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AI Research

Recent papers from arXiv (cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.CL, cs.CV, cs.RO, stat.ML). Abstracts are excerpts only — read the full paper on arXiv.

Artificial Intelligence

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LLM Agents Can Easily Tamper With Their Own Traces↗

Asynchronous monitoring, incident investigations, and compliance audits primarily rely on agent traces to reconstruct what happened. These analyses assume that LLM agents cannot tamper with their own execution traces. We show that local LLM agents such as Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity, Open Code and Grok Build fail to enforce this boundary. All tested harnesses, except Muse Code, allowed agents to delete their traces when asked, without triggering monitor guardrails. We also validate that external attackers can exploit this gap to induce trace deletion. Finally, we show that trace tampering behavior emerges naturally in frontier models, when agents try to improve their rewards. We advise practitioners to ensure trace logging happens through an independent interception mechanism outside of the agent's control, preserving trace integrity even in cases of full host compromise. Overall, ou

1d agoJeremy Qin, David Schmotz, Derck Prinzhorn et al.PDF↗
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AD-WM: Action-Discriminative World Models for Counterfactual Model Predictive Control↗

Latent world models are typically trained to predict factual transitions, whereas model predictive control (MPC) must compare alternative actions from the same state. A model can therefore achieve low factual prediction error yet poorly distinguish candidate actions. We introduce AD-WM, an action-discriminative joint-embedding world model for counterfactual MPC. AD-WM combines residual latent dynamics with predictor-level action-recovery regularization, using inverse dynamics and a normalized recovery objective motivated by conditional mutual information. Both objectives encourage planning transitions to preserve action information; their auxiliary heads are discarded at test time, leaving MPC unchanged. On OGBench-Cube, AD-WM improves hard-start success from 3.7% to 52.0% over a matched LeWM baseline and improves mean success over the reproduced baseline in four of five simulation envir

1d agoJiabin Qiu, Zixuan Chen, Hongye Cao et al.PDF↗
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RAPID: Robot Agentic Programming from Demonstrations↗

Coding agents have demonstrated enormous success in solving complex programming problems. To leverage their potential for robot systems, this work introduces Robot Agentic Programming from Demonstrations (RAPID), which automatically generates, verifies, and refines robot programs, given a single visual human demonstration. The iterative agentic loop of code refinement requires several key ingredients: (i) a testable task specification, (ii) action primitives for robot execution, and (iii) an interactive environment for program execution and verification. RAPID infers all three from the demonstration automatically. To make the resulting program reusable beyond the demonstration setting, RAPID uses an object-centric relational program representation that focuses on the underlying structure of the demonstrated strategy rather than the specific motion per se: it expresses the action primitiv

1d agoYuyao Liu, Jiayuan Mao, David Hsu et al.PDF↗
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Rolling-WAM: World Action Models with Rolling Imagination↗

World Action Models (WAMs) couple action generation with future visual prediction for robotic manipulation. However, completing the joint video-action denoising process at each replanning cycle incurs substantial latency, delaying action updates and limiting closed-loop responsiveness. We present Rolling-WAM, a formulation that distributes joint denoising across successive replanning cycles. Our method maintains a sliding window of video-action chunks at staggered noise levels. At each step, a rolling noise schedule fully denoises the imminent action chunk for execution, while partially refining farther-future chunks. As the window advances with new camera observations, the retained future chunks continue their denoising process. This distributes the computational cost over time while carrying an evolving visual-action context across chunk boundaries. Evaluations on LIBERO, RoboTwin, and

1d agoYinghua Zhou, Junjie Ye, Yiqi Zhao et al.PDF↗
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Coding Agents for Generalized Task and Motion Planning Problems↗

Task and motion planning (TAMP) problems remain difficult even with full observability and object-centric states because discrete decisions are tightly coupled to geometric, kinematic, and dynamic constraints. Generalized TAMP addresses this difficulty by exploiting regularities across problem instances to reduce planning effort on new instances. However, existing methods require substantial TAMP-specific engineering. We investigate whether coding agents can automate this process by synthesizing programs that generalize across instances. Given a task description and simulator access, each agent chooses how to interact with the environment while developing a program within a fixed synthesis budget. The program is then frozen and evaluated on unseen instances. We evaluate Claude Code (Opus 5) and Codex (GPT-5.6 Sol and GPT-6 Astra) on 28 simulated environments from KinDER and PDDLStream, w

1d agoMatteo Merler, Bowen Li, Josh Roy et al.PDF↗
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To Trust or Not to Trust: Retrieval-Augmented Fact Checking in Speech↗

Online misinformation increasingly appears in spoken formats such as news clips, podcasts, interviews, political speeches, and social media videos, creating a need for fact-checking systems that can verify claims directly from speech. We introduce VeriSpeak, a probe benchmark for studying speech-based fact verification in Large Audio Language Models (LALMs). VeriSpeak contains 3,879 spoken claims spanning temporal, geographical, and relational facts, with balanced true and false labels. The benchmark is designed to examine whether factual verification ability transfers from text to speech, and whether retrieval-augmented LALMs can use textual evidence to correctly support or refute spoken claims. Our experiments reveal a consistent text-speech modality gap: LALMs that verify written claims reliably often fail on the same claims when spoken. Moreover, retrieval alone provides limited gain

1d agoDebajyoti Mazumder, Mamta, Abhirama Subramanyam PenamakuriPDF↗
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PoEM: Predicting RL Outcomes from Existing Policies↗

Foundation models are post-trained with reinforcement learning (RL) to maximize specific rewards, such as human alignment, correctness, or instruction following. This post-training process is computationally intensive, sometimes unstable, and has to be run from scratch every time the reward model changes or when we want to combine multiple rewards. We hence ask: given a new reward function, is it possible to predict the RL outcomes without actually running RL on it? We answer this in the affirmative by introducing PoEM, a framework to predict the outputs of RL on a new reward function using a set of models already post-trained on other rewards. First, we show that if the new reward function can be written as a linear combination of existing ones, then the new policy in log-space can be written as a linear combination of the existing log-policies. Surprisingly, even in cases where the rew

1d agoKimia Hamidieh, Giannis Daras, Antonio TorralbaPDF↗
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TrackEverything: Long Horizon Dense Tracking via De-Duplicating 3D Scene Representations↗

Existing point tracking models face a fundamental tradeoff: they can either track a sparse set of query points over long horizons, or track all points across only short clips. We introduce TrackEverything, a 3D point tracker that breaks this trade-off by representing videos as persistent 3D scene tracks in world coordinates. Grounded in the insight that videos are 2D projections of an underlying 3D world, TrackEverything decouples model complexity from video duration, allowing it to scale with unique physical scene geometry instead. Our approach introduces three key innovations. First, we employ a voxelization-based de-duplication mechanism at sliding-window boundaries to merge co-located tracks, preventing repeated observations of the same surface from redundantly accumulating. Second, we decompose tracking into an endpoint refiner that predicts each point's destination and static-versu

1d agoAyush Jain, Sreeharsha Paruchuri, Ishita Gupta et al.PDF↗
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Requirement-Bound Verified Commissioning: A Frozen Four-Billion-Parameter Local Model as a Candidate Generator under an External Acceptance Layer with Verification and Release Authority↗

An acceptance protocol is developed for sensor-coordinate and polarity binding in mechatronic commissioning. Candidate generation is separated from release authority. Requirements unsupported by a deterministic parser are routed to a frozen local language model with four billion parameters. Plans are released only when both facts can be derived by an external gate under a sealed grammar. One canonical answer is requested from a gold-standard user when eligible. The protocol was evaluated once under a criterion fixed before benchmark construction, on 144 tasks written by isolated agent contexts without access to the gate, grammar, or experimental plan. Three contributions are established. First, candidate generation and release decisions were measured separately. Fabricated ready plans were committed on 21 of 22 routed unanswerable tasks, and all were rejected. The same 83 releases were r

1d agoMehmet IscanPDF↗
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Minimally Invasive Steering of Language Models↗

Pre-logit steering adapts a frozen language model to a test-time reward by adding vectors to its final hidden states. Unregularized reward optimization can substantially alter the output distribution and degrade generation quality. We propose Minimally Invasive Steering Vector Optimization (MISVO), which penalizes interventions using the local KL geometry of the induced token distribution. The resulting Fisher quadratic measures distributional sensitivity and admits an analytic gradient computed through matrix--vector products with the frozen language-model head. We derive an exact decomposition of the sequence-level KL gradient into an analytic Fisher term and a suffix score-function term. For a fixed generation horizon, we show that the suffix term is second order in the steering magnitude and that three Fisher surrogates agree with the full KL gradient to first order. MISVO uses the f

1d agoTaha Entesari, Jingyu Zhang, Daniel Khashabi et al.PDF↗
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Instrumental Monitor Evasion Emerges Under Ordinary Task Pressure↗

A central concern in AI safety is that agents may treat oversight as an obstacle when it conflicts with completing their goals. We study instrumental evasion, the propensity of LLM agents to circumvent runtime monitoring as a means of completing ordinary tasks. We introduce EvasionBench, a benchmark of 50 diverse task-policy pairs in which completing the task requires an operation prohibited by a runtime monitor. Agents know that their tool calls are monitored and are prompted to continue working when they pause. Across our evaluations, best-of-3 evasion attempt rates reach up to 98% and success rates up to 88%, with substantial variance across models. Claude Fable 5.1 succeeds less often, but frequently makes creative attempts to circumvent the monitor. Evasion generally increases with test-time compute, with higher evasion rates at greater reasoning effort and token use. Traces show th

1d agoDavid Schmotz, Derck Prinzhorn, Luca Beurer-Kellner et al.PDF↗
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Underwater C3-JEPA: An Object-Centric Cross-View World Model for ROV Salvage↗

We present Underwater C$^{3}$-JEPA (cross-view, control-conditioned, context-extended), an object-centric multi-view predictive world model for near-field heavy-load underwater ROV salvage. Without contact sensors, it predicts in latent space how the task-object state evolves through contact interaction and under the hydrodynamic lag of the vehicle, from synchronized multi-view RGB observations and vehicle control signals. C$^{3}$-JEPA encodes multi-camera observations into task-object and context tokens, fuses cross-camera evidence through held-out-view attention, and directly predicts future states conditioned on control. Weak binding anchors the target and gripper at low annotation cost, while SIGReg sharpens the geometric representation. Experiments show that the learned representation transfers substantially more task-relevant information to downstream probes than a reconstruction-f

1d agoYuncong Yang, Jinlong Li, Yulong Xue et al.PDF↗
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A Living Benchmark for Information Retrieval from Electronic Health Records↗

Large language model (LLM)-based clinical assistants are increasingly being integrated into electronic health record (EHR) systems, transforming how clinicians retrieve and synthesize information from patient records. Their safety and utility depend on rigorous evaluation, yet existing benchmarks are manually curated, costly to update, and rapidly become obsolete with evolving technological advancements. We present a scalable framework that automatically generates question--answer pairs from longitudinal EHR notes. Nineteen clinicians validate the benchmark generator, producing the Benchmark for Retrieving Information in EHRs (BRIE), a continuously maintainable evaluation dataset. Across nine LLMs and five inference strategies, state-of-the-art systems frequently omit clinically important information, particularly for questions requiring synthesis across multiple documents and encounters

1d agoJordan L. Cahoon, Chloe O. Stanwyck, Sulaiman Somani et al.PDF↗
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ExplorationBench: Measuring AI Systems' Exploration in Verifiable Alien Worlds↗

Scientific discovery begins where known problems end. There, AI systems must engage in exploration: framing hypotheses, designing experiments, and iterating on the results. However, evaluating this ability is difficult: (1) how to verify whether a genuinely new hypothesis holds, and (2) how to determine whether a system has discovered it through exploration or merely recalled related knowledge from pre-training data. To this end, we introduce ExplorationBench, which turns the wicked problem of evaluating scientific exploration into a concrete and tractable framework built on verifiable Alien Worlds: their rules are executable, so every answer can be checked exactly, and they conflict with familiar knowledge, so recall alone cannot solve the tasks. The benchmark contains two sandboxes, AlienCode (31 discovery targets, 70 tasks) and AlienLogic (24 discovery targets, 70 tasks). Each sandbox

1d agoMing Zhang, Zhenghao Xiang, Peizhong Gao et al.PDF↗
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SAGE: Mitigating Long-Horizon Reasoning Biases via Topological Guidance↗

Long-horizon reasoning remains a central challenge for large language models (LLMs) under sparse-reward regimes. We argue that this brittleness arises from two biases induced by complex reasoning spaces: an exploration bias, where models are drawn toward locally plausible but structurally unstable branches, and a compounding bias, where small local deviations accumulate across depth and suppress rare rewards. We introduce Symbolic Closure Analysis (SCA) as a theoretical lens characterizing how branching structures and sparse rewards induce these biases in long-horizon reasoning with local admissibility, and as a design principle for structural priors in less formal reasoning tasks. Motivated by this analysis, we propose SAGE (Structural Admissibility-Guided Exploration), a unified framework that injects structural guidance to alleviate exploration bias and compounding bias in long-horizo

1d agoXinyue Zeng, Jiawei Zhang, Yujun Yan et al.PDF↗