Human cognition organizes continuous experience into bounded units while maintaining continuity across them. Linguistic elements are also organized into bounded structural units such as words and phrases, with sentence marking the final bound of a grammatical construction process. How do such boundaries emerge? We propose boundaries emerge from interacting demands to maintain unresolved dependencies, integrate completed relations, and update semantic context, with structural completion allowing but not determining closure. First, in a generative simulation without predefined boundary positions or constituent labels, these demands produced sentence-like segment-length distributions and distinct characteristic timescales, with structural completion allowing but not determining closure. Near boundaries, unresolved dependency load declined, integration cost peaked, and accumulated pressure reset. Then, we tested whether same demands predicted human listeners' boundary choices during comprehension. Listeners were more likely to mark boundaries with fewer unresolved dependencies, higher integration cost and semantic mismatch, and elevated preceding memory load, beyond syntactic and prosodic cues. Third, in naturalistic self-paced reading, sentence-final slowing coincided with declining memory load and increasing integration cost and semantic mismatch, broadly consistent with the simulation. Processing same narratives with a large language model revealed increased local intrinsic dimensionality and straighter hidden-state trajectories at sentence endings, followed by larger representational updates. Boundary explained additional variation in reading time and hidden-state geometry beyond processing demands, but considerably less in next-token surprisal. Together, these findings suggest linguistic boundaries emerge as discrete manifestations of transitions in continuous processing dynamics.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08085
Efficient deployment of large language models (LLMs) on mobile devices requires balancing performance with compute and memory constraints. Post-training compression is an effective approach to managing this trade-off, while requiring much less computation than in-training counterparts. We propose DictLLM, a dictionary-based compression scheme in which weight matrices within grouped layers are decomposed into a shared dictionary and layer-specific sparse coefficients, directly obtained from a pre-trained model without further training. Specifically, we cast DictLLM as a four-step post-training optimization. First, we obtain shared dictionaries via singular value decomposition (SVD) of input-scaled weight matrices, amortizing rank across grouped layers; second, we sparsify the layer-specific coefficients to the target compression ratio using a dictionary-aware Hessian; and third, we refine the dictionaries given the resulting sparse coefficients. Finally, we aggressively quantize both components using factor-specific Hessian information: input covariance for the dictionaries and the dictionary-aware Hessian for the coefficients. The resulting representation reduces memory footprint by storing a single shared dictionary per layer group, along with sparse layer-specific coefficients. On language modeling and zero-shot reasoning benchmarks, DictLLM consistently outperforms existing post-training low-rank compression methods and pushes the Pareto frontier between model size and performance. DictLLM compresses the original LLaMA-7B model by 5.1x with only a 2.9-point increase in WikiText-2 perplexity, achieving a 3.6x higher compression ratio than the state-of-the-art low-rank method.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08082
Industrial Anomaly Detection (IAD) is a long-established problem that aims to detect defects in industrial products during manufacturing for quality control. Most existing studies focus on static visual patterns as the basis for detection. However, in real manufacturing environments, many anomalies are dynamics-based, such as irregular movements that cannot be perceived from static cues alone. We observe that even recent Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM)-based approaches fall short in identifying such dynamic anomalies due to limited temporal modeling capability. To address this, we introduce MUSTARD: MUltimodal SpatioTemporal Anomaly Reasoning and Detection, a framework that equips MLLMs with fine-grained spatiotemporal dynamics awareness for detecting and reasoning about dynamics-based defects. MUSTARD introduces optical-flow-guided keyframe selection and augmented modalities to capture critical motion irregularities through local motion patterns and global dynamic evolution. Its normal pattern-based reasoning pipeline requires only a few normal reference samples as the detection basis, avoiding any model updates. This enables efficient adaptation across various products and provides high decision interpretability. MUSTARD is the first MLLM-based framework for dynamics-based IAD. Experiments demonstrate its superior performance in detecting spatiotemporal anomalies and providing plausible explanations. The code will be made publicly available.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08080
Large language models (LLMs) have recently been reported to read and write the raw weights of neural networks directly, a capability termed weight-space programming. We ask whether the reading side of this capability reflects reasoning about weight flows or a combination of local arithmetic at the network's edges and memorized priors over public datasets. We test Claude Opus 5.5 on small convolutional networks of about 125,000 parameters trained on five image datasets, providing every weight as plain text with no tools, no forward passes, and no dataset or class names. The model performs accurate local calculations: batch-normalization statistics lead it to infer about three optimizer steps on networks stopped after three updates, and output-layer sign patterns recover the vehicle/animal split of CIFAR-10. The sessions report reading the first and last layers closely and sampling the middle, and several claims built on partial tracing fail verification, although we did not run a direct forward-pass test. Semantic judgments lean on familiar datasets: the model names CIFAR-10 for CIFAR-10 networks but also for all three fast-food networks, relabels KMNIST as MNIST, reads a 99.57%-accurate SAT-6 network as CIFAR-10 animal photos, and calls "frog" the output favored by a feature that fires most on trees. Permuting CIFAR-10's labels preserves the output split at the new indices, but every class pair the model interprets is then wrong, indicating reliance on remembered label order. These are exploratory results from mostly single runs. We conclude that zero-shot weight reading by this model is better described as local arithmetic plus dataset priors than as weight-flow tracing, and we provide a protocol for auditing future weight-space claims.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08070
Diet is a major determinant of health, yet accurate dietary assessment from free-living meal images remains challenging. Existing retrieval-based Vision-Language Model (VLM) approaches to nutrient estimation typically rely on textual food representations, while, to our knowledge, direct grounding on visually similar annotated meals has not been investigated. We present NutriVisRAG, a retrieval-augmented generation framework that uses a vision encoder to retrieve similar meals with known nutritional annotations and provide them as multimodal in-context exemplars for VLM nutrient estimation at inference time, without task-specific fine-tuning. We evaluate NutriVisRAG across four datasets, four VLMs, three retrieval encoders, and two prompting strategies, including free-living meals from adults with insulin-treated diabetes, where carbohydrate estimates are compared against two dietitians' annotations. Across all 96 configurations (4 datasets x 4 VLMs x 3 retrieval encoders x 2 prompting strategies), NutriVisRAG reduced the primary estimation error in 56, with improvements more frequent under whole-meal (35/48) than per-item prompting (21/48). Across the evaluated configurations, the lowest NutriVisRAG error was below the best Vanilla error in 13 of 16 VLM--dataset pairs. For GPT-5.4-mini, under whole-meal prompting, the best-performing retrieval encoder for each dataset reduced the primary error on all four datasets relative to Vanilla, with reductions of 1.7--35.7%. Overall, our results show that grounding in multimodal exemplars comprising images and respective annotations can improve nutrient estimation at inference time without task-specific fine-tuning, although the benefits remain configuration-dependent.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08054
The exponential growth of textual and audiovisual information has made the task of automatic keyphrase extraction (KE) increasingly significant. This article provides a comprehensive analysis of contemporary theoretical approaches and practical solutions for KE across both text and speech modalities. The primary contribution of this work is its systematic synthesis of these often-disparate research strands into a unified analytical framework, highlighting the evolution of the field from statistical methods towards large language models (LLMs) and end-to-end speech processing. We examine the stages of KE, the characteristics of keyphrases in written and spoken language, and terminological nuances. Various methods for automatic KE are discussed and analyzed in detail: statistical, hybrid, machine learning-based, and structural. The review dedicates substantial attention to emerging paradigms, including keyphrase generation using LLMs, and provides a detailed overview of methodologies and challenges in automatic corpus annotation. Furthermore, we specifically analyze current directions and inherent difficulties in KE for spoken language, comparing transcript based and end-to-end acoustic approaches. This synthesis leads us to conclude that the field is moving towards a more integrated, context-aware paradigm. Future progress will depend on addressing key challenges such as data scarcity for low-resource languages, effective multimodal fusion, and the nuanced evaluation of generative KE systems.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08006
Model compression can facilitate the deployment of large language models in resource-constrained legal settings, but its effects on domain-specific performance may depend on the evaluation protocol. We investigate this issue using ArabLegalEval, a Saudi Arabic legal benchmark, under both with-context and no-context evaluation. The former provides supporting legal passages, while the latter assesses performance without external context. Removing the context produces accuracy gaps of up to 27 percentage points for the base model. We examine three stages: domain adaptation, quantization, and knowledge distillation across FANAR-9B, JAIS-8B, and Qwen2.5-7B. Four-bit quantization reduces model memory by 64-71%, with changes in no-context MCQ accuracy ranging from -3.2 to +1.6 percentage points. Distillation produces more variable results, with accuracy generally declining as student size decreases. A Qwen2.5-7B student distilled from FANAR achieves 76.6% no-context accuracy, compared with 77.2% for its teacher. Our findings suggest that no-context evaluation provides a useful complement to context-supported testing when assessing the effects of adaptation and compression on Arabic legal language models.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07988
Intent-based networking (IBN) promises QoS provisioning in which the network derives the configuration from operator-stated goals. Its first step, translating a natural-language intent into enforceable service-level objectives (SLOs) grounded in a live snapshot of the network state, increasingly relies on large language models (LLMs). These large models add cost and energy to the management loop and typically require multi-GPU, cloud-hosted infrastructure. Can lightweight open LLMs take over this step dependably? We answer this question with a five-dimensional evaluation of ten LLMs with <10B parameters from five families, under four prompting setups, on 716 placement intents. We evaluate translation performance, intent validation, hallucination, energy impact, and robustness to diverse phrasing. The best configurations translate intents with a strict F1 of 0.943 and reject up to 191 of 195 invalid intents. With few-shot reasoning, the strongest models hallucinate unsupported QoS requirements in only about one response in a hundred, whereas the zero-shot setup struggles. A translated intent costs 0.044-0.148 Wh of GPU energy without reasoning, and added energy cost for reasoning pays off for the weaker models. Furthermore, we show that realistic rephrasing lowers the rejection of invalid intents in 15 of 16 configurations for the best-performing models, leaving robust intent validation as a key open challenge for reliable IBN. Our code and data are available: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07982
Can large language models (LLMs) advance theoretical computer science and resolve its long-standing open conjectures? To study progress toward this goal, we introduce TCSExam, a unified framework and benchmark covering the full range of TCS research. It evaluates theorem proving, solver engineering, and constructions alongside direct attempts to resolve open conjectures, capturing both concrete research accomplishments and progress toward long-standing research goals. TCSExam-Full contains 100 expert-reviewed tasks, with submissions checked by the Lean kernel or an executable task checker. TCSExam-Lite selects 20 tasks, five per track, reducing the number of task attempts by 80% at the same per-attempt budget. We evaluate eight agents on Full and nine on Lite. The TCSExam Index combines all four tracks: GPT-6 Astra leads Full (71.9), and Opus 5.5 leads Lite (72.3). Full and Lite rankings are strongly aligned across eight shared agents (Spearman's $\rho=0.93$), supporting Lite as a compact, discriminative benchmark. The evaluations yield improved solver outputs and mathematical constructions, together with independently verified special cases and bounds from open-conjecture attempts. TCSExam provides an extensible framework with task sources, Docker build recipes, and evaluation tools for reproducible use.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07962
As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, evaluating the correctness of their responses is crucial for reliable use. However, such evaluation is challenging because reference answers are rarely available in practice. Existing reference-free methods mainly rely on output signals, which may assign high scores to incorrect responses and thus do not necessarily reflect correctness. This motivates exploring the model's internal computation for complementary correctness signals. Recent studies exploit internal states, but they mainly analyze hidden-state trajectories across layers, which record only the combined updates of attention and feed-forward networks (FFNs) and overlook how these components interact. We therefore propose Circe, a training-free self-evaluation method that assesses a response using both internal and external signals, without reference answers or repeated sampling. For internal signals, we first introduce component interaction consistency (CIC), which measures the directional alignment between attention updates in earlier layers and attention-induced FFN output changes in later layers. We further incorporate representation geometry (RG) to characterize normalized displacement and angular changes along layerwise hidden-state trajectories. For the external signal, we convert the mean negative log-likelihood of generated tokens into a bounded likelihood confidence (LC) score. Finally, we fuse CIC, RG, and LC into a unified correctness score. Experiments on five LLMs and six benchmarks across four domains show that our method distinguishes correct from incorrect responses more effectively than existing baselines, and generalizes to multilingual, multimodal, and open-world settings.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07948
ChemE-as-Code provides an open-source environment in which AI agents built on large language models (LLMs) can carry out chemical engineering work and engineers can check it. Its calculation tools range from catalysis through process simulation to plant layout, HAZOP and life cycle assessment, and skills tell a general-purpose agent how to use them. Engineering files are linked, machine-readable and versioned in Git; calculations run outside the LLM, each value records its origin, and automated checks report inconsistencies and out-of-date results by file and line. In an illustrative ammonia case, agents developed a written task into a preliminary basic-engineering package (simulation files, P&IDs, layout, HAZOP, datasheets, relief) for USD 224 of API cost in the design sessions. Planted faults and engineering changes show that the checks find what their rules cover and miss the rest, so they guide human review rather than replace it. No independent engineer has reviewed the design.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07947
tok is a plain-text notation for Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) 2.0.2 process models and Decision Model and Notation (DMN) 1.5 decisions. One engine checks a tok document against both standards, compiles the document to XML with an automatic diagram, and serves language-model applications through the Model Context Protocol. The paper classifies the notation as an alternative concrete syntax of the BPMN and DMN metamodels and reports one study. A tok model takes 2.2 times fewer tokens than the smallest BPMN XML of 893 files exported by 37 tools and 7.7 times fewer than the files as exported. The checker signals 98.2% of 1,411 injected faults, against 85.8% for the XML Schema with bpmnlint. Four language models new to tok write valid tok from a one-page reference for 85.7 to 100% of 87 process descriptions from two datasets and valid BPMN XML for every description, and the strongest model writes tok with 25% and 19% fewer tokens than BPMN XML. As agents with a lean skill and one checker tool, the models write valid tok for 97.6 to 100% of the descriptions, the strongest model spends 21% and 14% fewer tokens on tok than on BPMN XML, and a skill which sends the model to read the reference through a tool costs 1.7 to 2.8 times the tokens of the lean skill. Of 47 event logs simulated from public models, 44 fit their source models, and tok imports every model discovered from the logs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07945
Background: Cardiovascular care generates large volumes of clinical free-text documentation in local languages. However, clinical natural language processing (NLP) resources remain concentrated in English, and no existing benchmark is cardiology-specific, multilingual, and broad in entity coverage. Methods: We present two contributions. The first is CardioCCC, a corpus of 508 cardiology case reports originally published in Spanish and extended to Czech, Dutch, English, Italian, Romanian, and Swedish through machine translation, annotation projection, and clinician review, with annotations covering diseases, symptoms, procedures, and medications. The second is CardioLM, comprising CardioBERTa, a set of language-specific encoders obtained by continued pretraining on cardiology and biomedical corpora, and CardioNER, a set of named entity recognition (NER) models fine-tuned on CardioCCC. Results: Cardiology-specific pretraining reduced pseudo-perplexity by up to a factor of eight, yet changed strict span-level F1 by at most 0.04, with benefits concentrated in languages whose backbones lacked biomedical coverage. The jointly trained multilingual XLM-RoBERTa-large models achieved the best strict F1 in nearly every language and entity type, exceeding the strongest monolingual system by up to 0.13 F1. A large share of residual errors concerned boundary detection: relaxed matching recovered 0.10-0.23 F1 for disease, procedure, and symptom, but only 0.01-0.07 for medication. Clinicians rated CardioNER well above a rule- and dictionary-based baseline, with the mean rating across entity types rising from 26% to 73%. Conclusions: Specialty-specific pretraining is not the decisive factor for downstream entity recognition, whereas multilingual joint training yields the strongest results in nearly all settings and a simpler deployment path for multi-country clinical information extraction.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07940
Autoregressive driving world models systematically suffer from structural drift, identity drift, and quality decay over long rollout horizons due to transient conditioning signals that lack persistent state. We present WAM-Sim, a driving world model anchored by a persistent hierarchical memory and optimized via online flow-matching RL. WAM-Sim structures persistent context across three temporal and semantic scales: pose-aligned structural tokens encoding persistent road topology, read-only scene tokens supplying geolocated background appearance, and write-once instance tokens preserving individual traffic participant identities across occlusions and chunk boundaries. To restore visual sharpness and physical plausibility degraded by multi-scale conditioning, we introduce an online post-training framework that optimizes self-generated rollouts via flow-matching RL guided by hierarchy-aligned visual rewards and a vision-language model physical judge. The invariant memory empirically confines policy optimization within the anchored context, helping suppress semantic collapse and reward hacking, while online RL systematically enforces physical commonsense and fine-grained visual fidelity. On the nuScenes benchmark, WAM-Sim achieves a superior generation fidelity (FID=3.47, FVD=25.72) and strong downstream perception performance (24.16 mAP, 71.23 road mIoU). On minute-scale rollouts of self-collected data, WAM-Sim substantially mitigates structural and identity drift, preserving high scene similarity and subject identity coherence across extended horizons. Project page: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07939
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is a standard approach to enhance the reliability of large language model (LLM) outputs by retrieving documents relevant to a query and supplying them in the LLM prompt. Today's RAG systems collect, index, and serve these documents from centralized stores. In practice, however, documents are owned by organizations, devices, and individuals who cannot or will not surrender custody of them to a central party, e.g., because of privacy, copyright or regulatory compliance. Existing modern decentralized retrieval techniques either reintroduce a coordinating authority, or rely on a global data structure that requires continuous network-wide coordination (e.g., DHTs). We present ZeroRAG, a decentralized routing layer for document retrieval in RAG that performs semantic query routing across an overlay of peers with- out global data structures or centralized orchestration. Documents remain with the peers that own them, and each peer keeps only lightweight local state: a bounded set of neighbor advertisements and a cache of recently routed queries. Using these, ZeroRAG steers each query through a best-first walk that progressively rewires the overlay toward semantically relevant neighbors, so recall improves over time as the network self-organizes. We evaluate ZeroRAG using three real-world workloads and two decentralized baselines. We find that ZeroRAG outperforms baselines in terms of recall and required network messages, approaches the recall and LLM answer accuracy of a centralized document store, self-heals after catastrophic peer failures, and scales to 100 000 peers.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07928
Quantization and pruning reduce the cost of deploying language models, but their effects are usually reported as benchmark scores. Such scores record only the loss that remains at the output. Inside the model, compression damages some components more than others, and the rest of the network can partly compensate. The observed loss therefore reflects both the damage and this compensation, which benchmark scores cannot separate. How the two combine, and whether their balance changes with model size, remains unclear. We study this compensation for in-context retrieval, a capability carried by a small, identifiable set of attention heads. To separate the two, the expected loss from ablating these heads is decomposed exactly into the part restored by the rest of the network, attributed to the components responsible, and the part that reaches the output. This decomposition is then compared across model sizes. For damage of comparable size, smaller models restore most of the loss, whereas larger models retain most of it, because the compensating responses offset less of it as models grow. Compressing the heads produces the same pattern. Compression that is nearly harmless in small models can therefore be costly in large ones.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07891
Large language models use auxiliary conditioning to incorporate additional information into time-series forecasts. However, auxiliary conditioning does not consistently improve accuracy and can increase forecasting error when its influence is poorly matched to the observed temporal context. We propose Forecast-Aware Residual Refinement (FARR), which learns to correct forecasts using endpoint evidence. FARR obtains a valid forecast under the standard condition and a null forecast under a predefined null condition. Their difference reveals how conditioning changes the prediction. A shared residual refiner combines this endpoint evidence with historical features to estimate the remaining error of the valid forecast. Horizon-wise gating then controls the contribution of the predicted residual to the final output. Experiments on four long-horizon forecasting benchmarks show that FARR achieves the best dataset-average MSE and MAE among the compared methods. Code will be released at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07870
Autoregressive approaches with large language models, such as long chain-of-thought reasoning, have become the default for new AI applications because they reach higher accuracy on a wide range of tasks. In production, however, they give inconsistent answers, require parsing of outputs, and add cost and latency. Decision models address this: given a question and a set of options supplied by the user, they return a probability distribution over the options without autoregressive decoding. We present Drex, a family of four open decision models with 8B (DLM), 9B (v1.5), 35B with 3B active (v2.0), and 27B (Max) parameters. Each request consists of a state (a document, record, or agent context, optionally with images) and questions about it, each asking for a choice among options, a yes/no judgment, or a score on an ordered scale. Training combines supervised fine-tuning with reinforcement learning from adjusted feedback (RLAF), plus vision tuning for Max. Ablations show that RLAF improves accuracy and that consistency losses improve robustness to option order. On Decision Index 0.4.1, Max sets a new state of the art among the decision models we compare (67.52 on the public suite vs. 60.70 for Jev 1.14.0). On Decision Bench v4, it is statistically tied with d3-turbo and GPT-6 Sol and trails Claude Opus 5.5 by 1.6 points, and it has the highest accuracy among decision models on DecideBench. Max answers a typical request in 183 ms, against about 2.0 s for GPT-6 Sol and 3.5 s for Claude Opus 5.5, and its outputs are stable under option reordering. All four models are open source: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07854
Frontier large language models (LLMs) have been reported to read, edit and write the weights of small neural networks, raising the prospect of auditing clinical prediction models from their files alone. Public demonstrations, however, mixed reading raw weights with running code. We separated these conditions in internally pre-specified simulation experiments. Tanh networks of 105 to 38,401 weights were trained on simulated cohorts of patients with subarachnoid haemorrhage, each with a planted relationship or none, and one network was trained on labels that under-recorded deaths in a subgroup. GPT-6 Astra and four other GPT models answered single prompts under a default or an explicit system instruction, either with the weights in the prompt and no tools, or with a calculation-only tool that exposed the weights (white box) or only the network's predictions (black box). Without tools, Astra recovered planted relationships in 353-weight networks but became unreliable at 3,457 weights, and under the default instruction it declined 11 of 12 audit and repair tasks as unidentifiable; the explicit instruction removed these refusals. With the tool, it recovered the planted relationship in all 29 runs on networks of up to 38,401 weights, raised no false alarm in 15 runs on null networks, and found the biased subgroup in 6 of 6 runs. Black-box access performed as well as white-box access, and other GPT-6 models read as accurately. A well-designed script matched the comparator models on the audit and the best LLM repair. For auditing these networks, what mattered was computation and elicitation, not access to the weights.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07847
In 2003, Clark et al. proposed the "Knowledge Plane", a layer of intelligent agents that share rich information about network state in order to collaboratively manage the Internet across administrative boundaries. The technology of the day lacked the two capabilities it demanded most: reasoning and unstructured communication. Thus, automated network management has remained largely confined to single domains, while interdomain problems are still resolved by human operators on the phone. We argue that agentic large language models can finally unlock the potential of the Knowledge Plane, but that doing so will require solving new research problems that arise particularly in this decentralized, multi-agent, coopetitive setting that have received limited attention in the literature thus far.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07827