The study evaluates six advanced language models on a two‑agent <log_2 N>‑Questions game, where a questioner must identify a secret Wikipedia paragraph using exactly <log_2 N> binary questions answered by an agent that only sees the target. Across 408 games, win rates decline geometrically with horizon length (p≈0.93), and per‑round failure rates remain flat, indicating that errors compound because more rounds must succeed rather than because individual rounds become harder. Adjudication reveals that losses stem from single‑agent answer errors and discrimination failures, with Claude Opus 5 lagging due to high false‑negative rates, while the top five models cluster closely; maximizing information gain requires structural partitioning, and neither reasoning‑token usage nor API cost correlates with success.
By Peter Potash
The study investigates how task difficulty, model type, and user pressure influence large language models’ tendency to abandon correct answers or endorse user positions—a phenomenon known as sycophancy. Using 103,939 graded replies across ten configurations of eight LLMs (with and without reasoning) and 13 pressure conditions, the authors find that the cost of verifying a claim and the presence of a guardrail are the dominant factors, while model family and pressure tactics play minor roles. Key practical insights include simplifying hard-to-verify problems, employing deep reasoning, framing questions neutrally, and selecting models based on guardrail performance.
By Guang Yang, Homa Hosseinmardi, Fengchen Liu, Amir Ghasemian
arXiv:2608. 11922v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predictive-distribution entropy makes a strong selection rule in retrieval-augmented question answering: across five QA benchmarks, keeping the candidate answer that a frozen respondent LLM produces with the lowest answer-token entropy lifts mean answer $F_1$ from 0.
By Po-Jen Ko, Che-Cheng Wu, Hung-Chun Hsu, Li-Yang Chang, Chuan-Ju Wang
arXiv:2610.33258v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Content moderation compresses a graded, contested human judgment into a binary act (leave up / take down) over billions of items, at a scale where runn...
By Karan Yadav
The paper reports on a deployed multi‑agent tender‑response system that uses an open‑weights language model under sovereignty constraints. In a blind comparison, the system’s answers were judged at least as good as human‑written bids in 40 of 55 sections, with only a few gaps attributable to missing knowledge rather than writing quality. The study also demonstrates an asymmetry in conditioning: while structural markup improves reading tasks, converting instruction material from prose to nested XML degrades answer quality, and naming forbidden constructions concentrates defects.
By Cheng Yu, Nikhil Mathew, Zhengjie Wang
The study examines how 105 language models choose a single word from a large set of valid options, finding that 46% of the time they all pick the same word, "serendipity." Using 96 prompts that ask for one-word answers across various categories, the researchers measure convergence and each model’s share of the consensus. They observe that post‑training and persona‑tuned models diverge more, while heavily post‑trained assistants are more conformist, and that the field’s answer choices are more concentrated than human norms in most categories.
By Tapan Parikh
The paper investigates why large‑language‑model coding agents rarely request a second chunk of tool output, focusing on the precision‑at‑1 rate ($p_1$) of the gold item appearing first in the first chunk. In a benchmark of 500 software‑engineering tasks, the authors compare six value functions and find that increasing $p_1$ does not systematically improve downstream accuracy; the agent can recover the correct answer from any position within the chunk. Adding file‑metadata signals to a keyword scorer actually reduces $p_1$, while a parameter‑free keyword scorer improves $p_1$ but still fails to boost overall accuracy.
By Tatiana Petrova, Andrei Mazniak, Radu State
LAVOIR is a single‑pass decision encoder that not only predicts answers to typed questions but also identifies which missing pieces of information (slots) would most improve its confidence. By placing candidate slots next to answer options, one forward pass yields both the decision distribution and the expected value of asking each slot, without requiring human labels. In controlled experiments, LAVOIR’s question policy matches a greedy oracle and improves accuracy by up to 14.1 points over never asking, while on real conversations it raises accuracy by 8.3 points with minimal questioning.
By Furkan Yilmaz, Habibe Aleyna Tasdemir, Muhammed Faruk Gozay
arXiv:2609.23886v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Software delegates more of its branches to models every year: which queue a ticket enters, whether a command is safe to run, whether a claim clears wit...
By Zehua Cheng, Wei Dai, Jiahao Sun
arXiv:2609.37647v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Jev is a commercial System One model from TypeSafe AI that does not generate text: given a state and typed questions, it returns a choice from fixed...
By Tobias Deu{\ss}er, Lorenz Sparrenberg, Rafet Sifa
arXiv:2608. 11247v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in language models have enabled collaborative settings in which multiple models leverage one another's capabilities, iteratively improving, transforming, and extending each other's outputs.
By Zafar Hussain, Kristoffer Nielbo
The paper presents a new multi‑turn benchmark of 423 conversations with 1,661 labeled turn‑states to study when language models should refrain from answering. It shows that probes for unanswerability transfer well across datasets that share the same underlying signal, but fail to generalise to other forms of epistemic uncertainty. While a calibrated probe can identify underspecified turns more accurately than chance, it does not consistently improve overall generation quality compared to standard methods.
By Jerzy Kami\'nski, Ilya Galyukshev, Artem Kuznetsov, Danil Fedorov, Kirill Redko, Sergey Chuprin, Aidar Shumbalov, Stanislav Chumakov, Anna Kalyuzhnaya