The paper introduces ScholarEvolve, a framework that evolves the software harness of language agents by automatically incorporating insights from recent research papers. It organizes harness improvements into functional modules, uses topic modeling to identify distinct strategies, and evaluates combinations to boost task performance. Experiments show significant gains on AppWorld and Tau2-Bench, raising Qwen3.5-27B completion rates from 49.6% to 63.6% and GPT-5.4-mini pass@1 from 72.7% to 81.9%.
By Jingbo Yang, Kwei-Herng Lai, Xiaowen Wang, Yaar Harari, Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Shiyu Chang
DualCast is a dual‑path language model that forecasts financial time‑series by combining a fast numerical forecaster with an optional text‑conditioned revision mechanism. The fast path trains only new financial‑token embeddings and output heads on a frozen Qwen3‑8B backbone, while the slow path uses a LoRA adapter to incorporate news and refine predictions. In zero‑shot tests across equities and energy prices at multiple time resolutions, the slow path achieves the lowest mean absolute percentage error in most settings, especially for longer horizons, and news ablations show additional gains in many markets.
By Wentao Zhao, Hongqiang Wu, Shanghang Liu, Zhaochen Zan, Yu Zhang, Biqing Huang
The paper presents an automated segmentation pipeline for whole‑slide histopathology images of colorectal cancer, labeling tumor grades 1‑3 and normal mucosa. It employs dense prediction transformers with multiple encoder backbones, overlapping patches, test‑time augmentation, and an adaptive augmentation policy guided by large language models. The approach, combined with soft‑voting ensembles and post‑processing refinements, raises the F1 score from 62.92 to 69.84 on a colorectal cancer grade dataset.
By \"Umit Mert \c{C}a\u{g}lar, Alptekin Temizel
The paper introduces STAM, a state‑transition‑aware memory framework for large language model agents that process clinical records. STAM records changes in a patient’s state as new entries arrive, using semantic retrieval and typed clinical relations to separate current information (Active) from superseded or resolved information (History). During retrieval, a query‑dependent gate selects the appropriate historical memory, enabling accurate question answering and state‑maintenance diagnostics across four longitudinal clinical benchmarks.
By Maryam Haghifam, Zahra Rajabi, Yizhou Sun, Carlos Morato
The paper introduces an explainable pedestrian routing method that estimates perceived safety by first generating a natural‑language caption from street‑level images and then deriving risk scores solely from structured features of that caption. Benchmarking nine captioning setups against a CLIP image‑embedding baseline shows comparable performance, and the system was deployed on over 650,000 images across 36 wards in Manchester and Huddersfield. Field validation with 3,669 ratings from 70 participants revealed a modest but statistically significant correlation (r = 0.262) with human judgments, while a stronger supervised benchmark did not translate into better real‑world performance.
By Simon Parkinson, Paloma Liu, Wei Zheng, Mohammadreza Sheikhfathollahi
PANDA is a decentralized architecture for large-scale, fault-tolerant multi-agent systems that enables heterogeneous agents to discover each other's capabilities and self-organize into specialized teams for each task. It decouples collective communication from team communication, allowing agents to participate in multiple teams simultaneously and load-balance tasks across the collective. PANDA supports three planning and execution patterns—star, chain, and mesh—detects and recovers from infrastructure and orchestration failures, and uses a web-of-trust model for governance without a central bottleneck.
By Matthew D. Laws, Cristina Nita-Rotaru
ShamAN-Q is a sub‑1‑bit post‑training quantization technique that builds on NanoQuant by replacing its diagonal reconstruction geometry with a dense curvature metric inspired by the Shampoo optimizer. For each linear weight, it fits a Kronecker product to the empirical Fisher information matrix of a small calibration set via Kullback–Leibler minimization, yielding a Mahalanobis reconstruction loss. The method updates continuous ADMM steps to Sylvester equations while keeping the discrete projection and deployment format unchanged, and it redistributes uniform rank across layers, achieving lower perplexity on Qwen3‑Base at roughly 1 bpw and matching or improving zero‑shot accuracy on the Eleuther LM Evaluation Harness.
By Jonathan Mei, Sang Hyub Kim, Oliver Knitter, Chi Chen, Martin Roetteler
FlexRouter is a routing framework for large language models that explicitly models model complementarity to maximize answer coverage. It formulates routing as a coverage-oriented subset selection problem and uses Determinantal Point Processes to capture both competence and redundancy. During inference, a greedy strategy based on marginal log-determinant gains allows the router to adaptively determine subset sizes without a fixed budget, achieving higher coverage with lower redundancy on the RouterEval benchmark.
By Wang Wei, Harry Yang, Tiankai Yang, Samyadeep Basu, Hongjie Chen, Andy Zhao, Franck Dernoncourt, Ryan A. Rossi, Hoda Eldardiry
Prompt2Skill is an unsupervised framework that constructs skills for Large Language Models directly from natural‑language task descriptions. It automatically derives task specifications, discovers or synthesizes datasets, and refines the skill through a reflective editing loop. In experiments across question answering, reading comprehension, spreadsheet manipulation, and mathematical reasoning, Prompt2Skill outperforms direct prompting, improving performance by an average of 10.8 points on both open‑source and frontier models.
By Bo Ni, Li Li, Ryan A. Rossi, Franck Dernoncourt, Tyler Derr
CollabFlow introduces a recursive self‑improvement framework for multi‑agent collaboration in large language model systems. It trains a Collab‑Director to assemble teams of agents, uses a frozen executor to run them, and retrains the director each round based on outcomes. The system incorporates evidence‑conditioned communication protocols within collaboration graphs and a Collaborative Trajectory Balance objective to maintain diverse high‑performing teams across rounds, achieving superior performance on twelve datasets.
By Xiao Huang, Mingda Zhang, Junming Zhang, Qiang Huang, Hanwen Zhang, Yue Dai, Zijia Wang, Xiaoying Tang
The paper introduces dattri-LLM, a library designed to make training data attribution (TDA) practical for large language models. It achieves efficiency by using compact gradient representations and a cost‑based routing system, while maintaining compatibility by capturing per‑example gradients from existing training loops without modifications, even in distributed settings. The library also offers extensibility through reusable gradient operations and callbacks, supporting various attribution methods and applications such as online data selection, and demonstrates significant performance gains and scalability up to 110B‑parameter models.
By Shixuan Liu, Tongli Zhou, Junwei Deng, Pingbang Hu, Jiaqi W. Ma
The paper identifies a flaw in rubric‑based reinforcement learning where additive reward aggregation allows policies to compensate for missing critical criteria, leading to higher scores but poorer answers, especially in clinical consultation tasks. It demonstrates that grouping rubric criteria into protocol‑level dimensions—so a dimension only counts when all its criteria are satisfied—mitigates this reward hacking. The proposed Protocol‑level Rubrics (ProRubric) improve appropriateness by 10.8 points without sacrificing coverage and achieve the best performance across seven benchmarks.
By Maoqi Liu, Junwei He, Bowen Zhang, Feiran Li, Wentao Ma, Rongyi Lin, Shuhan Zhong, Quan Fang
The paper introduces Triage, a method that predicts the attention distribution of audio tokens before a language model processes them, enabling early pruning of less important tokens. By fitting a linear map to encoder outputs, Triage achieves high correlation (ρ ≥ 0.69) with full-model attention across eleven of thirteen large audio language models. Using this prediction, Triage compresses audio inputs while maintaining near‑full performance, outperforming baselines in transcription accuracy and significantly increasing the amount of audio that fits within a model’s context window.
By Kyoungjun Park, Yunzhe Li, Lili Qiu
The paper introduces Adaptive Self-Consistency (ASC), a method that treats large language models as grey-boxes by leveraging the full answer distribution from log‑probabilities rather than single sampled answers. It formulates inference as sequential mode identification with distribution‑valued observations, proving that this approach never performs worse than traditional black‑box sampling and can stop earlier. The proposed ASC‑D algorithm, a betting‑based stopping rule, achieves significant reductions in required trajectories—up to 95.6% fewer—while attaining the best fixed‑budget correct‑certification rates on MMLU‑Redux across three open‑source models.
By Jingkai Huang, Yunfan Zhang, Will Ma, Weihua Zhou, Zhengyuan Zhou
DrivingBench is the first benchmark that tests general‑purpose vision‑language models on the task of driving a real Toyota Corolla around a parking‑lot cone course. The models receive live camera frames and issue steering and velocity commands, with inference latency counted as part of the challenge. In tests, only GPT‑6 Astra completed the course, while other models showed limited progress or failed to pass half the course.
By Aditya Ramabadran, Simon Mahns, Tobias Gessler
APTInvestBench is a benchmark that evaluates how well autonomous agents can investigate advanced persistent threats (APTs) when faced with different telemetry settings. It contains 370 cases derived from 56 attack reconstructions, totaling 16.4 million log records, and tests agents on seven SOC-inspired telemetry conditions. The benchmark measures evidence acquisition and formal citation support, revealing that while overall coverage drops only slightly when telemetry is limited, a significant portion of actions lose sufficient citation support, highlighting instability in agent performance.
By Yu Wang, Shuhao Li, Tao Yin, Ziyang Li, Xueying Zhao, Peishuai Sun, Jiang Xie
The paper introduces TED (Text-Axis Evidence Decomposition), a post‑hoc scoring method that improves anomaly localization in CLIP‑based detectors without altering the backbone or prompts. TED evaluates whether ambiguous responses are better supported by defect patches or normal patches, thereby distinguishing true defects from visually complex normal regions. Experiments show that TED significantly enhances pixel‑level localization across frozen VLM backbones and adapted hosts, especially under hard‑false‑positive competition.
By JinYoung Kim, Geonho Kim, GiJeong Park, Geonu Lee, YoungJoon Yoo
The paper introduces an LLM-based framework for continuous dimensional emotion evaluation in multimodal dialogue, combining discrete emotion recognition with Valence-Arousal-Dominance (VAD) assessment on the IEMOCAP dataset. It incorporates acoustic cues as natural language descriptions via the SpeechCueLLM approach and evaluates six models from the LLaMA, GPT, and Qwen families using zero-shot, few-shot, and LoRA fine-tuning. LoRA-fine-tuned LLaMA models outperform prompt-engineered GPT models, achieving a new state-of-the-art Valence CCC of 0.7822, and ablation studies show that textual audio descriptions significantly benefit smaller models.
"whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that domain adaptation through fine-tuning can surpass larger GPT models in multimodal emotion evaluation, highlighting the importance of tailored training for emotion recognition tasks."
By Yutong Hu, Jinho Choi
The paper introduces HealBench, a benchmark of 265 runtime errors from 18 real-world repositories, and HealGuard, a safety framework that restricts healing code to an analyzable subset of Python and applies static and dynamic taint analysis. Using these tools, the authors evaluate a dedicated healing method and three general coding agents powered by different LLM backbones, achieving a 38.11% resume rate and a 28.68% test‑pass rate, while HealGuard flags 17.4% of successful healings as potentially unsafe. The study demonstrates that current LLM agents can meaningfully repair real repository crashes, but also highlights significant safety concerns that the Guardrail framework can detect, albeit with a high false‑positive rate.
By Gou Tan, Pengfei Chen, Zhensu Sun, Jieke Shi, Junkai Chen, Ting Zhang, Weifeng Sun, Junda He, Shuai Liang, Chuanfu Zhang, Lwin Khin Shar, David Lo
DAGent introduces an Evaluate‑then‑Grow planning approach for deep research agents, building directed acyclic graphs incrementally based on confidence and uncertainty from completed tasks. The framework includes a hierarchical context layer for efficient query handling and a structural reinforcement learning component, DAGRPO, that rewards topology‑conditioned execution. Experiments on BrowseComp‑Plus, GAIA, and xbench‑DeepSearch show DAGent outperforming strong baselines across multiple backbones and scaling to large language models.
By Hanwen Liu, Yuanfu Sun, Qiaoyu Tan