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Import AI 478: Math for alignment; ProgramBench; and Mirendil shows what RSI means

What is “night” to a machine?

Cognitively Constrained Partners for Zero-Shot Coordination in Real-Time Partitioned Control

arXiv:2610.31726v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Effective human-machine teaming requires agents that coordinate with unpredictable human partners. Reinforcement learning from live human feedback or large behavioural datasets is expensive, while purely simulated training overfits to artificial conventions and fails at Zero-Shot Coordination with real people. We propose a framework for training teaming agents against Cognitively Constrained Partners: simulated partners whose diversity emerges from procedural constraints grounded in human physiological literature, specifically reaction delays and perceptual limitations, rather than from reward shaping or historical training checkpoints. In a modified Lunar Lander environment, we report preliminary evidence that these partners play more like r

New research finds: The existing critic in reinforcement learning can be directly repurposed as a confidence estimator for large language models.

An AI research paper published on October 26, 2026, on arXiv (ID 2610.31820v1) states that, for large language models (LLMs) trained using value-based reinforcement learning (value-based RL), their existing critic modules can serve as high-accuracy, highly calibrated confidence estimators without requiring additional training or data.

Why it matters：This study reveals the mathematical equivalence between confidence estimation and Critic training in reinforcement learning (under a well-defined correctness metric), and empirically demonstrates the effectiveness and generalization capability of reusing the Critic across more than ten domains, including mathematics, code generation, tool invocation, and general reasoning. These findings hold direct engineering value for lowering the barriers to trustworthy LLM deployment.

POS-Signature Demonstration Retrieval for In-Context Dependency Parsing

arXiv:2610.31966v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Demonstrations for in-context learning are often retrieved by semantic similarity, which may be a poor proxy for relevance in structured prediction. We study demonstration selection for Universal Dependencies parsing with a POS-signature policy that represents sentences with weighted part-of-speech statistics and retrieves three length-compatible, gold-parsed examples from the labeled training split. We evaluate two open-weight language models without fine-tuning on all 2,077 sentences of the UD English Web Treebank test set, comparing the policy with shot- and format-matched fixed and semantic three-shot baselines, as well as zero-shot, chain-of-thought, and critique-refinement systems. POS-signature retrieval yields the highest labeled atta

Semantically Rich, Metrically Affect-Blind: A Geometric Blind Spot in Modern Text Embedders

arXiv:2610.32122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We report a systematic dissociation in modern text embedders: sentiment is almost perfectly decodable from their embeddings, yet almost entirely absent from their metric. Across eleven frozen encoders spanning 2021 to 2026, including 2026-generation models and the 4B-parameter LLM embedder Qwen3-Embedding-4B, a linear probe recovers sentence polarity at up to 91.3% accuracy while cosine similarity separates polarity by a margin of only 0.003-0.064. Qwen3-Embedding-4B, the strongest probe in the panel, reaches 91.3% probe accuracy but only 64.3 retrieval MAP. Because retrieval, clustering, deduplication, and retrieval-augmented generation operate on the metric rather than on a trained probe, these systems are effectively blind to information t

Context or Knowledge: How LLMs Attribute Their Own Answers

arXiv:2610.32109v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models can answer a question from a supplied document or from their parametric knowledge. When later asked where the answer came from, what determines their source report? We study this by intervening on the model's key-value (KV) cache after the answer is generated and before the source question is asked. On a controlled factual task with four models (7B-32B), changing or removing the document's cache never changes the report. In contrast, transplanting the question-and-answer (Q+A) cache between runs with identical question and answer tokens transfers it: every eligible report follows the donor, while the recipient's document is unchanged. On the two smaller models, steering Q+A values along directions fitted before any source ques

Financial Context-Rich Strategy for Actor-Critic based Agents: A Deep Reinforcement Learning Approach for Stock Trading

arXiv:2610.32237v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In modern financial markets, more than 3/4th of the large volume trade is executed by algorithmic trading based on advanced trading strategies to attain higher precision and speed than traditional human traders. The conventional strategies focused on price-based indicators are inadequate in capturing the market dynamism arising from real-world events such as social sentiments, political instability, or sudden economic shifts. With the rise of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and data availability, there is a requirement for more efficient algorithms that can incorporate these external factors in trading strategies. DRL has shown potential in simulating real-world scenarios and in simplifying complex decision-making since DRL agents can autom

TaxoSAE: Rethinking Sparse Autoencoders through Taxonomic Logic

arXiv:2610.31894v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) decompose the representations of large language models (LLMs) into interpretable features, enabling precise readout and control of encoded knowledge. However, existing SAEs treat each feature as a standalone unit, whereas real-world knowledge is often taxonomically organized. As a result, readout carries no guarantee of taxonomic consistency, and control lacks the granularity to specify the scope of an edit. We propose TaxoSAE, which explicitly encodes taxonomical information, built on is-a (hypernym-hyponym) relations, into the SAE feature space. TaxoSAE mirrors a taxonomy with a stack of SAEs, one per taxonomy level, and introduces a taxonomic alignment loss that trains each concept to be active whenever on

KnitTrans: Coordinated Trajectory Transfer for Effective and Efficient LLM Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2610.32389v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trajectory transfer from rollout to training affects both learning quality and system efficiency in large language model reinforcement learning (RL). Enforcing batch-wide training requirements can delay the admission of completed trajectories, resulting in higher architectural staleness: the additional parameter-version gap from disaggregated pipelining relative to colocated execution. Beyond admission, misalignment between data access and training consumption causes redundant movement and unnecessary waiting when transferring large trajectory payloads. We present KnitTrans, a system that coordinates the rollout-to-training path through three designs. First, constraint-preserving mini-batch admission allows flexibility in early mini-batch com

Don't Forget What You Just Learned: Self-Directed Repair Turns Agent Mistakes Into Lasting Lessons

arXiv:2610.31846v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Intelligent agents should learn from their mistakes so that experience leads to continuous improvement. Yet today's agents recover from a mistake only temporarily: in-context reflections are easily forgotten across sessions and compete for limited context, while full-parameter fine-tuning is expensive and can interfere with existing capabilities. We introduce Self-Direction, a mechanism for agents to learn from mistakes that combines the benefits of temporary in-context retries and policy updates. When an agent fails a task, it reflects on its own trajectory in order to extract a lesson and immediately distills it into a lightweight low-rank adapter. By keeping the original weights frozen, Self-Direction prevents adapter training from overwri

From Noisy Retrieval to Decision Evidence: Silver Evidence Demonstrations for In-Context Learning

arXiv:2610.32128v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: RAG and retrieval-augmented few-shot ICL can struggle when decision-relevant evidence is buried in long, noisy context. Retrieved passages and demonstrations may contain redundant or distracting information. Although expert-labeled development examples may identify the text supporting each decision, these annotations are typically used only as answer-side rationales rather than as supervision for filtering noisy retrieval. We propose silver-evidence demonstrations, which replace raw retrieved passages in ICL examples with generated, target-conditioned evidence summaries. For each labeled development example, an LLM generates silver evidence without access to the expert label or gold evidence; this evidence is then paired with the expert label

The study proposes a knowledge graph quality assessment framework for the era of large language models.

A paper published on October 26, 2026, on arXiv (ID 2610.31684v1) systematically reviews research on the quality assessment of data, information, linked data, and knowledge graphs (KGs). In response to a new scenario where large language models (LLMs) rely on KGs as the basis for reasoning, the paper proposes a general, customizable framework for evaluating knowledge graph quality, encompassing 24 quality dimensions and multiple quality metrics.

Why it matters：This paper directly addresses the critical issue of knowledge trustworthiness in the context of the deep integration of large language models (LLMs) and knowledge graphs (KGs). For the first time, it integrates quality-assessment theories from multiple domains to construct a comprehensive evaluation framework tailored to real-world applications. Its publication date—2026-10-26—matches the current date, making it one of the most recent academic advances, and it was posted on the authoritative preprint platform arXiv, ensuring clear provenance and adherence to academic standards.

Latent Coherence: Do Frontier Language Models' Probability Judgments Obey the Law of Total Probability?

arXiv:2610.31833v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LawZero's Scientist AI trains a Predictor toward the Bayesian posterior, with an objective that penalizes inconsistent probabilities among latent explanations. We ask whether current frontier language models, with no such training, are already consistent in this sense zero-shot: do their probability judgments satisfy the law of total probability, $P(X)=\sum_z P(z)P(X|z)$, when the latent $z$ must be inferred from records in the context? In separate single-turn calls, models are asked for $P(X)$, for $P(z)$ over the latent's states, and for $P(X|z)$; a causal family applies the same test to $P(y|do(x))$ and the back-door adjustment. Every query has an exact ground-truth probability, and a subset of items is asked in three wordings to separate

Spatial Heuristic Strategy based Diffusion Reinforcement Learning for Online 3D Bin Packing

arXiv:2610.32241v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Traditional heuristic methods have accumulated mature experience in core objectives, such as space utilization and layout compactness of 3D bin packing, relying on artificially designed rule-based logic. However, they exhibit obvious limitations in generalization ability and adaptability to dynamic scenarios. Diffusion reinforcement learning, which integrates the spatial search capability of reinforcement learning and the data distribution modeling capability of diffusion learning, has achieved certain progress in action distribution modeling and decision compliance constraints. Nevertheless, there remain issues including insufficient perception of the spatial topological structure in 3D bin packing and limited layout optimization capability.

GLP Networking API Specification

arXiv:2610.32583v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multiagent deterministic GLP (madGLP) runs Grassroots Logic Programs (GLP) as agents that communicate solely by asynchronous message passing, and assumes fair delivery: every message sent is eventually delivered. Each agent runs on a person's smartphone, named by the person's public key. A grassroots platform depends on no global resource but the network, so agents must reach one another over Bluetooth Low Energy, on a local network, and across the Internet from behind NAT, via rendezvous servers anyone can run. What madGLP requires of such a network, and what the network requires of the platform, has not been specified. We specify the networking layer beneath madGLP. Anything that can be done in GLP is done in GLP: the layer provides only

Distributional Alignment of LLMs and Its Generalization Properties

arXiv:2610.31687v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are increasingly used to simulate and probe human behavior, e.g., for surveys. For these applications, a key property is that outputs satisfy distributional alignment: to match its output distribution with some reference (in this case, human) distribution. An obstacle in achieving distributional alignment is generalizing from small training data. In this work, we study (1) how to distributionally align LLMs; and (2) how aligned LLMs might generalize to unseen samples and unrelated topics and tasks. Using two large-scale benchmarks, we find that LLMs can indeed achieve distributional alignment and generalize to unseen questions of the same domain. Cross-topic generalization depends on the relationship between topics (e.g.

PaperFormalizer: Author-in-the-Loop Autoformalization of Research Papers in Lean

arXiv:2610.31810v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Even a carefully proofread paper can leave small gaps in its proofs or its stated assumptions. We introduce PaperFormalizer, a Lean-based agentic pipeline that helps authors find and close such gaps in their own papers and turn each paper into a Lean-verified version. Starting from the LaTeX source, PaperFormalizer transcribes the paper into a dependency graph of statements, audits each statement in natural language for faithfulness, ambiguity and correctness, and then formalizes and proves the statements in Lean against Mathlib, optional domain libraries and the author's personal toolkit. Only the author knows what a statement is meant to say and how a formalization gap in a result is best fixed. The pipeline therefore stops and asks the aut

LazyFlash: Forward-Dense, Backward-Sparse Attention for Accelerated Long-Context Fine-Tuning

arXiv:2610.31911v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) process increasingly long sequences, attention becomes a major computational bottleneck. Sparse attention mostly targets inference, yet many methods still train densely or cannot support sparse training, and their added complexity makes sparsity hard to turn into wall-clock speedups, leaving dense attention widely used in practice. This paper introduces LazyFlash, a forward-dense, backward-sparse attention method built on the observation that attention training is dominated by the backward pass. LazyFlash keeps the forward pass exactly dense, so the trained model remains a standard dense model that existing systems such as vLLM can serve without any change. For the backward pass, LazyFlash proposes a gradient-a

Research reveals that activation interventions struggle to achieve conditional reuse in tool usage models.

The paper was posted on arXiv on October 26, 2026 (ID 2610.31686), and, based on the Qwen3.5-27B model, it systematically examined the impact of activation interventions on “conditional reuse” capabilities in tool-use tasks that depend on temporal or permission-based eligibility assessments. The experiments showed that while the intervention significantly improved the accuracy of target selection, it failed to generalize in scenarios involving fact‑based and identifier‑recombination tasks, and it did not enhance independent judgments of candidate eligibility.

Why it matters：This study is the first to clearly distinguish among three types of capabilities—“goal-selection control,” “condition-sensitive judgment,” and “complete-action correctness”—and demonstrates that merely optimizing output answers is insufficient to ensure that a model truly understands and reuses the conditions set by an intervention (such as time or permissions), thereby offering methodological implications for trustworthy tool invocation and the design of controllable AI systems.

Quantum Cadence: Post-Quantum Consensus with Multiple Concurrent Proposers

arXiv:2610.32803v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The consensus protocols of most high-performance blockchains use quorum certificates, which bundle the signatures of a quorum of validators. Signature schemes such as BLS can aggregate the signatures of a whole quorum into a single short signature, which keeps these certificates small. A large-scale quantum computer would break these schemes, and no post-quantum scheme with comparable aggregate size and aggregation time is known. Without aggregation, a certificate holds one large post-quantum signature per member of the quorum, so it becomes infeasible for each validator to broadcast certificates, as modern consensus protocols often require. We present Quantum Cadence, a post-quantum consensus protocol with multiple concurrent proposers that