A single multimodal large language model (MLLM) struggles to excel simultaneously at detection, localization, description, and reasoning in multimodal industrial anomaly understanding (MM-IAU). We show that in-domain training does not close this gap. On MMAD, a widely adopted MM-IAU benchmark, trained specialists reach at most 75.5% accuracy in defect localization, against 92.3% for human experts, and even detect anomalies less accurately than their untrained base model. Meanwhile, different MLLMs offer complementary strengths but share this weakness in fine-grained perception, so combining them alone cannot remove it. We therefore propose SiGMA, a spatially grounded multi-agent framework that divides labor between heterogeneous MLLM agents and a dedicated visual defect expert. A multimodal searcher supplies industrial knowledge and normal references, the defect expert turns query-reference comparison into calibrated anomaly evidence, and a label-free reliability controller weighs each source by task-wise competence and query-level evidence quality. SiGMA reaches 85.2% average accuracy on MMAD, 4.0% above the strongest trained specialist and Gemini-2.5-Pro and within 1.5% of human experts. Even with three agents of at most 9B parameters, it reaches 84.4%, and new MLLMs join without retraining.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12310
Learning and problem solving depend critically on the structure of internal representations. While many modern data-driven artificial systems achieve strong predictive performance, their learned representations often lack explicit structure for expressing abstraction, invariance, and task-relevant regularities. We propose a minimal structural framework in which representational operations relevant to problem solving, such as context formation, invariance recognition, representative selection, abstraction, and procedural reuse, are made explicit. The central notion is that of a \emph{context}, formalized as a partition of a subset of an underlying state space, which fixes the distinctions, granularity, and form in which a problem can be posed. Within this setting, invariance recognition and representative selection are treated as fundamental representational operations. The framework is realized as a Knowledge Space composed of two coupled graph structures: a Concept Graph that hosts constructed and refined concepts, and a Procedure Graph that encodes typed operations over representations. Together, these structures provide a minimal cognitive-representational algebra for operating on representations without assuming sophisticated inference, learning, control, perception, or motor mechanisms. Using simple illustrative examples and a finite weak-solver demonstration, we show that appropriate representational organization can simplify the form and scope of admissible regularities, even when problem solving is carried out by a fixed and limited solver. The contribution of the paper is structural rather than algorithmic: it identifies representational prerequisites for abstraction, invariance, and procedural reuse in problem solving, and states explicit success and failure conditions for the weak-solver setting.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12306
Machine learning (ML) in high-energy nuclear physics (HENP) is entering a new stage in which physical knowledge is incorporated more directly into data analysis, simulation, and physics inference. This mini-review focuses on developments that have matured in the past several years. Whereas earlier applications emphasized event classification, pattern recognition, and surrogate models for selected observables, recent work has moved toward physics-integrated workflows: calibrated Bayesian extraction of QCD matter properties, dense-matter equation-of-state inference from heavy-ion and neutron-star data, generative event modeling, neural unfolding of weak physical signals, differentiable inverse solvers, gauge-equivariant and diffusion-based lattice-field samplers, and neural reconstruction of model functions in holographic QCD. We survey recent applications of ML in heavy-ion collisions, neutron-star physics, lattice QFT, and holographic or continuum QCD. The emphasis is not on ML architectures alone, but on how they enter concrete physics workflows, how physical constraints such as symmetries, conservation laws, causality, thermodynamic stability, and topology are imposed, and how uncertainty quantification and validation determine whether an AI-assisted result can support a reliable physics conclusion.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12293
Topological Deep Learning extends graph-based learning to higher-order domains, such as hypergraphs, cellular, and simplicial complexes. These domains are typically constructed from patterns in an input graph through a process of graph lifting. Full-domain training constructs and stores the complete lifted representation before model execution. On large and dense datasets like Reddit (233k nodes and 57.3M edges), this global materialization becomes a severe computational bottleneck, often rendering training infeasible. To address this limitation, we introduce Cluster-TNN, a domain-agnostic framework that avoids this bottleneck by lifting locally instead. After partitioning the input graph during preprocessing, at runtime Cluster-TNN dynamically samples groups of node clusters, reconstructs their induced subgraphs to form mini-batches, and applies the chosen lifting within each mini-batch. Retaining all edges among sampled nodes preserves the connectivity needed to construct higher-order structures across clusters, producing topological mini-batches that existing Topological Neural Networks can process directly. Across 21 matched comparisons with full-graph execution, Cluster-TNN reduces peak GPU memory in every configuration, by 83.2% on average while maintaining competitive predictive performance. Notably, such a reduction enables, to our knowledge, the first training of multiple different higher-order Topological Neural Networks on large datasets such as Reddit and OGBN Products. These results establish Cluster-TNN as a general strategy for scaling Topological Deep Learning beyond the limitations of global domain construction.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12247
AI research agents automate the cycle of proposing, implementing, and evaluating experiments, opening a path toward recursive self-improvement. Yet their ability to propose experiments outpaces their capacity to execute them in real environments, making outcome prediction a key capability for sustained self-improvement under limited experimental budgets. We investigate language models as Research World Models (RWMs), which predict the outcomes of candidate interventions across research environments. Our evaluation draws on over 2,600 experimental records from nine research environments spanning pretraining, post-training, and inference, representing more than 171,000 H100 GPU-hours of experimentation. Research knowledge acquired from real experimental experience improves RWM predictions of unseen interventions within the same environment (Spearman +0.27), and can be reused across environments. For example, using only pretraining experience from OLMo3, Marin, and Nanochat, an RWM reduces selection regret in the Qwen3 environment by 78% compared with zero-experience setting. These benefits extend to multi-round Autoresearch under a fixed selection budget: RWMs with in-env and cross-env research knowledge increase the best gain achieved by 15.8% and 11.6%, respectively. Ablations across 13 language models used as RWMs show that adding research knowledge can improve intervention ranking more than changing models or increasing reasoning effort alone. These findings support language models as RWMs and motivate accumulating experimental data for future RWM training.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12235
Black-box optimization (BBO) arises in many scientific and engineering problems where objective evaluations are expensive and limited. Recent large language model (LLM) agents offer a new way to approach BBO by combining task semantics, computation, optimization tools, and feedback-driven decision making, showing great potential due to the integration with mathematically rigorous tools. However, existing agentic BBO studies use different task domains and system configurations, making their results difficult to compare and the effects of individual design choices hard to isolate. We therefore introduce AgenticBBO-Bench, a cross-domain benchmark for agentic BBO spanning synthetic functions, hyperparameter optimization, database tuning, chip design, and molecular design under a unified finite-budget evaluation protocol. In our experiments, agentic BBO achieves higher family-averaged scores than direct LLM-based methods in all five domains and outperforms the best numerical optimizers in four. We further study three factors shaping agent performance: optimization tools, task information and prior knowledge, and the role of the LLM during search. Our results show that additional numerical tools do not consistently improve performance, task semantics are broadly useful while more specific priors are less reliable, and numerical optimizers can effectively absorb gains from search trajectories established by the agent. Finally, we introduce a five-task frontier challenge within AgenticBBO-Bench and evaluate seven LLMs under the Codex agent harness, where GPT-6 Astra and DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash lie on the Pareto frontier of performance and cost among the evaluated models. Our code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12183
The evolution of Large Language Model agents from single-task execution to long-term autonomous operation highlights the critical challenge of transforming continuous experiences into reusable knowledge. To address this, we propose Hippocam, a hierarchical memory and continual learning architecture. Hippocam draws inspiration from two characteristics of human memory: cognitive processes selectively maintain information relevant to current goals, while long-term memories form gradually through repeated consolidation. Accordingly, Hippocam structures an agent's ongoing work as nested intents. The active context remains centered on the current intent, while completed intents are consolidated into the task-relevant outcomes and state needed for subsequent work, rather than carrying forward their full working details. Concurrently, a recursive prefix consolidation mechanism repeatedly consolidates earlier history, causing long-unused experiences to become increasingly abstract. Original interactions are preserved, allowing the agent to progressively recover finer-grained details through the hierarchy and stop once sufficient information is available. Crucially, when past experiences are recalled and reintegrated into active work, they undergo subsequent consolidation alongside new experiences, thereby being reinforced, supplemented, and updated. Through this memory dynamic of use and disuse, Hippocam connects working context, long-term memory, knowledge accumulation, and skill learning within a single continuously evolving experiential process. This enables agents to learn and evolve capabilities through their own experiences without parameter updates.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12124
Knowledge distillation (KD) transfers knowledge from stronger Teacher models to weaker Student models, but most methods require training the Student parameters, thereby binding the distilled knowledge to a specific architecture and checkpoint. This implicit representation is difficult to interpret or reuse across models and limits KD for API-only or costly-to-train models. This paper studies knowledge transfer for large language models (LLMs). We introduce Universal Textual Teaching (UTT), a parameter-update-free framework that distills observed Teacher-Student knowledge gaps into a textual, interpretable, and reusable natural-language artifact called Primer. Specifically, UTT first identifies representative gap cases through paired evaluations, and iteratively updates the Primer via multi-role interactions: the Student attempts each task, the Prompter turns evaluation feedback into a teaching instruction, the Teacher provides a targeted demonstration, and the Synthesizer consolidates validated lessons. Empirically, on the challenging math (Omni-MATH-2) and code generation (KernelBench) tasks, extensive results confirm the effectiveness of the method: UTT remarkably raises the Student's accuracy from 9.4% to 48.6% and Fast1 accuracy from 9% to 35% on KernelBench, while increasing mathematical reasoning accuracy from 27.6% to 51.7%. UTT also performs better than representative prompt engineering and parameter-based KD methods. Of note, UTT is shown to be generalizable across different Teachers and Students: a Primer synthesized for one Teacher-Student pair can generalize to other Students that do not participate in the synthesis.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12114
World action models (WAMs) aim to answer a coupled physical question: given a task instruction, what motion should the robot execute, and how will that motion change the surrounding world? Most existing WAMs build on pretrained video generators and represent world evolution through images or visual latents. Robotic interaction, however, takes place in metric three-dimensional space, while images are view-dependent projections whose pixel distances do not directly encode physical distances. We introduce UNITAS, to our knowledge the first 3D-native world action model that unifies observations, actions, and scene dynamics in a shared metric 3D frame within each interaction, using a common representation across robot embodiments and human hands. Action flow represents human hands and robot grippers as 3D point trajectories, while scene flow describes scene-point displacements conditioned on these trajectories. World-aligned 3D positional embeddings ground visual tokens with or without depth input, and a physical-time trajectory tokenizer encodes each point trajectory as one token anchored at its current 3D position. This interface supports both direct action execution and action-conditioned scene prediction. With 1.7B parameters, UNITAS achieves the best action-conditioned scene prediction on RoboTwin among the compared methods, with up to 49% lower displacement errors than PointWorld, and state-of-the-art manipulation success, including 99.8% on LIBERO and an average of 85% across real-world tasks. The code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12099
Digital technologies have made Islamic narratives more accessible, but existing platforms provide limited support for structured learning and comprehension of these stories, particularly in Arabic and multilingual settings. We present ILM, an interactive educational platform for Stories of the Prophets that combines Arabic natural language processing, structured knowledge representation, and retrieval-based question generation. Admin-approved Arabic narratives are processed by a Knowledge Graph (KG) Constructor Engine that identifies entities and narrative relationships and stores them as structured knowledge, enabling learners to explore stories through a visual story map and answer entity- and relation-based questions generated from the KG. Separately, a multilingual retrieval pipeline retrieves relevant passages from the original narratives to generate multiple-choice and open-ended comprehension questions. For open-ended questions, an LLM-as-a-Judge evaluates learners' answers against the retrieved passages and reference answers to determine correctness. The platform also incorporates Quranic content as a separate enrichment layer, allowing selected narratives to be supplemented with source-supported information. By combining structured knowledge with passage-based retrieval, ILM supports narrative exploration, comprehension, and assessment across Arabic and multilingual content. The system demonstrates the feasibility of combining structured knowledge representation and retrieval-based generation to support interactive learning of Islamic narratives. A demo is available at this http URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12064
Jev is a "System One" model that returns a choice among given options instead of generating text. We study how such a specialized decision model compares with general-purpose large language models (LLMs). We evaluate Jev on 13 multiple-choice benchmarks covering knowledge, reasoning, and multilingual understanding, and compare it with 19 LLMs in three tiers: frontier, representative, and small. Jev is competitive with frontier LLMs on knowledge and commonsense benchmarks and obtains the best score on MMLU-Redux and ARC-Challenge. Outside mathematics, it also outperforms most representative LLMs and all small LLMs. However, it falls behind on mathematical word problems: on MathQA, it is 17.7 points below the frontier median and scores lower than all 19 LLMs. These results indicate that a specialized decision model can match general-purpose LLMs on decisions that rely mainly on knowledge, but not on decisions that require multi-step calculation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11978
Machine unlearning in large language models aims to remove unwanted knowledge while preserving the model's remaining capabilities. Although existing methods use retention objectives or restrict where edits occur, achieving the desired forgetting level can still leave collateral changes that impair non-target behavior. Our recovery comparisons suggest that some of these changes can be reversed while preserving observed forgetting performance. In this work, we present Propose-Then-Project Unlearning (PTP-U), a framework that combines targeted forgetting with the recovery of non-target capabilities. PTP-U first applies local analytic edits to weaken target knowledge associations, then aligns non-target output distributions with those of the original model to recover capabilities while maintaining fixed forgetting constraints. Both stages serve a common goal: satisfying the forgetting requirements while preserving fluent generation and performance on non-target tasks. Across three benchmarks, PTP-U achieves the strongest forgetting-retention trade-off among evaluated methods, reaching 81.22%-91.03% forgetting while preserving 94.20% non-target utility on average. At matched forgetting, PTP-U consistently retains higher non-target utility.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11915
We present AuraLuxMuse, a novel system for automated aesthetic stage lighting design that integrates expert knowledge, representation learning, and preference-adaptive modeling. Lighting design in live performance settings requires the seamless translation of musical features into dynamic lighting behaviors. However, traditional workflows remain time-consuming, labor-intensive, and difficult to transfer. AuraLuxMuse encodes music and professional cue sequences into a shared retrieval space, estimates cue-event density, and retargets selected fixture commands to the destination stage. It assists pre-production authoring by returning editable cues rather than replacing the designer with an unconstrained generator. At the heart of AuraLuxMuse are two key modules: Lighting-Aligned Music Pretraining (LAMP), which performs contrastive learning between audio and lighting cues for alignment, and Preference-Adaptive Mixture of Experts (PAMoE), which conditions preference-aware cue retrieval and adaptation on designers' intent through a gated ensemble of style-specific expert networks. To support training and evaluation, we introduce Musilux, the first dataset of paired musical audio and professional lighting cue sequences under diverse performance scenarios. We evaluate AuraLuxMuse across both virtual simulation environments and professional-grade laboratories. Experimental results, including objective and subjective evaluation, demonstrate that AuraLuxMuse retrieves and adapts stage-lighting cues that are visually cohesive, semantically meaningful, and artistically expressive, showing its potential for AI-assisted aesthetic stage design.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11792
Interactive agents can turn experience into reusable skills, yet existing self-evolving skill libraries primarily improve by accumulating new knowledge. Failures may lead to new skills, while previously stored skills are less often revisited as new evidence arrives. However, growth alone does not ensure reliability, as a retrieved skill may be inapplicable under the current task conditions, and an existing skill may encode a mis-specified operational boundary. Reliable skill evolution therefore requires not only adding knowledge, but also testing and revising what is already stored. We introduce Skill-V, a verifiable self-evolving skill library. To make stored knowledge testable, we propose representing skills as versioned, falsifiable contracts that link semantic intent to observable behavioral criteria. We use environment outcomes to drive library evolution. Specifically, task failures motivate skill addition, while disagreements between contract evaluations and task outcomes guide revisions to existing skill boundaries. To validate these revisions, we require them to preserve protected semantic constraints and satisfy non-regression criteria for rubric-outcome metrics on historical replay evidence. Finally, we employ an applicability-aware filter to exclude candidates judged confidently inapplicable to the current task. Across ALFWorld and WebShop, Skill-V achieves success rates of 95.3% and 85.9%, respectively, while maintaining a more compact skill library than growth-oriented baselines. Applicability-aware filtering reduces incorrect skill invocations, and outcome-grounded revisions correct mis-specified skill boundaries without degrading performance on previously observed evidence. These results show that reliable skill evolution requires more than accumulating experience: the library must learn which knowledge to retain, when to revise it, and when it should be applied.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11781
Guard models are increasingly used to safeguard LLM-based agents, primarily by identifying actions that agents are forbidden to perform. However, identifying forbidden actions alone is insufficient to ensure agent safety. In this paper, we argue that agent safety also depends on identifying required yet unperformed safety-critical actions, which we call obligations. Our preliminary study on a popular benchmark for evaluating safety shows that 56.92% of GLM-5.3 trajectories contain unfulfilled obligations, compared with only 30.00% containing forbidden actions. This finding reveals unfulfilled obligations as a major and previously overlooked source of safety risk. However, to our knowledge, no existing benchmark evaluates whether guard models can identify these obligations. To close this gap, we introduce ObligationBench, the first benchmark for evaluating the capability of obligation identification, comprising 240 expert-validated trajectories covering issue resolution, feature development, and terminal operations. Our evaluation of 14 representative models reveals substantial limitations: the highest recall and exact-match rate are only 48.97% and 10.00%, respectively. To address these limitations, we develop ObligationGuard using 40,000 synthetic training examples. ObligationGuard achieves 57.52% recall and an exact-match rate of 21.67%, surpassing all evaluated models on both metrics. We call on the community to incorporate obligation identification into the design and evaluation of future guard models to improve agent safety.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11773
Large language model (LLM) agents are beginning to operate industrial energy equipment, and what they get right depends on what they are told about the plant. Established building ontologies name many kinds of points across many sites, whereas an industrial equipment system needs few entities with much knowledge about each. This study proposes the ontology tower, a narrow-and-deep ontology of a single equipment system whose knowledge deepens in two ways: through quantities derived from the measured points by physical relations, and through lessons from the operating journal incorporated as knowledge nodes. On a real low-humidity air-handling test plant operated daily through a programmable logic controller, agents received a text projected from its tower in a preregistered evaluation of nine tasks replayed from the plant's records, using four open-weight models from 9 to about 750 billion parameters. This knowledge raised the rate at which the agents avoided the most plausible misjudgment of each task by about 20 percentage points, and the overall task score of the 9-billion-parameter model as much as that of the largest. Operating lessons were used when incorporated into the tower or placed in the prompt as records, but seldom when left in the journal behind a search tool. In live runs through an invariant safety layer, the agents brought the controlled variable into its target band in 12 of 14 runs. An ontology narrow in entities but deep in what is known about them can thus supply the knowledge that an agent for an industrial equipment system needs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11768
Autoregressive video diffusion enables causal video streaming without a bidirectional pass over the full clip, but existing few-step systems usually retain only the opening and most recent frames in a fixed-size KV cache. Once an event leaves this window, later frames can no longer attend to it, a failure we term mid-horizon forgetting. We present Memory Forcing, a few-step streaming method that preserves this missing history without increasing the cache size. Its Archive \& Working Banks partition the cache into sink, archive, and working regions, retaining diverse intermediate events alongside recent motion under fixed memory. Because absolute temporal indices drift outside the training range, Bank-aware RoPE reassigns indices at attention time so each bank remains distinguishable. At 1.3B, Memory Forcing leads on longer clips, shows the smallest drop from 5s to 60s among methods reporting all four lengths, and preserves subjects and scenes through leave-and-return. The same design scales to Wan2.2 5B, producing more physically plausible, realistic, and dynamic videos and, to our knowledge, the first public 5B model on this forcing line.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11756
Some defects in an AI-generated study can be identified from its artifacts; others require knowledge of what was approved before execution. We propose study contracts that bind declared experimental choices, run obligations and claim scope to recorded execution evidence, and distinguish this contract-relative verification from scientific truth. A diagnostic using eight self-authored clean/mutated pairs illustrates the information boundary. A deterministic checker applying a registered, fault-specific rule to approved and executed objects detected all eight registered mutations. Across eighteen recorded judge aliases given individual metadata-filtered packages without pair context or the registry-selected fault label, 104 of 144 mutated evaluation cases received defect flags; the remaining cases comprised 32 abstentions and eight terminal failures, with no explicit clean decisions on mutated cases. Some packages retained approval and execution fields, including digests. The prompt instructed judges to abstain when evidence was insufficient. These results characterize a deliberately information-asymmetric development setting; they do not isolate the effect of authoritative information from differences in task specification and rule selection, and they are not comparative verifier quality or agent reward hacking. We identify full-information comparisons, legitimate-adaptation controls and closed-loop agent evaluations as necessary tests of whether contract checks improve useful compliant completion under optimization.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11754
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a cornerstone in software engineering for enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs) with domain-specific knowledge. However, adapting retrievers to evolving code repositories remains challenging due to the noise and redundancy inherent in massive code corpora. Standard fine-tuning on the full corpus is computationally expensive and often leads to sub-optimal performance due to negative transfer from low-quality samples. Conversely, simple random sampling fails to guarantee data representativeness. To address these challenges, we propose MAP4CS (Multi-dimensional Awareness Pruning for Code Search), an adaptive data pruning framework. MAP4CS identifies a small, high-quality core subset by integrating syntactic structure, semantic diversity, and distributional representation, followed by a rigorous rule-based filtering pipeline. Extensive experiments on two large-scale datasets demonstrate that MAP4CS consistently outperforms random sampling baselines using only 5% of the training data. Remarkably, it achieves performance comparable to, or even superior to, fine-tuning on the full dataset, validating the ''less is more'' hypothesis in data-centric AI. Furthermore, linguistic analysis reveals an adaptive optimization mechanism: MAP4CS automatically functions as a de-duplicator for redundant corpora and a denoiser for chaotic ones, constructing a training corpus that is both lexically diverse and information-dense.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11727
Foundation models supply reinforcement learning (RL) with priors that mitigate its longstanding weaknesses in sample efficiency and transfer, but their token-by-token generation makes queries sequential and costly. Jev, a recently released decision model, generates nothing and returns calibrated, typed answers in a single forward pass. Existing work studies foundation models in RL either as models to be trained or as generators to be prompted, and Jev belongs to neither category, having so far served only as a black box in single domains. How well such a model decides on its own in RL environments, and how it can improve RL as a component of training, therefore remain unaddressed. To this end, in this paper we first examine the requirements that the objects of an RL system place on the answers they consume, and establish that Jev can fulfill all of them except the cardinal use of a value function. The remaining objects form positions that admit several roles each. We then construct algorithms that employ Jev at three of these positions, as a reference policy, an exploration judge, and a replay rater, to improve sample efficiency, exploration, and learning performance. Across nine MiniGrid tasks and three Atari games, training with Jev outperforms a standard RL learner, including where the learner makes no progress alone, while the model itself remains untrained. To our knowledge, we present the first use of Jev within the RL learning process and establish a frozen decision model as a usable component of RL training, inviting further exploration of how Jev and other advanced decision models can improve RL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11692