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PathAnchor: Path-Structured Evidence for Scientific Agents
2026-09-30 01:49:02Qiuhui Chen, Jiafan Lu, Shuaimin Tang, Tao Dai, Suyuan Wang, Chenrui Ji, Zhenglei Zhou, Weimin ZhongAbstract
Scientific agents can retrieve relevant passages yet still lose functional order, mix evidence across sources, or state conclusions that exceed the retrieved record. We introduce PathAnchor, a bounded scientific reasoning system built on path-structured evidence workspaces. Instead of treating passages or extracted concepts as independent units, the system retrieves source-linked Material-Sensor-Signal-System trajectories that preserve role, direction, and the evidence supporting each transition. A controller uses three read-only tools to search paper-specific trajectories, trace paths across candidate sources, and open exact evidence before producing a claim-cited answer and an explicit evidence boundary. On 120 single- and cross-paper flexible-sensor questions, PathAnchor scores 82.6% and leads six evaluated systems. Under a matched controller, corpus, and six-call budget, replacing unordered concept graphs with path-structured records raises source recall from 61.3% to 82.9%, increases answers whose claims all cite opened evidence from 69.2% to 90.0%, and reduces tool calls. These results show that evidence organization affects retrieval and citation completeness under fixed agent resources.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38766
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From cacophony to hierarchy: a principled framework for assessing AI consciousness
2026-09-29 22:58:49Shamil Chandaria, Arvo Mu\~noz Mor\'an, Fernando Rosas, Anil Seth, Henry Shevlin, Marcus Hutter, Thore Graepel, Adam Bales, Iulia Comsa, Murray Shanahan, Ruben Laukkonen, Morten Kringelbach, Chris Frith, Shane LeggAbstract
The question of AI consciousness is one of the most urgent pre-emptive problems in philosophy and computer science, yet progress is hampered by a cacophony of competing theories that often talk past each other. Separating the hard problem from the mapping problem allows the deepest metaphysical disagreements to be set aside: granting that experience supervenes on a system's organisation, the tractable question becomes at which grain of description that supervenience base sits. We extend Marr's three levels of analysis into a five-level hierarchy of functional descriptions (behavioural, computational, intrinsic causal-structural, organismic, and organism-environment) grounded in supervenience, coarse-graining, and multiple realisability. The major theories of consciousness are positioned within this hierarchy according to which level they take to be critical, and for each level we develop operationalisable indicators and assess current AI systems against them. A Bayesian model then combines theoretical credences with indicator evidence into an overall credence in a system's capacity for consciousness. In illustrative assessments, the verdict for current LLMs is driven as much by where theoretical credence is placed as by how the evidence is read: under different stipulated readings and credence distributions, assessments range from below 0.01 to roughly 0.8, showing sensitivity to assumptions. Finally, the consciousness indicators at each level closely overlap with the architectural features needed for general intelligence, suggesting that increasingly capable AI may become a stronger candidate for consciousness. The framework supports a structured agnosticism, in which theoretical commitments are made explicit, credences are updated as evidence accumulates, and assessments take the form of aggregated probabilities rather than verdicts.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.35618
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An Empirical Study of Architectural Shift from Traditional to AI-Enabled Simulink Controllers
2026-09-29 20:27:33Hadiza Umar Yusuf, Khouloud GaaloulAbstract
Effective AI adoption in cyber-physical systems (CPS) depends on embedding design knowledge into engineering practice. Yet as AI-enabled components increasingly replace analytically derived control laws, this occurs without a systematic understanding of how controller architectures differ or remain similar across paradigms. We address this gap with an empirical study of traditional and AI-enabled Simulink controllers, guided by a literature-derived taxonomy of ten structural categories and nine functional roles. The study analyzes 62 real-world models spanning 8 controller types and 10 application domains, and surveys 13 practitioners, identifying three architectural tensions. First, subsystem organization dominates all controller structures regardless of paradigm, occupying 68-72% of controller footprint, while core control logic occupies minimal space. Second, AI-enabled controllers rely heavily on discrete dynamics and user-defined abstraction, categories largely absent from AI literature, exposing a gap between described and implemented architectures. Third, constraint enforcement blocks largely disappear from AI-enabled models despite practitioner expectations. This reveals a misalignment where safety mechanisms shift from explicit structure to implicit training-time artifacts, breaking traceability.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38504
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Anthropomorphism in the age of Large Language Models: An overview of potential risks and mitigations
2026-09-29 20:15:01Ismael T. Freire, Marceau Nahon, Maud van Lier, Katie Evans, H\'elie Bazin, Michele Farisco, Kathinka Evers, Raja Chatila, Mehdi KhamassiAbstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) and more broadly Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems are often described and understood in human-like terms, a phenomenon known as \emph{anthropomorphism}. This paper provides a synthesis of recent literature on anthropomorphism in AI, covering theoretical frameworks, the role of language in framing AI as human-like, the various risks of anthropomorphizing machines, and strategies to mitigate these issues. After examining why we tend to anthropomorphize AI systems and whether we are right to do so, we highlight the impact of linguistic framing on anthropomorphism. Then, we introduce a conceptual taxonomy of risks associated with AI anthropomorphism. This taxonomy groups twenty-one concerns within five analytical categories: epistemic, affective, human agency, normative, and societal and institutional risks. Finally, we relate these concerns to proposed interventions in design, communication, education, and governance. We argue that a better understanding of AI systems requires concepts and theories grounded in their organization and demonstrated capacities. The linguistic shaping of anthropomorphic perceptions should form part of this scientific effort, since our descriptions influence both how these systems are understood and the roles we allow them to occupy in society.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38486
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PANDA: A Decentralized Architecture with Flexible Orchestration for Scalable, Fault-Tolerant Multi-Agent Systems
2026-09-29 20:10:31Matthew D. Laws, Cristina Nita-RotaruAbstract
Existing architectures for LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) cannot reliably and efficiently solve multi-step tasks at scale: they struggle to support large numbers of agents and concurrent tasks, tolerate failures, govern agent interactions, and accommodate the diverse planning and execution patterns different tasks require. We present PANDA, a decentralized architecture that connects a large collective of heterogeneous, independently administered agents, letting them discover each other's capabilities and self-organize into small specialized teams per task. PANDA scales by decoupling collective communication from team communication, allowing agents to participate in multiple teams simultaneously, load-balancing tasks across the collective, and scheduling concurrent work within each agent. PANDA further separates the underlying architecture from the orchestration strategy, supporting three planning and execution patterns (star, chain, and mesh) that can be selected according to the structure and requirements of each task. PANDA detects infrastructure and orchestration failures and recovers affected tasks by dynamically replanning around failed components. Finally, to provide governance without a centralized service that would limit scalability, PANDA uses a web-of-trust model to constrain agent interactions to established trust relationships. We evaluate PANDA on the HotPotQA benchmark, demonstrating that it scales to thousands of agents, assembles teams in milliseconds, matches state-of-the-art accuracy at up to 8x the efficiency, and sustains 100% task completion under faults where existing systems fail.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38482
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AIM: Agentic Idea Management for Automated Research
2026-09-29 19:37:43Hyeong Kyu Choi, Bhavana Dalvi Mishra, Jiefeng Chen, Mihir Parmar, Rui Meng, Chun-Liang Li, Xiangru Tang, Sharon Li, Jinsung Yoon, Tomas PfisterAbstract
Frontier LLMs are increasingly used to automate scientific research through iterative search. We distinguish idea-driven search from solution-driven search and identify three core challenges: organizing evolving research ideas, selecting promising directions, and maintaining alignment between ideas and their implementations. To address these challenges, we introduce the Agentic Idea Manager (AIM), a fully autonomous framework for managing and exploring research directions in idea-driven automated research. Inspired by Bayesian optimization, AIM uses an Agentic Surrogate and an Agentic Acquisition mechanism to organize discovered ideas and guide their selection. A Solution Auditor maintains idea-solution integrity, while a Resource Planner adaptively allocates the remaining experimental budget across parallel search branches. Experiments on 10 AutoLab benchmark tasks show that AIM surpasses the strongest baseline by 1.6 percentage points on System Optimization tasks and 4.9 percentage points on long-horizon Model Development & CUDA tasks. Notably, AIM reaches the best baseline performance up to 3.1x faster in wall-clock time. We further provide a theoretical analysis of when searching over ideas becomes beneficial. Our analysis shows that explicit idea-level allocation makes semantic coverage directly controllable, and that broader coverage becomes increasingly valuable when competitive research directions are sparse among many plausible alternatives. Project Page: this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38445
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VidHarness: Evolving Agent Harnesses for Cost-Efficient Long Video Understanding
2026-09-29 19:06:54Susan Liang, Jianmin Wu, Daxiang DongAbstract
Vision-language models (VLMs) can answer questions about hour-long videos, but processing every frame is prohibitively expensive, even though the evidence for a question usually spans only a few seconds. Video agents, i.e., harness programs wrapped around a frozen VLM, address this by observing the video selectively, yet existing harnesses are hand-crafted by experts through slow build-and-test cycles. We propose VidHarness, a framework that automates harness design for cost-efficient long video understanding, in which a harness proposer iteratively evolves harnesses based on execution feedback from an evolution environment. To escape the local optima of greedy refinement, we organize the evolution as Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS), and to reduce the evaluation cost, we integrate uncertainty-aware multi-fidelity validation, which screens new harnesses on a few questions and promotes only the promising ones. Since the best harness varies with the frame budget, we further introduce a mixture-of-harness that routes each question to a harness specialized for its budget. VidHarness sets new state-of-the-art results on LongVideoBench, Video-MME, and Video-Holmes, outperforms the strongest hand-crafted video agent by up to $11.2$ points, and generalizes to the knowledge-intensive benchmarks Video-MMMU and MMVU with fewer than half of the frames of uniform sampling.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38413
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Self-Evolving Harness on Multiple Tasks with the Agent as Its Own Optimizer
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A harness is the code around a language-model agent that organizes prompts, calls tools, manages context, and controls execution. As models grow stronger, recent work has begun to let agents improve their own harnesses, a line of work known as self-evolving harnesses. In most existing methods, a separate proposer running on a human-designed harness modifies the solver's harness, and a separate harness is evolved for each benchmark. Real-world tasks come from many domains, so both the evolution and the evaluation of a harness should cover a diverse range of tasks. We propose a framework close to recursive self-improvement: the same frozen model, on the same version of the harness, first solves tasks as the solver and then, as the proposer, reads the complete run records and directly edits the harness that runs it. Each evolution batch draws tasks from five benchmarks in different domains. To measure generalization, training and held-out tasks are strictly separated, and we additionally evaluate on five out-of-distribution benchmarks never used during evolution. We frame the evolution process as deep-learning training with two stages, multi-task pretraining and continual training. Starting from a 49-line seed harness, the harness obtained at the end of the first stage improves the average score by 4.48 points on the in-distribution benchmarks and by 12.64 points on the out-of-distribution benchmarks, surpassing Codex on the former and matching it on the latter. In the second stage, continued evolution on Claw-Eval, one of the out-of-distribution benchmarks, further raises the score on that benchmark from 66.17 to 68.06, exceeding Codex. We also provide an in-depth analysis of the mechanisms that emerged during evolution, including output truncation, history compaction, and independent review.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38372
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Inductive Visual Logic for Few-Shot Out-Of-Distribution Adaptation in VLMs
2026-09-29 18:25:04Hung-Jen Chen, Yu-Heng Ho, Ting-Yao Huang, Po-Hsiang Hsu, Li-Yu Chen, Chun-Yi Lee, Min SunAbstract
Generative vision-language models (VLMs) such as Qwen-VL and LLaVA achieve strong zero-shot performance on tasks overlapping with their pretraining distribution, yet fail on specialized domains where the required discriminative features were never learned, a regime we term distant out-of-distribution (OOD). Standard adaptation methods cannot overcome this representational absence because they operate within the encoder's existing feature space. However, VLMs retain a robust descriptive capacity even when discrimination collapses: a model that cannot classify a medical scan can still articulate its visual patterns. Exploiting this asymmetry, we introduce Inductive Visual Logic (IVL), a training-free framework that constructs classification knowledge from the model's surviving descriptive ability. IVL extracts visual traits from few-shot support images through dual-mode prompting, combining semantic descriptions with primitive visual observations, and organizes them into per-class trait dictionaries. At inference, hierarchical filtering identifies spatially grounded trait evidence for classification. Across multiple distant-OOD benchmarks, IVL achieves the highest aggregate accuracy under two VLM backbones while producing interpretable, trait-traceable predictions.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38362
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Halluscoring 2026: The first shared task on llms hallucination detection and answer verification
2026-09-29 18:18:18Aisha Alansari, Abdessalam Bouchekif, Ahmed Hasanaath, Salah Eddine Bekhouche, Malak Alkhorasani, Mohammed-En-Nadhir Zighem, Saad Ezzini, Hichem Telli, Hend Al-Khalifa, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Hadid Abdenour, Hamzah LuqmanAbstract
We present HalluScoring 2026, a shared task for evaluating hallucination detection and factual verification in Arabic question answering under challenging generalization settings. The shared task is organized into two main tasks, each comprising two subtasks, for a total of four subtasks. Task 1 evaluates binary hallucination detection, considering generalization to unseen questions (Subtask 1.1) and responses generated by unseen LLMs (Subtask 1.2). Task 2 extends the evaluation beyond detection by requiring the systems to additionally identify the correct factual answer from six related candidates, covering Islamic knowledge (Subtask 2.1) and general knowledge (Subtask 2.2). The shared task is based on two Arabic datasets: HalluScore and HalluTruthQA. A total of 13 teams participated in the shared task, 10 of which submitted system description papers. The results of Task 1 demonstrate that hallucination detection remains challenging under distribution shift, with the winning team achieving AUC-ROC test scores of 0.772 and 0.767 for Subtasks 1.1 and 1.2, respectively. For Task 2, the winning team achieved scores of 0.882 and 0.857 in the Islamic and general-knowledge subtasks, respectively, under assisted evaluation.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38355
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OpenCollab: A Multi-Agent Coding Framework with Programmable Collaboration and Controllable Runtime
2026-09-29 18:08:54Chun-Wah Hsu, Kai Gong, Yu Wu, Xianhe Chen, Mengyang Liu, Jie Li, Hanyu Li, Zhixuan Liu, Naisheng Tang, Jiaying Chi, Ziheng Fan, Xuning He, Xiaokang Yang, Xue Jiang, Yihong DongAbstract
Multi-agent coding systems are designed to tackle complex software engineering tasks through collaboration. However, existing evaluations typically assume configured organizations are followed faithfully, whereas reality differs. This behavioral gap, combined with differences in underlying system components, prevents clear attribution of observed gains. To this end, we introduce OpenCollab, a multi-agent coding framework that provides a unified infrastructure for programmable collaboration and controllable runtime. Specifically, OpenCollab unifies organization design, enforces experimental control on a shared runtime, and tracks execution through fine-grained event streams. On this basis, we define Adherence to quantify whether the declared organization is actually realized. Our experiments reveal that agents collaborate very differently across configurations: changing any single dimension shifts Adherence, from 47.2% to as high as 97.2%. Furthermore, extensive agentic coding benchmarks show that a two-coder workflow built on OpenCollab establishes new SOTA performance compared to the mainstream harnesses such as Mini-SWE-agent, Codex CLI, and Claude Code, showing that a well-designed organization can outperform strong existing harnesses, while OpenCollab's single-agent configuration uses the fewest tokens across all evaluated suites. OpenCollab establishes a unified multi-agent infrastructure for easy programmable collaboration and controlled causal evaluation.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38345
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Adversarial Training for Pixel Diffusion
2026-09-29 17:59:41Xin Lin, Zhifei Zhang, Yuqian Zhou, Haitian Zheng, Zhe Lin, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Truong NguyenAbstract
Pixel diffusion models generate RGB images directly, avoiding the bottleneck of an autoencoder, yet their outputs still systematically underrepresent fine-scale natural-image statistics. We show that adversarial learning provides an effective post-training correction for this deficiency. Starting from a pretrained model, we retain its original diffusion or flow-matching objective and add an adversarial loss to the predicted output at non-high-noise timesteps, leaving the model architecture and sampling procedure unchanged. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic study of adversarial post-training for pixel diffusion. Across two pixel backbones, the method jointly improves distribution fidelity, coverage, prompt alignment, and perceptual quality. We further investigate why it works. Frequency-band and power-law analyses show that the original models systematically underproduce natural-image high-frequency content, while adversarial post-training restores this missing spectral power. In contrast, perceptual loss also increases high-frequency content but sacrifices distribution fidelity and prompt alignment. Nearest-neighbor, recall, and matched no-GAN SFT controls further rule out memorization, mode dropping, and additional optimization as simple explanations. Finally, we examine the boundary of this effect. Under the tested latent diffusion configurations, the same procedure does not produce comparable joint gains and adds almost no decoded high-frequency power. These results identify direct output access to the image statistics being corrected as a key factor governing when adversarial post-training succeeds.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38170
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Rethinking Representations for World-Action Modeling
2026-09-29 17:59:22Haoyi Jiang, Liu Liu, Xinjiang Wang, Zhihao Sun, Zequn Chen, Sen Wang, Xinjie Wang, Xia Chen, Jingfeng Yao, Weiheng Zhao, Shanglin Yuan, Zhizhong Su, Wei Sui, Wenyu Liu, Xinggang WangAbstract
World-action models jointly learn robot policies and predict future observations, making the representation space an interface between control and prediction. We study the design of this space through controlled comparisons, finding that neither reconstruction fidelity nor pre-trained perceptual features alone ensure effective policy learning. These findings motivate ReWAM, a representation-centric world-action model built on pre-trained DINO features. Feature Calibration and a Temporal Representation Bottleneck organize these features into compact world states suited to dynamics modeling. Action-Grounded Representation Shaping routes only action-loss gradients to the bottleneck, thereby letting the policy shape what the representation encodes while the world model learns how it evolves. Without generative video pre-training, ReWAM achieves 93.6% success on RoboTwin 2.0. On RoboDojo, it achieves an average score of 12.29 and a success rate of 8.28% using approximately 600 hours of embodied pre-training data.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38163
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Breaking the Uniformity Trap: Scaling Video Diffusion Model via SplitMoE
2026-09-29 17:55:19Yu Xu, Yuxin Zhang, Xiao Yang, Haotian Yang, Yizhi Wang, Xinwei Huang, Minxuan Lin, Angtian Wang, Chongyang Ma, Fan TangAbstract
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE), popularized by large language models, is a promising paradigm for scaling visual generative models. However, conventional token-wise MoE routes tokens independently within a homogeneous expert pool and regularizes expert usage toward uniformity, making it poorly matched to video data that is spatiotemporally redundant and semantically long-tailed. We show that existing visual MoEs fall into a uniformity trap: semantically under-organized routing, compounded by uniform expert-usage regularization, scatters coherent patches across disparate experts, causing routing fragmentation and structural distortion. To address this, we propose SplitMoE, a split-role sparse architecture that breaks the shackles of uniformity. To accommodate the inherent semantic imbalance, we explicitly bifurcate the expert pool into semantic experts and generic experts, with semantic experts capturing high-level semantic abstraction and generic experts preserving residual visual information and flexible generative capacity. Leveraging prototype-guided routing and pull-push regularization, SplitMoE enables tokens to cluster naturally by semantic attributes rather than arbitrary balancing constraints. Extensive results show that under an equivalent activated-parameter budget, SplitMoE outperforms traditional load-balanced MoEs in convergence speed, routing coherence, and video generation quality across standard benchmarks. By revealing an emergent coarse-to-fine denoising logic, SplitMoE provides the community with a modality-aware scaling path, serving as a critical reference for building large-scale video world models.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38140
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Stochastic World Models for Verifying Vision-Based Neural Feedback Systems
2026-09-29 17:50:40I. Samuel Akinwande, Mykel J. Kochenderfer, Clark BarrettAbstract
Verifying a vision-based neural feedback system requires a model of the observations its controller acts upon. Such a model must capture the variation the sensor produces, while remaining tractable for closed-loop analysis. Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have served as perception surrogates, but they are large, reproduce complex scenes poorly, and are hard to verify. We explore stochastic world models as a richer class of perception surrogates. We train a world model with physically grounded latents, built from operations that standard verifiers bound. It reproduces held-out frames more faithfully than GAN surrogates with up to 130 times as many parameters. To verify these surrogates, we develop a procedure that combines falsification, adaptive refinement, symbolic, and backward analyses. On an emergency braking benchmark with a GAN surrogate, our procedure resolves the entire state space, 38% of which the state-of-the-art verifier left unresolved. On the RGB version of the benchmark, where no verification results have previously been reported, our procedure resolves over 80% of the state space with a world model surrogate.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38120
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NeuronEye: Query-Guided Visual Concept Activation for Vision-Language Reasoning
2026-09-29 17:44:09Ruiyu Yan, Bowen Chen, Shaowen Wan, Lin ZhaoAbstract
Current vision-language models (VLMs) encode visual information in dense hidden states where object identity, spatial layout, and local attributes are implicitly entangled rather than explicitly disentangled, limiting their ability to isolate and modulate the specific visual evidence required by a given language query. Inspired by sparse population coding and top-down modulation in biological vision, we introduce NeuronEye, a plug-in framework that constructs a sparse, concept-level neuron vocabulary from intermediate VLM representations and selectively activates query-relevant visual concepts during inference. NeuronEye decomposes vision-token states into an overcomplete sparse basis organized by concept-level clusters, uses the language query to activate relevant clusters and localize the patches where selected concepts are expressed, and injects the focused evidence back into vision tokens. A complementary suppression mechanism attenuates dominant perceptual directions to preserve weaker but relevant cues. All operations run in a single forward pass over a frozen VLM backbone. On Qwen2.5-VL-7B, NeuronEye raises CV-Bench overall accuracy by +3.1 with gains of +9.5 on Distance, and improves BLINK Multi-view by +8.3, with similar trends on LLaVA-1.6-7B. These results suggest that sparse neuron vocabularies can serve not only as post-hoc interpretability tools but also as active interfaces for concept-level visual reasoning.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38098
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VISTA: Internalizing Collective Visual Experience via On-Policy Distillation for Active Multimodal Agents
2026-09-29 17:39:09Zheng Jiang, Houde Qian, Yiming Chen, Ling Li, Chaoyang Li, Yueqi Li, Yuxuan Liu, Lifeng SunAbstract
Active multimodal agents use visual tools to acquire task-relevant evidence while reasoning. Although reinforcement learning samples multiple interaction trajectories per input, outcome-based objectives primarily use the group to estimate scalar advantages, leaving complementary visual discoveries underused. We introduce VISTA, which internalizes collective visual experience through on-policy distillation by turning observations from same-input rollouts into shared supervision. Collective visual experience distillation (CVED) organizes these observations with their interaction context and aligns them with individual decisions, while heterogeneity-aware policy improvement (HAPI) reinforces successful trajectories and provides experience-guided distillation for unsuccessful attempts. An experience-conditioned teacher evaluates the student's sampled response prefixes, allowing discoveries from one trajectory to guide learning in another without replacing the student's original history or generating new target trajectories. The trained agent retains its visual tools and acts using its own interaction history. VISTA achieves the strongest average performance among the evaluated active multimodal agents of comparable size and consistently outperforms same-backbone training baselines across fine-grained perception and general reasoning tasks, demonstrating the value of collective experience for active multimodal learning.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38086
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Signatures of semantic search in the activations of large language models
2026-09-29 17:17:32Luke Leckie, Peter M. Todd, Jacob G. FosterAbstract
When recalling lists of concepts (e.g., animals) during the semantic fluency task (SFT), both humans and large language models (LLMs) organise their output into clusters of related items (e.g., sea animals) that are punctuated by strategic switches between clusters. In humans, this pattern can be explained by a semantic foraging process, whereby distinct neural and behavioural signatures accompany within-cluster production ("exploit") and between-cluster switching ("explore"). Whether LLMs likewise represent these two search regimes within their internal states is unknown. Here, we apply a range of mechanistic interpretability techniques to provide evidence for this. In Study 1, we use the Jacobian lens (J-lens), which maps intermediate-layer residual-stream representations to token-level activations, to show that concept-level activations predict switching. First, we find that switching coincides with low next-token activations. Moreover, the probability of switching rises as the set of strongest J-lens activations (the J-space) becomes depleted of items from the category currently being produced, analogous to explore-exploit decision-making during patch foraging. We then show that middle-layer J-lens activations of abstract category-related labels (e.g., "water") increase in anticipation of switching into that category. We confirm these representations to causally influence switching by deriving steering vectors that target category switching. In Study 2, we identify generic residual stream directions that are activated during and in anticipation of switching. By steering activations along these directions, we bias increased or decreased rates of switching. Our study extends the semantic foraging framework to artificial intelligences and provides evidence that LLMs maintain distinct representational signatures for exploration and exploitation as they verbalise conceptual information.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.35599
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BITEM at the NTCIR-19 R2C2 Task: Predicting Confidence from Agentic RAG Pipeline Signals
2026-09-29 16:52:38Julien Knafou, Luc Mottin, Alexandre Flament, Paul van Rijen, Esteban Gaillac, Patrick RuchAbstract
The BITEM team entered both subtasks of the NTCIR-19 R2C2 task with a single agentic pipeline, in which a model searches, reads and records evidence over a movie corpus while an orchestrator holds the record and rules on what may be submitted. A claim is admitted only once an entailment cascade has checked it against the passage it cites, and an answer is released only once enough checked evidence stands behind it. Each question is run three or four times, every pass retrieving from a corpus stripped of what the earlier passes have already seen. The confidence filed with each answer is computed by the orchestrator from what the run leaves behind and is never asked of the model, which is offered no way to rate itself. The two retrieval runs placed 4th and 5th of 22, pooling the passes was worth 0.0709 nDCG@20, and the gain was largest on the multi-hop and post-processing-heavy questions, where the organisers rank the pooled run top of the field. Sixteen of the 25 answer runs were built on passages these two runs supplied, 12 of them filed by other teams. HMR rewards a system whose confidence is high where it answers right and low where it answers wrong. The pipeline reached an accuracy of 0.9219, 6th of 25, while the confidence filed with those answers gave an HMR of 0.4915, 13th. A few rules crafted over those same recorded signals, with no further model call and no further retrieval, raise that to an accuracy of 0.9375, 5th, and an HMR of 0.6985, 9th. Ranking on HMR alone can reward a system for answering wrongly with low confidence, so we propose accHMR, the accuracy multiplied by HMR, which reports the reward in proportion to the accuracy, and on which the revised rules would have scored 0.6549, 5th. For future work, fitting a model on the numbers the pipeline already produces, rather than writing such rules by hand, would be a real step forward.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.37993
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Topological Coherence for Self-evolving Multi-agent Systems
2026-09-29 16:27:14Sen Zhao, Ruiqi Kong, Zuyu Zhang, Lifeng Shen, Xinyu He, Xu Zhang, Qinghua ZhangAbstract
Complex tasks inherently couple workflow structure, agent responsibility, collaboration, and memory access: task regions delimit responsibility and tool scope, cross-region dependencies give rise to handoffs, and ownership boundaries delimit private and selectively shared memory. Existing methods can jointly optimize agent and communication structures, yet such optimization does not by itself require responsibility, handoff, and memory boundaries to remain consistent with task dependencies. We term this requirement topological coherence. We introduce TOCOMAS, a Topology-Coherent Multi-Agent System. TOCOMAS grounds a task graph in tool interfaces, organizes compatible task nodes into reusable responsibility domains, and derives dependency-induced and profile-conditioned collaboration together with boundary-regulated memory visibility. During online self-evolution, TOCOMAS proposes coupled changes to agent, collaboration, and memory policies, retaining for subsequent tasks only candidates that satisfy structural constraints and improve evaluated reward. Across BBEH, WorkBench, SWE-Bench-Verified, and CoMemBench, TOCOMAS improves task success over baselines across backbones. CoMemBench also shows gains over the self-evolving baseline in verified progress, handoffs, and memory isolation.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.37953
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