Vol. I · No. 144THU, SEP 10, 2026
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Reinforcement Learning for Neural Model Editing

Editing pretrained neural networks requires specialized algorithms tailored to specific objectives. Designing such algorithms is often time-consuming and demands significant effort. We present an exploratory framework that formulates neural model editing as a reinforcement learning problem, where agents modify models using reward feedback. We introduce two environments: MaskWorld, where agents scale weights multiplicatively, and ShiftWorld, where agents apply additive weight updates. The reward function combines a utility-preservation objective with a task-specific editing objective, enabling...

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Toward Instructions-as-Code: Understanding the Impact of Instruction Files on Agentic Pull Requests

AI-agents (e.g., GitHub Copilot) collaborate as teammates in different software engineering tasks, including code generation proposed through pull requests (Agentic-PRs). For better agent efficiency, developers create instruction files that guide the AI-agents, including how to navigate the project, locate the right components, run tests, respect best practices, and more. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between the creation of these instructions and the performance of AI-agents in creating better pull requests, which have a higher chance of success (i.e., the merge rate), addre...

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Why Sampling Is Not Choosing: Intentionality, Agency, and Moral Responsibility in Large Language Models

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have prompted claims that such systems exhibit agency or qualify as moral agents. This paper argues that these attributions are misguided. We maintain that moral responsibility requires commitment-bearing agency grounded in intrinsic intentionality and self-attributed action, and that such agency constitutes the form of free will relevant to responsibility. Although LLMs generate coherent and normatively evaluable outputs, their operation is fully characterized by probabilistic input-output mappings learned from data. Their apparent intentionali...

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Neuro-Symbolic Agents for Regulated Process Automation: Challenges and Research Agenda

LLM-based agents are entering regulated industries where they automate judgment intensive quality management processes. We argue that symbolic structures already embedded in these domains, including regulations, typed process models, and compliance constraints, should be treated not merely as external monitoring mechanisms but as core architectural components that shape the agent's decision-making and behavior. We propose compliance-by-construction as a complementary paradigm to guardrail-based monitoring: a structural foundation that prevents control-flow violations, while guardrails remain ...

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Who Pays the Price? Stakeholder-Centric Prompt Injection Benchmarking for Real-world Web Agents

Web agents driven by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world environments, where they operate over untrusted web content and execute actions with direct consequences. This makes them vulnerable to prompt-injection attacks, in which seemingly benign content embeds adversarial instructions that manipulate agent behaviour. Existing security benchmarks adopt an \textit{attack-centric} perspective, focusing on the technical feasibility of injections while overlooking the nuanced distribution of resulting harms. In practice, however, prompt-injection risk is victim-depe...

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Can I Buy Your KV Cache?

Right now, across the world, AI agents are repeating the same absurd act: to read one document, they each recompute it from scratch. Every agent re-runs prefill, the most compute-intensive step a large model takes, over identical text, only to rebuild a key-value (KV) cache identical to the one the agent before it just built. The same answer, computed a million times. We make a proposal that is almost offensively simple: compute it once. Let a publisher precompute a document's KV cache, and let every other agent buy the right to load it and skip prefill. It works, and it is token-exact: loadi...

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SkillCAT: Contrastive Assessment and Topology-Aware Skill Self-Evolution for LLM Agents

Skill self-evolution methods for LLM agents aim to turn execution trajectories into reusable skill documents, but current pipelines typically learn from one trajectory per task, merge candidate skill patches before checking them, and load the full skill corpus before inference. We propose SkillCAT, a training-free framework that separates this process into three stages. Contrastive Causal Extraction (CCE) samples multiple trajectories for each task and compares same-task success/failure pairs to identify evidence that explains outcome differences. Assessment-Augmented Evolution (AAE) replays ...

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RogueAI: A Reverse Turing Test for Detecting Licensed AI Deception in Dialogue

The original Turing Test asks a human judge to distinguish a machine from a person through dialogue. Three quarters of a century later, conversational systems pass this test in casual settings; the interesting epistemological question has shifted. We argue that the relevant modern variant asks not whether a dialogue partner is artificial, but whether it can be trusted. We present RogueAI, an interactive webapp that operationalizes this revisited test as a one-on-two interrogation game: a human player questions two indistinguishable Large Language Model agents, knowing that exactly one of them...

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Google DeepMind is worried about what happens when millions of agents start to interact

Google DeepMind is funding research into the potential dangers of millions of different AI agents interacting with each other online. According to Rohin Shah, who directs the company’s AGI safety and alignment research, the mass-market arrival of agents that can carry out tasks without human oversight and follow instructions given to them by other agents creates…

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OpenAI to acquire Ona

OpenAI plans to acquire Ona to expand Codex with secure, persistent cloud environments, enabling long-running AI agents across enterprise workflows.

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Context-Driven Incremental Compression for Multi-Turn Dialogue Generation

Modern conversational agents condition on an ever-growing dialogue history at each turn, incurring redundant attention and encoding costs that grow with conversation length. Naive truncation or summarization degrades fidelity, while existing context compressors lack cross-turn memory sharing or revision, causing information loss and compounding errors in long dialogues. We revisit the context compression under conversational dynamics and empirically present its fragility. To improve both efficiency and robustness, we introduce Context-Driven Incremental Compression (C-DIC), which treats a con...

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DIRECT: When and Where Should You Allocate Test-Time Compute in Embodied Planners?

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed as high-level planners for embodied agents, with an emerging strategy of scaling test-time compute to improve capability. However, we observe that doing so increases latency, token usage, and FLOPs while yielding uneven, often diminishing gains in downstream success, limiting where embodied agents can be deployed. We argue that choosing when and where to spend test-time compute is central to bringing frontier performance to the real world. We introduce DIRECT, a routing framework that uses multimodal scene context to allocate compute per...

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APPO: Agentic Procedural Policy Optimization

Recent advances in agentic Reinforcement Learning (RL) have substantially improved the multi-turn tool-use capabilities of large language model agents. However, most existing methods assign credit over coarse heuristic units, such as tool-call boundaries or fixed workflows, making it difficult to identify which intermediate decisions influence downstream outcomes. In this work, we study agentic RL from two perspectives: \textit{where to branch and how to assign credit after branching}. Our pilot analysis shows that influential decision points are broadly distributed throughout the generated s...

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Claw-SWE-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating OpenClaw-style Agent Harnesses on Coding Tasks

General-purpose agents such as OpenClaw are increasingly used as autonomous tool users, but their coding ability is difficult to measure under SWE-bench: a generic agent does not by itself satisfy the clean Docker workspace, patch, and prediction contract required for scoring. We introduce Claw-SWE-Bench, a multilingual SWE-bench-style benchmark and adapter protocol that makes heterogeneous agent harnesses, or claws, comparable under fair settings including a fixed prompt, runtime budget, workspace contract, patch extraction procedure, and evaluator. The full benchmark contains 350 GitHub iss...

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Fourier Features Let Agents Learn High Precision Policies with Imitation Learning

High-precision robotic manipulation requires fine-grained spatial reasoning that is often difficult to achieve with RGB-only policies due to depth ambiguity and perspective scale issues. Policies that leverage 3D information directly, such as those based on point clouds, offer a stronger geometric prior over purely image-based ones, yet their performance remains highly task-dependent. We hypothesize that this discrepancy may be due to the spectral bias of neural networks towards learning low frequency functions, which especially affects architectures conditioned on slow-moving Cartesian featu...

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PROJECTMEM: A Local-First, Event-Sourced Memory and Judgment Layer for AI Coding Agents

AI coding assistants now support a growing share of software work, from quick scripts to production applications. Yet these agents remain largely stateless: each new session re-reads project files, re-derives prior decisions, and - most costly - may repeat debugging attempts that already failed. Reconstructing this context can consume an estimated 5,000-20,000 tokens per session; the bottleneck is often not model capability but missing project memory. We present projectmem, an open-source, local-first memory and judgment layer for AI coding agents. projectmem records development as an append-...

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A Five-Plane Reference Architecture for Runtime Governance of Production AI Agents

Enterprise security was built to govern data boundaries: the protected surface was data at rest and in transit, and the controls -- access control, data-loss prevention, perimeter inspection -- governed crossings of that boundary. Production AI agents dissolve this assumption. An agent reads context, calls tools, invokes connectors, and modifies systems of record on an enterprise's behalf, so risk moves inside the workflow, into sequences of individually-permitted actions that may transform a business process no one authorized. Existing policy engines do not extend to this regime: they evalua...

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CCKS: Consensus-based Communication and Knowledge Sharing

In Decentralized Training and Decentralized Execution (DTDE) for cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), action-advising-based knowledge sharing promotes interpretable and scalable cooperation among agents. However, current action advising approaches often adhere too much to the teacher's guidance without evaluating teacher-student compatibility, which causes excessive advising, suboptimal stability, and degraded performance. To overcome these challenges, this paper presents a Consensus-based Communication and Knowledge Sharing (CCKS) framework, which allows agents to adopt rec...

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Towards Responsibly Non-Compliant Machines

We consider the problem of engineering autonomous intelligent agents that are capable to responsibly not comply with user requests. We argue that machine non-compliance comes in many different forms, and sketch the issues we should pursue on the road of accomplishing responsibly non-compliant intelligent machines. We anchor responsible non-compliance in justifications for task refusal, pathways to override the non-compliance, as well as careful tracking of security risks and liability transfers.

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FORT-Searcher: Synthesizing Shortcut-Resistant Search Tasks for Training Deep Search Agents

Training deep search agents requires verifiable questions whose answers remain unavailable until sufficient evidence has been acquired through search. Existing synthesis methods often increase apparent difficulty by enriching graph structures, but structural complexity alone does not guarantee realized search difficulty: the intended search process can collapse through a cheaper identifying route. We formalize this gap with a shortcut-aware difficulty framework and identify four actionable shortcut risks: evidence co-coverage, single-clue selectivity, exposed constants, and prior-knowledge bi...

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Bootstrapped Monitoring: Leveraging Transparent Reasoning to Oversee Stronger AI Agents

Trusted monitoring is a cornerstone of AI control. However, as frontier models grow more capable, the increasing capabilities gap between trusted and untrusted models may render trusted models unreliable monitors. We introduce \emph{bootstrapped monitoring}, a protocol that addresses this by inserting a stronger, intermediate untrusted model with transparent chain-of-thought reasoning into the oversight chain. The untrusted monitor ($U_m$) evaluates the agent's actions, while a weaker trusted model ($T$) oversees $U_m$'s reasoning to detect collusion. We evaluate bootstrapped monitoring on mu...

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Exploration Structure in LLM Agents for Multi-File Change Localization

Software engineering tools increasingly rely on LLM based agents to localize files to change to resolve a software issue. Most AI agents explore repositories linearly, that is, visiting one directory or file per step. We postulate that this is a structural mismatch for changes that span several subsystems. We compare linear sequential exploration against non-linear, domain-scoped parallel agentic exploration. Using SWE Bench Pro as initial benchmark, we focus on ansible as an exemplar. We construct an approach for persistent-session evaluation of GitHub issues anchored at a single base commit...

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Setting a custom price for a model in AgentsView

TIL: Setting a custom price for a model in AgentsView I've been really enjoying AgentsView by Wes McKinney as a tool for exploring my token usage across different coding agents running on my laptop. Claude Fable 5 came out today and wasn't yet included in the pricing database AgentsView uses. I used Fable to reverse-engineer AgentsView and figured out this recipe for setting custom prices. Here's my Claude Fable 5 usage for today so far, plotted by AgentsView as a treemap across my different local projects: Tags: ai , generative-ai , llms , llm-pricing

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EEVEE: Towards Test-time Prompt Learning in the Real World for Self-Improving Agents

In this paper, we propose EEVEE, the first multi-dataset test-time prompt learning framework for LLM agents, enabling test-time prompt learning under real-world task streams. Existing methods are largely designed for single-dataset settings, while real-world applications require models to handle heterogeneous input streams drawn from multiple datasets, domains, and task distributions, limiting their practical applicability. To mitigate cross-dataset interference, EEVEE introduces a router that partitions incoming inputs into task clusters and assigns them to suitable prompt configurations. Th...

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Data Journalist Agent: Transforming Data into Verifiable Multimodal Stories

Data tells stories that shape society; the data journalist's job is to turn raw information into stories non-experts can trust. A high-quality news feature takes a newsroom team weeks: hunting for context, running statistics, choosing an angle, and designing visuals. Recent agents handle individual steps well: data-science agents close the analysis loop, while design agents synthesize beautiful websites. But can an agent serve as a data journalist end to end? We introduce Data Journalist Agent (Data2Story), a multi-agent framework that orchestrates specialized roles into a single virtual news...

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ABC-Bench: An Agentic Bio-Capabilities Benchmark for Biosecurity

Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly acquiring capabilities relevant to biological research, from literature synthesis to interpretation of experimental data. Increasingly, LLM agents can also perform in silico biology tasks that previously required experienced human biologists. These emerging AI capabilities offer new opportunities for scientific discovery and biomedical advances, but they also shift the landscape of biosecurity risks. To address this, we introduce the Agentic Bio-Capabilities Benchmark (ABC-Bench), a suite of tasks to measure agentic biosecurity-relevant capabilities. A...

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A History-Aware Visually Grounded Critic for Computer Use Agents

Various test-time interventions for Computer Use Agents (CUAs), including critic models, have been developed to improve performance through pre-execution action evaluation in complex Graphical User Interface (GUI) environments. However, existing critics suffer from two key limitations: they (1) focus primarily on short-sighted decision loops (e.g., forgetting earlier actions) and (2) lack the visual grounding needed to detect flawed actions (e.g., clicking wrong UI elements). To address these, we introduce HiViG, a History-aware Visually Grounded test-time framework, built around a multimodal...

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Accelerating Federated Learning Research with AI Agents and NVIDIA FLARE Auto-FL

Federated learning (FL) research often begins with a deceptively simple question: What should we try next? A new aggregation rule, a FedProx coefficient, a... Federated learning (FL) research often begins with a deceptively simple question: What should we try next? A new aggregation rule, a FedProx coefficient, a server optimizer setting, a SCAFFOLD variant, or a model architecture tweak may all look promising before an experiment starts. After the run finishes, the harder questions begin: Did the change actually improve the metric? Source

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