Knowledge
-
PRAISE: A Reproducible Workflow for Non-Programmer Scientists to Implement Published AI Models
2026-10-12 15:39:12Max Achterweust, Stefan Groot Nibbelink, Vincent J. de Beer, Stefan Schipper, Zeynep Y\"uksektepe, Pedro Andrade da Silva, Aurelia Peppelaar, Martijn J. van der Willigen, Christophe B. Minkenberg, Robert F. van der WilligenAbstract
Artificial Intelligence (AI) models are increasingly developed, published and used across scientific fields. Researchers, students and industry professionals who want to apply these models to their own research questions often lack the programming and data science expertise to do so. Existing guidelines cover single steps, but not the route from a published model to working predictions on one's own data. Here we present the hands-on workflow PRAISE, a Practical, Reproducible AI-model Implementation for Science and Education, that helps non-programmers implement published AI models step by step. Because implementations rarely work the first time, PRAISE anticipates common failures and provides a fallback route for each. As a proof of principle, three BSc chemistry students and their tutor applied PRAISE without prior programming or data science knowledge. They reproduced, validated and extended a state-of-the-art model that predicts enzyme-substrate interactions. This shows that with PRAISE, implementing an AI model from the literature becomes a learnable skill, one that turns non-programmer scientists from users into evaluators and improvers of AI models.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16980
PDF
-
UA-Bench: Benchmarking Large Audio-Language Models on Underwater Acoustic Recognition
2026-10-12 15:18:11Zhe Sun, Liang An, Jiayu Yao, Ronglai Qian, Jianing Cai, Ziwei Huang, Qing Fan, Zhiyuan Yang, Yujun Cai, Hongli Cao, Yiwei Wang, Xiaoyan WangAbstract
Large audio-language models (LALMs) are fast becoming a general interface to sound, yet how far their broad pretraining carries into specialized domains remains largely open. Vessel monitoring, maritime safety, and ocean sensing all depend on recognizing underwater signals, but to our knowledge LALMs have not been systematically evaluated on them. Annotated recordings are costly to collect, and a faithful synthetic alternative has to bring together many interacting factors: the structure of detection pulses, communication waveforms, and ship-radiated noise, and the sound-speed profile, geometry, and multipath propagation through which each reaches the receiver. We address this by proposing \textbf{UA-Bench}, to our knowledge the first large-scale benchmark for evaluating LALMs on underwater acoustic signal recognition. It comprises 375,051 audio records that couple parameterized sources with modeled propagation, so that every record can be traced to the conditions that produced it. The records span these three signal families, and each carries a three-level label hierarchy (13 leaf classes), a templated multi-turn dialogue, and source and channel metadata. We evaluate on a balanced 2,600-record subset with a gated coarse-to-fine protocol that locates each error at source routing, fine-grained classification, or output format, and add a paired silent-audio control to test whether the waveform is actually used. Nine open LALMs, evaluated without task-specific adaptation, reach only 2.0\%--13.1\% leaf accuracy, against a random reference of 7.7\%. The waveform helps source routing far more than leaf recognition (for one model, +29.5 versus +2.3 points over silence), and just four models gain reliably at the leaf level, by at most 4.7 points. UA-Bench thus gives a reference point for these models, and its released training partition supports follow-up adaptation work.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16942
PDF
-
Observe, Share, or Predict? Disentangling Partner Information in Embodied Multi-Agent Collaboration
2026-10-12 14:49:31Adri\'an Szlatincs\'an, Filippo Ziliotto, Bruno Lepri, Luciano Serafini, Massimiliano Luca, Tommaso CampariAbstract
LLMs are used as high-level controllers for embodied agents, but it remains unclear whether they support collaborative reasoning, such as anticipating a collaborator's actions in real-time teamwork without dialogue. We ask if observing the partner's state, exchanging object knowledge, and predicting the partner's next action, shape task outcomes and coordination when agents can share percepts but never intentions, plans, or task-level messages, and whether the two agents occupy symmetric roles. Using the Habitat-based PARTNR benchmark, we introduce a Decoupled Partial Observability regime that enforces strictly individual perception, and we augment decentralized zero-shot ReAct planners with Other Agent's State (OAS) observation, object Knowledge Exchange (KE) between co-located agents, and Other Agent's Next Action (OANA) prediction, evaluated on the full 2 x 2 x 2 grid with four planners on 1,000 validation tasks. OAS observation improves task quality, reducing extraneous effort for every planner, whereas KE primarily improves execution efficiency, cutting simulation steps by up to 25% with little change in success. The two are largely redundant for strong planners but complementary for the weakest, for which KE without the OAS is the worst configuration. OANA prediction lowers the success rate in 15 of 16 model x context pairs while raising explicit partner mentions to 55-100%, and its accuracy gains lie mainly in the coarse action type, partly because agents recognize the action the partner is already performing. The robot retrieves objects sooner and completes its tasks earlier than the simulated human. Shared context reduces total task time by shortening the remaining duration that the human works alone. Also, coordination benefits arise from responding to shared context, especially the OAS, rather than explicit anticipation, yielding shallow, planner-dependent partner modeling.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16895
PDF
-
From Chasing Ghosts to Missed Attacks: Perspectives and Perceptions of SOC Practitioners on LLM Integration, Risks, and Readiness
2026-10-12 12:50:32Jonas Thurner, Nadine Jost, Stefan Albert Horstmann, Fabian Ising, Lea Groeber, Alena Naiakshina, Sebastian SchinzelAbstract
Security Operations Centers (SOCs) process large volumes of security events, requiring analysts to accurately detect and assess ongoing cyberattacks under time pressure. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) suggest potential benefits for security operations, yet their practical suitability for real-world SOC workflows remains poorly understood. To address this gap, we conducted 25 semi-structured interviews with SOC practitioners who had prior experience with LLMs, complemented by interactive scenarios to anticipate challenges and identify opportunities for the responsible integration of LLM-based tools into SOC workflows. We identified 15 LLM use cases grouped into six functional categories. While LLMs are valued for automating repetitive, low-level tasks such as report automation, practitioners rate high-impact tasks such as incident analysis as not yet feasible, reporting limitations in technical depth, context awareness, and organization-specific knowledge. They locate these limitations less in the models than in the readiness of their SOCs and human factors driving over-reliance. Despite concerns, practitioners express a strong willingness to adopt LLMs, describing competitive pressure that leaves few alternatives. This work contributes an empirical, practitioner-driven analysis of LLM use across SOC roles and organizations and derives concrete design and integration requirements for human-centered, operationally safe LLM-assisted security operations.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.00672
PDF
-
PRB-WM: Physics-Regularized Beta World Models for Predictive Link Adaptation on Real Time-Varying Underwater Acoustic Channels
2026-10-12 11:46:34Shengjie Zhong, Zhongliang Zhao, Jingxuan Chen, Dianrun Huang, Zichen Zhao, Yang Liu, Dapeng O. Wu, Tony Q. S. QuekAbstract
Adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) improves the spectral efficiency of underwater acoustic (UWA) links, but its feedback is inevitably stale: sound propagates slowly, and by the time channel state information (CSI) arrives, the fast time-varying multipath channel has moved on. Predictive link adaptation therefore needs more than a point forecast: it needs a distribution over each candidate action's consequences. We propose PRB-WM, a physics-regularized Beta world model for predictive per-subcarrier link adaptation on real time-varying UWA channels. A persistence-anchored stochastic latent-space dynamics model learns how the channel evolves; a counterfactual outcome head evaluates, for every candidate modulation and coding scheme (MCS), a Beta-binomial distribution of bit errors on shared imagined futures; and a chance-constrained receding-horizon model predictive controller maximizes expected spectral efficiency subject to a bounded probability of violating the bit error rate (BER) target. To the best of our knowledge, PRB-WM is the first world model for UWA communications. In closed-loop replay of six measured sea-trial links from the public UWA Channel Library against a 24-method pool spanning the full methodological spectrum, PRB-WM attains a mean goodput 87% above the strongest baseline, ranks first on all six time-varying links at the longest lookahead, and is the only method whose realized frame risk decreases systematically with lookahead, meeting the BER-violation contract where no baseline does. Ablations confirm that rollout sampling dispersion is essential to the chance constraint and that the physics anchor is necessary for trainability.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16628
PDF
-
LATCH: LLM-Assisted Timing Closure Harness for Post-Route FPGA Optimisation
2026-10-12 11:44:40Shu Gu, Matthew Youngman, Yuqin Zhao, Cristian Sestito, Ali Siddique, Ramesh Krishnamurthy, Danial Chitnis, Themis ProdromakisAbstract
Post-route FPGA timing closure remains expert-dependent and computationally expensive. We present LATCH (LLM-Assisted Timing Closure Harness), a two-layer framework that separates large language model (LLM) orchestration from deterministic FPGA implementation and evaluation. Across sixteen designs and seven LLMs, a single-iteration study compares three agent control granularities - expert-written recipes, direct EDA operations and LLM-constructed procedures - to ask how much control an agent needs per attempt. Functional-pass rates are 98.2%, 71.4% and 17.9%, respectively; yet direct operations give slightly larger 3.4% median Fmax gains when passing, versus 3.2% for recipes. This exposes a trade-off between execution reliability and timing improvement. Informed by this trade-off, a multi-iteration study fixes the action tier at expert recipes to ask how repeated attempts are best organised, comparing a fitted deterministic heuristic with sequential LLM reasoning, branching exploration and knowledge base-guided exploration within 12 checkpoints per run. Branching raises mean maximum-frequency improvement from 10.5% (sequential) to 16.0%, and the knowledge base to 20.3%, improving 15 of 16 designs. Characterisation across 2,421 recipe attempts profiled their gain and validation rates, showing hard-block re-placement gives the largest cumulative mean gain at 41.4MHz.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16625
PDF
-
LLM-HB: Language-Aware LLM-Guided Hotword Biasing for Code-Switching ASR
2026-10-12 11:00:40Yuxuan He, Genshun Wan, Pengcheng Li, Gongping Huang, Jianqing Gao, Yanmin QianAbstract
Code-switching (CS) speech, characterized by language alternation within a single utterance, is prevalent in multilingual communities and poses challenges to automatic speech recognition (ASR) due to rapid language transitions. We propose LLM-HB, a language-aware large language model-guided hotword biasing framework for code-switching ASR (CS-ASR). The framework incorporates a mixture-of-experts (MoE) adaptor and an auxiliary language prediction head to better capture and differentiate multilingual representations, while hotwords are injected through LLM-based prompting. Experiments on the ASRU2019 code-switching challenge test set demonstrate that LLM-HB achieves a 20.30% relative reduction in mixed error rate (MER) over the baseline, reaching 5.85% MER under a 15-distractor hotword setting. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to integrate LLM-guided biasing into code-switching ASR. We further release the extracted ASRU2019 hotword list to support future research.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16579
PDF
-
SLEM: Spectrum-Aware Latent Expert Merging
2026-10-12 09:38:24Dohyeon Kim, Bedionita Soro, Bruno Andreis, Sung Ju HwangAbstract
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models scale model capacity efficiently by activating only a small subset of experts for each input, while still requiring all parameters to be stored in memory, resulting in substantial memory overhead. Expert merging techniques have recently emerged as a promising compression paradigm that reduces this overhead by consolidating multiple experts into a smaller set. However, existing approaches have two key limitations: (i) direct convex interpolation in parameter space is not generally guaranteed to yield meaningful interpolation of expert functions; and (ii) estimating expert similarity or merging coefficients often relies on calibration data, introducing dependence on the calibration distribution. To address these limitations, we propose Spectrum-Aware Latent Expert Merging (SLEM), a calibration-free expert merging framework that occurs in a structured latent representation of expert weights using a VAE. SLEM groups experts within and across layers based on latent similarities and derives merging coefficients from expert weight spectra. It then performs geometry-aware latent interpolation and decodes the resulting representations into merged expert weights. Compared with existing expert merging methods, SLEM achieves comparable or better performance on general knowledge benchmarks and higher average performance on generation benchmarks involving mathematical reasoning and code generation.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16484
PDF
-
Discrete Flow Matching for Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learning
2026-10-12 06:23:00Fairoz Nower Khan, Nabuat Zaman Nahim, Peizhong JuAbstract
Many reinforcement learning (RL) tasks have discrete action spaces, but most generative policy methods based on diffusion and flow matching are designed for continuous control. Meanwhile, generative policies usually rely heavily on offline datasets and offline-to online RL is itself challenging, as the policy must improve from new interaction without losing useful behavior learned from static data. To address those challenges, we introduce DRIFT, an online fine-tuning method that updates an offline pretrained continuous time Markov chain (CTMC) policy with an advantage-weighted discrete flow matching loss. To preserve useful pretrained knowledge, we add a path-space penalty that regularizes the full CTMC trajectory distribution, rather than only the final action distribution. For large discrete action spaces, we introduce a candidate-set approximation that updates the actor over a small subset of actions sampled from reference-policy rollouts and uniform exploration. Our theoretical analysis shows that focusing on a small set of high probability actions can reduce computation while keeping the approximation error small, making our method practical for large action spaces. We evaluate on macro-action MinAtar games where offline-pretrained DRIFT outperforms its online-only counterpart across all five games and achieves the highest mean return on three and on oracle free Jericho, DRIFT achieves a mean normalized score of 7.3\% with a lightweight GRU encoder, outperforming the evaluated pretrained language-model baselines. Ablations demonstrate the importance of appropriately weighted path-space regularization and reference-guided candidate construction.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12379
PDF
-
Label-Centric Knowledge Retrieval for Zero-Shot Text Classification
2026-10-12 05:00:56Daoping Wu, Dong Wang, Siyu Liu, Chen Liang, Jian Geng, Ziqi Li, Shuguang Xiong, Ying ZhangAbstract
Flagship large language models (LLMs) offer rich general knowledge and strong reasoning capabilities, but their high inference cost and latency limit their use for large-scale data labeling. We study zero-shot text classification with semantically meaningful labels and task descriptions, without task-specific labeled examples or classifier feedback. We propose \textbf{SLKR} (Semantic Label Knowledge Retrieval), a label-centric retrieval-augmented generation framework that separates offline knowledge construction from lightweight online inference. Offline, a flagship LLM independently generates label definitions, retrieval keywords, and boundary rules for potentially confusable label pairs, forming a reusable label-knowledge store. Because this construction operates over the label space rather than the input corpus, its one-time flagship cost can be amortized across large-scale inference. Online, hybrid semantic and lexical retrieval first identifies the top-$K$ candidate labels and then selects up to $M$ input-relevant boundary rules connecting candidate-label pairs. A lightweight LLM performs the final classification in a single call using the retrieved definitions and rules. Across three public benchmarks and a real-world multilingual book-classification dataset, SLKR achieves the best results on all four datasets with Qwen3.5-4B and on three of four with Ministral-3-3B, while using compact input contexts and no task-specific labeled examples. Boundary ablations further show that retrieving a small set of input-relevant rules preserves performance close to using all boundaries with substantially less context, supporting efficient reuse of flagship-generated label knowledge for lightweight classification.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16182
PDF
-
Omni-Modal LLMs Know More Than They Say
2026-10-12 03:52:46Na Min An, Taekyung Kim, Jaemyung Yu, Hyunjung Shim, Dongyoon HanAbstract
Omni-modal large language models (Omni-LLMs) extend LLMs to process heterogeneous modalities (e.g., vision, audio, and IMU signals) alongside language, enabling a broader range of multimodal tasks. Yet we find that these models often fail to express information from non-textual modalities even when they perceive it correctly. We term this disconnect knows-but-cannot-say. To investigate this phenomenon, we introduce Token-level Modality Alignment (TMA), which measures the alignment between individual modality representations and response representations. Our analysis shows that non-textual representations are less aligned with response tokens and receive less attention than textual representations, suggesting a potential explanation for uneven modality preferences. Motivated by these findings, we propose OmniCatalyst, a simple perceive $\rightarrow$ infer strategy that complements the original modality inputs with self-generated text, making non-textual knowledge more accessible. Across seven Omni-LLMs, OmniCatalyst consistently improves performance (+7.29%) and yields more balanced modality preferences, with further gains from diverse training strategies. Further analysis demonstrates that the knowledge extraction phases increase TMA, suggesting that improved alignment makes non-textual information more accessible during response generation. In summary, our findings uncover how Omni-LLMs can better express modality knowledge through language. Our code is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16135
PDF
-
Query Your Way Out: Benchmarking Multi-Turn Knowledge Reasoning through Generalized Puzzle Solving
2026-10-12 03:50:39Xin Cheng, Junming Yang, Ning XuAbstract
Puzzles offer a natural testbed for Large Language Models (LLMs) reasoning because they pose verifiable goals under partial information and require multi-step decisions to reach a solution. However, existing puzzle benchmarks typically focus on narrow environments with rigid mechanics and tightly constrained solution targets. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Active Probing Benchmark (APB), which generalizes puzzle-solving by casting concept identification as an interactive reasoning task that integrates specialized knowledge assessment into the puzzle setting. Specifically, APB evaluates whether models can acquire information via multi-turn active probing and inference to pinpoint 960 target concepts of specialized difficulty across eight diverse academic domains. Our evaluation reveals a counter-intuitive phenomenon: most open-source reasoning models significantly underperform their standard instruction counterparts. This finding suggests that in interactive settings, these models struggle to leverage procedural reasoning to reliably access and apply specialized domain knowledge. Beyond these empirical insights, APB provides a scalable pipeline for generating benchmarks that probe knowledge reasoning under interaction across diverse settings.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16133
PDF
-
Where Polanyi Meets Galois: Tacit Knowing as an Algebro-Deterministic Operation, Toward Re-rooting AI-Generated Science
2026-10-12 03:12:47Hiroyuki Chuma, Kanji Otsuka, Yoichi Sato, Kodo YamauchiAbstract
We argue that tacit knowing is better modelled as an operating regime of one memory substrate than as a kind of content. The substrate is VaCoAl, an algebro-deterministic XOR-and-shift hyperdimensional memory over GF(2), realized as CASRAM (commercial SRAM-CAM) and PyVaCoAl (DRAM-CAM).In VaCoAl/PyVaCoAl a directed acyclic graph (DAG) reads two ways. Repairing every collision (Rescue mode) makes the trace exactly auditable but ranks no path higher; tolerating collisions (Don't Care mode) yields a path-integrated confidence, CR$_2$, that silently favours direct routes. This audit-valuation complementarity is a formal counterpart of Polanyi's claim that tacit and explicit knowledge are not sharply divided. It separates contingent tacitness, which a new query brings out (AlphaGo's game tree), from regime-bound tacitness, statable only in a regime where it is gone (AlphaGo's hunches). (1) Polanyi's from-to structure reads as non-commutative binding, the Identikit as role-filler composition, recognition as majority-vote coincidence. (2) Explicating the valuation destroys it, as attending to his fingers can make Polanyi's pianist falter, yet a closed-form law states it. Polanyi, Nonaka, Tsoukas and Collins each capture part of this but narrowly; even Nonaka and von Krogh's continuum cannot tell contingent from regime-bound tacitness. (3) Collins's three tacit knowledges become strata, one outside the substrate. (4) Our mentor-student DAG is a tacit-transmission graph. (5) Terence Tao's remark that AI-solved problems spawn few follow-ups is diagnosed as rootless explicit knowledge: checkable results whose route no one can follow and that no one yet understands well enough to extend, teach or judge. To re-root them, LLMs generate, VaCoAl/PyVaCoAl keeps an auditable trace with its confidence, and people value, a role virtue epistemology shows cannot be offloaded. Testable predictions follow.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16102
PDF
-
Large language model-generated patterns for epidemiological modeling: a multi-benchmark evaluation framework
2026-10-11 23:48:02Sophia Mao, Keshav Gandhi, Alexander GutfraindAbstract
Representing individual-level behavioral heterogeneity is challenging in epidemiological modeling, particularly when empirical behavioral data are sparse. We assess the potential of large language model (LLM)-generated behavioral outputs in addressing this challenge, using hepatitis C virus-related behaviors among people who inject drugs as a case study. Correspondence with epidemiological patterns was evaluated using external benchmarks: literature-informed association directions, correlations from an agent-based model (ABM), and survey associations. Across three LLMs, unconditional directional recovery across 28 retained literature-informed associations was 46-68%, compared with 82-93% agreement when LLMs were directly asked to classify the same associations. Mean absolute differences from ABM and survey correlation patterns were 0.11-0.13 and 0.15-0.18, respectively. Together, these findings show partial alignment between LLM-generated behavioral relationships and epidemiological evidence, despite higher knowledge-probe agreement. More systematic evaluation is needed before incorporating LLM-generated behavioral outputs into epidemiological models that simulate transmission dynamics.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15994
PDF
-
Harmonic Representations in Symbolic Music Transformers are Localized and Controllable
2026-10-11 22:24:20Adi Silberschein, Megan Wei, Tamar Rott ShahamAbstract
Transformer models trained on symbolic music have become remarkably capable. However, it is yet unclear how they represent music structure, and whether understanding their internal representations can be used to unlock methods for model control. We examine this through a case study of harmonic analysis: when a music transformer navigates a cadence, what does it internally "know" about its harmonic context, and can that knowledge be used to affect the generation? Using Aria, a LLaMA-based symbolic music transformer evaluated on Bach chorales, we find that harmonic decisions are causally localized progressively from middle layers onward. Linear probes show that mode becomes decodable in the same layer range where patching identifies growing causal effect, while key identity emerges later. We then confirm these representations are actionable for music generation control: steering via latent directions corresponding to harmonic changes reliably produces a deceptive or minor resolution, while preserving structural coherence and generation quality. This demonstrates that, at inference time, the model's internal harmonic knowledge can be directly manipulated to control the harmonic output.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15957
PDF
-
Vision: 'What Don't I Know About User's Preferences?' How Uncertainty Estimation Improves Proactive Assistant Alignment
2026-10-11 22:13:37Zhiyu An, Ziyi Xuan, Yu Yang, Wan DuAbstract
Proactive Smart Assistants (PSAs) increasingly use general knowledge, learned patterns from group-level data, patterns from individual user's data, and recent sensor observations to anticipate which action a user may prefer. Existing systems typically select actions from predicted user preference likelihoods, but these likelihoods alone do not reveal how reliable the prediction is, which evidence supports it, or why ambiguity remains. In this vision paper, we argue that uncertainty estimation can provide this missing information and substantially change appropriate downstream behavior. Using the example of a home assistant, we introduce the questions that uncertainty estimation aims to answer, i.e. how sure is the assistant about the predicted preference likelihood, whether the confidence come from group-level assumptions or individual's data, and whether likelihood ambiguity reflect the user's intrinsic preference variability or insufficient data for the particular situation. We further introduce uncertainty estimation applications in neighboring domains, such as human trajectory prediction, personalized activity recognition, information-collection, and model-based control. Finally, we draw on insights from neighboring domains to envision how future uncertainty-aware proactive assistants may address key challenges in proactive interaction.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15948
PDF
-
LLM Value Functions for Credit Assignment in Agentic RL
2026-10-11 18:46:50Kaijie Zhu, Weixiang Yan, Omar Attia, Abbas Kazerouni, Alexander Toshev, Andrew SzotAbstract
Reinforcement learning (RL) for large language model (LLM) agents remains challenging in long-horizon tasks with sparse outcome rewards, where assigning credit to individual actions is difficult. Methods such as GRPO assign the same trajectory-level advantage to all actions, while critic-based methods require learning an additional value function that can be costly and unstable. We introduce LLM Value Function RL (LVRL), which uses the pretrained knowledge and in-context learning ability of an LLM to estimate policy-aware state values without finetuning a separate critic. LVRL conditions the value model on group context and calibrates its predictions using known values at the initial and terminal states, enabling step-level credit assignment from estimated value differences. We further extend this idea to learning from an expert policy through on-policy distillation (OPD), introducing LLM Value Function OPD (LVOPD), which focuses teacher supervision on actions associated with decreases in estimated value. We evaluate our approach across diverse agentic benchmarks: AppWorld, BabyAI, and SWE-bench Verified. Across policy scales (4B to 32B), LVRL consistently and substantially outperforms both GRPO and PPO. On AppWorld and SWE-bench Verified, LVRL yields absolute improvements of up to 13.6 and 8.6 percentage points over GRPO. Notably, on tasks requiring extended exploration like BabyAI, LVRL bridges the gap from total failure to 75.0% success. Furthermore, LVOPD yields consistent improvements over standard distillation baselines on AppWorld. Finally, Monte-Carlo analysis confirms that our frozen critic accurately identifies semantic pitfalls and recoveries, proving that LVRL extracts robust, policy-aware step-level credit from sparse terminal outcomes.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15840
PDF
-
Why Software Engineering Is Indispensable in the Age of Coding Agents
Abstract
Can AI make Software Engineering (SE) -- the discipline -- obsolete? And can it make software engineers -- the professionals -- redundant? This paper argues that the rise of capable AI coding agents makes SE and software engineers essential, not obsolete: the missing foundation without which AI-assisted development produces misleadingly plausible, unverifiable, and ultimately untrustworthy software. Three structural properties of large language models (probabilistic generation, agnosticism, and semantic statelessness) create a structural vacuum that no amount of training can eliminate. Filling it requires four knowledge levers: methodological knowledge, domain knowledge, design choices, and process choices. All four must be reified as persistent artifacts, and each requires the software engineer as methodologist, mediator, and custodian.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10226
PDF
-
Radioactive Feedback: Tracing Models Trained by Label-Only LLM Supervision
2026-10-11 15:09:58Yuejia Li, JunHeng Li, Hao Wu, Ke He, Mang YeAbstract
Conventional distillation transfers capability through teacher-generated demonstrations. LLM-as-a-Judge knowledge distillation offers a distinct and increasingly practical alternative. In the label-only variant studied here, the student generates every response and improves from scalar scores alone. Prior work shows that this non-demonstrative feedback can improve student capability, but it creates a fundamentally different provenance problem. No teacher-generated answer enters the student's training set, so any evaluator-specific trace must pass through a low-bandwidth reward signal rather than copied text. Existing watermarks and distillation detectors do not cover this score-only channel. We introduce Radioactive Feedback, which encodes a registered pattern of behavioral preferences in the rewards themselves. The evaluator applies bounded pointwise adjustments to quality-qualified responses, allowing repeated optimization to transfer the pattern to a student trained by another party. Experiments on code and mathematics show that the registered preferences transfer through scores alone and across datasets, enabling black-box detection against a fixed reference pool.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15685
PDF
-
Knowledge Interaction in Hypernetwork-based Continual Learning: Conflict and Composition
2026-10-11 14:57:18Jiaqi Zheng, Yi Hu, Yadong Mu, Muhan ZhangAbstract
Continual learning aims to adapt pretrained large language models (LLMs) to evolving data while preserving their pretrained capabilities. A central challenge is catastrophic forgetting: adaptation to new data can impair performance on previously learned knowledge. Since continual learning commonly changes model parameters, the model's predictions may draw on knowledge from the base model, the parameter update, and the input context. Understanding how these sources interact is essential: conflicts reveal whether new knowledge can override outdated knowledge, while multi-hop reasoning tests whether new knowledge can be composed with existing knowledge to support generalization. We study these interactions in a hypernetwork-based adaptation framework, where a shared network generates adapters from context, allowing a frozen base model to adapt without task-specific updates. We find that, under knowledge conflict, models preferentially follow the context, and their choices depend more on where knowledge is presented than on its content. We also show that context and adapter knowledge perturb the base model's representations along directions orthogonal to its clean hidden states, enabling us to derive steering vectors that control which source the model follows. In multi-hop reasoning, we find that models fail to reliably compose knowledge across the three sources, with the key breakdown arising from the interaction of the hypernetwork with both the base model and the context. Code and reproduction materials: this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15677
PDF
