Knowledge
-
Context-Conditioned Hamilton-Jacobi Reachability for Adaptive Safety Filtering
2026-10-06 10:36:41Ali Fuat Sahin, Yunus Yazoglu, John Talbot, Zeyuan Feng, James Dallas, Somil BansalAbstract
Hamilton-Jacobi reachability constructs safety certificates for specified dynamics and safety constraints, tying each certificate to the deployment context for which it is synthesized. We ask whether a single certificate can instead represent a family of context-dependent safety problems and be queried across deployment conditions without re-synthesis. We learn a backward reachable tube for an eight-state vehicle model conditioned on local boundary geometry, friction coefficient, and adversarial disturbance scale. Geometry enters through an ego-frame boundary observation that defines the local containment constraint, while friction and disturbance scale enter as explicit operating-condition variables. This allows the same value function to be queried across friction coefficients from 0.4 to 2.0 and on geometries absent from synthesis. On 11 held-out evaluation geometries, the certificate maintains containment across the full tested friction range, including simultaneous geometry and grip shifts, while remaining within 1.2 percentage points in intervention rate and 0.09 m/s in speed of certificates re-synthesized with knowledge of the test geometry. We then deploy the certificate as a sampled discrete-time control barrier function filter on a full-scale vehicle near the handling limit. Lateral containment holds in every hardware session under both adversarial driving and autonomous racing, with 99th-percentile acceleration magnitude reaching 0.99 g. Across three certificates evaluated under a fixed autonomous racing controller, lap time varies by only 3.1%, demonstrating that a context-conditioned reachability certificate can transfer to deployment geometries absent from synthesis with modest performance cost.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08115
PDF
-
Natural Language Questions as an Interface for Knowledge Graphs: QRAKEN Graph Distillation and Semantic Self-Healing
2026-10-06 10:24:26Remo Grillo, Lukas Klic, Giovanni ColavizzaAbstract
Natural-language access to RDF knowledge graphs is a core Semantic Web ambition. Large language models (LLMs) have advanced Text-to-SPARQL, yet on unfamiliar graphs they often generate valid queries that misrepresent the populated data model. QRAKEN is a training-free, ontology-agnostic neurosymbolic pipeline grounding generation in empirical graph evidence rather than schema expectations. An offline distiller produces TTQL, a compact description of populated multi-hop patterns, conditional frequencies and path-conditioned literal examples, plus a class-property co-occurrence matrix. Online, TTQL guides the LLM, while deterministic syntax, vocabulary and data-model checks provide diagnostics for iterative refinement. On CK25 (First International Text2SPARQL Challenge), under matched-condition recomputation on a QLever snapshot, QRAKEN achieves strict F1 of 0.643 $\pm$ 0.026 with GPT-4.1 mini and 0.652 $\pm$ 0.012 with GPT-5.4: relative gains of 30% and 32% over the strongest recomputed participant, outperforming systems using the same base model family. Ablations identify TTQL patterns as the dominant driver (+0.31 strict F1 over a shape-only baseline); the refinement loop provides a cheap safety net, rejecting triple patterns unsupported by the co-occurrence matrix. Compared with auto-derived SHACL, TTQL yields 64% higher strict F1, supporting the value of empirical patterns beyond schema exposure. With two local 35B 4-bit open-weight models at zero marginal cost, the same pipeline matches the strongest recomputed participant, and TTQL advantages over shape-only and SHACL baselines persist. Results on a single, relatively small benchmark provide an initial empirical signal; monolithic TTQL injection on very open cross-domain graphs remains the main limitation.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08095
PDF
-
Self-Retrospection Distillation: Turning Post-hoc Experiences into Prior Foresight
2026-10-06 10:06:47Haoxiang Zhang, Qinglin Chen, Hiroaki Hayashi, Zhuofeng Li, Siming Zhang, Jiaxin Zhang, Jixuan Chen, Fang Wu, Pan Lu, Silvio Savarese, Julian McAuley, Chien-Sheng WuAbstract
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) turns agent experience into learning signals primarily through scalar outcome rewards after interaction. For group-relative objectives, however, this signal vanishes when all rollouts receive the same reward, even though their trajectories may reveal useful information about what the task requires and how the agent fails. We ask a complementary question: can hindsight teach an agent what it could have anticipated before acting? We introduce prospective learning, which uses post-hoc experience to supervise foresight predictions from the pre-interaction view, and instantiate it with Self-Retrospection Distillation (SRD). Intuitively, a completed trajectory reveals knowledge that would have been useful and pitfalls that should be avoided; SRD distills this privileged hindsight into trajectory-blind foresight of the same policy. Foresight serves only as a training target and need not be explicitly generated at inference time. Across 10 tool-integrated reasoning and long-horizon agentic tasks, SRD complements RLVR and self-distillation baselines with gains of up to $24.2$ pp. Its advantage is especially pronounced when reward contrast is scarce: when $37$--$98\%$ of rollout groups are reward-uniform across model scales, yet SRD can still exploit learning signal from sampled trajectories. In the 2B setting, where $98\%$ of groups are all-failure, the RLVR training ends up at $0.0\%$ success, while adding SRD reaches $60.6\%$ under the same rollout budget. Our results suggest that post-hoc agent experience is useful not only for evaluating or improving behavior, but also for shaping predictive representations before available interaction.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08077
PDF
-
SpeedrunBench: Challenging LLM Agents with Video Game Speedrunning
2026-10-06 10:06:25Yoshinari Fujinuma, Keisuke Kamahori, Ryuto Koike, Abdelrahman Madkour, Varun Prashant Gangal, Monty Bichouna, Martyna Markiewicz, Shivani Jain, Duncan Curtis, Rebecca Qian, Anand KannappanAbstract
Frontier LLM agents have been shown to be capable of solving increasingly complex tasks for which humans have measurable solutions. This begs the pertinent question of whether LLM agents can go beyond what humans have already solved. The ability to develop sophisticated strategies to tackle consequential problems becomes paramount as well-trodden, human-developed solutions become insufficient for problems for which we lack context or enough training data. We study agents' capability of such strategy formation through the communal practice of video game speedrunning. In speedrunning, practitioners compete to find the fastest way to complete a video game under certain conditions, and in so doing uncovering interesting unorthodox play styles that require a thorough understanding and mastery of the underlying game mechanics. We introduce SPEEDRUNBENCH, a benchmark that evaluates frontier LLM agents across 9 different games. To perform well in this benchmark, agents must repeatedly improve their strategy, reflect on their performance, exploit their gained knowledge, and reason across a long-horizon of actions to improve on an increasingly difficult problem: being faster than themselves and everyone else. Our experiments show that while frontier agents approach human world records in simple platformer games, they remain behind human performance on longer, more complex games under practical budgets. These results suggest that SPEEDRUNBENCH is a useful testbed for studying agents' strategy formation capabilities as well as being a saturation-resistant evaluation measure, as there is almost always a faster completion time waiting to be discovered.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08076
PDF
-
DAEDALUS: Bootstrapping Agent Memory from Self-Generated Tasks
2026-10-06 09:46:32Antoine Edy, Max Conti, Victor Xing, Marc-Antoine Allard, Nawfal Benhamdane, Gautier ViaudAbstract
LLM agents often lack the operational knowledge to act reliably in new environments, as they must discover specific tool behaviors or environment conventions on their own. Without memory of past attempts, they repeat the same mistakes across tasks, leading to more task failures and longer trajectories. To address this, agentic systems typically rely on human-written guidelines or on procedural memory built from training tasks and an oracle verifier, both of which require prior knowledge of the environment. We present DAEDALUS, a method for bootstrapping reusable agent memory from self-generated practice without existing tasks or oracle verifiers. DAEDALUS pairs two agents: an explorer that interacts with the environment to generate challenging yet solvable tasks, and a solver that attempts them. A heuristic is derived from each solver failure and accepted only after the solver repeatedly succeeds with that heuristic in context. These outcomes also provide feedback for the explorer to refine the difficulty of future tasks. Accepted heuristics are then consolidated into a memory bank for test-time use. Across AppWorld, $\tau^2$-bench, and AutomationBench, DAEDALUS improves mean success rates by up to 15.9 points and pass^5 by up to 2.2x over a no-memory baseline, and is competitive with methods using training tasks, at a lower inference cost than most. We show that performance gains already emerge with a small exploration budget, and that its heuristics also benefit agents from other model families. Our ablations further reveal that solver traces provide the key information needed to derive effective heuristics, while factorizing early discoveries makes exploration more cost-efficient. Beyond memory construction, we find that the tasks generated by DAEDALUS can serve as a proxy for benchmark tasks when ranking models by performance. Code and artifacts: this http URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08048
PDF
-
Are Language Models Script-Aware?
2026-10-06 09:31:04David Kletz, Sandra Mitrovi\'c, Ljiljana Dolami\'c, Fabio RinaldiAbstract
Language models frequently generate outputs in unintended languages or scripts, a phenomenon known as off-target generation. While existing research has focused on language selection, the dimension of script knowledge remains understudied: before any linguistic understanding can occur, users must recognize the graphic symbols in a model's response. We investigate whether Small and Large Language Models (SLMs and LLMs) possess script knowledge by testing them on multi-scriptic languages. Through two complementary experiments, we evaluate whether models (1) adapt their output script to match the input, and (2) follow explicit instructions to generate text in a specified script. The models we tested demonstrate substantial script knowledge: they all achieve a near-perfect Latin script fidelity (more than 98%) and follow script instructions with high frequency. Nevertheless, we notice differences between LLMs and SLMs, with higher scores for LLMs including for non-standard script combinations.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08037
PDF
-
Same Feedback, Different Answer: Measuring Run-to-Run Instability in Frontier-Model Customer Feedback Analysis
2026-10-06 09:29:25Viraj Bagal, Raviraja Ganta, Prabhath ChellingiAbstract
AI agents are increasingly being programmed to automate knowledge work over large collections of unstructured data. Such automation requires repeatability: when the underlying evidence is unchanged, the agent's categories, priorities, and counts should not shift materially between runs, even if each individual answer appears plausible. We introduce a repeat-run evaluation framework that aligns semantically equivalent categories and focuses on two operating metrics: theme churn, the normalized change in the returned category set, and volume disagreement, the change in counts for categories that persist. We evaluate three recurring customer-feedback tasks across eight frontier models, corpus sizes from 100 to 5,000 records, multiple prompts, and three execution designs: raw generation, taxonomy-free hierarchical decomposition, and a taxonomy-grounded agent (TGA) using persistent themes, subthemes, and record-level predictions. With Claude Opus 4.8 and the 1,000-record corpus fixed, TGA reduces theme churn by 86--88% relative to both raw generation and hierarchical decomposition, while matched-theme volumes have zero disagreement. The taxonomy-grounded agent is more stable than every raw model in the screen, remains more stable at each corpus size, and keeps this advantage when theme matching is made stricter or looser. Although evaluated on customer feedback, the framework targets repeated synthesis of unstructured corpora more broadly, including financial reports, legal documents, incident records, and scientific literature. Overall, these results show that taxonomy grounding produces more consistent and repeatable outputs for recurring knowledge work.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08036
PDF
-
Revisiting Numerical Forecasting Models for Language-Based Trajectory Prediction
2026-10-06 08:28:52JunGyu Lee, Inhwan Bae, Hae-Gon JeonAbstract
Language-based trajectory predictors represent coordinates as discrete tokens and learn auxiliary tasks such as destination and group reasoning. This formulation enables the model to capture behavioral intent and social context beyond coordinate dynamics alone. However, token-level objectives provide only indirect guidance for continuous coordinate-space dynamics. To address this limitation, we introduce MoRE (Mixture of Reward Experts), a refinement framework that transfers numerical forecasting priors into a pretrained language-based predictor through reinforcement learning. Five frozen numerical predictors provide complementary coordinate-level knowledge of motion and interactions. Their predictions are converted into expert rewards and combined through an uncertainty-weighted consensus that penalizes disagreement. A ground-truth reward anchors the prediction to the target trajectory. To focus refinement on difficult cases, MoRE refines the policy using the top 1% of training samples ranked by predictive entropy. Expert predictions are computed once and cached before PPO training, so the experts are not run during policy updates or inference. In this way, MoRE combines the contextual modeling of the language-based predictor with coordinate-level feedback from numerical experts. On ETH-UCY, MoRE reduces ADE from 0.22 to 0.20 m and FDE from 0.32 to 0.29 m. Relative to the base policy, ADE decreases by 17.9% on SDD and 12.7% on NBA. On ETH-UCY, MoRE also reduces collision rates and better matches ground-truth pedestrian spacing, without increasing measured inference memory or latency. The project page is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07954
PDF
-
Hybrid Latent Attention for Looped Language Models
2026-10-06 08:14:07Yuhan Chen, Siyuan Zhang, Nan Wang, Feiyang Kang, Ruoxi JiaAbstract
Looped language models apply the same stack of layers T times to each token, which deepens the model without adding parameters but multiplies its key-value (KV) cache by T. The larger cache limits how many sequences a GPU can decode at once and slows each decoding step, which reads the whole cache. We propose Hybrid Latent Attention (HLA), which keeps exact keys and values within a sliding window of W recent tokens and stores each older token as a compact latent that the query of each loop reads directly, without reconstructing keys and values. We uptrain HLA on Ouro looped models (T=4) with 1.4B and 2.6B parameters, keeping the pretrained weights frozen and training only the added parameters to reproduce the original attention. The cache shrinks by 10.7x per token, fitting 4.0-8.8x as many concurrent sequences per GPU, and decoding throughput improves by 2.5x at 1K-token contexts and by up to 7.4x at 16K. HLA retains over 97% of the original accuracy on math, knowledge and reasoning benchmarks, and 96-100% on long-context retrieval up to 16K tokens. After supervised fine-tuning, it performs on par with the fine-tuned original model on competition-level math.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07940
PDF
-
Multimodal Knowledge Distillation for Gastric Adenocarcinoma Classification from Whole-Slide Images
2026-10-06 07:56:54Shrihari Dumbre, Bikash SantraAbstract
Gastric adenocarcinoma (GA) is a leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide, and accurate histopathological subtype classification from whole-slide images (WSIs) is essential for effective treatment planning. While multimodal approaches that integrate pathology report text with WSIs can improve classification, existing methods often depend on computationally expensive transformer architectures and large language models. We propose a multimodal knowledge distillation (MKD) framework that combines a pretrained WSI image encoder and a clinical text encoder using Low-Rank Multimodal Fusion (LMF) to efficiently model cross-modal interactions during training. Each WSI is represented as a bag of patches paired with a slide-level diagnostic caption. The teacher model learns fused image-text representations for subtype classification, while the student model distills this knowledge to enable accurate image-only inference. We evaluate our method on the PatchGastric benchmark dataset and achieve at least 3.35% higher mean accuracy than state-of-the-art approaches, without relying on transformer-based fusion, multi-task learning, or large language models. The source code is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07913
PDF
-
Textual Environmental Context and Spatial Graphs for LLM-Based Regional SST Forecasting
2026-10-06 07:42:51Xiong Li, Xiaowei Zhou, Yanwei Yu, Qian Cui, Junyu DongAbstract
Sea surface temperature (SST) forecasting depends on local temporal persistence, regional spatial dependence, and environmental conditions that evolve with the forecast date. We study how these heterogeneous conditions can be presented to a large language model (LLM) for regional multi-step forecasting without serializing the full SST grid as text. We formulate forecasting as conditional numerical generation: historical SST and anomaly sequences, date-aligned environmental records, and static ocean knowledge form a textual context, while regional spatial state is supplied through continuous graph-derived prefixes. A static graph encodes persistent geographic--climatological relations, and a dynamic graph encodes recent SST correlations and localized tropical-cyclone influence. Two graph neural networks produce a target-node representation that is mapped by a spatial-prefix fusion and injected into the LLM input. On SST forecasting in the South China Sea, the complete configuration achieves the best MAE and $\Rtwo$ among the compared methods over ten forecast steps. Alongside the numerical forecast, a rule-based module matches predicted trends and environmental-factor directions with knowledge entries to return source-linked, post-hoc contextual explanations.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07895
PDF
-
A self-learning scientific agent for X-ray diffraction
2026-10-06 07:09:39Bin Cao, Huichi Zhou, Runyu Yang, Jingsong Li, Shuchen Sun, Yan Song, Hanyu Gao, Zhongwei Yu, Tong-Yi Zhang, Jun WangAbstract
A central challenge for scientific agents is to turn analytical experience into reusable expertise grounded in physical evidence. Here we introduce Gan Jiang, a self-learning agent for powder X-ray diffraction built on a diffraction-analysis ecosystem we developed: XMatcher, XQueryer, XDecomposer and WPEM. Together, these engines span phase identification, multiphase decomposition and physics-constrained whole-pattern modelling. Gan Jiang converts analytical experience into executable skills by diagnosing failures, revising skill instructions and code, and validating revisions before reuse, without retraining the language model or changing the underlying physical models. Skills selected using development data and frozen before held-out evaluation achieve higher refinement scores than the original expert-designed skills across FullProf, GSAS-II and PyWPEM. The agent resolves strongly overlapping reflections, quantifies a five-phase ancient Egyptian cosmetic, tracks lattice evolution in an operating battery and compares atomic configurations in a disordered oxide catalyst. On DeltaXRDbench, it leads the evaluated methods in single- and multiphase identification across simulated and experimental data. Without supplied composition, single-phase top-1 accuracies reach 96.30\%, 81.78\% and 40.83\% on MP500, RRUFF and opXRD, respectively, compared with 58.00\%, 58.47\% and 26.45\% for the strongest comparator. These results demonstrate how an integrated scientific tool ecosystem can support agents that extract structural knowledge from measurements while accumulating validated analytical expertise that transfers to new samples.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07862
PDF
-
WorkflowOps: Learning Agent Collaboration Priors for Multi-Agent Workflow Orchestration
2026-10-06 07:01:38Qi Cheng, Shengyu Chen, Wei Cheng, Zhengzhang Chen, Xiaowei Jia, Haoyu Wang, Haifeng ChenAbstract
Multi-agent systems are increasingly deployed for complex knowledge work, yet their orchestration layers remain largely memoryless: each new task is decomposed, assigned, and executed from scratch with no benefit from prior successful executions. We present WorkflowOps, a multi-agent workflow orchestration framework that learns agent collaboration priors from historical workflows and expands its agent pool on demand to cover new capability requirements. Our approach introduces three coupled mechanisms. First, a transition probability matrix captures pairwise agent collaboration frequencies from past workflows and applies them as soft guidance during DAG workflow construction through intra-layer ordering optimization, probability-thresholded edge suggestion, and transitive reduction for parallelism maximization. Second, a sufficiency-driven agent creation loop detects capability gaps via semantic matching scores, generates specialized agents through an LLM, and simultaneously injects them into the collaboration matrix, so that newly created agents are immediately usable with predicted collaboration priors. Third, a layered semantic matching strategy uses pre-trained sentence embeddings for fast, deterministic capability matching as a first pass, invoking LLM verification only for low-confidence cases, thereby reducing LLM routing calls by over 80\% compared to pure-LLM approaches. Experiments on mixed code, math, and question-answering suites show that WorkflowOps improves end-to-end pass rates over recent workflow-construction baselines, with the largest gains on structured, decomposable tasks where past agent handoff patterns transfer.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07860
PDF
-
End-to-End Safe Social Navigation via Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning and Probabilistic Perception
2026-10-06 06:33:28Tommaso Van Der Meer, Andrea Garulli, Antonio Giannitrapani, Renato Quartullo, Alberto Vaglio, Alexandre AlahiAbstract
Autonomous social navigation requires balancing efficiency, physical safety, and social compliance. Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods provide a viable and effective solution but often rely on unrealistic assumptions, such as the knowledge of humans' position and velocity. In this paper, we introduce JESSI (JAX-based E2E Safe Social Interpretable navigation), a lightweight end-to-end RL framework that maps raw LiDAR scans directly to kinematically feasible control commands. JESSI enhances safety via Dirichlet-parameterized continuous action spaces and deterministic bounding, while an integrated attention-based perception module extracts probabilistic human states for interpretable, socially aware decision-making. Through extensive simulations and real-world deployment on a differential-drive robot, we demonstrate that jointly optimizing the RL policy with a supervised perception signal in a multi-task paradigm enhances social behavior. Ultimately, JESSI is able to balance high navigation success rates and superior social behaviors compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05733
PDF
-
ThinkFuse: Trajectory-Aware Test-Time Fusion for Small Reasoning Models
2026-10-06 05:56:21Myunghoon Kang, Jungseob Lee, Jaehyung Seo, Heuiseok LimAbstract
Small reasoning models (SRMs) have shown strong performance on complex reasoning tasks by generating extended chain-of-thought trajectories, but they often fail to recover once their reasoning enters an erroneous path. Existing test-time fusion methods rely on local fusion signals to determine when to trigger fusion, which can be misled by transient uncertainty fluctuations and may reinforce unstable reasoning trajectories. We propose ThinkFuse, a training-free test-time fusion framework that selectively intervenes in unreliable reasoning segments. ThinkFuse compares segment-level uncertainty shifts with trajectory-level uncertainty trends to identify unstable reasoning points and fuse auxiliary reasoning paths into the primary model's trajectory. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ThinkFuse outperforms baselines on mathematical and knowledge-intensive reasoning benchmarks, with consistent gains across model-family combinations, and remains robust with a smaller primary model. Our analysis shows that ThinkFuse requires fewer fusion triggers and generates fewer tokens, highlighting the efficiency of selective triggering. Our code is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07803
PDF
-
ServeLearnBench: How Well Can Agents Self-Improve from Serving Experience?
2026-10-06 05:39:42Haizhong Zheng, Yizhuo Di, Ranajoy Sadhukhan, Shuowei Jin, Beidi ChenAbstract
Large language model agents are increasingly deployed to perform complex tasks in real-world environments. However, the knowledge required for correct behavior in these environments is often implicit, undisclosed, and subject to change over time. Recent continual-learning harnesses seek to address this challenge by enabling agents to improve from serving experience. Yet the effectiveness and limitations of these methods are not yet well characterized. Existing benchmarks provide only partial coverage: some explicitly provide the target knowledge, others assume a static environment, and those that support continual adaptation remain limited in scale and knowledge diversity. To enable systematic evaluation, we formalize an evolving-environment streaming dataset (EESD), in which agents must infer, apply, and revise latent environment knowledge from interaction and outcome feedback as hidden policies evolve, and introduce ServeLearnBench, spanning retail support, banking, and sales-pitch generation with 53 environment windows and 7,718 tasks. We evaluate five learning harnesses (RAG, Mem0, SkillOpt, Continual Harness, and Prime) across six models (GPT-5.6 Terra, Opus 5, Kimi K3, GLM-5.3, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, and GLM-5.3 Flash), covering 28 model-harness pairs and 252 learning runs. Our evaluation reveals three main findings: a substantial gap remains between task capability and learning from experience; continual adaptation is costly and can degrade already-correct behavior; and insufficient exploration emerges as a key bottleneck to effective adaptation. Overall, ServeLearnBench provides a controlled testbed for diagnosing these limitations and tracking progress toward agents that continually and reliably improve through serving experience.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07792
PDF
-
Illusory Pattern Perception Drives Spurious Inference in Large Language Models
2026-10-06 05:37:12Peihua Mai, Zhuoyan Shao, Xinbao Qiao, Meng Zhang, Xinyue Zhou, Yan PangAbstract
Illusory pattern perception is a well-documented human cognitive tendency to infer meaningful relationships in data that is actually random. Such a tendency, often described as "connecting the dots" where none exist, can result in systematic reasoning errors. This paper investigates whether Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit such perceptual tendencies, which can lead to systematic errors in downstream applications. To our knowledge, this work presents the first systematic study of illusory pattern perception in LLMs, adapting classic psychological paradigms to three tasks with direct empirical comparison to human behaviors. We find that LLMs frequently exhibit stronger illusory pattern perception than humans. In particular, models tend to over-associate frequent positive attributes with majority groups or large organizations, and show increased tendencies to construct causal narratives from ambiguous events. To uncover the mechanism behind these behaviors, we develop a feature interpretability framework based on Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) to analyze internal representations. Our results reveal that holistic frequency perception and analytic cognitive orientation are linked to the emergence of illusory perceptions. These findings highlight a previously underexplored cognitive-like illusion that may affect the reliability of LLM reasoning. Code available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07791
PDF
-
From Laboratory to Road: Evaluating Wearable Gaze Accuracy for Driving
Abstract
Bird's-eye-view (BEV) representations have become a widely used interface between perception and planning in autonomous driving, but they encode what is in a scene, not what is behaviorally relevant to a human driver. Gaze offers a compelling behavioral signal for this gap, yet wearable eye trackers are routinely deployed as if their spatial output were ground truth, despite known sensitivity to head motion, illumination, and calibration drift. We present, to our knowledge, the first unified framework for quantifying wearable gaze accuracy under real driving conditions. Our on-road study contains 41 validated scenes in which one driver fixated a vehicle's license plate. Gaze error is measured as the angular difference between the plate center and the gaze direction estimated by the glasses. Separate indoor studies with the same driver and device systematically analyze how distance, illumination, head motion, target motion, and gaze eccentricity affect both systematic bias and gaze precision. The mean on-road error was 4.58 degrees. Applying an offset estimated from the indoor recordings reduced it to 1.10 degrees and improved all 41 scenes. Because this offset varied between sessions, reliable BEV supervision may require online recalibration and condition-dependent estimates of gaze uncertainty.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07783
PDF
-
Persistent Memory in Multi-Agent LLM Inference: What It Costs, What It Buys, and When You Can Tell
2026-10-06 05:17:44Hochan Son, Kyungdoe Han, Jaehan Koh, Xiaowu Dai, Wenlu Xu, Guang ChengAbstract
Decomposing long-context inference across cooperating agents bounds the active KV cache per call rather than total evidence, which matters when KV-cache memory binds. Many such systems add a persistent tier storing and recalling reasoning traces, usually validated by an ablation reporting an accuracy gain. We measure both on one three-tier agent architecture. Decomposition delivers: peak KV working set of 14.3 MiB per query against 35.5 and 35.3 MiB for single-pass and retrieval-augmented baselines. The persistent tier does not: across eight controlled dataset pairs at n=100 per arm it costs +0.368 MiB [+0.167, +0.590] of peak cache and produces no detectable accuracy change (+0.015, 95% CI [-0.011, +0.046]). We argue the null is structural: single-question benchmarks supply each item with its own evidence and score it independently, and correctness requires resetting stored traces between conditions, so recall has nothing informative to retrieve. Reaching it took four measurement corrections -- three inflating the apparent benefit, the fourth making an effect that size look resolvable -- none visible in the results table. We give the conditions an agent-memory ablation must satisfy and detection procedures that need no knowledge of the specific defect.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07782
PDF
-
How Well Do LLMs Reason with Noisy Evidence? An Active Visual Reasoning Benchmark
2026-10-06 04:49:11Bach Nguyen, Zhaonan Li, Mau Son Nguyen, Sanika Chavan, Nilay Kumar, Hong Anh Nguyen, Khoa Vo, Ben ZhouAbstract
Real-world reasoning rarely reduces to static question answering: agents must actively gather information from tools and sensors that are often noisy and unreliable. Yet most existing active reasoning benchmarks assume that environmental feedback is trustworthy, or introduce noise without exposing an explicit, calibrated uncertainty signal, leaving open how LLMs should reason when the evidence itself is uncertain. We introduce VisualNoiseQA, a novel benchmark for active reasoning under noisy visual feedback. A text-only LLM must solve VQA problems by iteratively querying a fixed, off-the-shelf VLM treated as a stochastic visual sensor. For each query, we draw multiple samples and expose an empirical uncertainty signal via self-consistency, enabling the reasoner to probe from different angles and decide what to ask next and when to stop. Our construction is automatic and scalable: starting from diverse VQA sources and two noisy VLMs, we retain only questions where the sensor is inconsistent yet human-solvable. We evaluate multiple LLM reasoners on 1,000 instances spanning perception, chart understanding, and knowledge-intensive reasoning. VisualNoiseQA thus provides a controlled playground to study how different LLMs exploit uncertainty signals for robust reasoning.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07751
PDF
