LLM
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The Bitter Lesson of Tool Calling
2026-08-06 17:58:32Ishan Patel, Sahil Sen, Elias Lumer, Vamse Kumar SubbiahAbstract
Tool use transforms LLMs into agents that act beyond their training data, and for code-capable models, programmatic tool calling extends this further by replacing rigid JSON calls with scripts that chain and parallelize naturally. However, a systematic evaluation of tools as code on an established benchmark across current and prior model generations under real-world task conditions has not been conducted. In this work, we empirically compare programmatic tool calling (PTC) to native JSON tool calling across 14 language models on BFCL v4. In the programmatic tool calling paradigm, tools are exposed as typed Python stubs that the model invokes through code, with execution and results handled in a single agent turn. Programmatic tool calling matches or exceeds native JSON tool calling in 11 of 14 models on BFCL v4, with the GPT-5.6 family achieving a 10.6% improvement over the JSON tool calling baseline. Further, it matches or outperforms baseline in 13 of 14 models under parallel fan-out, and holds stable under context rot conditions where baseline degrades 2.3% on average. Our results demonstrate that programmatic tool calling is a viable and robust alternative to JSON tool calling, with performance tracking model capability across release generations.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06370
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Tracing the Heart: An Evidence-Linked Pipeline for Heart-Failure Feature Engineering
2026-08-06 17:57:37Soorya Ram Shimgekar, Michelle Hu, Dorisa Shehi, Daniel Kang, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Koustuv Saha, Christian Poellabauer, Christopher Lee, Sajeev Singh, Piyum Zonooz, Navin Kumar, Zeeshan Ahmed, Priyadarshini KachrooAbstract
Electronic health record (EHR) feature engineering is a major bottleneck in clinical research and AI, accounting for 39-45% of data scientists' workload. This is especially pronounced in heart failure, which affects an estimated 6.7 million U.S. adults and requires integrating fragmented EHR data with disease-specific, guideline-based clinical reasoning. Existing rule-based and large language model (LLM)-based approaches offer only partial automation with limited maintainability and evidence traceability. We developed the Nimblemind Multi-Agent System (nMAS), an evidence-linked, rubric-grounded pipeline for automated heart-failure feature engineering, and evaluated it on 500 dummy patient records from nine EHR source tables. nMAS generated 132 structured and 70 rubric-scored aggregated features, verified for structural integrity, rubric compliance, and provenance, and audited by a restricted LLM. Adding the aggregated features improved held-out AUROC from 0.895 to 0.963 for HFrEF and 0.870 to 0.910 for HFpEF phenotyping, and an independent LLM-based rubric assessment of evidence support and methodological soundness scored the features at 81.5% of maximum points. These results demonstrate the feasibility of automated, auditable feature engineering for complex cardiovascular EHR data, though evaluation was limited to a single-institution cohort and external validation is needed.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06366
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AV-AIVAT: 74x Cheaper Agent Evaluation with Certified Anytime-Valid Stopping in Imperfect-Information Games
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Deciding which of two agents is stronger means playing games until skill outweighs luck, and every game costs money, model inference, or expert time. Since the number of games needed is unknown, fixed-budget evaluations either keep paying after the result is settled or stop before the agents can be told apart, while naive optional stopping with an ordinary confidence interval invalidates the stated level. We make such an evaluation stop as soon as its evidence suffices, with the guarantee intact. The Action-Informed Value Assessment Tool (AIVAT) reduces variance in imperfect-information games through conditional mean-zero corrections, by a median $54\times$ across 15 LLM agent configurations spanning 71,439 paired Heads-Up No-Limit Hold'em (HUNL) hands, but does not say when to stop. We combine AIVAT with continuously monitored Confidence Sequences (CSs) into anytime-valid AIVAT (AV-AIVAT), whose online value model learns only from past games so that no game scores its own correction. At the nominal 95\% level and a target precision of $\pm1$ Big Blind, raw outcomes need a median $74\times$ as many hands as AIVAT-corrected outcomes to stop under the Asymptotic CS (AsympCS). Exact finite-sample certification uses the Empirical-Bernstein CS (EB-CS), which needs an independently justified bound on corrected payoffs. We establish such a bound structurally for Leduc hold'em and characterize a width floor set by the CS's bet cap and that bound, which governs how much of a variance gain becomes earlier stopping; the descriptive HUNL EB-CS runs show a median $1.37\times$ stopping-time ratio. AV-AIVAT turns variance reduction into efficient, auditable early stopping while separating asymptotic screening from exact certification, so an evaluation can stop the moment its evidence suffices and hand a third party everything needed to recheck the verdict at that very stopping time.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06362
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RP-OPSD: Reasoning-Pivot-Guided On-Policy Self-Distillation for Multilingual Reasoning Transfer
2026-08-06 17:52:06Xinye Wang, Junxiao Liu, Shujian HuangAbstract
Multilingual reasoning transfer is crucial for extending reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) beyond high-resource languages. On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) and its variants have emerged as a promising paradigm, providing dense token-level supervision on student-generated rollouts, yet their objectives do not explicitly prioritize reasoning signals most critical to cross-lingual transfer. We characterize that target-language reasoning comprises the generation of both surface text and reasoning pivots, which are decisions that advance or redirect the reasoning process and shape subsequent inference. This motivates concentrating privileged distillation around such pivots. We therefore propose RP-OPSD, Reasoning-Pivot-guided On-Policy Self-Distillation, using the distributional shift between matched teacher views with and without an English reference solution as an operational proxy to guide privileged distillation and reference anchoring. Experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks covering 17 languages and multiple difficulty levels show that our method outperforms strong multilingual reasoning baselines and OPSD variants. Further analysis reveals that RP-OPSD concentrates privileged distillation on reasoning-control and problem-condistioned state-update tokens, while downweighting it for tokens that mainly support surface realization. Our code is available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06347
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TRAJDEBUG: Tracing Error Lifecycle to Identify Critical Failures in Long-Horizon Agent Trajectories
2026-08-06 17:51:20Yunjia Qi, Zehua Yin, Xintong Shi, Hao Peng, Songyuanyi Lu, Yixian Liu, Richeng Xuan, Yuhong Liu, Zhichao Hu, Xiaozhi Wang, Lei Hou, Bin Xu, Juanzi LiAbstract
LLM-based agentic systems have shown remarkable capabilities in complex domains, while suffering from cascading errors and difficulty in debugging. Critical error detection aims to locate the earliest error step in a failed trajectory that is responsible for the final failure. However, progress faces two main challenges. First, long trajectories make it difficult to identify individual errors, since the evidence for judging a step may be scattered across distant instructions, observations, and prior context. Second, failed trajectories often contain multiple local errors with different downstream effects, only some of which remain responsible for the final failure. In this work, we propose TrajDebug, an error-lifecycle tracing framework that addresses long-trajectory error discovery with multi-granularity history compression and evidence-based error identification, and supports critical attribution by tracing each error's resolution status and terminal impact. We further construct TrajErrBench, a benchmark of 486 manually annotated failed trajectories from Tau2Bench and SWE-Bench Pro, covering realistic tool-use and coding scenarios. Experiments across diverse agent benchmarks show that TrajDebug achieves the best overall performance over existing baselines, and application studies further demonstrate that its diagnoses provide actionable feedback for improving downstream agent success. We will release the codes and data to facilitate further research.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06346
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Tytan: Interactive Neurosymbolic Construction of Analytic Semantic Schemas from Relational Data
2026-08-06 17:40:26Donna Hooshmand, Shubham Shahi, Cameron Barrie, Abhratanu Dutta, Marko Sterbentz, Harper Pack, Kristian J. HammondAbstract
From natural-language query interfaces to automated report generation, data analysis tools need a description of the data: the real-world entities it contains, which columns function as measures or identifiers, and how tables connect into units of analysis. Today, this semantic layer is usually written by hand. This is a knowledge-acquisition bottleneck that limits the scalability of analytic systems, keeps non-technical users dependent on experts, and is itself error-prone. We present TYTAN, a system for automatically constructing an analytic semantic schema from a relational database and, when available, a short user-provided description. TYTAN combines symbolic analysis of the database with LLM-based semantic inference for entity proposal, role assignment, and naming. When the evidence leaves a decision ambiguous, TYTAN asks the user a targeted natural-language question. We evaluate TYTAN on eight databases spanning real-world and benchmark domains along the three axes that define a schema's functional utility: (i) coverage, are all important entities and features captured?; (ii) retrieval correctness, do the schema's instructions actually reach the data; and (iii) characterization accuracy, are semantic types correct? Across the seven reference domains, TYTAN reaches every entity, attribute, and aggregable feature of the expert-corrected reference schemas (100% coverage). Additionally, 100% of its retrieval instructions execute correctly (1,678 of 1,678 self-generated claims), and semantic roles agree with the reference on 92-100% of matched attributes. Checking the underlying data showed the small disagreement is in the reference, not in TYTAN. On a held-out blind test (a live, ten-table database with no declared keys), TYTAN recovers the full entity structure with verified keys and satisfies 100% of the satisfiable expectations of five independent blind annotators.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06331
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Benchmarking the Benchmarks: Evaluating Benchmarks for Conversational Agents
2026-08-06 17:39:21Noam Koren, Roy Bar-Haim, Abigail GoldsteenAbstract
Task-oriented conversational agents are evaluated using curated or automatically generated benchmarks, yet benchmark quality is rarely assessed. Poor benchmarks may contain inconsistent tasks, simplistic scenarios, or limited policy coverage, leading to unreliable evaluations. We introduce a reference-free framework that uses LLM judges to assess benchmark consistency, complexity, and policy coverage, while providing actionable diagnostics of weaknesses. We validate the framework by demonstrating agreement with independent human annotations and by evaluating benchmarks generated by LLMs of varying capabilities, as well as benchmarks subjected to controlled quality-degrading perturbations. Across domains and judge models, the proposed metrics consistently distinguish between benchmark quality levels. We further demonstrate the framework's applicability to manually curated benchmarks. Our framework offers a practical approach for evaluating synthetic and manually curated conversational-agent benchmarks.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06329
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Benchmarking and Enhancing LLMs for Rule-Intensive Review of National Standard Documents
2026-08-06 17:27:23Tao Wang, Qihao Yang, Rongjiao Liang, Lianghong Lin, Haitao Wang, Xinyu Cao, Tianyong HaoAbstract
Large language models (LLMs) increasingly support complex professional tasks, yet their capabilities in rule-intensive document review remain insufficiently evaluated. National standard documents, such as China GB/T standards, offer a representative testbed: they are lengthy, highly structured, and governed by explicit rules for scope, terminology, normative wording, and cross-section consistency. Existing benchmarks focus on domain knowledge and question answering, largely overlooking intrinsic quality review for professional documents. Such reviews rely heavily on human experts, making them costly and difficult to scale. To bridge this gap, we introduce GB/T-Bench, the first benchmark for the structured review of national standard documents. Its GB/T Review Taxonomy is a hierarchical schema covering document structure, scope alignment, normative modality, terminology consistency, and normative references, with 25 diagnosable error types. A controllable counterexample generation mechanism combines deterministic rules and constrained LLM rewriting to process 488 documents into 7,306 traceable review error instances for evaluation. We also develop a diagnosis-oriented evaluation protocol requiring exact matches on error location, review dimension, and error type, plus document-level coverage metrics. We further propose GB/T-Reviewer, a multi-agent framework that converts review knowledge into specialized skills and coordinates global inspection, targeted diagnosis, rule scanning, and result verification. Experiments with 14 mainstream LLMs reveal a substantial human-LLM gap: the strongest model achieves only 0.3280 CMCS versus 0.6640 for experts. GB/T-Reviewer raises the best CMCS to 0.5094, showing the value of structured skill coordination for rule-intensive document review. This work paves the way for trustworthy AI in standardization and other high-stakes document domains.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06312
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RRC: Unlocking Generative Reward Models in LLM Reinforcement Learning via Ranking-Based Reward Construction
2026-08-06 17:24:36Chenglong Wang, Ziming Zhu, Yifu Huo, Bei Li, Qiaozhi He, Yan Ding, Xiaoyang Hao, Yuxin Gao, Tianhua Zhou, Xiaojia Chang, Tongran Liu, Jingbo ZhuAbstract
Recent advances in reward modeling show a paradigm shift from discriminative reward models to generative reward models. However, despite their strong capabilities in response ranking, generative reward models have not realized their potential in reinforcement learning (RL). Our analysis reveals that this limitation arises from a mismatch between the comparative nature of generative reward modeling and the scalar scoring paradigm adopted by existing RL algorithms. To bridge this gap, we propose a Ranking-based Reward Construction (RRC) approach, which enables generative reward models to provide more effective RL learning signals by deriving rewards from relative preference rankings. RRC introduces two complementary strategies: self-competitive ranking, which exploits comparisons among sampled responses, and anchor-guided ranking, which enables scalable ranking-based reward construction with a small set of reference responses. Experiments across open-ended chat and reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that RRC substantially improves RL training with generative reward models, achieving consistent gains over existing reward construction approaches. Our code can be found at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06310
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HarnessOpt-Bench: Evaluating LLMs at Harness Optimization
2026-08-06 17:21:05Varun Ursekar, Apaar Shanker, Yash Maurya, Shehab Yasser, Vijay S. Kalmath, Veronica Chatrath, Yuan XueAbstract
As LLMs are increasingly deployed within agentic systems, their capabilities depend not only on the model weights but also on the harness: the prompts, tools, control flow, memory, and orchestration code surrounding them. This makes automated harness optimization -- the iterative and evaluation-guided improvement of a harness by an AI system -- both an important route to improving AI systems and a demanding capability for AI systems themselves. Yet the community lacks a common protocol for measuring how well frontier LLMs perform at this task. We introduce HarnessOpt-Bench, a benchmark for end-to-end harness optimization under expensive and stochastic evaluation. An optimizer, an LLM paired with a coding harness, receives a target agent's seed harness, graded evaluation feedback, and a fixed target-evaluation budget. It edits the harness and nominates a final candidate, which is scored by its normalized gain over the seed on a held-out test partition that remains inaccessible throughout search. A trusted execution environment enforces the evaluation boundary, meters target-agent resource use, and preserves candidate versions for audit. We evaluate 5 frontier LLMs as optimizers both under a shared coding harness and under their native harnesses across 4 downstream tasks, over 111 scored runs. Experiment results show that optimizer models separate more than the coding harnesses they act through, native harnesses are not consistently superior, and gains vary substantially across tasks and seed regimes. These results establish harness optimization as a measurable and discriminative capability with large space for improvement.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06301
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QuanTiMedAI: Quantum-Enhanced Time-Series Model guided by Agentic AI for Cardiac Arrest Mortality Prediction
2026-08-06 17:18:03Mutasim Fuad Sarker, Adiba Rahman Namira, Wafa Binte Alam, Md Adnan Arefeen, Mahzabeen Emu, Sumaiya Tabassum NimiAbstract
Cardiac arrest remains one of the most lethal conditions encountered in intensive care units. Despite the growing availability of electronic health record data, existing mortality prediction studies in this population largely depend on static summaries derived from early admission. Such approaches ignore the temporal progression of physiological deterioration and recovery that unfolds throughout a patient's ICU stay. To address this limitation, we introduce QuanTiMedAI, a quantum-agentic framework developed for cardiac arrest mortality prediction using agentic AI guided quantum enhancement time series model. The proposed system combines an agentic large language model (LLM) for clinically informed feature discovery with a compact quantum recurrent network for temporality aware mortality prediction. Our findings demonstrate that agentic LLM-guided feature selection consistently outperforms conventional feature selection approaches, and the proposed quantum architecture achieves competitive predictive performance through nonlinear feature enhancement while keeping the number of parameters very low. Through extensive experimentation on a MIMIC-IV cohort of cardiac arrest patients, QuanTiMedAI's quantum-enhanced architecture attains an AUROC of 0.852 using only 605 parameters, an improvement of approximately 2.9\% over a current state-of-the-art baseline for this task. A structured ablation study systematically validates the contribution of each architectural design choice. These results show that quantum-enhanced sequential modeling can exceed classical recurrent networks while using substantially fewer parameters.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06294
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NeSy-RAG: Neuro-Symbolic RAG for Explainable Question Answering
2026-08-06 17:16:28Jonas Gann, Michael GertzAbstract
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves question answering by grounding large language models (LLMs) in external knowledge such as text corpora. However, its reasoning process remains largely opaque: intermediate reasoning steps are difficult to verify and cannot be reliably attributed to specific evidence. Moreover, missing user-specific context is rarely detected systematically, often leading to incomplete or incorrect output. We propose NeSy-RAG, a modular neuro-symbolic RAG framework that synthesizes attributable Prolog modules from retrieved text chunks. For each chunk, the system generates semantically meaningful predicates that encode Boolean claims, which may depend on user facts. Using joint natural language-code embeddings, predicates are retrieved and composed into Prolog queries. To address incomplete user context, we introduce a symbolic knowledge-gap detection mechanism that identifies missing user facts whose truth values affect the query outcome and automatically triggers follow-up interactions. Executing the resulting Prolog queries yields deterministic answers together with transparent execution traces that link each reasoning step to its originating source. On the ShARC benchmark, without domain-specific training, NeSy-RAG achieves 61.1% accuracy, outperforming a same-model RAG baseline that achieves 42.8% accuracy.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06292
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The Illusion of Visual Tool-Use: A Causal Audit of Thinking with Images
2026-08-06 17:01:08Zhiheng Wang, Bo Peng, Lai Wei, Chaochao LuAbstract
The "thinking-with-images" paradigm equips multimodal LLMs with active visual operations such as crop-and-zoom. However, models using these operations often achieve only marginal or negative gains over direct inference at substantially higher token cost. They may also repeatedly crop irrelevant regions and fail on questions that direct inference answers correctly. We ask whether the returned visual evidence causally affects the answer. To answer this question, we formulate visual tool-use as a causal graph that separates observation-mediated paths from action-induced shortcuts. We then audit it through interventions at the three levels: policy (comparing tool-use with direct inference), trajectory (corrupting all observations during rollout), and step (counterfactually replacing one individual observation under a fixed prefix). Our step-level estimand, Visual Evidence Gain, isolates the contribution of each returned observation. Across six representative models and five fine-grained perception benchmarks, we uncover policy miscalibration with two failure modes. In Calling Without Looking, returned observations have no causal effect on the answer. In Looking Without Planning, observations are informative but the call schedule is incoherent. A trajectory-level diagnostic decomposes the policy-level accuracy gain and shows that the gain is concentrated in a Calibrated minority. We term this discrepancy the illusion of visual tool-use: despite aggregate accuracy gains, visual tool-use is not causally effective across a broad range of rollouts. The code is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06270
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d3LLM: Ultra-Fast Diffusion LLM using Pseudo-Trajectory Distillation
2026-08-06 16:26:09Yu-Yang Qian, Junda Su, Lanxiang Hu, Peiyuan Zhang, Zhijie Deng, Peng Zhao, Hao ZhangAbstract
Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer capabilities beyond those of autoregressive (AR) LLMs, such as parallel decoding and random-order generation. However, realizing these benefits in practice is non-trivial, as dLLMs inherently face an accuracy-parallelism trade-off. Despite increasing interest, existing methods typically focus on only one-side of the coin, targeting either efficiency or accuracy. To address this limitation, we propose d3LLM (Pseudo-Distilled Diffusion Large Language Model), striking a balance between accuracy and parallelism: (i) during training, we introduce pseudo-trajectory distillation to teach the model which tokens can be decoded confidently at early steps, thereby improving parallelism; (ii) during inference, we employ entropy-based multi-block decoding with a KV-cache refresh mechanism to achieve high parallelism while maintaining accuracy. To better evaluate dLLMs, we also introduce AUP (Accuracy Under Parallelism), a new metric that jointly measures accuracy and parallelism. Experiments demonstrate that our d3LLM achieves up to 10$\times$ speedup over vanilla LLaDA/Dream, and 5$\times$ speedup over AR models without much accuracy drop. Our code is available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07568
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What Current AI Benchmarks Leave Unmeasured: Modality, Search, Citations, and Implications
2026-08-06 15:58:32Ro Encarnaci\'on, Tina Behzad, Emma Lurie, Dana\'e MetaxaAbstract
Large language model (LLM) benchmark evaluations are routinely used to support claims about model safety, reliability, and deployment readiness. Yet most evaluations rely on a single access modality (model APIs), perform a single run per prompt, and report accuracy as the primary outcome metric, without accounting for conditions such as web search that may have effects on model behavior in deployment. We audit these assumptions for one of the most widely-used LLMs, comparing two modalities, ChatGPT's chat UI and OpenAI's API, with and without web search enabled. We use a stratified total sample of 401 prompts from two popular benchmarks, BBQ and SafetyBench, collecting 4,812 total responses across three repeated runs per prompt. Beyond standard performance measures, we evaluate model output dimensions including response consistency, response text similarity, citation grounding, and abstention behavior. For instance, chat UI responses were less accurate than API responses on both benchmarks with search disabled. Enabling web search reduced accuracy by up to 8 percentage points, and even reversed the direction of modality performance trends for one benchmark. Repeated runs of the same prompt produced inconsistent responses in up to 21\% of prompts. The two modalities also grounded answers in different citations, and abstention behavior was also inconsistent across both modalities. These results illustrate that, even within a model family, reporting only simple accuracy metrics can obscure important forms of model behavioral variation relevant to AI safety assessments. We argue that AI safety evaluations should systematically account for modality, multi-run consistency, search conditions, and response-level behaviors to better reflect how deployed AI systems behave in practice.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06202
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EnvACE: Internalizing Environment Dynamics via World Rehearsal for Agentic Reinforcement Learning
2026-08-06 15:54:36Zishan Xu, Zhiyuan Yao, Yuxin Chen, Yifu Guo, Zhengxi Lu, Yuquan Lu, Jinyang Huang, Yan Xu, Yasheng Wang, Weinan Zhang, Xingshan Zeng, Weiwen LiuAbstract
Training large language model agents for long-horizon tool use typically relies on interactions with real or synthesized executable environments, whose construction and verification are costly, or on external simulators that are difficult to ground. We introduce EnvACE, an agentic reinforcement learning method that replaces external environment interaction during training with world rehearsal. The policy alternates between acting and rehearsal: it first generates a tool call, then plays the role of the environment to produce the response induced by that action, and conditions subsequent decisions on the rehearsed response. Both roles are jointly optimized end-to-end using task-success rewards. Through world rehearsal, the policy internalizes the relationship between actions and their environment responses in its parameters, yielding an agent world model that directly supports decision making. Across BFCL-v4, tau^2-Bench, VitaBench, and FinMCP-Bench, EnvACE achieves strong and transferable performance, outperforming environment-scaling baselines in the overall evaluation. Controlled studies further show that world rehearsal consistently improves policy learning across model scales. At test time, the internalized world model enables private rehearsal before committed execution, yielding further gains under a moderate rehearsal budget without additional external interaction. Our findings establish world rehearsal as a new path toward scaling LLM agent training beyond the constraints of external environments. Our code is publicly available at this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06197
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Comparative Approaches to Agent Retrieval over Large Skill Libraries
2026-08-06 15:54:23Indivara Kolluru, Nathan SportsmanAbstract
Agents backed by large skill libraries must decide which skills to load and in what order. Loading the entire library into context is expensive and provides no structure for autonomous sequencing. We study two systems for this problem over a corpus of 690 skills: a hybrid ranker combining lexical and dense-embedding retrieval for sparse, on-demand loading, and a typed knowledge graph encoding workflow relations such as prerequisites, data flow, and ordering. On a set of 117 realistic, non-echoing queries, the hybrid ranker retrieves the correct skill within the top five in 73.5% +/- 8.0 of cases, leaving roughly a quarter of queries unserved. When used as the design intended (substituting graph neighbours for additional ranked results at matched token budget), the graph is significantly worse (-11.2 points, p = 0.0007). Its LLM-generated edge layer adds nothing over neighbours obtained free from a local embedding pass, and 73% of the queries the ranker misses are not reachable through the graph at all. We attribute this to a pre-filter topology bound. Because the graph's candidate edges are drawn from the same embedding neighbourhood the ranker already searches, 98.6% of typed edges connect skills the ranker had already surfaced together. The graph can enrich relation semantics but cannot extend retrieval reach. We further show that evaluating on author-written queries overstates hit@5 by up to 44 points, which would have hidden these results entirely. Our contribution is a mechanistic account of why added structure does not improve retrieval over a strong ranker, and identify the conditions under which adding structural interdependence into the retrieval is optimal.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06196
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MicroEvo: Knowledge-Guided LLM Sampling for Efficient Microarchitecture Design Space Exploration
2026-08-06 15:43:31Jia Xiong, Runkai Li, Chenxu Niu, Guangyuan Gao, Changwen Xing, Yifan Zhang, Xinlai Wan, Jieran Cui, Chen Bai, Yusheng Hua, Ying Wang, Ming Ling, Xi Wang, Tao XieAbstract
Microarchitecture design space exploration suffers from expansive search spaces and expensive PPA evaluation, leaving only a small simulation budget for design decision-making. Existing methods perform blind search without considering microarchitectural dependencies and fail to learn from the iterative search effectively, leading to wasted evaluations and weak Pareto convergence. In this paper, we propose MicroEvo, a knowledge-guided framework that couples off-the-shelf LLMs with Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for multi-objective microarchitecture optimization. MicroEvo combines LLM-driven evolutionary operators, a Pareto-aware tree policy that balances Pareto contribution and diversity, an active knowledge accumulation mechanism that extracts and reuses optimization insights, and state-aware directives that adapt the search behavior online. Experiments show that MicroEvo improves Pareto-front quality by up to 36.2% over NSGA-II and achieves 10.6x higher search efficiency, and also demonstrates strong scalability to a complex industrial-scale core. The code repository is available at: this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06183
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iARCS: Iterative Agentic RL for Controllable 3D Scene Generation
2026-08-06 15:30:21Saugat Adhikari, Ashok Prasad Neupane, Pramish Paudel, Ajad Chhatkuli, Danda Pani PaudelAbstract
Synthetic 3D scene generation is increasingly used as a data source for computer vision and embodied AI, but existing generators often optimize perceptual realism without reliably satisfying task-critical functional constraints. This mismatch limits the usefulness of synthetic data for downstream training, where accessibility, traversability, and spatial rule compliance are often essential. We present iARCS, an iterative agentic reinforcement learning framework that adapts a pretrained scene generator to natural-language task requirements. iARCS uses a two-stage strategy: universal-reward pretraining to improve physical plausibility and layout quality, followed by task-specific fine-tuning with LLM-generated reward programs that are iteratively refined from training feedback. Experiments show improved constraint fidelity on walkability, reachability, and clearance-focused tasks, effective task-specific constraint optimization, and competitive scene diversity. We further show that data generated by iARCS improves a base generator, supporting its value as a practical synthetic data generation tool rather than only a controllable scene editing method.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06161
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Learning Globally Reusable Skills for Coding Agents
2026-08-06 15:19:56Chen Yang, Jiashuo Tian, Ziqi Wang, Xinyin Liu, Meiru Ye, Junjie ChenAbstract
Automated skill evolution enables Large Language Model (LLM) agents to continuously improve without expensive retraining. However, existing approaches typically treat skill evolution as a sequence of local updates, overlooking relationships among skills and often producing overfitted skill updates that fail to generalize across tasks. We propose GSE, a globalized skill evolution framework that jointly optimizes skill compatibility and skill generalization. To preserve consistency across the skill bank, GSE maintains a Skill Relation Graph (SRG) that explicitly models and co-evolves inter-skill relationships. To improve generalization, GSE performs cluster-based skill consolidation to abstract reusable capabilities from local updates and employs replay-driven verification to prevent overfitting and behavioral regressions. We evaluate GSE on two representative software engineering tasks: bug-revealing test generation and false-positive bug report filtering. Across two state-of-the-art coding agents, OpenHands and mini-SWE-agent, GSE consistently achieves the best precision, recall, and F1-score. Compared with existing evolution techniques, GSE improves precision and recall by 6.1%~34.1% and 31.8%~180.0% for test generation, and by 15.4%~96.4% and 13.1%~19.8% for false-positive filtering. Deployment on an internal industrial agent further yields a 61.4% improvement in F1-score, demonstrating the effectiveness and generalizability of GSE for evolving effective skills.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.06153
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