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Your Benchmark Is an Empirical Measure Over Difficulty
2026-10-21 16:02:37Yifan Sun, Naicheng Yu, Jiawen Gong, Jingyan Shen, Huan ZhangAbstract
A benchmark is not merely a collection of test questions; it naturally induces an empirical measure over difficulty. In this work, we develop this measure-based view of benchmark evaluation. This perspective allows us to identify and formalize two central failure modes: measure mismatch, where the benchmark difficulty distribution differs from the intended difficulty distribution, and coverage gaps, where uncovered regions along the difficulty axis prevent benchmarks from detecting meaningful localized training progress. We propose two diagnostic metrics that capture these two failure modes and provide rigorous theoretical guarantees. Empirically, we analyze 25 popular benchmarks spanning 7 domains using carefully estimated item difficulties. Our results show that many benchmarks implicitly overweight certain difficulty regions, so their leaderboard conclusions should be interpreted with caution; others leave substantial portions of the difficulty axis uncovered, limiting their ability to monitor the model improvement process. Finally, we turn diagnosis into action by introducing BenchFill, a simple difficulty-targeted item rewriting algorithm that effectively reduces local coverage gaps.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29927
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CausalAlign: Causal Alignment of Video Generation Models for Consistent Ego-Motion
2026-10-21 15:54:57Kai Zhu, Yintianrun Zhang, Shuwei Jiang, Ruolin Zuo, Yixin Chen, Duomin Wang, Miao Liu, Yin Li, Daquan Zhou, Yiwu ZhongAbstract
Diffusion-based video generation models (VGMs) can produce visually plausible videos, yet their camera ego-motion often drifts over long horizons. Camera ego-motion determines how the viewpoint changes between frames and is essential for maintaining consistent geometry and trajectories. To address this problem, we propose CausalAlign, a causal alignment framework with two components. First, we diagnose how precise ego motion is represented, used, and retained within VGMs using linear probes and causal interventions, revealing a rise-and-fall pattern during denoising. Second, we strengthen ego-motion state in VGM by aligning the representations at the identified layers to a 3D foundation model through delta-token space. This space encodes the changes between consecutive frames, allowing the alignment to focus on ego-motion dynamics rather than static scene content. With Wan2.2 fine-tuned on DL3DV and RealEstate10K, CausalAlign can largely improve motion accuracy, geometric consistency, and temporal smoothness, while preserving visual quality. For example, it improves geometric consistency by more than 20% relative to the base model. Moreover, with the fine-tuned VGM, CausalAlign improves the success rate of world action models (WAMs) by 10 points on mobile manipulation tasks of RoboCasa365 benchmark. Overall, CausalAlign improves ego-motion consistency in diffusion-based VGMs and yields noticeable gains in embodied models.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29915
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GeoMem-VLA: Internalizing 3D Scene Understanding into Temporal Memory for Vision-Language-Action Models
2026-10-21 15:23:18Qinfan Zhang, Yifan Luo, Haoyuan Shi, Guanlin Liu, Han Dong, Haozhe Shan, Yong Dai, Xiangcong Ren, Xiaozhu JuAbstract
Geometric structure is essential for robotic manipulation and understanding the 3D world. Most VLA models rely on 2D representations of current observations, while geometry-aware approaches often require additional 3D information. However, geometry inferred independently from individual observations is often discarded rather than accumulated into a persistent task representation. Our key insight is that action generation needs a compact, task-relevant geometric abstraction that can be continuously updated, rather than a complete, renderable 3D reconstruction at every step. We introduce GeoMem-VLA, a VLA framework that internalizes explicit 3D supervision into dedicated geometric tokens and maintains them as temporal memory for action generation, without directly aligning the VLM's native visual embeddings with the teacher feature space. During training, a frozen geometry foundation model supervises learnable GeoPlan tokens through a geometric flow-matching objective over the current scene point map and future end-effector tracks. These tokens are integrated with the memory of observation representations, where historical information is retrieved, adaptively fused with current observations, and consolidated to retain event frames as the task progresses. At inference, the policy retrieves historical representations and fuses them with the current working representation to predict actions, without invoking the 3D teacher or explicitly reconstructing the scene. After benchmark-specific downstream adaptation, GeoMem-VLA achieves 98.9% average success on LIBERO and 91.10% / 91.24% on RoboTwin's clean/randomized settings. Across five real-world tasks, GeoMem-VLA achieves 78.0% average success. These results suggest that internalizing and remembering 3D scene understanding is a promising approach to robot control.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29866
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Robot Generalization Beyond Volume: The Diversity Path via Zero-Shot Capabilities
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General-purpose robots must handle tasks, objects and environments they were never trained on, yet zero-shot generalization remains one of the least solved problems in physical AI. In digital AI, zero-shot capability grew with the volume and, above all, the diversity of training data, much of it sourced from the crowd. Robotics instead relies on paid collection by a few well-funded teams, which yields volume without diversity. We formulate zero-shot generalization in physical AI as coverage of the deployment distribution, and show that more samples from the same collectors shrink the unseen region only slowly, while each new contributor can extend it. Building on this and on zero-shot learning, we propose a shared latent space for robot actions that combines multi-modal alignment, generative augmentation, and noisy-label learning. As a scalable source of diverse data, we propose a community of developers building applications on one standard, approachable robot, Origami. We close with a testable hypothesis and an evaluation protocol relating real-robot zero-shot success to the diversity of contributed data.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29829
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Painting Change Map as guidance for generating painting processes
2026-10-21 14:35:17Markus Pobitzer, Chang Liu, Niccol\`o Biondi, Nicu SebeAbstract
Digital art generation has undergone a massive paradigm shift, moving from static image synthesis to dynamic video generation that can mimic the human painting process. While existing models can synthesize visually stunning time-lapses of paintings being created or "unpainted," they largely treat the creative process as a black box. Current conditioning mechanisms are either too rigid, relying on static geometric cues like Canny edges or depth maps, or too holistic, utilizing simple scalar progress variables that offer no localized control. Consequently, users lack the agency to steer how a painting evolves over time. In this work, we argue that true control over the video generation of artwork requires a joint understanding of two fundamental dimensions: where an artist acts, and when those actions take place. To achieve this, we introduce the Painting Change Map, a novel spatio-temporal control mechanism that explicitly tracks normalized structural changes across a 1,000-timestep continuum, a resolution sufficient to capture fine-grained stroke-level changes while remaining computationally tractable. By mapping localized visual differences into an encoded RGB space, our representation enables fine-grained guidance for both the forward painting and reverse unpainting processes. Extensive benchmarking demonstrates the efficacy of our approach. We outperform existing control baselines and achieve competitive or superior results compared to state-of-the-art painting methods. Furthermore, under oracle conditions, our method surpasses all baselines by a significant margin. Code is available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25369
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Open-Vocabulary Models and Label Propagation for Uncertainty-aware Pseudo-Labeling of Object Detection Datasets
2026-10-21 14:15:35Jonathan Klees, Timo Heller, Matthias RottmannAbstract
Object detection models rely on large-scale annotated datasets that require substantial manual annotation effort. The labeling costs further increase when annotation uncertainty is captured through soft labels, as multiple annotations must be collected for each object. We address this challenge by introducing a semi-supervised framework for the uncertainty-aware annotation of object detection datasets. Our approach leverages open-vocabulary object detectors to generate region proposals and semantically meaningful object representations. Based on these representations, we construct an object-level similarity graph and propagate probabilistic label information. Our framework assigns soft labels to previously unlabeled objects, quantifying both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty. We evaluate our method on four object detection benchmarks with soft-label annotations and demonstrate that high-quality annotations can be obtained with only a small fraction of manually labeled objects. Furthermore, we show that detectors trained on semi-automatically annotated data achieve performance comparable to models trained on fully manually annotated data. We achieve state-of-the-art downstream detection performance for the task of semi-supervised object detection on the COCO dataset, with 40.5% AP virtually matching the performance of the model trained on fully manually constructed data (40.9%) at only 1% of labeling costs. These results highlight the potential of open-vocabulary models and graph-based label propagation for efficient, accurate and uncertainty-aware pseudo-labeling.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29788
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Evolving with Open Worlds: Towards Recursive Self-Improvement for Future Forecasting
2026-10-21 14:09:57Zhipeng Chen, Yunsen Liang, Yanxi Chen, Hongkang Zhao, Lingyun Feng, Ruiyang Ren, Guoxin Chen, Jia Deng, Feng Chang, Chuan Hao, Ran Tao, Jian Yang, Ji-Rong Wen, Bryan Dai, Wayne Xin ZhaoAbstract
Most contemporary artificial intelligence (AI) systems are released with frozen parameters and improve through external updates, whereas an ideal system would keep improving from its own experience, a capacity we call recursive self-improvement (RSI). Yet studying RSI requires an environment that is continuously changing, objectively verifiable, and naturally grounded, posing a fundamental challenge for agent evolution. Here we introduce DeepEvolve, a sustainable evolution agent system grounded in future event prediction, in which agents continuously interact with a dynamically evolving environment and improve by internalizing and externalizing the experience gained through these interactions. A living environment synthesizes verifiable tasks, and a recursive-evolution engine turns the reasoning trajectory behind each prediction back into capability: decoupling search from prediction adapts parameter-level evolution to the contamination-prone live environment, while distilling reusable skills lets the agent evolve from the limited live trajectories such an environment affords. On the external FutureX leaderboard, which evaluates predictions against real-world outcomes and is updated weekly, our self-improved forecaster ranked first across all systems over three consecutive weeks, achieving up to a 195% improvement in rating. On our synthesized evaluation, it ranked among the top three across four base LLMs, outperforming the strongest baseline by up to 10.7 Bradley--Terry points. More broadly, these results suggest that a system built for self-improvement is best understood as an agent that co-evolves with a genuinely living, open-ended environment, pointing to a shift in AI from training static models on fixed data toward cultivating agents that grow stronger from their own experience, with such an open world as the indispensable basis of that growth.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29784
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UniRAP: Towards Unified Part-level Physical Affordance Reasoning and Actionable Perception
2026-10-21 14:02:25Linfei Li, Ruining Hu, Lin Zhang, Zhong Wang, Fengyi Zhang, Ying Shen, Binqiang Wang, Xin ZhangAbstract
Vision-language perception has achieved impressive progress in aligning natural language with visual observations, yet grounding high-level semantics into part-level physical interaction remains challenging. To address this gap, we propose UniRAP, a unified model for inferring part-level physical affordances and mapping language instructions to actionable geometric representations. UniRAP formulates this problem as a conditional multimodal generation task, integrating visual inputs, textual instructions, and optional prompts into a shared spatiotemporal representation space through a unified interface token mechanism. To predict executable contact geometry, we introduce a Unified Affordance Decoder (UAD), which jointly performs object detection, part-level affordance segmentation, and 4-DoF interaction pose estimation by leveraging intermediate segmentation features. In addition, we propose a curriculum-based transfer training strategy that progressively adapts the model from general visual parsing to interaction-aware perception, improving data efficiency under limited textual annotations. Experiments show that UniRAP achieves state-of-the-art performance on referring expression segmentation, affordance grounding, and interaction pose estimation, while maintaining strong spatiotemporal consistency in dynamic video scenarios. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of UniRAP as a unified perception framework for language-guided physical manipulation.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29768
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ALIAS: Evaluating Performance and Memorization in LLM-Written TLA+ Specifications
2026-10-21 14:02:02Arslan Bisharat, Mujtaba Nazari, Khushboo Bhadauria, Brian Ortiz, Eric Spencer, Beatriz Santos, TaiNing Wang, George K. Thiruvathukal, Konstantin Laufer, Mohammed AbuhamadAbstract
Memorization inflates the benchmark scores of large language models (LLMs), since a model can reproduce answers it saw in training. Researchers test for it with consistent identifier renaming (CIR), which gives every identifier in a task a new name, and treat a lower score on the renamed task as evidence of recall. We test this method on the Temporal Logic of Actions Plus (TLA+) language, whose model checker acts as an oracle by confirming whether a renamed task preserves the exact behaviors of the original. Across 111 TLA+-Bench tasks, renaming lowers the correctness of Claude Opus 4.8 from 28% to 18% and of GPT-5 from 9% to 7%. Most of this decrease comes from how the test grades, which requires exact names that most descriptions never state. Grading by behavior shrinks the decrease to about 3 percentage points for Opus 4.8 and to 0 for GPT-5. In two model families fine-tuned on disjoint halves of the tasks, renaming removes about half of the training gain in likelihood and costs 4.9 percentage points (Qwen) and 1.3 percentage points (Gemma) on unseen tasks. A lower score after renaming therefore mixes memorization, name-based grading, and the cost of new names.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29767
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OMAR: Open-World Multi-Attribute Reasoning for Scene-Conditioned Shelf Organization
2026-10-21 13:59:13Benedikt Kreis, Rohit Menon, Benno Wingender, Muhammad Ehsan Ullah, Nils Dengler, Maren BennewitzAbstract
With the advent of foundation models, robots are increasingly capable of understanding and executing explicitly specified human tasks. Extending these capabilities to open-ended tasks, however, requires robots to infer appropriate actions from the observed scene. Household organization exemplifies this challenge, as robots must often act without detailed instructions, predefined object vocabularies, or known object-receptacle associations. While robots may follow instructions or learn organization preferences from demonstrations, inferring the latent organization of an occasionally changing scene and placing a novel object consistently with it remains challenging. We propose an open-world multi-attribute reasoning pipeline that grounds unknown objects across views and constructs an instance-level 3D scene graph for placement reasoning. First, a vision-language model proposes labels together with attributes such as content and packaging type, which are grounded through segmentation, depth, and multi-view association. Then, an LLM reasons over this representation to infer the latent shelf organization and rank scene-consistent object placements without explicitly user-provided preferences. The resulting placement rankings guide subsequent geometric and kinematic feasibility checks for execution. Our experimental evaluation shows that our approach leads to improved instance mapping and placement coherence over single-view language-grounding and geometry-only baselines, enabling autonomous placement of previously unseen objects without predefined object-receptacle mappings or class-specific retraining.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29761
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Bridging Foundational and Agentic Capabilities of LLMs
2026-10-21 13:50:43Wei Guo, Yuanjian Xu, Jianing Hao, Yongyao Duan, Ran Chen, Zhong Li, Guang ZhangAbstract
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as agents, yet it remains unclear how their foundational capabilities translate into agentic capabilities. End-to-end scores leave unresolved whether low benchmark capability or weak deployment drives a failure, limiting actionable diagnosis. We bridge foundational and agentic capabilities through an operation-level measurement framework. We represent each model with a foundational profile derived from capability benchmarks and an operation profile derived from interaction trajectories, and define capability realization gaps as deviations of observed operation performance from predictions based on foundational capabilities. Experiments on fifteen model services in $\tau^2$-Bench show that foundational profiles only partially predict agentic operations. Models with comparable profiles can differ substantially in execution, and these gaps remain consistent across task subsets. Operation profiles add information and substantially improve task-score prediction. The framework locates execution departures at the operation level to inform model development and agent evaluation. We will release our code and analysis artifacts.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29751
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LEAF-Mamba: Feature Adaptation and Fusion for Whole Slide Image Analysis
2026-10-21 13:46:27Lubin Gan, Jing Zhang, Mingjun Ma, Linhao Qu, Dachun Kai, Xiaoyan SunAbstract
Whole slide image (WSI) analysis enables computational diagnosis and prognosis, but gigapixel images and limited annotations make slide-level learning challenging. Multiple instance learning addresses this task by aggregating patch representations from frozen pretrained encoders. Recently, Mamba has enabled efficient modeling of long patch sequences. However, task supervision alone does not explicitly constrain information recovery during feature adaptation, while Mamba couples local processing with long-range propagation rather than retaining separate representations for fusion. Motivated by these challenges, we introduce LEAF-Mamba, a framework that jointly addresses latent evidence adaptation and fusion for frozen-feature WSI analysis. A reconstruction-regularized adapter learns compact, task-specific representations while reconstructing the input features. Parallel Mamba and convolutional streams then capture long-range dependencies and sequence-local interactions, with an input-dependent gate modulating their joint representation before slide-level pooling. Experiments across feature extractors demonstrate improved average performance over strong MIL baselines in both diagnostic classification and survival prediction. Component analyses further support the contributions of adaptation and fusion. These findings highlight the value of jointly designing feature transformation and contextual aggregation to translate pretrained representations into effective slide-level predictions.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29746
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Post-hoc Epistemic Uncertainty for Vision-Language-Action Policies
2026-10-21 13:34:03Johannes Keller, Albrecht M. Blo{\ss}e, Adrian Lindenmeyer, Thomas Neumuth, Daniel SchneiderAbstract
Vision-language-action (VLA) policies need to recognize gaps in their training knowledge to request useful demonstrations or assistance in new situations, especially when failures are costly. Disagreement within an ensemble of independently trained policies can guide these decisions, but requires training and running multiple policies. We propose post-hoc kernel-variance heads that estimate epistemic uncertainty from the embeddings of a single policy. Each head computes the conditional variance of a Gaussian process conditioned on embeddings from the training demonstrations. Fitting requires no regression targets or gradient updates and leaves the policy unchanged. In experiments with SmolVLA on LIBERO-10, the kernel variance heads perform competitively with two-policy ensemble scores in task-level correlation with task success, in demonstration acquisition during active learning, and in referral to a stronger supervisor policy as a proxy for human assistance. For SmolVLA, the head on the vision-language backbone reduces uncertainty-scoring time by up to approximately a factor of 50 compared with ensemble scores, while also substantially reducing setup costs. We also show that the established evaluation protocol on LIBERO-10 primarily rewards recognition of coverage differences between tasks, while execution variability weakens assessment of within-task rankings. Thus, controlled perturbations provide a complementary evaluation: modality-specific heads identify unfamiliar camera, instruction, or state inputs, while fused heads can detect unfamiliar combinations of individually familiar inputs. With a supervisor proxy trained on the evaluated perturbation families, the decoder head improves within-task referral over ensemble disagreement. These findings show that useful uncertainty estimates for adaptive robot learning can be obtained from a single policy.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29730
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Reconstruction-Augmented Visuomotor Pre-Training of 3D-Grounded Bimanual Dexterity from RGB-Only Human Videos
2026-10-21 13:28:19Xingyi He, Zhiwen Qiu, Adhitya Polavaram, Yunhao Cao, Cory Fan, Julius Samwer, Saleh Kalantari, Kuan FangAbstract
We present SpatialDex, a framework that learns 3D-grounded bimanual dexterity from RGB-only human videos through reconstruction-augmented visuomotor pre-training. The central idea is to learn human behavior together with its spatial context. From each video, we reconstruct the scene geometry and estimate the hand motion, align them at a shared video-level scale using the hand-size prior of 3D hand estimates. We retain the reconstructed geometry as both a policy input and a prediction target. The policy grounds the token grid of a pre-trained vision-language model in this geometry through gated residual fusion, is trained to predict future scene geometry alongside wrist and finger actions, and generates finger motion conditioned on the predicted trajectories of both wrists. Pre-trained on 1M human-video clips and fine-tuned with a small number of robot demonstrations, SpatialDex outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by 16.5 points on nine simulated dexterous tasks across two embodiments and by 38.3 points on six real-world bimanual dexterous tasks. Under a matched comparison, pre-training with reconstructed geometry improves success by 14.2 points over pre-training on hand motion alone.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29716
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CausGround: Causal Interaction Grounding for Adaptive Embodied Planning
2026-10-21 13:16:19Yijun Shen, Diqi He, Jinbang Guo, Wanyue Zhang, Jiaming Mi, Huan Yang, Zhongyuan Wang, Zhiwei Yu, Kai ZhangAbstract
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show promising reasoning capabilities, but reliable physical interaction requires planning that accounts for when actions are executable and how they change the world. These preconditions and effects are environment-dependent and often not captured by MLLMs, making adaptation challenging. Yet existing approaches either require costly environment-specific training or rely on unstructured interaction experience that is difficult to reuse. Therefore, we introduce CausGround, a non-parametric causal interaction grounding framework that distills interaction experience into reusable action-centered causal knowledge. CausGround identifies action preconditions and effects and organizes them in a factorized world-state representation capturing object attributes and inter-object relations. At planning time, task-relevant causal dependencies are grounded in current observations to support backward reasoning over preconditions and forward reasoning over effects for action selection and multi-step planning. We evaluate CausGround on simulated high-level planning, interaction reasoning, and real-world robot manipulation. On adapted VirtualHome and RoboCasa benchmarks, CausGround improves vision-based high-level planning across MLLM backbones, increasing average task success from 24.9% to 53.3% on VirtualHome and closed-loop planning success from 43.0% to 57.0% on RoboCasa. On SWITCH, average interaction reasoning accuracy increases from 25.8% to 31.9%, indicating improved action selection, recovery, and verification. Moreover, real-world experiments show that CausGround reasons backward from MLLM-interpreted goals to derive executable high-level action sequences for sequential manipulation. These results demonstrate that reusable action preconditions and effects support long-horizon embodied planning across diverse environments without parameter updates.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29702
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AirPlayground: Benchmarking Aerial Navigation across Diverse Reconstructed Environments
2026-10-21 13:13:00Rangya Zhang, Yujing Shang, Zhuoyuan Yu, Mingsheng Li, Qingsong Yan, Chao Yan, Yuhang Zhang, Mir FeroskhanAbstract
Large-scale aerial resources provide a foundation for learning navigation across diverse environments. However, existing resources remain limited in providing (1) densely sampled flight demonstrations for learning different policy formulations and (2) broad environment coverage for standardized closed-loop evaluation. To address these limitations, we introduce AirPlayground, a unified benchmark for training and evaluating aerial navigation policies across diverse environments. We first construct 94 photorealistic 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) environments spanning indoor, urban outdoor, and vegetation settings, with aligned collision geometry. Building on these environments, we develop a scene-adaptive pipeline for automated expert flight collection, yielding 94K demonstrations and 46.5M synchronized observation-state-action samples at 50 Hz. We further provide an extensible API that supports training different policy formulations on this shared corpus and evaluating them under unified protocols in the corresponding environments. We benchmark seven baselines spanning four policy paradigms across three navigation settings in seen and unseen environments, and further examine scaling behavior with ACT. Scaling ACT's training corpus from 5 to 70 scenes raises median success rates on seen and unseen environments from 30.6% and 16.8% to 41.2% and 29.4%, respectively. Through this shared training and evaluation framework, AirPlayground supports analysis of how offline prediction errors relate to closed-loop outcomes. Our analyses highlight the roles of prediction errors, execution protocols, and scene interactions in closed-loop performance.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29699
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FlowVLA: Learning Flow-Aware Physical Completion for Quantitative Robotic Pouring
2026-10-21 13:07:39Liwen Yang, Yutian Zhang, Jiaqi Zhai, Li Yang, Tutian Tang, Qiwei Shan, Yancheng Bi, Qiankuan Shangguan, Yangkun Zhu, Ce Hao, Dong Wei, Qiaojun Yu, Dibo HouAbstract
During steady pouring, images and robot pose may remain nearly unchanged while transferred mass accumulates, making the return decision ambiguous for a whole-task vision-language-action (VLA) policy. We present FlowVLA, which separates motor generation from physical-completion estimation. A shared $\pi_{0.5}$ action expert learns approach, pour, and return with boundary-aware supervision. A target-independent estimator fuses visual, joint, wrist-wrench, and recurrent force-belief histories to maintain an estimate of transferred mass. The controller initiates return when this estimate plus predicted residual outflow reaches the requested mass. In coffee-pot/water experiments, FlowVLA achieves 13.1 g goal-balanced mean absolute error (MacroMAE), lower than all tested VLA baselines. Across all attempts, 53.7% both complete the task and finish within +/-10% of the requested mass. The same model interpolates to held-out 150/250-g targets without retraining. Independently trained models further evaluate the formulation in three additional container-fluid settings.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29692
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From Acceptance and Avoidance to Affective Viscosity: Designing Social Agents Intermediating in Human Relationships
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As social agents become embedded in human relationships, they are expected not only to provide smooth assistance but also to handle rejection, discomfort, jealousy, persistence, and other forms of social tension. This paper connects two research directions: acceptance and avoidance in response to an agent's gaze, approach, and contact, and affective viscosity as a model of how negative affect accumulates, persists, is suppressed, and is expressed over time. We argue that avoidance should not be treated merely as a failure of interaction, but as a relational signal that indicates boundaries between humans and agents. Building on this view, affective viscosity provides a design perspective for agents that maintain, suppress, or express negative states depending on social relationships and interaction histories. We discuss several ongoing design cases, including triadic jealousy, discomfort suppression, patience timing, and spatiotemporal stickiness, and consider how these cases lead to broader questions of blame and accountable intervention. Rather than designing agents as simple scapegoats or artificial villains, we ask how agents can intermediate in problematic social situations while making their intervention traceable, limited, contestable, and repairable.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29674
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Conflicted Records: Typed Adversarial Contracts for Auditable LLM Output Quality Enforcement
2026-10-21 12:43:35Kardelen Subasi, Jaros{\l}aw A. ChudziakAbstract
LLM-generated records increasingly populate production information systems where they are treated as data assets subject to the same quality expectations as records from operational databases. A single such record can simultaneously satisfy and violate a quality rule: a grounded fact adjacent to a hallucination, a useful answer adjacent to a stereotype. Classical data cleaning cannot resolve this because the two judgments are incompatible over the same span; a single LLM judge cannot either, since it shares the training biases that produced the conflict. Existing interventions such as prompt engineering, chain-of-thought, and RLHF reduce surface error rates but provide no audit trail and cannot distinguish genuine remediation from blanket suppression. The question is whether a deterministic check over structured inter-agent records can catch the defects that referential checks alone miss. We present BiasGuard-D: two adversarial roles drawn from distinct model families exchange typed claim documents, a three-model quorum adjudicates by majority vote, and a combined referential-plus-semantic invariant validates the verdict. The semantic component fires on verdicts referential checks miss; removing the iterative loop drops invariant satisfaction sharply. The deliberation layer transfers from stereotype to hallucination remediation on HaluEval QA with only role-framing changes, raising right-answer recovery by 49 percentage points; the triage gate required a cross-family second auditor to maintain recall on objective hallucination. Every claim, vote, and instruction is stored as a typed record giving operators a provenance trail auditable under emerging AI regulations.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29669
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Overview of CHIP 2026 Shared Task 1: Patient-Specific Phenotype Concept Recognition in Full-Text Biomedical Literature
2026-10-21 11:45:35Xuanlyu Zhu, Feng Tian, Yang Zhong, Pengqi Zheng, Xiwen Bi, Ling Luo, Yuanyuan Sun, Jian Wang, Lingfei LinAbstract
Automatic phenotype information extraction plays an important role in rare disease diagnosis, genotype-phenotype analysis, and precision medicine. However, accurately identifying phenotype concepts and determining their associations with specific patients remain challenging, particularly in full-text biomedical articles involving multiple patients and complex clinical descriptions. This paper presents an overview of CHIP 2026 Shared Task 1, which aims to promote the development of methods for patient-specific phenotype concept recognition from full-text biomedical literature. The task consists of two subtasks: full-text phenotype concept recognition and patient-specific phenotype association. For this evaluation, we used 200 annotated full-text biomedical articles from the PatientPheX dataset, containing 506 patients, 15,193 phenotype mentions, and 5,656 patient-phenotype associations. A total of 455 teams registered for the competition, with 189 and 103 valid submissions received on the Phase A and Phase B leaderboards, respectively. The best-performing system achieved an overall score of 0.7389 on the final test set, outperforming the baseline by 8.37 percentage points. The top-performing teams explored diverse approaches combining biomedical language models, large language models (LLMs), and ensemble strategies. The evaluation results highlight both the potential of these approaches and the remaining challenges in patient attribution and phenotype normalization from full-text biomedical literature. The post-evaluation phase remains open at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29606
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