Skip to content
AI NEWS.ccAI正在发生 未来正在更新
Bookmarks
THE JOURNAL
AI NEWS JOURNAL
AI, IN PERSPECTIVE

Search AI news

Search headlines, summaries and articles to connect the dots.

Newest first

arXiv cs.DC

Beyond Proof of Possession: A Relational Theory of Authority

arXiv:2611.07159v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Proof-of-Possession (PoP) establishes that an executor controls an artifact (key, token, credential, or capability), but such control alone determines neither the executor's relational profile nor the causal history of an execution occurrence. We separate PoP from Proof of Relationship (PoR), the semantic property that one execution occurrence validly continues another, and from authorization, which is occurrence-sensitive. The foundational change is in the semantic domain of authorization: from holders and authority-bearing artifacts to execution occurrences situated in causal histories. We give authorization models an observation-based occurrence verdict and a separate transition-admissibility relation; kernel inclusion yields a partial order on observation-kernel classes. Building on Provenance Identity Continuity (PIC) and Proof-of-Continuity (PoC), we classify executors by authorization-relevant equivalence relations whose quotients form relational profile spaces, with positive predicates over profile transitions forming a distributive lattice. This adds relational attenuation to authority attenuation: along a valid causal history, $C_{i+1}\subseteq C_i$ and $\rho_{i+1}\Rightarrow\rho_i$. We prove dual monotonicity, combined closure, and origin relational closure. Two occurrences of the same authenticated executor, with the same profile and possession evidence, need not be authorization-equivalent, and within a valid PIC lineage a deputy's independent authority cannot be imported outside the origin context. Finally, we prove that the executor-dependent decision factors through the relational profile and is invariant under sound mechanisms establishing it: successor-side PoP is a possible evidence mechanism, not a necessary premise of authorization. Under explicit Witness Assumptions, a boundary-witnessed checkpoint construction realizes the premises without successor-side PoP.

arXiv cs.AI

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.LG

Finite-Time Convergence and Regret Guarantees for Neural Reinforcement Learning in POMDPs

arXiv:2611.07069v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) in Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) is computationally challenging due to the curse of long-range dependence on history. Fortunately, recent studies have shown that a range of POMDPs that satisfy the filter stability assumption can be well approximated by a superstate Markov Decision Process (MDP) based on a truncated history in a finite-memory window, with a value gap that decays with the window length. However, existing finite-time convergence analyses on such superstate MDP surrogates are either limited to over-simplified linear function approximation or rely on an i.i.d. sampling oracle that is violated by POMDP trajectories, both of which severely limit the applicability of these theoretical results in practice. This motivates us to bridge the gap by investigating RL in POMDPs with nonlinear neural value function approximation. Our main contributions are threefold: i) We first establish a new finite-state MDP point-wise approximation error bound, which lays the foundation for our RL algorithm design and analysis in POMDPs; ii) By applying Temporal-Difference (TD) learning to POMDP-generated superstate transitions and targeting the Bellman fixed point of the superstate MDP, we prove a finite-time critic error bound with nonlinear neural value function approximation; and iii) By combining the neural critic function approximation error bound with the policy mirror descent framework, we obtain a finite-time sublinear regret against the optimal POMDP value. To the best of our knowledge, such a finite-time sublinear regret based on neural function approximation is the first in the literature for finite-memory POMDPs. Our numerical experiments also verify our theoretical results.

arXiv cs.DC

Full Provenance on the COSS Causal Axis: An Event-Level Closure of Causal Attribution and Confused-Deputy Exclusion

arXiv:2611.07164v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Provenance Identity Continuity (PIC) represents an authority-use event as an operation/resource behavior situated in a causal lineage, $(o,r,\ell)\in O\times R\times L$. We make the causal occurrence itself primitive: a represented security-relevant causal graph $(E,\to_c)$ in which each occurrence has a unique causal history, so the consistent event-lineage space is canonically isomorphic to $E$. The modeled execution has one causal partial order; distinct lineages are distinct causal histories inside it and may share a root while diverging into incomparable branches. PIC's $O\times R\times L$ is the authority-behavior projection of this space, and Causally Ordered Security-State (COSS) continuity generalizes it to an arbitrary behavior product over the same causal execution. On this semantics we prove an architecture-independent confused-deputy exclusion theorem. PIC continuation requires $C(e')\subseteq C(e)$ on every ordinary causal edge, so descendants are bounded by their ancestors; at an ordinary join, authority available on only one incoming branch cannot be resurrected, even when branches share a common root. Non-conservative combination must be an explicit authorized composition or relaxation event. With protected-effect mediation, an effect caused by request $q$ through an ordinary authority segment can exercise only authority in $C(q)$, so a confused-deputy state is contradictory. The result holds for any system whose protected request-to-effect causes are faithfully represented and whose ordinary authority transport satisfies PIC. We revisit Rajani, Garg, and Rezk: their value, control-flow, and initial-heap attacks are different witnesses of causal ancestry, so full provenance is an evidence mechanism for recovering edges of the causal graph, not the foundation of the PIC theorem. Finally we lift it to the COSS product of heterogeneous security-state coordinates.

arXiv cs.CL

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.DC

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.

arXiv cs.DC

Post-Quantum Authentication of IoT Data on Ethereum: Signatures, the Calldata Floor, and Device-Signed Merkle Roots

arXiv:2611.08108v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Field devices deployed today will still be producing records when quantum computers may break their signatures, so systems that anchor IoT data on blockchains need a post-quantum (PQ) authentication path now. We measure its cost on Ethereum under the current execution rules, including the EIP-7623 calldata floor and the EIP-7825 transaction cap, and under the calldata repricing scheduled for the Glamsterdam upgrade. We combine device-side measurements of ML-DSA, Falcon, SLH-DSA, LMS and XMSS, reproduced costs of open-source Solidity verifiers, a new standard-compliant LMS/HSS verifier for SHA-256 and SHA-256/192, and complete transactions on an Osaka-rule EVM, priced with today's verifiers and with proposed precompiles. Three results stand out. Signing every record costs 8.7 times as much as ECDSA even with an ML-DSA precompile, because the calldata floor rather than verification sets the price. When each device signs a Merkle root over 100 records, a standard LMS verifier available today costs about 3,350 gas per record, against 245 gas for ECDSA in the same design, and it is unaffected by the scheduled repricing, which raises floor-bound designs by up to 1.9 times. With the proposed precompiles, ML-DSA-44 costs 1,031 gas per record, and a hybrid ECDSA and ML-DSA signature adds only 2.5%. Post-quantum device authentication is therefore deployable on Ethereum without protocol changes, provided that the latency of batching and the data-availability properties of the chosen variant fit the application.

arXiv cs.AI

Trust Responsive Runtime Authorization for Agentic AI with Empirical Characterization of Policy Behavior and Parameter Sensitivity

arXiv:2611.06996v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The policy that converts runtime estimates of an autonomous agent's condition into operational authority is rarely specified or measured. We empirically characterize the Trust Responsive Authorization Policy (TRAP), which maps an Authorization Readiness Score (ARS), a weighted combination of runtime trust, operational stability, and contextual risk, onto discrete authorization levels through an asymmetric rule: escalation requires consecutive observations above a band edge plus a margin, while a sharp drop in readiness restricts authority at once. On one matched set of 100 Monte Carlo traces, we compare TRAP with static, trust-only, risk-only, and symmetric policies. Under abrupt degradation, TRAP restricts at onset and re-escalates sooner after recovery than the symmetric policy, with the highest and, descriptively, least variable stability among the adaptive policies, although more of its post-recovery escalations occur below the selected trust threshold. Paired bootstrap intervals exclude zero for the remaining differences. In one-factor sweeps, recovery time rises with the escalation margin and run length, shifts with the score weights, and is unchanged by the restriction threshold. In an exploratory post-freeze experiment, when the same degradation is spread over 5-20 intervals, TRAP restricts only on the 4 traces that retain a single-interval drop above that threshold; averaged over all 100 traces, it holds authority above what readiness supports for 15.9-18.9 of the 20 degradation intervals, against 0.8 under abrupt degradation and about 10 for the symmetric policy. Its restriction advantage therefore depends on degradation being abrupt. All reported values are traceable to the publicly available, versioned research release.

arXiv cs.CL

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.

arXiv cs.DC

A Controlled Experimental Evaluation of Configuration and Cache Architecture in LLM Serving Engines

arXiv:2611.05991v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent LLM applications repeat most of their prompt tokens across requests, and serving engines reuse the cached state of shared prefixes. vLLM and SGLang reuse it at different granularities, and benchmarks of their default deployments report large performance gaps, usually credited to the cache. Such comparisons rarely control for other configuration differences. One of them, whether a long prompt is prefilled in chunks, is set by each engine's defaults from the hardware and the release, and it confounds the comparison. We built a reproducible testbed on Kubernetes and a seeded multi-agent workload generator, and compared the two engines under vendor defaults and with chunked prefill matched. SGLang's configuration is the same in both arms, which makes it an internal control across independently provisioned deployments. Under defaults, vLLM's median time to first token is up to 64x SGLang's. Matching one setting removes 78% of the capacity gap where that gap is largest and 30 to 67% of the latency gap. Near saturation the remaining latency gap reflects queue growth. A fluid queue model driven only by a 4.4% throughput shortfall reproduces it, and shows that such a gap scales with the length of the benchmark run. What survives matching is a tail-latency advantage of 2.4 to 6.4x at equal throughput, consistent with cache-aware ordering of waiting requests. We derive six recommendations for comparing serving engines.

arXiv cs.DC

CoordX Protocol: Peer to Peer Cryptographically Verified Shared Records

arXiv:2611.06034v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: People, companies and software agents often must work on shared records even when they do not trust each other. Today they usually give those records to a central server. The server keeps the canonical copy, authenticates users, and decides who has permissions to act on the record. The CoordX Protocol removes the need for that central server. In the CoordX protocol the author of a record holds full permission over it. Permission for any other party to create, read or update the record is assigned by explicit grants and keys. An invitation only starts contact between two parties. It gives no permission. Each record is a causal tree of signed entries, and each entry is immutable. Each entry names the permission that allowed it. Any party can get the proof of that permission and check it without help from anyone. Two honest parties that check the same bytes, with the same keys and local settings, always get the same answer. The content is encrypted, so the relays that may carry it in transit see only sealed bytes. To exclude a party from future content, the other parties move to new keys. The protocol does not choose a winning version, does not put entries in time order, and does not need global agreement. Applications decide what the entries mean above the level of the protocol.

arXiv cs.DC

Energy-Efficient Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models

arXiv:2611.05748v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning for language models alternates between generating responses and training the policy. These stages place different demands on GPUs, creating opportunities to reduce clock frequency with little loss in throughput. Selecting frequencies online is difficult because response lengths change and frequency trials themselves consume time and energy. We present EE-RL (energy-efficient RL), an online controller that selects separate frequencies for generation and training during RL execution. It compares candidate settings with a prediction of the default GPU governor on the same token workload, and keeps the most energy-efficient setting that meets a throughput threshold. The controller then monitors throughput and energy and adjusts frequencies as the workload changes. Fixed-frequency sweeps on H100 and GB200 show GPU energy savings of up to 28.2% per valid training token across synchronous and asynchronous execution, while largely preserving throughput. EE-RL turns this headroom into online savings, reducing GPU energy per valid training token by up to 16.9% at a modest throughput cost.

arXiv cs.CV

From Activation to Intervention: Interpreting Sparse Visual Features through Reconstruction

arXiv:2611.05522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) decompose visual representations into individual features, offering a promising basis for explaining model behavior. Interpreting these features typically relies on images or pixel regions that most strongly activate them. However, this evidence becomes ambiguous when multiple features with different semantics frequently activate in the same locations, such as texture and color in the same patterns. We propose Reconstructive SAE Intervention (RecSAEI), a framework that shifts feature explanation from passive observation to active visual reconstruction. By intervening on representations along SAE decoder directions and reconstructing the visual output, we provide direct evidence of a feature's semantic meaning. We demonstrate that our method successfully disambiguates feature meanings across multiple datasets and vision encoders. Furthermore, our framework grounds [CLS] SAE interventions in a sparse set of patch SAE decoder directions. Beyond stable target response, this attribution also exposes the compositional relationship between elementary visual patterns and high-level semantics. Our results advocate for intervention reconstruction as an essential complementary signal for explaining neural networks.

arXiv cs.CV

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.CL

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.

arXiv cs.LG

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.AI

Uncertainty-Aware Resource Orchestration for Agentic AI Systems

arXiv:2611.05392v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) systems powered by large language models (LLMs) execute as autonomous multi-step pipelines that dynamically invoke tools, integrate observations into memory, and iterate until a task is resolved or a resource budget is exhausted. Unlike classical workflows with fixed graphs, the aggregate compute, bandwidth, and end-to-end latency demands of such pipelines are unknown at dispatch time: they emerge at runtime from intermediate observations and stochastic token sampling, yielding heavy-tailed, multi-modal random variables. This unpredictability forces infrastructure orchestrators into a dilemma: under-provisioning risks mid-execution throttling and deadline violations, while over-provisioning wastes scarce edge or cloud capacity. Existing schedulers require a fully known pipeline graph, while edge resource-management methods rely on parametric or stationary demand models, and neither fits the unknown, non-stationary profiles of agentic pipelines. We formalize this setting as the uncertainty-aware agentic orchestration problem, where the goal is to reserve, at dispatch time, compute and bandwidth allocations that cover actual pipeline demands, and to verify that the pipeline can meet its deadline, each with a prescribed probability. We then propose Conformal Reservation for Orchestration (CRO), an online algorithm that translates a sliding window of past execution traces into dispatch-time resource allocations with finite-sample, distribution-free coverage guarantees via conformal prediction. Simulations over heterogeneous task mixes with multi-modal and heavy-tailed profiles show that CRO is the only evaluated method that simultaneously satisfies target probabilistic coverage across all risk levels while, among coverage-feasible methods, attaining the lowest over-reservation, roughly halving the resource waste of the Chebyshev-bound baseline.

arXiv cs.AI

Verified but Vacuous: Three Failure Surfaces of LLM-Driven Verified Code Generation

arXiv:2611.05590v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: What should ``verified'' mean when evaluating LLM-generated code? Many existing pipelines report a single verification number. We argue this collapses three distinct properties measured in a conditional audit sequence: verifier acceptance (Surface A), \emph{syntactic specification binding (Surface B: does the proof obligation bind to the spec?), and \emph{semantic specification fidelity} (Surface C: does the spec capture the informal requirement?). Two empirical demonstrations show the surfaces separate. \textbf{First ($A \neq B$), via Li@Opus (a same-model reproduction of \citet{li2025dafny}'s Dafny-as-intermediate-representation (IR) pipeline under Claude Opus 4.7) on three Python benchmarks}: it reaches \textbf{99.1\% verifier acceptance} on HumanEval while only \textbf{1.9\%} carry a certificate binding to a spec-defined predicate or function. \textbf{Second ($B \neq C$), via VCG on two Rust benchmarks}: we use VCG (which is our own in-house Dafny-as-intermediate pipeline) on Rust because the Rust target lets us enforce fully-verifiable output (every component ships as a Dafny certificate, ensures-binding gate passing by construction). Even inside that construction, \textbf{11.48\% (MBPP-Rust) and 14.82\% (VeriContest LC slice) of structurally-verified samples still fail hidden tests}. On the LC slice of VeriContest, \textbf{VCG's reported End2End rate is 7.79\% (535/6870).} The cited external rates are 5.51\% (GPT-5.5) and 1.88\% (single-shot Opus 4.7). These give descriptive differences of 2.3 percentage points and 4.14$\times$, respectively; task-budget, repair and harness differences prevent a matched-performance claim.

arXiv cs.AI

VirtualTrialHarness: Coordinating Agentic Operationalization of Virtual Trial Protocols Across Complex Clinical Schemas

arXiv:2611.05551v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Virtual trials use routinely collected clinical data to evaluate treatment strategies, but translating a study protocol into an executable analysis requires determining how clinical concepts and study requirements should be represented in the available data and applied consistently across the workflow. These decisions depend on local data representations and operational conventions and can involve source selection, patient and encounter identity, linkage, and temporal interpretation. Here we introduce VirtualTrialHarness (VTHarness), an agent framework that coordinates virtual-trial operationalization by selecting reusable procedural skills for each workflow stage and uses explicit contracts to maintain consistent study decisions across stages. We also introduce VTBenchmark for evaluating source selection and cohort construction. Across three complex synthetic environments, VTHarness successfully produced all required cohort outputs matching the references in 95.1% of workflows after requirement clarification, compared with 60.4% using retrieval from the same procedural corpus. Procedural skills improved source recovery across three language models and increased source overlap with analyst code in 13 Mayo Clinic cases. Site-specific adaptation enabled reference-matched cohort execution across eight MIMIC-IV tasks. Within the Mayo Clinic Virtual Trials Program, the framework supported investigator review of cohort construction and endpoint analysis. These findings support coordinating procedural guidance with workflow decisions to improve virtual-trial implementation across complex clinical schemas.

arXiv cs.CV

CHROMA-MILL: Joint Low-Light Enhancement and White Balance under Colored Illumination

arXiv:2611.04092v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Capturing an image in a low-light environment produces a weak, noisy sensor signal. Low-light image enhancement (LLIE) aims to restore it. Auto white balance (AWB) is also required for every image, and the same noisy signal degrades its ability to infer the scene illuminant. LLIE is typically performed first, followed by AWB, but this strategy remains largely unexamined because existing low-light datasets span a narrow range of illuminants and lack illuminant ground truth for evaluating AWB. We address this with CHROMA-MILL, a RAW dataset of 50 scenes captured with a DSLR and smartphone under four calibrated illuminants at eleven intensity levels. Because light is additive, we blend these captures in the linear RAW domain to synthesize physically valid illuminant mixtures with exact chromaticity ground truth. Benchmarking on this data, we find joint correction is best, and introduce CTI-Retinexformer, which supervises an illumination map, a chromaticity prediction, and an illumination-invariant scene embedding, outperforming the best cascade by 0.7 dB PSNR$_L$ and 1.1 $\Delta E_{00}$.