B student, configurations in the full family reach higher accuracy than the matched-magnitude single-channel (entropy-only / gap-only) 1D restrictions in 33 of 36 comparable cells, and a 26-cell mean-match isolation experiment places dynamic gating ahead of effective-KL-matched static baselines in 19 of 26 cells. Because cells share training data, models, and parameter substructure, we report both counts as exploratory aggregate directional evidence rather than as independent hypothesis tests. Targeted three-seed paired replications of the nine headline comparisons singled out by that sweep -- including a third task, offensive -- are directionally consistent, but individually smaller than the single-seed estimates and not significant at n=3. We therefore present the parameterization primarily as a shared coordinate system for comparing per-token gating designs in short-output classification OPD.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11768