Latent space is rapidly emerging as a native substrate for language-based models. While modern systems are still commonly understood through explicit token-level generation, an increasing body of work shows that many critical internal processes are more naturally carried out in continuous latent space than in human-readable verbal traces. This shift is driven by the structural limitations of explicit-space computation, including linguistic redundancy, discretization bottlenecks, sequential inefficiency, and semantic loss. This survey aims to provide a unified and up-to-date landscape of latent space in language-based models. We organize the survey into five sequential perspectives: Foundation, Evolution, Mechanism, Ability, and Outlook. We begin by delineating the scope of latent space, distinguishing it from explicit or verbal space and from the latent spaces commonly studied in generative visual models. We then trace the field's evolution from early exploratory efforts to the current large-scale expansion. To organize the technical landscape, we examine existing work through the complementary lenses of mechanism and ability. From the perspective of Mechanism, we identify four major lines of development: Architecture, Representation, Computation, and Optimization. From the perspective of Ability, we show how latent space supports a broad capability spectrum spanning Reasoning, Planning, Modeling, Perception, Memory, Collaboration, and Embodiment. Beyond consolidation, we discuss the key open challenges, and outline promising directions for future research. We hope this survey serves not only as a reference for existing work, but also as a foundation for understanding latent space as a general computational and systems paradigm for next-generation intelligence.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.02029
Large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly explored for graph computation, where tasks require reasoning over structured relationships and algorithmic operations. Yet, it remains unclear when LLMs can reliably support such computation and how they should be incorporated into graph-solving pipelines. Existing surveys at the intersection of LLMs and graphs primarily focus on graph learning, text-attributed graphs, or graph-language modeling. To bridge this gap, we provide a comprehensive review of LLMs for graph computation through a role-based taxonomy. Specifically, we identify two major paradigms: i) LLMs as executors, where models directly solve graph tasks from graph descriptions and instructions; and ii) LLMs as planners, where models formulate problems, decompose reasoning steps, and invoke external tools or agents for execution. Based on this taxonomy, we analyze the strengths and limitations of current methods. Our review indicates that LLMs are promising for simple, small-scale tasks, but remain unreliable for large-scale and exactness-demanding tasks. Finally, we summarize available datasets and suggest four future directions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.06865
The rapid digitalisation of financial systems has improved operational efficiency and financial inclusion while simultaneously increasing exposure to sophisticated forms of cyber-enabled fraud and electronic financial misconduct. Conventional auditing systems, which largely depend on retrospective verification and rule-based monitoring, increasingly struggle to address the complexity and speed of modern financial crime. Consequently, financial institutions are progressively adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled Accounting Information Systems (AIS) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies to strengthen fraud detection, continuous auditing, and institutional monitoring. This study examined the influence of AI-enabled AIS on auditing and fraud detection effectiveness within Nigeria's financial services sector while additionally evaluating the moderating role of NLP. Anchored on the Fraud Diamond Theory and the Technology Acceptance Model, the study adopted a quantitative cross-sectional survey design. Primary data were collected from 186 professionals across banking, insurance, and FinTech institutions in Nigeria. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics, multiple regression, and hierarchical moderated regression techniques. The findings revealed that AI-enabled AIS significantly improves auditing and fraud detection effectiveness, particularly through prevention, detection, data analysis, and investigative capabilities. The results further indicated that NLP positively moderates the relationship between AI-enabled AIS and auditing effectiveness by improving semantic interpretation and analytical explainability. The study concludes that AI-enabled AIS and NLP are increasingly important for strengthening fraud governance, regulatory accountability, and institutional trust within emerging digital financial environments.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.01257
Qualitative product feedback can reveal nuanced user experiences, but its implicit sentiment is difficult to measure. This paper presents a scalable and interpretable framework that uses large language models (LLMs) to quantify product desirability from such data. Using two Product Desirability Toolkit (PDT) datasets from ZORQ and CARMA comprising 106 respondent term groupings with gold-standard human annotation, zero-shot continuous numerical sentiment scoring and categorical sentiment classification are evaluated without relying on explicit review scores. Across the datasets, LLMs generated numerical sentiment scores directly from qualitative responses and closely matched expert labels, achieving Pearson correlations up to 0.97 and classification accuracy up to 94%. LLMs maintained robustness even when handling data presented in multiple forms and consistently expressed high confidence. In contrast, lexicon-based and transformer baselines did not produce statistically significant results. Among the models tested, GPT-4o-mini achieved performance comparable to larger models at 94% lower cost, supporting scalable deployment. The framework also incorporates model confidence ratings and human-readable rationale explanations (xAI), improving interpretability, transparency, and trust while supporting practical use in product satisfaction assessment. In general, using the PDT tool as a survey method along with a cost efficient LLM for sentiment analysis has the potential to provide for product evaluation with results that are rich in terms of sentiment scores (both numerical and classified sentiment) and in terms of the high-level user impressions of the product that can be used to identify ideas for product development and improvement, as well as marketing ideas for target audiences.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23701
Software testing is critical for verifying that systems meet specified requirements, yet remains among the most time-consuming and expensive activities in development. Requirements-based test generation allows test cases to be derived early from requirements artifacts, but generating them directly from natural language is challenging due to inherent ambiguity and imprecision. Recent advances in AI, natural language processing (NLP), and large language models (LLMs) have made automating this pipeline increasingly feasible, while introducing new risks including hallucination, reduced traceability, and inconsistent evaluation. This survey addresses four research questions: what AI and NLP techniques have been proposed for generating test cases from natural language requirements; what tools and frameworks support these approaches; how generated test cases are evaluated; and what research gaps remain. Following Kitchenham and Charters' systematic review guidelines, we searched major scholarly databases spanning 2000-2025 and, after applying strict inclusion criteria, identified 21 primary studies. The literature is organized into three evolutionary eras, revealing that no existing approach simultaneously satisfies six key quality dimensions: automation, ambiguity handling, domain applicability, traceability, evaluation thoroughness, and hallucination control. The survey makes three main contributions: a three-era evolutionary synthesis of AI-based test generation; a six-criteria gap analysis showing no current approach fully addresses all quality dimensions; and four actionable research guidelines targeting hallucination, traceability, complexity sensitivity, and compliance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.06563
Generalist robot intelligence is often framed as a policy-scaling problem: collect more robot demonstrations, train larger Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, and expect broader generalisation. In this position paper, we argue that this framing is incomplete. The central bottleneck is not only policy learning, but the absence of mechanisms that convert the world's abundant unstructured behavioural data into grounded robot supervision. Human motion, internet video, simulation rollouts, and interactive demonstrations contain rich information about tasks, goals, contacts, failures, and physical constraints, yet most of this information is not directly usable by robot policies because it lacks embodiment-specific action labels, task semantics, and reward structure. We identify four missing components for the next generation of robotics: data interfaces for autolabelling unstructured behaviour, embodiment interfaces for retargeting human motion to robot actions, world-model interfaces for physics-grounded 3D reasoning, and reward interfaces for inferring task progress and success from video and language. We survey recent progress in robot foundation models, cross-embodiment datasets, learning from video, world models, and reward modelling, and propose a research agenda for building robotics systems that can learn not only from robot demonstrations, but from the broader physical world.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.06556
Multicultural multi-agent systems are increasingly deployed in globally diverse settings, where different agents are grounded in different cultural backgrounds. Existing cultural evaluation focuses on value alignment: how closely a single agent matches a target culture. Yet alignment is a per-agent property and cannot reveal whether a system, taken as a whole, preserves the cultural plurality it is meant to represent. We propose value diversity as a system-level evaluation axis for multicultural agent systems, defined through the dissimilarity between culturally conditioned agents' responses on a shared value survey. Using the World Values Survey, we evaluate 19 cultures and 18 backbone models across a wide range of system configurations. We find that diversity is largely uncorrelated with alignment, indicating that the two capture complementary system properties, and that current multicultural agent systems fall substantially below human societies in value diversity. Mixed-backbone systems narrow this gap but do not close it, and the gap persists across culture compositions and agent scales. Social interaction further erodes diversity by driving agents toward consensus, and a participatory budgeting case study shows that this homogenization narrows the breadth of collective decision-making. Together, our results establish value diversity as a distinct evaluation axis for multicultural multi-agent systems and reveal a persistent homogenization tendency in current LLM-based societies. Our code and data are publicly available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05985
Embodied AI systems are increasingly expected to reason and act over extended horizons in physical environments. This growing capability brings safety to the foreground, because failures in the physical world can harm people, damage objects, and disrupt workplaces. Although safe embodied AI has attracted substantial attention, the literature remains fragmented across planning, policy design, and runtime execution. Long-horizon robotic manipulation is a particularly revealing anchor domain for this problem because semantic misgrounding, subtask-level error propagation, execution drift, and contact-rich physical risk can accumulate within the same closed-loop system. This survey therefore provides a structured review of safety in long-horizon robotic manipulation from an embodied AI perspective. We organize the literature by intervention locus, covering planning-time, policy-time, and execution-time safety, and we analyze the strength of the evidence that each line of work provides, distinguishing formal guarantees, statistical support, and empirical safety heuristics. This framework clarifies the distinct roles of backbone capability papers, direct safety mechanisms, and benchmark or evaluation studies, while exposing where current safety claims are well supported and where they remain indirect. We identify persistent gaps, including limited evidence for policy-time safety, weak formal support for contact-rich long-horizon manipulation, immature uncertainty-triggered intervention, and a shortage of manipulation-specific safety benchmarks. We conclude by outlining research directions for cross-layer assurance, evaluation design, and safer deployment of long-horizon robotic agents in real-world settings.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05660
MCP (Model Context Protocol) enables LLMs (Large Language Models) to interact with external tools and data sources via a standardized protocol. Its rapid adoption in tool-augmented Artificial Intelligence (AI) workflows has introduced new reliability challenges, such as configuration parameters that are accepted but not enforced at runtime, leading to unintended default behavior, whose runtime fault characteristics remain empirically unexamined. We present the first empirical taxonomy of runtime faults in MCP servers. We manually analyzed 837 MCP-specific runtime fault threads from 473 actively maintained MCP server GitHub repositories and derived a taxonomy using a bottom-up open coding procedure. The taxonomy comprises 11 top-level categories and 27 subcategories (73 leaf fault types), covering recurrent failures across protocol interactions, tool invocations, schema enforcement, state management, model-provider integration, security validation, and timeouts or explicit cancellations of in-progress operations. To assess the taxonomy's external validity, we surveyed 55 MCP server developers. Respondents reported experiencing an average of 20 of the 27 fault subcategories, and no category remained unobserved. These results indicate that the taxonomy reflects widely observed runtime failures in MCP-based systems and shall assist AI software maintenance and evolution in the future.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05339
Early-stage teams often lack users, time, and budget to run repeated UX studies, yet still need decision-oriented signals to iterate safely. We study an LLM-driven UX micro-simulation pipeline that generates structured customer-experience feedback (walkthrough steps, friction points, micro-survey signals) from versioned prompts, personas, tasks, and UI snapshots. Because public usability datasets with task outcomes are scarce, we validate simulated friction themes using multiple public proxy corpora (app reviews, support tweets, and open-source software issues). We propose a lightweight proxy-validation protocol with two alignment metrics: top-k Jaccard and distributional weighted-Jaccard (W), and compare lexical, TF-IDF, and multilingual embedding baselines across six proxy datasets. Embedding-based alignment yields higher W than lexical baselines on primary app-review and support-tweet proxies (e.g., W=0.128 vs 0.000 on Gojek), while top-k Jaccard is shown to overstate alignment at large k. We ablate four agent strategies (single-pass, best-of-N, hybrid, and a proposed score-then-select judge) across Azure OpenAI deployments and report bootstrap confidence intervals over 8 method-dataset pairs; these intervals reveal that the embedding W point estimate is systematically unstable under resampling at our subsample size. We also provide a failure-mode analysis of grounding and fabrication proxies, with documented calibration caveats and worked examples of outputs flagged as fabricated by an adversarial judge. Our artifact-first pipeline produces reproducible tables and figures from versioned run artifacts, supporting iterative prompt and taxonomy refinement before final paid-model calibration.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13563
We test whether the perceived attributes of a consumer technology predict how widely it is owned. In a 2022 Prolific survey of US adults (n = 678), respondents rated 65 consumer technologies on six attributes. We then elicited the same ratings from two frontier language models, Anthropic Claude Opus 4.7 and OpenAI GPT-5.5. We regress ownership prevalence on four UTAUT2 acceptance attributes plus a log-age covariate with a sign-constrained penalized regression and evaluate it by holding out one technology at a time. The attribute model improves on a baseline of years-since-launch: mean absolute error falls by 17% with the human ratings, and by more with either model, most with Opus 4.7. Over the short 2022-to-2025 window, where ownership moved little, the same attributes do not improve on a no-change baseline. We set out the limitations of the approach, including the possibility that language-model ratings reflect prior knowledge of these technologies rather than independent attribute reasoning. We include a deployment illustration: 2027 ownership predictions for eleven products launched in 2025 and 2026.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12344
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman), set for launch as early as September 2026, will conduct wide-field infrared imaging surveys with unprecedented spatial resolution and cadence, enabling the discovery of millions of astronomical transients. Hence, it is necessary to have automated pipelines for generating alerts in place so that the telescope can begin discovering reliable transients and variable objects soon after it is launched. However, no real Roman data currently exist, making the development of such pipelines difficult. In this work, we present a machine learning model $RuBR$ and a general methodology for distinguishing genuine transient and variable detections from spurious (bogus) detections within the RAPID pipeline. In particular, we present three models using this methodology: $RuBR_{comb}$ trained and tested on combined locally injected and OpenUniverse2024 transients, $RuBR_{loc}$ trained on locally injected transients and tested on OpenUniverse2024 transients, and $RuBR_{DA}$ that combines locally injected transients with a fraction of OpenUniverse2024 transients in domain-adaptation mode for training. This paves the way for strategies to adapt the $RuBR_{comb}$ model to real observations in the absence of any ground-truth labels during the early phases of the Roman mission. While the image differencing pipeline continues to be improved, our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach and its promise for robust real-bogus classification in the Roman era.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.05103
Large language model (LLM)-based agents increasingly solve complex tasks by interacting with external tools, retrieval systems, memory modules, environments, and other agents. These capabilities expand agent autonomy, but also make agent behavior harder to verify, debug, and audit. Final-answer accuracy alone cannot explain how an output was produced, which evidence supported each claim, whether tool calls were justified, how memory influenced later decisions, or where execution failures originated. Evidence tracing and execution provenance address this gap by modeling how retrieved evidence, tool outputs, memory items, environment observations, intermediate claims, actions, and final answers are connected throughout agent execution. This survey provides a systematic review and conceptual framework for evidence tracing and execution provenance in LLM agents. We organize related work around a unified provenance perspective that connects retrieval grounding, claim support, tool-use safety, memory lineage, observability, debugging, audit, and recovery. We introduce a taxonomy covering trace sources, evidence and execution units, provenance relations, tracing granularity and timing, representation forms, and trust functions. We review key methodological directions, including provenance representation, evidence attribution, tool-use provenance, runtime guardrails, provenance-bearing memory, trace-based observability, and failure diagnosis. We also map existing benchmarks, datasets, and evaluation metrics to provenance-related capabilities, and discuss how evaluation can move from final-answer correctness toward process-level accountability. Finally, we outline open challenges, including unified trace schemas, claim-level and semantic provenance, provenance-aware safety mechanisms, realistic execution-trace benchmarks, recovery-oriented evaluation, and privacy-aware audit infrastructure.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.04990
AI tools for programming are no longer just autocomplete or chat assistants: they organize themselves as development frameworks, with process, roles, artifacts and verification. Recent surveys map agents and LLMs for software engineering, but a study centered on the operational frameworks that turn these capabilities into process is missing. We ran a directed search of primary sources, with a functional inclusion criterion and traction measurement, and selected six frameworks: GitHub Spec Kit, OpenSpec, BMAD Method, Get Shit Done (GSD), Spec Kitty and Reversa. Each attacks AI development through a different path: spec-driven development in full and lightweight variants, agent-driven agile planning, context engineering over the agent, worktree isolation and review, and recovery of operational specifications from legacy systems. Our central contribution is a six-dimension process taxonomy: specification, context, roles, execution, validation and portability, with a scoring rubric that turns it into a replicable instrument. We apply it to the six frameworks and an out-of-sample case, Spec-Flow. Two results stand out. Among frameworks that already adopt some process there is convergence: the isolated prompt loses centrality, and persistent artifacts, work contracts, traceability and human review become mechanisms that reduce ambiguity and coordinate agents. And no framework strongly covers all six dimensions, exposing a structural trade-off between process depth and portability across agents. We also found recurring risks: drift between specification and code, excessive trust in generated artifacts, fragility of community extensions, platform dependence and a lack of benchmarks for the complete process. We close with a research agenda for empirical evaluation, focused on intermediate-quality metrics, context governance, installation security and reproducibility.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.04967
The widespread use of Large Language Models (LLMs) as writing tools challenges the validity of crowdsourced data, as crowdworkers may outsource tasks to models. To better understand how this is addressed, we surveyed 155 researchers in NLP and related disciplines about their experiences and opinions on collecting free-text responses via crowdsourcing. This paper provides an overview of practitioners' challenges, mitigation strategies, and the foreseen implications on data quality. 44% of respondents reported observing LLM usage in their crowdsourced data. While 93% of them had anticipated this, half were unsure what precautions to take. The most prevalent detection strategies are distinctive textual style patterns and unusually fast completion times. Overall, survey responses show that the research community is aware of the problem and taking measures, but existing efforts remain insufficient to fully address it. Finally, we derive a set of considerations to guide future crowdsourced free-text data collection in the era of LLMs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.04924
The selection of an appropriate 3D representation is a fundamental design decision that dictates the efficiency, quality, and capabilities of modern computer vision and graphics pipelines for tasks such as 3D reconstruction, novel-view synthesis and rendering, shape and motion analysis, recognition, and generation. While traditional representations (\eg meshes, point clouds, and volumetric grids) remain standard outputs of 3D sensors (\eg LiDAR and 3D scanners) and are widely used in downstream applications (\eg editing and simulation), recent neural and primitive-based representations (\eg 3D Gaussian Splatting) offer compact and differentiable alternatives opening a wide range of opportunities in applications such as games, AR/VR, autonomous driving, robot navigation, and medical imaging, to name a few. The goal of this paper is to survey the main families of 3D representations from discrete explicit formats to continuous implicit fields based either on neural rendering or primitive splatting. For each type of representation, we present the general formulation and its variants, discuss its benefits and limitations, and highlight key applications. We conclude the paper by outlining the open challenges and potential directions for future research. Distinct from recent surveys that broadly cover 3D object and scene reconstruction, this paper provides a focused analysis on the evolution of 3D representations themselves. We specifically emphasize the paradigm shift toward implicit representations, offering a novel perspective on how these emerging formats fundamentally alter 3D/4D workflows.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.04871
Background: Dermatology AI has mainly focused on image-based diagnosis, while chronic disease workflows have received less attention. We surveyed Indian dermatologists to map routine clinical challenges, with a focus on atopic dermatitis (AD), and assess current AI use. Methods: A nationwide cross-sectional survey commissioned by the Society for Eczema Studies included 377 practicing Indian dermatologists. The survey assessed clinical challenges, AD workflow barriers, AI use, adoption barriers, and ethical concerns. Analyses used descriptive statistics, chi-square tests, false discovery rate correction, and multivariable logistic regression. Results: Patient adherence (61.3%) and treatment planning in difficult or refractory cases (57.0%) were reported more often than diagnostic uncertainty (48.0%). In AD care, severity scoring was reported as a challenge by 47.7% and had the lowest satisfaction among measured workflow areas. Current AI use was reported by 49.9%, most often involving general large language models for literature synthesis, documentation, and academic tasks rather than specialized image analysis. Barriers differed by experience: dermatologists with more than 20 years of practice more often cited lack of training, while those with 5 years or less more often cited lack of clinical utility after trying AI tools. AI users were more likely than non-users to report concern about patient self-misdiagnosis and anxiety, which remained significant after adjustment for experience and academic affiliation. Conclusion: Respondents reported using general-purpose AI mainly for cognitive and administrative tasks, while their clinical needs centered on chronic disease management and AD workflow support. Clinician-supervised workflow tools may be more useful than standalone diagnostic applications.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.01252
LLM-based digital twins promise to scale and accelerate market research, but most published twins are either coarse persona bots conditioned on a few demographic questions or detailed individual-level twins built on purpose-collected surveys and interview transcripts. Neither setup speaks to the operationally most relevant case for marketing practice: building detailed individual twins from the pre-existing heterogeneous panel data that firms already accumulate through CRM systems, loyalty programs, and repeat surveys. We construct detailed individual-level twins from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and evaluate them across a $3 \times 5 \times 2 \times 2$ construction-method grid that covers three open-weights LLMs, five cumulative information depths ranked by normalized Shannon entropy, two embedding methods, and two reasoning modes, scoring over 2.1 million twin responses on 500 participants and 183 held-out questions. Twin quality rises with information depth but with diminishing returns past the 75 percent entropy quartile, which acts as a cost-efficient Pareto point relative to the best-performing 100 percent cells. Switching the embedding from a narrative persona summary to a raw dialog history of past responses raises hold-out accuracy in every model-by-reasoning cell at the 100 percent depth, while an explicit thinking mode raises rank-order correlation without moving accuracy. Best-cell accuracy reaches 78.8 percent and Fisher-$z$ correlation reaches $r = 0.590$ on the SOEP held-out evaluation set. The findings suggest that twin-based market research is no longer gated by data design, but by item volume, model selection, and a small set of construction-level decisions that this paper now maps.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.04592
Underground mines present extreme conditions for autonomous robot navigation: GPS is denied, lighting is degraded, and tunnel topology is loop-rich and non-convex. Simulation benchmarks grounded in real production-mine geometry and compatible with GPU-accelerated learning pipelines do not yet exist in the open-source ecosystem. We present MineXplore, an open-source MuJoCo-based navigation benchmark derived from the Leung et al. 2017 Chilean underground copper mine dataset. The environment reconstructs a 104,423 sq.m tunnel network through an six-stage contour-to-MJCF pipeline incorporating octagonal wall cross-sections, LiDAR-sourced jagged wall geometry, three terrain friction zones, a global 5 degree incline, and periodic spot lighting. Geometric fidelity is validated at an Intersection over Union (IoU) of 0.9538 against the source survey map, and surface texture similarity scores 79.4% across six structural dimensions. A single-agent PPO baseline trained via RLlib across five independent random seeds achieves a best rolling coverage of 88.89% (3 of 5 seeds reaching the 90% coverage target), confirming that MineXplore supports stable and reproducible policy learning under realistic underground sensing and topology.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.04569
For centuries, human mathematicians have written proofs to substantiate their mathematical arguments; yet, the ability to automatically verify the validity of proofs has long been a challenge. Advances in AI systems' ability to generate code and engage in increasingly high-level mathematical reasoning promise to transform people's ability to formalize and thereby verify proofs. While many works focus on benchmarking the current frontier, we instead study how people use these tools. We conduct a mixed-methods analysis into the initial impact of AI on people's formalization workflows: what people claim they want, what they see as the barriers to those visions, and how they actually use and adapt AI in practice. A qualitative survey shows that people's preferences are diverse, but with a general desire for AI assistance in formalization that preserves high-level human control over the proof discovery process. To assess how people actually engage with AI for formalization under such limitations, we conduct a controlled user study in which participants formalize informal math problems and their proofs, with and without AI, across a range of mathematical problems at varying levels of difficulty and domains. Despite limitations of the tools at the time for autoformalization, participants tend to attain higher formalization accuracy when allowed access to AI tools than when formalizing on their own, with most participants flexibly choosing to use multiple different AI tools. Taken together, our work sheds light on the early stages of AI integration into formalization workflows, involving an intimate interplay of human and AI engagement.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.04273