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When Every Choice Is Correct: A Causal Study of Numerical Preference in Language Models

arXiv:2611.06025v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When a language model chooses a number between 1 and 30, every integer in the range is valid, yet the model can favor particular answers. We use numerical choice to study how preference is processed across layers and tokens. Perturbation probing and gradient attribution nominate neurons for activation interventions. In a selected Qwen3-4B case, a pre-answer edit changes 17 to 15 while both runs first emit 1. After the edit ends, selective cache and attention-output replacements trace part of its continuing influence on the second digit. Replacing one attention head's output or the other heads' outputs jointly produces similar immediate readout contributions; both interventions restore 17 but have different final log-odds effects on 7 versus 5. Holding later multilayer perceptron (MLP) outputs at their values from the edited run without either replacement reduces this effect gap from 0.119 to 0.0025 nat. Later computation therefore changes how similar local contributions affect the continuation. Retrospective estimates across eighteen contexts capture much of the probability movement but miss the selected answer switch. Prompt tests also separate influence from answer changes: one held-out prompt retains influence without switching, and only one of twelve fresh wordings qualifies for the reader/MLP test; there, joint MLP clamping again reduces the gap between the two reader effects while the answer remains 17. These results use numerical choice as a controlled case for studying persistent state and conditional downstream processing; they do not establish the origin or a complete circuit of natural numerical preference.

AGORA: Reliability-Aware Aggregation of LLM Judges via Item-Response Theory

arXiv:2611.05556v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-as-a-judge is a common substitute for costly human evaluation, and aggregating several judges is the standard remedy for any single judge's bias. Judge pools mix judges of very different reliability, while the human-labeled sets that validate them hold a few hundred items or fewer. In this regime the per-item mean weights weak judges as heavily as strong ones, and confusion-table models such as Dawid-Skene must estimate a per-judge error table from too few items. We propose AGORA (Aggregation Of Reliability-weighted Assessments), an item-response-theory aggregator that places every item on one latent quality scale and describes each judge by a sensitivity parameter and ordered rating thresholds, so judge reliability is learned from all items jointly and without human labels. Across three benchmarks, AGORA matches or exceeds Dawid-Skene on large evaluation sets, and its advantage widens as the set shrinks toward a few hundred items. It remains accurate as pools grow more uneven, a label-free dispersion statistic indicates in advance when trust weighting helps, and its learned trust weights track per-judge human validity.

Clearing up a robot’s fuzzy memory

A new system identifies and corrects unreliable object descriptions stored in a robot’s memory, improving the robot’s ability to interact with its environment.

A thousand fewer paths to root

OpenAI built an autonomous pipeline that found, validated, and generated patches for 948 local privilege-escalation vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel.

Swapping the Judge Changes the Ranking: A Preregistered Study of Cross-Provider Replication in LLM-Judged System Comparisons

arXiv:2611.04090v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Practitioners who compare systems with an LLM judge and have no human labels often check a conclusion by repeating it with a judge from another provider. We test how far that check can be trusted. In a preregistered study (with a disclosed post-registration reduction of the judge set), five judge models from three providers re-judged 4,000 Chatbot Arena battles (nine systems, 33 system pairs) that carry human votes, each in both response orders. Agreement with the human vote was low at the verdict level (median Cohen's kappa = 0.22), and system rankings did not survive a change of judge: Kendall's tau with the human ranking ranged from 0.17 to 0.89 (median 0.67), so the preregistered hypothesis that rankings remain stable was not supported. Conclusions replicated by two low-cost judges from different providers matched the human conclusion more often than single-judge conclusions (+0.10 precision), but the gain came from filtering out one poorly aligned judge, and replication involving that judge left a conclusion for only 35% of comparisons. Judges that agreed with humans reached a stable conclusion with no more verdicts than human votes required; the others failed to converge on 26-70% of system pairs at the sample sizes tested (up to 100 verdicts per pair). Disagreements with the human vote co-occurred across judges far more often than independence predicts, although a single human vote per battle cannot separate shared judge bias from voter noise.

Detect Before You Disambiguate: Perturbation-Based Input Ambiguity Detection in LLMs

arXiv:2610.36353v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often answer ambiguous inputs as if they had a single intended meaning. This is problematic because input ambiguity is an upstream source of uncertainty: when a prompt admits multiple valid interpretations, the key question is whether the model should answer directly at all. Existing input uncertainty methods often rely on LLM-generated statements or clarifications, but such transformations may already disambiguate the input before the ambiguity is measured. We propose a label-preserving perturbation framework for input ambiguity detection in which perturbations remain close to the original input while preserving its label. We instantiate this principle with two detectors: a black-box rule-based perturbation libra

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SLICE-Mem: Salience-Gated Lightweight Information Curation for Efficient LLM Agent Memory

arXiv:2610.33015v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-term memory enables large language model (LLM) agents to maintain personalized and temporally coherent interactions, but repeated LLM inference for memory admission, extraction, and organization introduces substantial cost and latency. We present SLICE-Mem, a lightweight memory framework that combines salience-guided admission and predicate-centered information extraction. A compact classifier identifies user turns worth retaining, and a semantic-dependency-based extractor converts admitted turns into concise memory entries. This online pipeline requires no generative LLM calls, while cross-entry reconciliation is deferred to an offline consolidation stage. We evaluate SLICE-Mem on the weekly subset of Memora and LongMemEval-S using 8B a

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Knowledge-Guided LLM for Intent-Driven Service Orchestration in Integrated Terrestrial and Non-Terrestrial 6G Networks

arXiv:2610.33007v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Natural-language service intents in integrated terrestrial and non-terrestrial (TN/NTN) 6G networks can be incomplete, ambiguous, or inconsistent, making unconstrained LLM generation challenging for reliable network-facing orchestration. This paper proposes a knowledge-guided LLM framework that combines grammar-constrained semantic parsing with a knowledge-graph (KG)-driven clarification loop to produce validated, orchestration-ready service profiles across four representative service classes. On a 200-sample intent dataset, the framework achieves 89% classification accuracy and 95% policy validity with an average of 0.66 clarification turns per request. Compared with a Pure-LLM baseline, the proposed framework improves policy validity and co

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DMAIC-Bench: From Self-Reflection to Self-Restraint for Agents in Multi-Stage Analytical Tasks

arXiv:2610.32305v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-stage analytical tasks require LLM agents to use intermediate evidence to decide whether to continue, redirect or stop. Self-reflection, in which an agent critiques its output, is widely studied, yet a critique does not show whether evidence changed the next action. We call that capability self-restraint. Existing agent benchmarks largely measure task completion or output quality and leave it untested. DMAIC-Bench evaluates it with 97 seeded tasks across 15 industrial cases in four sectors, built around Lean Six Sigma's explicit statistical prerequisites. Paired counterfactual variants require opposite actions at the same workflow position, distinguishing warranted restraint from indiscriminate stopping. We assess execution traces with

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When and How Does Muon Precondition? The Role of Structured Gradient Noise

arXiv:2610.31728v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Muon has become a popular optimizer for large language model training, yet its theoretical foundations remain poorly understood. In this work, we study how gradient noise geometry shapes Muon's preconditioning benefits. We first show, theoretically and empirically, that under the classical isotropic noise assumption, Muon offers no acceleration beyond a rescaling of the learning rate. This motivates us to investigate structured noise arising from mini-batch sampling in associative memory with heterogeneous task frequencies. We establish an exact balancing threshold for two tasks and extend the analysis to multiple tasks, revealing how task coverage and gradient reliability jointly shape learning. Our analysis shows that Muon can soften the de

When and How Does Muon Precondition? The Role of Structured Gradient Noise
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Democratizing LLM Training with the Edge: Challenges, Systems, and the Road Ahead

arXiv:2610.32215v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The growing computational power of modern GPU data centers has let a few industrial giants train and deploy large language models (LLMs) on massive amounts of data. Yet the sheer scale of these models and their training data makes centralized development increasingly hard to sustain, and at the same time shuts out smaller institutions that hold relevant private data but lack comparable infrastructure. In this paper, we organize our positions on distributed LLM training around the pretraining and fine-tuning paradigms, covering federated learning, split learning, and decentralized approaches, and we assess their readiness for geo-distributed settings with heterogeneous hardware and unreliable connectivity. We then present a {\em unified} syste

Democratizing LLM Training with the Edge: Challenges, Systems, and the Road Ahead
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The study proposes the “Schema Consistency Index” (SCI) to assess the coherence of belief representations in language models.

On October 26, 2026, arXiv published the paper arXiv:2610.31683v1, introducing the Schema Coherence Inventory (SCI)—a 96-item forced-choice scale designed to assess whether the beliefs attributed to persona-conditioned language models genuinely structure their cognition, rather than merely eliciting emotional responses.

The Schema Coherence Inventory: Measuring Whether an Assigned Belief Organizes a Language Model's Cognition

Why it matters:This study fills the current gap in the lack of a verifiable measurement method for the “degree of belief internalization” in language models; through validation by clinical experts, testing across multiple model backbones, and the design of target-specific criteria, it provides the first assessment framework that focuses on cognitive structures rather than emotional representations, and has open-sourced all its tools.

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Hugging Face Releases Carbon-X, a 14B Open DNA Language Model that Brings DNA and Natural Language Together for the First Time

Hugging Face released Carbon-X, an open 14.8B DNA language model built on Qwen3-14B. It reads raw DNA in chat, answers in English, and averages 66.7% across 5 DNA benchmarks under Apache 2.0. The post Hugging Face Releases Carbon-X, a 14B Open DNA Language Model that Brings DNA and Natural Language Together for the First Time appeared first on MarkTechPost.

Hugging Face Releases Carbon-X, a 14B Open DNA Language Model that Brings DNA and Natural Language Together for the First Time
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Consistency Does Not Equal Effectiveness: Self-Rewarding Moral Reasoning Makes Large Language Models More Decisive but More Susceptible to Manipulation

The study, posted on arXiv on October 24, 2026 (ID 2610.30349v1), proposes a method for training large language models to make ethical judgments by self-assessing the quality of their own reasoning. It finds that the model exhibits more consistent behavior—i.e., becomes more “decisive”—when the order of options is varied, but this does not improve the effectiveness of its ethical judgments and it still suffers from sycophancy and reframing issues.

Consistency Is Not Validity: Self-Rewarded Moral Argumentation Makes Language Models Decisive but Pliable

Why it matters:The paper challenges the prevailing assumption that behavioral consistency—such as sequence invariance—serves as a proxy for moral reasoning capability, empirically demonstrating that consistency can be optimized without improving the quality of substantive judgments, thereby offering important cautionary insights for methodologies used in AI ethics assessment.

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