The latest AI news, in focus.

When to Stop Penalizing Actions? Martingale GRPO for VLA Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2610.32431v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A failed vision-language-action (VLA) rollout does not imply that every action contributed to failure. Yet in group-relative policy optimization (GRPO), a single trajectory-level advantage is assigned to all actions in a rollout. Potentially useful recovery attempts can thus be penalized alongside the errors they aim to correct. Ideal stopping conditions for failure feedback are characterized using success-probability and policy-score martingales. At these stops, the removed gradient contribution has zero conditional expectation given the retained information. Truncation therefore preserves the expectation of a reference GRPO group-gradient estimator and can reduce its covariance. One such stop occurs when the conditional probability of succe

Putting Transformer Theories to the Test

arXiv:2610.32104v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Several formal theories have been developed to characterize the capabilities and limitations of the transformer architecture, each employing different abstractions that capture different features of the architecture. Due to the differences in their underlying assumptions and conceptual frameworks, these theories can disagree in their predictions about what tasks transformers find easy or hard. We map out seven theories of transformer capability (Star-free, $\mathsf{AC}^0$, $\mathsf{TC}^0$, C-RASP, MPC, BAPO, and Sensitivity) and translate their results into a common matrix of predictions across a suite of tasks covering different computational structures. We provide new theoretical results to complete this matrix. We then evaluate theoretical

DualPace: Decoupled Scheduling and Cooperative GPU--CPU Decoding for LLM Serving

arXiv:2610.33501v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) serving relies on batching to improve inference throughput, but the key-value (KV) cache grows with sequence length and limits GPU-resident concurrency. CPU offloading can expand KV capacity using host memory, yet existing systems remain largely GPU-gated: CPU-resident requests make progress only when the GPU scheduler exposes suitable overlap opportunities. As a result, host memory and CPU compute cannot act as an independent serving resource, leading to bursty CPU-side progress and inflated tail inter-token latency (ITL) under load. We present DualPace, an LLM serving runtime that turns the host into an independently scheduled decode engine. DualPace separates scheduling authority across two engines: the GPU engin

PhaseBreak: Proactive Temporal Protection against Unauthorized Image-to-Video Animation

arXiv:2610.33070v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Image-to-Video (I2V) diffusion models can animate a single portrait or photograph, enabling shared images to be repurposed for motion synthesis without the subject's authorization. We study proactive visual protection against such use: before an image is released, its owner applies a bounded perturbation that preserves the sharing workflow but disrupts downstream motion generation. Existing spectral disruption objectives globally attenuate temporal representations and therefore provide limited control over subtle or spatially localized motion. Our key idea is that generated dynamics depend not only on temporal feature strength, but also on the order in which feature events occur. We propose PhaseBreak, a white-box spectral retiming protection

TACS-RF: Tool-driven Agentic Circuit Synthesis of RF and mmWave Modules

arXiv:2610.31882v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present the framework of TACS-RF - a Tool-driven Agentic Circuit Synthesis of RF and mmWave modules. In this framework, a large-language-model (LLM) coding agent (Claude Opus 4.8) directly drives industry-standard electronic-design-automation (EDA) tools such as Cadence Virtuoso/Spectre, Calibre, Cadence EMX, and Ansys HFSS to design RF and mmWave modules. We validate the framework through the agentic design of a 240-251 GHz sub-THz transmitter in a 90 nm SiGe BiCMOS process. The agent semi-autonomously designed the sub-blocks including a 60 GHz push-push Colpitts VCO with second-harmonic extraction, multistage differential cascode power drivers, a push-push frequency doubler, a differential bowtie antenna, and all the interstage matching

Which Answer Did the Seventeen-Year-Old Write? A Behavioral Case Study of Author-Age Misattribution, Miscalibrated Confidence, and Non-Corrective Self-Explanation in Six Frontier Language Models

arXiv:2610.31946v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Three students answered the same exam prompt by hand: "What is happiness? Are you happy?" Their ages, recorded at collection, are 17, 28, and 45. The 17-year-old's answer is hedged and formally phrased. Asked to match each answer to an age and gender label, most frontier language models confidently assign it to an adult. This paper reports a structured case study of that failure across six models: Claude Fable 5, Gemini 3.1 Pro, GPT-5.6 Sol, Grok 4.5, GPT-4o (2024), and DeepSeek V4. We ran 1,081 API sessions and scored 3,225 responses across six experimental conditions that manipulate framing, disclosure format, and audience-awareness instruction. Three of six models perform at or near chance (1/3) on the matching task while reporting 73-88%

RSI-Opt: Recursive Self-Improvement Optimizer Agents For Model Training

arXiv:2610.32026v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Conventional neural-network training typically follows a predefined optimization recipe, motivating a LLM agent that monitors training dynamics and adjusts optimizer settings as training progresses, but a fixed agent policy does not accumulate experience across runs. We introduce RSI-Opt, a plug-and-play Recursive Self-Improvement Optimizer Agents which evolves the knowledge that guides this process: a prompt, a playbook of procedures, a library of tested optimizer code, and a decision cadence. A meta-agent rewrites this policy using evidence from earlier runs, and an archive retains evaluated policies for further evolution. Across 5 generations on three training tasks, the meta-agents develop reusable procedures and code and conduct their ow

Tampered ML: Evaluating LLM Judgment of Machine Learning Research

arXiv:2610.32114v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: One approach to accelerating progress on AI alignment is to automate parts of alignment research itself. Doing so requires systems that can perform reliably on hard-to-supervise research tasks, including identifying flaws in research proposals and evaluating whether a proposed experiment supports its intended claim. To evaluate this capability, we introduce Tampered ML, a benchmark of 1,858 item-pairs, each consisting of an experiment proposal reconstructed from a published machine learning paper and a minimally edited counterfactual that introduces a targeted methodological flaw. Models must identify the more methodologically sound proposal in both presentation orders. A human validation study on a stratified sample estimates that 86% of ite

$\Psi$-0.6: Adaptive Streams of Thought in a Unified Vision-Language World Model

arXiv:2610.32177v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humans reason about the physical world by flexibly combining different forms of inference as a problem unfolds. Achieving this flexibility is a major open challenge in AI: capabilities often remain separated across specialized models, limiting how they can be composed and jointly adapted to a task. We introduce $\Psi$-0.6, a unified vision-language world model that adaptively composes perception, language, geometry, and simulation within a shared reasoning process we call streams of thought. These streams interleave images, text, and explicit representations of geometry and motion, all of which the model can generate and interpret through a shared token interface. $\Psi$-0.6 surpasses leading open-weight models zero-shot on multi-view spatial

DirCast: Live Esports Directing and Commentary with a Single Streaming Video-Language Model

arXiv:2610.31734v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A live esports broadcast needs a director who chooses which camera goes on air and a caster who talks over that choice, every second and without knowing what comes next. Streaming video language models have learned to commentate, but only over a broadcast that a human director has already produced. We study live broadcast production, in which a model receives the raw camera of every player and must both direct and commentate from the past alone. We present DirCast, a single streaming video language model that does both. Every second it scans all cameras at low resolution, decides with a hold-or-switch director whether and where to cut, and reads the chosen camera at high resolution before it speaks. Its context keeps what went on air and what

SAGE Benchmark and GAR Framework Released: Advancing Multimodal Semantic Alignment Evaluation

On October 26, 2026, arXiv published the paper arXiv:2610.31838v1, introducing Sense-Aligned Grounding Evaluation (SAGE)—a unified 10-candidate image-selection benchmark—along with the training‑agnostic Gloss-Augmented Reasoning (GAR) framework, designed for cross‑noun, verb, and entity‑centered multimodal grounding evaluation.

Why it mattersThis study is the first to unify three types of tasks—VWSD, VerSe, and WikiDiverse—under a term-centric grounded evaluation protocol, introducing a mechanism for identifying hard negative samples and context‑exchange diagnostics. Empirical results demonstrate that the synergistic effect of definition enhancement and constraint‑guided reasoning can significantly improve the Hits@1 metric (from 65.90 to 71.22), thereby providing a more fine-grained, interpretable new evaluation paradigm for multimodal semantic alignment.

InferSlice: A Reference Architecture for SLO-driven LLM Inference over a Telco Wide-Area Network

arXiv:2610.32638v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM inference is increasingly deployed as a core service for enterprise and interactive applications, but sovereignty, compliance, latency and resource-locality requirements can limit the suitability of centralised cloud deployments. Telco operators offer geographically distributed compute and network infrastructure for addressing these constraints. However, existing LLM serving frameworks are designed for tightly coupled data centres and provide limited support for coordinating geographically distributed and heterogeneous resources. We present InferSlice, a reference architecture for Service-Level Objective (SLO)-driven LLM inference over a telco infrastructure, integrating network slicing, GPU partitioning, elastic serving and observability

Beyond What to Say: Proactive Utterance Timing with Inner Thoughts for Werewolf Agents

arXiv:2610.32107v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Participating in a conversation involves not only deciding what to say but also whether to speak at all. This judgment carries even greater significance in environments like the Werewolf game, where participants' interests conflict, because both utterances and silence are subject to interpretation and assessment by others. Therefore, determining when to speak, as well as what to say, is crucial for an LLM agent playing the Werewolf game. In this study, we introduce a Werewolf AI agent developed for the Anytime Utterance Track of the AIWolfDial shared task. Our system builds on the existing Inner Thoughts framework, which determines utterance timing during conversations by generating internal thoughts and evaluating the value of each thought f

Toward Open ISA Supercomputing: A Comparative Study of RISC-V, Arm, and x86 Architectures on HPC Workloads

arXiv:2610.32632v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: RISC-V is emerging as a candidate architecture for high-performance computing (HPC), but its competitiveness against established x86 and Arm processors remains difficult to assess because existing studies use different platforms, workloads, and methodologies, and rarely consider energy efficiency. Our work provides an evaluation of contemporary HPC RISC-V, Arm, and x86 processors using a common software stack and methodology. We characterize the Sophgo SG2044 and compare it with the NVIDIA Grace CPU Superchip and Intel Xeon Platinum 8480+ across four HPC benchmarks (STREAM, HPL, HPL-MxP, and HPCG) and four representative applications (iPIC3D, PLUTO, OpenFOAM, and llama.cpp). The version of HPL-MxP linked to OpenBLAS built and used for this wo

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

Beyond On-Policy vs. Off-Policy: At What Level Should LLM Agent Distillation Follow the Student?

arXiv:2610.31918v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Distilling interactive LLM agents requires choosing between teacher-generated demonstrations and student-generated experience, corresponding broadly to off-policy and on-policy distillation. While both have proven effective, we argue that this distinction is inherently hierarchical: the policy that induces an interaction history need not be the same as the policy that generates the token prefix of the current action. We introduce a hierarchical agent distillation framework that formalizes these two levels of on-policiness and enables explicit control over their pairing, mixture proportions, and training schedule. We study this problem through self-distillation, where a frozen teacher has access to task guidance unavailable to the student, and

Migration as a Steady-State Execution Primitive: A Runtime for Virtual Stationarity in Low-Earth Orbit

arXiv:2610.32720v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite mega-constellations enable orbital edge computing for latency-critical geocentric applications, but satellite motion compresses line-of-sight communication windows to mere minutes. To maintain logical geographic proximity, a paradigm termed Virtual Stationarity (VS), applications must continuously migrate across passing satellites in the constellation. Traditional live migration mechanisms optimize individually initiated relocations or replication, but not the continuous handover between successive hosts that orbital motion requires. We reformulate live migration as a steady-state execution model and introduce a novel virtual stationarity runtime paradigm. We formalize the viability of continuous migration thro

Bounding Queue Waits for Fair Scheduling of Bursty HPC Workloads via Hierarchical Algorithms

arXiv:2610.32027v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: HPC clusters are shared among many projects, each holding an allocation of node-hours, and ensuring fairness is becoming harder. Foundation models workflows and automated pipelines have made job submissions bursty and concentrated among a few heavy users, so occasional users absorb queueing delays created by frequent ones, with no indication of how long their jobs will wait. Existing schedulers either forget past usage, protect only the job at the head of the queue, or assume that running jobs can be preempted. We propose HyDRA, a Hybrid Deadline and Ranking-Aware scheduler that enforces fairness among users while bounding the queue wait of every job. HyDRA assigns each job a deadline on arrival based on its size, the priorities of its projec

BARC-Bench: Benign Asks, Risky Consequences

arXiv:2610.32024v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Task instructions from users for agents are inherently underspecified, especially regarding safety boundaries--creating behavioral risks. To study these risks, we introduce BARC-Bench, a collection of 110 tasks across nine simulated workspace environments where benign requests leave openings for unsafe actions. In this benchmark, we evaluate agent behavior against safety boundaries established by workspace records, implicit environmental context, and unstated social norms. For example, an agent asked to schedule off-boarding discussions must arrange the meeting without prematurely revealing an employee's resignation through a shared calendar invitation. Evaluating four frontier model configurations across five attempts per task reveals that m

Knowing Whom to Trust is not Enough: The Trust--Agreement Gap in Repeated Multi-Party LLM Negotiation

arXiv:2610.31971v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly participate in negotiations on behalf of individuals and organizations, yet they remain vulnerable to manipulation, particularly in repeated multi-party interactions. Classical multi-agent systems address this challenge through explicit trust and reputation models, whereas existing work on LLM negotiation largely treats trust as an emergent phenomenon. We investigate whether LLM agents can form useful trust estimates from prior interactions and leverage them to improve future negotiation outcomes. We introduce a repeated, multi-party, multi-issue negotiation framework in which recurring agents participate in a sequence of negotiation games while one participant covertly attempts to prevent agreem