Vol. I · No. 197MON, NOV 2, 2026
Archive

The Archive

Search the full wire by company, model, lab, or keyword. Every story we have ever aggregated.

Time-Aware Validation of Machine Learning Fuel Consumption Models: Evidence from 1\,Hz Operational Data, CCGS \textit{Sir Wilfrid Laurier}

Ship fuel consumption (SFC) prediction supports vessel operation optimisation, emissions estimation, and decision support systems (DSS) for sustainable maritime transportation. Numerous data-driven fuel models have been developed over the past two decades, but a critical and often overlooked limitation lies in their validation practices: most studies evaluate performance using random train--test splits, which, applied to high-frequency records, admit temporal leakage and yield optimistic results that do not reflect deployment conditions. This paper examines that gap using time-aware evaluatio...

·

Policy Iteration with Human Feedback: Bringing Post-Training RL to In-context Learning

Generative pretraining established reusable task representations; later work on language-based task conditioning and in-context learning showed that a fixed model could adapt its behavior from instructions and demonstrations. Policy Iteration with Human Feedback (PIHF) builds on this development and the recurrent evaluate-and-improve structure of generalized policy iteration. PIHF uses a pretrained language model as its execution substrate and moves persistent revision to a versioned natural-language policy and tool set. A language-model critic and clinical expert review complete-panel reason...

·

CaliBench: Are the Stochastic Dynamics of Video World Models Physically Calibrated?

Video world models approximate the stochastic distribution of physical outcomes through generative sampling, but existing benchmarks score individual generations or compare distributions coarsely over a whole dataset, leaving the fine-grained aleatoric uncertainty of specific phenomena untested. We introduce CaliBench, which scores outcomes in a physically interpretable discrete space - a bin index, a die face, a suit, a colour - rather than a learned feature space such as in FID, so the distance from a known reference distribution is measured directly. We curate outcome spaces whose referenc...

·

GEO-Flag: Detecting and Measuring GEO-Optimized Web Content

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) modifies web content to increase its likelihood of being selected and cited by generative search engines. This can give strategically optimized pages visibility disproportionate to their authority or relevance and even make weak or false information appear well supported. Unlike conventional search, generative search synthesizes information into direct answers rather than presenting competing sources, which can further amplify these risks, as assessing source provenance and authority requires additional user interaction. Despite these concerns, systematic ...

·

Quipu: A Governed Bitemporal Knowledge Graph Store

Agents now write knowledge graphs, but knowledge-graph stores still carry defaults set when humans curated them: accept writes now and clean later, keep one time axis or none, treat every writer's facts as equally trustworthy, and leave governance to dashboards and middleware. These four defaults are individually convenient and jointly untenable under agent workloads. We present Quipu, an embeddable store that inverts all four: no fact enters except through a gate whose predicates evaluate the pending post-state; data, trust labels, verdicts, and the rules themselves are bitemporal; named gra...

·

Unsupervised Learning of Cell Instances with Generative Routing Pyramids

Identifying and representing object instances such as cells or nuclei is a common task in microscopy image analysis. Established machine learning workflows typically use supervised detection or segmentation followed by feature extraction or classification, which requires manual annotations and treats instance segmentation and cell representation as separate stages. We describe a new unsupervised method for cell instance segmentation and phenotypic classification from unlabeled microscopy images. Our method is based on reconstructing each image using a coarse-to-fine routing pyramid that assoc...

·

When State Becomes an Attack Surface: State-Semantic Injection in LLM-Driven Embodied Agents

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated capabilities in in-context learning, task decomposition, step-by-step reasoning, and code generation, driving their gradual evolution from text generation models into the core of agents capable of perceiving environments, invoking tools, and executing tasks. Traditional LLM Agents typically obtain information through webpages, documents, databases, or external tools and generate corresponding invocation sequences according to user goals; when this technology is further integrated with robotic systems, large language models begin to undertake func...

·

Diagnosing Dense Same-Class Attribute Misbinding in Large Vision-Language Models

Large vision-language models can recognize the objects and attributes in a crowded scene yet assign an attribute to the wrong same-class instance. Generic visual-question-answering accuracy marks the response as wrong, while object-hallucination metrics may regard both the object and attribute as image-supported; neither reveals the transfer. This study formalizes this blind spot as Dense Same-Class Attribute Misbinding (DSCAM) and presents InstaBind-Lite, a controlled benchmark that makes it directly measurable. Its 524 images contain 529 curated groups of 3-6 same-class entities, 1773 boxed...

·

Cross-Sign Language Transfer Learning Using Domain Adaptation with Multi-scale Temporal Alignment

Sign language serves as a vital means of communication for individuals with hearing impairments, yet recognition resources for the over 100 distinct sign languages are severely lacking. In response, we present our work on sign language recognition using transfer learning and the domain adaptation method TA3N, which utilizes the Temporal Relational Network (TRN) module for aligning multi-scale temporal relations. Our findings highlight the superior performance of Domain Adaptation to neural network-based transfer learning, particularly in improving recognition of American Sign Language (ASL). ...

·

When Agents Coordinate: Measuring Coordination in Multi-Agent AI Coding

We study how teams of AI coding agents coordinate while solving programming tasks. Current evaluations usually report whether the agents complete the task and how much the run costs, leaving the coordination inside the team largely unmeasured. We introduce an instrument to measure this coordination. Each run is represented as a temporal network in which agents and files are nodes, and messages, file writes, and file reads are timestamped directed edges with an associated cost. We apply this instrument to 1902 runs, each evaluated with a fixed test suite, across configurations that vary the te...

·

ClawGym II: Exploring Black-Box RL on Agent Harness

Agent harnesses have substantially improved performance on long-horizon tasks by coordinating agent interactions with the environment. However, reinforcement learning through complex harnesses remains largely unexplored, as scaling such training to long-horizon agent tasks introduces fundamental challenges. In this work, we present a unified black-box RL framework for stable and scalable optimization of general agents through complex harnesses. Concretely, we first build a sandbox-based execution infrastructure that isolates task environments and harnesses within temporary sandboxes for large...

·

UniDot: A Unified Network for Sequence Modeling and Feature Interaction in Large-scale Recommendation

Industrial recommenders rely on two model families that have evolved largely independently: feature-interaction models over multi-field user/item features, and sequential models over user-behavior histories. Production systems couple them only loosely. To unify the two, we present UniDot, a novel architecture for post-click conversion prediction built from the factorization-machine (FM) point of view: the embedding inner product---which powers collaborative filtering and lets a recommender generalize to unseen user--item pairs---is the same primitive as attention's query dot key scoring, so a...

·

Historical Backtesting for Scientific Question Discovery: A Protocol and Astronomy Pilot

Systems that generate scientific research questions are evaluated today by expert scores, LLM-as-judge ratings, or curated case studies -- all subjective, none falsifiable. We formalize historical backtesting as an alternative: a system generates questions from a corpus frozen at a historical cutoff, the questions are frozen before any access to later literature, and a temporally isolated future corpus then determines whether each question was subsequently answered, partially addressed, independently posed, or ignored, and whether its underlying premise was supported or refuted. The protocol ...

·

Neurosymbolic Embodied Agents

Language and vision-language models generate plausible embodied plans but do not guarantee executability, as their outputs can violate environment dynamics or act on incorrectly grounded entities. We present a neurosymbolic agent that factors long-horizon household tasks into task-directed visual exploration and constrained symbolic planning. In the first phase, a vision-language model and exploration harness acquire goal-relevant predicates and instance bindings from egocentric observations and grounded interactions, producing a symbolic initial state. In the second, a PDDL transition model ...

·

Steering the Flow: Inverting Face Recognition Models via Gradient-Guided Flow Matching

Model Inversion Attacks (MIAs) aim to reconstruct representative training samples of target identities from face recognition models, exposing critical security vulnerabilities. Existing methods typically rely on indirect guidance or highly stochastic guidance, making it difficult to stably optimize generation trajectories toward target facial images. In this paper, we propose Steering Flow Model Inversion (SFMI), a novel two-stage white-box model inversion method that reformulates inversion as a trajectory-steering task. Specifically, Step I, Learning a Generic Flow Matching Prior, pre-trains...

·

GRIP: Grounded Reasoning via Information-Restricted Premises

High-capacity encoders in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) can let the query dominate the latent state, leaving retrieved evidence functionally irrelevant. We call this failure mode query dominance. To address it, we introduce \textbf{GRIP} (Grounded Reasoning via Information-Restricted Premises), which imposes capacity asymmetry: the decoder keeps full-dimensional access to the query, while retrieved evidence passes through a severe stochastic bottleneck. This forces the evidence channel to encode only the residual information unavailable from the query. Across five reasoning benchmarks,...

·

Topological Attribution Distance (TAD): Revealing Segment-Level RAG Influence on LLM Output Geometry for Incident Log Analysis

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being deployed in cybersecurity operations to assist cybersecurity analysts with rapid decision-making against emerging threats. However, there is a main criteria that must be met when using LLMs in cybersecurity, that is, trust in the generated outputs. As Agentic AI is integrated into operational systems, a robust evidence attribution and provenance tracking technique is essential to trace the origins of model generations. When autonomous agents make a decision (right or wrong), the ability to trace back through the decision chain is critical, a...

·

Beyond $L_2$: Generalizing Abductive Latent Explanations to Diverse Prototype-Based Architectures

Prototype-based neural networks are hailed as interpretable-by-design architectures. Recently, Abductive Latent Explanations (ALE) were introduced to provide formal, mathematically guaranteed explanations that leverage the intrinsic structure of these networks to ensure both predictive safety and human readability. ALEs rely on computing tight bounds on latent space distances to produce formal explanations. However, existing ALE formulations are rigidly confined to Euclidean latent spaces. This leaves a critical gap: modern state-of-the-art architectures increasingly rely on non-Euclidean rep...

·

TRACE-Bench: Decomposing and Diagnosing Multi-Reference Image Generation

Despite recent advances in unified multimodal models for multi-reference image generation, existing benchmarks remain organized around predefined task types (e.g., "subject composition"), which are ill-suited to this combinatorial setting and lead to fragmented coverage, uncontrolled complexity, and little diagnostic value. Recognizing that diverse multi-reference tasks share a common set of atomic operations, we adopt a capability-oriented perspective and formalize four operators: Anchor ($f$), Disentangle ($g$), Apply ($\oplus$), and Compose ($C$). Any multi-reference prompt can then be rep...

·

LAVA: Logic-Aware Validation and Augmentation Framework for Large-Scale Financial Document Auditing

Financial document validation in production, such as payroll auditing, tax compliance, and loan underwriting, demands exceptional accuracy, consistency, and reproducibility under strict enterprise constraints. In practice, documents arrive with heterogeneous layouts and formats, semantically rich and context-dependent content, and embedded business rules that current pipelines struggle to process reliably. We introduce LAVA (Logic-Aware Validation and Augmentation), a modular, backbone-agnostic pipeline built on multimodal large language models, that integrates a four-stage design: document-r...

·

On the Principles Behind Neural Network Optimizers

Reliable optimization is central to neural network (NN) training, yet Adam, the default optimizer for modern LLMs, rests on a fragile foundation. This thesis develops a principled grounding for Adam and motivates new designs. First, we revisit Adam's divergence--convergence debate and show the existence of a problem-dependent phase transition: with properly chosen, batch-size-dependent hyperparameters, Adam converges, whereas under small-$β_2$ regimes it can diverge. Second, we investigate why Adam substantially outperforms SGD on Transformers through Hessian structure. We find that the Hessi...

·

Would this change your answer? Evaluating Explanations of LLM Behavior In The Wild with Counterfactual Experiments

Many areas of AI research, such as language model interpretability and chain of thought faithfulness, seek to explain model behaviors. But what constitutes a "good" explanation? In this work, we evaluate explanations through the lens of counterfactual simulatability-whether the explanation is useful for predicting model behaviors on related counterfactual inputs. To this end, we introduce CHIVE (Counterfactual Hypothesis Investigation Via Edits), a novel agentic pipeline that identifies unexpected model behaviors in the wild and investigates them with counterfactual prompt edits. This yields ...

·

TDD-Agent: Test-Driven Reasoning for Code Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in code generation, yet ensuring correctness in complex, repository-level tasks remains challenging. Existing approaches often use generated tests as static post-hoc validators, which limits their ability to guide implementation and may introduce misleading feedback when the tests themselves are incomplete or incorrect. In this paper, we introduce TDD-Agent, which operationalizes the test-driven development paradigm for code generation. TDD-Agent first prompts the model to generate executable tests, encouraging it to clarify expec...

·

Le Critique: Privileged Value Functions for LLM Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning algorithms for Large Language Models (LLMs) are largely distinguished by their variance reduction strategy. Group-relative methods like GRPO reduce gradient variance by sampling multiple rollouts per prompt, but provide only sequence-level credit. Training is also blocked by straggler rollouts, reducing throughput and increasing off-policyness. Learned value functions theoretically address both problems, providing token-level advantages without requiring large groups. However, additional infrastructure engineering challenges combined with the practical success of critic...

·

GoalEvolve: From Handcrafted Algorithm Priors to Goal-Driven Evolution of Physical Design Algorithms

Physical design algorithms operate within tightly coupled, multi-stage optimization flows, where stage-local gains may vanish or induce downstream degradation. Existing program-evolution frameworks often rely on stage-local objectives or undifferentiated multi-metric feedback, which neither guarantee better final results nor identify which unmet requirement should guide the next iteration. We present GoalEvolve, a goal-driven framework that makes physical design algorithm evolution accountable for the final quality of results (QoR) of the complete flow. Given a multi-objective QoR target regi...

·

Unsupervised Anomaly Detection for Image Dataset Quality Assurance in Multi-Center Breast MRI

Corrupted, inconsistent, or anomalous data silently threatens the safety and reliability of medical AI. Despite growing regulatory recognition of dataset quality assurance (QA) for high-risk medical AI, scalable automated detection remains underdeveloped. We employ unsupervised anomaly detection (AD) and out-of-distribution (OOD) detection as an automated dataset QA mechanism for multi-center dynamic contrast-enhanced breast MRI. We build a controlled AD benchmark of 17 realistic QA-relevant anomaly types from six public datasets (protocol violations, processing errors, incorrect anatomical r...

·

The Ethical Decision Head: Operationalizing Normative Ethics in Autonomous Vehicles via Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

As autonomous vehicles (AVs) approach Level 4 and Level 5 operational capability [SAE International, 2018], their on- board decision systems must handle not only safety-critical locomotion but also their subsequent moral weight. This paper details the Ethical Decision Head (EDH), a deep re- inforcement learning (RL) framework that encodes ethical reasoning as a differentiable reward signal, enabling a pol- icy gradient agent to learn morally-aligned driving behavior in scenarios whose state representation is aligned with the CARLA simulation environment [Dosovitskiy et al., 2017]. Two normati...

·
30 stories