VeriHarness is a method that enhances verification for large language model agents tackling long‑horizon tasks without needing reference answers at test time. It transforms the base LLM into an agentic verifier by providing a workspace, evidence tools, and reusable verification skills, using disagreement resolution and consensus challenge to evaluate competing claims. Across five benchmarks and two frontier models, VeriHarness outperforms baselines, achieving significant performance gains and demonstrating self‑improvement of verification skills from failure feedback.
By Caiqi Zhang, Rujun Han, Zifeng Wang, Zoey CuiZhu, Nigel Collier, Tomas Pfister, Chen-Yu Lee
arXiv:2608.22048v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed on local hardware for privacy, cost, and accessibility reasons. Yet many evaluations emphasize accuracy...
By Orion Powers, Daniella Seum, Khaled Slhoub
arXiv:2606. 29654v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent deliberation among LLMs can improve reasoning, but deployment requires deciding when the current answer is reliable enough to act on and when it should be escalated to human review.
By Mengdie Flora Wang, Haochen Xie, Guanghui Wang, Devin Zhang, Jae Oh Woo
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
System1-Arena is a benchmark that evaluates which decisions can be handled by System‑1 models—those that output probabilities in a single forward pass—versus System‑2 models that generate reasoning steps. It contains 92,000 questions across 105 tasks from 268 public sources, grouped into text classification, applied decisions, evaluation and control, and agent/action, and also includes 138 closed‑loop environments such as web shopping, coding control, robotics, games, and driving. The study tests 30 models, showing that large System‑1 models can match or exceed fast closed LLMs in non‑agentic accuracy with better‑calibrated probabilities at lower latency, while reasoning LLMs are most accurate but far more expensive, and large open LLMs perform best in closed‑loop settings.
By Tianyu Chen, Xinyang Liu, Ruyi An, Zhendong Wang, Mingyuan Zhou
The paper introduces SPLIT, a method that optimally allocates test‑time compute among sampling, model selection, and verification for language models and agents. Using an exact probability formula that accounts for task difficulty, shared blind spots, and verifier correlations, SPLIT is fitted via empirical Bayes on a small labeled pilot and then used to plan budgets for unseen tasks. Across seven diverse benchmarks, 26 models, and six verifier types, SPLIT achieves near‑optimal performance, outperforming rule‑based baselines by up to 2.5 percentage points and providing insights into when additional LLM judges reduce precision.
By Srinivasan Iyengar
arXiv:2609.38612v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: As natural language drives more applications, language models increasingly run inside programs as decision components: the program sends them the curre...
By Jhen-Ke Lin, Chung Chun Wang
RGDT-Bench is a new benchmark that evaluates large language models on Rule‑Governed Decision Tasks, where models must apply external rules to facts, justify decisions, and provide checkable justifications. The benchmark offers 202.1K condition‑level supervision slots across four task tracks and eight task‑probe combinations, and it labels warrant completeness through label‑blind extraction and deterministic checks. Evaluation shows that among correct responses, 40.2% of warrants are incomplete, and existing evaluators struggle to detect this, prompting the authors to train a reward model that improves AUROC to 69.24% and outperforms outcome‑supervised baselines.
The study shows that large language model (LLM) agents are far more likely to commit to a directional prediction when presented with a professional‑looking market panel than when asked the same question directly, with commitment rates rising from 6.5% to 54.0% across 12 frontier models. Even when the panel’s data is entirely fabricated, commitment still increases significantly, indicating that the authority of the presentation, rather than the truth of the information, drives confident action. The authors demonstrate that this act/don’t‑act decision gate is narrow, model‑specific, and can be mitigated through supervised fine‑tuning, though its effectiveness depends on response format and context.
whyItMatters":"The findings reveal a specific vulnerability in LLMs where presentation style can override factual accuracy, highlighting the need for careful design and training to prevent misleading confidence in uncertain scenarios."
By Pranav Aggarwal
The paper reports on training and calibration experiments for three open models on the ARC‑AGI‑2 benchmark, using offline runs on four L4 GPUs for up to 12 hours. For the NVARC Qwen3‑4B grid model, a curated corpus of 12,000 executable rules and 95,993 tasks was built, and fine‑tuning on 1,920 real task records raised the semi‑private score from 28.96 to 33.06, with no synthetic‑task checkpoint outperforming the real‑task model. For the Qwen3.8‑27B reasoning model, fine‑tuning on 1,036 of its own reasoning traces and a specialized inference procedure increased the score from 26.81 to 44.03, while the Qwen3.8‑Flash‑Next mixture‑of‑experts model achieved a best score of 56.67 after expert pruning, routing statistics adaptation, and an FP8 indexer cache.
By Nguyen Minh Thang, Trinh Thi Phuong
arXiv:2610.18760v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Test-time scaling for large language models (LLMs) can involve generating multiple candidate solutions for selection or revising an earlier attempt. To...
By Zheye Deng, Sha Li, Changlong Yu, Xin Liu, Qin Lu, Priyanka Nigam, Yangqiu Song
arXiv:2607. 23386v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We document a failure class in frontier large language models -- exception chain collapse -- observed in eligibility evaluation under nested conditional rules of the form "A is required UNLESS B applies, UNLESS C overrides B".
By Paul Simpson, John Kozak, Lisa Doake