The study investigates how verbal attunement and real‑time behavioral mimicry affect users’ perceptions of an embodied AI counselor in virtual reality. Participants interacted with a system that varied in verbal attunement (attuned vs. neutral) and behavioral mimicry (present vs. absent). Results indicated that verbal attunement most reliably increased perceived empathy, while mimicry had a marginal effect on perceived humanness and showed exploratory positive associations with empathy, positivity, and humanness, especially among female participants.
By Nathalia Gomez, Haig Shamlian, Omar Khan, Tiffany D. Do
The paper introduces SGCA‑Net, a framework for place recognition using automotive spinning FMCW radar. It combines rotation‑robust feature extraction with Spatially Gated Correlation Aggregation, which learns spatial weights to mitigate unstable radar regions while preserving informative pairwise correlations. Experiments on the MulRan dataset show SGCA‑Net outperforms state‑of‑the‑art methods in various environments, and tests on the HeRCULES dataset demonstrate its ability to generalize to unseen settings and sensors without fine‑tuning.
By Saimunur Rahman, Sagun Singh Shrestha, Abdelwahed Khamis, Peyman Moghadam
LabourCrew is a multi‑agent Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG) framework designed for trustworthy statutory question answering in labour law. It introduces three grounding mechanisms: StatuteGraph, an evidence‑exchange ledger, and a calibrated trust gate that controls false‑accept rates. Evaluated on a Bangla Labour Act QA set, LabourCrew achieves a false‑accept rate of 0.081 and higher answer relevancy than existing RAG methods, demonstrating that calibrated abstention is key to auditable legal QA.
By Fatema Tuj Johora Faria, Mukaffi Bin Moin, Jubayer Al Mahmud, M. F. Mridha, Md. Alam Hossain
The paper introduces a formal framework for agent harnesses that guarantees termination, prevents drift, and enforces spend limits through bounded loops, gates, and repair relations. It proves that these guarantees hold even with repair budgets and demonstrates the effectiveness of the system by identifying vacuous gates and achieving low false‑accept rates in a 69‑loop catalogue. The authors provide an instrumented implementation and a held‑out mutant corpus to validate gate correctness.
By Varun Pratap Bhardwaj, Garima Singh, Arun Pratap Bhardwaj
Schr"odinger's Repository (Schr"odingerRepo) is an evaluation framework that tests coding agents on dynamically instantiated repository representations to mitigate data leakage from static repository benchmarks. It transforms test repositories through four levels—problem statement reconstruction, namespace remapping, intra-file layout reordering, and functionality-preserving code rewriting—to obscure familiar cues while preserving executable behavior. Experiments on popular LLMs using SWE-bench Verified and SWE-QA show that removing these cues consistently degrades performance and increases interaction costs, mainly due to harder repository exploration and localization.
By Silin Chen, Yufei Yang, Xiaodong Gu, Yuling Shi, Chengcheng Wan, Haibing Guan
The paper discusses how financial institutions are increasingly using AI agents in areas such as credit, fraud, and compliance, yet current governance focuses only on individual components. It introduces ARIA, a finance‑specific reference architecture that adds six capabilities—policy specification, population‑level monitoring, bounded authority, runtime containment, adaptive policy change, and preserved human oversight—to address the gap of constitutional non‑compositionality. Two simulations demonstrate how local controls can miss collective bias and how observed‑versus‑expected monitoring can provide earlier warnings of drift.
By Jose Manuel de la Chica Rodriguez, Juan Manuel Vera Diaz, Pablo Delgado Romero
The paper introduces the Agile‑V Assurance Spine, a cross‑domain transition contract designed to manage the assurance of outputs from agentic engineering systems across software, firmware, and PCB domains. It specifies that evidence is only accepted when it demonstrates required properties through an authoritative source profile, is tightly bound to the exact artifact and policy baseline, stays current with declared dependencies, and meets risk‑appropriate independence and authority. Gate decisions are recorded as receipts, approvals and exceptions are scope‑ and time‑bounded, and authorization is rechecked at the effect boundary before any merge, deployment, flashing, release, or fabrication step.
By Christopher Koch
The study investigates how Large Language Models (LLMs) acting as surrogate consumers are influenced by marketing pricing cues such as just‑below pricing and promotional framing. Using a tool called "Tool‑Lab" to trace information acquisition, the researchers found that when no cost is imposed, pricing cues rarely mislead LLMs, but when acquisition costs are introduced under a vague goal prompt, LLMs tend to omit important diagnostic attributes and make suboptimal choices similar to human heuristics. The findings suggest that marketing heuristics in AI‑driven shopping are shaped more by storefront information architecture than by inherent LLM limitations.
By Davood Wadi, Yu Ma
The paper introduces the Agent-Editing World Model (AEWM), a new approach that models how reasoning and actions influence future task progress instead of simulating tool responses. AEWM includes an Action Judge that classifies decisions as Critical, Exploratory, or Noisy, and a State Revision mechanism that edits noisy reasoning–action continuations from the same observed history. The integrated system, EditAct, directly updates the underlying state during real execution, leading to significant performance gains across multiple benchmarks and agent backbones.
By Shuang Sun, Guoxin Chen, Fanzhe Meng, Jia Deng, Huatong Song, Jinhao Jiang, Wayne Xin Zhao, Hongteng Xu, Ji-Rong Wen
The paper introduces a language‑guided approach for robots to join human groups by predicting socially compliant joining poses. It uses recursive spectral partitioning to generate candidate group subsets, ranks them with a language‑conditioned image–geometry model, and then applies a goal predictor that incorporates human‑formation priors to produce a multimodal energy–orientation map of feasible robot poses. Experiments on various group scenarios show competitive grounding accuracy, superior joining‑pose prediction, and successful real‑robot demonstrations in both static and dynamic settings.
By Zilin Fang, Zishuo Wang, Gim Hee Lee, David Hsu
The paper derives an information‑theoretic bound for a shared‑state cognitive architecture that uses an auxiliary variable to mediate context. It shows that the residual dependence of observable behavior on context, given the shared state, is bounded by the information carried by the auxiliary variable and its conditional entropy. A recognition‑memory example illustrates how to compute and compare this bound across different representational choices, providing a framework for analyzing context‑memory‑control trade‑offs in cognitive models and artificial agents.
By Song-Ju Kim
The paper introduces Preregistered Belief Revision Contracts (PBRC), a protocol that separates open communication from admissible epistemic change in deliberative multi-agent systems. PBRC fixes evidence triggers, revision operators, priority rules, and fallback policies, requiring that belief changes cite preregistered triggers and validated evidence tokens. The authors prove that PBRC prevents confidence inflation from conformity, preserves auditability, ensures epistemic accountability, and characterizes enforced belief trajectories under token-invariant contracts.
By Saad Alqithami
SR‑Fraud is a framework that uses a frozen, stateless LLM agent to score transactions in real time while an offline reflection agent proposes boundary hypotheses based on matured errors. The system then verifies these hypotheses deterministically before updating its knowledge state. On a production payment‑fraud benchmark, SR‑Fraud outperforms both static and periodically retrained CatBoost models and successfully detects an emerging fraud burst.
By Xuwei Tan, Yao Ma, Xueru Zhang
The paper investigates how to improve large language model (LLM) based autonomous web agents by filtering irrelevant webpage content. The authors reproduce baseline models on the WebArena benchmark and identify failure modes caused by raw HTML input. They propose DeBERTa‑ and T5‑based retrieval models that rank HTML elements by relevance, fine‑tuned on Mind2Web data, and demonstrate that the DeBERTa model raises the LLaMA‑2‑70B agent’s success rate from 1.97% to 2.96%. Additionally, a zero‑shot ColBERT retriever achieves recall of 0.52 on Mind2Web and 0.47 on WebArena.
By Zhitong Guo, Jing Yu Koh, Ruiyu Li
The paper introduces Expected‑Severity‑Risk (ESR), a new objective for selecting questions in proactive medical dialogue that prioritizes reducing the expected severity of diagnostic errors rather than merely uncertainty. ESR uses population statistics to marginalize over possible answers and distills its rankings into a prefix‑only language policy, enabling deployment without teacher‑side risk computation. Experiments on DDxPlus show ESR cuts high‑severity diagnostic misses by 29.5% and boosts accuracy while adding only 0.14 extra questions per dialogue.
By Chenxuan Li, Xinrong Chen, Luyan Zhang, Peidong Jia, Runfan Zheng, Zhongyu Zhao, Xuecheng Shang, Peixing Wan
TwinCheck is an inference‑time verification policy for stateful tool agents that only replaces a proposed tool call when a trace‑grounded counterfactual alternative, called a negative twin, satisfies structural checks and is preferred by a pairwise verifier in both candidate orders. The method uses exact replay to isolate intervention effects, and in experiments on 159 multi‑turn BFCL V4 tasks, it increased GPT‑5.6 Sol’s task success from 45.3% to 58.5% without any observed success‑to‑failure regressions.
By Jiaxuan Dai, Tianyi Huang
The paper introduces PLLM+, a hybrid pipeline for resolving Python dependency conflicts that combines deterministic steps—such as static AST inference, replaying known successful configurations from a solutions database, and live PyPI validation—with an LLM-based repair fallback. Evaluated on the HG2.9K benchmark of 2,891 failing snippets, PLLM+ successfully fixes 1,500 cases, outperforming the baseline PLLM and reducing average runtime from 368.7 to 71.8 seconds per snippet. The majority of fixes (1,495) come from replaying existing configurations, while the LLM fallback contributes only five additional solutions.
By Veronica Poweska, Ariana Oyanguren, Jessica Pourleyli, Sourena Khanzadeh, Manar Alalfi
The paper introduces Issuer‑Sovereign Agentic Payments, a framework that keeps the issuing bank in control of AI‑agent payments. It allows a cardholder to set a spending rule once, which the bank’s authentication system records. When an AI agent initiates a payment, the bank verifies the merchant against the approved rule and generates the card authentication value only if the merchant is permitted, enabling the transaction to proceed through standard card rails without additional dependencies.
By Dishant Sharma, Rajneesh Kaushal, Ashu Kanaujia
CAVEAT is a new benchmark that tests computer‑use agents (CUAs) in nine online marketplace environments where platform incentives may steer agents away from user goals. The study finds that agents succeed in choosing user‑optimal products only 78.6% of the time in neutral settings, dropping to 17.3% when steering mechanisms are active. By diagnosing three failure points—priority distortion, premature narrowing of options, and early commitment—CAVEAT-Harness interventions raise user‑optimal purchasing success by 55.0%.
By Yuxuan Li, Will Epperson, Wesley Deng, Zezhou Huang
Emergi-PersonaOS is a psychology‑grounded operating system designed to manage persona agents throughout their lifecycle. It structures personas into three layers—dispositional traits, characteristic adaptations, and narrative identity—allowing the system to infer current persona states from situational cues and generate appropriate actions. The OS records experiences, evaluates revision candidates, and controls belief updates through explicit review and traceable evidence, enabling controllable evolution of persona agents over long interactions.
By Haoluan Fu, Keni Chen, Xinyu Jia, Jinpeng Wang, Yuyu Yin