Large language models

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

29,760 stories · RSS feed

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 25

GeoNLI - A Natural Language Interpreter for Satellite Imagery

GeoNLI introduces a unified, modular pipeline that combines advanced SAM variants with multimodal large language models to perform satellite image captioning, visual question answering (VQA), and visual grounding. The EarthMind model achieves strong results on captioning and VQA, while multiple RemoteSAM-SAM and DiffuSAM pipelines are used for grounding, ultimately employing a majority‑voting ensemble across several models. The system reports 82% captioning accuracy, 83.32% VQA accuracy, and 64.94% grounding accuracy, demonstrating improved consistency over task‑specific approaches.

By Ashutosh Gandhe, Anupam Rawat, Geet Sethi, Kabir Nasiruddin, Madhav Kotecha, Panav Shah, Rakshit Sawarn, Soumitra Nayak
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 25

Context-aware Skin Cancer Epithelial Cell Classification with Scalable Graph Transformers

The paper introduces scalable Graph Transformers for classifying healthy versus tumor epithelial cells in whole-slide images of cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma. By constructing a full‑WSI cell graph and incorporating morphological, texture, and neighboring cell class features, the proposed SGFormer and DIFFormer models outperform traditional image‑based methods, achieving balanced accuracies above 85% on single‑WSI tests and 83.6% on multi‑WSI evaluations. The study demonstrates that preserving tissue‑level context through graph representations improves classification of morphologically similar cell types.

By Lucas Sanc\'er\'e, No\'emie Moreau, Katarzyna Bozek
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

An Empirical Study of Automating Agent Evaluation

The paper presents EvalAgent, an AI assistant that automates agent evaluation by encoding domain expertise into evaluation skills such as procedural instructions, reusable code, and dynamic API retrieval. EvalAgent constructs a trace-based pipeline that outputs metrics, executable code, and reports, and is evaluated using a new meta-evaluation framework and AgentEvalBench. Results show that EvalAgent improves the Eval@1 metric from 17.5% to 65% and receives 79.5% human expert preference, while ablation studies confirm the importance of evaluation skills.

By Kang Zhou, Sangmin Woo, Haibo Ding, Kiran Ramnath, Subramanian Chidambaram, Aosong Feng, Vinayak Arannil, Muhyun Kim, Ishan Singh, Darren Wang, Zhichao Xu, Megha Gandhi, Nirmal Prabhu, Soumya Smruti Mishra, Smeet Dhakecha, Vivek Singh, Gouri Pandeshwar, Lin Lee Cheong
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 25

PROVE: Proof-guided Regime-aware Operator Verification for Hallucination Detection in Medical Visual Question Answering

PROVE is a black‑box hallucination detector for medical visual question answering that tailors its verification strategy to each question’s evidential structure. It classifies questions into three regimes, activates a subset of five operators per regime, and calibrates operator importance using deterministic question‑answer features to produce a risk score. On 8048 test samples across three medical VQA benchmarks and four state‑of‑the‑art vision‑language models, PROVE achieves an AUROC of 0.821, surpassing the best baseline by 0.159 with consistent improvements across all models and datasets.

By Keyang Zhou, Siyi Li, Zhongnan Shi, Qichao Ying, Wei Tang, Zhenxing Qian
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

Exploiting answer-invariant redundancies in satellite imagery for efficient VLM inference on edge

The paper introduces Rift, a two‑stage system that reduces the computational load of vision‑language models on satellites by pruning image tiles that do not affect the answer and then applying elastic prefill to limit token usage. By exploiting answer‑invariant token redundancy, Rift cuts energy consumption by 78 % and latency by 69 % compared to exhaustive tiled inference, while boosting accuracy from 45 % to 73 % on LLaVA‑1.5 7B running on a Jetson AGX Orin.

By Ishani Janveja, Davis Zhang, Seoyul Oh, Deepak Vasisht
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Screen Before You Serve: Simulation for Production Customer Experience AI Agents at 140M Scale

The paper introduces a hypothesis-driven simulation workflow that screens customer experience (CX) agents before deployment, using synthetic customers and simulated tool outputs to emulate multi-step interactions without accessing production backends. Applied to Nubank’s high-volume Card Delivery and Card Management chat-support agents, the simulation’s binary evaluator scores correlated strongly with production results, and simulation-guided iterations raised transactional net promoter score by 36.69 points in a live A/B test. Additionally, screening over 16,000 simulated conversations helped select a model that increased self‑service rate by 8.82 percentage points without harming net promoter score, demonstrating that simulation enables extensive model exploration safely.

By Edesio Alcoba, Kevin Rossell, Aman Gupta, Shao Tang, Jiwoo Hong, Pabel Carrillo-Mendoza, Wanderson Concei\c{c}\~ao Ferreira, Alvaro Tedeschi, Zayd Simjee, Shreya Rajpal, Bruno Finardi Hime, Christian Sousa, Luis Moneda, Herbert Fei, Daniel Silva, Rohan Ramanath
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Search-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Component Query Understanding in Roblox Game Search

The paper introduces a search‑aware reinforcement learning framework for multi‑component query understanding in Roblox game search. It first uses teacher‑student supervised fine‑tuning to create a schema‑compliant policy, then applies reinforcement learning that optimizes each query‑understanding component with component‑specific rewards derived from live search engine interactions. Experiments show that this approach improves per‑component utility and overall search quality, raising NDCG@20 by 8.9 points over the supervised baseline and 3.5 points over a single end‑to‑end reward strategy.

By Nayoung Choi, Shengjian Chen, Xiaokai Wei, Wenzheng Zhang, Daiyao Yi, Rachit Pareek, Vincent Su, Michelle Gong, Jinho D. Choi
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Speculative Evaluation of Stochastic LLMs

The paper introduces Speculative Evaluation, a method to reduce variance in evaluating stochastic large language models (LLMs) under a fixed rollout budget. It employs a Hierarchical Bayesian Neyman (HBN) policy that first runs a short uniform pilot, then pools task-level success counts via a hierarchical Bayesian model to compute posterior expectations of task-level sampling variances. Using these expectations, the method applies exact positive-integer Neyman allocation to allocate rollouts, and an asynchronous variant (HBN-async) speculatively executes continuations from partial pilot feedback to mitigate synchronization overhead. Across six checkpoints and 18 benchmark groups, Speculative Evaluation achieves 12.8%-33.6% lower variance compared to uniform allocation, outperforming empirical and independent Bayesian baselines, and demonstrates practical benefits in real-generation experiments.

By Qianli Shen, Xiang Li, Ruomeng Ding, Yanxi Chen, Daoyuan Chen, Yaliang Li
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Persistent Billable State: Denial-of-Wallet Attacks and Defenses in Tool-Calling LLM Agents

The paper investigates how multi‑step tool‑calling large language model agents can unintentionally create persistent billable state, allowing malicious or compromised tools to generate repeated charges without user credentials. It formalizes the persistent billable‑state boundary, identifies six denial‑of‑wallet attack vectors, and evaluates them with the DOW‑BENCH harness across six model families. The study shows significant cost amplification, demonstrates effective mitigation via deterministic history transformation and host‑side invariants, and highlights the scarcity of existing safeguards in real‑world repositories.

By Jinqian Zhang (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences), Haojun Xia (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences), Shujiang Wu (Beihang University), Jingkun Yue (State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China), Xia Zhang (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences), Zhangpei Cheng (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences), Bibo Tu (Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences)
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Domain Recentering and Confidence-Weighted Prior Calibration for Vision-Language Models

The paper introduces Domain Recentering with Confidence Calibration (DRC), a training‑free technique that adapts CLIP to unlabeled target images by fitting a Gaussian mixture and subtracting a posterior‑weighted average of component means from each embedding. It further corrects residual class bias using a log‑prior adjustment based on confidence‑weighted predictions. DRC outperforms other methods, raising average accuracy on cross‑domain datasets by 4.13 and 5.07 points over zero‑shot CLIP for ViT‑B/16 and ResNet‑50, and maintains gains under ImageNet distribution shifts.

By Youngeun Seol, Jimin Shin, Heeseo Yoon, Uiwon Hwang
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Prefilling the Reasoning Channel: Output-Prefix Attacks on Reasoning LLMs

The paper investigates a new attack method called output‑prefix attacks on reasoning LLMs, where an attacker prepends a malicious text to the model’s output, thereby conditioning all subsequent tokens on that prefix. The study systematically isolates the scratchpad reasoning channel as a vulnerable vector and compares three attack types—reasoning‑only, output‑prefix‑only, and combined reasoning‑plus‑output‑prefix—across both exposed and hidden reasoning models. Experiments on three 2026‑era frontier models (Gemini 3 Flash Preview, DeepSeek V4 Flash, and Claude Haiku 4.5) show that reasoning alone is largely ineffective, but adding a trivial output prefix can raise attack success rates to as high as 99% for some models, with contextual prefixes outperforming static ones and susceptibility varying by model.

By Luk\'a\v{s} Br\r{u}na, Robert Bridges, Adam Ek
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Structured Pose-Conditioned Flow Matching for Generative 5G CSI Augmentation

The paper introduces StructFlow-HPR, a structured pose‑conditioned flow matching framework that generates realistic 5G channel state information (CSI) paired with human pose data. It learns a continuous latent transport process from Gaussian noise to real CSI, preserving the receiver‑frequency topology via a reconstruction‑preserving autoencoder. A pose‑conditioned Transformer models the latent velocity field, enabling pose‑aligned CSI generation through ordinary differential equation sampling, which improves human pose recognition performance when data are scarce.

By Haojin Li, Anbang Zhang, Wai Ho Mow, Chenyuan Feng, Chen Sun, Haijun Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Tracking States or Tracking Cosets? An Algebraic Account of Learned State Tracking

The paper investigates how neural networks, particularly Transformers and recurrent models, learn to track group elements by predicting their running product. It finds that Transformers tend to recover quotient classes and that their accuracy can be predicted by the reciprocal of class size, while recurrent networks can capture both normal and non‑normal right‑coset partitions. The study links partial accuracy, learning stages, and internal state representations to the subgroup cosets the models learn to track.

By Zhiyu Zhang, Yupeng Li
arXiv AI
Sep 25

GHOST-Q: Towards Studying Grounding Hallucinations Overlooked Under Same-score TradeOffs in Quantized VLMS

GHOST-Q evaluates how post‑training quantization affects visual grounding in vision‑language models. The study compares three 8B VLM families across FP16, INT8, and NF4 precisions, pairing predictions to measure how compression redistributes grounding successes and failures. While most quantized variants maintain overall accuracy, several exhibit significant changes in hallucination‑sensitive conditions, and memory savings do not always translate to lower latency.

By Saim Rehman, Muhammad Shafique
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Era by Eon: Benchmarking Enterprise Agents on Hidden Knowledge

The "Era by Eon" benchmark tests enterprise agents by presenting questions that specify answer rules and require code to compute answers from generated company data. While top models can answer most questions, the benchmark introduces eight new templates that rely on hidden facts not explicitly stated in any document, making the task harder. Evaluation of 12 agents shows that only the best agent correctly answers 18 of 24 attempts, with many questions remaining largely unsolved.

By Benjamin Gruenbaum, Doron Porat, Assaf Natanzon, Roy Zavida, Chen Dinachi, Or Itzahary
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Unraveling the cognitive patterns of Large Language Models through module communities

The paper presents a network-based framework that links cognitive skills, LLM architectures, and datasets to uncover the cognitive patterns of Large Language Models. It identifies module communities within LLMs that exhibit skill distributions partially mirroring distributed cognitive organization seen in avian and small mammalian brains, yet distinct from the focalized specialization of specific biological systems. The study highlights that LLM skill acquisition benefits from dynamic, cross-regional interactions and neural plasticity, suggesting fine-tuning should leverage distributed learning dynamics rather than rigid modular interventions.

By Kushal Raj Bhandari, Pin-Yu Chen, Jianxi Gao
arXiv AI
Sep 25

PFArena: Benchmarking Language Models for Protein Modification

PFArena is a new benchmark for evaluating language models in protein modification tasks, featuring four controlled interfaces that span single‑mutant generation and multi‑mutant ranking. It incorporates varying levels of mutation fitness data to represent four research scenarios with different amounts of prior experimental context. The benchmark tests six protein language models, six large language models, and five LLM‑based agents, finding that PLMs excel at open‑ended single‑mutant generation while LLMs and agents perform best in multi‑mutant ranking when target‑specific data are available, yet all struggle as search space and mutation depth grow.

By Yawen Ouyang, Xinbo Zhang, Ziyuan Ma, Yixin Wu, Wenbin Liao, Feiran Zhang, Wenjie Li, Lihao Wang, Hao Wang, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuefeng Yan, Lei Bai, Ya-Qin Zhang, Shuyi Zhang, Wei-Ying Ma, Dahua Lin, Bowen Zhou, Hao Zhou
arXiv AI
Sep 25

AlphaDiverse: Post-Training Local Quantitative Research Agents for Diverse Exploration in Alpha Factor Mining

AlphaDiverse is a framework that enhances large language model–based multi‑agent systems for alpha factor mining by addressing cost, availability, and confidentiality constraints. It generates diverse research paths through varied environments and post‑training local agents, then fine‑tunes these agents with supervised learning and optimizes them jointly using a GRPO method that balances predictive quality and diversity. The approach limits research feedback to inner‑period data and evaluates a frozen model on outer‑period data to avoid test‑set tuning, demonstrating competitive prediction and broader exploration across four Chinese stock universes.

By Qingzhuo Wang, Zikun Wei, Zhihua Wei, Wen Shen
arXiv AI
Sep 25

CRISS: A Retrieval-Augmented AI Chatbot for Assisting Cancer Registrars

CRISS is a retrieval‑augmented generation chatbot designed to aid cancer registrars by providing rapid, citation‑supported answers to complex coding and staging questions. It uses a domain‑specific knowledge base of national registry standards, indexed as dense embeddings, to retrieve relevant passages that ground responses generated by a large language model. In evaluations, RAG configurations consistently outperformed non‑RAG baselines across easy, medium, and hard questions, achieving higher grounding and semantic similarity scores while maintaining human oversight for final decisions.

By Vani Seth, Mohammad Beheshti, Anirudh Kambhampati, Vishwa Bhayani, Lucinda Ham, Prasad Calyam, Iris Zachary
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

Decoupled Early Exits for Task-Dependent Compute Allocation in Flow-Matching VLAs

The paper introduces a framework for Flow‑Matching Vision‑Language‑Action (VLA) models that allows independent adjustment of backbone depth, action expert depth, and denoising steps. Lightweight Exit Transformers are added at intermediate layers to enable early exits, and a KV Cache synthesis mechanism manages skipped layers so the action expert can exit deeper than the backbone. Experiments on SmolVLA and π0.5 across LIBERO and Meta‑World show that joint tuning of these compute axes reduces latency by 79.2 % and FLOPs by 31.8 %, while improving mean success rate by 5.6 %.

By Riccardo Andrea Izzo, Rimvydas Rubavicius, Gianluca Bardaro, Subramanian Ramamoorthy, Matteo Matteucci, Alessandro Suglia