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When the Consumer Is an Agent: Execution-Grounded Service-Level Agreements

arXiv:2611.04182v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly act as service consumers. They select operations and report whether a task is complete. In an asynchronous distributed service, an accepted call or immediate state read does not establish that the required state became observable by its deadline. We introduce execution-grounded completion contracts, which treat completion as a service-level outcome. An independent control plane observes a deadline-bound service-state predicate, admits completion, and directs recovery while the agent performs the task. We evaluate placement and deletion in a live multi-provider data service with heterogeneous models and an injected transfer delay. Across policies, some tasks that missed the deadline were accepted and some that met it were rejected. Under enforcement, accepted completions remained consistent with later observations; all included healthy tasks completed, and unresolved faulted tasks terminated as unverified. The results show that completion of these tasks can be governed by independent observation of service state rather than by the agent's self-assessment.

Whose startup does the AI back? An algorithm audit of reputation and demographic signals in LLM-assisted crowdfunding

arXiv:2611.03993v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) assistants increasingly advise backers on which crowdfunding campaigns to support. LLMs have known race and gender problems, and it is unsettled whether they reproduce, erase, or reverse the discrimination documented in entrepreneurial finance. We ask when, and through which decision process, LLM assistants use founders' gender and ethnicity. In a pre-specified choice-based conjoint experiment, seven LLMs chose among five synthetic campaigns with independently randomized quality signals and founder names, under three backer personas and a persona-free control (40,248 responses). By default, founder names barely matter: under budget-conscious and delivery-focused personas, gender and Black-name effects are statistically equivalent to zero. When the backer wants to support underrepresented creators, the models favor Black-signaled (+8.1 percentage points; positive in all seven models) and female-signaled (+5.1) founders. They do so most strongly among near-tied campaigns and for the founder who alone carries the signal, and they almost never name gender or ethnicity in their reasons. The results fit an agency account of algorithmic discrimination: an aligned assistant takes its demographic preferences from its user rather than from its training data.

Why Pay for Long Reasoning When Rewrite Do Trick? Causal Effects of Reasoning History Compaction on Future Generation and Agent Cost

arXiv:2611.03852v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning substantially improves language models' ability to solve difficult problems, but long reasoning traces make these gains expensive. Efficient reasoning should express useful analysis in fewer tokens by reducing repetition and text that adds little value to solving the problem. Progress in proprietary models motivates this goal, yet their hidden scratchpads limit direct study of how it is achieved. We investigate whether open-weight models can generate less verbose reasoning by changing the form of their own earlier thoughts, without retraining. Our intervention rewrites prior reasoning into compact state records before pending tool results are revealed, then compares continuations from original and compact histories. Across the tested models, accepted compact histories usually shorten future reasoning; a coding case study also shows less repeated verification after a shared candidate solution. In software-agent deployments, compaction can reduce total spending, although task quality and rewrite-inclusive time depend on the target and compressor. These findings identify reasoning history as one way to reduce future reasoning-token use and motivate model-specific compaction policies evaluated for both efficiency and retained capability.

Computation in Anonymous Directed Dynamic Networks: Exact Worst-Case Termination Time and Network-Wise Intractability

arXiv:2611.01761v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We determine the exact round complexity of Counting in anonymous directed dynamic networks. Agents have no identifiers, but $\ell\geq1$ of them are designated as leaders. Every agent knows $\ell$ and its own leader status, while the population size $n$ is unknown and has to be determined by the agents. Communication proceeds in synchronous rounds; the directed communication graph may change arbitrarily and unpredictably from one round to the next, but is assumed to remain strongly connected. We solve Counting with a distributed algorithm that makes every agent output $n$ and halt after a number of rounds equal to $\begin{cases} n&\text{if }n=\ell\\ 2n-1&\text{if }n>\ell\text{ and }\ell=1\\ 2n-2&\text{if }n>\ell\text{ and }\ell\geq2. \end{cases}$ The algorithm works even for networks with loops and parallel arcs and even when agents learn their outdegree only after sending. We prove that this bound is worst-case tight over directed multigraphs for every $n$ and $\ell$ with $1\leq\ell\leq n$. Moreover, the local computation is polynomial (provided that each communication multigraph has at most $2^{\operatorname{poly}(n)}$ arcs): in every round, each agent solves at most one linear system with up to $n$ variables. By standard techniques, solving Counting also enables the evaluation of any computable function of the multiset of agents' input values within $2n-1$ communication rounds. The bound above optimizes the worst case over all networks. For an individual network, we show that even deciding whether an agent already has enough local information to determine $n$ is $\mathsf{coNP}$-complete (provided that the numbers of parallel arcs are encoded in binary). Thus, worst-case-optimal Counting admits polynomial local computation, whereas exact network-wise optimization is intractable under standard complexity assumptions.

Fairway: Load-Aware KV Cache Reuse for LLM Prefill Scheduling

arXiv:2611.02082v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based applications often employ agentic workflows and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which build long prompts from shared context. When prefixes are shared across requests, serving engines reuse the key-value (KV) cache to skip parts of the prefill computation. Reuse is typically graded: the uncached work of requests in a queue can differ by up to 100x. In this setting, the order of scheduling determines the time-to-first-token (TTFT) for the queued requests. KV reuse-first scheduling, which prioritizes the requests with the longest KV cache hit, gives the lowest median TTFT but starves expensive requests under load spikes; first-come-first-served (FCFS) scheduling bounds the tail but raises the median TTFT. We present Fairway, a prefill scheduler built on adaptive reuse prioritization: it favors KV cache reuse while queues are short, and shifts toward fair allocation as requests wait longer relative to their own prefill time. Fairway employs a virtual dual lane model: a KV reuse-first Fast lane and a Fair lane atop the serving engine's waiting queue that enables speeding up of cheap reuse requests without starving expensive ones. This model automatically adapts to the workload without any per-workload tuning. Fairway lowers the tail TTFT at no cost to the median in transient overload. Across workloads and load levels, Fairway matches or beats the best baseline, with a p99 TTFT up to 8.6x lower than prior prefix-aware schedulers. During load spikes, it keeps the tail of FCFS at a 6x lower median TTFT.

From Single-Shot QA to Continuous Perception: Revisiting the Energy Composition and Optimization Boundary of Edge VLMs

arXiv:2611.00036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual-prefill energy conclusions for edge vision-language models (VLMs) are commonly drawn under single-shot workloads; we revisit them under continuous perception. Profiling nine VLMs across three architecture families on Jetson AGX Thor and Orin (4,508 records, calibrated with a pure-text task), we find two mutually independent energy laws: the per-output-token decode cost grows monotonically with model scale, whereas the visual-prefill (image-encoding) cost is dominated by visual-encoder architectural efficiency, not scale. Under continuous perception ($N{=}10$) with sparse output, visual-prefill energy reaches 92--97\% of total. We derive optimization strategies---visual frame reuse, adaptive output truncation, task-aware routing, and encoder throughput optimization---for edge VLM deployment.

Rethinking Model Aggregation for Federated Learning with Domain Skew: A Knowledge-Preserving Perspective

arXiv:2611.01893v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Domain skew challenges federated learning by requiring a shared model to accommodate distinct visual distributions. Domain-specific experts can capture these distributions separately, creating an opportunity to integrate their representations in a unified predictor. We propose Federated Knowledge-Preserving Learning (FKPL), a two-stage framework that combines domain-oriented expert training with prototype-based classifier calibration. First, a one-shot subspace-based clustering procedure groups clients for intra-cluster training. The resulting expert encoders are concatenated and frozen, preserving each learned feature mapping during global integration. Second, clients interpolate their concatenated features with class-matched domain prototypes and upload the resulting virtual features. The server trains a global linear classifier on these features, concentrating classifier optimization at the server after a single feature upload. FKPL achieves average accuracies of 73.01\%, 67.00\%, and 64.51\% on Office-Caltech-10, PACS, and a four-domain subset of DomainNet, respectively. On DomainNet, its cross-domain standard deviation is 7.50 percentage points, the lowest among the evaluated methods. With the same concatenated extractor, prototype-based calibration improves average accuracy over federated classifier training by 9.99 and 14.94 percentage points on Office-Caltech-10 and PACS. These results identify classifier calibration as an effective way to combine preserved domain representations into a global predictor.

Token-as-a-Utility: A Model-Agnostic Architecture for Metering and Provisioning AI Inference Services

arXiv:2611.01371v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Token-based subscriptions are emerging as a commercial model for large language model inference, but extending them into interoperable utility services requires comparable consumption accounting. Raw token counts do not consistently measure inference resource use because demand varies with model architecture, context length, tokenisation, and concurrent serving conditions. This paper presents Token-as-a-Utility, a model-agnostic architecture integrating inference metering, service-level-aware provisioning, and inter-operator settlement. We prove that, under batched serving, no per-request meter can be additive, independent of co-resident traffic, and exactly cost-reflective at once. This motivates separating provisioned capacity, metered consumption, and contracted quality into distinct service products. Consumption is expressed in Reference Inference Units (RIUs) derived from prefill and decode demand, while occupancy-indexed operator ratings recover shared serving costs without altering the common unit. Versioned inference records support auditing and re-rating across operators; software-enforced capacity leases and quality-constrained routing enable provisioning on shared accelerators. The resource model is measured on three NVIDIA RTX 5000 Ada GPUs, and multi-tenant behaviour is evaluated with a trace-driven model calibrated to them. For the reference model, occupancy-indexed rating limits statement energy error to 9% under measured traffic, compared with up to 70.5% under fixed-occupancy rating. In calibrated multi-tenant experiments, tenant mispricing decreases from 7.36 times under flat token counting to 2.39 times with RIUs and 1.06 times after occupancy-based reconciliation. These findings demonstrate how portable inference accounting can be combined with load-dependent cost recovery and contract-based provisioning to support heterogeneous inference services across operators.

Intersectional Invariant Learning for Fair Deepfake Detection

arXiv:2610.37881v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deepfake detection models achieve high overall accuracy but exhibit large performance disparities across demographic groups, causing some groups to experience substantially higher false-positive rates than others. Existing fairness-aware methods address this by constraining model outputs to equalize group predictions, but do not tackle the underlying feature-level bias. As a result, models may still rely on demographic characteristics, such as skin texture, as indirect cues for detecting manipulated content. To address this problem, we propose Intersectional Invariant Learning (IIL), a framework that improves feature learning rather than only adjusting model outputs. IIL alternates between identifying the most challenging demographic partitio

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Convex Potential Learning for Optimal Transport Between Medical Images

arXiv:2610.37844v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Computing optimal transport maps between medical images plays a fundamental role in morphological analysis. However, existing methods are either difficult to scale to large 3D medical images or rely on regularized formulations that provide only approximate transport maps. To improve the accuracy of downstream medical image analysis, we propose a novel approach for estimating optimal transport maps by parameterizing the convex potential function. By construction, the resulting transport map is guaranteed to be curl-free, consistent with Brenier's theorem. We evaluate the proposed method on both 2D and 3D medical imaging datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves lower transport estimation errors and produces higher-q

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Amortized Localized Posterior Inference for Model Calibration with Application to an Ocean Turbulence Closure

arXiv:2610.37731v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model discrepancy may prevent a single calibration parameter from reproducing a physical response across the context domain. In addition, uncertainties in observations and contexts affect calibration and must be accounted for and quantified. We construct a family of localized posteriors by weighting observation likelihoods according to their proximity to a target context. Gaussian localization weights incorporate context uncertainty through covariance inflation, with reflection at domain boundaries and an optional correction for uneven context sampling. A conditional normalizing flow approximates the family of posteriors through amortized variational inference. Integrating the localized posteriors under a prescribed context measure gives the

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What Constitutes Food Similarity? Visual Representations and Retrieval in Indian Cuisine

arXiv:2610.37867v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Food similarity underlies retrieval, recommendation, substitution, and other food computing tasks, yet food representations are typically evaluated by identity preservation. We ask what happens to food similarity beyond identity: how different visual representations organize foods into relational neighborhoods, what culinary relationships these neighborhoods reveal or obscure, and how consistently these structures emerge across representations. Indian cuisine provides a challenging setting in which visually similar foods may have different culinary identities, while foods within a culinary family can vary substantially in appearance. Using an expanded Khana dataset and seven pretrained visual representations spanning convolutional, transforme

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FilingLoop: Evaluating and Evolving LLM Agents for Corporate Disclosure Review and Revision

arXiv:2610.37905v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Public disclosure repositories such as SEC EDGAR support informed investment through web access to corporate filings. Supporting their review with language model agents requires discovering unstated deficiencies across related documents, acquiring missing company facts, and verifying that requested revisions satisfy evidence-backed requirements. Existing financial question-answering evaluations provide limited evidence of these interactive capabilities. We introduce \textbf{FilingLoop}, an interactive benchmark and a self-evolving agent framework for corporate disclosure review and revision. Grounded in historical U.S.\ Securities and Exchange Commission correspondence, FilingLoop reconstructs 380 predominantly IPO review tasks from 96 compan

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Spokes, not a Ring: Revisiting the Weekday Manifold in Language Models

arXiv:2610.37796v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent work has hypothesised that large language models may represent some concepts as multi-dimensional manifolds instead of single directions. Using these manifolds to interpret or steer representations often assumes that moving along them corresponds to a continuous change in the represented concept. In this work, we test this continuous manifold assumption on the prototypical weekday manifold. Despite its striking circular geometry, we find that the weekday representations behave more like seven discrete states arranged in a circle than a continuous ring. First, we show that local sensitivity has seven minima aligned with the weekdays, producing a step-like mapping between representation and behaviour under on-manifold steering. Second, w

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Rank-Aware Differentially Private Release of Listwise Preferences for LLM Alignment

arXiv:2610.37682v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Listwise preference feedback offers richer supervision for large language model (LLMs) alignment than pairwise comparisons, but a full ranking also reveals more sensitive user preferences. Existing privacy-preserving alignment methods focus mainly on pairwise feedback, while listwise alignment under local differential privacy (LDP) remains unexplored. Extending LDP to this listwise domain raises a critical challenge: the high sensitivity of the full ranking space demands excessive noise, neutralizing the benefits of listwise supervision. To address this challenge, we analyze the interaction between supervision granularity and privacy noise in downstream training, and introduce a rank-aware exponential mechanism that privatizes listwise prefer

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A Comparative Study of Parallel Implementations of Short-Time Fourier Transform

arXiv:2610.38069v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The short-time Fourier transform (STFT) computes the Fourier transform of a short-duration window of a longer signal, which characterizes how a frequency changes over time. While the Fourier transform algorithms, particularly the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithm, has been well developed to take advantage of parallel computing, there is limited work on understanding the performance of parallel short-time Fourier transform algorithms. In this study, two parallel short-time Fourier transform algorithms, one is FFT-based and the other a quasi-parallel feedforward algorithm, are implemented and analyzed in comparison with each other. It is found that while the quasi-parallel algorithm outperforms in runtime under low concurrency settings, th

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Exposure Is Not Commitment: Double-Stratified Evaluation of Latent Monitors for Tool-Using Agents

arXiv:2610.37679v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tool-using language agents are vulnerable to indirect prompt injection, and a growing literature probes model internals to catch unsafe actions before they execute, with sharply conflicting results. We argue much of the conflict is an evaluation artifact, and propose a double-stratification protocol: separate injection exposure from behavioral commitment, in both the evaluation and the training population. On the primary Qwen AgentDojo grid, monitors trained on the naive mixed unsafe-versus-rest contrast mostly learn exposure: they flag exposed trajectories whether or not the agent complies, and barely predict which cases turn unsafe. Retrained on exposed cases only, the same probe families predict the model's own unsafe tool call up to two s

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Artifact Distillation: Training-Free Transfer from Frontier to Small Language Models

arXiv:2610.37680v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Closing the gap between frontier and smaller language models is usually approached by distillation: fine-tuning the small model (student) on a frontier model's (teacher) outputs, which binds transfer to training compute and leaves the transferred knowledge largely opaque. We propose Artifact Distillation: a teacher solves training instances and externalizes its problem-solving procedure into an artifact bank that a student queries at inference time, with no gradient updates. Across four LiveBench tasks, a bank written by Claude Opus 4.5 lets Claude Haiku 4.5 outperform unaided Claude Sonnet 4.5 on spatial reasoning (0.707 vs. 0.647) at 60% of its cost, and reach Sonnet 4.5's level on table joining at 89% of its cost. The same raw bank raises

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Locating Sycophancy Across Training Stages in Open Language Models

arXiv:2610.37788v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language model assistants sometimes change a correct answer when the user suggests a wrong one. The behavior, called sycophancy, is usually attributed to preference-based post-training, yet early measurements found it in pretrained models. We ask where it comes from by measuring it at every available stage of training: 13 open checkpoints from 5 lineages, from base model through supervised fine-tuning and preference optimization to release. We separate how far an injected claim moves a model's answer from how firmly the answer was held, and vary who makes the claim, how reliable they are said to be, and how strongly they make it. Two sycophancy behaviors with different origins emerge, and both replicate across datasets. Deference to a claim i

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Responsible Quantum Machine Learning for Medical Imaging: A Fairness Audit Across Sensitive Subgroups

arXiv:2610.37819v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum machine learning (QML) is increasingly explored for medical classification, yet its behaviour under subgroup-aware fairness criteria remains understudied. We present an empirical fairness audit of classical and quantum classifiers for medical imaging, assuming QML is not inherently fair. Two scenarios are evaluated: dermatological lesions on DDI (sensitive attribute: Fitzpatrick skin type) and chest X-rays on CheXpert-derived data (sensitive attribute: age group). Using ResNet-18 embeddings, we train SVM, MLP, QSVM and QCNN under a baseline and three mitigation settings: differentiable Equalized Odds (EO) regularisation, Gradient Reversal Learning (GRL), and both combined. Foundation models (PanDerm, EVA-X) serve as external reference

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