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arXiv cs.AI

Provably Optimal HBT Legalization in Seconds: Certified Optima Reveal Where the Headroom Really Lies

arXiv:2611.14928v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hybrid bonding terminal (HBT) legalization assigns every terminal of a face-to-face 3D IC to its own pitch-grid site with minimum total Manhattan displacement. Open3DBench reports that a reinforcement-learning (RL) legalizer reduces displacement by 19-22% relative to a sliding-window (SW) heuristic, but none of its legalizers is publicly released. We ask how much displacement any legalizer can still recover. We build an open benchmark of 21 design/pitch instances from Open3DBench placement data, with reconstructed greedy, SW (ViaLegal-style) and BTAssign-style baselines, and GEO-Exact, an exact solver that runs successive shortest augmenting paths over lazily generated spatial candidate edges. An independent dual certificate proves its assignment optimal on all 21 instances (relative primal-dual gap at most $8.2 \times 10^{-16}$). Against these optima, our SW reconstruction with ViaLegal's default configuration is on average 0.011% above optimal (worst 0.119%), while on the 16 contended instances BTAssign-style, a density-guided heuristic (DGHL) and greedy are 3.0%, 6.9% and 64.5% above. Headroom does appear outside this regime: with 2x2 windows SW reaches 34.1%, and above about 58% utilization, on three of six swept designs, it reaches 21.1% on bp, 27.5% on swerv and 8.9% on jpeg (217 further certified instances, and ten bp points checked against an independent exact solver). If the published 19-22% gain were measured on instances like ours, SW would have to be at least 24-28% above optimal on average, far more than any SW variant we tested at nominal pitch; the RL paper's own comparison with the Hungarian optimum puts its SW 3.05% above optimal on average. GEO-Exact is also about an order of magnitude faster than DGHL and SW in our harness (geometric means 8.1x and 40x; a compiled core against Python baselines on a shared server). Code, optimal values and certificates are released.

arXiv cs.CL

ToolTurns: Benchmarking LLM Agents in Multi-Turn Dialogue

arXiv:2611.14925v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tool-using language models are increasingly deployed in conversational settings, yet most large-scale tool-use benchmarks focus on isolated requests. We introduce ToolTurns, a benchmark of 2,620 problems spanning 1,827 tools and 11,004 API endpoints across 47 categories. Each dialogue begins with an intentionally underspecified request and continues through two context-dependent follow-ups, testing clarification, tool use, and retention of conversational context. We also introduce an open-source user simulator that reveals withheld context through dialogue and generates follow-up requests, with a checker--fixer pipeline for improving its turns. Across nine language models, the best agent resolves 69.6% of individual requests but completes only 39.8% of full dialogues. Under this evaluation protocol, every evaluated model receives lower success scores on follow-up requests than on the initial request, and dialogue-quality rubric scores and task success can rank models very differently. Paired turn-level evaluation shows that the checker--fixer reduces detected dialogue defects, and blind human evaluation favors the revised turns. ToolTurns provides a testbed for evaluating whether agents sustain task success across multi-turn dialogue with tools.

arXiv cs.AI

When Is Proof-Step Verification Worth Its Cost? Operating Requirements of Certify-or-Decline Verification for Open-Weight Mathematical Reasoning

arXiv:2611.14794v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Proof-step verification rewrites a solver's answer into typed steps and uses LLM judges to certify or decline. We evaluate this pipeline on open-weight models across GPQA, AIME-2025, and a MATH-500 subset. Certification raises answer-key-match precision by 31 percentage points on the strong GPQA configuration and 46 on AIME, while answering only 35% and 21% of attempts. On near-ceiling MATH-500, gains are at most 5 points at a loss of 13-27 points of coverage. An output-token-matched self-consistency selector obtains 82.9% precision at 35% coverage, compared with the verifier's pooled 87.6% (paired difference: +4.8 points, 95% interval [-8.2, 18.5]). A diagnostic sample reveals a distinct failure mode: 52 of 88 completed problems end in invalid proof construction without ever reaching a judge. Finally, external-LLM acceptance of rendered certified chains is 61.0-67.6%, compared with 87.6% answer-key match. These audits lack human or formal-kernel ground truth. Open-weight auditor pairs show near-zero chance-corrected agreement, which measures consistency rather than accuracy against proof truth. These results motivate separate reporting of execution failures, selected-answer precision, and independently assessed proof validity. We provide per-configuration results and evaluation details in the supplement.

SiliconANGLE AI

Mercor raises $750M at $20B valuation to take AI agent evaluation to enterprises

Artificial intelligence training data company Mercor.io Corp. today revealed that it has raised $750 million in new funding at a $20 billion valuation. Mercor provides the human expertise used to train and evaluate AI models, drawing on a network of more than 5 million domain experts. Most of that work so far has been for […] The post Mercor raises $750M at $20B valuation to take AI agent evaluation to enterprises appeared first on SiliconANGLE.

arXiv cs.LG

Multimodal Graph Learning: A Survey of Models, Benchmarks, and Frontiers

arXiv:2611.12990v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal attributed graphs (MAGs), in which nodes carry text, images, and other modalities while edges encode relations among entities, underlie e-commerce, social media, content platforms, and creative applications. Learning on MAGs has developed along two complementary lines: graph-centric methods redesign how modalities are fused, propagated, and connected within message passing, while foundation-model-centric methods pretrain transferable multimodal graph encoders or bring graph context into multimodal large language models for prediction and generation. In parallel, several benchmarks have appeared with different datasets and evaluation protocols. This survey takes an algorithm-centric and evaluation-grounded view of the field and makes three contributions. Modeling: we introduce a unified message-passing formulation and organize methods into five integration levels (feature, propagation, topology, learning, and foundation model), covering discriminative and graph-conditioned generative models; within this formulation we derive representative methods as special cases, compare their assumptions, expressiveness, and cost, and identify cross-modal sensitivity as a property that separates otherwise similar architectures. Datasets and evaluation: we review recent benchmarks, summarize their datasets and metrics, define model-independent descriptors (label homophily, average degree, clustering, and edge provenance), and map each evaluation protocol to the baselines it uses. Frontiers: we connect multimodal graph learning to AI agents, covering the multimodal graphs that agents perceive and remember and graph engineering, the practice of organizing agent workflows as explicit graphs; we then discuss open problems, concrete efforts for the community, and research directions, including when graph structure helps in the presence of strong multimodal foundation models.

arXiv cs.LG

One Table, Many Queries: Benchmarking Generalist Tabular Models Across Generation, Imputation, and Prediction

arXiv:2611.13001v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generation, imputation, and prediction query different aspects of the same tabular distribution, but are usually evaluated separately. This leaves unclear which capabilities they share, how their training objectives interact, and whether one model can perform all three well. We introduce the One Table Benchmark (\ours{}), spanning 56 datasets, 46 registered methods, and 20 capability axes under aligned data splits and explicit task contracts. We compare task ranks on aligned support, train five backbones under all seven non-empty objective combinations on five datasets with three seeds, and contrast fixed-model profiles with specialist portfolios. Rank comparisons connect imputation and prediction through numerical recovery and dependence preservation, and link generation to both through predictive utility; distributional fidelity follows different, sometimes opposing, rankings. Objective interventions show the largest pooled gains from including the recipient's own objective. Generation has the broadest coverage of positive pooled auxiliary effects, while prediction shows potential to improve imputation and synthetic-data utility, with responses that vary across backbones. Cross-addition effects reveal that objective benefits need not add and depend on the objectives already present. Fixed-model comparisons expose corresponding utility--fidelity trade-offs: some generalists surpass specialist portfolios on utility, while fidelity continues to favor specialization. Frozen foundation models show strong prediction and numerical point imputation, together with promising synthetic-data utility, highlighting their potential across all three tasks. These findings motivate unified tabular models that share useful conditional information while improving categorical reconstruction and faithful joint sampling.

arXiv cs.CL

SELD: Detecting Silent Evidence Loss in Context Compression beyond the Answer

arXiv:2611.12903v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Context compression is now routine for language models with long inputs, but a compressed context is useful only if it keeps the evidence for the answer. Existing checks compare the reader model's answer or its most likely words, and thus miss a frequent failure, silent evidence loss: key evidence is removed while the answer stays the same, leaving the answer unsupported and risky for other models that reuse the context. To address this challenge, we propose SELD (Silent Evidence Loss Detector), which needs no training and no labels. Its principle is that when evidence is lost, a reader model's preferences among the answers it leaves unsaid shift even if its answer does not, so comparing these preferences before and after compression reveals losses that answer checks cannot see. We also build SEL-Pairs, a benchmark of length-matched evidence and control deletions from three question-answering datasets. Quantitative and qualitative experiments with five reader models on it show that SELD consistently outperforms strong and recent baselines across compressors, compression rates and models, identifying the evidence-removing edit in 83% of matched pairs with unchanged answers, against 70% for the strongest baseline. These results show that evidence loss in compressed contexts can be detected even when the answer is unchanged.

arXiv cs.CL

A Model Organism for Studying Unverbalized Evaluation Awareness

arXiv:2611.09945v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models can recognize when they are being evaluated and change their behavior accordingly, undermining the reliability of safety benchmarks. Evaluation awareness (EA) is usually measured by having an LLM judge scan reasoning traces for explicit statements of recognition, but this signal is increasingly unreliable. Recent frontier-model system cards report a drop in verbalized rates between releases, which is indistinguishable from awareness that has gone unverbalized. Interpretability methods could detect such unverbalized evaluation awareness (UEA) in individual interactions, but lack instance-level ground truth. Asking the model alters the input, and dataset labels do not reveal whether it recognized a particular prompt as an evaluation. We address this gap with a model organism. Using synthetic document fine-tuning, SFT, and DPO, we train Qwen3.5-27B to emit a marker (a designated token) in its final response when it recognizes an evaluation, while suppressing the marker and verbalized awareness in its reasoning. The marker largely tracks the evaluation concept as it can be strongly modulated by evaluation framing in the system prompt. When not told whether it is being evaluated, the organism recognizes evaluations from test-question cues, mirroring what its base model often verbalizes. Using the marker as a label, we benchmark linear probes, the Jacobian Lens, and Activation Oracles, built on the base model and blind to the marker. None recovers the label reliably. These results suggest that current interpretability methods are not yet reliable UEA detectors, even when recognition relies on simple cues. Our model organism offers a testbed for improving them.

arXiv cs.CL

CulturalCrosswords: A Multilingual Benchmark comprised of Answer Constraints and Grid Completion

arXiv:2611.10044v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When several answers fit a riddle, exact-match scoring can penalise a valid response. CulturalCrosswords tests how answer constraints affect large language models (LLMs) solving cultural riddles, whose solutions draw on knowledge specific to a community. We constructed 53 crosswords from crowdsourced riddles in 42 languages and evaluated 11 LLM configurations on five versions of each clue set: plain batches, batches with lengths, batches with lengths and partial-answer hints, and crosswords requesting an answer list or a completed grid. On 962 clues with alternative answers, lengths improve agreement with the reference by 22.8 percentage points, compared with 8.4 points when accepted alternatives also receive credit. Part of the gain therefore appears to come from selecting a required answer form. Crossword input increases the share of all crossings with compatible answers by 9.7 points; requiring a completed grid reveals large differences between models. The benchmark distinguishes agreement with a reference from the ability to produce answers that fit together and occupy the correct cells.

arXiv cs.CV

AtariBench: Evaluating Spatiotemporal Reasoning of Vision-Language Models in Atari Gameplay

arXiv:2611.08755v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved strong performance on static visual understanding benchmarks, yet their ability to act in dynamic environments remains less well understood. We introduce AtariBench, a controlled benchmark that evaluates VLMs across 20 Atari 2600 games, requiring models to make sequential decisions from high-temporal-resolution gameplay streams. By decoupling fast in-game dynamics from wall-clock inference speed, AtariBench focuses on whether models can perceive rapid visual state changes, reason over spatiotemporal dynamics, and ground actions in the current observation. Our experiments reveal substantial limitations in state-of-the-art VLMs: models often fail to infer object motion and direction, exhibit brittle sequential decision-making, and over-rely on textual interaction history despite newly appended visual feedback. We further introduce a separability analysis to identify which in-game scores provide reliable signals of model competence, and use the benchmark to study how memory design and prompting strategies affect performance. Overall, AtariBench exposes a persistent gap between passive visual perception and active decision-making, providing a lightweight and rigorous testbed for developing VLMs that can reason and act in dynamic environments.

arXiv cs.LG

Evolutionary Adaptive Metric Learning: A Multi-Objective Framework for Learning Local Distance Functions in Nearest Neighbor Classification

arXiv:2611.08549v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Nearest neighbour classifiers inherit the geometry of their distance function. Fixed distances and globally learned metrics apply the same geometry throughout the input space, although relevant feature directions may vary across regions. We propose EAML (Evolutionary Adaptive Metric Learning), a framework that learns instance-dependent positive-definite metrics through a low-dimensional parameterization. Each local metric combines an input-dependent diagonal scaling, generated by softmax interpolation between anchor points, with a global low-rank correlation component. A real-coded elitist genetic algorithm optimizes the parameters using a scalar objective combining leave-one-out prediction error, robustness, metric smoothness, and regularization. We establish positive definiteness, metric equivalence, existence of an optimal solution, and Lipschitz continuity of the metric field. We further investigate prediction stability, generalization bounds, and evolutionary convergence under explicit assumptions. Experiments on synthetic data with region-dependent feature relevance show that EAML can recover local metric variations and outperform global metrics. Evaluation on thirteen public datasets using nested 5-fold cross-validation reveals a more nuanced picture: EAML improves performance on selected datasets but does not significantly outperform global metric baselines overall. Additional experiments show that global diagonal metrics can be preferable under nuisance features and test-time noise. These findings identify the conditions under which evolutionary local metric learning is beneficial and highlight its practical limitations.

arXiv cs.CV

Extrapolation Matters: Sparse-Only Depth Completion Beyond LiDAR Coverage

arXiv:2611.08782v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Extrapolation beyond LiDAR coverage is an important yet under-evaluated challenge of depth completion. In real camera--LiDAR systems, partial sensor overlap, occlusions, and limited field coverage often leave large image regions weakly observed or completely unobserved by LiDAR. Thus, we investigate depth completion in this beyond-coverage regime using only sparse supervision from raw single-sweep LiDAR, without dense depth labels, LiDAR accumulation, or pseudo-LiDAR generation. Our approach leverages a frozen monocular depth foundation model, lightweight per-frame alignment to sparse LiDAR geometry, and a refinement module that fuses the aligned prior with sparse LiDAR anchors to predict dense metric depth. To regularize learning under raw sparse supervision, we introduce a high-frequency normal-consistency loss defined as the image-space gradient of the per-pixel normal cosine discrepancy. This term penalizes spatial variation in scalar angular error; it does not directly match changes in neighboring normal vectors. We further introduce an evaluation protocol that explicitly separates LiDAR-supported and beyond-coverage regions, revealing extrapolative behavior that conventional depth-completion metrics can obscure. Our method achieves strong depth accuracy beyond LiDAR coverage while remaining competitive in LiDAR-covered regions, providing a practical way to deploy monocular foundation priors in multi-sensor systems.

arXiv cs.AI

Pdb or Not to Be: Comparing Debugging Interfaces With Pass$_{X}$@$k$

arXiv:2611.08666v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Interactive debuggers are indispensable to human software development, yet coding agents overwhelmingly rely on edit-execute-observe loops, using common bash tools, test scripts, and print statements to debug via repeated shell commands. Stepping through a debugger provides live access to runtime state, which may enable different problem-solving capabilities. However, prior work typically introduces the debugger as an additional tool or through a new subagent, making its individual contribution difficult to isolate from the associated scaffold changes. To address this, we compare a debugger-only agent against a bash-only agent on all 500 SWE-bench Verified instances, holding the rest of the scaffold fixed. We evaluate both architectures on two models, GPT-OSS-120B and Nemotron-3-Ultra-550B, with three independent runs per architecture $\times$ model configuration. Crucially, to distinguish interface specialization from expanded coverage under repeated sampling, we introduce pass$_X$@$k$, a cross-agent pass@$k$ that provides an unbiased estimator of the probability that at least one of $k$ agents is successful. Although the bash and debugger agents solve partially disjoint subsets of the benchmark in any single pair of runs, our pass$_X$@$2$ estimator reveals that this is largely due to run-to-run variance rather than tool complementarity. Across both models, we find that two bash rollouts outperform the combination of one bash and one debugger rollout. Our findings highlight the importance of accounting for stochastic variance in evaluating agent and tool diversity, and we hope that pass$_X$@$k$ will serve as a useful framework for the community.

arXiv cs.CL

ProcessPrefBench: Evaluating Cross-Task Transfer of Individual Process Preferences from Naturalistic Human-AI Interaction

arXiv:2611.06065v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In natural human-AI dialogue, users' corrections, requests, and self-descriptions carry reusable signals about how they want work to be done. These signals reveal individual process preferences, user-specific standards for evidence, depth, analytical focus, procedure, and delivery. We ask whether a preference revealed in one dialogue can shape an assistant's later answer when the task does not restate it. ProcessPrefBench uses three months of natural dialogues from two knowledge workers to build 66 source-target cases separately judged for source evidence and target applicability. Sources are preselected, so the benchmark tests application rather than retrieval. We test three models with target-only, full-history, and distilled-preference prompts. Target-specific 0-2 rubrics score preference realization, and a task gate flags severe failures. Compared with target-only prompting, full-history and imperative distilled-preference prompting raise preference realization by 0.204 and 0.244 points on the 0-2 scale, respectively, with no reliable advantage from distillation. Fabricated-evidence failures rise from 5.8% under target-only prompting to 10.1% under full-history and 10.4% under imperative prompting. ProcessPrefBench highlights a tension in learning from dialogue, where drawing on prior interactions can improve preference realization yet also invite fabricated evidence. We hope it helps build assistants that honor a user's process preferences without sacrificing factual reliability.

arXiv cs.AI

Assurance-Conditioned Continuous Authorization for Autonomous AI Agents

arXiv:2611.05632v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous software agents can act through tools, delegate work, and change their models or execution environments while earlier authorizations remain in flight. We present Assurance-Conditioned Continuous Authorization (ACCA), an approach designed to be harness-independent, for maintaining operational authority according to currently justified assurance. It distinguishes evidence validity from contextual applicability, derives assurance claims from eligible evidence, and resolves a multidimensional effective-authority envelope within a principal-declared ceiling and applicable policy. A typed dependency graph supports selective re-evaluation of authorization-relevant changes. An authority epoch changes when effective authority changes; a distinct optional authorization-basis version supports revalidation of action-specific authorization conditions. Protected effect-time enforcement can reject stale actions before a consequential resource change, subject to the available commit mechanism. A compositional Domain Governance Profile expresses domain-specific semantics without granting authority. Controlled scenario tests implemented as a regression suite using a trading profile exercise default-deny rules, evidence-conditioned contraction and recovery, policy divergence, selective non-response, and stale-action rejection at a local gateway before the simulated-broker boundary. The study establishes implementation-level evidence in one domain, not a cross-domain guarantee of harmful-behavior prevention.

arXiv cs.CL

Phonological Knowledge of Chinese Characters in Language Models

arXiv:2611.05803v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: How much phonological knowledge do language models (LMs) possess about Chinese characters, and how is this knowledge represented and used? We introduce PinyinBench, a controlled benchmark covering homophones, phonological features (initials, finals, and tones), and polyphonic characters. We investigate 17 text-only and multimodal LMs through three complementary approaches: behavioral evaluation, layer-wise probing, and activation steering. Behaviorally, models demonstrate substantial knowledge of initials and finals, with a frontier model (DS-v4-flash) scoring 90%+ in homophone judgment, when two characters share no phonological features. However, its accuracy drops sharply to 72% when two characters differ only in lexical tone. Probing reveals that tone is highly decodable from embeddings and improves modestly across layers, whereas segmental information starts less decodable and improves substantially with depth. Activation steering shows that segmental representations can systematically influence generation, while tone exhibits much weaker effects. Furthermore, audio-bearing training improves phonological decodability, including tone, without corresponding improvements in steering effectiveness. Together, these findings reveal distinct representational and functional profiles for segmental and tonal information, with tonal information much harder to access and manipulate, demonstrating the necessity for combined evaluation, probing, and causal intervention for understanding linguistic knowledge in LMs.

arXiv cs.CL

SRRM: A Retrieval-Reconstruction Benchmark for Evaluating Long-Context Memory in Small Language Models

arXiv:2611.05386v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Small Language Models (SLMs) are increasingly deployed on consumer-grade hardware, yet their ability to preserve information across progressively longer contexts remains insufficiently understood. Existing benchmarks primarily evaluate retrieval-oriented tasks, providing limited insight into whether successful retrieval reflects comprehensive long-context memory preservation. To address this limitation, this paper introduces Simple Retrieval-Reconstruction Memory (SRRM), a lightweight and fully reproducible benchmark that jointly evaluates Targeted Retrieval and Global Information Reconstruction. This study also proposes the Memory Preservation Ratio (MPR), a benchmark-level metric that quantifies the relationship between retrieval and reconstruction performance. SRRM was evaluated using a synthetic dataset on three Qwen2.5 models (0.5B, 1.5B, and 3B parameters) across context loads ranging from 10 to 100 factual statements. Experimental results show that reconstruction performance deteriorated substantially faster than retrieval accuracy as contextual information increased, indicating that retrieval alone is insufficient to characterize long-context memory preservation. Among the evaluated models, Qwen2.5-1.5B achieved the highest retrieval accuracy (86.7%), reconstruction performance (45.7%), and MPR (0.53), outperforming the larger Qwen2.5-3B model (72.2%, 18.5%, and 0.26, respectively). These findings demonstrate that increasing parameter count does not necessarily improve long-context memory preservation. Overall, SRRM provides a reproducible and extensible benchmark for systematically evaluating long-context memory while revealing complementary memory behaviors that remain hidden under retrieval-only evaluation frameworks.

arXiv cs.AI

Towards Efficient Whole Page Ranking with One-Pass Inference

arXiv:2611.05542v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Whole-page ranking jointly optimizes advertisements and organic content to balance business outcomes and user engagement under complex layout and business constraints. Existing non-autoregressive (NAR) approaches enable efficient page generation but typically score candidate items independently of previously selected items, limiting their ability to capture order-dependent interactions. Autoregressive (AR) methods address this limitation through sequential conditioning, but incur substantial inference overhead that challenges large-scale deployment. Bridging this quality-efficiency gap remains a challenge in industrial whole-page ranking. We propose Multi-Item Scoring (MIS), a prefix-aware NAR-style framework that incorporates sequential context into efficient multi-item scoring. MIS integrates global candidate interactions, localized prefix conditioning, and position-aware scoring within a shared representation architecture. By computing reusable representations once per request and performing lightweight prefix-conditioned scoring during constrained beam search, MIS captures important sequential dependencies without repeated full-model inference. Experiments on KuaiRand-1K and RL4RS demonstrate that MIS approaches the generation quality of an autoregressive CGA baseline while achieving 4.07x and 3.54x faster CPU decoding, respectively. In a randomized evaluation on a large-scale social-video platform, MIS improves the realization metric by 0.104% and watch time by 0.058%, while reducing ranking-service CPU consumption by 9.73%. These results demonstrate that prefix-aware multi-item scoring can narrow the quality gap between NAR and AR generation while retaining the efficiency required for industrial scalability.