Natural language querying for time series databases aims to let users find what they need in long histories of data by asking in plain language. Shape queries ask how a series moves. They are the main challenge of this task. Recent work makes them feasible by using symbolization as a bridge between the query and the long history. However, existing symbolizations were designed for compression, similarity indexing, or classification. What a symbolization should provide for natural language querying has not been systematically studied. We therefore examine the definitions of six classical symbolizations against this task and identify three limitations. (1) Direction is missing from the string, (2) direction is measured at too small a scale, and (3) the letters are arbitrary. Three design principles follow. We follow these principles and make a minimal redesign of SAX called TT-SAX (two-track SAX). The level letters stay. Each segment gains a trend letter. It is measured across neighboring segments rather than inside one, and graded to match the adjectives that queries use. We conduct extensive experiments on the public NLQTSBench benchmark, comparing TT-SAX with the six classical symbolizations across six LLMs. TT-SAX outperforms all six on shape queries, and ablations trace its gains back to the three limitations one by one. This paper is the first systematic study of time series symbolization with natural language querying as the design goal. It provides a foundation for future research on this task. Our code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30593
LLMs have shown strong in-context learning (ICL) capability, but extending it to Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) remains challenging. Prior multimodal ICL methods often rely on ICL-specific datasets for additional training or task vector extraction, which can improve performance on the same ICL benchmark used for adaptation. However, they do not generalize well to other benchmarks and often induce forgetting in previously well-solved tasks. For this reason, we identify 'visual grounding' as the key bottleneck in multimodal ICL; MLLMs often fail to attend to task-relevant visual evidence in demonstrations, instead over-relying on textual cues and producing hallucinated outputs. To address this, we propose ProCoRe to enhance visual grounding through contrastive reinforcement learning on multimodal contrastive data for improving multimodal ICL. ProCoRe generates captions for contrastive image pairs, decomposes them into propositions, and optimizes contrastive rewards that encourage alignment with corresponding images while discouraging mismatched ones. Despite never seeing ICL-formatted training examples, ProCoRe improves average multimodal ICL classification accuracy by 5.6% and captioning ROUGE-L by 13.8% over the off-the-shelf Qwen-VL-3-8B model, outperforming ICL-data-dependent state of the arts across benchmarks. Finally, we introduce PICL, a personalized multimodal ICL captioning benchmark that tests whether MLLMs genuinely understand visual demonstrations rather than relying on pre-trained semantic priors.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30592
Designing large language model (LLM) multi-agent systems (MAS) still relies on trial and error and informal "folk wisdom." Manual studies test only a few communication structures or topologies (e.g., sequential, parallel, shared-memory, or debate), while automated optimizers discard search trajectories after selecting a task-specific workflow. We present a two-phase pipeline for mining reproducible design principles from workflow code and execution traces. We repurpose AFlow's MCTS optimizer across six composable operators and 26 deterministically verified Enigmata tasks, retaining all intermediate rounds to build a corpus of 28,568 executable workflows. A sandboxed AutoResearch loop then mines orchestration code and prompt templates under an $L_0$-penalized validation objective and tests candidate principles on held-out searches. Across 300 feature-mining trials, we identify effects that persist on held-out searches across three levels of workflow design: workflows beginning with independent solvers and one-shot aggregation (Star-first) perform worse ($\Delta = -0.045$); persistent shared documents (SharedMemory) outperform debate ($\Delta = +0.135$); and prompt specificity and placeholder-based context routing yield gains comparable to communication-structure selection ($\Delta = +0.118$). More broadly, our pipeline and results show the feasibility of turning discarded search trajectories into a statistical testbed for discovering and validating multi-agent workflow design principles.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31709
LLM agents that act on live Web data must combine heterogeneous evidence, remember what they have done and improve from outcomes without weakening their own safeguards. We study this problem in autonomous investing, where every action is irreversible and based on untrusted Web content. We present Steward, a multi-agent LLM system that draws the boundary of self-evolution in its type system. First, nine role-specialised agents decide jointly: four analysts read news feeds, SEC filings, macroeconomic series and market data and emit typed reports, from which a Portfolio Manager sets target positions that a protected Risk Manager audits. Second, a seven-layer shared memory, assembled by code from the system's own record, gives each decision its position context, the market narrative, calibration and the agent's past decisions. Third, the system improves itself by review: code grades every trade and forecast nightly and writes the grades into memory, and each quarter a reflector proposes prompt learnings that a deterministic gate applies reversibly and replay of recorded inputs verifies. All three operate around an invariant core of order arithmetic, risk rules and discipline-agent prompts that no self-edit can reach. In a five-month live deployment (102 trading days, 1,632 LLM calls), the system contained a 24.6% sector drawdown to a 0.3% loss; in replay of its recorded inputs, a single model given the same raw data traded more and lost 1.35 points against the market over five days where the joint design showed no significant loss, and no injected instruction was followed; and a 2015-2026 backtest shows the core alone lowering the maximum drawdown under all 50 random entry policies. The reflector traced the dominant failure to its root cause, and the gate applied a learning that the agent adopted on trigger evenings and on no control evening. Code: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30557
Industry Foundation Classes (IFC), the standard for building information exchange in architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC), is increasingly queried through large language models (LLMs) using natural language. Evaluating these systems at scale is difficult because free-text answers require costly human or LLM-based review. We propose IFC-MCQ, a method that automatically generates multiple-choice benchmarks from IFC files for exact option-set grading. The taxonomy covers 15 categories and 36 subtypes across four groups, with answer keys derived from the file and distractors constructed from file-derived values or predefined rules. We applied IFC-MCQ to IFC models of varying sizes and modelling characteristics to assess generation coverage and evaluated two agentic configurations on selected models using tool- and code-based retrieval. The evaluation exposed category-specific failure modes and showed that performance can vary with the source IFC model and retrieval interface. IFC-MCQ enables scalable benchmarking of LLM-based IFC retrieval in AEC workflows.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30533
The Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) standard is central to building data exchange across the lifecycle, from design and construction to facility management and Digital Twin integration. In operational settings, stakeholders increasingly require access to building information without specialist knowledge of IFC's complex, deeply nested schema, motivating natural language interfaces. Existing Large Language Model (LLM)-based querying approaches typically rely on a single data representation, which is not equally suited to attribute retrieval and spatial reasoning. We present IfcLLM, a framework that combines complementary relational and graph representations, routing each query type to the more suitable backend. An LLM agent integrates both through iterative retry-and-refine reasoning, recovering from failures without user input. Evaluated on 30 query scenarios across three IFC models, the top-performing configuration achieved 96% accuracy. Results with open-weight LLMs further demonstrate the potential for local deployment in data-sensitive AEC settings.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13236
In large language model (LLM) steganography, an encoder hides a private message in an otherwise ordinary response, as text transmitted to a decoder, who attempts to recover it. The success of this private-message transmission is commonly measured through end-to-end (E2E) recovery, which checks whether the decoder correctly reconstructs the private message. However, E2E recovery cannot distinguish encoding failures from decoding failures or reveal how the private message is represented in the encoder's transmitted text. To address these limitations, we introduce a rolewise decomposition framework that separately examines how private messages are represented in encoder transmitted texts, what decoders recover, and what deterministic verification can establish. Across 7,200 encoder responses, we identify 168 verifiable encodings missed by decoders and 706 responses containing private messages reconstructed through word-length or token-initial patterns not explicitly specified in the encoder's instructions. These findings demonstrate that E2E recovery alone may obscure important distinctions between encoding and decoding, motivating their separate evaluation to better understand and mitigate the safety issues caused by LLM steganography.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30516
LLM judges are used to determine which of two answers is better. Trusting these verdicts requires knowing how repeatable they are and how much they depend on the judge's instructions. We show that similar aggregate scores can conceal substantial changes in individual verdicts, both when the same setup is repeated and when the instructions change. Using 500 Arena-Hard v2.0 prompts with two models' answers held fixed, we run GPT-4.1 as the judge under all eight combinations of criteria, output format and task framing, and repeat every setup unchanged at temperature zero on a pinned model version. Rerunning the default setup moves the aggregate score by about one point but changes the win/tie/loss outcome on 21.2% of prompts. Instruction changes introduce further sensitivity: in one setup, which asks for the verdict without reasoning and also drops several other instructions, outcomes change on 28.2 percentage points more prompts than the two setups' unchanged reruns do on average, and the aggregate score falls by 4.09 points. In another, where the criteria prioritise accuracy, outcomes change on 6.7 percentage points more prompts by the same comparison, while the aggregate score barely moves. A stable aggregate score therefore does not establish that individual verdicts are repeatable. This distinction matters when those verdicts are used as preference labels or to assess individual responses. Evaluations that rely on individual verdicts should repeat each setup they use and report both aggregate scores and prompt-level agreement.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30512
Large language models (LLMs) are widely used to answer factual questions, but their answers can contain errors and must be fact-checked claim by claim. Yet the resulting score depends on three design decisions: which questions the claims answer, under what conditions each claim is judged, and which sources count as evidence. No existing benchmark specifies all three. We introduce JSFactCheckBench, a Japanese benchmark that specifies all three, with 1,913 claims from LLM answers to questions about misleading information that circulated on Japanese social media, each annotated for factuality at a reference time and for importance to the question, using evidence from preselected Web sources. Across six LLMs, all verify claims directly answering the question less accurately than supplementary claims, a gap that aggregate scores obscure. Scores also drop when models must locate the relevant content in longer or multiple sources and, for all four open models, when the surrounding question and response are added. These weaknesses are visible only because the benchmark records the conditions behind each label. A benchmark that leaves them implicit cannot reveal them.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30504
Personal intelligence systems are taking on increasingly complex everyday tasks, yet repeated questions, unnecessary confirmations, and unwanted outreach can turn capable assistance into interaction burden. Reducing this burden requires agents to remember how users want to be assisted. However, existing memory benchmarks focus on factual recall and personalized answers and rarely test how agents learn and act on interaction preferences. We introduce MemPABench, an interactive environment for on-policy evaluation of memory in personal agents. MemPABench poses long-horizon tasks requiring agents to decide when to clarify, confirm, or act autonomously. Four grounded simulated users hold 14 preferences across work and personal contexts. Their feedback spans 99 sessions over four months, with five event-driven changes per user testing memory updates. We evaluate preference selection, delivered behavior, and sensitivity to context and preference change. Evaluating four memory systems across four LLM backbones, we find that current memory brings limited gains in preference selection. Retrieval-based systems (i.e. Mem0, MemOS, simple RAG) do not outperform No Memory, while File-based memory improves accuracy but applies preferences beyond relevant contexts. Our analysis shows that current memory struggles to retrieve interaction preferences and adapt to preference changes. Even with the correct preference available, overriding the agent's default interaction habits remains challenging. The environment and dataset are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30485
Modern LLM agents can retrieve information from accessible documents, and then disclose a sensitive conclusion assembled from them. This mosaic effect creates a critical risk for agents operating over confidential data. We quantify its realization with 30 synthetic cybersecurity, medical, and military examples, yielding 10,800 final answers from three LLM agents in controlled simulation and 1,440 answers from live agents in two open-source harnesses. Even under benign queries designed to be answerable from one document, GPT-5.6-Sol, the best performing model tested, discloses forbidden composites in 7.08% of answers (95% CI: 3.75-10.67%) in simulation, with worse disclosure rates in live harnesses. Adding visible classification headers and explicit aggregation rules reduces pooled disclosure rates substantially, yet unsafe disclosures persist in 32.37% of simulated answers (95% CI: 28.33-36.19%) across all intents despite these safeguards. Furthermore, increased refusals do not guarantee confidentiality, since significant refusals reveal the prohibited conclusion regardless. These results point to a troubling conclusion: sensitive data leaks via mosaic-style events are an observed confidentiality failure mode in the evaluated settings at non-negligible rates. They motivate stronger controls on what agents may infer and disclose in sensitive data environments with mixed-clearance users.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30418
Social media platforms provide spaces for individuals to disclose mental health experiences and seek support, yet how these disclosures evolve during major shifts in platform governance remains unclear. We examine mental health self-disclosure surrounding Elon Musk's October 2022 acquisition of Twitter, analyzing approximately 824K tweets across anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder (BD), borderline personality disorder (BPD), and suicidal ideation (SI) or related experiences, alongside 266K comparison tweets. Using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) and an LLM-based intimacy classifier, we characterize changes in psycholinguistic expression and disclosure intimacy. Following the acquisition, we observe declines in affective and social language, alongside increases in first-person singular pronouns and future-focused expressions. Intimacy patterns vary by condition: anxiety, depression, and BPD show increases in low-intimacy and decreases in moderate-intimacy disclosures, whereas suicide-related posts show more high-intimacy disclosures. However, compared with broader Twitter discourse, only the relative decline in moderate- versus low-intimacy disclosure for BPD remains statistically significant. Our findings underscore the importance of considering both language and intimacy when studying platform transitions, informing the design of online environments that support sensitive self-disclosure.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30413
LLM-based chat agents are increasingly used for complex, multi-turn, multilingual medical triage in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), yet evaluation methods focus on single-turn, English-only benchmarks that primarily test the chatbots' knowledge. In practice, users are often confused, overwhelmed, or emotionally vulnerable, giving unclear, misspelled single-word answers or long messages in regional dialects, and the context of a conversation can shift rapidly. We propose SIM-UT (Simulation of User Behaviour for Triage), a multi-turn, simulation-based evaluation method that identifies ecologically valid, contextually relevant failure modes of LLM-based triage chat agents. Using SIM-UT, we evaluated three real-world WhatsApp-based health chatbots: a respiratory screening programme in India, a hearing health support programme in South Africa, and a diabetes and lifestyle coaching agent in Kenya. We compared a medically fine-tuned open model (MedGemma) against general-purpose frontier models (ChatGPT and Claude) across 5,000+ multilingual simulated conversation turns grounded in the personas, constraints, and communication patterns of the real user populations, over 2-4 iterative rounds. A key failure mode emerged in both model families: de-escalation risk. The agents initially identified medical emergencies correctly, but when the user minimised the symptoms without introducing new clinical information, they de-escalated, exhibiting clinically dangerous sycophancy, for example agreeing that vaginal bleeding in pregnancy was "not a problem" or that decreased fetal movements at 32 weeks "can be normal". We recommend user simulation-based behavioural evaluation, grounded in real user context and covering adversarial and edge cases, as standard practice for triage chatbots in production, so that safeguards can be added before deployment or in subsequent iterations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30412
LLM correctors of ASR output are judged by aggregate WER, which hides what they fix and what they break. We decompose every WER change exactly into repaired tokens, damaged tokens and insertions, and use this to ask what the source audio adds to a corrector. We compare correction with and without the audio, for the model's own draft and for the output of an independent recogniser, on three corpora. With Gemini 2.5 Flash, text-only correction of its own draft breaks 13-32% of already-correct transcripts; with the audio, 1-3%. Damage falls in both settings. Repair falls against the own draft and rises against the recogniser. On medical dictation, kept insertions cancel the gain in net WER. The open-weight Voxtral, which rarely edits, does not show this pattern. Prompts differ between the two arms, so the contrasts bound the effect of the audio and do not isolate it.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30385
LLM agents are flexible in language interaction, but using them as long-horizon planners is costly and prone to hallucinated or invalid actions. This paper targets a different role for LLMs: constrained bridges between language and symbolic planning. We propose MemPlan, a memory-conditioned PDDL planning framework for partially observable interactive text environments. MemPlan keeps the PDDL domain fixed and reconstructs the PDDL problem at each step from parsed observations, candidate hypotheses, and interaction memory. Positive graph memory assigns relevance-based action costs to candidate hypotheses for missing objects, locations, or conditions, guiding the planner toward more plausible checks. Negative memory records execution-refuted assumptions and compiles them into exclusion constraints, preventing repeated attempts at candidates already contradicted by feedback. A unified schema-conditioned language--symbol interface, trained offline with supervised fine-tuning, connects text environments to the planning loop through observation-to-fact parsing and symbolic-action-to-command grounding. Experiments on TextWorld, ALFWorld, and Robotouille show that MemPlan improves task completion and step efficiency over language-only and PDDL-aware baselines, while substantially reducing online token cost compared with LLM-planning baselines such as ReAct. The same fine-tuned interface is also reused across TextWorld task types without task-specific fine-tuning. Our code and data are available at: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30379
LLMs are increasingly consulted for moral judgment. We aim to improve performance on such tasks by rewarding good arguments, on the premise that arguing well increases the likelihood of judging well. We train a reinforcement learning policy initialized from a state-of-the-art language model in a self-judged tournament with masked thinking: the generated arguments are judged pairwise on argument quality by the policy itself. As an empirical basis, we extract authentic dilemmas from classic novels, using a logic solver to verify that each constitutes a conflict. We show that our judge rates argument quality like human annotators, and the policy then adopts the language register that it rewards. Testing on the external benchmarks MoralChoice, ELEPHANT, and MORABLES, we find that the policy becomes more decisive and invariant to the order in which options are presented, but sycophancy and reframing remain a challenge to validity. Two ablation studies with synthetic dilemmas and unmasked thinking match the reordering gains, but show a weaker register shift and higher sycophancy. We conclude that consistency is not validity: consistency under reordering can be optimized without improving the moral judgment it is meant to signal.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30349
Training Arabic large language models faces challenges from noisy web data, dialectal variation, and the high cost of continual pretraining (CPT). We introduce AQL-Lite (AQL: Arabic Quality Language), a time- and resource-efficient framework for adapting a multilingual LLM to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). AQL-Lite couples a quality-first curation pipeline (structural cleaning, heuristic and model-based filtering, MSA selection, and deduplication) with a partial-parameter CPT recipe that trains RS-LoRA adapters across the network together with the last eight transformer blocks and the embedding matrix, under layer-wise learning rates. At a matched 1B-token budget, CPT on AQL-curated data raises a four-benchmark Arabic mean by 3.51 points over CPT on raw web text, which yields no gain over the base model. In a controlled 5B-token comparison, AQL-Lite recovers 94% of the gain of full-parameter CPT (mean 73.19 vs. 73.58) in 52% of the wall-clock time and outperforms adapter-only baselines on every benchmark, and a component ablation shows that adapters, unfrozen blocks, and embedding training each contribute. Scaled to 40B MSA tokens and instruction-tuned on one million examples, the resulting 12B model scores 75.3 on the seven-benchmark Open Arabic LLM Leaderboard v2 (OALL v2) suite. These results suggest that partial-parameter CPT on a carefully curated corpus is a practical route to efficient MSA adaptation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30344
Most questions that reach an HPC help desk have already been answered in the center's user guides or in a ticket someone else filed last semester; users still file new tickets because the guides are hard to navigate and the ticket history is not theirs to search. We present an assistant that answers from both sources: an orchestrator calls two tools over the Model Context Protocol, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) over the live documentation and a Llama-3-8B model fine-tuned with QLoRA on 11,244 query-resolution pairs mined from historical tickets, and merges their answers. Every model runs on-premises or on the university's hosted LLM service because ticket data may not leave the institution. On 400 held-out tickets from Purdue's Rosen Center for Advanced Computing, disjoint from training and free of near-duplicates, and evaluated by two judges from model families that generated none of the answers, fine-tuning on resolutions rewritten into self-service guidance is the clear winner in agreement with RCAC's resolutions (BERTScore F1 improves from 0.06 to 0.27 over the base model) and is judged most correct on average. The end-to-end system does not improve on its tools, although they are complementary: choosing the better answer per question would exceed either tool (judged correctness 3.41 versus 3.20, an oracle bound), while the merge follows the documentation tool in 78% of answers. Returning one tool's answer instead recovers the fine-tuned tool's quality (3.19 versus 2.66), but neither a learned selector nor an LLM verifier beats that tool alone.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.31703
Dynamic representations based on 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS) have shown strong capabilities in reconstruction and rendering, yet current methods remain limited in supporting complex natural-language referring in dynamic scenes. Existing 4D Gaussian methods are primarily designed for rendering-oriented dynamic modeling, while current semantic extensions often rely on scene-specific semantic optimization or are evaluated on relatively simple query settings. In this paper, we study Referring 4D Gaussian Splatting (R4DGS), a task for grounding temporally varying, multi-target or reasoning-intensive, and zero-target or distractor expressions in dynamic 4D scenes. To support this task, we introduce R4D-Bench-QA, a benchmark with structured query annotations. We further present ReferGaussian, a unified framework built upon 4DGS that converts low-level dynamic Gaussians into persistent, language-addressable entities for training-free referring inference. ReferGaussian organizes mask-supported Gaussian entities in an EntityBank, uses Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to decompose complex queries into trackable object phrases and structured referring constraints, and performs constraint-aware grounding without scene-specific semantic optimization. Experiments on R4D-Bench-QA and the 4D LangSplat protocol demonstrate improved temporal target selection and competitive spatiotemporal grounding without scene-specific semantic training. Project resources are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30326
Large Language Models (LLMs) have accelerated research on low-resource and multilingual NLP, but their effectiveness in creating an equitable landscape remains unmapped. We analyze 1,158 peer-reviewed open-access papers published between 2020 and 2025, examining research attention to low-resource languages (LRLs) and representation across language and speaker populations. To assess linguistic inclusion beyond publication counts, we introduce the Linguistic Inclusion Framework (LIF), a multidimensional framework that measures linguistic inclusion in four dimensions: research growth, representation expansion, representation continuity, and distributional equity. While annual publications grew from 52 to 415, a 5.4X increase in their ACL Anthology publication share, this growth largely concentrated on represented languages rather than expanding coverage of underrepresented languages. Further analysis shows that languages spoken in Asia account for 64.1% of speakers across LRLs we analyze but receive only 46.7% of the language representation share (0.7X their proportional share), while European languages receive 5.3X their proportional share. At the country level, linguistically diverse regions such as sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia show the lowest language coverage ratios. Applying the framework at the continental level, we find that no region scores well on all four dimensions, showing that research growth alone is not a reliable metric of progress toward equitable and inclusive language technology\footnote{We will release all collected and annotated data for research purposes}.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30296