arXiv AI

Inheritance as an Admission Test for LLM Prompt Merge Operators

The paper proposes an admission test for merge operators in large language model (LLM) agents, evaluating whether a new operator improves performance relative to a frozen panel of existing agents. Experiments on a negotiation task using gemini‑3.1‑flash‑lite show that tactic‑append and template‑append operators meet the test criteria, while free‑rewrite does not. The study highlights how scoring against a population and using confidence bounds can guide operator selection without relying on a fixed verifier.

arXiv AI
Oct 9

Constitutional Gating and Deterministic Recovery for Multi-Agent LLM Negotiation: Ablations Against a Stateful Adversarial Gatekeeper

The paper evaluates a three‑part control stack— a 5‑Pillar runtime constitution, a 4‑tier swarm (Director, majority vote, Monitor, hard gate), and Cognitive Annealing—for multi‑agent LLM negotiation against an adversarial Gatekeeper. Experiments with Gemini 2.5 Pro agents and Claude Haiku 4.5 show that the constitution and Director improve framing but not reliability, the Monitor and hard gate do not reduce unlocks, and deterministic recovery via atomic purge and a canonical strike successfully resolves deadlocks while keeping call budgets unchanged. The study demonstrates that the stack can recover from deadlocks without additional model cost, though it does not reduce overall call or token usage as initially hypothesized.

By Masaaki Nakatsu (AO, Inc. / OrbLabs AG), Reno Wang (AO, Inc.)
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Selection, Recombination, or a Fresh Solve? A Candidate-Free Control for Single-Pass Test-Time Aggregation

The paper investigates whether providing candidate solutions during test‑time aggregation improves or harms accuracy compared to a fresh solve that does not use any candidates. Using Qwen3‑4B on AIME‑2025 and HMMT‑2025, the authors find that conditioning on multiple correct candidates boosts accuracy (+0.290), while conditioning on an all‑wrong candidate pool reduces accuracy (−0.123); the effect for a single correct candidate remains unclear. The study also explores structured interventions and placebo controls, but the underlying mechanisms of these effects are not resolved.

By Guiv Farmanfarmaian
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
Oct 9

Who Verifies the Verifier? Co-Evolving Inspectable Graders with Self-Improving Agents

The paper introduces a method for co-evolving inspectable verifiers alongside self-improving agents. By synthesizing verifiers from clustered failures and selecting them based on agreement with a reference set, the authors demonstrate improved held‑out agreement on MBPP+ and outperform a bare LLM judge. They also show that removing anchor guards collapses the verifier into a vacuous grader, yet the collapsed verifier still trains skills effectively, indicating that downstream task scores cannot certify a self‑evolved verifier.

By Xing Zhang, Guanghui Wang, Yanwei Cui, Ziyuan Li, Wei Qiu, Bing Zhu, Peiyang He
arXiv AI
Oct 1

Hard-Gate Candidacy in a Deployed Validator Suite

The paper evaluates hard‑gate candidacy for validators in a deployed generative‑agent system by measuring how well each validator’s firing separates successful from failed builds. Across 13 validators and thousands of builds, only a few checks show statistically significant separation, while many fail to distinguish or never fire. The study highlights that skipped checks are recorded as passes, limiting detectable failure rates and underscoring the need for clearer evaluation records.

By Xin Xu
arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

What Breaks and What Comes Back: Capability Damage and Recovery in Depth-Pruned Small Language Models

Depth pruning removes entire Transformer blocks to shrink and speed up language models, but the resulting damage is uneven across capabilities. In a study of four 1.2–1.7 B instruction‑tuned models, function calling and mathematical reasoning collapsed in every case, while other skills varied in order of degradation. Fine‑tuning a short ‘healing’ run can restore some abilities, with the choice of which blocks to retrain and the allocation of a limited token budget influencing recovery outcomes.

By Piyush Dhoka, Vedant Pandhare, Varun Inamdar, Aadarsh Pathre, Pavitha Nooji
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 4

Resample or Reroute? Recoverable Stopping Debt Without Identified Action Selection

The paper investigates how to handle a large‑language‑model’s weak verifier that accepts a response, followed by a second call that may resample or reroute. It introduces three decision gates—recoverable stopping debt, two‑sided FIT action support, and held‑out value from an outcome‑blind selector—to determine action selection, which is treated as an identification problem. Experiments on MBPP+, LiveCodeBench, and BigCodeBench show that while stopping debt exists, the current evidence does not identify when to resample versus reroute.

By Teng-Ruei Chen