arXiv AI

Evidence Before Expansion: Reuse, Spawn, or Defer in Lifelong Expert Pools

arXiv:2608. 19888v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Streaming systems that maintain a pool of expert models must repeatedly decide whether to reuse an existing expert for arriving data, spawn a new one, or defer.

arXiv AI
Sep 1

Moving the Mean Toward the Known Good, Not Beyond It: What Inference-Time Interventions and Weight Consolidation Buy in Open-Ended Generation

The study investigates how inference‑time interventions and weight consolidation affect open‑ended generation in an online bin‑packing task. By iteratively generating, verifying, selecting, and consolidating with LoRA, the model’s outputs shift toward higher value, reducing excess by 1.7 points and outperforming random consolidation by 3.1 points. Across three independent runs, the mean performance remained consistent, and the best candidates converged to the classic heuristic’s level without exceeding it, while consolidation also lowered the proportion of better‑than‑classic candidates but increased their absolute number.

By Roberto I. Ono Filho
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Neuro-Symbolic Computer Use: Learning Reusable Policies for Reliable and Efficient Execution

The paper introduces neuro‑symbolic computer use, a method that learns reusable policies to execute recurring computer workflows efficiently. Instead of re‑planning each run, the learned policy encodes stable decisions (ordering, variables, loops, branches) into executable code while delegating observation‑dependent decisions to neural models. Using neuro‑symbolic policy iteration, the approach iteratively refines the policy from a single agent trajectory, diagnoses failures, and revises the code with a coding model, achieving superior Pass^3 scores and significant reductions in per‑run cost and latency on OSWorld‑Verified and ScienceBoard benchmarks.

By Hyewon Suh, Thanh Minh Nguyen, Chih-Lun Lee, Darrow Hartman, Lizhao Liu, Xin Eric Wang, Ang Li, Jiachen Yang
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Knowing When to Ask for Help: Bayesian Self-Escalation in Hierarchical LLM Agents

The paper introduces a Bayesian self‑escalation strategy for hierarchical large‑language‑model agents, allowing an agent to detect during its own reasoning that it is unlikely to succeed and hand control over to a stronger model. The authors formalise this as an optimal‑stopping problem over a learned competence posterior, derive a myopic escalation threshold, and prove that the optimal policy is a time‑varying threshold without assumptions on the raw signal. They provide theoretical guarantees—including a 1/√n regret decay with n calibration trajectories—and validate the approach in simulations and a real‑model code‑generation cascade, showing that the escalation frontier outperforms post‑hoc routing at equal cost. whyItMatters":"The study offers a principled, theoretically grounded method for agents to dynamically decide when to seek stronger models, potentially improving efficiency and reliability in hierarchical LLM systems."

By Nadeem Shaikh
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 5

When Does Pooling Pay? Credibility and Resolution under Forgetting in Intermittent-Demand Forecasting

The paper investigates when pooling information across intermittent-demand series is beneficial, focusing on the trade‑off between forgetting past data and borrowing strength from other series. By applying a single exponential recency operator to both item‑ and group‑level statistics in a hierarchical empirical‑Bayes hurdle model, the authors derive a diagnostic that quantifies credibility and resolution, and use it to screen for regimes where refinement offers no advantage. Empirical tests on five public panels of over 19,000 series show that the diagnostic accurately predicts when shared priors improve accuracy, and the resulting forecaster (EBB) matches specialist Gaussian‑process models within a few percent while being far cheaper to run.

By Zong-Han Bai, Po-Yen Chu
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

When Stale Constraints Go Unchecked: Budgeted Verification Failures in Inherited Agent Memory

The paper investigates how agents that inherit consolidated memory can mistakenly rely on constraints that were once true but have since been superseded by newer records. By modeling supersession explicitly and limiting verification to two records, the study shows that native allocation often leads to stale-consistent decisions, while reallocating one verification slot to the critical provenance path markedly improves consistency. The results suggest that memory systems may need separate freshness or supersession signals beyond relevance to avoid such errors.

By Kazuki Nakayashiki