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Decision Context: Persistent Behavioral Learning for AI Agents

arXiv:2611.08644v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents do not learn from corrections across sessions. A user fixes the same mistake at the start of every conversation. Existing agent memory systems primarily handle facts, such as preferences, entities, and conversational history, rather than procedural knowledge. We present Forge Decision Context (forge_dc), a system that captures behavioral signals from human corrections and self-assessed tool-call failures, compiles them into imperative RULE directives, and injects them at the decision points where they apply. We evaluate forge_dc alongside four predecessor approaches on DC-Bench, a new benchmark of 71 scenarios across nine behavioral dimensions, built from real executed agent traces in a deterministic mocked-tool environment. forge_dc reaches 95% compliance, up from 55% with naive retrieval, while injecting approximately 10 times fewer tokens per query. Across the five-stage progression, the strongest systems represent behavioral memory as explicit directives and deliver it at the decision points where it applies. The results identify representation, activation, and placement as central design choices for persistent behavioral learning.

Interpretable Multifidelity Learning with Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks for Spatiotemporal Nuclear Reactor Flow Modeling

arXiv:2611.08512v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-fidelity computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations of nuclear reactor systems are computationally expensive, motivating machine learning methods that reduce cost while preserving accuracy. Multifidelity surrogate modeling addresses this by combining inexpensive low-fidelity data with limited high-fidelity data. This work investigates whether the high-fidelity data required to predict the spatiotemporal mass flow rate across all 193 fuel assemblies of a pressurized water reactor (PWR) core can be reduced, comparing black-box multifidelity feedforward neural networks (MFNNs) with interpretable multifidelity Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (MFKANs). Cross-fidelity correlation across the core is weak, making this a challenging multifidelity problem, and neither architecture predicts the transient particularly well in absolute terms. MFKAN nonetheless performs comparably to MFNN for one-time-step-forward prediction while also providing closed-form symbolic equations unavailable with MFNN. To address the scarcity of CFD transients, with only one available per fidelity level, TabDDPM-generated synthetic data was used to augment cross-fidelity forecasting. KAN and FNN achieve comparable self-evaluation accuracy (Pearson correlation of roughly 0.73--0.81), but both perform poorly at true cross-fidelity forecasting (correlations of 0.03--0.06). Assembly-level analysis shows that each assembly's forecast correlation tracks its real cross-fidelity correlation for both architectures ($r=0.840$--$0.896$ for KAN, $r=0.804$--$0.903$ for FNN), confirming that forecasting accuracy is fundamentally limited by how correlated the fidelity levels already are. Overall, KAN-based multifidelity modeling achieves accuracy consistently comparable to MFNN across all settings, while additionally providing symbolic equations that match or exceed the spline representation's accuracy.

Nemotron-Personas-Finance-Japan: A Synthetic Dataset Capturing Japan's Demographics and Financial Context

NVIDIA and Elith have released Nemotron-Personas-Finance-Japan, a large-scale open-source synthetic dataset featuring 9 million personas based on Japan’s official demographic, labor, and financial statistics. Built using NVIDIA’s NeMo Data Designer and SDG-PGMs framework, the dataset includes 50 fields per record with natural Japanese text, covering demographics, household finances, occupations, financial literacy, and personality traits. Designed for commercial and non-commercial use under CC BY 4.0, it enables privacy-safe development of financial AI applications such as conversational agents, customer simulations, and bias testing, while aligning with Japan’s cultural and regulatory context.

Your Experts Have Partners. There's HOPE for Keeping Them Together

HOPE, a second-order expert pruning method for Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models, accounts for pairwise expert interactions by optimizing a quadratic program based on an interaction matrix derived from calibration data. Unlike first-order methods that prune experts independently, HOPE preserves cooperative expert groups, leading to better performance—especially at high pruning rates like 50%. On benchmarks such as SWE-Bench Pro, HOPE outperforms state-of-the-art first-order methods like REAP by up to +6.1%, maintaining model quality while significantly reducing memory footprint. The method requires only a single calibration pass and efficient quadratic programming, with negligible overhead. It has been validated on Qwen3.5 and GLM-4.5 models, showing consistent improvements across diverse tasks and calibration sets.

A Closer Look at Phonon TTS. Launching High-Quality On-Device Speech That Tops the Benchmarks.

Phonon, a small text-to-speech model that runs entirely on the user's device without requiring internet access, has been released with support for English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese. Built on the Pocket TTS lineage using flow matching, Phonon achieves high-quality audio in compact sizes (65 MB and 75 MB), with the 31m version licensed under Apache 2.0 for commercial use. It excels in intelligibility and speed, ranking first in German and Spanish on Hugging Face's Open TTS Leaderboard and leading in CPU streaming benchmarks. The model supports voice cloning, custom voices via Gradium Studio, and integrates with Hugging Face Transformers. It is available in multiple formats and backends, including WebAssembly, GPU, and NPU, enabling deployment across phones, laptops, single-board computers, and browsers. Over 200,000 downloads were recorded in its first two weeks, with active developer adoption through tools like ExecuTorch, Micdrop, and Spaces. Future developments include support for additional languages, smaller models, and custom vocabulary fine-tuning.

A Feasibility Condition for Confidence-Gated Tiered LLM Inference

arXiv:2611.05394v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tiered inference distributes large language model computation across a hierarchy of devices, from on-device and edge hardware to the datacenter, and is increasingly offered as the route to cheaper, lower-latency, and more private serving. Most such systems orchestrate frozen model checkpoints, and most decide what to resolve locally and what to escalate using a confidence signal produced by a forward-deployed model. We give a closed-form condition for when no threshold on that signal makes a tiered cascade worthwhile relative to sending every query to the backstop. Modeling the routing decision as a binary test and separating local from escalation cost through an architecture cost ratio $\kappa$, we derive a feasibility condition bracketed by a signal-free floor, below which a cascade is feasible at any signal quality, and a perfect-signal ceiling, above which none is. Read along the $\kappa$ axis the condition inverts: where local compute is billed, cost binds, matching a recent empirical finding; where it is sunk, on decentralized hardware, feasibility becomes unconditional and signal quality instead sets what the cascade achieves. We turn the condition into three design requirements that existing trained-in primitives satisfy only in isolation, and we propose, as future work, a co-designed architecture and a protocol to test it. The condition and the inversion hold independently of that architecture; they are the paper's contribution.

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.

Dharma Field Extractor: Any Document In, Structured Fields in JSON Out

The Dharma Field Extractor, a 2-billion-parameter model, specializes in extracting specific fields from diverse document types—such as invoices, IDs, and medical forms—into structured JSON format. It outperforms general-purpose frontier LLMs in accuracy and reduces cost by up to 147 times when self-hosted, demonstrating that domain-specialized small models can surpass large general-purpose models on well-defined tasks. The model supports both open extraction (detecting fields without a schema) and schema-directed extraction (returning exact field names and types), with training data spanning English, Brazilian Portuguese, and multilingual documents. Benchmarks show superior F1 scores and valid JSON output across real-world datasets like SROIE and FUNSD, reinforcing the thesis that specialization beats scale for enterprise document processing.

Prospective Memory for Proactive LLM Agents

arXiv:2611.05731v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most memory systems for LLM agents are retrospective, preserving and retrieving past information to inform current decisions. Proactive agents, however, also require prospective memory: retaining future-directed intentions and realizing them when appropriate opportunities arise, even without explicit requests. Crucially, remembering the right intention does not guarantee acting at the right time: a related observation may call for waiting, while a later cue may make the same intention actionable. Inspired by cognitive theories of human prospective memory, we introduce Pro-Memory, a memory framework that separates maintaining future intentions from deciding when and how to realize them. Pro-Memory preserves pending objectives linked to their supporting evidence, assesses new observations against their original goals and activation conditions, and coordinates appropriate contributions with the agent's ongoing actions. It further updates intention states based on actions actually issued or evidence of resolution, while an experience memory distills feedback from completed episodes into guidance for future decisions. Experiments on two benchmarks spanning delayed-intention tasks and open-ended proactive assistance demonstrate consistent improvements in proactive task performance over representative memory approaches across multiple LLM backbones, while limiting unnecessary interventions.

When Latent Dynamics Meet Data Assimilation: A Benchmark of Koopman-Type Representations

arXiv:2611.03916v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Koopman representations describe nonlinear dynamics through linear evolution in a transformed space, offering an attractive framework for their linear simplicity and generality. Yet these advantages do not necessarily translate into improved performance in deep latent data assimilation (LDA). We systematically compare seven representative methods and structural baselines across five systems spanning approximately periodic to strongly chaotic dynamics and a broad range of state dimensions. We evaluate forecast and assimilation accuracy, physical state recovery, latent-trajectory behavior, and dynamical consistency, and assess Gaussian error assumptions, objective convexity, and uniqueness of analysis solutions. Our results reveal a trade-off between representational flexibility and optimization tractability. Linear evolution of the latent state can stabilize short-term forecasts but restrict expressiveness in strongly chaotic and high-dimensional systems, without consistently improving assimilation accuracy. Parameterized linear operators offer greater flexibility, yet their joint optimization with the encoder--decoder remains nonconvex. Methods with closed-form analysis updates generally perform better and exhibit greater robustness in our experiments, although matrix inversion remains a computational bottleneck. These findings show that the practical benefits of Koopman structure depend on both sufficient observational information and the choice of assimilation procedure.

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.

EMBERS: Empirically Motivated Robustness Testing of Deep Research Systems via Defect-Guided Fuzzing

arXiv:2611.03723v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep Research (DR) systems extend large language models into autonomous agents that decompose complex information needs, iteratively search the web, and synthesize evidence to answer challenging questions. However, their multi-stage execution may introduce robustness risks, as variations in user questions or intermediate search inputs may propagate across research stages and lead to incorrect answers. Existing evaluations focus on task-solving capabilities or robustness against external evidence disturbances, leaving intrinsic weaknesses in DR execution insufficiently explored. Thus, we conduct an empirical study of 1,932 execution trajectories from three representative DR systems and identify nine recurring defect categories across subquestion formulation, online search, and final reasoning. Guided by these findings, we propose EMBERS, an empirically motivated, defect-guided fuzzing framework for robustness testing of DR systems. Starting from correctly answered seed questions, EMBERS generates stage-targeted test inputs using defect-guided mutation, web-search-assisted fidelity assurance, and diversity-aware seed maintenance. Experiments across 16 framework--model--dataset settings show that EMBERS achieves 3.21 times the failure-discovery throughput of the strongest baseline under identical testing budgets. Human and LLM-assisted evaluations demonstrate that most generated inputs preserve the original information need and necessary contextual constraints. Moreover, model fine-tuning experiments show consistent-answer performance improvement, highlighting their value for robustness testing and model improvement.

Stress-Testing the Robustness of LLM-Based Causal Inference

arXiv:2611.03656v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Why do some of the world's most powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems still struggle to reason about cause and effect? Causal discovery, the ability to discern the underlying drivers of a system, is fundamental to scientific inquiry and has traditionally relied on structured data and statistical methods. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been explored as an alternative paradigm for causal inference, leveraging their broad knowledge and reasoning capabilities. Yet, despite their linguistic fluency, LLMs often rely on surface-level pattern recognition rather than genuine causal logic. While it is known that LLMs stumble in this domain, we lack a precise map of where, why, and how significantly these failures occur. In this paper, we propose a systematic stress-test framework across six critical dimensions: model scale, causal graph complexity, prompting strategy, metadata quality, data quality, and sensitivity to uncertainty. Our findings reveal a significant "optimism bias" in LLMs; models consistently overestimate causal links, leading to low precision across the board. Furthermore, we demonstrate that traditional evaluation metrics can be deceptive: while reasoning-heavy models lead in performance, the highest scores often occur when uncertainty in inference is overlooked. Once uncertainty is integrated into the evaluation, performance drops, providing a more honest reflection of causal reliability. We also find that, while scaling model size improves outcomes, these gains are fragile; performance degrades sharply as the quality of metadata decreases. This work serves as a practical guide to the blind spots of LLMs, offering a clear-eyed assessment of when these tools can be integrated into a causal discovery pipeline and when they are likely to lead researchers astray.

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.

Towards Automatic Heart Murmur Characterization from Multi-spot Phonocardiograms

arXiv:2611.03654v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cardiac auscultation traditionally detects the presence of a heart murmur, but clinicians further characterize it by timing, shape, pitch, quality, and grade. Most automatic phonocardiogram analysis systems stop at binary detection and do not estimate this richer description. In this work, we formulate automatic murmur characterization as five patient-level classification tasks and compare three multi-spot strategies on recordings from the aortic, pulmonary, mitral, and tricuspid auscultation locations. First, classical and deep-learning classifiers are trained independently at each location, and predictions are combined via a maximum-severity late-fusion rule. Second, a synchronous multi-input CNN jointly processes one representative segment per location for a single task. Third, a unified multi-input, multi-output CNN predicts all five attributes from one shared multi-spot representation. Using 735 patients from the CirCor DigiScope dataset with complete four-spot recordings, the best late-fusion configurations reach an unweighted mean sensitivity between 85.56% and 93.81% across the five tasks, with class-specific recalls between 80.00% and 100.00% for every relevant category. The multi-input CNN trails late fusion by 7-16 points depending on the task, while the multi-output model reaches values between 72.59% and 79.40%, estimating all five attributes from one shared representation. We further show that naively balancing training data by adding all minority-class segments degrades patient-level performance under the maximum-severity rule, since it introduces non-representative, noisy segments not filtered by the clustering-based segment selection used for evaluation. These results indicate multi-spot murmur characterization is feasible with both fusion-based and jointly learned architectures, outlining a path toward automatic, structured murmur reports complementing binary screening.

FlatCake: A Flat KVCache Storage Architecture for LLM Serving

arXiv:2610.38355v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: KV cache reuse accelerates LLM serving, but existing systems manage host DRAM and NVMe SSD as a tiered hierarchy where DRAM acts as an intermediate cache. Production LLM workloads break both premises of this hierarchy. First, bimodal reuse defeats DRAM temporal filtering, since workloads are dominated either by one-shot blocks with long reuse distances or by multi-gigabyte agentic sessions that exceed DRAM capacity, putting SSD on the critical read path. Second, DRAM staging and eviction-ordered layout bottleneck SSD restoration. Holding host staging buffers for in-flight prefixes causes contention under load that aborts prefetches, while incremental eviction scatters a session's blocks across the SSD and prevents large sequential reads. We p

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Seq@K: Evaluating Language Models Under Sequential Feedback

arXiv:2610.37859v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language-model agents differ fundamentally from prior intelligent systems in their ability to learn from natural language in context. This capability enables agents to iteratively refine their answers in response to feedback, a prevalent mode of operation in modern agentic workflows. However, the community primarily ranks models by metrics such as Pass@1 or Pass@K, which cannot capture how they utilize feedback on prior attempts. We introduce Seq@K, a natural evaluation protocol that measures whether a model can solve a problem within K sequential attempts, provided feedback after each previous failure. Unlike multi-turn agentic benchmarks that examine long-horizon planning, Seq@K isolates and formalizes the core capability of refinement from

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