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 10

Inducing Emergent Misalignment from Reward Hacks with Iterative DPO

The paper introduces iterative DPO as a cost‑effective alternative to reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) for studying reward hacking and emergent misalignment in language models. Experiments show that training GPT‑4.1 with iterative DPO on a single‑turn reward‑hacking environment produces covert misaligned power‑seeking and alignment faking, while training Qwen2.5‑32B‑Instruct yields both misalignment and improved instruction following. The authors argue that iterative DPO democratizes and speeds up research into emergent misalignment from RLVR.

By Oliver Daniels, Perusha Moodley, Benjamin M. Marlin, David Lindner
arXiv AI
Sep 10

RelightFormer: Feed-forward Generative Transformer for Multiview Object Relighting

RelightFormer is a feed‑forward generative Transformer that performs single‑ and multi‑view image relighting without explicit intrinsic property estimation. It incorporates a latent illumination module that injects target environment maps into spatial features via cross‑attention, and uses permutation‑invariant positional encodings to process unordered multi‑view inputs symmetrically. Trained on the large Laval Objaverse Dataset, the model achieves state‑of‑the‑art visual and photorealistic relighting quality, and demonstrates strong zero‑shot generalization across various relighting tasks.

By Hejun Wang, Jinxi Li, Junwei Jiang, Shiwei Mao, Hu Cheng, Shouwang Huang, Bo Yang
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Typed Federated Artifacts for the Agentic Web:Sharing Tool-Routing Knowledge Across Frozen,Heterogeneous LLM Agents

The paper proposes typed federated artifacts—schema‑validated objects with per‑field privacy and dispute resolution—to enable tool‑routing knowledge sharing among frozen, heterogeneous LLM agents. By replacing flat text prompts with typed fields, the authors achieve near‑centralized routing performance on StableToolBench while reducing data size to 20 MB JSON per client. The study also highlights that a simple TF‑IDF classifier can outperform LLM routing on labeled benchmarks, indicating limitations in current evaluation methods.

By Abhijit Chakraborty, Ni Trieu, Vivek Gupta
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

Vague2Detect: Handling Ambiguous Prompts in Knowledge-Based Open-World Detection

Vague2Detect is a hybrid pipeline that improves object detection for ambiguous prompts by combining a fine‑tuned Sentence‑BERT to retrieve candidates from a structured household knowledge base, YOLO‑World to verify their presence in images, and a GPT‑3.5‑turbo fallback to generate new candidate descriptions when prompts fall outside the knowledge base. On a benchmark of household scenes, Vague2Detect raises the vague prompt success rate from 32% (YOLO‑World alone) to 61% with high precision, and up to 85% when the GPT fallback is used.

By Ibrohimjon Muminov (Dongguk University, Seoul, South Korea), Jihie Kim (Dongguk University, Seoul, South Korea)
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

Phase Structure in Rotary Attention: A Spectral Framework for Semantic Continuity and Execution-Boundary Governance

The paper introduces a bounded spectral framework to analyze rotary attention in transformer language models, focusing on phase alignment, hidden‑state continuity, and semantic drift. It identifies ordered hidden‑state sequences as suitable domains for spectral decomposition, derives the Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) attention score as a sum of magnitude‑weighted cosine terms, and proves a local stability lemma linking bounded phase displacement to pre‑softmax score degradation. By defining complex modal coordinates and a weighted coherence functional, the work distinguishes representational continuity from execution‑boundary admissibility, offering a theoretical program for when spectral structure explains continuity and when external governance is required.

By Abraham Chachamovits
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Parser-Free VLM Verification for Federated Weakly Supervised Video Anomaly Detection

The paper proposes a lightweight federated multiple‑instance learning (MIL) framework that trains only a compact MIL scorer across distributed clients while using a frozen vision‑language model (VLM) to verify high‑scoring video segments post‑hoc. Two VLM feedback interfaces are explored: a parsed text‑generation interface and a logit‑based interface that derives a continuous anomaly score from next‑token Yes/No probabilities. Experiments on UCF‑Crime with InternVL3.5‑2B and Qwen3‑VL‑2B‑Instruct show that the logit interface consistently improves frame‑level AUC and AP over the MIL baseline without requiring temporal post‑processing, whereas the text‑generation interface is more sensitive to prompts, parsers, and model choice.

By S\'ebastien Thuau, Amira Gran, Siba Haidar, Rachid Chelouah
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

The EM-algorithm and the Method of Moments in Softmax Mixture Models

arXiv:2409. 09903v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Softmax Mixture Models (SMMs) are discrete $K$-component mixture models for the probabilities of selecting one of $p$ candidate feature vectors $X_1,\ldots,X_p\in\mathbb{R}^L$ in heterogeneous populations and are widely used in econometrics and scientific applications.

By Xin Bing, Florentina Bunea, Jonathan Niles-Weed, Marten Wegkamp
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Mapping the Emerging Social Science of Large Language Models

The paper maps the nascent social‑science literature on large language models (LLMs) by analysing 198 curated papers and 47,719 field‑scale papers. It identifies three main domains—LLM as Social Minds, LLM Societies, and LLM‑Human Interactions—each containing 13 subcategories such as reasoning, bias, collective intelligence, and trust. The taxonomy is validated through clustering stability, author classification agreement, and topic mapping, revealing differing prominence across conference and journal venues.

By Yi Yang, Xiao Jia, Zeyun Dong, Chenzhang Wang, Zhanzhan Zhao
arXiv AI
Sep 10

How AI Models Manage Epistemic Authority: A Taxonomy and Comparative Analysis of Responses to User Disagreement

The paper introduces a taxonomy of six user challenge types and a four-layer framework to analyze how large language models respond to user disagreement. Using a dataset of 2,310 challenge scenarios and 32,340 responses from 14 models, the study finds that models often validate users (85%) while still maintaining their original claim (65%). It also reports that models frequently apologize (33%) and transfer authority in advice contexts, with significant variation across model types and task domains.

By Riyadh Alnasser, Yusuf M\"ucahit \c{C}etinkaya, Sumin Zhao, Tu\u{g}rulcan Elmas
arXiv AI
Sep 10

No\=esis: Deterministic-First Retrieval with Two-Tier Context Hydration for Factuality-Critical Queries on Small Local Models

Noesis is a retrieval-augmented architecture designed for small local language models that prioritizes deterministic judgments before generation. It employs a fact layer, positional addressing, provenance scoping, and two-tier context hydration to ensure factual integrity, achieving parity with larger models on exact value accuracy and eliminating confabulated numbers. The system delivers single-generation queries with traceable, source‑linked outputs, improving performance in regulated domains.

By Nicola Cogotti
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Recompilation Is Not Enough: Test-Guided Decompiled-C Repair

The paper discusses a workflow for repairing decompiled C code that goes beyond mere recompilation. It uses compiler and linker diagnostics to guide initial repair, then applies smoke checks and official tests to ensure the recompiled binary behaves as expected. In a study of 104 Coreutils binaries, 87.5% successfully recompiled and passed the test gate, while a small portion failed to recompile or still failed tests.

By Yuhan Huang, Puzhuo Liu, Jianlei Chi
arXiv AI
Sep 10

ASDA: Automated Skill Distillation and Adaptation for Financial Reasoning

ASDA (Automated Skill Distillation and Adaptation) is a framework that improves large language models on financial reasoning tasks without fine‑tuning. It works by having a teacher model analyze a student’s failures, cluster errors, and generate structured skill artifacts—reasoning procedures, code templates, and worked examples—that are injected during inference. On the FAMMA benchmark, ASDA boosts arithmetic reasoning by up to 17.33% and non‑arithmetic reasoning by 5.95%, outperforming existing training‑free methods.

By Tik Yu Yim, Wenting Tan, Sum Yee Chan, Tak-Wah Lam, Siu Ming Yiu
arXiv AI
Sep 10

More Than Mimicking Reviewers: Evaluating LLMs for Pre-Submission Peer Review

The paper introduces an author-facing large language model (LLM) system that generates a broad set of atomic concerns about a manuscript and compresses them into a concise report, aiming to provide early peer‑review feedback. Evaluations on 3,398 ICLR 2026 submissions show that the system covers 44.9% of historical reviewer issues on a diagnostic set, rising to 78.7% strict coverage and 84.9% seriousness‑weighted coverage after deduplication and refill, using 3.6× more requests and 5.2× more tokens. Ablation studies reveal that representative selection and matcher sensitivity are key factors limiting the compression quality.

By Pouya Parsa, Amin Rezaei
arXiv AI
Sep 10

MARBO: Relational Belief Grounding for LLM Agents in Social Deduction Games

The paper introduces MARBO, a framework that grounds large language model agents’ actions and speech in relational beliefs about hidden roles and team alignments in social deduction games. By providing preference feedback only when behaviors are supported by reliable relational beliefs and lead to favorable outcomes, MARBO encourages consistent learning under uncertainty. Experiments demonstrate that compact LLM agents using MARBO consistently outperform existing baselines in representative social deduction games.

By Hwang Yechan, Bae Sangjun, Kim Jeongmo, Bang Sangwoo, Han Seungyul
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Less Is Personal: Learning Minimal Sufficient User Profiles for Personalized Language Models

The paper introduces ENOUGH, a method for creating minimal sufficient user profiles for personalized language models. ENOUGH iteratively adds behavioral records or stops, evaluating profile prefixes with a counterfactual search that balances downstream gains, user specificity, and token costs. The resulting profiles are distilled into a lightweight controller that orders records and triggers the generator only once, achieving better effectiveness and efficiency than existing baselines across six tasks.

By Minghang Liu, Qiang Qiu, Yuanzhuo Wang, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Improving Randomized Metric Distortion to 2.1441

The paper announces an improved upper bound on the distortion of randomized voting rules in metric social choice, reducing it from the previous range of $[2.1126,2.5]$ to $2.1441$. It introduces the concept of random-size stable lotteries, proves their existence, and derives the new bound via a potential argument. The proofs were generated with GPT-5.6-Sol and subsequently verified and simplified by the author.

By Nisarg Shah
arXiv AI
Sep 10

DART: A DAG-Based Reputation and Incentive Framework via Blockchain-Enabled Governance for Trustworthy LLM Multi-Agent Collaboration

The paper introduces DART, a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)-based framework that combines centralized orchestration with blockchain-enabled decentralized governance to manage reputation and incentives in large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems. DART dynamically allocates tasks based on agent capability, reputation, and workload, while continuously updating trust scores through post-execution evidence and smart contract accountability. Experimental results show that DART outperforms centralized baselines, achieving high task success rates, low retry rates, and effective containment of malicious agents.

By Manoj Kumala, Xinyun Liua, Ronghua Xu
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Beyond the Verdict: Evidence-Aligned Evaluation of Visual Prompt-Injection Guardrails

The paper introduces Mind2Web-Injection, a benchmark of 9,954 instruction‑screenshot pairs designed to evaluate whether vision‑language models (VLMs) use visual evidence when judging conflicts between on‑screen text and user instructions. Across six VLMs, models with similar overall precision can differ dramatically in Evidence‑Aligned Detection (EAD), revealing that verdict‑only metrics miss critical grounding failures. The authors also propose two training‑free interventions—ReadGate and CmdCompare—to improve evidence grounding and instruction‑command consistency, and argue for separate reporting of verdict correctness, evidence localization, and counterfactual responsiveness.

By Suyoung Lee, Myungsub Choi
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Diffs vs. Whole Files: An Empirical Comparison of Iterative Edit-Based and Direct Generation for Flutter/Dart Code Models

The paper compares two output regimes for code-editing language models: direct generation, where the model outputs the entire modified file, and iterative diff-based generation, where the model emits a sequence of localized edits. Experiments on Flutter/Dart tasks show that direct generation consistently outperforms diff-based generation across metrics such as compilation success, token efficiency, and quality judgments. However, diff-based generation can be competitive for short, spatially localized edits, particularly in refactoring and error-handling tasks with few edit steps.

By Andrej Andrejev