arXiv:2607. 09156v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Additive activation steering (injecting a scaled residual-stream direction during generation) is calibrated almost entirely in single-turn chat, yet the models it targets are increasingly deployed as tool-using ReAct agents.
By Lucas Pinto
The paper introduces AgentDiff, a metric that quantifies how much LLM agents’ answers differ when inputs are altered by meaning‑bearing rewrites (paraphrases, synonym substitutions) versus presentation changes (reordering, formatting, distractors). Across 68 model–benchmark–scaffold combinations involving ten LLMs and over 1,500 questions, meaning‑bearing rewrites consistently produce a roughly 20‑percentage‑point higher inconsistency rate than presentation changes, a gap that persists across severity proxies and remains significant even outside the Qwen family. Trace analysis reveals that meaning‑bearing rewrites preserve the first action but reduce thought similarity from the second step onward, extending the divergence cascade—a phenomenon termed “stealth divergence.”
By Liyun Zhang, Jiayi Guo
arXiv:2606. 01090v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Equivariance theory predicts that an architectural symmetry prior reduces sample complexity by a factor of |G|; this is widely cited but rarely measured as a scaling law with controls that separate the prior from its confounds.
By Ahmed M. Adly
arXiv:2607. 04510v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Emergent misalignment (EM) -- the broad misbehaviour a language model acquires after fine-tuning on narrow harmful data -- is mediated in Qwen2.
By Lyndon Drake (University of Oxford), Zandi Eberstadt (University of Oxford)
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:2607. 18553v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Can a language model read the quality of ongoing computation, and can an external intervention turn that readout into better outcomes?
By Jan Kirin