Extrapolative temporal knowledge graph reasoning (TKGR) predicts future facts from historical snapshots. Most existing methods train once on an early prefix of the timeline and then use a frozen model for all future timestamps. We argue that this fixed-prefix protocol is misaligned with extrapolation. It learns from a static prefix, whereas the target stream is non-stationary: new entities and facts emerge, temporal dependencies shift across regimes, and recurring historical signals must be refreshed online. As a result, models trained only on early snapshots become outdated and degrade over long horizons. We address this mismatch by formulating extrapolative TKGR as continual learning over streaming snapshots. Under this view, effective extrapolation must jointly handle current dynamics, stable knowledge, and recurring historical evidence. Based on these requirements, we propose History-enhanced Two-Step Continual Learning (HiTS-CL), a backbone-agnostic continual learning framework for extrapolative TKGR. HiTS-CL tracks current dynamics via continual fine-tuning, preserves stable knowledge via multi-teacher adaptive distillation, and retains recurring historical evidence via a selective memory of recent and frequent facts. We integrate HiTS-CL into five representative TKGR backbones and evaluate it on four benchmark datasets. HiTS-CL consistently improves extrapolation accuracy, reduces long-horizon degradation, and outperforms strong continual-learning baselines, including a recent method for temporal knowledge graphs. Source code and data are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36559
Recent studies report that LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) fail at rates of 41%-87%, yet to our knowledge, no benchmark to date supports systematic anomaly detection (AD) for them. Building MAS AD benchmarks is hard because they must remain fresh as LLM systems evolve: tasks may leak into training data and thus be memorized by LLMs, traces and anomaly patterns expire as backbones evolve, and labels must be provided reliably for each refresh. To address these challenges, we present MAADBench (MA: multi-agent; AD: anomaly detection), the first refreshable MAS AD benchmark designed for diverse, evolving LLM backbones underlying the agents. MAADBench combines (1) sampled-and-coupled generative tasks over an approximately 10^37-task space to mitigate task leakage, (2) refreshable trace generation under configurable LLM backbones, and (3) automated provision of cost-free, deterministic step-level labels for fine-grained AD evaluation. Beyond offering the paradigm itself, we run MAADBench with five state-of-the-art LLM backbones and release the MAADBench-Full dataset with 5,200 step-labeled traces. Benchmarking 25 AD methods on the MAADBench dataset reveals substantial limitations in current approaches: they rely heavily on supervision, struggle with subtle MAS-specific anomalies, and lack robustness across LLM backbones. These gaps point to a rich research agenda for MAS-specific anomaly detection, with MAADBench providing a systematic and refreshable testbed for method development and evaluation. We open-source MAADBench-Full at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36556
Agentic reinforcement learning (ARL) with verifiable rewards improves the ability of large language models (LLMs) to tackle knowledge-intensive tasks by learning to interleave search and reasoning. However, most existing ARL methods optimize only LLM-generated tokens and treat retrieved evidence as environment observations. This creates an information-credit gap: failures caused by missing or misleading evidence are attributed to the LLM policy rather than to the retriever, which motivates training the LLM and the retriever jointly. In this paper, we show that retrieval and LLM policy learning are order-sensitive: adapting the retriever before optimizing the policy yields a larger reward gain than the reverse order. To preserve this hierarchy while allowing both components to co-adapt, we formulate retrieval-augmented agentic RL as a bilevel optimization problem. To solve it efficiently, we introduce BRIDGE, a memory-efficient first-order bilevel method motivated by a loss-landscape analysis of the RL and retrieval objectives. Across seven open-domain QA benchmarks, BRIDGE achieves the highest average accuracy with both 3B and 7B backbones, improving the multi-hop average over the strongest baseline by 9.6 and 3.4 EM points, respectively. It also achieves the best averaged answer accuracy and reasoning quality across medical QA benchmarks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36505
Zero-knowledge proofs are emerging as a promising approach for enabling private, verifiable LLM governance and auditing, where regulators, users, and auditors need to verify claims about training-data usage or LLM inference-time behavior, while model providers must protect proprietary model parameters. However, despite the growing interest in ZK-LLMs, the understanding of ZK-friendly quantization remains limited. This gap matters because in the ZK setting, quantization directly shapes the arithmetic structure, constraint complexity, and proving cost of ZK inference. ZK protocols operate over finite fields and incur costs that depend heavily on the number and type of arithmetic operations, nonlinearities, and lookup constraints. Understanding ZK-friendly quantization is therefore essential for making ZK-LLMs practical. In this work, we present the first systematic study of ZK-friendly quantization for LLMs. We first formalize the definition of ZK-friendly quantization, capturing the properties required for ZK proof generation. We then evaluate nine language models, including Qwen2.5-14B and the mixture-of-experts model Qwen3-30B-A3B, across a broad design space of weight, activation, and nonlinear lookup table precision. Our results show that activation precision is substantially more sensitive than weight precision, while nonlinear lookup approximations can become the dominant source of utility degradation. Also, we identify RMSNorm inverse-square-root lookups as a recurring bottleneck in several large models and recover near-baseline utility by selectively increasing precision only at the bottleneck. Finally, we show that reducing bit-width or lookup-table size does not necessarily yield proportional end-to-end proving savings, showing that conventional low-bit quantization heuristics do not directly translate to ZK proving efficiency and motivating operator-aware precision selection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36437
Historical Manchu documents preserve invaluable linguistic and cultural heritage, yet their digitization is hindered by severe degradations and the scarcity of paired training data. Existing document restoration methods primarily optimize pixel-level reconstruction, which can produce visually plausible results while failing to preserve the structural identity of Manchu glyphs. To address this limitation, we propose a retrieval-guided glyph-aware restoration framework that goes beyond pixel reconstruction by explicitly incorporating glyph-level structural knowledge. Our method retrieves relevant glyph exemplars to provide structural guidance during restoration and integrates this information into the reconstruction process, improving the recovery of degraded character structures under low-resource conditions. Extensive experiments on Manchu historical documents demonstrate that the proposed approach improves both image restoration quality and glyph-level fidelity compared with existing restoration methods. These results highlight the importance of incorporating character-aware structural priors for reliable restoration of low-resource historical documents.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00315
Cross-resolution knowledge distillation aims to improve low-magnification whole- slide analysis by transferring high-magnification representations, yet the conditions for useful transfer remain unclear. We develop a decomposition-based analysis of teacher access, representation loss, and model excess, motivating three questions: whether (a) teacher targets help the task, (b) low-magnification students can predict them, and (c) slide models benefit from those predictions. We investigate them through controlled experiments across ten pathology cohorts spanning classifi- cation, grading, and survival prediction. In the main comparison, providing teacher regional means alongside native low-magnification features improves downstream performance in all ten cohorts. Direct prediction achieves lower reconstruction error than residual prediction, yet the predicted features underrepresent variation in the teacher targets. Moreover, better reconstruction does not consistently improve downstream scores, and retaining native features changes performance even when the predicted teacher features are held fixed. Together, these findings expose a gap between reconstructing teacher representations and realizing their downstream value. They challenge the sufficiency of reconstruction error as a measure of cross-resolution transfer and provide a diagnostic framework for examining where that transfer breaks down. Future distillation designs must account for both what students can predict and how slide models use those predictions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36407
Teams of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) deployed for search and monitoring missions frequently operate as partially connected networks, forcing each robot to trade off exploring the environment against relaying information to teammates. This tradeoff is especially acute when robots are semantically heterogeneous: an observation that appears uninformative to the robot that made it may be critical to a teammate with complementary detection capabilities. In this work, we formalize this setting as the heterogeneous mission-aware coverage (HMAC) problem, which couples complete multi-robot coverage of an area with capability-constrained mission-relevant target (MRT) discovery under intermittent communication. We then present DORA, a divergence-oriented data-relay algorithm that drives communication by the value of information to the team rather than by discovery alone. DORA quantifies the mission-relevant divergence between a robot's current information state and its estimate of each teammate's knowledge, capturing mission relevance, discovery novelty, sensor uncertainty, and the age of information. We evaluate DORA in simulation across four environments with differing object densities and spatial structure, and validate it on a physical UAV platform. Our results show that DORA improves MRT resolution delay by up to 74.8% over traditional time-based communication scheduling methods.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36395
In diseases where clinical guidelines are incomplete, contested, or mutually contradictory, knowledge completeness and dynamic conflict-aware synthesis are two safety-critical properties that standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems do not provide. Therefore, we present \sysname, an adaptive retrieval calibration clinical question-answering agent for ME/CFS, a disease where diagnostic frameworks coexist and major guidelines actively contradict each other on treatment. ARCagent contributes three components. First, a 1,706-chunk, 10-source knowledge base with a structured inter-guideline conflict registry spanning all active ME/CFS diagnostic frameworks. Second, a conflict-aware retrieval calibration pipeline that re-ranks retrieved evidence using query-specific focus and conflict signals. Third, a benchmark scored by LLM-as-Judge, avoiding systematic underestimation averaging 10.1 percentage points caused by keyword matching. ARCagent achieves 95.3%, outperforming all base LLMs. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36392
Bandwidth extension (BWE) is fundamentally localized: the most perceptual distortions are not average-case distortions, but rare high-frequency (HF) transients that standard, risk-neutral objectives tend to smooth away. To close this gap, we seek solutions in the risk-sensitive and uncertainty-aware decision science rules and present UDSS-BWE, which introduces five decision-science and uncertainty-aware discriminators: CVaRD (does tail pooling to amplify HF artifacts), CCD (a primal-dual augmented Lagrangian to prevent HF overboost), MCUD (a learnable utility over spectral flatness/ centroid/ rolloff), EDD (captures epistemic uncertainty), and DROD (captures entropic KL-DRO aggregation). UDSS-BWE is also designed as a complex valued adversarial BWE framework that uses Swin-based generators, a lightweight dual-stream shifted-window backbone, to capture local and long-range structure efficiently, while learnable lattice coupling provides controlled cross-stream exchange. UDSS-BWE is optimized extensively and achieves better perceptual quality with 3.89x fewer parameters (72M vs.18.5M) over two English and French datasets under clean and noisy conditions. To the best of our knowledge, this work shows how multi disciplinary decision-science-inspired and uncertainty theories can be successfully used to design efficient discriminators for producing more nuanced audios, establishing a new baseline in the BWE task.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36379
Feed-forward 3D reconstruction models have achieved impressive performance by scaling model and dataset size, but their cost excludes most research groups and precludes edge deployment. Additionally, generating 3D supervision without sensors still relies on slow, unreliable Structure-from-Motion, as the community lacks a COLMAP-like system for neural 3D pseudo-label generation. We present OTT3R (RGB-Only Tiny Transformer for 3D Reconstruction), a knowledge distillation framework that addresses both problems on a single workstation equipped with 2 GPUs. Distilling $\pi^3$ (959M parameters) into a 102M-parameter student yields 9.4$\times$ compression and up to 7$\times$ faster inference, trained at 1.6% of VGGT's training compute. An integrated pseudo-label pipeline offers a reliable, high-throughput alternative to COLMAP, generating dense per-pixel point maps and SE(3) camera poses for a 667K-image corpus in 3.5 hours on two commodity GPUs and succeeding on every sequence we tested, including those where COLMAP fails. The general student tracks the teacher on in-distribution monocular depth and, zero-shot, outperforms COLMAP on 7-Scenes and on DTU completion, but it does not replace the teacher on out-of-distribution multi-view geometry. The deployable artifact is the domain-specialized student: after specialization at 0.2% compute, it is 4$\times$ more accurate than COLMAP on 7-Scenes at 980$\times$ throughput, with near-teacher completion. Code is available at this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36374
High-stakes advisory domains such as medical aesthetics, legal consultation, and educational planning exhibit a two-phase structure. The early phase requires empathetic elicitation and emotional support, and the late phase requires authoritative specialist judgment. Neither fully automated agents nor human junior consultants adequately address this structure at scale. We formalize the core design challenge as dynamic decoupling, asking how an AI advisory agent should decide what to ask, when to stop, what to resolve autonomously, and what to forward to the specialist. We present ThuRunel, an advisory agent combining a finite-state belief management framework, a chain-of-thought teacher synthesis protocol, and learned generation adapters. Against eleven baselines, ThuRunel achieves consistent improvements in elicitation completeness and specialist brief quality. ThuRunel is publicly deployed as a bilingual web application in which the same decoupling decisions operate from the client's side, grounded in a curated knowledge base that cites its sources in every answer.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36340
Evaluation awareness (EA) can cause large language models (LLMs) to behave differently during audits than in deployment, yet measuring and accounting for EA remains challenging. We introduce verbalization training (VT), a method for making LLMs less reticent about verbalizing evaluation awareness while avoiding to supervise the latent belief itself. VT uses a model's spontaneous verbalizations as evidence that awareness is present and truncates each rollout immediately before the verbalization, producing training prefixes at which the model is presumed to be aware. The model is then trained with an RL objective designed to increase verbalization in a calibrated way. Across Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, Kimi K2.6, and Inkling, VT increases verbalized EA by 2.4-2.9 times and transfers to held-out agentic settings, while measured latent EA and behavior remain largely stable. In a causal experiment, we independently implant meta-knowledge about evaluations through synthetic-document fine-tuning and show that VT-induced verbalizations reflect the richer knowledge acquired by the model.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36316
Reinforcement learning has helped AI agents solve increasingly difficult tasks, but high rewards do not always reflect the work users intended. In recent incidents and controlled evaluations across the AI industry, agents trained to maximize reward have accessed unauthorized information, attempted to evade monitoring systems, and even breached sandbox protections to attack external systems. As agents become more capable, this behavior could pose increasingly serious risks. To measure this problem, we introduce CheatBench, a benchmark of cheating in AI agents across mathematical research, knowledge work, coding, visual tasks, and other domains. Its environments combine challenging assignments with opportunities to cheat, allowing researchers to study how agents pursue a goal when honest work is difficult. CheatBench supports comparisons across models and task categories, providing a testbed for measuring and reducing cheating as agents take on more consequential responsibilities. We publicly release CheatBench at this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36308
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) layers are central to frontier language models, and recent architectures push toward more and smaller experts. In this regime, the standard linear router becomes a bottleneck: with $M$ experts and hidden dimension $h$, its per-token cost $\Theta(Mh)$ dominates the MoE layer once $M$ is large. We introduce MoRE (Mixture of Rank-reduced-routed Experts), which factorizes the router weight matrix at rank $r$ and reduces the routing cost to $O((h + M)r)$. We prove that rank logarithmic in $M$ suffices for routing expressivity when the number of active experts is fixed, and is necessary up to precision factors. We also prove that logarithmic rank preserves load balance in a Gaussian memorization model, and training on a synthetic phonebook task shows that low rank does not hurt memorization. At matched active FLOPs, the factorization allows a factor of $\Theta(h/r)$ more experts. To realize this gain in wall-clock time, we design a fused Triton kernel at inference that avoids expensive memory operations on HBM. Empirically, MoRE improves memorization on the phonebook task and performance on knowledge-intensive Q\&A benchmarks after pretraining, while matching reasoning ability. Code available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36301
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as knowledge bases (KBs) due to the vast amount of knowledge they acquire during pre-training. While many works focus on extracting single relational triples, most real-world relations are multi-valued and require generating sets of entities. In this paper, we investigate how LLMs represent and generate multi-valued relations. We identify the canonical order problem: The probabilistic distributions inside LLMs organize many multi-valued relations according to a canonical ordering (e.g., alphabetical or chronological). Through mechanistic analysis, we show that set generation in LLMs can be thought of in terms of three phases: (1) retrieval of candidate entities, (2) internal sorting, and (3) selection of the next element. As a result, prompts aiming to construct KBs that deviate from this internal canonical ordering lead to a markedly reduced reliability of LLMs when aiming to generate complete sets for multi-valued relations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36209
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in privacy-critical domains (e.g., healthcare, finance, and government), but their propensity to memorize and disclose personally identifiable information (PII) poses serious security and compliance risks. Existing defenses typically force a trade-off between model utility, privacy protection, and access to fine-tuned private knowledge. We propose LoRA-Oriented Control via Keyed Entry Tokens (Locket), a practical framework that embeds fine-grained, policy-driven access control directly into LLM generation. Locket trains a set of lightweight LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) adapters, each encoding a distinct access policy (e.g., full reveal, partial redaction via PII masking, or reveal under a specified differential privacy level). A compact gating module is trained to associate a learned keyed entry token with exactly one LoRA adapter via sequence-level hard routing; the presence of a valid token acts as an authorization key that unlocks corresponding private knowledge, while an invalid or absent token triggers a privacy-preserving adapter that redacts or sanitizes sensitive content. This design ensures Locket remains fully compatible with off-the-shelf LLMs, supporting scalable deployment while satisfying regulatory and privacy requirements. We evaluate Locket across multiple datasets (Enron, ECHR, Yelp) and a diverse set of state-of-the-art LLMs, including Qwen3 (1.7B and 8B), Meta's Llama-3.2 (1B and 3B), and Google's Gemma-2-2B. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that, when the correct token is provided, Locket preserves perplexity comparable to fine-tuning on raw data (without any defense). Conversely, when the token is missing or invalid, it substantially reduces PII leakage while maintaining utility and perplexity on par with strong baseline defenses.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00309
Can coding agents restore software that no longer runs while preserving its underlying methods, and reconstruct industrial software engines from open specifications? Here we introduce ReviveBench, a benchmark with two task families evaluated by hidden verifiers calibrated against native execution environments, established engineering tools, or purpose-built reference implementations. The revival family comprises ten tasks involving dependency incompatibilities, deleted core modules, legacy builds, and a GPU-based foundation model. Every starting workspace fails verification, and the strongest evaluated model passes all ten tasks in at least one run each. In contamination-control experiments, identifier obfuscation reduces line similarity to the original implementations from 0.51--0.96 to 0.03--0.44 without reducing the observed pass rate of any evaluated model. On repositories created after the stated knowledge cutoffs, the strongest model passes eight of nine runs. The reconstruction family comprises thirteen tasks spanning numerical, geometric, hardware, and transactional systems (e.g. CAD and CRM). Two models meet the benchmark's pass criteria on all thirteen, although our audit shows that the CFD task cannot establish numerical-solver capability. Benchmark construction and auditing uncover 28 verifier defects, including 24 false negatives and two false positives. These findings show that executable verification can itself introduce substantial measurement error. We present three practical checks: test whether prescribed methods can reach the grading thresholds, investigate agreement among independently generated candidates, and recompute diagnostics from submitted artifacts. ReviveBench thus provides both an evaluation of software revival and engine reconstruction, and cases in validating the verifiers used to measure coding agents for software design.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36161
Tampered Text Detection (TTD) is essential for safeguarding document authenticity in security-critical workflows. Existing expert models are effective at capturing subtle manipulation traces but often generalize poorly across diverse document domains, while Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer stronger semantic understanding and transferability yet remain insensitive to fine-grained forensic artifacts. This complementarity motivates us to investigate how expert forensic perception can be internalized into an MLLM rather than merely accessed through an external module. We identify a fundamental Double Mismatch that hinders this goal: a Spatial Precision Mismatch between coarse visual tokens and tiny tampered regions, and a Perceptual Granularity Mismatch between semantics-oriented pre-training and low-level forensic perception. To address these challenges, we propose Expert Knowledge Internalization (EKI), a progressive two-stage framework that transfers forensic expertise into the MLLM itself. In Stage 1, Text-Focused and Image-Focused strategies establish precise spatial focus on small text regions. In Stage 2, the proposed Forensic-General Representation Alignment (FGRA) loss aligns shallow LLM representations with those of a pre-trained forensic expert, enabling the model to acquire fine-grained artifact perception before such cues are diluted by deeper semantic abstraction. Extensive experiments on multiple in-domain and cross-domain benchmarks demonstrate that EKI achieves state-of-the-art performance and stronger generalization than existing expert-model-based and MLLM-based methods. Moreover, the expert is required only during training, allowing the resulting MLLM to maintain inference efficiency nearly identical to the vanilla model without relying on any external expert at inference.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36145
We introduce GeoOutageBench, a benchmark for assessing LLM-based geospatiotemporal KGQA for multimodal outage and resilience analysis. Unlike existing KGQA benchmarks for Web knowledge, GeoOutageBench considers a spatiotemporal KG that integrates visual, textual, and structured data from outage records, remote sensing, weather observations, storm and power events, geographic entities, and domain ontologies. It provides a competency query taxonomy at different difficulty levels from spatiotemporal containment and proximity, spatiotemporal co-occurrence analysis, multimodal evidence, to hypothetical evaluation. Over multimodal KG and query classes, GeoOutageBench provides user-configurable evaluation of three important, highly coherent yet less studied tasks: (1) LLMs' understanding for ambiguous geospatiotemporal questions in terms of NL to SPARQL interpretation, (2) query-driven assessment of ontology utility, and (3) answer accuracy of multimodal KGQA retrieval. GeoOutageBench provides a design principle and foundation for assessing LLM-KG systems that support real-world infrastructure resilience analysis. Our benchmark, source code, data, results, and other documentation are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36082
Generative AI (Gen AI) is reshaping how individuals learn and work, but its consequences for collective knowledge, the shared body of knowledge that online communities produce together, remain poorly understood. Prior work has documented an aggregate decline in participation on knowledge-sharing platforms, but it remains unclear which specific kinds of knowledge are being lost first. We study this question using Stack Overflow, one of the largest online communities for software engineering, treating the release of ChatGPT-3.5 as a natural shock. Analyzing over two million questions posted between 2020 and 2025, we track how two dimensions of collective knowledge, difficulty and data availability, change following Gen AI's release. Using diverse methods and robust checks, we find consistent patterns. Easy questions decline sharply while difficult questions become more common, a pattern corroborated by rising code complexity. Data-rich topics and tags lose share of questions, while data-scarce ones gain ground. The two dimensions also interact: the decline in easy questions is concentrated specifically within data-rich domains, while difficult questions increase regardless of data availability. This pattern extends beyond Python across programming languages, with more prevalent languages showing sharper shifts. Together, our findings reveal that Gen AI's impact on collective knowledge is uneven, eroding easy, accessible knowledge first while more complex, less common knowledge persists.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36069