Large language models

Model releases, architecture work and prompting research on large language models — from frontier-lab announcements to the arXiv papers behind them.

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arXiv AI
Oct 1

DAGent: Evaluate-then-Grow Planning for Deep Research Agents

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
arXiv AI
Oct 1

UniAE-MoE: A Unified Audio Encoder via Mixture of Experts

UniAE-MoE is a unified audio encoder that uses a Mixture-of-Experts architecture to model cross‑domain audio representations. It integrates encoder components from Qwen2‑Audio and Audio‑Flamingo 3, enhances them with SwiGLU and shared experts, and applies a two‑stage instruction‑tuning strategy along with task‑specific data scaling. The model achieves state‑of‑the‑art results on the XARES‑LLM benchmark (0.802) and tops the Interspeech 2026 Audio Encoder Capability Challenge, demonstrating strong generalization across speech, music, and general audio tasks.

By Shengbo Cai, Zhisheng Zhang, Zichao Nie, Jing Peng, Jingran Xie, Zhiyong Wu
arXiv AI
Oct 1

EngramBench: A Capability-Grounded Benchmark for Skill-Evolution Harnesses

EngramBench is a new benchmark designed to evaluate skill evolution in autonomous agents by focusing on genuine capability abstraction rather than solution copying. It includes 30 learning tasks and 13 unseen transfer tasks that require agents to manage complex, multi-hour development cycles with LLM‑simulated users. The study shows that while static skill banks cannot eliminate the need for precise code implementation, they effectively reduce redundant context and cut overall coding time by more than 55%.

By Zhixuan Tan, Pengjie Gu, Zhao Li, Yihan Hu, Xu He, Dong Li, Jianye Hao
arXiv AI
Oct 1

Faithful Dual-constrained Erasure for Robust LLM Safety Alignment

The paper introduces FDCU, a dual‑constrained subspace projection framework designed to improve machine unlearning for large language models. FDCU limits parameter updates with a dual‑masking rule that preserves general knowledge via Fisher Information while preventing the activation of spurious suppressors through the Principle of Minimal Functional Intervention. Experiments show that FDCU achieves state‑of‑the‑art robustness against retraining attacks while maintaining near‑lossless general utility, thereby ensuring durable safety for LLMs.

By Jiaqing Li, Shide Zhou, Zhibo Zhang, Yuxi Li, Tianlong Yu, Kailong Wang
arXiv AI
Oct 1

Working Around the Compute Ceiling: Byte-Exact Memory in Galahad Makes LLM Reading a One-Time Cost LLM Reading a One-Time Cost

The paper introduces Galahad, a memory layer that stores a transformer language model’s key‑value state for blocks of text, allowing subsequent requests to reuse previously computed attention rather than recomputing it. On seven real‑world datasets, 98.7% of prompt tokens were already read, and with Galahad the model could attend to an entire 97,000‑token corpus, achieving 98–100% recall on a 100‑fact test while reducing inference time and energy consumption dramatically. The approach was validated across 30 models and all runtimes, demonstrating that stateful inference can replace stateless serving without loss of accuracy.

By Sietse Schelpe
arXiv AI
Oct 1

Hiding in Plain Sight: Decoupling Pretext from Actuation for Skill Poisoning in LLM Agents

The paper introduces a new skill poisoning technique for large language model agents that decouples the pretext (rationale) from the actuation (operation). By separating these two risk‑realization factors, the authors create coordinated pretext‑actuation skill pairs that allow malicious actions to remain hidden within legitimate agent behavior. An automated framework is presented to discover execution dependencies, synthesize these skill pairs, and refine them through closed‑loop feedback, achieving high attack success in both single‑session and persistent scenarios.

By Wenxin Wu, Lingyong Yan, Lei Sha, Shuaiqiang Wang, Jiashu Zhao
arXiv AI
Oct 1

TTLab at Daleel 2026: STAR-Ar, Sequence Tagging for Argument Recognition in Arabic

The paper introduces STAR‑Ar, a BERT‑BiLSTM‑CRF model designed for the Daleel 2026 Arabic argument mining shared task. It treats argument discourse unit detection and classification as a token‑level sequence labeling problem, achieving an F1‑score of 72.69 on validation and 73.7 on test data. Analysis shows that models trained only on editorial texts perform worse than those trained on debates, mainly due to the smaller editorial dataset.

By Bhuvanesh Verma, Ali Abusaleh, Alexander Mehler
arXiv AI
Oct 1

GroundingPI: A Grounding Foundation Model towards Physical Intelligence with Visual Primitives

GroundingPI is a 4‑billion‑parameter grounding foundation model that generates points and boxes as quantized coordinates in a shared vocabulary. It is trained with multimodal and spatial pretraining, supervised fine‑tuning, and reinforcement learning, achieving a new state‑of‑the‑art average of 73.68% across 34 grounding benchmarks. As a visual backbone, GroundingPI improves performance in robotic manipulation and autonomous driving, outperforming larger models and mainstream backbones in several out‑of‑distribution settings.

By Qize Yu, Lianrui Fan, Boyu Chen, Jiaqi Liang, Xini Ding, Yue Chen, Zetian Song, Yuran Wang, Yi Zou, Kaixuan Wang, Tianxing Chen, Wenxuan Song, Bohan Zhou, Mingleyang Li, Siqiao Huang, Yuqi Ye, Caigao Jiang, Wei Wei, Ruihai Wu, Hang Zhang, Yixiao Ge, Shuchang Zhou, Shilong Liu, Xianming Liu, Ping Luo, Shiyu Huang
arXiv AI
Oct 1

D-Scope: Decomposing and Steering Diffusion Transformers with Sparse Autoencoders

D‑Scope is a framework that links the interpretation of sparse autoencoder (SAE) features in diffusion transformers (DiTs) to controllable image generation. It aggregates SigLIP‑2 embeddings of highly activating image patches into visual centroids, matches target text descriptions against these centroids, and retrieves individual features without per‑feature text annotations. The method provides visual evidence for each selection and uses spatially masked interventions to test decoder directions under fixed generation conditions, evaluated across 150 SAEs and a benchmark of 100 target concepts.

By Xinyue Xu, Jiahao Zhang, Lijie Hu, Peter Hase, Hao Wang
arXiv AI
Oct 1

Pretext: Defeating Malicious Skill Detection Frameworks for AI Agents

The paper titled "Pretext: Defeating Malicious Skill Detection Frameworks for AI Agents" demonstrates how an attacker can bypass current skill‑scanning defenses by crafting malicious skills that evade both static analysis and LLM‑based semantic checks. By moving malicious payloads into natural language and distributing instructions across files, the white‑box attacker named Pretext achieves high evasion rates—up to 97% against a frozen detector and 77% against a co‑adaptive one—across three open‑source models.

By Tobias Kaisar, Aritra Dhar
arXiv AI
Oct 1

Stress-Testing LLM Lie Detectors: Role-Play Failures and Spurious Correlations

The paper examines the reliability of lie detection probes for language models when the models adopt anti-factual personas, such as conspiracy theorists. A dataset of 8,916 human-reviewed responses from three LLMs was created, and eight existing probes were evaluated, revealing many fail to flag falsehoods under these personas. The authors also constructed confounder datasets showing that probes often track spurious correlations like instruction compliance, and propose a simple linear probe that performs best on both persona and confounder tests.

By Maximilian von Klinski, Sebastian Lapuschkin, Wojciech Samek, Lennart B\"urger
arXiv AI
Oct 1

Mid-Harness: Scaling Actions Between Model and Harness for Terminal Agents

Mid‑Harness proposes a test‑time compute strategy that samples and verifies candidate actions before execution, keeping the underlying generator and harness unchanged. Experiments show that with a strong verifier, sampling more actions significantly boosts success rates—e.g., a GPT‑5.6 verifier raises Pass@1 from 50.00 % to 68.03 % on TerminalBench‑Lite using eight samples. The approach also improves performance across various models, benchmarks, and harnesses, demonstrating that action scaling is a promising target for enhancing terminal agent reliability.

By Minki Kang, Ryo Hachiuma, Shaokun Zhang, Subhashree Radhakrishnan, Yonggan Fu, Jindong Jiang, Mingjie Liu, Ehsan Hosseini-Asl, Yi Dong, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang, Byung-Kwan Lee
arXiv AI
Oct 1

PhantomEnvironments: Training LLM Agents in Fictional Worlds

PhantomEnvironments is a framework that trains large language model agents in synthetic, rule‑generated fictional worlds. By creating multi‑turn reinforcement learning environments where agents search templated articles to answer multi‑hop questions, the approach eliminates the need for costly human data or hallucinated LLM‑generated settings. Agents trained in these zero‑cost, purely rule‑based worlds transfer effectively to real‑world multi‑hop search benchmarks, often surpassing models trained on real data, and demonstrate scalable search behavior that grows linearly with question difficulty.

By Anmol Kabra, Swathi Saravana Selvam, Albert Gong, Chao Wan, Christian Belardi, Dongyoung Go, Katie Z. Luo, Kilian Q. Weinberger
arXiv AI
Oct 1

X-Planner: Event-Structured Task Planning for Embodied Intelligence

arXiv:2609.25187v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Task planning bridges high-level instructions and executable behavior in long-horizon manipulation, yet modern Vision-Language-Action (VLA) systems...

By Howard Lu, Shalfun Li, Porter Pan, Cris, Lumen, Cyril, Eric Hu, Lily Li, Maeve Zhang, Rain Sun, Robert Wang, KZ Zheng, Viggo Chen, Tim Ding, Regsis Cheng, YJ Xiao, Kian, Hai Lin, Alan Song, Elise Ma, Gody Li, Victor Yao, Yohann Tang, Ingrid Yu, Jason He, James Wang, Ryan Yu, Ping Yang, Chris Pan, Vincent Chen, Roy Gan, Hao Wang, Qian Wang