Geospatial reasoning links VLMs to real-world action and decision making. Reliable reasoning requires accurate spatial information and effective spatial representations. However, current VLMs obtain this information mainly from language and vision. At larger geographic scales, limited visual observations make it difficult to establish accurate spatial references and recover precise spatial relations. This leads to a bottleneck for VLM spatial perception and reasoning. This paper proposes that geospatial vector geometry can become a native spatial modality within a VLM and introduces GeoVec-VLM. First, we develop a structured geometry representation that preserves the spatial structure and arrangement of vector objects, building an explicit spatial basis. Second, we introduce a geometry interaction strategy that brings this basis into multimodal computation, where it interacts with visual content and language references according to the queried spatial relations. Together, these designs allow perception and reasoning to operate on shared geometric references. Across five spatial reasoning tasks, GeoVec-VLM improves mean accuracy by about 11\% relative to the strongest baseline, maintains its gains under geographic transfer, and shows greater geometric consistency. Our results show that geospatial vector geometry offers a promising internal spatial basis for VLM spatial reasoning. this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16769
Relational learning typically predicts from a database state, but decision making asks a different question: how will that state change under an action? In operational systems, the answer depends on system-specific dynamics that may not be visible in the database itself. We view each such system as a relational "world" and ask whether a model can infer how it behaves from observed executions. We introduce TabWM (Tabular World Model) and WorldRel, a generator of executable relational worlds for pretraining. Given executions from an unseen world, TabWM uses them as context to predict the sparse structured edits caused by a new action without parameter updates. Across 512 held-out worlds, complete-edit F1 rises from 0.016 with no observed executions to 0.685 with 64, where a correct edit must match its operation, relational location, and value. Because these predictions are explicit relational edits, they can be applied recursively to imagine candidate futures and compare actions before they are taken. Broader search over these predicted futures improves the realized return of selected action sequences. Together, these results suggest that relational dynamics can be learned in context, broadening relational learning from modeling system state to modeling how that state changes under action.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16763
Pseudonymous accounts and complex smart-contract ecosystems substantially hinder the tracing of illicit cryptocurrency fund flows. Existing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved promising performance in blockchain fraud detection, yet their static node- or edge-level predictions do not naturally generalize to multi-hop fund tracing. Meanwhile, existing tracing methods mainly rely on predefined heuristics to capture multi-hop relationships, limiting their adaptive reasoning capabilities. To bridge this gap, we introduce CryptoFlowBench, a benchmark constructed from authoritative reports on cryptocurrency-related illicit incidents, with four tasks spanning local to multi-hop fund tracing. These tasks pose substantial challenges to existing learning- and heuristic-based methods, particularly in complex multi-hop scenarios. We therefore propose ChainSleuth, a graph-tool-augmented agent that iteratively reasons, invokes graph tools, and updates its tracing trajectory, enabling adaptive information acquisition and recovery from erroneous paths. Experiments show that no baseline consistently dominates all four tasks, revealing substantial gaps between local fraud detection and multi-hop fund tracing. ChainSleuth achieves notable improvements on multi-hop tasks, demonstrating the potential of agentic graph reasoning for cryptocurrency fund investigation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16449
Deploying robots in human-shared environments requires deciding not only how to navigate, but also when dedicated social signals are worth emitting. Classic observation-based inference can be misleading in such settings: confounding factors may bias the estimated relationship between a signal and the task outcome, leading to incorrect decisions. Causal inference provides a framework for disentangling these relationships by modelling the mechanisms linking observations, actions, and outcomes, and by estimating interventional effects after accounting for confounding paths. We study a human-robot interaction scenario in a corridor and use a causal model to estimate whether a social navigation signal causally improves transit success. We represent the interaction as a causal DAG involving robot action, pedestrian occupancy, available space, task outcome, and a controlled confounder (static obstacles). We compare the interventional estimate with the observational estimate obtained by conditioning only on the robot action, which does not explicitly model interventions. Our results show that accounting for confounding variables can reverse the conclusions drawn from naive observational analysis: the observational estimate wrongly suggests that the social signal is detrimental, whereas the causal estimate shows that it is beneficial. This discrepancy highlights how failing to account for confounding can lead to incorrect conclusions and demonstrates the importance of causal models for context-aware signalling decisions in social robot navigation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16411
We study environment scaling as a way to increase agent-benchmark difficulty while holding core task objectives fixed. Our framework, Recursive Environment Scaling (RES), transforms existing benchmark environments while preserving their objectives and completion requirements. A proposer changes information access, resource relations, and execution dependencies; execution-grounded checks validate the resulting candidate, and accepted changes are inherited across rounds. This produces related environments for paired evaluation and training-trajectory collection. Experiments on 294 initial tasks from three benchmarks show lower task success for all six evaluation models, with decreases of 57.14--77.14 percentage points on Claw-Eval-Live. With equal trajectory counts and identical optimization settings, fine-tuning on RES trajectories outperforms original-trajectory SFT in all nine model--benchmark comparisons by 7.00--14.61 percentage points. Ablations identify recursive inheritance and dependency composition as important contributors to increased difficulty. Together, these results support environment scaling for both agent evaluation and training.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16397
Real-world studies (RWS) analyze routinely collected healthcare data, such as electronic health records and insurance claims, to estimate treatment effects, monitor safety, and identify risk factors outside randomized trials. Automating RWS with large language model agents is appealing but brittle: valid analyses depend on dataset-specific clinical semantics, including index dates, follow-up windows, patient/event-level units, and outcome boundaries that are often implicit in observational data. This leads to schema mismatches, temporal errors, inconsistent analytical granularity, and unsupported clinical claims. We present ProCARE, a profile-grounded framework that reformulates RWS automation as constrained compilation. ProCARE converts heterogeneous data profiles into Evidence Contracts specifying available variables, temporal attributes, distributions, and evidentiary limits, and compiles study objectives into RWS-IR, a strongly typed intermediate representation for variables, time relations, analysis units, and statistical tasks. Deterministic validation and localized repair then check and revise generated workflows across schema mapping, cohort construction, variable derivation, analysis, and interpretation. On 36 EHR-based benchmark tasks, ProCARE outperforms strong LLM-agent baselines in code executability, semantic consistency, and conclusion traceability, with automated violation diagnoses showing moderate-to-substantial agreement with blinded expert review.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16175
Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) achieve strong results on video question answering, yet often fail to recover the temporal structure that makes a video coherent. They may merge neighboring events, miss single-event progression, or infer implausible relations across events. We study structured temporal understanding as the ability to recover event structure from visual evidence, including event boundaries, single-event progression, and multi-event relations. We argue that this gap arises from a mismatch between current post-training objectives and temporal reasoning, where caption-style supervision allows models to rely on language shortcuts rather than visual temporal grounding. To address this, we propose EventLens, a vision-centric reinforcement learning framework that learns video understanding through event-structure recovery. Instead of reconstructing captions, EventLens trains models to recover temporal structure under controlled perturbations, such as altered temporal granularity, reversed progression, and shuffled event order. We instantiate this framework with a three-level temporal ontology and derive three verifiable task families: event segmentation, progression discrimination, and multi-event relation reasoning. These tasks admit deterministic rewards, enabling task-specialized GRPO training without human preference labels or learned reward models. We further introduce multi-teacher on-policy distillation (MT-OPD) to consolidate specialized policies into a unified model. Experiments on Qwen3-VL backbones show consistent improvements on temporal grounding and event-sensitive reasoning benchmarks, while preserving general video-QA performance. Learning curves further demonstrate that EventLens achieves comparable downstream transfer with significantly reduced training cost compared to direct mixed RL optimization.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16172
We present Unravel, a training-free framework that turns a single image into an interactive 3D scene, where every object is an independent and movable asset. Existing generators either produce one entangled geometry in which no object can be moved, or predict all objects in one feed-forward pass, where a wrong guess cannot be detected or repaired. Unravel instead takes a different approach: it first takes the scene apart, and then puts it back together. Starting from the input image, an agentic harness that iteratively peels the image layer by layer, and adopts point cloud as major modality for spatial relationship recovery. Specifically, a vision-language model plans which objects are fully visible, an image editor removes them and restores the occluded regions. Every edit is verified before being incorporated into the reconstruction. This process gradually turns occluded parts of the scene into direct observation, allowing objects to be reconstructed when they are best exposed rather than hallucinated from the original image alone. The scene is then rebuilt in reverse removal order, so that the supporting objects are naturally placed before the objects they support. Since a single-view image only reveals part of an object, we treat the observed points as a lower bound on its size: an asset may grow to cover its points, but can not shrink away from them. Finally, we physically settle the reconstructed scene to remove floating objects and interpenetrations, followed by an agentic audit that corrects remaining placement errors. Extensive experiments on diverse indoor scenes show that Unravel recovers more objects, places them more faithfully, and produces scenes that are more physically-plausible than existing methods.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16146
The rapid deployment of agentic AI has introduced complex challenges for the ethics and governance of AI systems. Agents built on large language models act through tools on behalf of people, and each deployment case brings its own instructions, policies, evidence, and stakeholders, so alignment must be formed case by case. To this end, this work proposes agentic reflective equilibrium (ARE), a computational reflective equilibrium framework that serves as an ethical alignment scaffold in the agent harness. Drawing inspiration from the reflective equilibrium of John Rawls, the scaffold links principles from the system prompt and operator policy, considered judgments, tool evidence, and candidate actions through typed support and attack relations, with provenance encoding the instruction hierarchy. The agent acts on an equilibrium of this state and calls tools or asks questions only while doing so is worth its cost, unless a due-diligence mandate requires them. Governance enters through value priorities, source authority, prohibitions, human-in-the-loop triggers, and mandates, and certificates attribute each action to the sources whose commitments drove it. We show that equilibria are Nash equilibria of a mutual-adjustment game and establish monotonicity, lexical priority, stability certificates, and a quarantine theorem for prompt injection. Two case studies illustrate the framework: a computer-use assistant told to win a refund "whatever it takes" files an honest warranty claim, refuses a fake review, and ignores an injected request for personal data; a hiring agent showcases how authority, oversight triggers, audit mandates, and hard prohibitions shape discrimination, privacy violations, and escalation. The framework offers traceability, coherence, and adaptivity, facilitating safe, secure, and trustworthy agentic AI.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16015
Representing individual-level behavioral heterogeneity is challenging in epidemiological modeling, particularly when empirical behavioral data are sparse. We assess the potential of large language model (LLM)-generated behavioral outputs in addressing this challenge, using hepatitis C virus-related behaviors among people who inject drugs as a case study. Correspondence with epidemiological patterns was evaluated using external benchmarks: literature-informed association directions, correlations from an agent-based model (ABM), and survey associations. Across three LLMs, unconditional directional recovery across 28 retained literature-informed associations was 46-68%, compared with 82-93% agreement when LLMs were directly asked to classify the same associations. Mean absolute differences from ABM and survey correlation patterns were 0.11-0.13 and 0.15-0.18, respectively. Together, these findings show partial alignment between LLM-generated behavioral relationships and epidemiological evidence, despite higher knowledge-probe agreement. More systematic evaluation is needed before incorporating LLM-generated behavioral outputs into epidemiological models that simulate transmission dynamics.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15994
Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed as teams, yet they fail in characteristically social ways: information holders stay silent, dominant speakers anchor groups on wrong answers, and norm violations go unsanctioned. We present Agent Sociodrama, a framework for modeling and validating evolving social dynamics in LLM agent teams. Under fixed personas, agents' emotional states and directed, asymmetric relationships are updated every round by a unified external LLM judge and shape their subsequent interactions. Across six LLM backbones and five social scenarios, we assess social fidelity through classical social-theory patterns and agreement with human judgments. The resulting trajectories exhibit structured social patterns and model-specific differences. We then introduce Trajectory-Guided Persona Recasting (TPR), which diagnoses group-dynamic failures from interaction transcripts and social trajectories and recasts agent personas before rerunning the task. Across four collaborative benchmarks, TPR improves performance from both heterogeneous and randomly initialized agent persona compositions, yielding up to 83.3%p of accuracy improvement over the initial casting. On representative distributed-information cooperation and mixed-motive bargaining tasks, we outperform SOTOPIA and AgentVerse in three of four comparisons, by up to 37.5%p in Pareto rate. These results show that validated social trajectories provide actionable signals for repairing LLM agent teams.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15788
The Flow Matching objective supervises the velocity field at intermediate states, whereas waveform metrics are evaluated after decoding and may be non-differentiable. To align Flow Matching models with waveform-level and perceptual quality objectives during post-training, FlowGRPO optimizes their trajectories using endpoint rewards. In this work, we focus on music separation and use multi-resolution short-time Fourier transform (MRSTFT), scale-invariant signal-to-distortion ratio (SI-SDR), and Virtual Speech Quality Objective Listener (ViSQOL) as reward components. Before policy optimization, we analyze the relationship between data quality factors and the within-group gap between the maximum and mean rollout rewards for each component. This analysis motivates a revised ViSQOL reward that matches channel-wise root-mean-square (RMS) levels and evaluates the interval from the first to the last active frame, retaining inactive frames within that interval. We also apply a sample-quality filter based on predefined waveform checks. Together, the revised reward and quality filter enable FlowGRPO to improve the pretrained vocal separator in both separation performance and perceptual quality.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15780
We study the problem of inverse garment design, reconstructing simulation-ready 3D outfits with arbitrary layers from a single image, with visual agents. Unlike differentiable optimization that is time-consuming, or feed-forward methods limited by training data, we introduce DressAgent, a hierarchical agentic system that recovers garment sewing patterns through planning and closed-loop refinement grounded in physical simulation. To this end, we first present an enhanced representation based on GarmentCode for diverse styles and arbitrary dressing layers, and build the first multi-layer sewing pattern dataset with over 15K outfits for supervision and benchmarking. Inverse design then proceeds coarse to fine: In layer planning and coarse estimation, agents infer layer order and relations, peel each layer into its own view, and estimate coarse patterns. In fine-grained refinement, an agentic trio of Tailor, Critic, and Orchestrator refines patterns in a closed loop of editing, simulating, and judging against the reference with visual and measured evidence. Carefully designed tools and an evolving memory make this refinement converge on the target geometry. We also design an agentic generation method for high-fidelity textures. DressAgent outperforms feed-forward methods by a large margin, surpasses or matches differentiable optimization in a fraction of the time, and generalizes to complex layering, diverse poses, and body shapes.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15582
Sleep-disordered breathing, including snoring, hypopnea, and obstructive apnea, is the hallmark of obstructive sleep apnea, whose severity is quantified by the Apnea-Hypopnea Index (AHI). As conventional polysomnography is costly and clin- ically demanding, microphone-only detection has emerged as a noninvasive alternative for screening. We propose ALE- Confidence Fusion Sound Event Detection (ACF-SED), the first framework that directly injects the per-frame confidence map of an Adaptive Line Enhancer (ALE) into Transformer atten- tion biasing and feature modulation, rather than as mere pre- processing. A Multi-Resolution ALE Bank aggregates three parallel NLMS filters at distinct decorrelation delays, while a Confidence-Guided Cross-Path block couples event and noise streams via gated cross-attention. On the Audio-Polygraphy Dataset for Sleep Apnea Analysis, ACF-SED achieves state- of-the-art detection across Event-F1, Segment-F1, and PSDS, enabling end-to-end AHI estimation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15532
How do we tell a world model what information to preserve? We study this question through the lens of spectral representation learning. We introduce SpecWM, a JEPA framework that explicitly specifies desired relationships between observations through a target similarity kernel and trains the encoder to reproduce those relationships in its embedding geometry. Different kernels provide different supervision, ranging from physical state information to a fully self-supervised temporal kernel requiring only the ordering of observations within trajectories. We characterize the global optima of the objective, establish conditions for linear recoverability and invariance to nuisance information, and connect temporal-kernel similarity to the behavioral successor measure under an idealized setting. Empirically, the choice of kernel strongly controls which physical quantities are recoverable from the representation. More importantly, temporal spectral alignment improves CEM planning success over LeWorldModel from 52% to 68% on OGBench Cube, 49% to 77% on OGBench Scene, and 29% to 51% on CALVIN. These results suggest that explicitly specifying representation geometry provides a simple way to steer what latent world models preserve for control.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15429
Compressing the key-value (KV) cache is essential for serving long-context large language models (LLMs) under memory constraints. While current scalar quantization methods achieve significant compression, they typically face a quality-fidelity trade-off, either suffering from performance instability at 2-bit precision or necessitating 3-bit keys to maintain model quality. In this work, we demonstrate that a uniform low-bit k2v2 configuration (2-bit keys and 2-bit values) can preserve near-baseline quality by using vector quantization (VQ) based on the $E_8$ lattice for KV keys. We show that structured VQ exploits correlations across adjacent dimensions to achieve signal-to-quantization-noise ratios (SQNR) higher than those of independent scalar quantization at the same key payload rate. To ensure practical utility, we adapt a table-based asymmetric scoring algorithm that avoids explicit codebook dequantization during attention computation and preserves decode-throughput parity with scalar baselines. Across five LLM families, our $E_8$ k2v2 approach yields \textasciitilde$6\times$ KV compression, roughly 20\% smaller than scalar k3v2 (3-bit keys and 2-bit values), while retaining near-baseline long-context perplexity. In our full-suite perplexity evaluation, $E_8$ improves over scalar k3v2 in 80\% of model--dataset--context settings. These results indicate that $E_8$ lattice VQ improves quality per byte while keeping throughput at parity, suggesting that structured key quantization is a useful primitive for KV-compression stacks. Overall, our work provides a low-overhead primitive for expanding the quality-memory frontier in long-context LLM inference.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15384
The inherent variability of fMRI responses across trials encourages a generative view of the stimulus-to-response mapping. Prior generative encoders often operate in compressed latent spaces and condition predominantly on semantic features, which provide limited low-level cues for early visual cortex. We propose StimFlow, which synthesizes fMRI directly in native voxel space using conditional flow matching with a linear path. This design aligns training and inference distributions, enabling competitive performance with a single sample and reducing reliance on averaging. To match the visual hierarchy, StimFlow combines structural DINOv2 features with semantic CLIP features, which prove complementary along the cortical processing stream. With a single sample, StimFlow achieves a per-voxel Pearson correlation of 0.371, matching baselines that average five draws. Generation in voxel space allows direct ROI analysis and concept localization without a decoder. Furthermore, it recovers over half of full-data performance from just one hour of scans, supporting efficient cross-subject adaptation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15341
LLMs increasingly support sensor-based human activity recognition (HAR) by linking motion signals with activity semantics and physical knowledge. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) grounds decisions in sensor examples and domain features, enabling training-free target-user inference with less dependence on raw numerical arrays. However, existing LLM/RAG-based HAR typically searches single-level activity spaces using static population knowledge. Consequently, they compare many unrelated candidates using the same static population evidence and overlook personalized motion patterns. We propose OntoAR-HAR, an ontology-guided agentic RAG framework combining static population and personalized knowledge. Its tree-structured activity ontology decomposes classification into local decisions among semantically related activities. The static store supplies node-constrained examples, while offline-discovered executable signal features provide numerical evidence for local distinctions. During inference, the personalized store collects selected user observations, which the LLM integrates with static knowledge and signal features while traversing the ontology to an activity label. Cross-subject and heterogeneous-sensing experiments show complementary gains from hierarchical retrieval and personalized memory across multiple LLM backbones, achieving state-of-the-art performance. By explicitly modeling hierarchical relations across activity granularities, OntoAR-HAR also addresses the long-overlooked semantic inclusion problem and avoids treating related labels as independent categories.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15292
Multi-environment POMDPs (ME-POMDPs) generalize POMDPs by encoding a finite set of possible environments, capturing model uncertainty. The finite-horizon robust reward maximization problem for a ME-POMDP asks for a policy that maximizes reward in the worst environment, and recent work has shown this problem to be $\mathsf{PSPACE}$-complete. We expand the complexity landscape of ME-POMDPs by identifying which subclasses retain this $\mathsf{PSPACE}$-completeness. In particular, we take subclasses of POMDPs that are tractable in the single-environment case, and investigate the computational complexity of these classes when extended to the multi-environment setting. We first prove the $\mathsf{NP}$-completeness of multi-environment blind MDPs and deterministic POMDPs using a certain closure-under-mixture condition. We then prove $\mathsf{PSPACE}$-completeness for a range of subclasses that do not satisfy that closure condition, yielding new complexity results for multi-observation POMDPs. Finally, we show existential theory of the reals ($\exists \mathbb{R}$)-completeness for numerous ME-POMDP problems under time-dependent Markovian policies or finite-state controllers that are $\mathsf{NP}$-complete for standard POMDPs. These results reveal a subtle relationship between POMDP and ME-POMDP complexity that depends heavily on the subclasses involved.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.15010
How do language models generalize from their training data? This is a central challenge for alignment: models reliably learn their training distribution given enough samples, but we want models that behave well when deployed in new contexts. We study out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization of propensities. Our central experiment uses a range of elicitation techniques -- system prompting, few-shot learning, SFT on reference answers, and GRPO -- to increase a target propensity in a model, then measures how it spills over onto others across the resulting cross-elicitation matrices. We find that spillover is highly correlated between models when the same elicitation technique is used, but our SFT and GRPO runs induce different spillover profiles. Elicitation of benign traits can sometimes generalize towards undesired traits, for example a model trained to claim that it is sentient often becomes more power-seeking. We further find that spillover partially resembles trait correlations found in humans and identify three clusters of traits that account for about half of the variance using exploratory factor analysis (EFA). Across many elicitation runs, we observe that models change in characteristic ways that don't depend on the targeted trait, a phenomenon we refer to as drift. Drift moves Qwen3.5-9B towards its base model. When investigating if LLMs are able to predict spillover, we find that Claude Opus 5.5 predicts spillover slightly better than the models themselves, but worse than data-driven approaches using alternative elicitation methods or models. Overall, no single dominant predictor emerges, and generalization remains hard to predict. Code and data are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14937