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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

Contextuality and Contradictions: Exploring Real-World Identifications of AI-Generated Writing

arXiv:2611.08704v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As AI-generated content spreads into nearly every domain of human interaction, practices and discourses of AI detection, both formal and informal, have become an everyday part of how people interact with text and with each other. In this paper, we explore the real-world practices and discourses of AI identification that have emerged in response to a shifting discursive landscape where the human provenance of a text can no longer be taken for granted. We pair qualitative coding with computational analysis of lexical change, grounded in linguistic anthropological perspectives on language and communication, to investigate AI identifications among English Wikipedia editors and students. We find that these identifications draw on a diversity of evidentiary types, from discrete textual features and judgments about content to circular sense-making claims and presumptions about the author's moral character, and that they are contradictory, dynamic, and contextually dependent. In practice, what often motivates an AI identification is not the presence of any specific textual element, but pragmatic infelicity: a perceived mismatch between the elements present and those deemed appropriate within the text's particular context. Consequently, real-world identifications of AI-generated writing do not merely neutrally point out the perceived presence of "AI-like" features, but can be leveraged as a discursive resource to maintain and define sociolinguistic norms: what can be said in a given context, what is appropriate, and, ultimately, what is human. Further, the design and implementation of systems and tools that treat AI-likeness as a context-free property of text may therefore inherit, and enforce at scale, the norms of whichever contexts they were trained on.

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

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.CL13:00

Semantic Conditional Similarity (SCS): A Formal Mathematical Framework

arXiv:2611.08778v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) operates on document pairs, returning a single scalar per comparison. In a multi-document setting where several sources may have contributed to one or more targets, pairwise STS cannot disentangle each source's marginal semantic contribution from their shared vocabulary. In this paper, Semantic Conditional Similarity (SCS) is introduced as a conditional form of STS that computes similarity between two documents after eliminating semantic elements shared with a third via set-theoretic operations. SCS makes four contributions: 1) it introduces directionality, partitioning pairwise relations into lateral (inter-source) and vertical (source-to-target) classes; 2) conditioning induces role-dependent asymmetry by extending the comparison domain from unordered pairs to ordered, conditioned triples of a target, a reference, and a conditioning document; 3) SCS introduces inter-document conditioning by subtracting shared content from a third document, complementing the intra-document conditioning in recent C-STS work; and 4) the set-theoretic decomposition achieves threshold-free partitioning of shared and residual content, requiring no arbitrary similarity cutoff. Although developed for the $n \to 1$ configuration, the framework extends to $1 \to n$ via vertical role reversal and to $m \to n$ via independent composition of source- and target-side conditioning. With the established $1 \to 1$ case, these span the full spectrum of document cardinality. SCS scores should be interpreted ordinally, as rankings of marginal contributions rather than absolute measurements. The broader implication is that metric space axioms commonly assumed in similarity formalizations constrain expressiveness in role-differentiated multi-document settings, and that extending the domain to conditioned triples can recover information that pairwise-symmetric comparisons suppress.

arXiv cs.AI13:00

Transporting the Past: An Optimal Transport View of Backtracking Counterfactuals

arXiv:2611.08682v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study backtracking counterfactual inference for Structural Causal Models (SCMs) through the lens of optimal transport. In SCMs, a factual observation generally induces a posterior distribution over exogenous variables, making counterfactual inference inherently distributional. We introduce two complementary frameworks that transport this posterior onto the set of exogenous configurations satisfying a desired counterfactual query. The first constructs a natural pointwise projection and is suitable when the transported exogenous distribution can be used directly. The second enforces mutual independence among counterfactual exogenous variables, so that the transported variables remain interpretable as genuine exogenous noises of the same SCM. We show that both frameworks are consistent with the original backtracking counterfactual principle, and we propose marginal, penalty-based, and hard-constrained solvers for finite-posterior settings. Synthetic experiments on non-bijective SCMs illustrate the geometry of the problem and reveal trade-offs among transport cost, counterfactual constraint satisfaction, and preservation of exogenous independence.

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

A Proxy-Based Method for Measuring Racial Disparities in~Text-to-Image~Generators

arXiv:2611.07132v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present an automated method for auditing text-to-image generators for representational bias against ground-truth demographic benchmarks. Our approach adapts the racial proxy variables used in U.S. antidiscrimination law to provide a fine-grained comparative analysis of variations in racial representation in generated images. We classify each generated image by race and then compare the model's distribution to publicly available demographic benchmark data to identify patterns of over- and under-representation. We also measure skin tone using CIELAB values and calculate cosine similarity amongst groups of images in order to capture biases that don't show up in demographic comparisons such as differences in image quality across races and skin tones. We report on experiments testing three models (Imagen 4 Fast, Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large Turbo, and Flux Schnell) using three categories of proxies (geographic, occupational, and surname) and 50 variants within each category. We find notable variation across the models as well as by proxy category. For example, Imagen 4 Fast overrepresents white classified images more than the other models tested and produces images with lighter, more homogeneous skin tones. Imagen 4 Fast also had the largest representational disparity for Black demographics among surname and geographical prompts. Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large Turbo produces results that overall diverge most from census data but yield the most diverse range of skin tones. Our method yields a generalizable and legally-grounded auditing tool that surfaces detailed information about model outputs without relying on implicit normative definitions of fairness.

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.CV13:00

PSGAgent: Enhancing MLLMs' Dynamic Visual Perception for Panoptic Scene Graph Generation via Agentic Reasoning

arXiv:2611.07408v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Panoptic Scene Graph generation (PSG) requires holistic yet fine-grained reasoning over complex relations among objects. However, current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) applied to PSG suffer from a perception bottleneck: they function as static observers limited by fixed-resolution views. As a result, models often overlook critical relations involving small or peripheral objects and struggle to differentiate ambiguous predicates in complex scenes. To address these limitations, we propose PSGAgent, an agentic framework that enhances visual perception for PSG through a think-act-observe loop. PSGAgent allows MLLMs to dynamically refine their visual perception using two tools: a Region Zoom-In Tool for local exploration of small or boundary relations and a Visual Highlight Tool for relation-focused segmentation that filters out irrelevant contextual noise. To optimize decision-making, we construct a two-stage training pipeline. First, we create a high-quality, error-aware Multimodal Chain-of-Thought (M-CoT) dataset that provides robust supervision for cold-start learning. Then, we design a novel hierarchical reward mechanism integrated with Group Sequence Policy Optimization (GSPO) to enable strategic and adaptive tool usage. Extensive experiments on the PSG benchmark show that PSGAgent achieves SOTA performance, demonstrating strong capability in both holistic and fine-grained scene understanding.

arXiv cs.CL13:00

Selective, Risk-Controlled Emotion Forecasting in Conversation: From a Persistence Barrier to Departure Detection with Conformal Guarantees

arXiv:2611.05896v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Forecasting emotion in conversation is increasingly framed as predicting the next emotional state's value. We show this targets a hard quantity in a state-observed testbed and propose a learnable, deployable reformulation instead. On valence-arousal-dominance trajectories from a dyadic corpus, repeating a speaker's own previous state sets a persistence baseline that no frozen-encoder correction meaningfully improves upon and a state-space filter exceeds; the floor requires the historical state to be observed, since an estimated anchor collapses persistence below a direct forecaster. What survives is the timing of a departure from persistence, learnable on three of four corpora and near chance on the highest-base-rate corpus, a negative result we report. We recast the task as selective departure forecasting: a lead-time-weighted metric with a leakage protocol, and commitment policies whose best choice switches with the departure rate. A dialogue-level conformal risk control bounds the expected loss of committed predictions, meeting the target in all twelve configurations tested, though the guarantee is bought through abstention, with coverage and alarm recall falling sharply on the hardest corpus. One tested language model's confidence fails as a ranking signal where another succeeds, a model-dependent failure not yet attributable to family versus scale. Code and result logs are available from the corresponding author upon request.

arXiv cs.CL13:00

Where Should a KV-Cache Repair Budget Go? Distractor Structure and Contextual Compatibility in Non-Prefix Reuse

arXiv:2611.06397v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Non-prefix KV-cache reuse encodes retrieved chunks independently and concatenates their caches. To find where a small repair budget should be spent, we vary the chunks around the answer-bearing one (the target) across three 7B-8B models and four datasets of dialogue memory, open-domain QA and API documentation. Reuse loses 19-100% of the context-dependent questions that full prefill answers, and it loses more when the other chunks are of the same kind as the target. Because the recoverable damage is spread over these other chunks, restoring a few of them recovers little, and the budget is better spent on the target. This works through contextual compatibility: recomputing the target against the reused cache beats inserting its full-prefill KV in all seven settings tested, although the recomputed KV stays far from the full-prefill KV. Question attention over reused caches, however, selects the target in at most 18.8% of development questions. A retriever finds it more often, and recomputing its top chunk after moving it next to the question significantly beats InfoFlow-style reordering at the same 5% budget in six of nine open-domain QA and API-documentation settings. On dialogue memory, though, recomputing chunks never significantly beats the token-level selector chosen for each setting.

2026-11-05

arXiv cs.DC13:00

Ab Initio Accuracy Beyond the Cutoff: Distributed Message-Passing Equivariant Attention at Tens-of-Millions-of-Atom Scale

arXiv:2611.06122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Molecular dynamics predicts molecular motion from atomic forces and trajectory integration. Density functional theory (DFT) provides first-principles forces, but its $O(N^3)$ cost limits simulations to thousands of atoms; empirical force fields scale to millions but miss bond breaking and charge transfer. Equivariant message-passing Transformers learn the ab initio potential at linear cost. Stacked layers propagate information beyond a single cutoff, giving four layers a receptive field up to 23{\AA}. At this frontier, scale is limited by communication: layers exchange boundary features across devices, force backpropagation repeats the exchange, and moving atoms change neighbor graphs and tensor shapes. We present Tessera, a distributed runtime that fixes workload shapes between rebuilds. It sorts atoms along a space-filling curve into equal-count shards, ensuring identical atom counts and tensor shapes per rank. Peer sets scale as $K^{0.5}$, not $K$. A conservative neighbor skin preserves topology across updates, enabling each rebuild interval to replay as one CUDA Graph. Fused kernels, three-level neighbor search, and overlapped All-to-All complete it. On 512 GPUs, Tessera sustains 30.7M atoms at 89.7% weak-scaling efficiency (77--90% across three per-GPU loads); per-step time rises 1.11--1.29x as machine and problem grow 16x. Graph reuse cuts full-step time $1.87\times$. Across an $8\times$ device increase, neighbor-search cost grows $1.7\times$, versus $3.0\times$ for Morton order. In a live $10.24$M-atom salt solution, NVE energy drift is $0.42\,\mu$eV/atom/ps over $10$ ps, and structure matches a serial reference. A 10.06M-atom Norovirus capsid sustains 100 ps of NVT at $\approx 8$ ps/day on 256 A100 GPUs. Over 200,000 steps, it has no broken bonds or anomalously close pairs and uses three compiled variants, with no graph breaks or eager fallbacks.

arXiv cs.CV13:00

Discarded or Unreachable? Diagnosing and Repairing Spatial Relation Failure in Vision--Language Similarity

arXiv:2611.05565v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contrastive vision-language models score left/right relations near chance, but the symptom has two causes that call for opposite repairs: the relation may survive in the pooled embedding yet be unreachable by native image-text similarity, or pooling may discard it while the dense features retain it. On clean two object photographs, across ten encoders, the lateral polarity is linearly decodable from the flip odd component of the pooled vector at 0.77-0.99, yet a search over a million captions leaves nine of the ten at chance under native scoring: an access failure. On controlled C4 orbits, where the relation is the only thing that varies, pooling keeps the arrangement axis at 0.998-1.000 and loses its polarity, which the patch grid retains: a pooling failure. Both sit downstream of the dense features, so one readout covers both. Our zero parameter, query conditioned spatial moment recomputes the geometry from the patch grid and stores it as a vector beside the native embedding. On a 118,287 image index it raises left/right pairwise accuracy against reversed geometry negatives from 0.51-0.53 to 0.81-0.96 and conditional R@1 among 21 category matched candidates from 0.05 to 0.37-0.75, at under a millisecond per batched query, while reproducing the native ranking exactly for queries that name no relation.

arXiv cs.CV13:00

Lesion Overlap Ranks PET Segmentation Models but Does Not Certify Patient-Level Tumor Burden

arXiv:2611.05564v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Metabolic tumor volume (MTV) summarizes whole-body PET disease burden for prognostic stratification and treatment assessment. Automated MTV is useful only if its estimate is reliable for the individual patient, yet segmentation models are usually evaluated with overlap metrics such as Dice rather than burden error. We examined whether overlap metrics identify unreliable MTV estimates using 1,014 autoPET FDG PET/CT studies. We evaluated LesionTracer predictions held out from fine-tuning, compared five selected released models on 489 tumor-positive patients, and examined the findings in 597 PSMA studies. Across the five FDG models, ranking by higher mean Dice gave the same order as ranking by lower mean relative MTV error ($\rho=-1.00$, exact $p=0.017$). At the patient level, however, out-of-fold Dice tracked relative MTV error strongly ($\rho=-0.75$), yet 82 of 489 patients (16.8\%) fell on opposite sides of the Dice 0.80 and MTV-error 25\% thresholds. Within the training-exposed released models, correlations ranged from $-0.47$ to $-0.74$ over narrower, high-Dice ranges. Out of fold, opposing false-positive and false-negative volumes cancelled about one third of spatial error in net MTV. In 236 of 489 patients, each of the five models missed at least one lesion, though not necessarily the same lesion. Thus, agreement in average model rankings did not establish the reliability of individual MTV estimates or reveal shared lesion misses. PET segmentation benchmarks should report patient-level MTV error and missed-lesion counts alongside Dice and other overlap metrics.

arXiv cs.DC13:00

Performance Portability of Out-of-Kernel Optimizations on GPUs: A Molecular Docking Case Study

arXiv:2611.06207v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Achieving performance portability is challenging for irregular scientific applications built as repeated multi-kernel GPU pipelines, because throughput depends on out-of-kernel decisions as much as on kernel efficiency. Using molecular docking as a representative case study, we propose an out-of-kernel tuning methodology that treats batching policy, worker concurrency, and per-worker memory allocation as explicit optimization parameters, replacing backend-dependent occupancy-driven choices with a more portable execution strategy based on explicit resource bounds. We implement this methodology in the muDock mini-app under a manager/worker execution model where multiple host workers share a GPU through independent streams. We then evaluate the methodology on NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel GPUs across CUDA, HIP, and SYCL implementations. Across all evaluated platform/backend pairs, the memory-bounded formulation exceeds the peak throughput of the occupancy-guided baseline. The fully tuned methodology improves the end-to-end throughput on all tested configurations, achieving an average speedup of 1.53x over the baseline.

arXiv cs.LG13:00

Stacking-Based Weighting for Large Language Bayes in M-Open Settings

arXiv:2611.03966v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Bayes (LLB) transforms a natural language problem description into a collection of candidate probabilistic programs and performs inference within each model, combining their predictions using Bayesian model averaging. While this provides a flexible framework for probabilistic inference without manual model specification, the resulting candidate model set is often misspecified in practice, and likelihood-based aggregation can concentrate on a single model, under-representing uncertainty across the sampled models. We propose a stacking-based aggregation method for LLB that selects model weights by optimizing predictive performance rather than marginal likelihood, while preserving the original language-model-driven model generation and within-model inference pipeline. Because leave-one-out predictive quantities are intractable in latent-variable models, we derive a variational lower bound that yields a tractable ELBO-based stacking objective. Across real-world probabilistic inference tasks, our method achieves comparable predictive performance to Bayesian model averaging while yielding more dispersed model weights, reducing concentration on a single candidate model under misspecification.

arXiv cs.AI13:00

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.

arXiv cs.AI13:00

Towards Robust Long-Lived Agents: Benchmarking Experience Lifecycles in Evolving Environments

arXiv:2611.05450v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As agents become more capable, they are moving beyond one-off tasks toward sustained assistance across successive user goals. Such assistance requires agents to discover how unfamiliar environments work, reuse what they learn across tasks, and keep that experience current as environments evolve. Existing benchmarks increasingly study experience reuse and adaptation, but provide limited insight into which parts of accumulated experience agents revise, retain, or lose. To address this gap, we introduce ReScopeBench, a benchmark for the experience lifecycle across 18 interactive environments. It distinguishes structural experience about how an environment is organized and accessed from rule experience about reusable principles and constraints that guide decisions across tasks. To study how experience is acquired, reused, and revised, we propose an experience-first construction approach. It builds task streams around shared experience and introduces silent environmental changes. We evaluate task performance and track changes in saved experience throughout each stream. Across 20 models, we find that retained experience improves task performance, but agents struggle to keep it current as environments change. Even when the required experience is correctly recorded, agents do not always complete tasks successfully. These findings identify selective maintenance and effective use as complementary challenges for long-lived agents.