Automated interviewers and conversational agents are increasingly used in research, recruitment, customer service, and education. However, many existing systems rely on fixed question sequences and provide limited context-based personalization without considering participants' knowledge, which can lead to repetitive or irrelevant follow-up questions. Therefore, there is a need for an adaptive interviewing system that can adjust question depth while maintaining conversational continuity and semantic progression. To address this, an Evidence-Traceable Dynamic Interviewer Architecture is presented using a locally hosted Large Language Model (LLM), with the interview continuously adapted throughout the entire conversation based on the participant's responses and evolving context. The interviewer profiles participants' expertise in real time to generate knowledge-appropriate questions, well-articulated responses, and smooth transition messages that support conversational continuity. A five-module prompt-driven architecture and persistent interview-state record support these functions. The interviewer was evaluated with 246 participants. Expertise Profiling module (M3) showed 78.9% exact agreement with independently reported participant expertise, with a weighted Cohen's K of 0.80. Generate Iterative Questions module (M4) showed a strong expertise-complexity association (p=.79, p<.001), and participants reported high relevance (mean 4.41), engagement (mean 4.32), and satisfaction (mean 4.38), providing evidence that the architecture's adaptive components operated consistently with their intended functions while participants reported a positive interview experience.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11651
Large language models (LLMs) perform remarkably well on complex tasks, yet remain highly vulnerable to prompt injection attacks, where malicious instructions embedded in external data can override user intent. Existing defenses remain limited by model fine-tuning requirements, vulnerability to adaptive attacks, or reliance on brittle handcrafted prompts. We argue that a fundamental source of this vulnerability is the lack of an explicit representation of trust provenance. To address this, we introduce Learnable Trust-Boundary Delimiters (LTBD), a lightweight defense that explicitly encodes trust boundaries in the input while keeping the LLM parameters unchanged. LTBD uses a small number of learnable delimiters to distinguish trusted user instructions from untrusted external data, enabling the model to better respect the intended trust hierarchy. Experimental results show that LTBD substantially outperforms inference-time defenses and performs competitively with training-based approaches, while preserving benign-task utility and introducing negligible inference overhead. In particular, LTBD achieves 0.00% ASR on AlpacaFarm and only 0.11-0.19% ASR on TaskTracker. LTBD also remains effective under adaptive attacks, where adversaries have full knowledge of the defense and explicitly attempt to bypass it.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11634
Knowledge distillation enables efficient spatiotemporal prediction by transferring knowledge from an accurate teacher to a compact student. However, matching outputs or features independently for each sample leaves cross-sample predictive structure underused. Exploiting this structure requires representations and historical references that reflect the dynamics of each task. We propose TAM, a Task-Aware Memory Distillation framework that organizes a frozen teacher's knowledge into a bounded, retrievable history. Memory entries encode latent features, forecast changes, or flow residuals, while task-specific selection rules identify relevant historical references. The student either matches the teacher's similarity distribution over shared references or regresses observation-conditioned residual prototypes. These objectives complement supervised prediction and conventional distillation. The teacher, memory, and auxiliary adapters are used only during training, leaving student inference unchanged. We evaluate TAM on video prediction, weather forecasting, and traffic flow prediction across multiple teacher-student configurations. Averaged over four paired runs, adding TAM improves SSIM on all six video datasets and reduces MSE on five relative to the corresponding KD baselines. Mean paired MSE reductions reach 1.86% on KittiCaltech, 1.93% on WeatherBench with a gSTA teacher, and 1.01% on TaxiBJ. These results demonstrate the utility of historical teacher supervision across distinct forecasting tasks without additional student inference cost.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11617
Cross-view geo-localization (CVGL) aims to estimate geographic locations by matching images captured from different viewpoints, such as drone and satellite views. Existing methods mainly rely on visual representations, but often fail to jointly model fine-grained structural correspondences and semantic priors, making them prone to confusion between visually similar but semantically different regions, and thus limiting robustness under large viewpoint variations. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{S$^3$Geo}, a structure-semantic synergistic learning framework for cross-view matching. Specifically, we first introduce a Decoupled Query Pooling (DQP) module to extract a compact set of region-aware features from dense tokens, enabling explicit modeling of local structural patterns. We then design a query-level contrastive learning scheme with an optimal transport (OT)-based formulation to establish soft correspondences under cross-view spatial misalignment. Furthermore, we incorporate a Semantic Knowledge Distillation (SKD) strategy from a frozen CLIP teacher to transfer semantic priors and relational structures, thereby improving discrimination on hard negatives. By operating synergistically, the semantic priors provide robust contextual filtering, which guides the structural module to establish precise spatial alignments. Experiments on the University-1652 and SUES-200 datasets demonstrate that \textbf{S$^3$Geo} consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches without increasing inference complexity, validating the effectiveness of jointly modeling structural and semantic information for CVGL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11608
We introduce NanoProof, to our knowledge the first factorized execution-guided theorem prover in Lean 4 whose training data, extraction tooling, training pipeline, and weights are all released, making it end-to-end reproducible using open-source resources. To this end, we build and release a dataset of structured proof trees, as well as a tool for programmatic interaction and data extraction within the Lean 4 formal verifier. To support sustainable research, we focus on compute efficiency to facilitate accessible training and evaluation. NanoProof achieves 50.8% pass@16 on MiniF2F-Test, exceeding the two closest systems of its class, HyperTree Proof Search and ABEL, at roughly 90x and 7x less compute, and using more than four orders of magnitude less compute than AlphaProof. Stronger open-weight provers exist, but they are fine-tuned from large pretrained language models and release neither training data nor pipeline; NanoProof shows that the factorized execution-guided class of provers can be rebuilt from scratch with modest resources.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11605
Recent advances in large language model (LLM) pretraining highlight the role of high-quality training data in improving performance. While model-based filtering has proven effective in selecting high-quality subsets from web-scale corpora, especially for high-resource languages, low-resource languages face challenges due to limited availability of annotated data. This work explores extending quality filtering to over 100 languages by proposing a multilingual adaptation approach that converts an existing English quality classifier into a multilingual variant. Our approach proposes training a small multi-layer perceptron on top of Transformer encoder-only model embeddings, using multilingual text as input and scores obtained from English classifiers applied to machine-translated text as labels. Our 1B, 3B and 8B scale experiments show that our approach maintains the downstream LLM benchmark performance of existing multilingual model-based filtering baselines, without harming regional and cultural knowledge benchmarks. To further evaluate cross-lingual generalization, we compare classifier scores of high-quality synthetic data and web samples, and the correlation of classifier scores with LLM-based ones, revealing that the classifier can learn the scoring criteria of its original English variant, even for languages not included in its training data.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11585
End-to-end autonomous driving demands trajectory planners that are both highly accurate and cheap enough for edge deployment. State-of-the-art artificial neural network (ANN) planners meet the accuracy requirement at the cost of heavy dense computation, while spiking neural networks (SNNs)---though promising orders-of-magnitude energy savings through sparse, event-driven arithmetic---still lag far behind in planning accuracy. We present \textbf{SDPAD}, a fully spike-driven end-to-end planning pipeline that closes this gap. SDPAD converts a pre-trained ANN perception stack into integer-spike form via quantized ANN2SNN conversion, lifts multi-view images into the bird's-eye-view (BEV) space with a spike-driven-max (SDM) depth distribution (Spike-3D-Lift), and plans through the Spike-QFormer, a spiking query transformer in which ego, agent, and map queries distilled from the BEV scene are fused by learnable waypoint queries via cross-attention, followed by deformable spike-cross-attention refinement. Every operation is gated by integer spikes and inference is a single feed-forward pass without temporal simulation loops. On the nuScenes open-loop benchmark, SDPAD achieves an average $L_2$ error of 0.40\,m and a collision rate of 0.12\%, on par with strong ANN planners while consuming 69.9\,mJ---less than 2\% of recent ANN baselines. In closed-loop evaluation on the NAVSIM navtest split, SDPAD reaches 86.3 PDMS, surpassing the previous SNN planner SAD by 4.3 points and matching mainstream ANN planners at a fraction of their energy. To our knowledge, SDPAD is the first fully spike-driven planner evaluated in end-to-end autonomous driving, demonstrating that SNNs can rival dense ANNs in complex driving tasks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11583
Battery state of health (SoH) forecasting is important for battery management, but remains challenging due to nonlinear degradation and heterogeneity across batteries. Existing data-driven approaches primarily use temporal models to learn from numerical battery time series, and higher-level degradation characteristics are often not explicitly represented. These characteristics, however, can provide degradation guidance to support reliable forecasting and make the influence of degradation more interpretable. In this paper, we propose \textsc{Sera}, a \underline{se}mantic \underline{r}epresentation \underline{a}ggregation framework that complements temporal modelling with degradation semantics. Guided by battery domain expertise, \textsc{Sera} extracts degradation semantics from time series and constructs two complementary representations using rule-based knowledge and LLM-based interpretation. The representations are independently encoded and integrated with the representation learned by temporal models through gated aggregations. Experiments on the mainstream benchmark across multiple prediction horizons and different temporal models show that \textsc{Sera} consistently improves forecasting performance, achieving up to a 37.3\% reduction in prediction error over the temporal baseline and enhanced generalizability. Counterfactual analysis examines how forecasts respond to changes in degradation semantics to assess interpretability. The results show that prediction responses are consistent with the meanings of key degradation descriptors across tested horizons. Together, these findings demonstrate that structured degradation semantics and effective aggregation can improve forecasting accuracy and support reliable and interpretable battery health forecasting for advanced battery management.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11567
Existing Open-Ended Deep Research (OEDR) systems primarily generate reports from scratch, making them inefficient for scenarios where research reports need to be continuously maintained as new information emerges. We introduce \textbf{Incremental Open-Ended Deep Research (Incremental-OEDR)}, a research setting that treats a report as an evolving research state and incrementally updates it by preserving valid knowledge, revising outdated or incomplete content, and incorporating newly available information. To support this setting, we propose \textbf{Structured Harness}, which represents reports as structured collections of outlines, sections, and supporting evidence, and provides structured retrieval, a persistent structured evidence pool, and structured generation for selective report updating and evidence reuse. We further establish a temporal evaluation framework spanning ten years, with \emph{Single-Step Task} and \emph{Long-Chain Task} to evaluate incremental updates over both individual transitions and long-term update chains. Extensive Experiments on DeepResearch Bench and DeepConsult under both the Open-source Configuration (OC) and Proprietary Configuration (PC) show that Incremental-OEDR maintains competitive report quality while substantially improving report continuity and reducing research costs. As shown in Figure~\ref{fig:profile}, it achieves up to 0.51 higher content-level ROUGE-L F1, 0.63 higher outline-level EM F1, 33\% lower token consumption, and 61\% fewer search calls than OEDR on DeepResearch Bench. For more details, please refer to our project page: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11566
Graph clustering is a fundamental task in data analysis, aiming at grouping nodes with similar characteristics in the graph into clusters. This problem has been widely explored using graph neural networks (GNNs) due to their ability to leverage node attributes and graph topology for effective cluster assignments. However, representations learned through GNNs typically struggle to capture global relationships between nodes via local message-passing mechanisms. Moreover, the redundancy and noise inherently present in graph data may easily result in node representations lacking compactness and robustness. To address these issues, we propose a conjoint framework CoCo, which captures compactness and consistency in the learned node representations for deep graph clustering. Technically, our CoCo leverages graph convolutional filters to learn robust node representations from both local and global views, and then encodes them into low-rank compact embeddings, thus effectively removing the redundancy and noise as well as uncovering the intrinsic underlying structure. To further enrich the node semantics, we develop a consistency learning strategy based on compact embeddings to facilitate knowledge transfer from the two perspectives. Our experimental results indicate that our CoCo outperforms state-of-the-art counterparts on various datasets.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11506
We study how a coding agent learns across a sequence of abstract reasoning tasks. The agent runs on a frozen foundation model inside a fixed harness and acts by writing and running Python and shell scripts. It retains no state across turns other than its written artifacts, so every thought it forms, carries, corrects or abandons leaves a trace, where a thought is any belief, rule or plan committed to a file. We let the agent play ARC-AGI-3, a set of interactive reasoning games that provide no instructions. Each game is a sequence of levels, and a strategy that clears one level can fail on the next, so every new level is in effect a new task. The agent records what it learns as Python scripts and text notes, while the harness keeps a complete log of every action and observation. Our contribution is a measurement protocol that traces each thought through these files, from the task where it forms to the task where it is corrected or abandoned, applied to seven evaluation runs with three backbones from two model families. Scripts written for one task are almost never called again in a later task (33 of 630 references cross a task boundary), because most scripts embed the state of the current level. Instead, the agent rewrites its knowledge into new scripts, keeping the general rules and dropping the level-specific details, and abandons 74% of the scripts it wrote before a boundary. The notes, which only the model reads, are never revised: the agent appends without removing earlier claims, and the contradictions that accumulate are settled against the log. Because the log preserves everything, the agent forgets selectively, not catastrophically. The most costly error is a hard-coded value carried into a task where it no longer holds. These findings come from the files the agent wrote, without access to the model, and constitute a white-box analysis of how a coding agent continually learns.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11450
While domain-specific Large Language Models (LLMs) have encoded vast biomedical knowledge, their limited context windows often hinder a deep understanding of nuanced relationships within and across texts. To address this limitation, we introduce BioBigBird, a bidirectional language model pre-trained on extensive biomedical literature and clinical data, specifically designed to handle long-range dependencies. BioBigBird leverages a sparse attention mechanism to process sequences up to 4096 tokens, and its training incorporates a multi-stage process to mitigate noise from the large-scale pre-training corpus. We further enhance its performance by employing a multi-task learning (MTL) framework that jointly optimizes for Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction. Comprehensive evaluations on the BLURB benchmark reveal that our MTL-enhanced BioBigBird achieves highly competitive results against state-of-the-art models. Our work contributes an effective methodology for developing powerful, long-context language models for specialized domains, demonstrating the value of extended sequence processing for complex text analysis. Our models are publicly available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11430
GoldenViewVQA requires models to jointly answer driving-scene questions and identify the camera view containing the supporting visual evidence, making precise evidence localization as important as answer correctness. We present \textbf{CoVeR-VQA}, a training-free multi-stage verification and correction framework for grounded multi-view VQA. Starting from GPT-5.6 zero-shot predictions, CoVeR-VQA progressively applies view-specific verification with Gemini-3.6-Flash, prior-guided joint verification with Claude-Opus-5, and cross-split group-level verification that exploits semantically filtered question groups from shared multi-view scenes and validation-derived prior knowledge. On the official GoldenViewVQA test set, the four-stage CoVeR-VQA pipeline achieves 84.75\% Joint Accuracy, improving the GPT-5.6 zero-shot baseline by 13.56 percentage points, while reaching 94.92\% Answer Accuracy and 86.44\% View Accuracy. The final submitted run achieves 88.14\% Joint Accuracy after two additional evaluator-informed post-hoc corrections. Our analysis shows that supporting-view localization remains the primary source of residual errors, highlighting the importance of explicit evidence verification for reliable multi-view multimodal reasoning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11402
AI-generated image detectors are commonly trained on fixed generator domains and become difficult to maintain as new generative models emerge. Continual adaptation is challenging because replaying historical generated images is costly, whereas updating shared parameters with limited current-domain data can overwrite prior forensic knowledge. We propose EvoKnow, a replay-free framework that formulates continual AI-generated image detection as forensic knowledge evolution. EvoKnow preserves a shared forensic basis learned from base domains, incrementally adds isolated residual experts for complementary generator-relevant evidence, and retrieves expertise through an Analytical Incremental Router (AIR) updated in closed form from current-stage generated images and accumulated sufficient statistics. Experiments demonstrate effective cross-generator generalization, few-shot expansion, and long-horizon continual adaptation. With ten generated images per arriving generator, EvoKnow achieves 96.70% average accuracy on non-base GenImage generators and 94.48% accuracy on Chameleon without target-benchmark adaptation. Under a strict replay-free continual learning protocol, EvoKnow achieves state-of-the-art continual learning performance, attaining 96.32% mean stage-wise accuracy and 4.32% average forgetting.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11381
Continual learning remains challenging for large language models, which must enable models to acquire new skills and knowledge without degrading existing capabilities. Existing approaches typically address this challenge by carefully designing how model parameters are updated. In contrast, prompt optimization avoids costly parameter updates while achieving competitive or even superior performance to reinforcement learning methods such as GRPO on individual knowledge-intensive and reasoning tasks. This raises a natural question: \textit{Can prompt optimization, as an efficient adaptation approach, be directly applied to continual learning?} Our analysis shows that, under sequential task adaptation, it suffers from catastrophic forgetting, while optimized prompts accumulate rules that overfit to local task distributions. To address these limitations, we propose \emph{Evolving Functional REpertoires} (EFRE), which replaces a single prompt with a repertoire of functions that evolves as new tasks arrive: compatible updates refine existing functions, while conflicting updates trigger the emergence of new ones. On a three-task continual-learning stream, EFRE achieves a final average performance 7.50 percentage points higher than GRPO. Moreover, after adaptation to the Bio task, its performance on FinQA decreases by only 1.56 percentage points, compared with 25.10 percentage points for the base prompt optimization method. We further instantiate EFRE in a minimal agent system and observe consistent improvements across different backbone models. Overall, these results demonstrate EFRE's strong performance in continual learning for large language models and highlight its substantial potential for continual learning in advanced agent systems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11373
Contemporary decoder-only large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities across a wide range of domains. However, existing pretraining paradigms for gloss-free sign language translation (SLT) are largely designed around conventional encoder-decoder pretrained language models, which limits their direct applicability to decoder-only LLMs. To address this limitation, we propose SignRAG, a unified framework combining hierarchical pretraining, target-domain retrieval augmentation, and retrieval-aware reinforcement fine-tuning. Hierarchical pretraining first learns linguistically grounded sign representations and then jointly aligns the sign encoder with an LLM, mitigating cross-modal optimization imbalance. For downstream adaptation, SignRAG complements parameter-based fine-tuning with a target-domain retrieval gallery that provides instance-specific translation cues. To ensure that retrieved contexts are used appropriately, we further introduce Retrieval Utility-Guided Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RUG-RFT), which combines translation-quality and retrieval-utility rewards to encourage beneficial retrieval use while suppressing harmful reliance. Experiments on multiple SLT benchmarks establish new state-of-the-art performance. In particular, to the best of our knowledge, SignRAG is the first gloss-free approach to outperform gloss-supervised methods across all reported metrics on CSL-Daily. Our code has been released at \href{this https URL}{GitHub}, together with models of different sizes to support future academic research.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11371
Rule-governed contextual decision tasks require models to apply specified rules to case-specific context and evidence. Written rules can leave gaps in decision guidance and process evaluation, while reference judgments vary in their support from the rules and evidence. To address these challenges, we introduce AdaptEvo, a framework for learning under imperfect supervision that couples confidence-adaptive policy optimization with evolving decision knowledge and evaluation rubrics. Its Training module uses Confidence-Adaptive GRPO (CA-GRPO) to balance outcome and process rewards according to reference confidence. Its Evolution module synthesizes reusable decision knowledge from recurring failures across training cases and refines process rubrics to detect overlooked errors. To support empirical evaluation, we construct an industrial multimodal content moderation dataset comprising a training set and In-Period and Out-of-Period test sets, with the latter collected under changed rules. Using Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, AdaptEvo achieves 61.9% exact-label accuracy and 72.2% binary decision accuracy on In-Period, exceeding GRPO by 7.5 and 3.7 percentage points, respectively. On Out-of-Period, the policy trained with CA-GRPO retains exact-label accuracy gains over the base model across evaluated checkpoints without injected decision knowledge, while GRPO declines with continued training. CA-GRPO also outperforms the tested fixed reward mixtures on both Out-of-Period metrics.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11354
Physics-based models connect scientific explanation with quantitative prediction. Constructing them requires selecting physical processes, defining states and governing equations, specifying couplings, and identifying parameters from experiments. Existing AI systems remain limited in making these model structure decisions autonomously. We introduce EvoSim, a self-evolving AI scientist for physical modeling. It uses experimental discrepancies to drive mechanism and equation revisions and held-out experimental data to test physical plausibility. Exploration traces make updates to knowledge, skills, and multi-agent orchestration. This co-evolution improves physics-based models and EvoSim's ability to select mechanisms, diagnose failures, and coordinate research. We evaluate EvoSim on two industrial battery modeling tasks. It predicts lithium-metal-plating onset from 25 to 45 degrees Celsius and 2 C to 6 C with a mean absolute error of 1.79% in state of charge. Dynamic voltage prediction under vehicle driving conditions achieves a root mean square error of 7.62 mV, surpassing the reported accuracy of models developed by human experts. Self-evolution reduces model and physics errors by approximately 36% relative to baseline, demonstrating improved scientific modeling capability. EvoSim turns experimental observations into validated models and cumulative research expertise.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11344
Large Language Models (LLMs) serving as long-term dialogue agents require memory systems that support reliable reasoning over extended interactions. However, existing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) frameworks typically treat memory as passive storage, making it difficult to distinguish source-attributed beliefs from unattributed event/fact records and to connect evidence dispersed across sessions. We introduce CogMem, a cognitive memory architecture based on the PEC$^2$F (Person-Event-Concept-Claim-Fact) graph schema. Dedicated Claim nodes preserve the source and target of subjective statements, while Fact and Event nodes represent semantic and episodic knowledge. Dialogue turns are incrementally converted into provenance-aware graph records, consolidated into higher-level facts, and reconciled into temporally scoped Claim views when the same source provides conflicting updates. For retrieval, a rule-based controller driven by LLM intent parsing composes four deterministic graph operators---anchoring, traversal, intersection, and evidence grounding---to reconstruct query-relevant context. Experiments on LoCoMo and LongMemEval show strong performance, especially on multi-hop, temporal, and knowledge-update tasks. Ablations and a semantic-collapse probe support complementary contributions from epistemic separation, consolidation, and agentic retrieval. Code: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11314
Large-scale construction of medical vision-language model (VLM) benchmarks is increasingly feasible with richly annotated imaging datasets and large language models (LLMs), yet existing automation largely focuses on generating evaluation items within predefined benchmark specifications. We study the broader problem of automatically deriving the specification itself: what to evaluate, which annotations support each task, and how to translate this evidence into reliable evaluation items. We formulate benchmark construction as constrained compilation, in which the benchmark specification is progressively derived from evaluation requirements, heterogeneous annotations, and medical knowledge. Based on this formulation, we introduce MedBenchAgent, a multi-agent framework with a Benchmark Intermediate Representation (BIR) that encodes task definitions, evidence mappings, evaluation protocols, and item specifications across construction stages. MedBenchAgent separates planning, which derives and verifies the specification, from instantiation, which constructs and audits items under the locked specification. MedBenchAgent achieves a Task-Space F1 of 90.9%, outperforming direct task induction (79.2-80.0%) and prior-guided induction (85.1%); 994 of 1,000 sampled items from correctly identified tasks pass human audit. We further demonstrate portability to a specialized medical domain and evaluate twelve VLMs, revealing task- and setting-specific variation obscured by aggregate scores. These results establish constrained compilation as a scalable and auditable framework for medical VLM benchmark construction beyond question generation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11312