arXiv AI

Conflicting Supervision Moves Commitment, Not Capability: A 12.29{\sigma} arrangement effect that is exactly zero under a convention-agnostic score

The paper investigates how the ordering of training data written under two incompatible but correct conventions influences a model’s learned parameters. It shows that the learning‑rate schedule acts as an averaging operator that determines the ordering effect, with constant schedules producing larger effects than decaying ones. Experiments on a single corpus with fixed budget demonstrate a statistically significant 12.29‑sigma shift in parameter commitment, yet this shift is zero when measured with a convention‑agnostic metric.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

A Shared Learning Rate Is Not a Neutral Control in Selective On-Policy Distillation

The paper investigates selective on‑policy distillation, where a student model is trained only on token positions chosen by a selector. It demonstrates that the commonly used shared learning rate is not neutral: performance varies significantly with the learning rate for different selectors, leading to inconsistent comparisons. The authors attribute this selector‑rate entanglement to the selection process itself and recommend reporting the full arm‑by‑rate matrix for fair evaluation.

By Chencheng Zhu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 15

GRADE: Graph Representation of LLM Agent Dependency and Execution

The paper introduces GRADE, a graph-based representation of large language model (LLM) agent executions that captures both execution steps and their dependencies. By adding graded dependency edges—observed, declared, or inferred—to the trace, the authors evaluate how this dependency layer affects failure prediction across six corpora involving tool use, coding, and web tasks. Experiments show that the dependency block can improve prediction in some settings, but its effectiveness varies with the evaluation probe and corpus, and controlled experiments demonstrate that the observed structure is not merely a degree-matched artifact.

By Yue Zhao
arXiv AI
2d ago

The Delegation Danger Band: Why Mid-Capability Sub-Agents Over-Trust Inherited Stale State

The paper investigates how inherited state affects sub-agent performance in multi-agent frameworks, comparing three inheritance policies—Reset, Selective, and Full—across a ladder of Qwen3 models. It finds that reliance on stale state decreases with model capability, but a mid-capability model (Qwen3‑1.7B) exhibits a statistically significant local minimum of net harm, defining a "danger band." Selective handoff consistently improves accuracy over Full, especially within the danger band, while a fixed-threshold router fails on other datasets.

By Jundong Hu, Shekar Ramachandran
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Instruction Duplication as an Inference-Time Control Primitive

The paper introduces instruction duplication, a simple inference‑time control that repeats the procedural instruction without retraining or decoding changes. Across seven instruction‑tuned models and 16,800 scheduled generations, duplicating the instruction improves deterministic All‑8 diagnostic‑response success from 90.22% to 93.17% and reduces failures by 30.2%. In downstream Answer Engineering scenarios, duplication further boosts success rates, demonstrating its practical impact on systems that rely on the generated trajectory.

By Victor Lavrenko (PeaceTech VC, Israel)