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

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

TaxoSAE: Rethinking Sparse Autoencoders through Taxonomic Logic

arXiv:2610.31894v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) decompose the representations of large language models (LLMs) into interpretable features, enabling precise readout and control of encoded knowledge. However, existing SAEs treat each feature as a standalone unit, whereas real-world knowledge is often taxonomically organized. As a result, readout carries no guarantee of taxonomic consistency, and control lacks the granularity to specify the scope of an edit. We propose TaxoSAE, which explicitly encodes taxonomical information, built on is-a (hypernym-hyponym) relations, into the SAE feature space. TaxoSAE mirrors a taxonomy with a stack of SAEs, one per taxonomy level, and introduces a taxonomic alignment loss that trains each concept to be active whenever on

Beyond Hotness: High-Resolution Memory Characterization of Cloud and LLM Workloads for Tiered Memory with ARM SPE

arXiv:2610.32711v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Memory demands from data analytics and LLM workloads grow rapidly, driving up memory costs in cloud and data centers. Multi-tier memory has emerged as a promising solution to balance performance and cost. However, effectively leveraging it requires a deep understanding of workload memory behaviors. This work introduces a high-resolution memory characterization methodology for analyzing workload-specific opportunities for multi-tier memory usage. In response to the increasing deployment of ARM-based processors in data centers, we implement our methodology using the recent Statistical Profiling Extension (SPE) for ARM. By characterizing eight memory-intensive workloads from CloudSuite and LLM applications, we identify region-specific access pat

HyScale: Scaling Long-Context Training for Learned Sparse Attention

arXiv:2610.32057v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present HyScale, a long-context training system for learned sparse attention. Learned sparse attention is a promising architecture for million-token contexts, widely adopted in production since DeepSeek-V3.2. Selection, however, grows into the training bottleneck. For each query, it scores every previous token whereas sparse attention reads only $k$; worse, current systems materialize a full score table and repeat selection during recomputation. Our key insight is that the output of selection is not an activation, but rather a set of indices. Building on it, HyScale introduces HyTopK and selection replay. HyTopK finds each query's exact top-$k$ on the fly without a score table, while selection replay reuses forward-pass selection in recomp

The Helpful Agent Problem: When Emergent Cooperation Among LLM Agents Bypasses Intended Workflows

arXiv:2610.31985v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents are increasingly deployed in collaborative settings where they pursue separate tasks while sharing resources and operating under review or oversight processes. Such settings create safety risks not only when agents are malicious, but also when they are simply trying to help. Prior work has largely studied adversarial or explicitly collusive behavior; we show that benign agents pursuing separate objectives can spontaneously cooperate in ways that bypass intended workflows. We call this the \emph{helpful agent problem}. We study long-horizon shared-resource environments in which agents sometimes depend on resources owned by their peers and cross-owner changes are normally mediated by a reviewer. When review becomes unavailable, agent

KnitTrans: Coordinated Trajectory Transfer for Effective and Efficient LLM Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2610.32389v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trajectory transfer from rollout to training affects both learning quality and system efficiency in large language model reinforcement learning (RL). Enforcing batch-wide training requirements can delay the admission of completed trajectories, resulting in higher architectural staleness: the additional parameter-version gap from disaggregated pipelining relative to colocated execution. Beyond admission, misalignment between data access and training consumption causes redundant movement and unnecessary waiting when transferring large trajectory payloads. We present KnitTrans, a system that coordinates the rollout-to-training path through three designs. First, constraint-preserving mini-batch admission allows flexibility in early mini-batch com

Can Test-Time Memory Evolution Outperform Test-Time Training for Scientific Discovery?

arXiv:2610.32046v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent \emph{test-time training} (TTT) frameworks have enabled open-weight large language models (LLMs) to outperform inference-only frameworks powered by frontier models on scientific discovery tasks. However, TTT introduces additional computational cost for online weight updates during the discovery process, making computational efficiency an important consideration when scaling to larger models. This motivates us to explore an efficient \emph{test-time adaptation} method for scientific discovery. We introduce \emph{Test-Time Memory Evolution} (TTME), a plug-and-play test-time adaptation method, as an alternative to TTT. TTME continually updates the external memory by distilling the experience to guide subsequent discovery without updating

Do AI-for-Science Agents Preserve Model Safety?

arXiv:2610.32045v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI-for-Science agents are increasingly being used for formulating scientific hypotheses, running autonomous experiments, and interpreting evidence. These agents are constructed by integrating a large language model (LLM) into a domain-specific agent harness, which in turn can improve the LLM's scientific capability and enable the model to orchestrate scientific tools. In this work, we ask whether model safety is preserved when an LLM is integrated in an AI-for-Science agent harness. We evaluate five agent harnesses on 50 harmful chemistry requests. Specifically, we study how the safety behavior changes under direct prompting, two simple adversarial prompting strategies, and an adaptive attack. Across four recent GPT variants, our results show

Training an MoE LLM in MXFP4: How We Closed the Gap to BF16

arXiv:2610.32229v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training large language models (LLMs) in sub-8-bit arithmetic promises substantial gains in memory bandwidth and compute throughput, yet FP4 formats introduce quantization error severe enough to destabilize optimization if left unaddressed. We present ALTO, an open-source training recipe for GPT-OSS-20B, a 20-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts (MoE) model, on the MLPerf Small MoE Training benchmark under the MXFP4 microscaling format. The recipe combines established techniques from Abecassis, Felix et al. [arXiv:2509.25149] (hybrid 1D/2D block quantization, randomized Hadamard transforms, and stochastic rounding) with a simplified weight de-oscillation scheme adapted from TetraJet-v2 [arXiv:2510.27527]. On C4 validation at global batch size

Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection in English and Mandarin

arXiv:2610.31808v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Patronizing and condescending language (PCL) is a form of harmful language that belittles and assumes pity for vulnerable groups, reinforcing negative societal stereotypes. However, unlike overt hate speech, it is often difficult to detect, even for human judges. This paper proposes a system for the automated detection of PCL. Our first approach uses static word embeddings and a convolutional neural network for classification, while our second approach uses pre-trained BERT embeddings fine-tuned for the PCL task. Our second approach was considerably more successful, and achieved an F1 score of 0.528 over the development set.

Don't Forget What You Just Learned: Self-Directed Repair Turns Agent Mistakes Into Lasting Lessons

arXiv:2610.31846v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Intelligent agents should learn from their mistakes so that experience leads to continuous improvement. Yet today's agents recover from a mistake only temporarily: in-context reflections are easily forgotten across sessions and compete for limited context, while full-parameter fine-tuning is expensive and can interfere with existing capabilities. We introduce Self-Direction, a mechanism for agents to learn from mistakes that combines the benefits of temporary in-context retries and policy updates. When an agent fails a task, it reflects on its own trajectory in order to extract a lesson and immediately distills it into a lightweight low-rank adapter. By keeping the original weights frozen, Self-Direction prevents adapter training from overwri

From Noisy Retrieval to Decision Evidence: Silver Evidence Demonstrations for In-Context Learning

arXiv:2610.32128v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: RAG and retrieval-augmented few-shot ICL can struggle when decision-relevant evidence is buried in long, noisy context. Retrieved passages and demonstrations may contain redundant or distracting information. Although expert-labeled development examples may identify the text supporting each decision, these annotations are typically used only as answer-side rationales rather than as supervision for filtering noisy retrieval. We propose silver-evidence demonstrations, which replace raw retrieved passages in ICL examples with generated, target-conditioned evidence summaries. For each labeled development example, an LLM generates silver evidence without access to the expert label or gold evidence; this evidence is then paired with the expert label

$M^3$: A Multi-LLM System for Multi-Turn Jailbreaking as a Markov Decision Process

arXiv:2610.31937v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern Large Language Models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to carefully orchestrated multi-turn interactions that progressively bypass safety mechanisms. However, many existing red-teaming approaches rely on heuristics or impose strong assumptions that limit their applicability in fully black box settings. We address this gap by introducing $M^3$, an automated red-teaming framework that formalizes multi-turn jailbreaking as a finite-horizon Markov Decision Process (MDP). In $M^3$, an attacker LLM interacts with a target LLM while operating over a compact internal state produced by a state LLM. Across two benchmarks and six target models, $M^3$ consistently outperforms state-of-the-art multi-turn red-teaming methods in Attack Success Rates (ASR), a

Speculative Diffusion is a Tale of Two Tradeoffs

arXiv:2610.31819v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speculative decoding is a technique that accelerates the inference speed of autoregressive large language models (LLMs) by sampling from a faster, lower quality draft model. Traditionally, a fundamental characteristic of speculative decoding is that it is lossless with respect to the verifier distribution, guaranteeing speed without sacrificing quality. This differs from recently developed diffusion LLMs (dLLMs), which are notably able to achieve substantial speedups by degrading the quality of their outputs with less diffusion effort. Because diffusion models are able to sample faster than autoregressive models by generating tokens in parallel, they are considered strong candidates for draft models in speculative diffusion. While it is widel

EDWARD-NMT: Elastic Dimensions With Adaptive Routing and Dual-consistency for Neural Machine Translation

arXiv:2610.32115v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) is a powerful paradigm for scaling Neural Machine Translation (NMT) and managing language heterogeneity. However, practical limitations hinder its deployment on resource-constrained devices: the entire expert pool must remain in memory, and the per-token compute budget is statically fixed during training by rigid top-k routing. We introduce EDWARD-NMT (Elastic Dimensions With Adaptive Routing and Dual-consistency for NMT), a novel MoE encoder-decoder architecture designed for a train once, deploy anywhere paradigm that exposes a family of deployable sub-networks at inference time. EDWARD-NMT integrates three key innovations: (i) Matryoshka-style elastic dimensions to flexibly reduce the memory footprint; (ii) a

Does LeWorldModel Preserve Local Action Geometry?

arXiv:2610.31716v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We examine how closely pretrained LeWorldModel (LeWM) reproduces the effects of small action changes. Using matched simulator and model responses, we measure action sensitivity with Gram matrices at three perturbation scales. Across nearly a thousand states from Reacher and OGBench Cube, the most sensitive action directions differ by median angles of about $36^\circ$ and $42^\circ$, respectively, at the smallest scale. Increasing the perturbation tenfold reduces median normalized Gram discrepancy by roughly 70\% on Reacher and 47\% on Cube. Geometry measured in pixels and embeddings varies more across scales than the chosen physical-state geometry. On held-out directions, environment Grams achieve median embedding response errors of 17\% and

The Path to NDE 4.0: A Review of Algorithms, Techniques, and Strategies for Autonomous Inspection

arXiv:2610.31704v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Non-Destructive Inspection (NDI) is a cornerstone of modern quality assurance, critical for ensuring the safety and reliability of infrastructure and manufactured components without causing damage. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the current NDI landscape, analyzing the field through four distinct lenses, namely, computational algorithms, physical techniques, industrial applications, and research objectives. We synthesize a broad range of academic literature to illustrate the rapid evolution from manual, analog interpretation to a digitized, data-centric paradigm known as NDE 4.0. Our analysis highlights the dominance of ultrasound and visual inspection as primary physical techniques, while revealing a significant shift toward d

Query recall determines the retrieval performance of classical Arabic poetry: BM25 and dense encoders show markedly divergent behavior as query abstraction increases.

A recent study published on October 26, 2026, on arXiv (arXiv:2610.31821v1) shows that, in classical Arabic poetry retrieval tasks, the degree to which users retain fragments of poetic lines—such as whether they can recall half a line—plays a more critical role in determining retrieval performance than model capabilities. BM25 outperforms all dense encoders, including state-of-the-art models with 8B parameters, on “tip-of-the-tongue” queries, but falls significantly behind on abstract queries.

Why it matters：This study, through systematic benchmarking using a bilingual corpus, a three-index model, and a dual-evaluation protocol, for the first time quantitatively reveals the dominant influence of query abstraction on different retrieval paradigms (lexical vs. dense), and—after being validated by both human annotators and open-source weight models—the conclusions demonstrate methodological universality and empirical robustness.

Permission to Retry: A Study of Authorization and Recovery in AI Agent Workflows

arXiv:2610.31916v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A durable agent can resume a consequential action while its authority changes and the action's external outcome remains uncertain. We study execution-time reliability of tool-using AI agents, isolating recovery decisions from language-model behavior. Checkpoint state, permission to dispatch, evidence of an external effect and permission to reconcile are distinct obligations. We present a finite conformance study that checks these obligations through histories scored against a provider effect ledger hidden from the recovering application. A prospectively frozen campaign executes 336 histories on native LangGraph and Temporal hosts, crossing 14 schedules, three provider contracts and four matched application policies. All 168 paired host cells

Latent Coherence: Do Frontier Language Models' Probability Judgments Obey the Law of Total Probability?

arXiv:2610.31833v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LawZero's Scientist AI trains a Predictor toward the Bayesian posterior, with an objective that penalizes inconsistent probabilities among latent explanations. We ask whether current frontier language models, with no such training, are already consistent in this sense zero-shot: do their probability judgments satisfy the law of total probability, $P(X)=\sum_z P(z)P(X|z)$, when the latent $z$ must be inferred from records in the context? In separate single-turn calls, models are asked for $P(X)$, for $P(z)$ over the latent's states, and for $P(X|z)$; a causal family applies the same test to $P(y|do(x))$ and the back-door adjustment. Every query has an exact ground-truth probability, and a subset of items is asked in three wordings to separate