In addition to the effects of explicit input prompts and instructions, large language model outputs are influenced by underlying behavioral preferences similar to human personality tendencies. These tendencies can affect how models interpret situations and make decisions. However, their influence is difficult to disentangle from the effects of model capabilities and instructions. Therefore, we introduce SPACE, a benchmark framework combining a controlled evaluation protocol with complementary datasets for personality verification, capability assessment, and hierarchical situational tasks. Controlled comparisons across guidance conditions help distinguish personality influence from measured capability changes and immediate instruction effects. Experimental results demonstrate that although prompting can shift generation style, models' internal personality tendencies are persistent and not readily overridden by opposing instructions. Furthermore, these underlying tendencies have an observable influence on LLM task performance, highlighting the need for greater attention to these characteristics and potential applications. Training code and SPACE benchmark specifications are available at https://github.com/Niklauseik/SPACE-training.
We study the fingerprinting of agentic cyberattacks. Our objective is to reliably infer information about the attacker's configuration, such as LLM version and harness, from telemetry. To achieve this, we introduce a technique we call shibboleth traps: modular honeypot services designed to elicit discriminative behaviors from agentic attackers. The traps make informative interactions a condition for obtaining resources the agent seeks, eliciting model declarations and characteristic writing without requiring a successful prompt injection. To achieve harness fingerprinting, we introduce general mechanisms to indirectly probe peculiar execution behaviors of harnesses. These probes reveal how a harness masks secrets in tool output, enforces command time limits, and schedules tool calls, using only the effects visible in subsequent requests. We show that combined declarative and behavioral inference distinguishes among 15 candidate models with an average 90% top-1 accuracy, with behavioral classifiers evaluated on held-out harnesses or task families. In a separate experiment across four harnesses, fixed probe rules identify the correct harness with 92% accuracy. When instructed to conceal their identity, agents still leave useful behavioral evidence even as their declarations become uninformative.
Artificial intelligence models for clinical prediction are proliferating across neurosurgery, but their aggregate discriminative performance, distribution along the care pathway and methodological quality are unclear. We systematically reviewed and meta-analysed these studies in neurosurgery and its subspecialities along with their risk of bias appraisal. We performed a PRISMA search for peer-reviewed original studies using AI to predict a clinical outcome in neurosurgical populations. Metrics were pooled using random effects modelling. Each study was classified as diagnostic, prognostic or forecasting and was assigned an evidence level. Clinical prediction task sub-stratification analysis was performed. Risk-of-bias was assessed using PROBAST. 1063 studies were included. Across 451 studies reporting AUC, pooled discrimination was 0.86, ranging from 0.84 (spine) to 0.87 (neuro-oncology), with extreme heterogeneity. Performance varied by clinical pathway stage, highest for diagnosis, grading and molecular tasks and lowest for post-operative tasks. Only 51 studies were using prospective data with external validation, whereas 619 rested on internal validation alone or no validation. 89 percent studies were at high risk-of-bias, driven by the analysis domain. AI models report high performance across all the neurosurgical subspecialities, concordant across AUC, accuracy, sensitivity and specificity and robust to risk-of-bias stratification. Performance is highest for imaging-anchored diagnostic tasks and lowest at decision-facing post-operative stage. However, the literature is dominated by optimism-prone, internally-validated and poorly calibrated models with extreme heterogeneity. External validation, calibration analysis and reporting guidelines adherence remain prerequisites for clinical adoption.
Autoregressive VLA planning usually predicts continuous trajectories as the final output, but driving instructions often describe actions rather than ego states, which weakens direct conditioning on the final continuous trajectory. We address this gap with TrajCond, which introduces a discrete trajectory-geometric condition for VLA planning. Specifically, we represent TrajCond as a 1D-Brohan differential action trajectory and learn it with a two-stage training framework before final continuous trajectory prediction. With the simultaneous autoregressive generation of discrete and numeric trajectories, we name our method AutoVLA-D (Double). Experiments on NAVSIM navtest, nuScenes, and NeuroNCAP show that discrete trajectories are weaker as direct outputs but more effective as TrajCond, consistently improving final continuous trajectory prediction across closed-loop and open-loop driving benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/ShivaTeam/AutoVLA-D.
Micro-scale air quality models require hourly traffic data on every road segment, whereas permanent counters cover only a small part of the network. A graph neural network (GNN) was developed to reconstruct hourly traffic flows on the 32,163 road segments of Paris intra-muros from the 1,573 segments equipped with a counter (4.9%). The model adapts the Graph Neural Network for Urban Interpolation (GNNUI) to a real, sparse counting network. Flows are decoded on the edges of the junction graph (one edge per segment, both directions summed), a traffic climatology serves as an offset in a zero-inflated negative-binomial likelihood, and training proceeds by masking counters. Eight-fold spatial cross-validation, with counters sharing a published series merged before splitting, distinguishes interpolation at a withheld counter in an instrumented district (R${}^2$ = 0.89, error of a quarter of the mean flow) from extrapolation to a district without counters (R${}^2$ = 0.74, a third of the mean flow). These scores hold on main axes where counters are located, while relative errors are about 50% on the few counted local streets. Ablations show that the climatology offset tends to help extrapolation. Road attributes, time cycles and the live state of the counting network matter most, while weather inputs have no significant effect. The masking rate is the only inherited hyperparameter with a clear effect. When evaluated on January--August 2026 (outside the training period), the frozen model stayed around the error band of previous years.
Shadow IT, the use of technology that the IT organisation has not approved, is a long-standing governance problem. We argue that autonomous AI agents can make it grow much faster: agents make building tools nearly free, act with their user's privileges, and leave behind scripts, automations and MCP servers that are themselves unsanctioned. A simple compounding model shows that, under its assumptions, shadow IT grows exponentially once agentic artifacts reproduce faster than the organisation retires them; retiring them starts with detecting them. We then ask whether unsanctioned agents can be detected on Windows endpoints. We propose a taxonomy of nine classes of agents and six layers of endpoint footprint, and argue that rules based only on the structure of processes and connections cannot separate an agent from its behavioural twin, the same program talking to a non-AI service. We present Agent Detector, an open-source Windows detector that anchors behaviour to the identity of the remote service and correlates it with configuration, installation and execution history, using a catalog of 39 tools and 184 LLM endpoint entries; it informs users through a notice they must acknowledge instead of blocking. On a controlled bench of 12 synthetic agents, 3 AI components and 9 benign workloads, repeated 5 times on one workstation, two behavioural rules flagged every behavioural twin, while Agent Detector flagged none and detected every agent in the majority of runs. Its limits are temporal: a connection to a provider behind a shared content-delivery network is attributable only while the DNS cache holds the provider's name, one to five minutes, and an intermittent agent was seen by about one scan in three. A scan costs about 154 ms. The bench is too small to rank detectors; it maps what each kind of evidence can see: unsanctioned agents can be partly detected, and not by behaviour alone.
We introduce AudioCodex, a fully causal autoencoder for live generative audio applications that compresses stereo audio into compact continuous latent sequences at ~10 Hz. It combines a Mean Flow magnitude autoencoder with latent hypersphere projection, bounded-noise augmentation, representation alignment, and adversarial phase recovery to learn representations that support both efficient downstream generation and high-quality reconstruction. Through extensive ablations, we show that AudioCodex outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of generation-reconstruction trade-off, whilst remaining strictly causal in both encoding and decoding. This work paves the way towards truly real-time interactive and streaming generative audio applications.
Correlation Matrix Memories (CMMs) store associations as sums of rank-one outer products, providing closed-form addressability, exact deletion, and linear attribution. While classical analyses assume random, orthogonal keys, semantic encoders produce correlated representations. We analyse CMMs under correlated keys using frame-theoretic coherence: (i) capacity bounds yielding an encoder-independent limit $n \le d(1+\varepsilon^2)$ for mean squared crosstalk $\varepsilon^2$; (ii) an exact characterisation of the collateral effect of deleting an association, guaranteeing that deletion never invalidates certified associations; and (iii) a geometric transparency bound demonstrating why attribution requires candidate sets of centred keys. On this basis, we introduce Topology-Aware Neuro-Symbolic Associative Retrieval (TANSAR). TANSAR traverses a directed acyclic association graph, prunes invalid paths via sound ground Horn constraints, and injects a representation derived strictly from the verified path into the residual stream of a frozen language model, guarded by a Clopper--Pearson selective-risk gate. Controlled experiments confirm all theoretical bounds. In multi-hop knowledge editing, Horn pruning reduces answer contradictions from 25.1% to 0.5%, whereas Hopfield retrieval incurs 24% contradictions when stale associations remain stored (and 0% if stale associations are removed). An end-to-end edit transaction requires 13.6 ms on a standard CPU and 2.37 ms on GPU. The symbolic component matches gold labels across all 600 ProofWriter theories and achieves 94.0% agreement on FOLIO, demonstrating sound and efficient multi-hop associative retrieval with exact unlearning.
Multimodal retrieval increasingly supports agentic systems, where user requests can involve cross-level relations, combine multiple constraints, and evolve across dialogue turns. In these settings, a highly similar result may still violate the user's requirements, while retrieved content may directly inform downstream actions without human screening. We introduce TRIAD, a multimodal retrieval benchmark for evaluating how well retrieval systems satisfy these complex, evolving requests. TRIAD comprises three tracks: abstraction, testing bidirectional retrieval between visual instances and concepts at different hierarchical levels; constraints, testing the joint satisfaction of positive and negative conditions; and state, testing the integration of requirements across dialogue turns and the updating of earlier conditions when users revise their requests. The benchmark contains six subsets, each with 1,000 queries and a fixed pool of 1,000 candidates per query, evaluated using a common multi-positive mean average precision (mAP) protocol. Simpler reference tasks and hard negatives grouped by the requirements they violate help characterize specific retrieval difficulties. We evaluate 20 configurations of 17 systems and find that no system leads across all six subsets. Performance declines with hierarchical distance, and negative-only queries generally underperform positive-only queries with the same number of constraints. Across paired tasks expressing the same final intent, multi-turn retrieval yields lower mAP in 39 of 40 configuration-domain comparisons. The benefits of explicit reasoning also vary across models and tasks. These findings highlight the gap between retrieving similar content and satisfying a complete request.
Speculative decoding speeds up language models by letting a lightweight drafter propose several future tokens that the target model verifies in parallel. Block diffusion drafters such as DFlash draft a whole block in one forward pass, and DDTree builds a draft tree from their per-position distributions. Each of these distributions assumes that the drafter's own most likely continuation is correct. A tree, however, gains over a chain only on branches that leave this continuation, where the drafter's top-1 accuracy drops from 89% to 18% and its candidate lists miss the right token far more often. When re-run from the fork token, the same drafter is usually correct, so the errors come from the prefix that the distributions condition on rather than from what the drafter knows. We introduce DForkTree, a training-free method that re-anchors each branch on its own tokens. DForkTree adds n-gram statistics from the target model's own outputs to the drafter's scores as pointwise mutual information, weights them more after the fork, and builds the optimal tree under these scores exactly on the GPU. On Qwen3.5-4B and 9B, with all tree methods sharing one drafter, tree pipeline and verifier, DForkTree is the fastest tree method on every benchmark. It is up to 41.5% faster than DFlash and 15.1% faster than DDTree in the same setting, with average speedups of up to 4.75x over autoregressive decoding.
A key challenge in action-conditioned world modeling is to construct macro-states from high-dimensional observations that support recursive prediction under actions, while keeping their predicted evolution consistent with visual changes in generated observations. We propose QCC-WM, a visual world model based on Quotient-based Causal Construction. QCC-WM uses action responses to guide macro-variable construction for recursive action-conditioned prediction. A shared reference quotient measurement constrains the consistency between predicted states and observed changes, allowing macro-level predictions to provide structured constraints for future visual generation. Using translational and rotational actions and their predicted responses, the model aggregates local visual features into macro-nodes with spatial correspondence through causal abstraction, and recursively predicts node content and motion under a shared reference measurement. Macro-level predictions guide future observation generation, while predicted motion transports historical appearance information. Node-level errors between generated observations and macro-level targets are then mapped back to the corresponding spatial regions for correction, improving consistency between visual generation and macro-level predictions. On the US-VLA dataset, QCC-WM achieves an ROI-MSE of 0.01861 for four-step prediction. Compared with the best baseline at each prediction horizon, it reduces LPIPS by 48.59%, 41.68%, and 30.23% for four-step prediction and eight- and sixteen-step recursive extrapolation, respectively. Ablation studies and mechanism analyses show that motion-guided reference transport mainly improves pixel reconstruction, while node-level error feedback further improves perceptual quality and consistency between generated observations and macro-level predictions.
Achieving generalizable and well-aligned multimodal representations remains a core challenge in robot learning. While recent approaches have attempted to align modalities by modeling conditional or higher-order statistical dependencies, they do not explicitly consider the structural coherence across modalities. In this work, we propose a novel multimodal alignment method that augments existing contrastive losses with a geometry-aware Gromov--Wasserstein (GW) distance-based regularization. To this end, we encode intra-modal geometry for each modality and reduce cross-modal structural discrepancies through a dynamically learned GW barycenter, thereby encouraging structural consistency in addition to instance-level contrastive alignment. We apply this optimal-transport-based alignment strategy to robot perception tasks involving underexplored modalities such as force and tactile signals, where modality data often exhibit varying sample densities. Extensive experiments on five robotic benchmarks show that our method improves structural alignment and downstream performance over state-of-the-art multimodal contrastive baselines across a wide range of downstream tasks, including robot and environment state prediction. Moreover, our GW-based regularization can be seamlessly integrated into most InfoNCE-like objectives.
Large-scale annotation of vectorized high-definition (HD) maps is labor-intensive and costly, motivating local-to-global auto-labeling approaches that incrementally construct global maps from local vectorized predictions. However, existing approaches often overlook prediction uncertainty and rely on heuristic map integration, potentially propagating errors and introducing topological inconsistencies. To address these limitations, we propose ReVMap, a reliable local-to-global framework that iteratively refines local map predictions and global map construction through uncertainty-guided prior utilization and connectivity-guided global map revision. Specifically, ReVMap leverages point-wise localization uncertainty to incorporate global map priors into local map prediction, improving robustness against inaccurate prior information. It then predicts local-to-global connectivity and selectively updates the global map through uncertainty-aware fusion based on the reliability of local predictions. By iteratively coupling local prediction and global revision, ReVMap progressively improves both local map accuracy and global map consistency. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes and Argoverse 2 benchmarks demonstrate that ReVMap achieves state-of-the-art performance in both local map prediction and global map construction.
Vision-language models such as CLIP achieve strong performance across computer vision tasks, yet their image-text alignment is less reliable for infrared (IR) imagery because large-scale pre-training is dominated by visible-spectrum data. Due to the high cost of the infrared-text labeling, we investigate adapting CLIP to IR through only paired infrared-visible images, which requires considering modality-specific knowledge while preserving scene content and CLIP's image-text alignment. To achieve this, we propose TMT (Text-Derived Modality Knowledge Transfer), which adapts CLIP's image encoder through a text-defined infrared-to-visible direction and supervision from paired IR-visible images. First, we found that modality discrepancy can be described by corresponding text embeddings, thus using the direction of text embedding differences to guide the knowledge transfer between visible and infrared modalities without erasing infrared-specific information. To enhance the representation of semantics and details of infrared images, we introduce Generative-Perceptual Co-Supervision that combines semantic alignment from CLIP visible image encoder with diffusion noise-prediction feedbacks. On four source-disjoint IR classification benchmarks, TMT achieves the highest mean zero-shot accuracy among the compared methods (48.92%). It also achieves the best IR-text retrieval results among the compared methods without infrared-text supervision during adaptation and the highest open-vocabulary segmentation mIoU on both CART and SemanticRT among the CLIP-like methods.
When a neuron's input is lost, or known through a belief $q$, what should it output? For a neuron storing a joint polynomial density $N$ with input density $D$, two formulas compete. $p_\mathrm{CD}=E_q[N]/E_q[D]$ costs one matrix-vector product; Hierarchical Correlation Reconstruction introduces it as a constant-denominator approximation to $p_\mathrm{EU}=E_q[N/D]$. For a density model both are exact answers to different questions: $p_\mathrm{CD}$ is Bayesian updating with the belief as virtual evidence; $p_\mathrm{EU}$ installs the belief as a new marginal (Jeffrey's rule). With a missing input $p_\mathrm{CD}$ returns the model's conditional; $p_\mathrm{EU}$ generally does not. This post hoc reading is proved, and illustrated outside the pair family up to $k=8$ inputs; it has no pre-registered test, only one exploratory real-data pilot. Post hoc, closed forms fall within a factor 2 of all 112 measured gaps, and negative density begins near input correlation $1/k$. In a pre-registered synthetic study (up to 32 inputs), 5 of 15 hypotheses are supported, 2 inconclusive and 8 not supported, including all three on transfer beyond equicorrelated Gaussians. Post hoc, where $p_\mathrm{EU}$ is defined, truncation usually outweighs the gap for Beta beliefs in pair neurons; triple neurons under flat and data beliefs are exceptions.
Raw radar spectra are widely viewed as too cluttered and noisy for direct representation learning, motivating handcrafted reductions, sparse point clouds, or compact Doppler descriptors in radar perception. We challenge this assumption and argue that the main limitation lies not in the raw representation itself, but in the absence of a learning objective that separates structured signal from noise. Handcrafted reductions partially address this problem but impose rigid assumptions about what constitutes signal, discarding weak yet informative structure while retaining artifacts that fit the reduction model. Once removed, such information cannot be recovered by supervised learning. We propose an alternative: structure is the component of a radar spectrum that remains reconstructable under localized corruption, while noise is the component that does not. This perspective motivates self-supervised masked modeling for dense radar spectra without predefined signal-noise separation. We instantiate it with Leakage-aware Spectral MAE, a masked autoencoder for raw radar cubes using a corruption strategy inspired by cross-bin energy spreading caused by spectral leakage. We also demonstrate the importance of Doppler organization: treating Doppler as a primary spatial dimension in an x-y-D representation, with height encoded as features, substantially outperforms naive channel stacking and enables effective learning from dense 4D spectra. Without handcrafted reductions, our approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art radar-based detectors and point-cloud-based self-supervised learning (SSL) counterparts. These results establish raw radar spectra as an effective representation for 3D perception when paired with an appropriate pretraining objective.
For decades, the netlist-to-schematic gap has remained a persistent challenge in design automation, especially for analog and mixed-signal (AMS) circuits. Netlists encode connectivity, not visual presentation, making their manual conversion into readable schematics time-consuming and dependent on expert conventions. The same gap leaves LLM-based design tools without structured visual feedback, forcing them to iterate on circuits they cannot see. We present AMSchem, a training-free, verifier-guided agentic framework that automatically generates human-readable schematics from AMS netlists. AMSchem separates circuit-aware visual planning (DrawingIntent) from executable schematic geometry (SchematicIR), and applies localized visual feedback with bounded, revalidated repair patches. Deterministic validators enforce device preservation, pin-net consistency, and geometric correctness throughout. For evaluation, we construct AMSchem-Bench comprising 64 circuits of 12 types. On the 40-circuit schematic subset, AMSchem with gpt-5.5 achieves 85.0\% validity (vs. 32.5\% direct generation). When integrated as a visual feedback module in LLM-based analog design, AMSchem resolves all 13 previously failed cases from AnalogCoder benchmark across five models, substantially improving the success rate. Our dataset and benchmark are available at https://www.amschem.com/benchmark
Machine learning (ML) models are said to predict. Philosophers draw a line between accommodation and prediction, depending on whether or not the evidence a theory succeeds on was used in constructing it. Does this distinction survive when a theory is replaced by an ML model? We argue so, yet the dividing line becomes fuzzy. Whether an output of an ML model counts as an accommodation or as a prediction hinges upon the relationship between the patterns the input instantiate and those on which the model was selected through its training. Once this relation is taken into account, most successful outputs of ML models, we suggest, bear a strong accommodation character. We further trace the consequences of our account for confirmation, novelty, and scientific realism.
Over the past ten years Tensor Network Kernel Machines have enabled efficient nonlinear system identification through the use of low-rank tensor networks. The goal of this article is to provide the reader with a basic understanding of this model class in terms of its two defining properties. Furthermore, both the optimization and regularization of such models are discussed, together with recent developments and starting points for further exploration.
World models enable agents to plan and learn from imagined experience, but in an unfamiliar environment they must learn its mechanics from limited interaction. A mechanic is a rule for how an action or an interaction changes part of the environment. Each occurrence of a mechanic that the model observes is one exposure. We ask how many exposures a world model needs to predict the effects of a new environment's mechanics. We address this question on ARC-AGI-3, a benchmark of interactive games defined by their programs. We introduce MechEval, which labels 69 recurring mechanics across 20 games from these programs. It scores each prediction on the cells the mechanic changes at each exposure. As a test bed, we build WARC (World model for ARC-AGI-3), a 35M-parameter vision transformer that is pretrained on other games and updates all of its parameters after each transition. On held-out games, WARC learns to predict four in five mechanics with at least 80% accuracy on the cells they change and keeps that accuracy to the end of the recordings. Half of them reach that accuracy within about 80 exposures, in a single play of the game, and without updates only one in seven does at all. In closed-loop play on the public games, WARC-Agent, which pairs WARC with a fixed graph explorer, triples the explorer's official efficiency score from 0.15 to 0.46, mostly through test-time training. On the hidden games of the Kaggle leaderboard, our entry scores 0.20.