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 18

A Simulation Platform for AUV Fault Recovery: Exploring LLM-Based Diagnostic Strategies

The paper introduces SPAR, a closed‑loop simulation platform that couples real‑time AUV control software with a higher‑level orchestration layer for fault injection, prompting, and evaluation of large language models (LLMs) in diagnosing and recovering from anomalies. SPAR enables ensemble testing of LLMs, comparing a frontier model with three locally deployable LLMs on a mass‑shift fault scenario across 480 trials, revealing that model choice significantly affects diagnostic accuracy. The study demonstrates that while the frontier model consistently ranks the correct fault mechanism among its top hypotheses, local models succeed mainly when they follow the full diagnostic procedure, and overall diagnosis and operational decisions appear decoupled in this dataset.

By Khalid Halba, Kylie Cooper, James G. Bellingham
arXiv AI
Sep 18

FAMOS: Feed-Forward 3D Articulation Modeling from Sparse Observations

FAMOS is a feed‑forward model that predicts movable‑part segmentation and joint parameters from a sparse, unordered set of partial point clouds. It jointly reasons over multiple observations using a Multi‑state Articulation Transformer that alternates state‑wise and global attention, and introduces an observed articulation span objective to supervise motion ranges across inputs. A procedural data generator supplies self‑annotated assets for training, and experiments on PartNet‑Mobility, ACD, and ArtiCraft‑10K show consistent improvements over existing feed‑forward and optimization‑based baselines.

By Kevin Qu, Tao Sun, Massimiliano Viola, Liyuan Zhu, Zhizhuo Zhou, Sayan Deb Sarkar, Konrad Schindler, Iro Armeni
arXiv AI
Sep 18

TripScore: Aligning LLMs for Real-World Travel Planning via Expert-Calibrated Reward

TripScore is a benchmark and evaluation framework for large language models (LLMs) in travel planning, built from real user logs and calibrated with 1,468 pairwise judgments from 203 travel experts. It uses a hierarchical feasibility gate for format and commonsense checks, and a unified point-wise reward that combines soft quality and preference fulfillment. Experiments show that reinforcement learning fine‑tuning, such as GRPO, consistently outperforms other methods when evaluated with TripScore.

By Yincen Qu, Huan Xiao, Feng Li, Gregory Li, Hui Zhou, Xiangying Dai, Xiaoru Dai, Xuan Huang
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Coding Agents with an Obstacle-Aware Harness for Safe Robot Manipulation

The paper introduces SafeHarness, an obstacle‑aware framework that improves the safety of coding agents for robot manipulation. By decomposing tasks into route planning and contact execution, the harness enables the agent to prioritize collision avoidance, achieving 71.9% task success and 87.5% collision avoidance—significantly better than prior methods. The study demonstrates that safety constraints can be effectively integrated into language‑model‑driven robot controllers.

By Bingxin Xu, Yuzhang Shang, Zhen Dong, Emilio Ferrara
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Model Specific Task Similarity for Vision Language Model Selection via Layer Conductance

The paper introduces a method for selecting the best vision‑language model for a downstream task by analyzing the internal dynamics of the visual encoder. It represents each task with layer‑wise conductance and uses an entropy‑regularized alignment to derive a target‑conditioned block importance distribution. The proposed Directional Conductance Divergence (DCD) metric captures asymmetric transferability, enabling accurate prediction of model rankings without direct inference, and achieves a 14.7% NDCG@5 improvement over SWAB on 48 VLMs across 21 datasets.

By Wei Yang, Hong Xie, Tao Tan, Xin Li, Defu Lian, Enhong Chen
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Architectural Design, Not Only Model Intelligence, Governs Multi-Agent LLM Performance

The paper argues that the architecture of multi‑agent large language model (LLM) frameworks, rather than just the intelligence of the underlying models, largely determines system performance. It introduces a taxonomy of architectural dimensions—such as orchestration, memory, planning interfaces, specialization, and communication topology—and presents MAFBench, a unified evaluation suite. An empirical study across nine frameworks, keeping the LLM constant, reveals six design principles and shows that choices like orchestration and communication topology can dramatically affect latency, accuracy, and coordination success.

By Abdelghny Orogat, Ana Rostam, Essam Mansour
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Faithful, Not Corrective: Model Capability Governs Message-Format Effects in Multi-Hop Agent Relays

The study investigates how different message formats affect the fidelity of information as it passes through multiple LLM agent relays. Using a controlled testbed, the authors encode twelve atomic facts in five formats (free natural language, precision‑instructed NL, JSON, triples, key‑value) across six hops and evaluate recall against programmatic ground truth. Results show that strong relays maintain near‑lossless recall for all formats, while weaker relays exhibit significant format‑dependent recall loss, and that any injected error is faithfully propagated across all formats without causing collateral damage.

By Sicheng Zeng
arXiv AI
Sep 18

AntiGrounding: Executable Robot Trajectories as Visual Prompts for VLM-Guided Manipulation

AntiGrounding is a visual action-selection framework that turns short robot trajectories into both executable motion plans and rendered prompts for vision‑language model evaluation. After filtering for feasibility, each trajectory is scored on safety, task alignment, efficiency, and physical plausibility using structured multi‑view visual question answering, and the best trajectories are refined and validated by a digital twin before real‑world execution. In eight real‑world manipulation tasks, the system achieved a 71.25% success rate with a single GPT‑6 Astra evaluator, outperforming baseline methods.

By Wenbo Li, Yiteng Chen, Wenhao Li, Qingyao Wu
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Watermarking Diffusion Language Models

The paper introduces the first watermark designed specifically for diffusion language models (DLMs), which generate tokens in arbitrary order unlike traditional autoregressive models. It overcomes the challenge of missing prior tokens by applying the watermark in expectation over the context and promoting tokens that strengthen the watermark when used as context. Experiments show a >99% true positive rate with minimal quality loss and comparable robustness to existing autoregressive watermarks.

By Thibaud Gloaguen, Robin Staab, Nikola Jovanovi\'c, Martin Vechev
arXiv AI
Sep 18

BuildBench: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Compiling Real-World Open-Source Software

BuildBench introduces a realistic benchmark for evaluating large language model agents on the task of compiling open‑source software (OSS). It includes diverse OSS projects that lack clear build instructions, have undocumented dependencies, and may require source patching or script modification. The authors also present OSS‑BUILD‑AGENT, a baseline LLM‑based agent that retrieves build instructions effectively and achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on the benchmark.

By Zehua Zhang, Ati Priya Bajaj, Divij Handa, Siyu Liu, Arvind S Raj, Hongkai Chen, Hulin Wang, Yibo Liu, Zion Leonahenahe Basque, Souradip Nath, Vishal Juneja, Nikhil Chapre, Tiffany Bao, Yan Shoshitaishvili, Adam Doup\'e, Chitta Baral, Ruoyu Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 18

MAS-Shield: A Defense Framework for Secure and Efficient LLM MAS

MAS-Shield is a defense framework for Large Language Model–based Multi-Agent Systems that uses a coarse‑to‑fine filtering pipeline. It first selects critical agents, then applies lightweight auditing to most cases, and finally escalates only suspicious signals to a heavyweight committee. Experiments show a 92.5% recovery rate against adversarial attacks and a latency reduction of over 70% compared to existing methods.

By Kaixiang Wang, Zhaojiacheng Zhou, Bunyod Suvonov, Jiong Lou, Zihan Wang, Yuxiang Zheng, Yidan Lin, Wutong Zhang, Xianghan Kong, Chentao Wu, Jie Li
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Effective and Efficient Threat Hunting with Small Language Models

The paper presents a framework for translating natural‑language queries into Kusto Query Language (KQL) using small language models (SLMs). It introduces lightweight retrieval, error‑aware prompting, LoRA fine‑tuning with rationale distillation, and a two‑stage architecture that pairs an SLM drafter with a low‑cost LLM judge. Evaluations on Microsoft’s NL2KQL Defender dataset show the two‑stage approach achieving high syntax and schema‑valid accuracy while dramatically reducing cost compared to larger LLM baselines.

By Saleha Muzammil, Rahul Reddy, Vishal Kamalakrishnan, Hadi Ahmadi, Wajih Ul Hassan
arXiv AI
Sep 18

VLM-CAD: VLM-Optimized Collaborative Agent Design Workflow for Analog Circuit Sizing

The paper introduces VLM-CAD, a workflow that uses Vision Language Models (VLMs) for analog circuit sizing while mitigating spatial blindness and logical hallucinations. It incorporates a neuro‑symbolic parsing module, Image2Net, to convert schematics into topological graphs and JSON, and an Explainable Trust Region Bayesian Optimization method, ExTuRBO, to guide design decisions with sensitivity evidence. Experiments on 12 sizing tasks across six circuits and four technology platforms show a Strict Pass@1 of 23.3% and a Relaxed Pass@1 of 91.7%.

By Guanyuan Pan, Shuai Wang, Yugui Lin, Tiansheng Zhou, Pietro Li\`o, Zhenxin Zhao, Yaqi Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Large language models eroding science understanding: an empirical study of malignment

This study investigates whether large language models (LLMs) can reliably answer scientific questions and how susceptible they are to manipulation by fringe scientific material. The authors modified custom LLMs to prioritize knowledge from selected fringe papers on the Fine Structure Constant and Gravitational Waves, then compared their responses with those of domain experts and standard LLMs. The altered models produced fluent, convincing answers that contradicted scientific consensus and were difficult for non-experts to detect as misleading, demonstrating that LLMs are vulnerable to manipulation and cannot replace expert judgment.

By Harry Collins, Hartmut Grote, Paul Newbury, Patrick Sutton, Simon Thorne
arXiv AI
Sep 18

By Their Fruits You Will Know Them: Comparing Formalizations of Law by the Decisions They Encode

The paper introduces a systematic method for comparing different formalizations of the same legal provision by analyzing their inferences on individual cases. It matches formalizations at the node level, derives shared interfaces, and uses a SAT solver to identify edge cases where any two formalizations disagree. The authors apply this approach to ten EU provisions formalized by nine advanced LLMs, finding that behavioral divergence is largely uncorrelated with structural agreement and that the resulting edge cases expose distinct types of disagreement, some reflecting real legal controversies.

By Julius Vernie, Matthias Grabmair
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Exploring a Layer-Wise Design Space for KV Cache Eviction

The paper investigates whether key‑value (KV) cache eviction strategies should vary across Transformer layers. By combining existing eviction methods in different layer configurations and profiling their performance, the authors find that heterogeneous, layer‑wise routing consistently outperforms homogeneous policies on LongBench tasks. Even with a fixed set of methods, the placement of each method strongly influences overall quality, and a single well‑chosen route surpasses all nine standalone baselines across multiple cache budgets.

By Chao Fei, Kaihua Liang, Hanzhi Hu, Hongcheng Guo, Jian Weng, Marco Canini, Panos Kalnis
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Modeling Human Behavior with Type Vectors Using AI

The paper presents an AI-based method that models human behavior by assigning a language model a vector of trait intensities—called a type vector—and asking it to predict actions in various settings. By adjusting traits such as Altruism, Risk Aversion, Fairness, and Trust, the authors fit the model to 119,147 decisions from 78,657 subjects across 35 countries and 10 economic games, finding that three dimensions (Risk Aversion, Strategic Sophistication, and Trust) closely match human choices. The resulting type vectors cluster into fewer than a dozen groups and can predict behavior in new games with different rules, demonstrating the method’s generalizability and interpretability.

By Matthew O. Jackson, Benjamin S. Manning, Yutong Xie, Walter Yuan, Qiaozhu Mei
arXiv AI
Sep 18

M2Tok: Multi-head Multi-codebook Discrete Action Tokenization for Vision-Language-Action Models

The paper introduces M2Tok, a Multi-head Multi-codebook Action Tokenizer that reduces reconstruction loss for continuous action signals by decomposing latent features into multiple heads and assigning independent codebooks to each. This design expands representational expressivity, leading to lower reconstruction error and higher success rates in Vision‑Language‑Action models evaluated on RoboTwin, Simpler‑Env, and zero‑shot real‑world tasks. Ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of both multi‑head and multi‑codebook mechanisms.

By Chunpu Xu, Zhixuan Liang, Yuhao Zhang, Chi-Min Chan, Jessie Wang, Yang Xiao, Mengkang Hu, Xiaokang Yang, Yao Mu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 18

Stiefel Attention: When the Geometry of Transformer Projection Matrices Dominates Optimizer Choice---and When It Does Not

The paper introduces Stiefel Attention, which constrains the query and key projection matrices of transformers to the Stiefel manifold and optimizes them with a Riemannian Adam variant. It demonstrates that this approach yields steepest‑descent updates, is well‑conditioned, and preserves learned attention geometry during weight decay. Empirical results show significant accuracy gains on modular arithmetic grokking and CIFAR‑10 patches, with the improvement attributed to a step‑scale‑free update rule rather than equivariance or projector changes.

By Rub\'en Dar\'io Guerrero
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 18

Enhanced Agriculture-informed Neural Network by Domain Knowledge

The paper introduces KAINN, a hybrid neural‑mechanistic model that augments the Agriculture‑informed Neural Network with domain knowledge on fertilizer diffusion, soil respiration, and water‑filled porosity to predict nitrous oxide emissions from agriculture. Experiments across CNN, LSTM, and Transformer architectures show that KAINN achieves lower root mean square error, lower mean absolute error, and higher R-squared values compared to purely data‑driven models and the original AINN. The learned interfaces exhibit smoother, more physically consistent parameter trajectories with reduced uncertainty.

By Ci Lin, Futong Li, Rose Chong-Wu, Tet Yeap, Iluju Kiringa