Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in multi-step reasoning and calling search tools at appropriate steps. However, existing retrieval-augmented reasoning approaches still rely on separate retrieval models, limiting LRMs to deciding when to retrieve and how to formulate queries rather than leveraging their pretrained knowledge and reasoning capabilities for retrieval itself. This structural separation introduces a representation bottleneck, as retrieval relies on separately learned representations that may obscure fine-grained distinctions needed for reasoning. Moreover, these approaches commonly employ fixed top-k retrieval, which can introduce superfluous documents and increase retrieval noise and context overhead. To address this, we reformulate retrieval from query-document relevance matching into the exploration of answer-containing paths within the corpus, and propose FREESON (Retriever-FREE Retrieval-Augmented ReaSONing), a framework that enables LRMs to directly navigate the original corpus text to locate information that satisfies their specific needs, serving as both the reasoner and the retriever. Specifically, we introduce CT-MCTS (Corpus-Traversing Monte Carlo Tree Search), a retrieval-specialized variant of Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). CT-MCTS iteratively expands and evaluates exploration paths, starting from multiple promising entry points across the corpus. This allows LRMs to selectively reference specific segments identified during traversal, instead of fetching a fixed top-k set. Across nine benchmarks, FREESON improves average EM and F1 by 15 points over four retriever-based baselines on five general-domain QA tasks, matching the strongest baseline. It also gains 12 points on fact-checking and 13 points on medical QA under zero-shot transfer, performing on par with the much larger MedGemma-27B.
Recent work on robot manipulation has focused on specialist policies trained on demonstrations. We show that generalist AI models can control manipulators more reliably than specialist policies such as vision-language-action models (VLAs) and world-action models (WAMs). We systematically analyze agentic manipulation policies (AMPs), in which a generalist AI model commands the manipulator directly, adapting its actions as the task unfolds. We present AMP1, a reference harness that runs unchanged across single-arm, bimanual, and mobile manipulation. AMP1 achieves state-of-the-art results on the RoboLab-120 and CaP-Gym benchmarks, with no demonstrations or task-specific training. On RoboLab-120, AMP1 reaches an 85.6\% success rate zero-shot, compared to 49.2\% and 42.9\% for leading VLA and WAM policies. The agent succeeds zero-shot in 104 of 108 real-world trials spanning twelve tasks and three robot instances, reducing failure rates by 20x and 15x relative to strong VLA and WAM baselines. The basic harness supplies no grasping, pushing, or placing skills; the agent develops its own strategies, such as searching for hidden objects, using objects as tools, and calibrating its cameras. With the addition of a persistent memory store, the agent can also learn from experience: an augmented harness with a memory representation that is carried across episodes lowers the failure rate on RoboDojo bimanual manipulation tasks by 4.6x relative to zero-shot deployment. Our analysis suggests that AMPs are substantially more general and robust than specialist manipulation policies, providing a promising foundation for robot manipulation.
Large language models reinvent the wheel all the time. They conflate task-solving with the execution of the solutions, which forces them to solve every problem from scratch. We show that once a task has been reasoned through, the application of its solution to a new problem instance can be done very efficiently and with little involvement from language models. We introduce agentic reasoning caching, a method for constructing robust CPU-executable agentic reasoning caches (ARCs) from LLM reasoning traces. ARCs show on-par performance with frontier LLMs across a range of difficult mathematical and scientific tasks, are fully explainable, continually trainable, robust to input perturbations, and 16-291x cheaper to invoke than the source model.
Test-time reinforcement learning (TTRL) adapts pretrained language models to unlabeled target-domain data using self-generated pseudo-labels, whose reliability remains poorly understood. We analyze majority-vote supervision for TTRL with online Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and decompose its error into population-majority bias and prompt-dependent finite-rollout variation. Because population-majority bias is generally unidentifiable without external supervision, we focus on mitigating the downstream effects of finite-rollout variation. We propose \emph{Prompt-Conditional Distributionally Robust DPO (PC-Dr.DPO)}, which conditions within-prompt robust reweighting on observed vote reliability to make updates from sampling-sensitive prompts more conservative. We further introduce a cache-based mechanism to reduce self-supervised forgetting during online adaptation. Across six mathematical and knowledge-intensive reasoning benchmarks and five model backbones, PC-Dr.DPO matches or outperforms the strongest TTRL baseline in 24 of 30 settings.
Loco-manipulation, which requires mobile manipulators to coordinate locomotion and manipulation over long horizons, is a key capability for large-object rearrangement in applications such as service robotics and warehouse automation. Despite recent progress, reliably executing these tasks remains challenging because performance depends on complex robot-object and object-environment interaction dynamics. Existing approaches address this challenge either through model-based methods, which often require accurate dynamics models, or through learning-based methods, which reduce this requirement but typically assume a fixed or predefined initial grasp. However, different geometrically stable grasps can lead to substantially different downstream manipulation performance. Therefore, we propose Grasp-TAGS, a task-aware grasp selection framework for goal-conditioned large-object rearrangement. We train a unified PPO-based reinforcement learning policy across multiple initial grasp configurations and distill the learned critic into a lightweight grasp utility network that ranks candidate grasps using only the candidate grasp configuration and goal information. At inference time, we select the grasp with the highest predicted downstream utility for the downstream policy to complete the task, before even making a contact. Experiments demonstrate that Grasp-TAGS improves rearrangement success over both fixed single-grasp policies and random grasp selection, achieving an average success rate of 89.84% compared with 79.87% for the best-performing single-grasp policies, an improvement of 9.97 percentage points. Grasp-TAGS also reduces final orientation errors across all evaluated objects. For more qualitative results, refer to the supplementary webpage: https://rpm-lab-umn.github.io/Grasp-TAGS-web-page/
Many multimodal alignment problems require mapping a source modality into a fixed space defined by a target modality, where the target space is not merely an intermediate embedding but is used directly for downstream analysis. In this setting, successful alignment should preserve both the global structure of the target distribution and the instance-level correspondence observed in paired source--target training data. Existing objectives typically address only part of this goal: contrastive losses encourage relative similarity, distribution-matching losses improve marginal agreement, and pointwise regression fits each source sample to its paired target without explicitly modeling target-space path geometry. We propose FlowAlign, a flow-guided target-space alignment method that repurposes conditional flow matching as a training-time alignment signal rather than an inference-time transport model. FlowAlign uses the learned flow field to guide the alignment of source-side representations with the fixed target space, encouraging them to preserve paired correspondence while remaining compatible with the global target-space structure. We further provide theoretical analysis showing how FlowAlign helps improve paired correspondence by controlling endpoint accuracy and capturing local target-space geometry. Experiments on synthetic data, paired single-cell multiome benchmarks, and image--text alignment demonstrate that FlowAlign improves instance level correspondence while preserving target-space structure across different modality settings.
This paper describes an approach and use case to estimate the correctness of LLM-generated COBOL summaries without access to human-authored references. The core intuition is that inter-model agreement on semantics is informative about truth, and that an LLM-as-judge can provide higher-fidelity pairwise assessments than traditional string- or embedding-based metrics. We operationalise this intuition with (i) controlled summary generation from diverse models; (ii) a LLM evaluator that compares pairs of summaries and emits structured judgments; and (iii) a calibrated aggregation rule that combines supportive evidence while penalising only corroborated contradictions.
Radiology AI has developed along two paths: specialized models that perform well on narrow tasks but cover few clinical findings, and generalist models that address a broader range of tasks but remain prone to hallucination and inaccurate measurements. Combining the two through agentic systems offers a route towards comprehensive radiology reporting, but published systems are tied to one modality or body part. We describe a radiology agentic framework that standardizes how an orchestrator calls modular tools to produce a structured report, and use it to measure what such a system can do with the tools from FDA-cleared radiology AI devices. Report generation is simulated on a large multi-modality report corpus, with the orchestrator given either a catalog of finding classes consolidated from the cleared devices, each available on the modalities it is cleared for, or an unlimited catalog in which any class can be requested, and planning either from the clinical indication or from the target report. Tool outputs are simulated from the reference report, so the comparison isolates tool availability and orchestration from tool error. With the cleared catalog and the indication alone, the orchestrator recovers under a third of the clinically actionable findings; recovery improves substantially with the unlimited catalog, and further when the plan is written from the target report. Attributing every missed finding to a cause shows that most are classes no cleared device offers for the study's modality, and that a third are classes or tools that were offered and not called. Adding the most frequently missing tools closes most of the gap to the unlimited catalog on held-out reports, whereas a smaller orchestrator with the unlimited catalog gives up the whole gain. Tool availability and effective orchestration are thus complementary constraints on comprehensive AI-assisted radiology reporting.
The key-value (KV) cache dominates memory capacity and bandwidth in long-context LLM serving. While 4-bit microscaling formats (NVFP4, MXFP4) shrink the cache and run attention on FP4 Tensor Cores, a fundamental gap remains between algorithmic quantization and system-aware acceleration: existing FP4 KV systems use vanilla quantization that causes severe accuracy drops, whereas accuracy-oriented 4-bit algorithms rely on vector codebooks whose lookup overhead degrades decoding throughput. We present BitDecoding-FP4, an algorithm--system co-design for accurate and efficient native FP4 KV decoding. We mitigate three error sources: Dual-Residual Query Quantization splits queries into two FP4 tensors, cutting query logit error from 60% to 1%; Underflow-Aware Probability Scaling prevents E4M3 scales from rounding long-context probabilities to zero; and Outlier-Aware Key Quantization combines static smoothing, Hadamard rotation, and scale search to suppress key outliers under token-wise scaling. At the system level, we remove the softmax bottleneck via transposed softmax with fused probability quantization and stacked query MMA on paged KV caches. Across dense and MoE models with GQA and MLA, BitDecoding-FP4 stays within 0.5 points of BF16 KV accuracy with NVFP4 (1 point with MXFP4), and tracks BF16 KV in RL training rollouts. In end-to-end serving on NVIDIA B300 with Qwen3-4B and Qwen3-30B-A3B, it delivers 2.4-3.0$\times$ higher peak serving throughput than BF16 KV. The implementation is available at https://github.com/OpenBitSys/BitDecoding-FP4.
Dominant methods for interpreting large models impose strong structural assumptions. Generative Latent Priors (GLP) are a complementary approach: a diffusion model that learns the distribution of a frozen model's activations directly, imposing no assumptions. We port GLP to ESM-2 activations (UniRef50) and evaluate it at two host scales (ESM-2-8M and -650M), both as a lens for protein representations and as a prior for editing them. Generation quality scales smoothly with depth and compute. As a lens, single GLP "meta-neurons" are the strongest probes of discrete Swiss-Prot concepts at both hosts, beating InterPLM's released SAE features, and lead on continuous properties at 8M though not at 650M; falsification tests show this is mostly concentration, not new information. As an editing prior, the on-manifold correction makes DiffMean steering of three biochemical properties effective and restores on-manifoldness, but only in isolation: re-embedding the sequences actually produced after several rounds of decoding, the structural plausibility is compromised. This is mainly reproduced in additional SAE-based clamping structural steering experiments, where only Helix motif succeeds. The naturalness failure is traced to the rewriting coverage and the decoder rather than the prior, highlighting what the method must clear before it can serve for both discovery-by-editing and discovery-by-exploration. Trained GLPs are released on huggingface.co/collections/HPAI-BSC/glprot.
Laya answers typed multiple-choice questions in one forward pass by scoring a hidden state at one [MASK] marker per option. We re-engineer the checkpoint (421M parameters; a 2-layer option head with no positional tensor; a documented but unused parallel layout) and test whether the answer depends on where an option is listed. Presenting 951 Qwen-verified questions under every cyclic rotation of their options (or six random permutations for 12 options), the released checkpoint changes its answer for 25.8% [22.9-28.7] of questions (19.7% on the 605 English-language items alone); accuracy with the gold option first versus last differs by 10.1 points, and the flips concentrate where the model's own confidence is low (54% versus 8% across confidence terciles). Fine-tuning with Laya's trainer on 2,818 teacher-verified rows with option shuffling cuts the flip rate to 7.2%; the identical rows without shuffling give 11.4%, so shuffling is responsible for 4.2 points of the improvement. A confidence-weighted vote over orderings gives 69.7% against 69.1% for a single base pass at 4.1x the compute. Labels are LLM-made and the test sets are teacher-filtered. We also fine-tune with the authors' parallel layout on the same rows: flip rate 0.5%.
LLM-based coding agents such as Claude Code are guided by repository instruction files (also called context files or agent configuration files) like AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md, which are read in every agent session. As any documentation artifact, these files can fall behind the code and become stale (e.g., a test folder moves, but the file still points to the old one). In technical debt terms, such a stale instruction is documentation debt, and its interest is the cost it adds to every later agent session. Evaluations that check only task success can miss this cost, and the stale file can persist. In this study, we ask what leads agents to act on a stale instruction, how it affects their behavior and at what cost, and how they recover. We study three real-world stale instructions from active open-source repositories in depth, each a different kind of guidance: a test command, a code location, and a procedure for adding a component. Agents fix 22 maintenance tasks under three versions of each instruction (left stale, corrected to the current path, and removed), with the code and the task held fixed, and we analyze 732 trajectories of two models at the level of individual tool calls. We find that agents follow stale guidance when it is relevant to their tasks, sometimes even when correct information is available elsewhere. On the stale test command, Claude Sonnet 5.5 needed about two extra tool calls per run, a third more than with the corrected command; in the other cases, we could not detect a difference. Although agents generally recovered from the immediate failures, none repaired the underlying instruction file. Correcting the instructions eliminated operations on obsolete paths, while removing them prevented most. Our findings show that task success alone can hide the costs of documentation debt, highlighting the need to evaluate agent behavior beyond final outcomes.
Test-time scaling improves the performance of a fixed model by spending more computation at inference. There are two common ways to spend it on agents when a verifier can score every attempt. Best-of-N sampling runs many independent agents and keeps the best result but saturates quickly. One large team of collaborating agents can score higher but stops improving as it grows. Can we get the best of both? Our method, parallel agent teams, does so by sampling many small teams in parallel and keeping the best team's result. We test it on 12 long-horizon tasks from GPU kernels and formal proofs to exploit development. With a 27B model and a budget of 100 agents, parallel teams of ten beat parallel agents on 10 of 12 tasks and beat one team of 100 on all four tasks where we ran such large teams. At equal dollar cost the same parallel teams beat a frontier model on half the tasks. A simple statistical model shows that individual agents lose because their many samples have a low mean and that one large team loses because a single sample gets no gain from variance. Sampling many small teams in parallel balances a high mean with the gain from variance. Parallel agent teams thus offer a more effective way to scale test-time compute.
Competitive programming problems pose distinctive challenges for Large Language Models, as they demand not only proficient code generation but also advanced algorithmic reasoning. This study presents a Retrieval-Augmented Generation approach specifically designed to enhance the capacity of Large Language Models to address such problems. Our approach integrates an embedding-based retrieval mechanism and a similarity search algorithm to identify analogous problems within a knowledge database, employing a dynamically adjusted threshold to mitigate retrieval noise. We conducted an evaluation using the CodeContests dataset, focusing on the test split problems that exhibit similarity to instances from the training split. The experimental framework considered three conditions: (i) problems provided solely with their original descriptions, (ii) problems supplemented with randomly selected examples from the training split, and (iii) problems augmented with similar examples retrieved through the proposed method. In addition, we incorporated a Min-K membership inference analysis to examine whether the generated code solutions were influenced by potential memorization of training data within the evaluated Large Language Models. This complementary perspective enables a deeper understanding of model behavior by distinguishing genuine generalization through retrieval from implicit recall of pretraining samples. Performance was assessed using both pass rates and the CodeForces Elo rating of the problems. The results provide empirical evidence that similarity-based retrieval substantially enhances Large Language Models performance in competitive programming scenarios, offering an scalable framework for improving code generation in algorithmic problem-solving contexts.
Extracting discriminative features from laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) spectra is important for the classification of complex biological samples. This study evaluates continuous wavelet transform (CWT)-based spectral peak extraction for distinguishing human plasma samples labeled as SARS-CoV-2-positive or negative. Plasma specimens from 181 individuals, comprising 53 positive samples and 128 negative controls, were deposited as 5 {\mu}L droplets on silicon substrates and dried before analysis. Spectra were acquired using a nanosecond Nd:YAG laser operating at 1064 nm, with 100 single-shot measurements collected per specimen and averaged after intensity-based outlier rejection. CWT-based peak detection was coupled with a support vector machine (SVM) classifier. The reported leave-one-out evaluation yielded an accuracy of 93.00%, sensitivity of 94.67%, and specificity of 91.61%; these estimates remain provisional pending reconciliation with specimen-level predictions. Features identified by the CWT pipeline included emission lines assigned to Ca II, K I, and N I. The workflow provides a basis for examining spectral features associated with the studied plasma groups. Independent validation and assessment of specimen, substrate, and acquisition-related variability are required to establish generalizability and diagnostic relevance.
AI agents can execute multi-step tasks on users' behalf, yet the boundaries of acceptable delegation remain unclear. We report a scenario-based survey of 289 U.S. adults with prior AI experience covering 45 use cases across nine life domains. Each respondent evaluated one scenario per domain, producing repeated measures of automation preference, trust, collaboration, AI leadership, privacy concern, and willingness to pay. Automation preferences varied substantially across domains. Generalized estimating equation models showed that greater trust in the AI agent, desired AI leadership, prior task-specific AI use, and anticipated financial savings were associated with greater automation preference. In contrast, concerns that automation would reduce personal fulfillment predicted lower automation preference. Open-ended responses further revealed a preference for bounded autonomy, with participants often favoring substantial AI execution while retaining human involvement, oversight, or final authority. We argue that delegation is best understood as a configuration of execution, collaboration, leadership, and authority.
Large-language-model decode attention streams the key-value (KV) cache for every generated token. Packing that cache into 2-bit or 4-bit quantized integers reduces memory traffic but does not automatically translate into latency saving. Existing 2-bit fused kernels reach under 31%/15% of peak HBM throughput on H100/B200. Converting each value and applying its scale and offset before feeding Tensor Cores is a major bottleneck because instruction-issue throughput is scarce on modern GPUs. Instead of applying scale and offset to each KV value, FOSCAR uses affine folding to apply them to the other operand or the output of decode-attention matrix products, depending on the quantization scheme (token-wise or channel-wise). This reduces scale-and-offset operations by up to two orders of magnitude while preserving the dequantized attention output in exact arithmetic. FOSCAR also uses bit manipulation to feed KV operands to Tensor Cores efficiently, requiring only 1 and 0.19 ALU instructions per INT2 element on H100 and B200, respectively. Finally, FOSCAR builds warp-specialized GPU pipelines for Hopper (H100) and Blackwell (B200) using wgmma and tcgen05. On H100, FOSCAR INT2 and INT4 kernels achieve geo-mean speedups of $3.36\times$ and $2.83\times$ over FlashInfer BF16, and $2.03\times$ and $1.71\times$ over TensorRT-LLM FP8. On B200, the corresponding INT2 and INT4 speedups are $2.67\times$ and $2.30\times$ over FlashInfer BF16, $1.48\times$ and $1.28\times$ over TensorRT-LLM FP8, and $1.16\times$ and $1.00\times$ over TensorRT-LLM NVFP4. We integrate FOSCAR into SGLang to benchmark serving efficiency. On long-context serving workloads, FOSCAR increases peak aggregate throughput by up to 170% and 341% over 2-bit and 16-bit baselines, respectively. We open-source FOSCAR as a kernel library at https://github.com/FutureMLS-Lab/FOSCAR.
LLM agents benefit from using memory systems to improve performance on long-horizon, multi-session tasks. However, memory introduces a critical attack surface. Malicious instructions encountered in one session may be stored and propagated through memory before being retrieved and acted upon in later sessions. Because memory systems differ in how they process and retrieve information, the downstream effects of poisoning can vary significantly across systems. To quantify the effects of poisoning across different memory architectures, we introduce MemoryDojo, a benchmark for tracing the lifecycle of poisoned information through agent memory and measuring its influence on subsequent agent behavior. MemoryDojo is easily extensible, consists of 155 multi-session long-horizon trajectories covering four domains, and supports five different memory systems. Through our evaluation, we find that all memory systems are susceptible to memory poisoning, with substantial variation in downstream effects. We further propose a memory-aware poison optimization process that increases the poisoning efficacy, highlighting differences between memory architectures. We hope that MemoryDojo will support research on understanding and mitigating agentic memory risks.
Modern LLM serving systems use prefix caching to accelerate multi-turn conversational workloads. They cache the key-value states of previous conversation prefixes and reuse them when subsequent requests share the same prefix, to avoid redundant prefill computation and reduce serving latency. However, achieving a high cache hit rate remains challenging because cache reuse depends on whether a conversation continues and how soon the next turn arrives. Our analysis of real workloads shows that user intent is a useful signal for this behavior, as different intents exhibit different continuation probabilities and inter-turn delays. Based on this key insight, we propose Intent-Aware Caching (IAC), an online eviction policy that classifies requests by intent, learns lightweight reuse statistics from recent serving logs and leverages these statistics to guide an oracle-inspired eviction strategy. Extensive evaluation on real workloads (WildChat and ShareChat) shows that IAC reaches a 34.6% cache hit rate. This substantially outperforms both the previous learning-based approach (18.8%) and traditional methods such as least recently used (LRU, 12.2%), while reducing average serving latency by up to 46.1%.
Anticipating Q-day security concerns, major CDNs and cloud providers are migrating to post-quantum cryptography (PQC). While existing literature benchmarks PQC performance, empirical research evaluating real-world adoption data remains scarce. We present an empirical assessment of PQC deployment across seven critical protocols (HTTPS, LDAPS, SMTPS, IMAP-SSL, POP3-SSL, TELNETS, and RDP) using 10,000 target IP addresses per protocol. At the origin-server level, PQC algorithm support reaches 9.1% for HTTPS and 7.39% for LDAPS, while falling below 1% for all other evaluated protocols. At the entity level, PQC support is 11% for HTTPS and 5.4% for LDAPS, while the remaining protocols have less than 5% of entities supporting PQC on the hosted servers. We further correlate these adoption trends against organizational digital and financial footprint, and industry sectors, yielding a multi-dimensional empirical assessment of PQC deployment. Finally, at the domain level, we perform a comparative analysis of PQC adoption in Cloudflare-hosted domains against baseline Cloudflare datasets. Collectively, our findings provide critical insights into the current state of PQC readiness over Transport Layer Security (TLS).