Knowledge
-
Lingdan-V2: Large language models for clinically grounded reasoning in traditional Chinese medicine
2026-10-10 08:22:12Rui Hua, Yu Wei, Ziri Jin, Zhuo Sun, Kai Chang, Jianan Xia, Zixin Shu, Xiaodong Li, Dongmei Jia, Fei Dong, Runshun Zhang, Jian Yu, Hao Xu, Haibin Yu, Jiansheng Li, Baoyan Liu, Wenjia Wang, Xuezhong ZhouAbstract
Large language models have advanced medical reasoning, but clinically grounded reasoning in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) remains challenging because prescription decisions require integrating domain knowledge, syndrome differentiation, treatment principles, herbal prescription composition, and dosage determination. We develop a TCM language model family comprising models with 4 billion, 8 billion, and 14 billion parameters. The artificial intelligence contribution is a staged clinical alignment framework integrating large scale continued pretraining on TCM and clinical records, complementary reasoning supervision, and prescription-centered reinforcement learning (RL). We further formulate herbal prescription generation as a structured RL problem with prescription-level feedback, enabling direct optimization of clinical decision outputs beyond knowledge reproduction and generic instruction following. The engineering application is TCM clinical decision support, particularly herbal prescription recommendation. We evaluate the models on a public benchmark containing 25,620 expert-verified items across 13 TCM knowledge and clinical reasoning tasks and on a private retrospective dataset of 4,348 spleen and stomach disease prescription cases. The 14 billion parameter reinforcement aligned model achieves a prescription generation F1 of 37.0 on the public benchmark, compared with 32.3 for DeepSeek-R1 with 671 billion total parameters, and a herb-level F1 of 52.8 on the clinical dataset with improved dosage agreement. Reinforcement post-training consistently improves prescription recommendation across all scales, while physician-source analysis shows that expert heterogeneity affects reward stability. These findings demonstrate a scalable pathway from domain grounding and reasoning supervision to clinically oriented prescription decision support.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14705
PDF
-
Decoupling Knowledge Forgetting and Refusal Learning in MLLM Unlearning
2026-10-10 05:46:42Haodong Chen, Shengtao Wen, Dong Liang, Lingbing Guo, Xiang ChenAbstract
Current evaluations of multimodal unlearning typically focus on whether a model stops outputting target information. This surface-level criterion, however, masks two critical failure modes. First, knowledge suppression techniques often induce confabulation, leading the model to hallucinate facts about the unlearned subject. Second, refusal training merely alters observable behavior without erasing the underlying knowledge; such models might decline open queries but still identify correct answers under multiple-choice probing. To overcome these limitations, we propose Forget-Aware Self-Distillation (FASD). This method is designed to achieve honest ignorance, a state where the model genuinely loses the target knowledge and learns to acknowledge its absence. FASD separates these goals into two complementary channels. The behavior channel distills appropriate refusals from an ignorance-prompted copy of the model itself. Crucially, target tokens are masked from the teacher distribution to avoid accidentally reteaching the forgotten concepts. Simultaneously, the knowledge channel directly suppresses ground-truth answer spans independently of the model's generated responses. Experiments demonstrate that FASD successfully unlearns target knowledge, prevents information leakage in open-ended tasks, and preserves performance on retained data. The resulting model not only forgets the specified information but accurately recognizes the boundaries of its own knowledge. Code and data will be released upon publication.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14605
PDF
-
RES-MR: Risk-Aware Reasoning for Explainable and Safe Medication Recommendation
2026-10-10 02:06:48Cong Wang, Jin Li, Shoujin Wang, Yishuo Li, Huilin Gu, Wenpeng LuAbstract
Medication recommendations seek to deliver personalized drug combinations based on patients' clinical information, where ensuring transparent decision-making and personalized safety are of paramount importance. However, existing approaches predominantly operate as ``black boxes'', offering limited interpretability and hindering clinician trust. Furthermore, they typically rely on fixed, patient-agnostic safety constraints, neglecting the heterogeneity of risk tolerance across individuals, which poses significant risks to vulnerable populations. To address these gaps, we propose \textbf{RES-MR}, a novel Risk-aware Reasoning framework for Explainable and Safe Medication Recommendation using LLMs. RES-MR follows a two-stage training paradigm: (1) an explainable clinical reasoning distillation stage to elicit diagnostic capabilities by fine-tuning on synthesized reasoning trajectories, grounded in patient-specific knowledge from graph retrieval; and (2) a risk-aware policy optimization stage to dynamically balance therapeutic efficacy with personalized safety. This stage employs disentangled drug factors to construct patient-specific reference prototypes that capture desired therapeutic drug features and risk features to avoid. These prototypes enable risk boundary calibration and guide the model toward safe recommendations via reward shaping and clipping. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that RES-MR significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in terms of accuracy, safety, and explainability. Our code and data are available at: this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14474
PDF
-
Co-adaptive Rule Routing and Constraining for Structured Knowledge Retrieval
2026-10-10 01:45:48Zhisheng Qi, Haoyu Han, Jiaxi Li, Bing He, Huiyuan Chen, Franck Dernoncourt, Ryan A. Rossi, Mahantesh M. Halappanavar, Jin Lu, Yu Zhang, Tianming Liu, Yu WangAbstract
Structured knowledge retrieval acquires task-relevant evidence from structured knowledge sources for downstream tasks. Existing methods rely on unconstrained retrieval or predefined query-rule supervision, such as author-paper rules for scientific discovery and anatomy-drug rules for precision medicine. Such supervision is rarely available in practice. We propose Co-Adaptive Rule Routing and Constraining Retrieval (CoRE), which jointly learns which reasoning rule to assign to each query and how to retrieve evidence under that rule, without predefined query-rule pairs. A routing agent selects a rule, and its corresponding retriever traverses the knowledge base and ranks evidence that satisfies the rule's constraints. Because routing and retrieval are interdependent, CoRE alternates between reinforcement learning for the routing policy and contrastive learning for the rule-constrained retriever. The selected rules provide supervision for retriever training, while retrieval performance rewards the routing policy. This closed-loop process enables both components to co-adapt without explicit query-rule supervision. Experiments on STaRK-QA datasets across scientific discovery, biomedical reasoning, and e-commerce knowledge management demonstrate CoRE's effectiveness. Ablations show the benefit of co-adapting the router and retriever. Generation-based routing transfers across datasets and benefits from multi-domain pretraining followed by target-specific fine-tuning. Analysis of rule usage across queries also informs automatic rule refinement and discovery.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14465
PDF
-
Can Language Models Play the Wikipedia Game?
2026-10-09 17:59:56Alexander Hickey, Joanna Knight, James BishopAbstract
Language models increasingly support or automate information retrieval from document collections too large to index. This task is difficult when it requires specialist linguistic or scientific knowledge. We used the Wikipedia Game to test language models on an analogous information retrieval task. In the game, players must reach a target article using only article links. We compared sentence embedding models and LLMs across five Wikipedia languages and five academic-literature datasets. We construct very large local graphs of Wikipedia pages and of paper citations using OpenAlex and provide code to build and navigate them. This allows the study of language models' navigation capabilities without relying on third-party APIs. We compared the models with human and TF-IDF benchmarks. The Wikipedia Game format enables robust comparisons across techniques, languages, and domains. No model significantly outperformed humans, although the best models (GPT-o3 mini, GPT-4o, QwQ:32B, and DeepSeek-R1:70B) achieved comparable success. Performance and rankings varied across languages and topics, with implications for practitioners utilising these techniques.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13948
PDF
-
DualQuant: Dual-scale Calibration-free Weight-and-Activation Quantization for LLMs
2026-10-09 15:51:38Mahsa Salmani, Sayeh Sharify, Hesham MostafaAbstract
Low-bit inference on accelerators with native 4-bit support requires quantizing both weights and activations to realize the full throughput gains these formats provide. While post-training weight quantization has been extensively studied, activation quantization remains considerably more challenging and typically requires calibration data. In this work, we introduce DUALQUANT, a dual-scale, calibration-free post-training quantization framework that directly minimizes the weight-reconstruction Mean Squared Error (MSE) and, as an immediate by-product, yields per-channel activation rescalings prior to activation quantization. Our key observation is that the scaling factors obtained by minimizing weight-reconstruction error provide effective activation rescalings, enabling competitive activation quantization without calibration data. We formulate DUALQUANT as a non-differentiable weight-reconstruction problem and develop an efficient solver based on variable splitting and block coordinate descent, where each subproblem admits a closed-form update. DUALQUANT provides a unified algorithm supporting a wide range of formats, including the full MX family and NVFP4. To our knowledge, DUALQUANT is the first dual-scaling method to formally support MX and NV block formats. Across Llama and Qwen models evaluated on WikiText-2, C4, and zero-shot downstream tasks, DUALQUANT matches or exceeds the accuracy of calibration-based SmoothQuant across most models and formats, and substantially outperforms calibration-free baselines, with large gains for MX and NV block formats. We validate these gains with a real packed W4A4 inference path for Llama-3.1-8B on an RTX 4090. The resulting implementation closely matches the accuracy of fake quantization while delivering up to 2.61x memory reduction and up to 2.46x throughput speedup over BF16.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13767
PDF
-
Amortized Counterfactual Prediction with Graph Neural Networks
2026-10-09 15:22:18Hendrik Stumpf, Francesco QuinzanAbstract
Counterfactual inference asks how an observed outcome might have differed under different circumstances, such as whether a patient would have recovered had they received a different treatment. Such questions arise whenever decisions depend on the outcomes of alternatives that were not observed. Answering counterfactual queries generally requires knowledge of the underlying causal structure, which is often unavailable in practice. A common approach is therefore to first estimate the causal graph from observational data and then perform counterfactual inference. However, errors in the estimated causal graph can propagate to downstream counterfactual predictions. To address this challenge, we introduce the Counterfactual Graph Neural Process (CFGNP), an end-to-end approach that answers counterfactual queries directly from observational data without first estimating a causal graph. CFGNP uses Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to exploit the dual-graph structure by restricting cross-world message passing to corresponding factual--counterfactual variables. Across synthetic and image-based benchmarks, CFGNP achieves stronger predictive performance than existing approaches, including on the German Loan benchmark, where it reduces MSE from $4.51 \times 10^{-2}$ to $0.19 \times 10^{-2}$. Furthermore, on synthetic causal graphs, a model trained only on 10-node graphs maintains strong predictive performance on graphs with up to 30 nodes, without retraining.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13724
PDF
-
Enhancing Legal Reasoning in Pre-trained Language Models via Knowledge Graph-Guided Multi-Task Pre-training
2026-10-09 15:21:12Ibrahim Siddig, Munir GeorgesAbstract
Legal language understanding requires reasoning over semi-structured regulatory documents, yet standard pre-training objectives do not explicitly target this structural capability. Because current legal language models rely solely on masked language modeling, they treat statutory text as flat token sequences and ignore the underlying hierarchical constraints. To bridge this gap, we present a multi-task pre-training approach for German traffic law (StVO). Our approach combines three complementary objectives: Next Sentence Prediction (NSP), Knowledge Graph (KG) Guided Clustering (CLU), and Knowledge Graph (KG) Aware Paragraph Classification (CLS). This approach explicitly encodes structured legal knowledge directly into the model weights. This encoding enables zero-shot legal reasoning at inference time and removes the need for discrete graph traversal. We evaluate our approach across nine Transformer-based encoders and 324 experimental runs. On synthetic StVO question answering, our models demonstrate consistent relative improvements between 10.3% and 155.0% over baselines. Furthermore, relative to the established LexGLUE baselines (Chalkidis et al., 2022), our models improve over prior results on four of seven legal benchmarks. It also achieves consistent zero-shot transfer gains between 3.4% and 15.8% on Austrian driving regulations. These experimental results indicate that our training approach generalizes successfully beyond the initial training legal domain.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13722
PDF
-
Improving Semantic Coverage in AI Test & Evaluation through Generative Augmentation
2026-10-09 14:57:12Connor Hashemi, Bharadwaj Ravichandran, Connor Anderson, Shitij Govil, Brandon RichardWebster, Brian Hu, Keith FieldhouseAbstract
In test and evaluation (T&E) of AI models, evaluators typically have access only to a held-out test dataset and no knowledge of the training data or its semantic composition. If critical input conditions---such as time-of-day, weather, or scene location---are underrepresented in this test dataset, T&E results can be misleadingly due to this semantic coverage gap. We propose a three-stage generative AI pipeline to detect and fill such semantic gaps without requiring ground-truth labels of these semantics. First, vision-language models (VLMs) perform zero-shot binary labeling of semantic factors, and an embedding-space clustering step identifies which semantics most affect downstream model behavior. Second, diffusion-based image-to-image models transform existing covered images into the underrepresented semantic domain, preserving scene content while augmenting high-level appearance. Third, statistical analysis of the augmented image embeddings verifies that the synthetic imagery improves dataset coverage before it is incorporated. Crucially, the synthetic data is used only to enrich the test set and no model retraining is performed for T&E. We validate the full pipeline on both image classification and object detection under day/night semantic gaps, showing that the augmented test datasets better distinguish models with and without exposure to the missing semantic, thereby yielding T&E conclusions that more closely match those of an ideal, fully covered dataset. Code available at this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13697
PDF
-
Verifiable Retrieval for Legal Reasoning through Structure-driven Knowledge Graph
2026-10-09 14:56:31Ibrahim Siddig, Sviatoslav Tugeev, Munir GeorgesAbstract
Any automation within reliability-critical contexts such as medicine or law has to be transparent and verifiable. Despite their advantages, current LLM-based systems do not meet these requirements due to their inherent black-box nature. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) attempts to ground the generative process in the relevant interpretable documents, thereby reducing the risk of AI 'hallucinations' and potentially enabling verification of the initial generation context. However, as the number and size of potential sources increases, naive retrieval approaches tend to perform worse, ignoring critical context elements. In this paper we aim to tackle this problem in the context of German Legal Code. Using structure-driven parsing to create a Knowledge Graph (KG) for the source document navigation and retrieval, we compare several KG-informed chunking and retrieval strategies and evaluate their effect on the accuracy of retrieved citations.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13695
PDF
-
Model-agnostic Knowledge Augmented Machine Learning for Weakly Annotated Bioimaging Data
2026-10-09 14:17:48Jayanie Bogahawatte, Sachith Seneviratne, Simon Maksour, Dzung Do-Ha, Elizabeth Qian, Samuel Brennan, Matthew Keon, Lezanne Ooi, Saman HalgamugeAbstract
Machine learning models are increasingly used for automated feature extraction from weakly annotated bioimaging data, such as microscopy and cytomorphology images. Due to the sole dependency of automated feature extraction, existing methods yield inconsistent classification performance across weakly annotated datasets. Here, we propose a model-agnostic knowledge augmentation method that enables ML models to exploit domain knowledge beyond what automated feature extraction can capture. The proposed approach improves classification performance across seven ML architectures. When integrated with masked autoencoder-based self-supervised learning, our method achieves the strongest overall performance, improving precision by 2.9% over the next-best method on three in-house microscopy datasets and by an average of 6.8% across three public cytomorphology benchmarks. We perform nucleus-level classification based on mislocalization of TAR DNA-binding protein 43 (TDP-43) from the nucleus to the cytoplasm, a phenotype linked to Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), using three independent microscopy datasets of motor neurons derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells. Accurate quantification of this phenotype at scale remains challenging and may contribute to inconsistencies across studies. Application of the best-performing model to these microscopy datasets reveals biological interpretations related to ALS, including dose-dependent effects of the proteasomal stressor, MG132, and the oxidative stressor, sodium arsenite (SA), on TDP-43 mislocalization, variable pathology in motor neurons from sporadic and familial ALS donors, and a lack of protection of the pharmacological compounds, edaravone and niclosamide, against SA-induced TDP-43 mislocalization. Together, our pipeline enables in-vitro cellular image analysis to advance understanding of ALS-associated pathology and potential treatments.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13637
PDF
-
Humanize Olympiad Agents: A Multi-Session Workflow for Olympiad Problem Solving with Solve, Review, Wiki, Verify
2026-10-09 14:14:14Zhengyang Zhang, Jing Xiong, Hongzhou Lin, Juihui Chung, Zijian Zhang, Song Han, Sihao Liu, Ligeng ZhuAbstract
Large language model (LLM) agents are rapidly improving on long-horizon scientific and olympiad tasks. Recent systems have produced a Lean-formalized resolution of the Navier--Stokes problem and autonomous solutions to four open questions in the ErdÅs Conjectures database. Yet neither system releases both its underlying model and complete inference stack. More broadly, a single agent session remains brittle on difficult problems: early errors can propagate, missing domain knowledge can stall progress, and apparent success can mask a misinterpretation or weakening of the original task. We introduce HOA (Humanize Olympiads Agent), an open, flow-level framework that coordinates multiple agent sessions through three complementary feedback channels. First, an independent reviewer evaluates each candidate and provides actionable feedback. Second, a structured wiki supplies task-specific knowledge that may be missing or unreliable in model pretraining. Third, a verifier checks generated Lean proofs against trusted challenge statements. With GPT-5.6 Sol, HOA achieves perfect scores on the IMO, IPhO, and IOI 2026, near-full marks on the IChO 2026 problem set, and solves all 672 problems (100%) on PutnamBench. On the Lean-Eval leaderboard, HOA ranks first, solving 251 of 304 problems (82.6%). We further evaluate HOA with open models. Using Kimi-K3, HOA achieves full scores on the IMO, IPhO, and IOI, and a gold-level score of 97.1% on the IChO. These results closely match the closed-source GPT-5.6 Sol + /Goal baseline on the IMO and IPhO, while exceeding it on the IChO and IOI, demonstrating that systematic feedback can help bridge substantial differences in base-model capability.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13632
PDF
-
RARA: Robust Policy Fine-Tuning through Retrieval-Anchored Representation Alignment for Robotic Manipulation
2026-10-09 13:31:20Xuhui Kang, Sung-Wook Lee, Yan Zhuang, Tianle Zhong, Yen-Ling KuoAbstract
Pre-trained robot policies, such as Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, provide a strong foundation for generalist robotic manipulation, but adapting them to new tasks with only a few demonstrations remains challenging. Directly fine-tuning a pre-trained policy often achieves strong in-distribution performance, yet it can distort the representations learned during pre-training and weaken the model's generalization ability under out-of-distribution shifts. We propose Retrieval-Anchored Representation Alignment (RARA), a two-stage adaptation method, to address this issue. First, RARA retrieves representation features from pretraining with similar task intent and motion, and aligns the policy's representations of the target demonstrations with the pre-trained representations of the retrieved demonstrations. Second, RARA fine-tunes the policy on the target demonstrations while limiting how much its representations of the retrieved demonstrations change during fine-tuning. By reducing the representation mismatch before action learning and preserving pre-trained knowledge during adaptation, RARA limits unnecessary representation drift during fine-tuning. Experiments with Diffusion Policy and GR00T on 13 tasks in RoboTwin, RoboCasa, and on a real robot show that RARA improves the average success of fine-tuning by 9.5 points in-distribution and 13.6 points out-of-distribution, and outperforms all compared baselines. Project page: this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13578
PDF
-
Auditing VLM Benchmarks from Existing Evaluation Runs
2026-10-09 13:05:22Denis Degtiarev, Anna Gromova, Sergey Katkov, Artem Mikhailin, Safina Mukhamedshina, Albert Nasybullin, Karina Shaikhutdinova, Artem TuzovAbstract
Every evaluation run of a vision-language model (VLM) already produces per-question artifacts (predictions, judged correctness, metadata) that leaderboards reduce to a single score and then discard. We reuse those artifacts to audit the benchmark itself, and add an audit layer to VLMEvalKit: six detectors that run as post-processing over saved outputs, plus one additional text-only rerun with visual inputs removed, emitting a per-question report. The layer reports per-question findings together with aggregate audit statistics; for the headline quantities, it attaches permutation-null excess where applicable, interval estimates for proportions, and sensitivity to the model pool. Auditing MMStar, a benchmark curated specifically so that the image is indispensable, with three models, we find zero aggregate accuracy gain from the image on 20.2% of its questions. An item-matched permutation null accounts for 17.0%, leaving a +3.2 pp excess (corrected permutation p = 0.001). This excess is concentrated in the mathematics and science categories and is absent from coarse perception, a localization consistent with knowledge substituting for visual evidence; confirming that mechanism would require item-level review. A second detector flags 134 questions on which every model that answered in parseable form picked the same non-gold option, and these candidates peak in the perception categories, whereas the zero-gain excess is largest in mathematics and science & technology. Replacing the LLM judge with exact string matching changes no conclusion, and every scoring discrepancy between the two traces to one model whose free-form answers a parser cannot read. On a binary yes/no benchmark the detectors measurably fall out of calibration, a scope boundary that we measure and report. The audit layer, the prediction artifacts and the generated reports accompany this submission.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13548
PDF
-
Decoupling the Declarative from the Procedural in Vision-Language-Action Models
2026-10-09 12:35:44Nikolaos Tsagkas, Andreas Sochopoulos, Chris Xiaoxuan Lu, Oisin Mac Aodha, Alexandros KourisAbstract
Deploying generalist robotic agents in the real world requires transferable skills. Specifically, a policy trained to clone a behavior from object-specific demonstrations must generalize beyond that object, otherwise data collection requirements become intractable. Recently, fine-tuning of pre-trained billion-parameter Vision-Language Models (VLMs), initially on large-scale robot datasets and then on fewer scenario-specific demonstrations, has emerged as the predominant paradigm for designing Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. While these policies achieve state-of-the-art manipulation performance in-distribution, they remain brittle to minor spatial, semantic, and task variations. In this work, we address the inability of current models to decouple the declarative (i.e., concepts and entity semantics) from the procedural knowledge (i.e., how to do something) encoded in their parameters, which is a fundamental bottleneck for zero-shot skill transfer to novel objects. To address this, we propose w$^{2}$VLA, a new VLA model with restructured information flow. Rather than feeding all multimodal tokens from the VLM encoder into a large, opaque transformer-based action expert, our approach modulates the robot state sequence with visual, spatial, and skill information in a compositional and interpretable manner. Unlike popular, state-of-the-art VLAs, we show that our modular approach successfully decouples knowledge representations, enabling robust behavior cloning and unprecedented zero-shot skill transfer capabilities across dissimilar, unseen objects.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.21496
PDF
-
Humanize MLE Agents: Multi-Agent Session Alternation Beyond Single-Agent Limits
2026-10-09 12:26:34Changye Li, Zijian Zhang, Muheng Li, Yiduo Pang, Tingjun Wu, Menghan Li, Yitong Liu, Hongkai Guo, Mengchi Chen, Chenyu He, Kaisheng Ma, Wei Xu, Song Han, Sihao Liu, Ligeng ZhuAbstract
Existing LLM-based agent approaches for long-horizon machine learning engineering (MLE) often use context engineering, implemented through custom harnesses that manage tools, skills, and accumulated experience. However, we find that as single-session execution lengthens, the agent's reasoning intensity declines alongside slowing progress, summarized as long-horizon deceleration, and the benefits of these custom harnesses vanish as the underlying model improves, summarized as harness staleness. These findings suggest that their benefits may not persist across versions, which motivates a workflow-level approach in which agents build on one another's work across sessions. We model these alternating agent sessions as a context-reset semi-Markov decision process (CR-SMDP) and establish sufficient conditions for alternation to exceed single-agent reference limits, derive an explicit experiment-budget bound, and characterize when session caps preserve this advantage. Guided by this analysis, we introduce Humanize MLE Agents (HMA), which alternates two agents on a shared workspace, limits each session to at most k experiments and resets the context between sessions, without additional task-specific harness or prior knowledge supplements. Across 75 Kaggle tasks in MLE-bench, HMA reaches a state-of-the-art any-medal rate of 78.2%, exceeding the strongest open-source baseline by 8.0 points with a quarter of its time budget. Moreover, among six configurations spanning five heterogeneous agent pairs, HMA improves any-medal rate over the constituent baselines by 6.4 points on average, demonstrating cross-pair generality. A supplementary case on kernel optimization reaches 878 cycles, within 1.6% of the community leaderboard leader, demonstrating applicability beyond MLE.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13494
PDF
-
A Local Agentic AI Framework to Generate Edge Case Scenarios for Safety Assurance
2026-10-09 12:13:17Victoria J. Hodge, Colin Paterson, Rob AlexanderAbstract
Generating edge case scenarios is crucial for training, testing and safety assuring autonomous systems. This identifies hazardous failures to increase system reliability and robustness, ensures the system can still function safely on the boundaries of its operational design domain and learns the expected system behaviour for these edge cases. The rapid advancement in the generation and analysis capabilities of language models (LMs) has expanded their applicability and recent work has investigated LM scenario generation. However, many recent approaches rely on human-in-the-loop or rule-based strategies. This restricts the LM's ability to generate diverse and edge case scenarios; the long tail of the distribution. Our work uses local LMs in a laptop-based agentic AI framework for adaptive scenario generation. This is cheap, fully-controlled, ensures data privacy and security. It uses think, act, observe, update, and continue loops with lightweight JSON encoding to generate scenarios. We use the system requirements, system description and environment description as knowledge bases in contextual prompts for an LM to ensure scenario realism. A second, independent LM critiques each scenario using domain specific criteria so it can be refined. The refined scenarios are run in simulation and evaluation metrics collected. These metric scores are analysed and similar scenarios are created for edge cases (exploitation) or novel scenarios are generated to explore the scenario space. Post-hoc clustering using metric scores and thematic-type analysis of the rich-text scenario descriptions produced by the LM pinpoints functional gaps and their triggering conditions. This creates traceable evidence for the safety assurance case. Our work highlights the potential of a flexible and adaptive local agentic AI framework for automating edge case generation and producing traceable safety assurance evidence.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13479
PDF
-
Towards Enriching Design-Time Models with Evidence from Simulation and Operational Activities
2026-10-09 11:57:36Barbara da Silva Oliveira (UniCA, Laboratoire I3S - COMRED, KAIROS), Julien Deantoni (UniCA, Laboratoire I3S - COMRED, KAIROS), Nicolas Ferry (UniCA, Laboratoire I3S - COMRED, KAIROS)Abstract
Cyber-Physical Systems are developed through multiple model based activities, comprising several stages of development. As the development progresses through simulation, experimentation, and operation, observations of system execution may reveal missing, uncertain, or invalid design knowledge. The path from execution results to persistent design-time enrichment, however, is often implicit. This paper addresses this challenge by proposing an evidence driven workflow for systematically transferring knowledge produced during simulation and operation back into design-time models. We demonstrate the workflow using an Influence Model, a design-time artefact used to represent how design artefacts and environmental factors jointly affect system response properties, using a sign-following robot use case. We show how simulation evidence can enrich Influence Models by supporting participant pruning decisions, interaction characterisation, influence-function abstraction, and validity-scope information. The application demonstrates the feasibility of the workflow for simulation-based evidence and its potential benefits to improve design-time reasoning and feedback in subsequent development iterations.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13456
PDF
-
Reflect-VLA: Internalizing Reflective Guidance via Dual-Path On-Policy Self-Distillation for Autonomous Driving
2026-10-09 11:52:17Yuechen Luo, He Chong, Fang Li, Shaoqing Xu, Hexin Zhang, Ruiqi Zhang, Ziying Song, Lei Yang, Zhi-Xin Yang, Fuxi WenAbstract
Reinforcement Learning (RL) substantially improves planning performance in autonomous-driving Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. However, existing RL methods rely on scalar trajectory rewards that measure overall quality but fail to identify specific planning errors or provide actionable correction signals. In long-tail scenarios, errors in scene understanding, behavior selection, and trajectory execution are compressed into a single score. We observe that Reflective Guidance turns trajectory evaluation into explicit diagnoses and corrective instructions, substantially improving planning accuracy. Yet such guidance requires an initial prediction and its evaluation results, making it unavailable for direct single-pass inference. We propose Reflect-VLA, which treats Reflective Guidance as training-time privileged information and internalizes its planning benefits through Dual-Path On-Policy Self-Distillation (Dual-OPSD). Unlike scalar-reward optimization, Dual-OPSD uses the driving score only to route student-generated trajectories. It distills dense token-level corrective distributions from the teacher for risky trajectories while applying self-imitation to preserve reliable ones. To provide reliable corrective distributions on student rollouts, the teacher is progressively constructed through Driving-Knowledge Pretraining, Planning-and-Refinement SFT, and Self-Refinement Rejection Sampling. At inference time, Reflect-VLA generates trajectories in a single pass without explicit guidance or iterative refinement. Experiments on NAVSIM v1/v2 and Bench2Drive demonstrate competitive planning performance while reducing training time by over 90% compared with RL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13453
PDF
-
Towards the Roof of the World: NLP Progress in Tibetan Languages
2026-10-09 11:11:10Xi Cao, Yijie Li, Yuan Sun, Shiwei Dong, Zeguang Huang, Nuo QunAbstract
Tibetan, spoken by some seven million people on and around the Qinghai-Xizang Plateau, remains underrepresented in natural language processing (NLP). We present, to our knowledge, the first peer-reviewed systematic bibliometric survey of Tibetan NLP: 140 publications from 2004 to 2026 in the ACL Anthology and DBLP, annotated for venue type, research area, first-affiliation country, and resource release. Output has grown rapidly, with 84% of the publications appearing since 2018, and has expanded bottom-up along the NLP pipeline, from corpora and word segmentation through script, speech, and applications to large language models (LLMs). Researchers based in China first-authored 87% of the publications, which span all 25 represented research areas, whereas work from other countries concentrates on Classical Tibetan. We argue that this full-pipeline paradigm, realized under the compounded constraints of a complex script, dialectal diversity, and geographic remoteness, offers a reference model for other low-resource languages of the Global South. We also identify gaps in dialect coverage, responsible NLP, native and comparable evaluation, cross-community visibility, and resource release (only 29% of the publications release data, code, or models), and recommend open science, shared standards, and community participation for the LLM era.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13398
PDF
