The paper introduces SCALPEL, a contrastive sparse autoencoder that selectively learns to unlearn target-specific information from neural network representations. It addresses the energy bias in standard reconstruction-based extractors, which tend to preserve dominant background structure while neglecting low-energy target components. The authors provide theoretical justification that contrastive training enhances target selectivity and demonstrate experimentally that SCALPEL outperforms NMF and standard SAE interventions on the TOFU benchmark, achieving performance comparable to Gradient Difference and RMU methods.
By Itai Zehavi, Fanny Jourdan, Ulrich Aivodji
The paper introduces Structured Thinking, a two‑turn pipeline that first generates a typed, schema‑constrained CPDAG summary and then uses that graph to answer causal queries. On the Corr2Cause benchmark, this approach boosts the Qwen3.5‑27B model’s F1 score from 73.0 to 86.4, outperforming a PC‑instruction baseline and demonstrating that externalizing the latent causal structure improves large‑language‑model reasoning. The study also shows that scrambling the CPDAG or using a prose intermediate degrades performance, supporting the principle that explicit, constrained representations aid downstream inference.
By Wentao Sun, Jo\~ao Paulo Nogueira, Dominique Verchere, Mathieu Acher, Alonso Silva
The paper introduces CodeHack, a library of code-based skills with natural-language descriptions designed to improve language agents in complex environments like NetHack. By allowing agents to invoke reusable skills instead of selecting individual actions, the study shows that skill-based agents nearly triple game progression and cut inference cost by 86% in zero‑shot settings, while still retaining the option to fall back on primitive actions. In reinforcement learning, skill-based agents learn faster, achieving a 7.2× larger average gain in dungeon level within the same training budget.
By Bart{\l}omiej Cupia{\l}, Jens Tuyls, Maciej Wo{\l}czyk, Davide Paglieri, Martin Klissarov, Benjamin Eysenbach, Piotr Mi{\l}o\'s, Karthik R. Narasimhan
OmouAI is an interactive deliberation system that combines large language models with computational argumentation to facilitate policy debates involving humans and simulated personas such as stakeholders, experts, or devil’s advocates. Each persona generates its own arguments, which are assembled into a shared argumentation framework that users can contest, add to, or revise, ensuring human oversight. The system evaluates arguments using deterministic argumentative semantics against external goals like the UN Sustainable Development Goals, providing faithful explanations and indicating how policy recommendations affect those goals.
By Stylianos Loukas Vasileiou, Antonio Rago, William Yeoh, Georgina Curto
The paper introduces LIFT, a lightweight vector‑intervention technique that transfers reasoning capability from a base large language model (LLM) to a vision‑language model (VLM) without retraining the VLM backbone. LIFT defines Reasoning Vectors as differences in hidden states between a reasoning path with an explicit trace and a solver path without it, and injects these vectors into the VLM’s language‑side activations. Experiments on two VLMs across six reasoning benchmarks show that vectors derived from the base LLM consistently outperform those derived from the aligned VLM, indicating that the base LLM is a more effective source for recovering degraded reasoning.
"whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that a simple, frozen‑backbone intervention can partially restore reasoning abilities in multimodal models, highlighting the value of leveraging the original language model’s reasoning power."
By Ziyi Wang, Li Li, Aolin Zhou, Yankun Shen, Chonghan Liu, Shuxia Lin, Xu Yang
arXiv:2609. 31176v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Repository-level issue localization aims to identify and rank the files and functions relevant to resolving a reported issue.
By Yunxiang Wei, Zhenyu Lei, Jundong Li
The paper introduces Stackelberg Program Optimization (SPO), a framework that uses large language models to discover adaptive destroy‑repair operators for large neighborhood search. SPO conditions operator decisions on a compact state representation, enabling state‑dependent behavior, and frames the discovery process as a Stackelberg game where destroy operators act as leaders and repair operators as conditional followers. Experiments on the traveling salesperson and capacitated vehicle routing problems show that SPO outperforms strong baselines, generalizes to larger instances, and exhibits coupled improvement in operator behavior during discovery.
By Xinyi Ke, Kai Li, Junliang Xing, Yifan Zhang, Jian Cheng
The paper argues that the current LLM-as-a-judge evaluation method, which compensates for systematic measurement bias by increasing the number of comparisons, is statistically unsound and computationally wasteful. It identifies that treating LLM judges as neutral ignores documented biases such as position bias, verbosity bias, judge severity, and self‑enhancement. The authors propose a unified latent variable framework that jointly models pairwise and ordinal data while explicitly correcting for these confounders, enabling reliable rankings with far fewer comparisons and negligible additional compute.
By Harshita Katoch, David Antony Selby, Gerrit Gro{\ss}mann, Sebastian Vollmer
The paper investigates how the definition of influence—specifically the behavior being attributed, the intervention on training data, and the counterfactual training process—affects rankings produced by influence estimators. It formalizes influence as a counterfactual estimand, distinguishes specification mismatch from approximation error, and categorizes existing estimators by their implied specifications. Experiments demonstrate that different specifications can lead to markedly different rankings, and that careful specification choice improves attribution quality in tasks such as noisy label detection and large‑language‑model attribution.
By Zhe Li, Wei Zhao, Peixin Zhang, Jun Sun
The paper introduces DIAL, a framework that uses large language models (LLMs) as judges while mitigating position bias and aligning their judgments with human preferences. DIAL separates judge‑specific position effects, learns shared structure in debiased LLM preferences, and adaptively calibrates this structure toward human targets using limited human comparisons. Experiments on simulations and three human‑preference benchmarks show that DIAL remains robust to unbalanced response order, achieves strong human‑aligned rankings with few labels, and adapts when LLM information is imperfect, supported by a real‑data study of over 410K judgments from 21 LLM judges.
By Zesheng Cai, Yingqi Fan, Sichang Chen, Jin-Hong Du
The study investigates how the choice between processing page images or parsed text in an information extraction pipeline depends on the document’s layout, focusing on privacy‑sensitive, on‑premise scenarios with small models (≤8 B parameters). It evaluates accuracy and energy consumption across input representations, model families, and inference settings, finding that batching dramatically reduces energy use, FP8 quantization offers modest savings, and neural OCR is far more energy‑intensive than classical OCR. The optimal representation varies: vision‑language models excel on layout‑rich documents, while small text‑only models with a cheap parser perform best on near‑plain‑text contracts, achieving higher accuracy and lower energy than any vision‑language setup.
By Christoph Walser, Mauricio Fadel Argerich, Jonathan F\"urst
The paper examines a method called Program-of-Layers (PoLar) that allows transformer layers to be dynamically routed rather than processed in a fixed sequence, mirroring the brain’s thalamic routing. Reproductions across five models confirm that skipping, repeating, and combining layer blocks improve performance, with shorter programs for easier inputs and more repeats for harder ones. However, the study could not replicate the claimed advantage of a learned single‑shot router, noting that its top prediction defaults to the standard pass while the top‑k predictions still yield accuracy gains. The authors also analyze the robustness of correction programs, finding them brittle to single edits, and release their code publicly.
By Justus Westerhoff, Stephan Olbrich, Hatem Oraby, Matthew Evan Larkum, Felix Alexander Gers
The paper introduces SeLATM, a framework that improves topic modeling by generating topics at the segment level and refining them through agentic feedback loops. This approach addresses limitations of LLM-based topic assignment methods, such as the inability to produce topic distributions, overly broad or narrow topics, and high resource consumption. Experiments on multiple datasets show that SeLATM reduces LLM resource usage while maintaining superior performance.
By Myeongjun Erik Jang, Antonios Georgiadis, Sae Young Moon, Fran Silavong
Game Arena is an open, continuously expanding platform that evaluates large language models through competitive games, allowing head‑to‑head matchups in structured environments. Unlike static benchmarks, it prevents performance saturation by increasing gameplay difficulty as models improve. The report outlines the infrastructure and presents three pilot games—Chess, Poker, and Werewolf—covering perfect information, imperfect information, and multiplayer settings, and details evaluation metrics and competition results.
By Bovard Doerschuk-Tiberi, Yao Yan, Justin Chiu, Hann Wang, Timothy Chung, Martyna Plomecka, John Schultz, Jon Lipovetz, Clayton Drazner, Yuchen Zhuang, Jaimie Hwang, Nate Keating, Riley Jones, Andrew Lee, Oran Kelly, Ian Gemp, Michael Aaron, Laurel Prince, Kate Larson, Jeff Moser, Harrison Jobe, Chad Woodford, Siqi Liu, Andrew Wang, Bo Chang, Christopher D'Mello, Diane Chaleff, Addison Howard, Johnny Yip, Chuck Sugnet, Antonio Gulli, Meghan O'Connell, Will Cukierski, Nenad Tomasev, Dima Yeroshenko, Kinjal Parekh, Roxanne Daniel, Marc Lanctot, Domino Weir, Elsa Dong, Daniel Hennes, Melissa Nalubwama, Robert Fraser, Ryan Trostle, Jun Peng, Tom Mason, Lloyd Hightower, Chiamaka Chukwuka, Yuexiang Zhai, Phoebe Kirk, Yi Su, Yuting Han, Jie Ren, Chris Prichard, Sahand Sharifzadeh, Karim Hakimzadeh, DJ Sterling, Meg Risdal, Kate Olszewska, Ya Xu, Orhan Firat, Minmin Chen
The paper investigates prompt minimization, aiming to reduce prompts to their smallest, most information-dense form without losing output fidelity. It argues that shorter prompts lower computational overhead and inference latency, especially when large contexts are unnecessarily included, and that longer prompts can harm LLM reasoning and accuracy. The authors propose three frameworks to identify minimal prompts and show that these often produce outputs comparable to longer versions, highlighting redundancy in the input space and opening new avenues for efficient prompt engineering.
By Marius F. R. Juston, Kevin A. Karim, Jonathan Gao, Kevin C. Li, Rudhi Bashambu
The paper introduces Steiner’s taxonomy of group tasks to study how multi‑agent large language model (LLM) teams scale on disjunctive versus compensatory tasks. By modeling agents as conditionally independent given the item, it shows that plurality voting converges to the modal answer while averaging converges to the item‑level bias. Experiments with 13 open‑weight models and up to 30 agents reveal that disjunctive tasks benefit from larger teams, whereas compensatory tasks like Fermi estimation see little improvement, highlighting that task structure and aggregation method fundamentally determine team scaling.
By Carolina Fortuna, Blaz Bertalanic
DeepEdu‑v1 is an AI‑tutoring system tailored for Vietnamese education that addresses data‑sovereignty and local curriculum alignment issues. It uses a long‑context inference engine to reduce retrieval calls and prefill latency by about 35%, and a self‑improving agentic layer that curates verified local knowledge without fine‑tuning. In deployment, DeepEdu achieves nearly twice the speed of standard vLLM serving and raises agentic accuracy from 70.0% to 79.5% on complex tasks, especially in financial reasoning and interactive‑agent benchmarks.
By Quang Nguyen, Hieu Nguyen, Hien Hoang, Toan Pham, Cong Tran, Nam Vu
The paper demonstrates that fine‑tuning reasoning models to predict their own confidence at intermediate steps—using only 600 self‑supervised examples—substantially improves inference efficiency. Without adding any explicit stopping or length penalties, the models generate up to 25 % fewer tokens while maintaining accuracy on mathematical, scientific, and coding benchmarks across several architectures. The study finds that confidence supervision preserves the models’ high‑level reasoning structure rather than merely suppressing specific behaviors.
By Parsa Hosseini, Akasha Tigalappanavara, Sumit Nawathe, Chenrui Fan, Sourya Basu, Genta Indra Winata, Anirban Das, Soheil Feizi, Nima Chitsazan
The article surveys fake review detection research, focusing on how pre‑trained language models (PLMs) and large language models (LLMs) influence both the generation of deceptive reviews and their detection. It reviews 211 studies from 2018 to early 2026, categorizing methods by evidence source—such as review text, sentiment, rating behavior, temporal metadata, user‑product graphs, multimodal content, external knowledge, and LLM‑generated signals—and by fusion level. The survey traces the evolution from traditional machine learning to PLM‑based and LLM‑based approaches, evaluates performance on Amazon, Yelp, and OpSpam benchmarks, and highlights open challenges including adversarial generation, cross‑domain transfer, uncertainty‑aware fusion, robustness to missing sources, interpretability, and trustworthy evaluation of AI‑generated deceptive content.
By Fanji Yang (Guizhou University of Finance and Economics), Huiyao Chen (Harbin Institute of Technology), Xi Yu (Guizhou University of Finance and Economics), Meishan Zhang (Harbin Institute of Technology), Xiaohong Xiao (Guizhou University of Commerce), Mingsen Deng (Guizhou University of Finance and Economics)
SignTrace is a system that tackles the reverse‑lookup problem in Chinese sign language by allowing users to describe a sign in natural language and retrieve the corresponding entry from a dictionary of 6,699 signs. It combines large‑language‑model–based dictionary enrichment, action extraction, seven‑channel retrieval, and candidate reranking, achieving a 94.0% Hit@1 and a mean reciprocal rank of 0.9540 on a benchmark of 500 queries. The system has been deployed for user trials, receives positive informal feedback, and processes median queries in 13.37 seconds.
By Zengji Tu, Xingye Zhu, Ningjing Wang, Tingyi Huang, Yangjunfeng Zhu, Dai Wan