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
Sep 30

HyperZip: Efficient Data Compression through Personalized Diffusion LLMs with Hypernetworks

HyperZip introduces an efficient data compression framework that uses diffusion-based large language models (dLLMs) with Multi-Token Prediction to speed up compression. It addresses the trade‑off between throughput and compression rate by employing a hypernetwork that generates data‑specific updates from a context representation, allowing the dLLM to adapt to target data without costly fine‑tuning. Experiments show HyperZip outperforms state‑of‑the‑art baselines in both compression rate and speed.

By Thai Nguyen, Khang Tran, NhatHai Phan
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Persona Dosing: Calibrated Activation Steering for Graded Trait Control

The paper introduces Persona Dosing, a method that uses an activation‑steering coefficient to control the intensity of a language model’s persona traits. By conditioning a FLAS controller on trait descriptions and calibrating its flow time against measured trait expression, the approach can adjust trait intensity without requiring paired training data. Experiments on Llama‑3.1‑8B, Qwen3‑8B, and Gemma‑3‑4B show significant increases in core‑trait expression and low targeting errors across multiple traits.

By Zehao Jin, Junran Wang, Ruixuan Deng, Jiahao Chen, Jingyuan Zhang, Yuxuan Zhang, Xinjie Shen
arXiv AI
Sep 30

From Retrieval to Reasoning: Agentic Mechanism Prediction from Cell Painting Profiles

The paper introduces PhenoAIR, a reliability‑aware multi‑agent framework for predicting mechanisms of action (MOA) from Cell Painting morphological profiles. It treats retrieved neighbors as uncertain evidence, calibrating their reliability based on source, phenotype stability, and mechanism confusion, and refines predictions through controller‑guided evidence evaluation. PhenoAIR is benchmarked on JUMP Cell Painting data and outperforms both representation‑matching and LLM‑based baselines across controlled, realistic, and open‑world settings.

By Jiayuan Chen, Botao Yu, Tianyu Liu, Thai-Hoang Pham, Meng Wu, Ping Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Rethinking Reasoning Paths as Phase-Structured Trajectories

The paper proposes PAIR, a method that treats reasoning paths of large language models as phase‑structured trajectories within each question. By sampling multiple trajectories per question, aligning them to shared relative phases, and comparing successful versus unsuccessful paths only within the same phase, PAIR isolates path‑quality signals from question‑level variation. Experiments show that standard correctness probes lose predictive power under this within‑question evaluation, while PAIR improves trajectory ranking, Best‑of‑N selection, and enables phase‑wise steering of generation outcomes.

By Zhenghao He, Guangzhi Xiong, Sanchit Sinha, Bohan Liu, Wenqian Ye, Aidong Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 30

MAADBench: The Refreshable Paradigm for Anomaly Detection in Multi-Agent Systems

MAADBench is a refreshable benchmark for anomaly detection in multi‑agent systems powered by large language models. It addresses the challenge of keeping benchmarks current by sampling and coupling generative tasks, generating trace data under configurable LLM backbones, and automatically providing deterministic step‑level labels. The authors evaluated 25 anomaly‑detection methods on 5,200 labeled traces, finding that existing approaches depend heavily on supervision, struggle with subtle MAS‑specific anomalies, and lack robustness across different LLM backbones.

By Lei Ma, Dennis Hofmann, Haowen Xu, Joshua DeOliveira, Peter VanNostrand, Lei Cao, Elke Rundensteiner
arXiv AI
Sep 30

BRIDGE: Bilevel Retrieval-Credit-Aware Agentic Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces BRIDGE, a bilevel optimization framework that jointly trains a large language model (LLM) and a retriever for agentic reinforcement learning (ARL). It demonstrates that adapting the retriever before the policy yields better rewards, and that BRIDGE outperforms existing methods on seven open‑domain QA benchmarks and medical QA tasks, achieving significant gains in accuracy and reasoning quality.

By Quan Xiao, Mingda Liu, Gaowen Liu, Katsuki Fujisawa, Tianyi Chen
arXiv AI
Sep 30

MemEvo: Automatic Discovery of Streaming Video Memory Mechanisms

MemEvo presents an automated approach to discover memory mechanisms for streaming video understanding. It frames memory design as a search over executable programs expressed in a lightweight domain-specific language, and uses a pretrained large language model to generate and refine candidate memory programs. The framework evaluates each candidate deterministically while keeping the underlying vision-language model frozen, ultimately producing a training-free, bounded-memory mechanism that shows strong performance on StreamingBench and OVO-Bench.

By Guohong Liu, Jialei Ye, Shanhui Zhao, Yunxin Liu, Yuanchun Li
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Code4Scene: Benchmarking Coding Agents for Constructing and Editing 3D Scenes

Code4Scene is a benchmark that evaluates coding agents on constructing and editing 3D scenes in Unreal Engine. It tests agents on two tasks: construction, where they must build a scene from open‑ended language, and editing, where they must recover a target scene from reference images while preserving everything else. The benchmark measures task fulfillment, artifact integrity, and physical validity, revealing that construction and editing performance are correlated but not interchangeable, with agents struggling most with spatial composition and precise edits.

By Xiaokang Ye, Siddhant Hitesh Mantri, Zimeng Chen, Edward Zhang, Zhaoxu Zheng, Yuanheng Li, Yizhao Chen, Tianyang Huang, Lianhui Qin
arXiv AI
Sep 30

AI as a Compiler: Compiling Triton kernels without the Triton compiler

The paper explores using large language models (LLMs) to replace traditional compiler backends, a process termed AI lowering. An LLM agent translates Triton kernels directly into NVIDIA PTX, achieving 0.83x–3.34x the performance of autotuned Triton on a variety of GPUs and ML kernels. The study also extends a PTX verifier to support modern GPU features, highlighting the potential for AI compilers to reduce engineering effort for new hardware.

By Fran\c{c}ois Costa, Charly Castes, Thomas Bourgeat, Azalia Mirhoseini
arXiv AI
Sep 30

The Default Trap: Rethinking Plan Evaluation in Tool-Using LLM Agents

The paper investigates how large language model agents that use tools respond to changes in plan priorities versus default plan removal, a phenomenon termed the "default trap." Experiments across 3,200 decision windows on Retail, Airline, and AgentDojo tasks show that switching priorities strongly redirects model choices, while removing a default plan yields weaker responsiveness. Additional studies reveal that the order of account lists and the presence of extra text significantly influence default target selection and priority effects, with overall task success varying from -19.4 to +8.3 points relative to no plan.

By Xueqi Li, Jingjie Ning, Yibo Kong
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Beyond Sub-Gaussian Detector Scores: Robust Weighted Profile-Loss Change Point Detection for Human-LLM Text Segmentation

The paper introduces Robust Weighted Profile-Loss Change Point Detection (RWCP), a method for locating authorship transitions in mixed human‑LLM documents using detector scores with varying reliability. RWCP combines capped reliability weights, Huber profile gains, and a narrowest‑over‑threshold search to express the population gap as a merge cost, enabling recovery of change points without a closed‑form nonlinear center. Experiments on five benchmark families show that core RWCP reduces WindowDiff by 17.6% compared to weighted change‑point detection, and an extended variant RWCP‑R further improves performance, especially for isolated changes.

By Wan Tian, Zhongyi Li, Yawen Li, Rui Zhang, Yijie Peng, Fuzhen Zhuang
arXiv AI
Sep 30

CoEM: Empowering Long-Context Reasoning with Commit-on-Evidence Memory

CoEM introduces a Commit-on-Evidence Memory system that learns when to compress source evidence into compact memory facts while preserving potentially useful excerpts verbatim in a pending set. The system uses a learned policy to decide whether to promote, retain, or discard each pending excerpt as new context arrives, and a frozen verifier ensures only supported facts are committed. Reinforcement learning trains this policy with step-level evidence rewards and final answer rewards, leading to consistent improvements in long-context reasoning, achieving 10.4–11.4 F1 points over the strongest baseline on 6,400-document inputs.

By Jingguang Li, Yebo Wu, Zuyi Guo, Kailang Ma, Xianjie Dai, Han Zheng, Benwang Chen, Li Li, Can Rong, Heye Huang
arXiv AI
Sep 30

MatToolBench: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents in Real-World Materials Science Workflows

MatToolBench is a new benchmark that evaluates multimodal GUI agents on professional materials science software. It contains 204 tasks across 10 tools in three modalities—GUI operation, OriginPro scripting, and code-based database queries—executed inside a Windows 11 VM. The benchmark offers fine-grained, expert-decomposed scoring and a high-performing multimodal judge for aesthetic assessment, revealing that strong general benchmark performance does not transfer to scientific workflows.

By Mei Wu, Rui Xie, Runyu Zhang, Yuqiang Li, Tianfan Fu, Bo Chen, Kai Yu, Xin Chen, Lu Chen
arXiv AI
Sep 30

SkillCome: Group Contrast Skill Optimization with Dual Memory

SkillCome introduces a skill-evolution framework that uses group contrast optimization and a dual memory system to refine large language model skills. By generating multiple trajectories per question and contrasting successful versus failed ones, it identifies key behavioral divergences to guide skill edits. The dual memory accumulates historical evidence across groups, enabling more generalized and reliable optimization signals, leading to consistent performance gains on diverse benchmarks.

By Haolin Li, Feng Hong, Ang Li, Chilin Fu, Weichang Wu, Ya Zhang, Yanfeng Wang, Xiaolu Zhang, Jiangchao Yao
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Learning from Viable Failure Prefixes: Milestone Viability Potential Policy Optimization for Long-Horizon LLM Agents

The paper introduces Milestone Viability Potential Policy Optimization (MVPO), a reinforcement learning algorithm designed for long‑horizon large language model agents. MVPO addresses the zero‑credit failure problem by learning from viable failure prefixes, estimating prefix potential over Union‑Find viability regions, and repairing zero‑credit groups with potential‑difference advantages. Experiments on Qwen2.5‑1.5B‑Instruct demonstrate that MVPO outperforms eight strong baselines, improving success rates on ALFWorld and WebShop with minimal overhead.

By Qi Zhou, Yuanfan Li
arXiv AI
Sep 30

From Judgment Quality to Downstream Utility: Rethinking LLM-as-a-Judge for Open-Ended Tasks

The paper investigates how the design of LLM-as-a-Judge protocols influences both the intrinsic quality of judgments and their downstream utility in open-ended tasks. By varying verdict granularity, critique usage, and evaluation batching, and by applying Judge guidance to test-time inference methods such as Best-of-N selection, revision, and beam search, the authors find that judgment quality and downstream performance do not always align and that protocol choices significantly affect outcomes. The study highlights the need for comprehensive evaluation of LLM Judges that considers both judgment quality and practical utility.

By Zheng Zhang, Lufei Li, Xinyue Tan, Yuanhao Zeng, Ziwei Shan, Yexin Li, Kan Ren
arXiv AI
Sep 30

When Tools Silently Lie: Evaluating and Mitigating Blind Compliance in Tool-Augmented Data Agents

The paper introduces ToxicBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate how tool‑augmented data agents handle incorrect tool outputs. By pairing clean and poisoned observations across numerical, label, schema, and retrieval errors, the authors assess both the checking process and the final answer adoption. In a 118‑task GPT evaluation, poisoning reduces task success by 26–39 percentage points, revealing that repeated poisoning leads to wrong-answer adoption even after checking, while ordinary retries help only under one‑shot poisoning. Human annotations on 200 trajectories confirm the scoring system’s reliability, showing 96% agreement with task success and supporting the benefits of retries and audit‑based adoption.

By Zifu Tao, Changqing Yin
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Learning to Prove, Not Just to Answer: Reinforcement Learning from Formal Verification for Natural-Language Logical Reasoning

The paper introduces Proof‑R1, a reinforcement‑learning framework that trains large language models to generate verifiable proofs for natural‑language logical reasoning tasks. Proof‑R1 only accepts a generated conclusion into the proof state when it satisfies formal verification constraints, ensuring each reasoning step is machine‑checkable. The method also reconstructs the dependency closure that supports the final answer, aligning credit with valid proof steps, and shows improved answer accuracy and verifiability across multiple benchmarks and models.

By Qili Zhang, Qianren Mao, Hanze Cai, Kaiming Zhao, Yuening He, Xihan Lei, Yashuo Luo, Hanwen Hao, Yutong Gu, Likang Xiao, Zhijun Chen, Weifeng Jiang, Haoyi Zhou, Jianxin Li
arXiv AI
Sep 30

OptiCom : A Unified Framework for State-Conditioned Composition in LLM-Driven Optimization

OptiCom introduces a unified framework for state-conditioned composition in large language model (LLM)-driven optimization. It models LLM optimizers within a shared configuration space (artifact, query, operator, evaluation, memory, strategy) and uses an Optimization Controller to dynamically compose mechanisms while a Strategy Adapter refines long-term preferences. Experiments on 32 benchmark groups show OptiCom outperforms 14 configurations, achieving the top score in 23 groups.

By Chenxing Wei, Sichen Liu, Lizhao Liu, Ningyuan Sun, Chen Bingzhou, Ying He, Bo Jiang, Fei Yu, Yao Shu
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Foundations of Proactive Agents: Principles, Technical Layers, and Proactivity-Gym

The paper introduces a framework for designing proactive large‑language‑model agents, centered on three joint principles—Task Capability, Temporal Allocation, and Trust—alongside a five‑dimensional design space. It proposes PROACTIVITY‑GYM, a simulation testbed for evaluating proactive assistance across multi‑day scenarios, and presents empirical findings that highlight performance gaps and the importance of aligning interventions with user trust. Human studies show that misaligned interventions can sharply reduce trust, even when outcomes are correct, underscoring the need for careful joint optimization of the 3T principles.

By Jio Oh, Seunghyun Do, Young-Jun Lee, Steven Euijong Whang, Dongyeop Kang