Reinforcement learning (RL) is promising for spatial text-to-image generation, but existing work largely focuses on policy optimization, assuming accurate rewards and effective online rollouts. We observe in-domain gains with out-of-domain degradation, exposing two limitations: unreliable spatial rewards in open-world settings and rollouts lacking basic-to-complex progression. We propose a curriculum-guided RL framework. First, we introduce SpatialCritic, an agentic reward model equipped with a spatial perception harness that combines reusable verification guidance with specialized vision tools. We then construct spatial preference datasets through targeted counterfactual perturbations and perform agent-harness alignment to improve tool selection and evidence integration efficiently. Second, curriculum learning organizes shared foundational capabilities and their compositional dependencies in a capability graph for mastery-guided rollouts, periodic review, and targeted remediation. On SpaRW-Eval, SpatialCritic achieves 95.1% verification accuracy, outperforming 320B GLM-5.3-Flash with a 40x smaller 8B backbone and raising average baseline scores from 78.4 to 83.9 on SD3.5-Medium and 83.2 to 86.5 on BAGEL. Project page: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14852
Industrial IoT sensors produce continuous, high-volume data streams that predictive maintenance needs to analyse in real time. Cloud-centric architectures send all raw telemetry to central servers, which costs latency, bandwidth and resilience. This paper presents a hybrid cloud-edge architecture for manufacturing predictive maintenance built on AWS IoT Core and AWS IoT Greengrass v2, with local machine learning inference at the edge and selective cloud synchronization. We deploy two configurations on real AWS infrastructure and compare them: a cloud-only baseline (Configuration A) and the proposed hybrid edge architecture (Configuration B). We measure end-to-end inference latency, bandwidth consumption and inference accuracy. Configuration B cuts cloud-bound bandwidth by 86.8% (63.6 KB to 7.2 KB per 200-reading window) and decision latency by 256x (23.1 ms cloud round trip to 0.09 ms local inference). At the edge, with no cloud involvement, it keeps an anomaly-class F1 score of 0.84 and 91% recall. The evaluation also instruments system uptime and Stream Manager queuing under cloud disconnection; the quantitative disconnection experiment is left as planned work. Our review of the literature points to four gaps that this work addresses: the lack of empirically validated Greengrass v2 deployments for predictive maintenance, unquantified bandwidth savings from selective edge synchronization, unmeasured resilience under cloud disconnection, and the open MLOps feedback loop at the edge.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14815
Most text-to-SQL benchmarks provide the target database. In a large data catalog, however, choosing the sources is part of the problem: an agent must find every database needed for a request, determine how their results fit together, and execute the resulting workflow. We present DSABench to evaluate these capabilities jointly. Its 815 human-reviewed tasks draw on Spider, BIRD, and LiveSQLBench; 618 require several databases to contribute, and 105 allow more than one interpretation of the required sources. Executable contracts define source participation, cross-source dependencies, and source-local execution, while RouteEnv lets agents inspect public catalog evidence without revealing the gold annotations. In our routing-only study across seven model backends, the highest RA-Set score is 60.55%, compared with a highest RA-Graph score of 34.66% when coordination requirements are included. The gap becomes more pronounced when execution is required. Across four backends, median non-privileged Route+Exec-Graph success ranges from 6.69% to 7.98% without clarification and from 11.44% to 13.25% with one clarification; the best observed clarified configuration reaches 16.99%. On ambiguous tasks, clarification improves exact branch-source recovery by 39.8-43.2 percentage points. These findings illustrate why retrieving plausible databases or producing correct local SQL is not enough: an agent must carry the right information through the entire multi-database workflow.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14700
Recursive self-improvement (RSI) offers a route to AI systems that participate in their own continued development. Recent methods allow language agents to retain changes to their parameters, memory, skills, and code for subsequent execution and improvement. We examine how these methods can inform new research ideas through two complementary perspectives. First, we introduce a unified taxonomy with nine design dimensions organized into four groups: update targets, update organization, update schedule and scope, feedback and selection. This taxonomy places existing methods in a shared design space, where examining individual dimensions and their interactions can inspire new research ideas. Second, we examine how existing RSI methods draw on traditional deep learning, for example through optimization, regularization, data augmentation, continual learning, and adversarial learning. We develop further ideas by examining more specific learning mechanisms and drawing on evolutionary computation. We also review how existing benchmarks assess self-improvement under online, offline, and offline-to-online settings. Together, these perspectives help researchers develop new RSI research ideas from existing designs and learning mechanisms. RSI papers and resources are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14625
Enterprise workflow automation typically requires retrieving a complete and accurate set of relevant information from large operational document corpora (SOPs, policy documents) given a specific scenario or request. In customer support (CS), for example, human specialists must determine the correct sequence of resolution steps for each case, a task that demands precise grounding in policy documentation. Meeting this bar in production typically requires complex document chunking, indexing, and retrieval pipelines, often layered with learned re-rankers, query rewriters, and bespoke agentic RAG infrastructure. We report a deployment case study of a simpler alternative: a portable skill consisting of a natural-language instruction, lightweight tools (a retrieval API, format-checking scripts), and a corpus enriched with an LLM-generated navigation layer, which is a structured "Wikipedia-style" index over the underlying documents. This agentic RAG approach is straightforward to implement (1-2 engineer days), portable across capable agentic harnesses (e.g., Claude Code), and performs strongly on the challenging task of CS resolution workflow generation, achieving 99.2% procedural equivalence to human-approved ground truth and 83.3% evidence sufficiency. It is also roughly an order of magnitude slower per case than our deployed production assistant (~90 s vs. ~8-9 s), so we claim no latency advantage. Our claim is scoped to that setting: a mature, well-curated corpus, a latency-tolerant workflow, and human review of every case. There, the skill did the work of a complex RAG stack, and maintenance became a matter of editing text and data rather than retraining models.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14428
This article offers an overview of recent developments in deep learning from a control vantage point. It reviews several classes of models including feedforward and residual neural networks, transformers, large-language models, and selective state space models while explaining how control theory plays an important role in understanding their training, properties, or architecture design. The article explains how residual neural networks can be interpreted as the discretization of a continuous-time control system thereby enabling the use of control theoretic techniques for its analysis. To illustrate the power of this bridge between control and deep learning, two technical results are discussed: 1) the ability of a residual neural network to approximate arbitrary continuous functions is a non-standard controllability problem that can be solved using geometric nonlinear control and 2) transformers, the key architectural component of most large language-models, can be seen the discretization of a consensus algorithm and thus large language-models exhibit consensus. Another point of contact between control theory and deep learning is the connection between backpropagation, the algorithm used to train neural networks, and optimal control. The article addresses how the older connection between these problems, established in the 80's using discrete-time models can be reconciled with the more recent approach using continuous-time models. Several open problems and directions for future research are discussed, including selective state-space models, a recent class of models inspired by the models used in control.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14385
AI-enabled systems must remain dependable when the conditions under which they operate change (e.g., due to input perturbations, distribution shifts, or changes in external dependencies). This makes robustness auditing of such systems important for judging whether the available evidence is sufficient to support a defined robustness conclusion. However, designing an AI robustness auditing framework is challenging. A key unresolved issue is determining the requirements such a framework should support; these requirements have not yet been consolidated. We address this gap through meta-requirements: higher-order requirements specifying what a class of auditing frameworks should support. In design science research, literature and domain experts are common sources of meta-requirements; accordingly, we derive the initial set from literature and validate and refine it with practitioners. Our systematic literature review retained 74 of 2,890 records and derived 43 meta-requirements across 16 categories. We evaluated them with 128 practitioners, obtaining 5,504 ratings and 586 substantive comments. Overall, 81.20% of ratings indicated agreement or strong agreement. In particular, 41 of the 43 literature-derived meta-requirements were classified as strongly supported. Practitioner feedback refined the requirements and identified an additional requirement concerning external components and supply chain dependencies. The final set comprises 44 meta-requirements across 16 categories, of which 43 received quantitative validation. These meta-requirements can help organizations implement AI robustness auditing frameworks, assess existing frameworks for completeness, and refine them.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14356
Natural disasters such as earthquakes, tropical storms, and floods cause extensive damage to buildings, and rapid, reliable damage maps are essential to guide emergency response. Automating this task, referred to as building damage assessment (BDA), from satellite imagery, has become an active research topic at the intersection of remote sensing, computer vision, and machine learning, particularly since supervised deep learning methods were shown to outperform earlier handcrafted approaches. Yet, despite a decade of intense activity and the release of several large-scale datasets, the field lacks a shared foundation. This chapter revisits the task of BDA from first principles, organized around three pillars: data, evaluation, and methods. We first clarify the candidate task for- mulations and argue for a sensor-agnostic, instance-based definition that tolerates missing pre-event imagery. We then review existing datasets along the axes of sensing modality, temporal configuration, and geographic coverage. On the evaluation side, we show that prevailing practices, largely based on a single aggregate score, are theoretically fragile, and we lay the foundations of a more informative, ranking-based, multi-score protocol. We further review methods ranging from task-specific deep networks to recent Earth observation foundation models, noticing that generalization to unseen events and regions remains an open difficulty. Finally, we discuss how these elements can inform the organization of a BDA challenge, including cross-validation, challenge, and private data-sharing setups designed to build trust between developers and users.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13857
A useful language model should know when to answer and when to say "I don't know." Can we improve that decision by training the model itself or by training a separate component to check its answers? We study both approaches on Qwen3-14B for factual questions, using a score that rewards correct answers, penalizes mistakes, and allows abstention. Across three training seeds and two held-out confidence thresholds, a learned answer selector improves threshold-averaged utility over the original model's calibrated confidence filter. On TriviaQA, mean coverage increases from 20.2% to 30.9%, while the pooled error rate among scored answers decreases from 23.0% to 14.5% under exact-match grading. The tested reinforcement-learning changes do not establish consistent gains. On NQ-Open, the selector improves threshold-averaged utility over the filter but still performs worse than always abstaining. A partial human-reviewed audit preserves the TriviaQA finding. Our results support learning to select answers in this setting while showing that reliable abstention across datasets remains unresolved.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13821
VeriContest is a benchmark of 1007 competitive-programming problems in Rust, each with a Verus specification, a judge-accepted solution, and a Verus proof. Its authors report that proof generation is the bottleneck for frontier models: given the specification and the code, the best model produces an accepted Verus proof for 13.95% of the problems on the first attempt. We report on solving the same proof-generation task with Rust-Prover, a verifier for Rust backed by Lean 4. The Verus specification and the Rust code are restated and translated into Lean, each specification becomes a theorem, and agents prove the theorems with Lean's kernel as the final check. All 1325 theorems of all 1007 problems were proved. 1259 of them were proved in one run of under 32 hours on Claude Opus 5.5, at a median of 3.2 minutes and $1.17 per proof, and 70% of them on the first iteration. The restated specifications were checked against the benchmark's test suites, and reviewed where no suite applies. None was wrong or weakened. The translated Lean programs were run on 21,413 of the benchmark's test cases and produced the same output as the Rust programs on every one. Across four Claude and four GPT models at five reasoning-effort settings, every current frontier model proves nearly all of a ten-theorem sample at every setting, and more effort raises the cost without raising the number of proofs. The cheapest Claude setting, Sonnet 5.5 at low effort, proves all of the 50 hardest theorems. We also rerun the benchmark's own Verus protocol with Claude Opus 5.5 on the 50 problems with the longest reference proofs. Opus 5.5 alone fails to prove one of them.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.03994
Large language model (LLM) agents are rapidly improving on long-horizon scientific and olympiad tasks. Recent systems have produced a Lean-formalized resolution of the Navier--Stokes problem and autonomous solutions to four open questions in the ErdÅs Conjectures database. Yet neither system releases both its underlying model and complete inference stack. More broadly, a single agent session remains brittle on difficult problems: early errors can propagate, missing domain knowledge can stall progress, and apparent success can mask a misinterpretation or weakening of the original task. We introduce HOA (Humanize Olympiads Agent), an open, flow-level framework that coordinates multiple agent sessions through three complementary feedback channels. First, an independent reviewer evaluates each candidate and provides actionable feedback. Second, a structured wiki supplies task-specific knowledge that may be missing or unreliable in model pretraining. Third, a verifier checks generated Lean proofs against trusted challenge statements. With GPT-5.6 Sol, HOA achieves perfect scores on the IMO, IPhO, and IOI 2026, near-full marks on the IChO 2026 problem set, and solves all 672 problems (100%) on PutnamBench. On the Lean-Eval leaderboard, HOA ranks first, solving 251 of 304 problems (82.6%). We further evaluate HOA with open models. Using Kimi-K3, HOA achieves full scores on the IMO, IPhO, and IOI, and a gold-level score of 97.1% on the IChO. These results closely match the closed-source GPT-5.6 Sol + /Goal baseline on the IMO and IPhO, while exceeding it on the IChO and IOI, demonstrating that systematic feedback can help bridge substantial differences in base-model capability.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13632
Every evaluation run of a vision-language model (VLM) already produces per-question artifacts (predictions, judged correctness, metadata) that leaderboards reduce to a single score and then discard. We reuse those artifacts to audit the benchmark itself, and add an audit layer to VLMEvalKit: six detectors that run as post-processing over saved outputs, plus one additional text-only rerun with visual inputs removed, emitting a per-question report. The layer reports per-question findings together with aggregate audit statistics; for the headline quantities, it attaches permutation-null excess where applicable, interval estimates for proportions, and sensitivity to the model pool. Auditing MMStar, a benchmark curated specifically so that the image is indispensable, with three models, we find zero aggregate accuracy gain from the image on 20.2% of its questions. An item-matched permutation null accounts for 17.0%, leaving a +3.2 pp excess (corrected permutation p = 0.001). This excess is concentrated in the mathematics and science categories and is absent from coarse perception, a localization consistent with knowledge substituting for visual evidence; confirming that mechanism would require item-level review. A second detector flags 134 questions on which every model that answered in parseable form picked the same non-gold option, and these candidates peak in the perception categories, whereas the zero-gain excess is largest in mathematics and science & technology. Replacing the LLM judge with exact string matching changes no conclusion, and every scoring discrepancy between the two traces to one model whose free-form answers a parser cannot read. On a binary yes/no benchmark the detectors measurably fall out of calibration, a scope boundary that we measure and report. The audit layer, the prediction artifacts and the generated reports accompany this submission.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13548
Long-term personalized tutoring requires language models to translate a learner's evolving history into appropriate instructional support. Existing LLM-based tutoring systems use memory and retrieval to personalize responses, but the pedagogical rationale linking historical evidence to teaching strategies is not always explicit. We introduce RegulaTutor, a theory-informed framework for long-term personalized tutoring that connects historical evidence, learner interpretation, and learner-facing instruction. Guided by self-regulated learning (SRL) research, its tutoring harness operationalizes a cognitive, affective, metacognitive, and motivational (CAMM) framework for deriving evidence-supported learner interpretations and teaching policies. The resulting policies retain links to their supporting evidence and are updated as new observations arrive. This staged workflow also supports systematic refinement through PairRoute, an offline procedure that uses intermediate execution records to distinguish harness, model, and mixed failures. PairRoute proposes and evaluates targeted harness revisions, then constructs reviewed stage-level supervision for confirmed model failures remaining under the selected harness. We focus this refinement on historical evidence acquisition, which underpins personalized instruction and allows outputs to be checked against learning records and reference answers. RegulaTutor improves historical-evidence accuracy, learner diagnosis, and judged teaching quality on average across evaluated model configurations. PairRoute results show an endpoint improvement in standalone-model historical-evidence accuracy over the refinement trajectory. Together, these results highlight RegulaTutor's potential to support lifelong personalized education through instructional policies that evolve with learner histories and targeted improvements to the tutoring system.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13399
Tibetan, spoken by some seven million people on and around the Qinghai-Xizang Plateau, remains underrepresented in natural language processing (NLP). We present, to our knowledge, the first peer-reviewed systematic bibliometric survey of Tibetan NLP: 140 publications from 2004 to 2026 in the ACL Anthology and DBLP, annotated for venue type, research area, first-affiliation country, and resource release. Output has grown rapidly, with 84% of the publications appearing since 2018, and has expanded bottom-up along the NLP pipeline, from corpora and word segmentation through script, speech, and applications to large language models (LLMs). Researchers based in China first-authored 87% of the publications, which span all 25 represented research areas, whereas work from other countries concentrates on Classical Tibetan. We argue that this full-pipeline paradigm, realized under the compounded constraints of a complex script, dialectal diversity, and geographic remoteness, offers a reference model for other low-resource languages of the Global South. We also identify gaps in dialect coverage, responsible NLP, native and comparable evaluation, cross-community visibility, and resource release (only 29% of the publications release data, code, or models), and recommend open science, shared standards, and community participation for the LLM era.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13398
Coding agents are increasingly used to build programs from scratch as software engineers do rather than to resolve issues within a repository or to generate a repository from a given requirements document. However, scalable verifiable training environments that force agents to discover what is required and to decide how the system should be designed remain scarce. Moreover, existing agent workflows also cannot sustain long-horizon development in which the agent explores the reference program before implementation. To address these challenges, we introduce ProgramGym, a framework consisting of Program-Env and Program-Agent for scalable training environments of long-horizon program reproduction agents. Specifically, Program-Env constructs verifiable training environments from repositories through a feedback-driven loop that repairs runtime sandbox builds and the quality of black-box tests. Using this novel pipeline, we obtain 1,648 training environments spanning C, C++, Go, and Rust. Program-Agent combines a role-isolated workflow of analysis, implementation, and review with revision management for compilation checks and failure recovery. Experiments on ProgramBench show that both Program-Env and Program-Agent improve performance on program reproduction. Fine-tuning on trajectories with these constructed environments raises the performance of Qwen3.8-27B from 34.87% to 42.84%. Program-Agent further raises the base and SFT models to 55.71% and 56.25%, both exceeding some flagship models. We will release the ProgramGym to support further research on coding agents that build programs from scratch.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13395
Thyroid nodule malignancy assessment relies on ultrasound imaging, yet current risk stratification systems suffer from substantial interobserver variability, contributing to a high rate of unnecessary biopsies. We propose a radiomics-based framework combining quantitative feature extraction via PyRadiomics with a Generalized Additive Model (GAM) classifier, selected among six candidates for its favorable trade-off between discriminative performance and interpretability. To complement point predictions with uncertainty estimates, Cross-Conformal Prediction with label-conditional guarantees is applied, flagging ambiguous cases for clinical review rather than forcing a binary decision. Experiments are conducted on TN5000, a publicly available ultrasound dataset of thyroid nodules. After Spearman correlation filtering, 36 features are retained and the GAM achieves an AUC of $0.89$, a sensitivity of $0.83$, and a specificity of $0.82$ on the validation set. At a significance level $\epsilon=0.09$, selected to ensure empirical coverage guarantees on both classes, 63\% of nodules on the test set receive a certain (i.e., single-label) prediction, with conditional precision of $0.94$ for certain malignant and conditional Negative Predictive Value (NPV) of $0.73$ for certain benign cases, while the remaining 37\% are referred to the clinician.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13387
Coding agents are increasingly deployed for end-to-end software engineering tasks, where a readily available oracle evaluator that defines the success criteria is often absent. This motivates verifications for coding agents that can reliably judge and explain their behavior. However, verification is non-trivial as coding agents are increasingly capable of solving long-horizon software engineering tasks. Their execution trajectories can be extremely long, containing hundreds of iterative interactions with code repositories and external tools. Existing verifiers either rely on general-purpose LLMs without specialized training or train dedicated critics that predominantly focus on producing scalar rewards, highlighting the relatively limited exploration of training-based generalist verification. We introduce SWE-Critix, a post-training pipeline for training generalist verifiers of coding-agent trajectories. Given a task and its execution trajectory, the learned verifier predicts the completion label and generates a natural-language analysis that explains its judgment. Our pipeline combines supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with reinforcement learning (RL) and trains a series of 30B models on trajectories from CodeForge-Preview. On a held-out test set, SWE-Critix improves classification accuracy from 57% for the base Qwen3-30B-A3B reasoning model to 66% after SFT and 78% after RL. We release our models, datasets, and training code to facilitate further research.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13356
Iterative text-to-video generation relies on feedback to correct compositional and temporal failures. However, existing methods typically require another full generation run for each correction, repeating computation and potentially disrupting already correct content. We introduce PreCoG, an iterative framework for correcting semantic failures during video generation. PreQA diagnoses failures from low-cost previews and constructs corrective conditions, while PreEdit edits cached generation trajectories under these conditions, attenuating orthogonal changes to limit disruption of already correct content. PreCoG completes generation only for the selected candidate, reusing its cached trajectory to reduce redundant computation and help preserve semantic consistency between the preview and the final video. Experiments show that PreCoG achieves the highest VBench and T2V-CompBench scores and approaches VSR's leading VS2 score at $0.56\times$ its inference time. It also outperforms GENMAC on all three quality and alignment metrics at $0.86\times$ its inference time.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13174
Large audio-language models (LALMs) frequently exhibit object hallucination, affirming absent sounds. The dominant mitigation, Audio-Aware Decoding (AAD), contrasts logits under real audio against an all-zero "blank" waveform, flagged by prior review as out-of-distribution. We introduce a black-box causal test that isolates the claimed evidence itself: localize a claim's evidence region via CLAP similarity, remove it by spectral gating, and compare against a random-window control across a 2x2x2 grid on three LALMs. On Qwen2-Audio-7B, localized ablation's raw AUROC trails blank's (0.613 vs. 0.721); this is a duration confound, not a localization failure, since blank removes the entire clip versus the grid's 2-4 s. Holding duration fixed, localization beats random removal at every cell on both models. Raw detection value remains model-dependent, especially on Audio Flamingo 3. The same evidence corrects decoding: contrastive decoding combining blank and language-prior contrasts, gated and ensembled, raises Qwen2-Audio accuracy from 57.1% to 71.9%, beating AAD alone. A unified causal-grounding profile does not transfer between models, indicating different grounding regimes. The source code and a detailed report of our findings, including identified limitations, are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13112
This paper introduces MathVis, a benchmark designed to evaluate LLMs' ability to visualize frontier mathematical problems and perform diagram-assisted reasoning. The benchmark consists of 512 tasks, each comprising a mathematical statement, a reference diagram, executable TikZ or SVG code, a Gold Intermediate Representation (IR), atomic rubrics, and error codes. Through rigorous evaluation, GPT-6-Astra, Claude Fable 5, and Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview achieve pass@1 scores of 31.25%, 26.56%, and 22.85%, respectively. We found that although the tasks require visualization, LLMs produce outputs dominated by formal languages, symbols, and graphics programs, rather than explicit diagram-mediated reasoning. Furthermore, while the solutions generated by LLMs may contain all the necessary elements, they are often visually confusing to humans. Ultimately, this benchmark aims to visualize mathematical problems and promote research on enabling LLMs to simplify their reasoning via visual diagrams.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12954