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2026-11-09

arXiv cs.LG13:00

Adaptive Depth Aggregation in Graph Transformers for Long-Range Graph Reasoning

arXiv:2611.08500v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graph Transformers improve long-range node-to-node communication through global or structure-aware interactions. However, improving cross-node communication does not determine how computations produced at different depths should be combined. Standard residual streams accumulate successive computations with fixed unit coefficients shared across nodes. This fixed aggregation is a residual-interface constraint: once intermediate contributions have been produced, the interface cannot explicitly reweight them by node. We hypothesize that this constraint can create a depth-wise aggregation mismatch when the relative utility of these intermediate contributions varies across nodes and structural contexts. To study this hypothesis, we formalize Graph Transformer residual computation as a causal node-wise history of graph-propagation and feed-forward network (FFN) contributions, making depth aggregation an explicit interface choice. We realize node-adaptive aggregation over this history with Attention Residuals (AttnRes) while preserving the backbone's graph-propagation and auxiliary-state machinery. Block AttnRes reduces the routing cost of long histories relative to Full AttnRes by pooling consecutive contributions. We instantiate the interface in GPS and GRIT and evaluate it on all five ECHO tasks. Both variants achieve lower mean absolute error (MAE) than their independently tuned backbones on every task, and at least one obtains the lowest mean among all compared methods in each task. Routing-only donor-swap interventions support the mismatch hypothesis, while additional ablations examine the key design choices. Together, these results support node-adaptive depth aggregation as a useful complement to cross-node communication in long-range graph reasoning.

arXiv cs.CL13:00

Compression of Emotion in Language Model Representations

arXiv:2611.08683v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have been evaluated on their ability to identify emotions expressed in text and produce fluent emotional language. However, output predictions alone do not reveal how fine-grained emotion distinctions are organized internally. We study seven LLMs on GoEmotions, an English Reddit dataset annotated with 27 fine-grained emotion categories plus neutral. We compare model predictions and emotion-prompted final-token representations with the 28 GoEmotions categories and with coarser emotion-family and sentiment groupings. We find a consistent pattern of $\textit{overcompression}$ relative to the fine-grained GoEmotions taxonomy. Under the tested KMeans protocol, when we cluster their hidden representations without using emotion labels, the clearest split is into two groups that largely separate positive from negative emotion. Coarser emotion groupings are also recovered with fewer clusters than the full 28-category taxonomy. Yet linear probes retain substantial fine-grained predictive information. These results suggest that fine-grained emotion information remains accessible even though broader affective structure more strongly organizes the unsupervised geometry.

arXiv cs.AI13:00

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.

arXiv cs.LG13:00

Embedding Consistent Recurrent Neural Networks in Finite Element Simulations for Path-Dependent Damage Prediction

arXiv:2611.08494v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Capturing sheet-metal localisation physics with a trained surrogate inside a finite element (FEM) solver requires the surrogate to deliver consistent predictions irrespective of the solver's strain-increment count, which is difficult to control in non-linear explicit codes. We address this by re-implementing a trained recurrent neural network (RNN) damage criterion in Fortran and embed it as a live, increment-by-increment fracture criterion inside an Abaqus/Explicit user material subroutine (VUMAT), advancing the network state alongside the solver. Two architectures are compared: a SimpleRNN and the proposed Consistent RNN (ConsRNN), whose transition function is designed so that predictions converge as the strain path is refined rather than drifting with the increment count. Both are trained on bilinear strain paths and evaluated under varying temporal discretisations and nonlinear histories. SimpleRNN predictions drift as the increment count increases, which disqualifies it for embedding; ConsRNN converges under refinement, at a substantial fixed-resolution accuracy cost relative to SimpleRNN on multilinear paths. Deployed at structural scale, the embedded ConsRNN surrogate governs element deletion in a clamped steel plate and reaches the same peak force and peak displacement as an established two-parameter fracture criterion. This pre-peak agreement is expected by construction, since no element is deleted before the peak and the two runs therefore share an identical constitutive path; the responses diverge only on the post-peak softening branch. The results establish discretisation consistency as the decisive property for embedding recurrent surrogates in explicit FEM solvers, and report the first embedding of a customised, non-standard-transition recurrent cell at structural scale.

arXiv cs.LG13:00

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.CL13:00

FinEvolveKG: Controlled and Attributable Prompt Evolution for Financial Knowledge Graph Construction

arXiv:2611.08643v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Financial institutions construct knowledge graphs (KGs) from shared SEC 10-Ks to serve risk analysis, portfolio management, and investment research, whose analytical needs differ. Extraction must adapt without fragmenting shared grounding, typing, and temporal rules. Hand-authored persona prompts and fine-tuning add cost. Weight-free prompt optimization offers an alternative, but unconstrained evolution of a monolithic prompt can rewrite shared rules alongside persona guidance, obscuring changes and complicating review. We introduce FinEvolveKG, a KG-construction harness separating reusable general and persona-policy blocks and mechanically confining GEPA, a reflective prompt optimizer, to the designated block. During persona adaptation, the approved general block remains byte-stable and every optimizer edit is localized to a separately versioned persona policy. A dual objective balances generic temporal-KG quality with persona-relevant facts, motifs, and multi-hop connectivity. We evaluate five mutation scopes on ticker-disjoint 10-K splits, with three seeds for the persona-conditioned arms (v3-v5) across three personas. On the three-seed mean, the complete two-stage block-constrained workflow (v4) improves over the frozen prompt baseline (v1) by 19.4-30.9% and over the tested unconstrained full-prompt workflow (v5) by 2.2-6.4%, leading v5 on both objective components and winning all nine paired-seed comparisons with the lowest seed variance in every persona. Without further optimization, v4 also exceeds v5 across all evaluated out-of-distribution (OOD) shifts. An SME audit supports using the generated triplets as ground truth; a blinded two-SME audit favors v4 over v5 in 70.1% of contrast-enriched judgments. These results show that mechanically attributable evolution can coexist with strong empirical performance, without attributing the gains causally to the boundary.

arXiv cs.CL13:00

Guardrail Erosion in Domain Fine-Tuned Large Language Models: A Paired Audit of Knowledge-Centric Abstention in Biomedical LLMs

arXiv:2611.08780v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The number of domain fine-tuned models, particularly in the biomedical domain, is rapidly expanding. Fine-tuning promises high-performing models at a fraction of the cost of training a base model, but it can also produce unintended behavioral changes. Multiple studies have shown that safety guardrails can erode with fine-tuning, yet large-scale studies across model architectures, data mixtures, and fine-tuning methodologies remain limited. Where prior work in this space has studied value-centric refusal, this work focuses on knowledge-centric abstention. We audit 25 biomedical domain fine-tuned large language models against 11 paired base checkpoints on MedAbstain and ClinDet-Bench to evaluate the impact of fine-tuning on knowledge-centric abstention. We find that defined appropriate abstention measured by these benchmarks, already low in base models (median 8.3% on MedAbstain), falls further after fine-tuning (median 4.2%, decreasing in 21 of 25 pairs on MedAbstain), and that the magnitude and direction of change are heterogeneous across pairs. These results motivate fine-tuning methods that improve domain-specific capability while preserving appropriate caution.

arXiv cs.LG13:00

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.

arXiv cs.AI13:00

IWIBench: Evaluating Gradient-Free Model Driven Intra-weight Injection

arXiv:2611.08647v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Intra-weight injection lets one model change another model's behaviour by editing its weights directly, without gradients. Such edits can range from altering lexical associations to enforcing output formats or updating factual knowledge. Despite growing interest in these approaches, there has been no systematic way to evaluate how well models perform them. We introduce IWIBench, which measures a large editor model's ability to modify the weights of a smaller target model (typically Gemma 3 4B IT) to achieve one of ten classical text-editing objectives while preserving its other capabilities. Editors are limited to four tools for reading and writing weights, with bounded tensor access and a fixed budget for generating and inspecting rollouts. A validator applies each proposed patch in a clean environment and compares the edited model against the unmodified target. Evaluating frontier closed- and open-weight models reveals sharply diverging capabilities, both across models and across tasks. A small number of models, most notably Astra and GPT-6.1 Sol, perform far ahead of the rest. The recency of this ability (little of it is evident in GPT-5.6 Sol, for instance), together with qualitative analysis, suggests it has been acquired through recent training. Tasks also vary widely: structured response resisted every attempt, and answer-length control yielded only one successful solution, whereas alias acquisition and recoding proved most amenable. Success in one task family correlated poorly with success in others, indicating an early and uneven capability frontier. We discuss strategies that editors repeatedly adopted and conclude with an outlook on intra-weight injection as an emerging but already potent approach to gradient-free behaviour modification.

arXiv cs.AI13:00

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.DC13:00

ReKV: Overlapping Quantized KV Transfer and Suffix Recomputation

arXiv:2611.08770v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prefill--decode disaggregation moves a prompt's key--value (KV) cache between workers before the first token can be generated. Reducing this handoff to either cache compression or recomputation misses a useful choice: which layers to transmit, at what precision, and which layers to execute again on the decode worker. ReKV transfers a quantized prefix KV cache and one BF16 boundary state, then reconstructs a contiguous suffix while the prefix is in flight. In a model-shaped synthetic benchmark on cross-node H100s, the Q8 configuration meeting separately evaluated quality criteria reduces 8K handoff latency by $2.36\times$, $2.84\times$, and $3.65\times$ over BF16 transfer for Qwen2.5-7B, Qwen2.5-3B, and Qwen3-8B. It is also faster than the best measured transfer-only or recompute-only action at those points. A separate real-weight BF16 recomputation experiment reduces prefill-to-token-return time by $1.16$--$1.63\times$. The preferred action changes with prompt length and link bandwidth.

arXiv cs.DC13:00

ResServe: Accurate and Efficient FP4 LLM Inference with Residue Compensation

arXiv:2611.08713v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Block-scaled 4-bit floating-point (FP4) quantization reduces large language model inference costs but can degrade task quality. Higher-precision computation can mitigate this loss at the expense of some of the efficiency gains from FP4 inference. Narrow matrix computations common in decoding often leave spare hardware capacity for low-cost precision recovery. ResServe combines an FP4 activation base with an FP4-quantized residue representing information lost during quantization. It uses this spare capacity to compute the residue's contribution and combines results on-chip, avoiding extra result transfers. We apply this principle to linear layers and decode attention, while selective compensation limits added work when processing input prompts. On NVIDIA B200, compensated linear kernels using the NVFP4 format improve numerical precision while retaining latency close to uncompensated execution for the evaluated operations with few rows. In the evaluated NVFP4 inference configurations, ResServe adds at most 3.4% request-latency overhead over W4A4 and reduces request latency by 22.4-53.3% relative to W4A8. Across five models, code-generation accuracy improves over same-format uncompensated inference, with mean relative gains of 15.04% for NVFP4 and 53.57% for MXFP4.

arXiv cs.CL13:00

Structuring Survey Histories for LLM Digital Twins: A Controlled Study of Background, Decision Procedure, and Evaluation Profiles

arXiv:2611.08730v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based digital twins aim to predict how individuals would respond in new settings from representations of their prior responses. Existing evidence that compression of survey histories need not reduce predictive accuracy suggests that representation structure, rather than information volume alone, may be an important design choice. We study BDE, a fixed representation that organizes each respondent's survey history into Background, Decision procedure, and Evaluation. We evaluate it on Twin-2K-500 (Toubia et al., 2025) by predicting each respondent's held-out answers on 17 tasks. In a paired evaluation with 100 respondents, a fully inferred BDE profile improves overall accuracy over the raw survey transcript by 1.27 percentage points (pp) on gpt-5.4-nano (p < 0.01) and 1.19 pp on gpt-5.4-mini (p < 0.001). Three analyses then examine the schema, extraction depth, and component composition. Against a length-matched free-form profile written from the same transcript by the same extractor, BDE improves pricing accuracy on both simulators (2.15 pp on nano, p < 0.01; 1.38 pp on mini, p < 0.05), while its overall advantage is significant only on nano (1.05 pp, p < 0.05). Allowing deeper inference during extraction yields no statistically significant gain on either simulator. By contrast, adding Evaluation to a Background--Decision procedure profile improves overall accuracy by 1.44 pp on nano (p < 0.001) and 1.22 pp on mini (p < 0.001). These results indicate that the advantage over raw transcripts is not explained by compression or length alone, and attribute it primarily to profile composition rather than deeper extraction.

arXiv cs.LG13:00

What Are LLM Agents Actually Learning on Low-Budget Molecular Optimization Benchmarks?

arXiv:2611.08522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent work reports large gains for LLM agents on low-budget molecular optimization. We measure the contributions of online optimization, retrievable task information, and permissive oracle landscapes. On PMO at 50 oracle calls, a GPT-4o mini agent's sum AUC falls from 14.44 to 4.85 after task names and curated reference compounds are hidden. An identity-blinded condition that states only the oracle form (e.g., similarity to a hidden reference) scores 5.39, while a deterministic retrieval-only baseline with no LLM reaches 12.16 (84% of the full agent). A full 23-task 2x2 ablation and a three-seed replication on eight tasks support this interpretation. On a protein-targeted benchmark with an AutoDock Vina composite oracle, a single-edit random walk is a strong lower bound; across three seeds it obtains composite 0.636 +/- 0.008 and docking improvement -1.11 +/- 0.04 kcal/mol. As a positive control, a retrieval-free population agent exceeds REINVENT at a matched 50-call AUC budget, with its strongest result at 100 calls. These results motivate two inexpensive sanity checks: retrieval-safe PMO prompts and a random-walk floor for docking-based optimization.

2026-11-06

arXiv cs.CV13:00

ArtiVidRM: Verifiable Artifact-as-Rubric Reward Modeling for Explicit Quality Articulation in Video Generation

arXiv:2611.07301v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning has become an effective approach for improving video generation, but its success depends heavily on reliable reward models. Existing methods either map videos directly to opaque scalar scores or generate free-form rationales that are not explicitly optimized as the basis of the final judgment. We propose ArtiVidRM, a verifiable, artifact-as-rubrics video reward model that follows an observe-then-score paradigm. It first identifies visible generation artifacts and organizes them into a structured artifact list, then uses these artifacts as explicit rubrics for quality assessment. This intermediate representation grounds each score in concrete video-level evidence, making the reward more interpretable and informative for optimization. We further introduce a multi-reward reinforcement learning strategy to jointly optimize artifact prediction and quality assessment. The reward decomposes into complementary objectives that evaluate artifact prediction quality, including semantic coverage and prediction efficiency, together with a pairwise preference objective that supervises quality ranking through score differences. By jointly optimizing the intermediate artifact representation and the downstream preference prediction, the model learns to produce informative artifact lists while improving the accuracy of video quality assessment. Experiments show that ArtiVidRM achieves state-of-the-art performance on video preference benchmarks, provides effective signals for video diffusion optimization, and enables artifact-guided refinement of closed-source video generators.

arXiv cs.AI13:00

BlockLock: Reproducible LLM Inference with Fixed Batch Geometry

arXiv:2611.06977v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reproducible LLM inference requires that a request produces the same output regardless of the other requests in the batch. Existing solutions pay for this in different ways: batch-invariant kernels constrain every operator, and isolating prefill with fixed-shape decode ({our CoRun-style baseline}) gives up shared prefill compute and pads decode. We present BlockLock, which keeps shared batched prefill and pins only the numerical path of the protected request: it fixes the geometry that the request sees, with {two modes: BlockLock-Rows uses fixed-width rows and retains batched decode of all requests; BlockLock-Pack uses terminal-anchored packing with an isolated dummy segment, then extracts the protected request's KV state for target-only decode. Under a stated per-deployment contract, both modes preserve the target's output bitwise when its companions change.} Across five {dense} models (Qwen3-8B/14B, Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, and Gemma-3-4B/12B-IT) and three single-GPU deployments (NVIDIA A6000, A100, and H100), we evaluate our approach on both tinyBenchmarks and BFCL{; we also include initial tensor-parallel experiments on two NVIDIA A6000 GPUs. Both modes preserve target sequences and Top20-logit bits in the reported tests.} At equal delivered work, {BlockLock-Rows} reduces latency by 53.5--55.0\% and improves throughput by 115.2--122.2\% relative to vLLM Batch-Invariant; compared with batch-invariant kernels, it needs no custom kernel implementations and constrains only the protected requests.

arXiv cs.AI13:00

Closed-Loop Agent Evaluation: Layered Measurement and Self-Calibration

arXiv:2611.07051v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Once an agent is live, teams want to know whether it is doing its job, not just whether it throws errors. Yet most evaluation is one-off: a benchmark run, a look at traces, a single score. Its conclusions neither check themselves nor reach the agent. We propose closed-loop evaluation, an evaluation method for deployed agents. It models evaluation as performance estimation under biased raters and censored outcomes, and it requires every level's conclusion to trace back to atomic data and to be computed by versioned rules. The method covers four levels of analysis (span, trace, conversation and engagement), measures along a spine of Execution, Substance, Trajectory and Results, treats Conduct as a constraint throughout, and uses Provenance and Adjudication components to certify the evidence and the evaluators. Evaluator agents generated by an Agent Factory carry these components, each with a domain knowledge pack and an adapter harness. Two loops close the evaluation: an inner loop audits the evidence, rules and metrics themselves, and an outer loop uses per-component regression checks to drive agent improvement. We also give a pipeline that runs this process automatically. Using the business-analysis agent SharpInsight as a case and porting the method to public conversation data, we show how problems differ across levels and how evidence-and-rule judgment is more reliable than holistic scoring (ICC 0.86 vs. 0.81; kappa 0.81 vs. 0.63).

arXiv cs.CL13:00

Holistic Parallel Supervision for Expressive Speech to Speech Translation

arXiv:2611.06010v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Expressiveness is central to speech-to-speech translation (S2ST), yet existing datasets rarely align source and target speech jointly in content, prosody, timing, and speaker identity. Consequently, current systems often rely on indirect conditioning or transfer mechanisms. To obtain this supervision, we introduce a training-data construction strategy that combines professional dubbing, which provides human-performed correspondence in content, prosody, and timing, with multilingual voice conversion to reduce speaker mismatch. We evaluate this supervision using existing expressive S2ST systems and DirectS2ST, an end-to-end method developed in this work that predicts the complete target-speech representation directly from source speech. Experiments on English-German and English-Spanish show that holistic parallel supervision improves expressive realization across all evaluated systems. DirectS2ST exhibits the largest gains in content, prosody, timing, speaker similarity, and human-rated expressiveness. To our knowledge, this work provides the first systematic investigation of holistic parallel supervision for expressive S2ST.

arXiv cs.CL13:00

Information-Matched Auditing of Conversational Emotion-Shift Forecasting: A Leakage-Safe Evaluation Protocol

arXiv:2611.05895v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Comparisons in conversational emotion-shift forecasting are easily distorted when a learned model receives rich features but its transition baseline is given a noisy or unavailable current-emotion label, when hyperparameter budgets differ, or when target-turn information enters the representation. We present an information-matched, leakage-safe auditing protocol that closes these gaps with an explicit commitment point, executable causality tests, equal four-configuration validation searches, and seed-dialogue-aware inference. Applying it to six causal model families on four text corpora and two feature-source sensitivity configurations shows that a deployable train-only current-emotion classifier feeding the transition baseline yields a different verdict than an oracle diagnostic where both sides receive gold current emotion. Under the deployable condition, learned models improve over the predicted-label baseline on all four primary corpora; DailyDialog gains are large and survive a 72-comparison Holm correction (best ROC-AUC gain = +0.167, adjusted p=.0144). Under matched gold information, the baseline remains competitive on IEMOCAP and stronger on MELD, while every model retains a large DailyDialog advantage. We additionally report precision-recall AUC, calibration, a strictly utterance-local feature control, same-person self-shift forecasting, and a future-access dose-response test. An eight-item leakage checklist accompanies the protocol. Code, raw seed predictions, and reporting artifacts are available from the corresponding author upon request.

arXiv cs.DC13:00

Not All Loops Cost the Same: Phase-Dependent Depth for Serving Looped Transformers

arXiv:2611.07211v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Looped transformers scale inference-time reasoning by repeatedly reusing a shared core, increasing computation without increasing parameter count. Serving prefilling and decoding with a uniform loop budget couples their costs. We present LoopDuet, a phase-dependent depth and training-free serving approach that selects the two budgets jointly while preserving decoding depth at prefilling boundaries. Our vLLM implementation gathers tokens requiring further recurrence into compact batches, turning the selected allocation into executable savings with existing weights and attention kernels. At runtime, a queue-age controller adjusts prefilling depth to retain quality as demand changes. Experiments on the full HotpotQA dataset with one A100-80GB demonstrate two benefits of this flexibility. First, separate phase budgets improve the quality--throughput trade-off: Huginn delivers 19\% more throughput than the fastest tested uniform setting meeting the same accuracy criterion, while a higher-throughput operating point gains 6.04 EM points over uniform depth eight at 97\% of its throughput. Second, the same execution mechanism retains more quality under load: on two evaluated OLMo arrival traces, adaptive prefilling gains 0.92--1.35 EM points over the most accurate tested fixed-depth controls at the same 100\% attainment of a one-second time-to-first-token target. Together, these results establish LoopDuet as a practical way to turn flexible model computation into higher serving capacity and better quality under load.