arXiv:2605.15473v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose using validated behavioral hypotheses as a lens for evaluating human-likeness in LLM-based agents. Our key idea is simple: If an agent is human-like, a population of such agents should reach the same inferential conclusion as the human population when run through the same experiment. Decades of social science have produced many such validated findings, each anchored to concrete experimental protocols and robustly established through independent replication. This yields an evaluation that is objective, decomposable, and scalable. We operationalize this lens through HumanStudy-Bench, an open platform that turns published human-subject studies into reusable simulation environments and administers the evaluation to configurable agents. It scores agent-human alignment on two metrics: the Probability Alignment Score (PAS) for inferential agreement and the Effect Consistency Score (ECS) for effect-size agreement. We curated an initial suite of 12 studies whose hypotheses are robustly established through independent replication, and evaluated 10 models under 4 agent designs. Results show that agent responses polarize between full replication and complete failure; agent design influences alignment more than model scale, but its effect is non-monotonic.
Science Journals
arXiv:2602.20207v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Knowledge editing in Large Language Models (LLMs) aims to update the model's prediction for a specific query to a desired target while preserving its behavior on all other inputs. This process typically involves two stages: identifying the layer to edit and performing the parameter update. Intuitively, different queries may localize knowledge at different depths of the model, resulting in different sample-wise editing performance for a fixed editing layer. In this work, we hypothesize the existence of fixed golden layers that can achieve near-optimal editing performance similar to sample-wise optimal layers. To validate this hypothesis, we provide empirical evidence by comparing golden layers against ground-truth sample-wise optimal layers. Furthermore, we show that golden layers can be reliably identified using a proxy dataset and generalize effectively to unseen test set queries across datasets. Finally, we propose a novel method, namely Layer Gradient Analysis (LGA) that estimates golden layers efficiently via gradient-attribution, avoiding extensive trial-and-error across multiple editing runs. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our LGA approach across different LLM types and various knowledge editing methods.
arXiv:2605.15792v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The long-standing goal of multimodal AI is to build unified models in which visual understanding and visual generation mutually enhance one another. Despite recent works such as BAGEL, BLIP3o achieves remarkable progress; In practice, however, this unification remains one-directional: understanding routinely guides generation, yet how and why generation can support understanding is rarely investigated. We revisit this asymmetry and propose Generation-to-Understanding (G2U) synergy, where visual generation becomes an explicit intermediate reasoning step. Our framework enables a model to perform controlled generative acts, such as detail enhancement, context expansion or structural visualisation, to produce self-generated visual thoughts, which are then fed back into the model to refine perception without retraining or external tools. Through a comprehensive evaluation on twelve benchmarks, this reversed information flow consistently improves multimodal understanding. We show that generative fidelity bounds perceptual gain and that distinct families of edit prompts govern transfer efficiency. We further analyse whether models can decide what to imagine. While they can produce plausible edits, these self-generated visual thoughts lack stable task alignment, revealing that current large multimodal models fall short of true self-reflection. This work exposes a missing mechanism in unified cognition and suggests that imagination is not the end of understanding but its beginning.
arXiv:2605.15247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This letter proposes a novel hybrid key distribution architecture that jointly exploits quantum key distribution (QKD) and Kirchhoff-law-Johnson-noise (KLJN) statistical-physical key exchange. In the proposed system, an optical BB84-type QKD link operates in coordination with a parallel wired KLJN link, which is used for secure basis handling and, in selected protocols, additional raw key generation. Three novel KLJN-assisted QKD protocols are introduced to eliminate public basis disclosure messages and bit sifting, extract basis-derived key bits, or generate raw key bits under ideal KLJN assumptions. Analytical expressions for the normalized key rate and absolute throughput are derived by accounting for optical channel penalties, KLJN bandwidth constraints, and synchronization bottlenecks. Numerical results show that the proposed hybrid architecture can improve key generation efficiency and throughput in short-haul infrastructures, including metropolitan area networks (MANs) and data center interconnects.
arXiv:2605.15496v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural distance fields offer a compact and continuous representation of 3D geometry, making them attractive for incremental LiDAR mapping. However, their online optimization is vulnerable to catastrophic forgetting, where new observations can degrade previously reconstructed geometry. Replay-based training is commonly used to address this issue, but existing methods typically rely on passive replay buffers and uniform sampling, which can waste memory on redundant observations and under-train poorly constrained regions. We propose LAPS, a replay management framework for incremental neural mapping that improves both replay retention and replay allocation during online updates. LAPS combines reliability-based active pooling to retain reliable historical samples under limited memory with uncertainty-guided active sampling to focus optimization on under-constrained regions. Experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks show that LAPS consistently improves reconstruction completeness while maintaining competitive geometric accuracy. On Oxford Spires, it improves recall by 4.66 pp and F1-score by 3.79 pp over PIN-SLAM on the Blenheim Palace 05 sequence. We release our open source implementation at: https://github.com/dongjae0107/LAPS.
arXiv:2605.14892v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLM-based autonomous agents have demonstrated strong capabilities in reasoning, planning, and tool use, yet remain limited when tasks require sustained coordination across roles, tools, and environments. Multi-agent systems address this through structured collaboration among specialized agents, but tighter coordination also amplifies a less explored risk: errors can propagate across agents and interaction rounds, producing failures that are difficult to diagnose and rarely translate into structural self-improvement. Existing surveys cover individual agent capabilities, multi-agent collaboration, or agent self-evolution separately, leaving the causal dependencies among them unexamined. This survey provides a unified review organized around four causally linked stages, which we term the LIFE progression: Lay the capability foundation, Integrate agents through collaboration, Find faults through attribution, and Evolve through autonomous self-improvement. For each stage, we provide systematic taxonomies and formally characterize the dependencies between adjacent stages, revealing how each stage both depends on and constrains the next. Beyond synthesizing existing work, we identify open challenges at stage boundaries and propose a cross-stage research agenda for closed-loop multi-agent systems capable of continuously diagnosing failures, reorganizing structures, and refining agent behaviors, extending current coordination frameworks toward more self-organizing forms of collective intelligence. By bridging these previously fragmented research threads, this survey aims to offer both a systematic reference and a conceptual roadmap toward autonomous, self-improving multi-agent intelligence.
arXiv:2603.04261v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Evidence on the effectiveness of Man-At-The-End (MATE) software protections, such as code obfuscation, has mainly come from limited empirical research. Recently, however, an automatable method was proposed to obtain statistical models of the required effort to attack (protected) software. The proposed method was sketched for a number of attack strategies but not instantiated, evaluated, or validated for those that require human interaction with the attacked software. In this paper, we present a full instantiation of the method to obtain statistical effort models for game resource localisation attacks, which represent a major step towards creating game cheats, a prime example of MATE attacks. We discuss in detail all relevant aspects of our instantiation and the results obtained for two game use cases. Our results confirm the feasibility of the proposed method and its utility for decision support for users of software protection tools. These results open up a new avenue for obtaining models of the impact of software protections on reverse engineering attacks, which will scale much better than empirical research involving human participants.
arXiv:2605.15368v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Group-convolutional neural networks (GCNNs) are among the most important methods for introducing symmetry as an inductive bias in deep learning: In each linear layer, GCNNs sample a transformation group $G$ densely and correlate data and filters in different poses (with suitable anti-aliasing for steerable GCNNs) to maintain equivariance with respect to $G$. Unfortunately, applying filters to many data items resulting from this sampling is expensive (even for translations alone, i.e., in ordinary CNNs), and costs grow exponentially with increasing degrees of freedom (such as translations and rotations in 3D), which often hinders practical applications. In this paper, we propose sampling in feature space, i.e., replacing geometrically dense samples with representative samples selected by feature similarity. This decouples geometric resolution from memory and processing costs during training and inference, providing a novel way to trade off computational effort and accuracy. Our main empirical finding is that a coarse feature-space sampling already preserves classification accuracy remarkably well, which permits precomputation based on geometric similarity, accelerating the training of equivariant 3D classifiers substantially.
arXiv:2605.15721v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are highly sensitive to their input contexts, motivating the development of automated context engineering. However, existing methods predominantly treat this as a global search problem, seeking a single context strategy that maximizes average performance across a dataset. This restrictive assumption overlooks the fact that different inputs often require distinct guidance, leaving substantial instance-level performance gains untapped. In this paper, we propose a paradigm shift by formulating context engineering as a recommendation problem. We introduce \textbf{Neural Collaborative Context Engineering (NCCE)}, a framework that transitions optimization from a static global search to dynamic, instance-wise routing. NCCE first bootstraps a diverse catalog of anchor contexts and then employs a novel \textbf{Context-CF Co-Evolution} mechanism. This stage establishes a synergistic feedback loop: a lightweight Neural Collaborative Filtering (NCF) model learns instance-context preferences to guide the generation of specialized context variants, while the newly evaluated contexts continuously refine the NCF model's understanding of latent preferences. At inference time, the trained NCF model acts as a context router, dynamically assigning the most suitable context strategy to each unseen instance. Theoretical Proofs and comprehensive experiments demonstrate that by matching individual inputs with their optimal contexts, NCCE significantly improves task accuracy, highlighting the critical importance of personalization in LLM context engineering.
arXiv:2605.14884v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have advanced significantly in handling graph-structured data, but a comprehensive framework for evaluating explainability remains lacking. Existing evaluation frameworks primarily involve post-hoc explanations, and operate in the setting where multiple methods generate a suite of explanations for a single model. This makes comparison of explanations across models difficult. Evaluation of inherently interpretable models often targets a specific aspect of interpretability relevant to the model, but remains underdeveloped in terms of generating insight across a suite of measures. We introduce AIM, a comprehensive framework that addresses these limitations by measuring Accuracy, Instance-level explanations, and Model-level explanations. AIM is formulated with minimal constraints to enhance flexibility and facilitate broad applicability. Here, we use AIM in a pipeline, extracting explanations from inherently interpretable GNNs such as graph kernel networks (GKNs) and prototype networks (PNs), evaluating these explanations with AIM, identifying their limitations and obtaining insights to their characteristics. Taking GKNs as a case study, we show how the insights obtained from AIM can be used to develop an updated model, xGKN, that maintains high accuracy while demonstrating improved explainability. Our approach aims to advance the field of Explainable AI (XAI) for GNNs, providing more robust and practical solutions for understanding and improving complex models.
arXiv:2604.09631v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As deep learning models are deployed on resource constrained edge platforms in autonomous driving systems, reli able knowledge of hardware behavior under resource degradation becomes an essential requirement. Therefore, we introduce a systematic characterization of CPU load, GPU utilization, RAM consumption, power draw, throughput, and thermal behaviour of TensorRT-optimized YOLOv10s, YOLOv11s and YOLO2026n pipelines running on NVIDIA Jetson Nano under a large-scale fault injection campaign targeting both lane-following and ob ject detection tasks. Faults are synthesized using a decoupled framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) and latent diffusion models (LDMs), based on original data from our JetBot platform data collection. Results show that across both tasks and both models the inference engines keep GPU occupancy stable, temperature rise under control, and power consumption within safe limits, while memory usage settles into a consistent release pattern after the initial warm-up phase. Object detection tends to show somewhat more variability in memory and thermal behavior, yet both tasks point to the same conclusion: the TensorRT pipelines hold up well even when the input data is heavily degraded. These findings offer a hardware-level view of model reliability that sits alongside, rather than against, the broader body of work focused on inference performance at the edge.
arXiv:2602.22870v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The generalized egg dropping problem is a classic challenge in sequential decision-making. Standard dynamic programming evaluates the minimax minimum number of tests in $\mathcal{O}(K \cdot N^2)$ time. A known approach formulates the testable thresholds as a partial sum of binomial coefficients and applies binary search to reduce the time complexity to $\mathcal{O}(K \log N)$. In this paper, we demonstrate that binary search over the complete sequential test domain is suboptimal. By restricting a binary search over multiples of $K$, we isolate a dynamic structural envelope that guarantees convergence. We prove that this boundary balances the search depth against the combinatorial evaluation cost, cancelling the $K$ variable to strictly bound the search phase to $\mathcal{O}(\log N)$. Combined with an incremental traversal, our algorithm eliminates the standard bottlenecks. Furthermore, we formulate an explicit $\mathcal{O}(1)$ space policy to dynamically reconstruct the optimal decision tree.
Decentralized LoRA augmented transformer with multi-scale feature learning for secured eye diagnosis
arXiv:2505.06982v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate and privacy-preserving diagnosis of ophthalmic diseases remains a critical challenge in medical imaging, particularly given the limitations of existing deep learning models in handling data imbalance, data privacy concerns, spatial feature diversity, and clinical interpretability. This paper proposes a novel Data efficient Image Transformer (DeiT) based framework that integrates context aware multiscale patch embedding, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), knowledge distillation, and federated learning to address these challenges in a unified manner. The proposed model effectively captures both local and global retinal features by leveraging multi scale patch representations with local and global attention mechanisms. LoRA integration enhances computational efficiency by reducing the number of trainable parameters, while federated learning ensures secure, decentralized training without compromising data privacy. A knowledge distillation strategy further improves generalization in data scarce settings. Comprehensive evaluations on two benchmark datasets OCTDL and the Eye Disease Image Dataset demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently outperforms both traditional CNNs and state of the art transformer architectures across key metrics including AUC, F1 score, and precision. Furthermore, Grad-CAM++ visualizations provide interpretable insights into model predictions, supporting clinical trust. This work establishes a strong foundation for scalable, secure, and explainable AI applications in ophthalmic diagnostics.
arXiv:2504.18361v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent advances in image manipulation have enabled highly photorealistic content generation, but also lowered the barrier to arbitrary editing, raising concerns about multimedia authenticity and security. Existing Image Manipulation Detection and Localization (IMDL) methods mainly target splicing or copy-move forgeries, while benchmarks for inpainting-based manipulations remain limited. To bridge this gap, we present COCO-Inpaint, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for inpainting detection and localization, with three key contributions: 1) High-quality inpainting samples generated by six state-of-the-art inpainting models, 2) Diverse generation scenarios enabled by four mask generation strategies with optional text guidance, and 3) Large-scale coverage of 238,302 inpainted images with rich semantic diversity. Our benchmark is constructed to highlight intrinsic inconsistencies between inpainted and authentic regions, rather than superficial semantic artifacts such as object shapes. We further establish a rigorous evaluation protocol with three standard metrics to benchmark existing IMDL methods and reveal current trends and challenges.
arXiv:2602.04003v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Most adversarial threats in artificial intelligence (AI) target the computational behavior of models rather than the humans who rely on them. Yet modern AI systems increasingly operate within human decision loops, where users interpret and act on model recommendations. Large Language Models (LLMs) generate fluent natural-language explanations that shape how users perceive and trust AI outputs, revealing a new attack surface at the cognitive layer: the communication channel between AI and its users. We introduce adversarial explanation attacks (AEAs), where an attacker manipulates the framing of LLM-generated explanations to modulate human trust in incorrect outputs. We formalize this behavioral threat through the trust miscalibration gap, a metric that captures the difference in human trust between benign and adversarial explanations. Using this metric as a lens, we highlight a behavioral risk where persuasive explanation framing can preserve user trust even when the underlying AI prediction is wrong. To characterize this threat, we conducted a human study with over 200 participants, systematically varying four dimensions of explanation framing: reasoning mode, evidence type, communication style, and presentation format. Our findings show that users report nearly identical trust for adversarial and benign explanations, with adversarial explanations preserving the vast majority of benign trust despite being incorrect. The most vulnerable cases arise when AEAs closely resemble expert communication, combining authoritative evidence, neutral tone, and domain-appropriate reasoning. Vulnerability is highest on hard tasks, in fact-driven domains, and among participants who are less formally educated, younger, or highly trusting of AI.
arXiv:2602.05414v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Global warming has intensified the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, which degrade CCTV signal and video quality while disrupting traffic flow, thereby increasing traffic accident rates. Existing datasets, often limited to light haze, rain, and snow, fail to capture extreme weather conditions. To address this gap, this study introduces the Traffic Surveillance Benchmark for Occluded vehicles under various Weather conditions (TSBOW), a comprehensive dataset designed to enhance occluded vehicle detection across diverse annual weather scenarios. Comprising over 32 hours of real-world traffic data from densely populated urban areas, TSBOW includes more than 48,000 manually annotated and 3.2 million semi-labeled frames; bounding boxes spanning eight traffic participant classes from large vehicles to micromobility devices and pedestrians. We establish an object detection benchmark for TSBOW, highlighting challenges posed by occlusions and adverse weather. With its varied road types, scales, and viewpoints, TSBOW serves as a critical resource for advancing Intelligent Transportation Systems. Our findings underscore the potential of CCTV-based traffic monitoring, pave the way for new research and applications. The TSBOW dataset is publicly available at: https://github.com/SKKUAutoLab/TSBOW.
arXiv:2605.15203v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce Agent4POI, the first POI recommendation framework that generates context-conditioned multimodal representations at recommendation time, rather than relying on static POI embeddings pre-computed independently of context. Existing multimodal systems encode each POI once as a static embedding, a design that precludes reasoning about why the same cafe affords solo work on Monday but group celebration on Friday evening. We formally prove that no pre-computed encoder can satisfy context-sensitive ranking under standard bilinear scoring, motivating inference-time item-side representation. Agent4POI inverts this computation: given a situational context, a four-phase LLM agent generates dynamic, context-specific affordance queries (Phase 1) and executes a five-step cross-modal chain-of-thought over image, review, and metadata evidence (Phase 2). The resulting uncertainty-aware affordance representation is grounded in Gibsonian affordance theory. These cross-modal verdicts form a structured, uncertainty-adjusted affordance representation (Phase 3), which is aligned with user preferences via a semantic caching system for low-latency ranking (Phase 4). On three POI benchmarks and three evaluation configurations (standard, cold-start, context-shift), Agent4POI achieves a 23.2% relative gain over the strongest baseline and degrades by only 7.5% under context-shift versus 16--17\% for the strongest baselines. In cold-start scenarios, Agent4POI outperforms the best content-based baseline by up to 2.4x, whereas ID-based methods fail to generalize.
arXiv:2602.04909v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and related methods align large language models from pairwise preferences by regularizing updates against a fixed reference policy. As the policy drifts, a static reference, however, can become increasingly miscalibrated, leading to distributional mismatch and amplifying spurious preference signals under noisy supervision. Conversely, reference-free variants avoid mismatch but often suffer from unconstrained reward drift. We propose Geometric Anchor Preference Optimization (GAPO), which replaces the fixed reference with a dynamic, geometry-aware anchor: an adversarial local perturbation of the current policy within a small radius that serves as a pessimistic baseline. This anchor enables an adaptive reweighting mechanism, modulating the importance of each preference pair based on its local sensitivity. We further introduce the Anchor Gap, the reward discrepancy between the policy and its anchor, and show under smoothness conditions that it approximates worst-case local margin degradation. Optimizing a logistic objective weighted by this gap downweights geometrically brittle instances while emphasizing robust preference signals. Across diverse noise settings, GAPO consistently improves robustness while matching or improving performance on standard LLM alignment and reasoning benchmarks.
arXiv:2602.04759v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The last decade has witnessed a rapid advancement of generative AI technology that significantly scaled the accessibility of AI-generated non-consensual intimate images (AIG-NCII), a form of image-based sexual abuse that disproportionately harms and silences women and girls. There is a patchwork of commendable efforts across industry, policy, academia, and civil society to address AIG-NCII. However, these efforts lack a shared, consistent mental model that clearly situates the technologies they target within the context of a large, interconnected, and ever-evolving technological ecosystem. As a result, interventions remain siloed and are difficult to evaluate and compare, leading to a reactive cycle of whack-a-mole. In this paper, we contribute the first comprehensive AIG-NCII technological ecosystem that maps and taxonomizes 11 categories of technologies facilitating the creation, distribution, proliferation and discovery, infrastructural support, and monetization of AIG-NCII. First, we build and visualize the ecosystem through a synthesis of over a hundred primary sources from researchers, journalists, advocates, policymakers, and technologists. Then, we conduct two detailed walkthroughs to demonstrate the usefulness of the ecosystem in 1) making sense of new AIG-NCII harms using a case study of Grok and 2) mapping a clearer tech policy landscape using U.S. federal law and 63 state laws. We conclude with a vision for future AIG-NCII research that refines the edges of the ecosystem, recommending researchers to study critical relationships between technologies and potential ripple effects from different interventions. Our goal is to produce an AIG-NCII technological ecosystem that provides a clear, shared terminology and framework for stakeholders to move into the future of AIG-NCII prevention with clarity and foresight.
arXiv:2602.01970v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning enhances the reasoning capabilities of large language models but often involves high computational costs due to rollout-intensive optimization. Online prompt selection presents a plausible solution by prioritizing informative prompts to improve training efficiency. However, current methods either depend on costly, exact evaluations or construct prompt-specific predictive models lacking generalization across prompts. This study introduces Generalizable Predictive Prompt Selection (GPS), which performs Bayesian inference towards prompt difficulty using a lightweight generative model trained on the shared optimization history. Intermediate-difficulty prioritization and history-anchored diversity are incorporated into the batch acquisition principle to select informative prompt batches. The small predictive model also generalizes at test-time for efficient computational allocation. Experiments across varied reasoning benchmarks indicate GPS's substantial improvements in training efficiency, final performance, and test-time efficiency over superior baseline methods.
arXiv:2602.01295v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate episodic Markov Decision Processes with heavy-tailed losses (HTMDPs). Existing approaches for HTMDPs are conservative in stochastic environments and lack adaptivity in adversarial regimes. In this work, we propose algorithms HT-FTRL-OM and HT-FTRL-UOB for HTMDPs that achieve Best-of-Both-Worlds (BoBW) guarantees: instance-independent regret in adversarial environments and logarithmic instance-dependent regret in self-bounding (including the stochastic case) environments. For the known transition setting, HT-FTRL-OM applies the Follow-The-Regularized-Leader (FTRL) framework over occupancy measures with novel skipping loss estimators, achieving a $\widetilde{{O}}(T^{1/\alpha})$ regret bound in adversarial regimes and a ${O}(\log T)$ regret in stochastic regimes. Building upon this framework, we develop a novel algorithm HT-FTRL-UOB to tackle the more challenging unknown-transition setting. Under a mild truncative nonnegativity condition on the loss distributions, this algorithm employs a pessimistic skipping loss estimator and achieves a $\widetilde{{O}}(T^{1/\alpha} + \sqrt{T})$ regret in adversarial regimes and a ${O}(\log^2(T))$ regret in stochastic regimes. Our analysis overcomes key barriers through several technical insights, including a local control mechanism for heavy-tailed shifted losses, a new suboptimal-mass propagation principle, and a novel regret decomposition that isolates transition uncertainty from heavy-tailed estimation errors and skipping bias.
arXiv:2512.00417v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper introduces CryptoBench, the first expert-curated, dynamic benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate the real-world capabilities of Large Language Model (LLM) agents in the uniquely demanding and fast-paced cryptocurrency domain. Unlike general-purpose agent benchmarks for search and prediction, professional crypto analysis presents specific challenges: \emph{extreme time-sensitivity}, \emph{a highly adversarial information environment}, and the critical need to synthesize data from \emph{diverse, specialized sources}, such as on-chain intelligence platforms and real-time Decentralized Finance (DeFi) dashboards. CryptoBench thus serves as a much more challenging and valuable scenario for LLM agent assessment. To address these challenges, we constructed a live, dynamic benchmark featuring 50 questions per month, expertly designed by crypto-native professionals to mirror actual analyst workflows. These tasks are rigorously categorized within a four-quadrant system: Simple Retrieval, Complex Retrieval, Simple Prediction, and Complex Prediction. This granular categorization enables a precise assessment of an LLM agent's foundational data-gathering capabilities alongside its advanced analytical and forecasting skills. Our evaluation of ten LLMs, both directly and within an agentic framework, reveals a performance hierarchy and uncovers a failure mode. We observe a \textit{retrieval-prediction imbalance}, where many leading models, despite being proficient at data retrieval, demonstrate a pronounced weakness in tasks requiring predictive analysis. This highlights a problematic tendency for agents to appear factually grounded while lacking the deeper analytical capabilities to synthesize information.
arXiv:2505.07322v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: High-Dynamic-Range Wide-Color-Gamut (HDR-WCG) technology is becoming increasingly widespread, driving a growing need for converting Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) content to HDR. Existing methods primarily rely on fixed tone mapping operators, which struggle to handle the diverse appearances and degradations commonly present in real-world SDR content. To address this limitation, we propose a generalized SDR-to-HDR framework that enhances robustness by learning attribute-disentangled representations. Central to our approach is Realistic Attribute-Disentangled Representation Learning (RealRep), which explicitly disentangles luminance and chrominance components to capture intrinsic content variations across different SDR distributions. Furthermore, we design a Luma-/Chroma-aware negative exemplar generation strategy that constructs degradation-sensitive contrastive pairs, effectively modeling tone discrepancies across SDR styles. Building on these attribute-level priors, we introduce the Degradation-Domain Aware Controlled Mapping Network (DDACMNet), a lightweight, two-stage framework that performs adaptive hierarchical mapping guided by a control-aware normalization mechanism. DDACMNet dynamically modulates the mapping process via degradation-conditioned features, enabling robust adaptation across diverse degradation domains. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RealRep consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both generalization and perceptually faithful HDR color gamut reconstruction.
arXiv:2605.15394v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) propose that a model should learn more useful abstractions when trained to predict latent representations rather than observed outputs. For autoregressive language-model fine-tuning the principle entails a stricter requirement: the induced hidden-state geometry must reach the language-model head \emph{and} improve the decoded task metric. We test that requirement under a fixed Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct LoRA harness on natural-language-to-regex generation, comparing twenty-two training-time auxiliaries across trajectory-shape regularisation, distributional constraints, predictor/target asymmetry, Fisher-metric Jacobi residuals, and a decoder-visible JEPA objective constructed to lie in cross-entropy's positive cone. The empirical answer is a structured null: several auxiliaries clear single-cell paired $\alpha = 0.10$ without correction (T3-Local at $\Delta = +2.53$~pp, $p = 0.003$ being the strongest), but none survives Bonferroni or Holm--Bonferroni at the relevant family-wise threshold, even though many change curvature, anisotropy, variance, and gradient direction. Decoder-visible JEPA yields the first positive auxiliary--cross-entropy gradient cosine in the study, yet exact match remains inside seed noise; a full-fine-tuning replication of the same auxiliary at $n = 5$ seeds reproduces the null on both benchmarks (TURK: $\Delta = +0.04$~pp, $p_{\text{paired}} = 0.96$; SYNTH: $\Delta = +0.52$~pp, $p_{\text{paired}} = 0.28$), so the null is robust across LoRA and full fine-tuning for the decoder-visible construction. Hidden-state representation work and decoded-task accuracy are therefore weakly coupled in this regime; we accordingly reframe LLM-domain JEPA evaluation as a coupling problem, in which the operative question is under which metrics useful hidden geometry becomes decoder-visible task signal.
arXiv:2511.19931v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation (CDSR) has been proposed to enrich user-item interactions by incorporating information from various domains. Despite current progress, the imbalance issue and transition issue hinder further development of CDSR. The former one presents a phenomenon that the interactions in one domain dominate the entire behavior, leading to difficulty in capturing the domain-specific features in the other domain. The latter points to the difficulty in capturing users' cross-domain preferences within the mixed interaction sequence, resulting in poor next-item prediction performance for specific domains. With world knowledge and powerful reasoning ability, Large Language Models (LLMs) partially alleviate the above issues by performing as a generator and an encoder. However, current LLMs-enhanced CDSR methods are still under exploration, which fail to recognize the irrelevant noise and rough profiling problems. Thus, to make peace with the aforementioned challenges, we proposed an LLMs Enhanced Cross-domain Sequential Recommendation with Dual-phase Training ({LLM-EDT}). To address the imbalance issue while introducing less irrelevant noise, we first propose the transferable item augmenter to adaptively generate possible cross-domain behaviors for users. Then, to alleviate the transition issue, we introduce a dual-phase training strategy to empower the domain-specific thread with a domain-shared background. As for the rough profiling problem, we devise a domain-aware profiling module to summarize the user's preference in each domain and adaptively aggregate them to generate comprehensive user profiles. The experiments on three public datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed LLM-EDT. To ease reproducibility, we have released the detailed code online at {https://anonymous.4open.science/r/LLM-EDT-583F}.