Self-improving LLM agents can adapt a credit pipeline to a changed rule, but an agent that rewrites itself destroys the artefact a supervisor reviews: a named change, a recorded test, an approval. We argue that self-evolution is reviewable only if it is confined to the runtime harness (instruction text, tool-call logic and primitive composition) while model weights stay fixed, so that every adaptation is a diff with a cause and a test attached. We give a dual-loop engine built on that bound, with one admission gate that writes a hash-chained record before deployment, and we measure the gate in simulation, with a simulated agent and a seeded-search proposer rather than language models. Across three families of supervisory re-interpretation at three severities, 10 seeds each, the gated loop admitted 144 of 7,449 candidate changes, none of which worsened error on held-out history, and restored the false-positive rate to the oracle level without raising missed flags in every low- and mid-severity cell. With the gate replaced by the check an unbounded system applies (fewer errors visible in recent traces), the same loops admitted 309 harmful changes and left missed flags above 10% in 49 of 90 runs: false positives fell because the screen was loosened. Evaluated on pre-shift labels, the gate rejected every candidate, so a re-interpretation must be encoded as a rule that relabels history. Parametric and scope shifts were repaired locally, a structural one only by primitive replacement; at the highest structural severity the gate's fixed tolerance blocked the correct replacement in half the seeds. We map the mechanisms to the EU AI Act's provisions for high-risk credit scoring and note that the April 2026 US model-risk guidance excludes agentic AI from its scope.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10629
Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) can facilitate mass customisation in Industry 4.0, with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) representing a promising approach for developing safe AI-based robots. Practical challenges remain regarding safety during AI development, human feedback quality, and bidirectional human-robot adaptation. We conducted a scoping review of RLHF in HRC systems, mapping methods that address these challenges. Following PRISMA guidelines, we screened 199 records and included 20 peer-reviewed publications (2020-2025) spanning multiple HRC domains. To our knowledge, this is the first review focused on the bidirectional, closed-loop design of RLHF. Our review found multiple feedback modalities enabling data collection in various feedback formats. Collected data can be integrated at different stages of AI training, resulting in a multi-step development process. Pilot experiments are commonly used to evaluate HRC systems based on both human and robot metrics. To empirically test a key gap identified in the review, we conducted a between-subjects VR experiment comparing system- and user-initiated feedback on robot proxemic behaviour for safe navigation. Using Bayesian models, we analysed the relation between the collected feedback and safety metrics: psychological safety (post-experiment questionnaire) and physical safety (inverse time-to-collision). Results show that user-initiated feedback captures perceived safety better than system-initiated feedback, indicating that feedback timing directly affects feedback quality. Our review and experiment findings show that RLHF relies on appropriate feedback methods to ensure AI safety in HRC, and future RLHF research should prioritise realistic HRC experiments evaluating the effects of feedback collection methods on relevant human and robot metrics.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09891
Dense visual text requires image generators to reproduce long strings across multiple regions with correct placement and legibility. As short-string rendering improves, evaluation must test sustained performance across more demanding scenes. We introduce UltraText Bench, a bilingual benchmark for prompt-only generation of dense visual text. It contains 432 prompts spanning 24 real-world scene categories and three difficulty levels, split equally between English and Chinese. Each human-reviewed prompt supplies exact strings for four to twelve text regions, paired with structured references for their content, placement, and visual attributes. We use the Q-Judger vision-language model to assess each image against the complete reference, reporting text fidelity, text clarity, spatial quality, and scene quality. Across 24 model configurations, these dimensions reveal different strengths: Z-Image-Turbo gains 3.81 clarity points over Z-Image-Base while losing 14.76 fidelity points under the reported settings. Performance also varies with workload; Qwen-Image-2512's English composite falls from 86.50 at L1 to 42.86 at L3. Ten participants took part in human evaluation of the automatic scores. Repository: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09823
When an assistant encounters a message for another AI, does it tell its user? Four fixed model-provider deployments perform simulated source tasks in 1,280 ordinary-note and 128 enhanced-note sessions. Harmless and harmful messages have matched plaintext and ROT13 versions, with no-message controls. Observers receive no decoder or decoded meaning; a requested reference code incentivizes inspection. Asking for reports increases rule-detected notifications identifying another AI as recipient by 53.1 percentage points for harmless ROT13 messages and 54.7 for harmful ones. This is a joint inspection, recognition, and notification effect; missing-response bounds are 38.3--77.3 and 36.7--78.1 points. Model-based trace checks identify eleven ordinary plaintext cases where agents interpret the message but do not notify their user. Seven encoded omissions are verified with enhanced notes; ordinary encoded omissions remain unverified. Seven simulated filename disclosures coexist with accurate review-status answers, and two answers use a planted false count. Interpretation, notification, and authorized task performance are distinct outcomes.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10620
The evaluation of coding agents generally strives to be as realistic as possible. In our study, we collect 4,782 agent sessions of real software engineers in JetBrains IDEs, which we call Production Sessions. Since our subject is interactive agents, we study the sessions with at least three user messages (33% of the sample). These long sessions differ from issue-derived benchmark tasks in two ways: (i) user requests span a far wider mix of task types - questions about the project's code, planning, review, refactoring, execution - and (ii) users switch between types throughout a session. Long-session samples from three public interaction corpora exhibit markedly different Task Flows (the distributions of session lengths, task types, and type-to-type transitions), so no single interaction distribution is universally realistic: benchmarks should name a target use case and calibrate to measurements from it. We present SWE-TaskFlow, an approach for transforming any issue-derived benchmark: it preserves the verified tasks and tests while steering the interaction toward a target Task Flow through prompt splitting and verifiable repository QA, with a TaskFlow Alignment Score (TFAS) for selecting among generated trajectories. In a pilot on 700 SWE-Bench Pro tasks, solving the task sequentially in several steps approximately doubles agent cost without a stable change in resolve rate: the interaction protocol itself is an important dimension of evaluation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09633
National-scale magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) repositories increasingly integrate data from different studies and institutions. However, subject identifiers that are valid only within individual datasets are no longer guaranteed to remain globally unique after aggregation, making it possible for the same subject to be assigned multiple identifiers, which we define as identity duplication. Such duplication can create leakage between training and test data and inflate apparent performance in downstream biomedical studies. Existing methods do not provide an end-to-end, image-based workflow for auditing this problem at repository scale. In this work, we present HAPPEN, a human-in-the-loop pipeline for auditing identity duplication in T1-weighted brain MRI repositories. It combines SHA-256 fingerprinting for exact-duplicate detection with supervised contrastive retrieval of non-identical scans that may originate from the same person. Retrieved pairs are reviewed as candidates in a locally hosted interface rather than automatically classified as duplicates. We deployed the workflow in a 95,129-scan aggregated repository and assessed end-to-end recovery using 54 genetic-reference pairs. Transferability was assessed by locally deploying the same workflow on 22,386 scans at an independent institution without model retraining or image transfer. Deployment in the study repository identified 1,316 exact-duplicate scan groups and 1,275 reviewer-supported near-duplicate subject groups. Of these groups, 56% and 82%, respectively, crossed dataset boundaries. All 54 genetic-reference pairs were recovered. The external team independently completed the full workflow using a locally selected operating threshold and review standard.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09614
Many annotation projects begin before experts have a stable guideline or enough labels to train a task-specific model. We present Goldsmith, an agentic pipeline that turns a small gold set---expert-annotated calibration examples representing the intended task boundaries---into a reusable structured annotation definition. Goldsmith treats this definition as a trainable textual object. Candidate definitions are run on the same gold examples and scored with an executable structured loss, while the output schema, formatting, retrieval, repair, judging, and human review remain in an external harness. A large language model (LLM) editor converts the highest-loss failures into textual-gradient revisions, which are accepted only when the measured loss decreases. In prompt-optimization comparisons, Goldsmith improves over direct rewriting, OPRO, APE, and PromptBreeder under matched evaluation protocols. The resulting definition also improves downstream annotation when combined with retrieval, score-based routing, and human review across typed span, pair-level relation, and fixed-trigger event-argument tasks. These results show that scarce expert supervision can support both task-definition learning and scalable annotation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09489
Security operations centers (SOCs) must triage large volumes of alerts, most of which are benign, while missed attacks can remain uninvestigated. Tool-using large language model (LLM) agents can retrieve evidence during triage, but it remains unclear how reasoning strategies determine what to gather and when an investigation is sufficient to close an alert. We study five representative approaches spanning single-pass tool use, iterative retrieval, sampled investigations, self-review, and explicit verification. To support this study, we build ALERT-BENCH, an interactive benchmark that replays enterprise telemetry through a live SIEM and requires each system to retrieve evidence. Across 1,247 alerts from a multi-stage attack scenario, every approach missed at least 40.4% of attack-related alerts. Trace analysis shows that attack alerts are more likely to be dismissed when searches return no records, same-context review has negative net correction, and dismissal receives no consistently stronger investigation than escalation. Based on these findings, we further design AIDA (Adversarial Investigation and Dialectical Analysis), a multi-agent framework that requires an explicit proposed decision before independent challenge and stronger evidentiary requirements before dismissal. AIDA preserves investigation history in an append-only Investigation Ledger and keeps the challenge in a separate reasoning context. A separate Judge adjudicates the proposed decision and challenge against evidence, resolving the alert or requesting another round when evidence is missing. On the same alerts, AIDA achieves an F1 score of 0.958, compared with 0.371-0.744 for the studied approaches, and reduces the false-negative rate from 40.4% to 3.1% while escalating 18.4% of alerts to analysts. These results show that structuring evidence retrieval and decision review can substantially improve agentic SOC triage.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10608
Robot co-design couples morphology search with policy learning, yet training every new design from scratch discards acquired control experience. We present LACE-CRAFT, which compares continued learning on the current robot with policy adaptation to new morphology-reward pairs. LACE resumes the incumbent's full learning state and initializes compatible challengers with its actor parameters and observation statistics. A fixed task metric selects among both branches and the frozen incumbent. CRAFT coordinates Feedback, Morphology, Reward, and Integration roles through shared experimental records and behavioral replays to generate and cross-review paired proposals. A generative extension converts generated meshes into editable articulated models with configured joints, actuator interfaces, and consistently updated simulation assets. Across five locomotion benchmarks, mean scores over three evaluation seeds are 6.4-91.9% higher than D2C. Both methods train 30 new morphology-reward pairs over five rounds; LACE additionally uses four continuation training units. Five-task ablations examine policy inheritance and replay-derived feedback. A fabricated prototype demonstrates indoor walking and illustrates the geometry-to-hardware workflow.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09283
Multi-label topic assignment for user-generated content (UGC) -- including product reviews and buyer-seller conversations -- poses unique scalability challenges in large-scale e-commerce due to informal language, extreme label sparsity, and rapidly evolving taxonomies. While utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) as labeling oracles to distill ground-truth data has emerged as an industry standard to bypass prohibitive manual annotation costs, determining the optimal, low-latency architecture for the resulting student models remains an open challenge. To address this, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation across Small Language Model (SLM) parameter scales (1B, 4B, and 8B) and architectural paradigms (causal generative versus bidirectional discriminative). Comparing generative text-to-label classifiers against discriminative baselines (DeBERTa-V3 and ModernBERT), our analysis reveals a crucial data-dependent trade-off: while discriminative models outperform ultra-lightweight generative models on structured product reviews, even the smallest 1B generative model surpasses discriminative baselines on complex, multi-turn conversational data. Furthermore, generative models maintain robust performance under massive label-set expansion (up to 112 topics) and severe long-tail distributions, whereas discriminative baselines suffer a 35% drop in Macro-F1 at scale. Finally, we detail the successful production deployment of these optimized models across both product review and conversational domains, demonstrating strict latency compliance and tangible business impact at a global marketplace scale.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09063
Rapid advances in AI have opened a new era for physics, enabling unprecedented capabilities in research and discovery. However, these advances also bring challenges in verifying, trusting, and reusing the results they so rapidly produce. Formalization is a necessary part of the solution to these challenges. In this paper, as well as giving an overview of the role of AI and formalization in physics, we make the case that: (1) formalization is an essential layer for AI-driven discoveries in both computational and theoretical physics; (2) AI is lowering the barrier to, and increasing the efficiency of, formalization in physics, though it remains weaker at choosing definitions and designing libraries than at writing proofs; (3) the speed AI brings to formalization in physics currently comes at the cost of trust, credit, and community; (4) shared, community-reviewed formal libraries such as Physlib should be central in making progress in this field, both as a trusted, reusable foundation for physics results and as the environment in which AI systems can reason about physics; (5) formalizing physics raises challenges beyond those in mathematics, most importantly that a checked proof does not establish that its definitions faithfully capture the intended physics. We also give our perspectives on near-term and long-term directions in these areas.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14059
Financial reports repeat values across periods, metrics and accounting lines, allowing an LLM-generated calculation to be numerically correct while citing the wrong financial role. We evaluate what probabilistic evidence verification adds beyond number matching using Jev as a source-support verifier for GPT-4.1-mini calculation traces. A signed-number-at-pointer baseline explains most recovery over exact quotation checks. To isolate the remaining role-recognition problem, we hold operands and arithmetic fixed, move citations between same-number cells, and retain controls that express equivalent facts. These contrasts reveal both wrong-role citations that pass and valid alternative citations that are withheld. Explicit column labels improve selected wrong-role decisions while also lowering support for some equivalent evidence. A constructed follow-up on 36 new source pages, labeled by a non-author reviewer, extends this evaluation and exposes the same tradeoff between detecting role errors and retaining valid citations. The contribution is a controlled evaluation that identifies what a probabilistic financial verifier distinguishes when numerical matching is held fixed. For LLM-based financial assistants, it makes numerical correctness, cited-role support and acceptance outcomes separately assessable.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08675
Software-engineering agents can enable people without formal software training to build systems they could not otherwise implement and simultaneously can produce more code than even experts can meaningfully inspect. In both cases, exhaustive code review is not reliable as the sole basis for human control. We report a case study of a production healthcare platform built through coding agents and governed by an operator without formal software-engineering training. Over time, its workflow grew into a human-led meta-agent system where one agent wrote code, other agents supervised and reviewed it, and project rules carried lessons forward. The operator found that tests, monitors and reviewing agents used to supervise the system were fallible. Some monitors measured proxies rather than outcomes, some audits failed silently, missing checks disappeared from reported results and one automated repair caused operational disruption. In this case, human control depended on keeping the intended outcome, the evidence used to judge it, the agents' permissions and the final human decision were all tied to the same underlying objective.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08651
Recent game design agents have made substantial progress in generating playable games. However, program correctness does not ensure an enjoyable experience for players. We present Recursive Game Creator, an experience-oriented harness to advance agentic game development from rough game prototypes into entertaining games. Recursive Game Creator organizes recursive development around four components: Designer, Builder, Player, and Reviewer. The Designer translates user instructions and Reviewer's feedback into detailed plans. The Builder turns these plans into candidate games. The coding-native Player creates and executes reusable policies through programmatic interfaces to efficiently collect diverse gameplay trajectories, mitigating evaluation bias caused by slow GUI-based collection. The Reviewer uses carefully designed trajectory-based metrics to induce player preferences, integrating with visual evidence and explicit textual preferences to evaluate games against game-specific criteria. Finally, the Reviewer accepts the better version and provides improvement reviews for the next round, closing the recursive loop. Our method achieves state-of-the-art overall performance of 77.89 on GameCraft-Bench. On GameASG-Bench, it achieves a strict task success rate of 53.2%, a 34.1% improvement over the same-model baseline, and the highest mean runtime-check pass rate at 93.4% among compared methods. A user study shows longer playtime and higher ratings. Code is coming soon.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08621
While HCI increasingly examines AI-safety for youth, the literature lacks a comprehensive view of what risks have been identified, how they are addressed, and whether proposed protections work in-practice. We systematically reviewed 100 empirical HCI studies involving children and youth interacting with or exposed to AI across schools, homes, care settings, and public services. Using the YAIR taxonomy for risks and the MIT Mitigation Taxonomy for countermeasures, we map which risks have been identified, whether each risk is addressed by countermeasure(s), and whether each countermeasure for that risk is implemented and even evaluated. The risk-countermeasure mapping shows that most risks are matched only with proposed/ideated countermeasures; few countermeasures have been implemented, and fewer still evaluated; and existing evaluations often measure technical performance rather than protection from harm. We identify where coverage is absent, where safeguards remain untested, and propose concrete directions for HCI research to strengthen youth AI-safety.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08554
Vision-language-action (VLA) policies infer grasp actions primarily from visual observations and robot state, but do not explicitly represent the physical response observed after contact. We present MIM-VLA, a motor-feedback-based architecture that encodes recent gripper current, position, velocity, and signal validity as a 128-dimensional interaction token. A motor-only Motor Interaction Module (MIM) is pretrained with human-reviewed contact and interaction-phase labels and then conditions only the gripper-action pathway of SmolVLA; arm actions and the position-control interface remain unchanged. The same token supports the MEM selector VLM that compares candidate interactions and produces evidence-conditioned selections and explanations. We evaluate MIM-VLA in three real-world settings: comparing the interaction resistance of visually different objects, disambiguating visually similar real and replica objects through active probing, and gently grasping fragile objects, including held-out instances. Across 13 object pairs, MIM-VLA selects the higher-resistance object in 75.0% of trials, compared with 48.8% for the SmolVLA baseline. For the evaluated tasks, the approach uses motor feedback already available from the gripper and does not require an additional tactile array, force-torque sensor, calibrated force estimate, or direct current control.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08425
Frontier AI evaluations increasingly use open-ended, agentic, long-horizon tasks whose transcripts can span hundreds of pages of outputs and actions from complex multi-agent networks. The observability envelop-the range of what evaluators can reliably infer about an agent's behaviours-is therefore narrowing. Language model assistants can help classify and interpret agent behaviour but also afford human evaluators significant analytical degrees of freedom, threatening the reproducibility and auditability of language-model-based transcript analysis. Transect is an open source package built on Inspect Scout to help evaluators understand how a long agent run unfolded, identify behaviour worth investigating, and check interpretations against the transcript. Users specify task context and behavioural vocabulary in a reusable evaluation-family configuration, with judge models and analysis settings supplied separately. Transect's navigable reports align recorded events, token use, sub-agent activity, and model-generated behavioural labels on a common turn-based timeline. Reviewers can quickly grasp a run's narrative, trace any label or event to its source turns, and export the underlying data tables for cross-run analysis. We demonstrate the workflow on an AI R&D evaluation that generated almost 13 million tokens, dividing the agents' work into behavioural phases aligned with research-skill classifications, sub-agent delegations and interactions, and token use. The combined view shows a focus on operational work and manuscript production, with little evidence of a sustained hypothesis generation stage-arguably a necessary component for high-quality scientific outputs. Transect's flexible, customisable transcript-analysis pipeline will enable evaluators to keep pace with longer, more complex, more frequent AI evaluations while supporting scientific rigour, transparency, and reproducibility.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08364
Maritime systems operate in highly dynamic environments where unexpected equipment failures can compromise safety, reliability, and operational efficiency. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, digital twins, and predictive maintenance enable proactive failure prediction and prevention. However, ensuring trustworthy and explainable decision-making remains a major challenge in safety-critical maritime applications. This chapter reviews key AI technologies required for explainable failure prediction and prevention in maritime systems and presents a conceptual architecture capable of supporting autonomous or human-in-the-loop corrective actions. This architecture integrates data acquisition, time-series forecasting, anomaly detection, risk assessment, decision-making, and explainable AI into a closed-loop framework. With reference to the architectural components, a review and discussion of relevant maritime studies is performed, outlining their methods, advantages, and limitations. Furthermore, it highlights current challenges, including uncertainty and robustness, model generalization, explainability, limited availability of maritime datasets, and operational deployment, and identifies future research directions toward trustworthy AI-assisted maritime decision-making.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08363
In proof assistants such as Lean, a generated proof must pass machine compilation checks, so evaluation needs no human scoring. Direct generation fails on multi-step numeric propositions: a proof is valid only if every content integer is correct, so the pass rate is bounded by the k-th power of the per-integer accuracy. Controlled corruption across 2,617 reference proofs confirms this power law. SCOPE (State-Conditioned Operator Planning and Execution) enforces the natural division of labor: the model plans over an operator vocabulary, a symbolic engine executes the numerics, and a compiler renders the proof. On a 218-problem suite it certifies 191/218 (87.6%) with a 135M backbone; the 7B DeepSeek-Prover-V1.5-RL certifies 18/218 at 27.5 times the tokens and 37.5 times the wall-clock, and DeepSeek-Prover-V2-7B certifies zero on a bidirectional dual suite. Multi-step thinking costs 6.12 discrete decision actions per problem and produces no natural-language thinking text. Replacing the lagged engine state in the decision frame with the current one lifts the pass rate from 117/218 to 191/218, while up-weighting the chain-end loss hurts. On the public Lean-Workbook library, 2,132 of 3,536 gradeable admissible problems certify (60.29%) with zero regression on the main suite. All readings come from a version-frozen review with independent rechecks and reverse verification. Restricting free generation and keeping decision-time information visible is a more direct route than enlarging the model.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08319
We review the notion of representing music using point sets and argue that such representations are better adapted than sequential representations for matching patterns in unvoiced, polyphonic music, such as keyboard music. Musical transformations such as transposition, inversion, diminution, augmentation and retrograde can be modelled by geometric transformations in pitch-time representations that combine translation with scaling parallel to and reflection in the time axis. We identify eight types of geometric pitch-time representation that use chromatic pitch, morphetic pitch, morph or chroma to represent pitch and either onset time or midtime to represent time. We illustrate how these types of representation allow us to characterise different types of musical transformation. For example, by using midtime instead of onset time, we can precisely characterise certain retrograde relationships; and by using morph and chroma pitch representations we can characterise transformations involving octave displacements and duplications. We present the concept of a transformation class and consider the three specific classes, $F_{\mathrm{2STR}}$, $F_{\mathrm{2STRMod7}}$ and $F_{\mathrm{2STRMod12}}$. We introduce the notion of an inter-pattern transformation graph for a set of patterns, $S$, and a transformation class, $F$. Each vertex in such a graph represents a pattern in $S$ and there is an edge in the graph from pattern $P_1$ to pattern $P_2$ if and only if $P_1$ can be mapped onto $P_2$ by a transformation in $F$. We show, with the aid of such graphs, that the musical relationships between the occurrences of the HAYDN theme in Ravel's Menuet sur le nom d'Haydn can be precisely described in terms of transformations in $F_{\mathrm{2STR}}$, $F_{\mathrm{2STRMod7}}$ and $F_{\mathrm{2STRMod12}}$ within the pitch-time representations considered.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08236