Predictor-Guided Latent Space Codon Optimization (LSCO) transforms the discrete codon selection problem into a continuous optimization task by embedding sequences into the latent space of a pretrained mRNA language model, allowing gradient-based search. LSCO integrates a data-driven expression objective from an uncertainty-aware predictor, a Minimum-Free-Energy regularizer for structural stability, a naturalness prior derived from a protein-to-codon back-translation model, and constrained decoding to preserve protein fidelity. In a real-world wet-lab antibody expression dataset, LSCO outperforms both simple frequency-based methods and modern deep generative baselines in predicted expression while maintaining appropriate biophysical properties.
By Alberto Caron, Tianyu Cui, Dmytro S. Lituiev, Mangal Prakash, Artem Moskalev, Amina Mollaysa, Bo Zhai, Hirsh Nanda, Daniel M. Poole, Zhongyin Liu, Iman Farasat, Robert Davidson, Nikolay V. Manyakov, Tommaso Mansi, Scott Oloff, Rui Liao
The paper introduces Pluralistic Preference Optimization (PlurPO), a method that reduces social sycophancy in language models by having the model simulate multiple stakeholders’ perspectives when responding to interpersonal conflict scenarios. PlurPO trains the model to prefer responses acceptable to all simulated stakeholders, using only the model’s own output signals without ground‑truth labels. Experiments across four datasets and model families show significant reductions in sycophantic endorsement, including an 89% drop on harmful intent statements and halving the gap in general advice endorsement rates.
By Stephane Hatgis-Kessell, Myra Cheng, Xiaoxuan Hou, Qian Hu, Rahul Gupta, Natasha Jaques, Emma Brunskill
The paper evaluates two strategies for training language‑model‑based world models—fine‑tuning and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)—across five diverse environments. Fine‑tuning generally yields higher rewards, while RAG is more data‑efficient. The authors propose a counterfactual error estimation for RAG, improve retrieval with a hierarchical query reformulation, and combine both approaches into a hybrid system that outperforms each method alone.
By Dhananjay Ashok, Shantanu Agarwal, Vivek Datla, Jonathan May, Alfy Samuel
The paper introduces HypoAgent, an agentic framework for refining abductive hypotheses over knowledge graphs. It treats user-provided conditions as steering operators, using a small generator for initial proposals, root-cause analysis to identify problematic branches, and a refiner agent that revises hypotheses based on diagnosis and prior proposals. Experiments on BioKG, PharmKG8k, and DBpedia50 show HypoAgent surpasses one-shot generation in both single-turn and multi-turn scenarios, including unconditional settings.
By Yisen Gao, Yixi Cai, Tianshi Zheng, Jiaxin Bai, Yangqiu Song
WebUIProof is a new execution‑oriented benchmark for WebUI code generation that supplies structured specifications and dense, executable interaction tests across general WebUIs and 3D interactive simulations. It employs a UI‑agent harness that runs tests in a headless browser using a plan–act–observe loop to locate DOM elements, perform actions, observe changes, and verify assertions. Evaluations on eight commercial LLMs reveal frequent interaction‑based failures, especially on 3D interfaces, and demonstrate that training compact models with RL rewards from these tests improves functional completion and reduces build failures.
By Yun-Yun Tsai, Yuning Mao, Shiqi Wang, Junfeng Yang, Sinong Wang
The paper introduces Whiteout, a tool that prevents large language models from revealing personally sensitive information (PSI) by overwriting such data with carefully crafted obfuscation samples. Whiteout is evaluated on various LLMs, including an OpenAI model, and shows effective PSI protection with minimal impact on model utility and safety. The study also tests Whiteout against multiple attack vectors and discusses its security and ethical implications.
By Anna Yoo Jeong Ha, Ronik Bhaskar, Haitao Zheng, Ben Y. Zhao
The report audits a long‑term‑memory retrieval chain on 500 LongMemEval‑S development questions, evaluating reader performance under an adapted GPT‑4o rubric. Scores vary widely across reader lanes (93–479), with the strongest lanes scoring 479 and 475, and re‑judging the same pass‑1 answers changes three labels, yielding 478. Fixed‑answer knowledge‑update re‑scoring achieves 70/72 or 69/72 depending on the template, and a different‑family reader scores 474, just 1.0 percentage point below the headline pass. The study also reports that live reader request bodies were not retained, that 18 of 23 gains occurred where baseline packets lacked evidence, and that a negative control rejects a verifier that repairs some wrong drafts but breaks many correct ones. Overall, the findings do not establish a new leaderboard leader or a transferable memory advantage, and the released artifacts support packet inspection and re‑scoring but do not reconstruct the method.
By Christopher J. Chanhnourack
The paper introduces GUI agents for continual game generation, presenting PlaytestArena—a benchmark of 200 browser-based game-generation tasks with rubrics for in‑play behavior—and Play2Code, an iterative framework where a game agent and a rubric‑blind GUI playtester refine games through shared memory. Play2Code achieves a 66.8% rubric pass rate, surpassing baseline methods by 37.1 and 14.6 points, and shows consistent score improvement across refinement rounds. The study demonstrates that GUI playtesting provides actionable, traceable feedback that can guide interactive code generation.
By Yixu Huang, Bo Li, Na Li, Zhe Wang, Kaijie Chen, Haonan Ge, Qingyi Si, Yuanzhe Shen, Ruihan Yang, Guangjing Wang, Hongcheng Guo
FastKernels is a benchmark comprising 384 GPU kernel tasks from 47 architectures across 8 categories, designed to evaluate kernel generation agents in realistic production settings. It covers 94.6% of HuggingFace Transformers architectures, scoring kernels on correctness, coverage, and speedup within their native execution paths. The benchmark reveals that kernel‑level speedups often collapse to modest end‑to‑end gains and that isolated performance rankings can misrepresent real‑world effectiveness.
By Gabriele Oliaro, Jaeseong Lee, Yichao Fu, Zhaoyuan Su, Owen Lu, Sreeram Vennam, May Jiang, Junli Wang, Hao Zhang, Zhihao Jia, Samyam Rajbhandari
The paper introduces BenchGuard, a framework that uses advanced language models to audit execution-based agent benchmarks. BenchGuard systematically cross-verifies benchmark artifacts through structured LLM protocols, optionally incorporating agent solutions or execution traces for deeper diagnostics. In tests on ScienceAgentBench and BIXBench Verified-50, BenchGuard uncovered numerous author-confirmed and expert-identified issues, including fatal errors that made tasks unsolvable, and demonstrated cost-effective auditing for complex bioinformatics tasks.
By Xinming Tu (Minta), Tianze Wang (Minta), Yingzhou (Minta), Lu, Kexin Huang, Yuanhao Qu, Sara Mostafavi
Goldilocks RL proposes an adaptive data‑selection strategy for reinforcement learning in language models, using a Selector network to predict reward variability and prioritize questions that are neither too easy nor too hard. By continuously adapting to the model’s evolving abilities, Goldilocks improves training efficiency on large‑scale reasoning datasets, achieving up to 78% fewer optimization steps compared to standard GRPO. The approach addresses the sample‑inefficiency problem of sparse rewards in reasoning tasks.
By Ilia Mahrooghi, Aryo Lotfi, Emmanuel Abbe
The paper investigates the gap between retrieval and reading in document vision‑language models, showing that even when the correct page is retrieved, the model often fails to use the text on that page. By comparing answers derived from page images alone versus images plus extracted OCR text, the authors demonstrate that adding OCR text can improve strict accuracy by 13 to 16 points on their FoveDoc‑Bench benchmark. The study also reveals that OCR benefits textual evidence but not charts or figures, and that its advantage diminishes as retrieval quality worsens.
By Qingtao Xia, Siyao Cheng, Jiahua Bao, Jiaxing Du, Jie Liu
The paper evaluates how well generalist and dermatology-specific machine learning models perform on diverse skin lesion datasets, including dermoscopic images and smartphone photographs. It benchmarks a range of architectures—general-purpose vision-language models, foundation models, and task-specific dermatology classifiers—under conditions of distribution shift, modality change, and demographic variability. The study quantifies the performance gap between current state‑of‑the‑art models and the robustness needed for safe, equitable clinical deployment.
By Emanoel dos Santos, Kelvin Cunha, Rodrigo Mota, Fabio Papais, Thales Bezerra, Natalia Lopes, Erico Medeiros, Shirley Cruz, Jessica Araujo, Paulo Borba, Tsang Ing Ren
The paper investigates how deep sequence models—such as recurrent neural networks and Transformers—can be integrated into conformal prediction for time series. It explores three methods: conditional quantile regression, conditional quantile function estimation, and localized conformal prediction, providing theoretical asymptotic conditional coverage guarantees for each. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the practical effectiveness of these approaches.
By Junghwan Lee, Jonghyeok Lee, Yao Xie
The paper introduces PTH (Probe The Harness), a set of checks designed to expose hidden details in experimental setups that can alter the ranking of stale-data reinforcement learning methods for language models. By applying PTH to a comparison between SAN and truncated importance sampling (TIS), the authors demonstrate that subtle harness configurations—such as how PPO ratios are computed, data seeding, replay queue reuse, and loss normalisation—can reverse the observed performance order. The study provides a detailed signature of each influencing factor, reference results for TIS and uncorrected GRPO, and a checklist to ensure fair comparisons.
By Taiheng Pan
The paper investigates why training terminal agents often stalls when using a meta‑agent like Claude Opus to generate tasks and verifiers. It identifies three failure modes—benchmark invalidity, harness brittleness, and reward misalignment—and shows that prompt redesign and context extension can improve solvability by 5.6×, yet a 9B model still tops out at 81.3% mean pass@2. Adding hard tasks drops performance to 20.6%, highlighting that solvability depends on the model used.
By Xi Qin, Isabel Kurth, Xin Cui, Elin Park, Alexander Schaefer, Yaad Oren
The paper introduces a de‑identified corpus of 33 in‑person cognitive assessment conversations, comprising 8,250 utterances annotated for three speaker roles and 56 dialogue acts. The authors benchmark large language models on fine‑grained dialogue‑act classification and next‑patient‑utterance generation, finding that instruction tuning and reasoning‑aware fine‑tuning improve performance but that models still struggle with closely related dialogue acts. The corpus and benchmark are presented as tools to measure interaction structure in cognitive assessments and to support future research on conversational markers, clinician education, and validated simulated patients.
By Vishalakshi Arumugam, Dan Schumacher, Veronica Rammouz, Erfan Nourbakhsh, Enrique Gonzalez Guerrero, Jeremy Davis, Anthony Rios
The study investigates why multimodal large language models (VLMs) perform better at verifying scientific claims when evidence is presented as a table rather than a chart, despite both formats containing the same data. Using layer‑wise linear probing and attention analysis on three open‑weight VLMs, the authors find that chart information is indeed encoded in intermediate representations but never reaches the prediction layer, a gap absent for tables. Attention patterns reveal that this disconnect manifests differently across model families, suggesting the issue lies in how encoded visual data is utilized at prediction time rather than in the encoding process itself.
By Sunisth Kumar, Xanh Ho, Tim Schopf, Andre Greiner-Petter, Florian Boudin, Akiko Aizawa
The paper demonstrates that a targeted adversarial perturbation can reduce a vision‑language model’s training loss to near zero for a fixed target caption, yet the same model, when generating freely, still produces the correct description. This phenomenon, termed the train/inference gap, is traced to a single autoregressive step where the target token’s rank is fixed across all images, and further analysis shows that the language decoder, rather than the visual encoder, determines whether the corrupted signal is amplified or suppressed. The study uses a controlled two‑stage PGD attack on Qwen2.5‑VL‑7B‑Instruct and evaluates the effect on 200 held‑out COCO images, revealing that adversarial robustness in autoregressive VLMs largely depends on the language decoder’s prior.
whyItMatters":"The findings suggest that defenses and faithfulness evaluations for deployed vision‑language models should focus on the language decoder rather than the visual encoder, as the former is the key determinant of robustness to adversarial perturbations."
By Arun Josephraj Arokiaraj, Zekun Wu, Adriano Koshiyama
The paper introduces Follow the Winners (FTW), a critic‑free policy‑learning algorithm that adapts the cross‑entropy method for reinforcement fine‑tuning of agentic large language models. FTW replaces group rollouts with an ordinal filter on replay‑buffer samples, achieving polynomial concentration in the order statistic of returns and offering a bounded risk‑seeking offset that balances variance reduction. Experiments on Sokoban and Search‑R1 show that FTW matches the performance of GRPO and PPO while reducing reliance on value models or repeated rollouts.
By Joery Ari\"en de Vries, Neil David Lawrence, Zhenwen Dai