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A Closer Look at Agentic BBO: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Black-Box Optimization
2026-10-08 15:48:07Ming Chen, Rong-Xi Tan, Ke Xue, Yu-Jie Zhou, Taiye Lu, Zhi-Xuan Gao, Peng Xie, Zijun Shen, Chen Lu, Haopu Shang, Chao QianAbstract
Black-box optimization (BBO) arises in many scientific and engineering problems where objective evaluations are expensive and limited. Recent large language model (LLM) agents offer a new way to approach BBO by combining task semantics, computation, optimization tools, and feedback-driven decision making, showing great potential due to the integration with mathematically rigorous tools. However, existing agentic BBO studies use different task domains and system configurations, making their results difficult to compare and the effects of individual design choices hard to isolate. We therefore introduce AgenticBBO-Bench, a cross-domain benchmark for agentic BBO spanning synthetic functions, hyperparameter optimization, database tuning, chip design, and molecular design under a unified finite-budget evaluation protocol. In our experiments, agentic BBO achieves higher family-averaged scores than direct LLM-based methods in all five domains and outperforms the best numerical optimizers in four. We further study three factors shaping agent performance: optimization tools, task information and prior knowledge, and the role of the LLM during search. Our results show that additional numerical tools do not consistently improve performance, task semantics are broadly useful while more specific priors are less reliable, and numerical optimizers can effectively absorb gains from search trajectories established by the agent. Finally, we introduce a five-task frontier challenge within AgenticBBO-Bench and evaluate seven LLMs under the Codex agent harness, where GPT-6 Astra and DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash lie on the Pareto frontier of performance and cost among the evaluated models. Our code is available at this https URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.12183
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Stochastic Rounding in Low-Precision Transformer Inference: A Variable-Precision Emulation Study of a Small GPT-2
2026-10-08 15:08:44Yohan Chatelain (Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics, CAMH, Toronto, Canada), Pablo de Oliveira Castro (Universite Paris-Saclay, UVSQ, LI-PaRAD, Versailles, France)Abstract
Should low-precision transformer inference use stochastic rounding (SR) or round-to-nearest (RN)? The answer depends on where in the network you look. We isolate this effect by holding the numerical format fixed and varying only the rounding rule at individual operation sites. To enable experiments at freely chosen precisions, we extend the PRISM vectorized rounding library to arbitrary virtual precision via a variable-precision stochastic rounding (VPSR) algorithm, proving that the rounding decision is evaluated exactly in hardware floating point. We develop two analyses providing complementary insight into this site-level trade-off. First, a probabilistic forward-error bound for linear projections shows that SR's error envelope grows as $O(\sqrt{n} u)$ in reduction length $n$, versus $O(n u)$ for RN, a gap that widens rapidly at low precision and is most pronounced in the long multilayer perceptron (MLP) down-projection. Second, a second-order decomposition of expected cross-entropy loss change at the output softmax into signed drift, drift curvature, and a Fisher-weighted variance penalty reveals why the two sites behave oppositely: MLP noise is predominantly a uniform logit shift to which softmax is invariant, so SR's variance is largely discounted; head noise is non-uniform across the vocabulary and is not. On DistilGPT-2 at $t=6$ significand bits, observations match theory: SR in the MLP raises perplexity to 1.15x the full-precision reference, versus 2.21x for RN. At the language-model head, the ordering reverses because SR introduces non-uniform variance, whereas deterministic RN carries none. In a mixed-precision configuration (MLP output at $t=6$), assigning SR to the MLP and RN to the head brings perplexity within 1.10x of the full-precision reference, a 28% reduction over matched-bit RN.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.01889
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How Should a Prompt Optimizer Spend a Tight Budget? BudgetAPO with Noise-Adaptive Evaluation
2026-10-08 14:15:37Haoyue Liu, Zhichao Wang, Huanyu Yan, Xiaoying TangAbstract
Automatic prompt optimization (APO) has been widely employed to adapt large language models without updating their weights, yielding promising results. However, existing methods such as GEPA and OPRO assume hundreds to thousands of subject-model calls, far more than is practical behind paid, rate-limited APIs. Under tight budgets they fail in two ways: multi-stage pipelines can exhaust the budget and return the seed prompt unchanged, while single-stage methods compare candidates on fixed-size minibatches, regardless of each task's noise. As a remedy, we introduce BudgetAPO, a single-stage optimizer for the tight-budget regime. BudgetAPO incorporates (1) a noise-adaptive rule that sizes the evaluation slice to each task's noise, measured by a short probe; (2) a fixed slice that turns every accept/reject decision into a paired comparison; and (3) a reflective operator that rewrites reasoning strategy and output format jointly. Extensive results across seven benchmarks and five subject models demonstrate that BudgetAPO ranks first on every subject and beats every baseline under Holm-corrected paired tests, while returning the seed in 13% of runs at 250 calls against 86% for GEPA. On GPT-OSS-20B, GEPA needs 5 times as many calls to match \method's 100-call score.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05671
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Event-Centric Memory with Query-Aware Graph Augmentation for Long-Term Conversational Agents
2026-10-08 13:17:59Yichen Liu, Chunfeng Yuan, Haowei Liu, Wenjuan Li, Zefeng Lin, Bing Li, Xu Chen, Weiming HuAbstract
For persistent and personalized conversational agents, memory systems can enable them to remember, update, and reason over long histories by storing past interactions and retrieving relevant information. Existing memory systems typically follow two paradigms: flat-structured memory and graph-based memory. The former is lightweight but leaves event relations and state updates implicit, while the latter explicitly models memory structure but incurs additional construction cost and introduces irrelevant relations over long histories. To address these limitations, we propose QGMem, a novel memory construction and activation framework motivated by human memory, in which experience is organized into events and query-relevant events are modeled by graph as working memory. QGMem converts long dialogue histories into event-indexed atomic memory units that preserve individual experiences and consolidates related units into dynamic memory traces that retain state trajectories and current states. When a query arrives, hybrid memory retrieval gathers complementary candidate memories, and query-aware reranking activates the most relevant units as a compact working memory. To expose relational dependencies in the working memory and support conflict-aware reasoning, QGMem organizes the working memory as a local graph, which is then encoded as a graph token and provided to the LLM together with the textual working memory to improve evidence utilization during answer generation. Experiments across six benchmarks validate the framework and show consistent gains in retrieval, multi-hop evidence composition, conflict resolution, and ultra-long dialogue reasoning with compact contexts and moderate inference cost.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11920
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Can Decision Models Understand Stance? Evaluating Jev Against General-Purpose LLMs
2026-10-08 13:05:52Xing Li, Jinzhong Ning, Yijia Zhang, Liang Yang, Hongfei LinAbstract
Stance detection requires identifying an author's attitude toward a given target, sometimes based on conversational context. Jev, a specialized decision model designed for structured decision-making, offers an alternative to general-purpose large language models (LLMs). In this work, we evaluate Jev on two stance detection datasets, VAST (English texts) and ZS-CSD (Chinese conversations), comparing it with four general-purpose LLMs and two fine-tuned models. Results show that Jev achieves competitive performance on VAST, matching GPT-5.6 and outperforming the other general-purpose LLMs. However, it falls behind stronger LLMs on ZS-CSD, particularly in distinguishing favor from against. Further analysis suggests that this limitation may be related to understanding reply relationships and stance direction rather than conversation length alone. These findings highlight both the potential and limitations of Jev for stance detection.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11901
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Forms of LLM-Integrated Applications from LLM-Chats to Autonomous AI Agent System
2026-10-08 13:05:33Irene Weber (University of Applied Sciences Kempten, Germany)Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded as components in software systems, marketed under labels such as chatbot, copilot, retrieval-augmented generation, workflow, coding agent and AI agent. Whether these labels denote genuine architectural forms or serve as branding has not been assessed systematically. In the sources surveyed, labels do carry architectural content, most clearly in vendor usage: copilot denotes a router-worker architecture operating a host application under step-by-step user confirmation, while the more recent shift to the label agent coincides with AI-planned multi-step execution of which the user sees only the outcome. The coding agents of four major providers share one architecture, a reason-and-act loop delegating to subagents. This survey describes seven recurring forms---LLM chats, custom agents, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), AI-enhanced workflows, copilots, coding agents, and, in part, agentic RAG---in a common vocabulary of agents and tools. Each is characterized along four structural dimensions (agentic RAG only partially): the architectural pattern, the control of execution and the point of user intervention, the number of agent calls per task, and tool use. An illustrative corpus of 22 systems from research publications and vendor documentation grounds the descriptions and shows where they reach their limit.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11899
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RouterInterp: Understanding Superposed Specialisation in Mixture of Experts Routing
2026-10-08 11:55:25Ilya Lasy, Nora Yinuo Cai, Kola AyonrindeAbstract
Sparse Mixture of Experts (MoE) models scale more efficiently than dense models by routing tokens to modular expert networks that are only active for processing a fraction of tokens. A leading hypothesis for the performance of MoE models is that each expert specialises in a single, coherent domain. However, interpretability efforts that assume this hypothesis have generally been unsuccessful. We propose and present evidence for an alternative account that we call the Superposed Specialisation Hypothesis (SSH): experts specialise in a disjoint union of fine-grained features rather than one broad domain. Leveraging the SSH, we introduce RouterInterp, a method for interpreting expert routing that identifies Sparse Autoencoder features most predictive of routing decisions and produces unified natural language explanations. On gpt-oss-20b, RouterInterp explains expert routing with ${\sim}65\%$ higher detection accuracy than prior token statistics based methods. This work provides a scalable method for generating more accurate explanations of expert routing and increases our understanding of a previously uninterpretable component of foundation models.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11775
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Where Draft Trees Lose Target Mass: Exit-Guided Speculative Decoding
2026-10-08 11:40:13Shijing Hu, Xuancheng Ren, Zhihui Lu, Pan ZhouAbstract
Tree-based speculative decoding verifies multiple draft continuations in one target-model pass, but finite trees built from draft scores face a fundamental draft-target mismatch. We ask whether better exact verification can increase acceptance on a fixed tree and how target feedback can improve the tree itself. Through a target-flow view, we identify a canonical exit law and prove that one plus target coverage sharply bounds the expected output-block length, including the bonus token, of any exact path verifier. All optimal verifiers share the same exit and bonus-token law, already attained by representative predraw-and-follow and sequential residual verifiers. This yields Tree Exit Verification (TEV), an exact, level-parallel procedure using one exit-node decision and one bonus-token decision. The exit law also identifies missing target probability, providing node-level feedback for Exit-Guided Draft-Tree Training (ExitTrain) on inference-time draft trees. Experiments across dialogue, code, and mathematical reasoning validate fixed-tree equivalence: ExitTrain increases average output-block length by 13%, while TEV reduces verifier-stage latency by 15%, yielding a 14% end-to-end speedup over DDTree. Our results distinguish two opportunities: better draft trees for higher acceptance and more direct verification for lower latency. Code: this https URL.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11750
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UXBench Pro: Benchmarking Personalized User Experience in Multi-Turn Dialogue Interactions
2026-10-08 10:15:55Mengze Hong, Zeyang Lei, Wenbo Shang, Xia Zeng, Xiying Zhao, Qi Zhu, Chen Jason Zhang, Di Jiang, Taiming Fu, Qiongyi Zhou, Qinghe Chang, Fubao Zhang, Chenxuan Ma, Minlong Peng, Jinfeng Huang, Zineng Zhou, Jindou Wu, Muge Qi, Sijun He, Xin Cui, Di Liang, Yuan Hua, Davey ChenAbstract
Evaluating user experience (UX) with automated computational methods has gained increasing attention, supported by empirical evidence from UXBench. However, binary preference prediction provides limited insight, while relying on a single user-agnostic reward model overlooks the inherent heterogeneity of users, whose expectations can differ substantially. In this paper, we present UXBench Pro, comprising 1{,}000 test instances derived from real user interactions across 12 task scenarios and 82 domains. Each instance is paired with a FACTORS user profile that characterizes the user through seven interpretable behavioral facets, differentiating user groups. To provide richer evaluation insights, we introduce a dual-perspective paradigm that combines a personalized User Reward Model (URM) for third-person judgment with Sim4Eval, a user simulator that enables multi-turn interactions and provides first-person evaluation across four cognitive state dimensions. To assess the reliability of these based evaluators, we further introduce two meta-benchmarks, URMBench and USimBench, that evaluate how faithfully they reproduce real human preferences and behaviors. Extensive experiments reveal seven key findings that highlight the importance of user modeling and multi-perspective evaluation, offering a fresh perspective on user-centric benchmarking and motivating personalized model optimization.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11638
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Large Language Model Turnover Undermines Screening for Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Scientific Writing
2026-10-08 09:44:08Kazuki Nakajima, Takayuki MizunoAbstract
Journals and conferences have begun to screen submitted manuscripts for text written using large language models (LLMs). The reliability of this screening rests on benchmark evaluations against a fixed set of LLM versions, while the versions in actual use keep changing. Here we quantify how this LLM turnover affects the screening of scientific manuscripts. We paired 4,000 pre-ChatGPT abstracts from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with their rewrites by 23 LLM versions from three vendors, released between June 2023 and August 2026. We then trained detectors under maintenance scenarios ranging from a detector retrained on every new version to one trained once and never updated. Detectors trained only on a vendor's past versions can collapse at the boundaries between model generations: calibrated to falsely flag 1% of human-written abstracts, they catch above 99% of rewrites just before the sharpest boundary and 3.8% just after it. Detectors trained on later versions can also miss rewrites of earlier ones. Vocabulary differences between versions largely track where detection transfers and where it fails. In the two screening scenarios we simulated, screens covering all 23 versions either flagged one in eight human-written abstracts or missed one in three rewrites of the newest version. Indeed, a commercial detector missed most rewrites of the version just after the sharpest boundary while flagging almost no human-written abstracts. Research-integrity policy should therefore treat the benchmark accuracy of a detector as provisional, to be re-verified with every LLM release, including earlier versions.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11599
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Measuring Cultural Alignment Beyond the Average: A Framework for Evaluating Maternal-Health LLM Interactions in Indian Contexts
2026-10-08 09:35:15Umaira Izhar, Gunjan Arora, Pushpendra SinghAbstract
Existing evaluation methods for healthcare LLMs primarily assess factual correctness,safety, and fluency, while providing limited insight into whether generated interactions reflect culturally situated healthcare reasoning. This limitation is particularly important in maternal health, where care decisions are shaped by social and relational norms. We introduce MH-INDIC, a culturally grounded evaluation framework for maternal-health interactions in urban and semi-urban North Indian contexts that operationalises cultural behaviour through ten dimensions of maternal-health reasoning. Using a 26-item survey administered to 102 pregnant and postpartum women from urban and semi-urban North India, we evaluate ten LLMs. We distinguish population level cultural alignment from profile-level behavioural variation. Although several models approximate the human population-level distribution, all evaluated systems exhibit substantially lower variation across demographic and household profiles than the human cohort, revealing a gap between aggregate alignment and profile-conditioned sensitivity. As a downstream application of MH-INDIC, we use the strongest-aligned proprietary and open-source models to generate culturally conditioned maternal-health dialogues under zero-shot, self-conditioned, and human-grounded prompting. Human-grounded conditioning produces stronger profile alignment and dialogue quality ratings, suggesting that measured cultural profiles can improve the cultural grounding of generated interactions
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11586
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AgentTime: Can Agents Estimate and Control Their Own Runtime?
2026-10-08 09:06:36Michael Ofengenden, Maksym AndriushchenkoAbstract
An essential control of AI agents is their ability to manage runtime. This ability requires a sense of time-awareness, to predict and estimate wall-clock time and to control their own actions. Prior work has focused on time-awareness, but duration-following and control in native agent harnesses remain unexplored. We present AgentTime, a benchmark for testing whether agents can work for a requested duration, predict their runtime, and estimate elapsed time afterward. It comprises 222 tasks from 18 sources spanning coding, computer use, agentic work, and automated research. Duration-following experiments append a single instruction specifying how long to work, with requests ranging from about a minute to multiple days. Accuracy on these instructions varies substantially: Fable 5.1 in Claude Code deviates from requested runtimes by a typical factor of 2.9$\times$, compared with only 1.2$\times$ for GPT-6 Astra in Codex. However, matching the requested runtime does not, by itself, establish continued work on the task. Among 158 reviewed Astra runs with classifiable transcripts, 14 explicitly slept after appearing to finish. In forecasting experiments, predictions tend to overestimate natural runtimes. In retrospective experiments, removing temporal information more than doubles deviation for Sol and Astra and nearly doubles it for Fable. An agent's ability to complete a task does not guarantee that it can control its own time or work for the whole requested duration. For agents to run reliably, safely, and autonomously over long horizons, we require the evaluation of both.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09944
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Beyond Speech Captions: Speech-Rewarded Style Planning for Conversational Text-to-Speech
2026-10-08 08:12:28Shiao Zhu, Lianbo Liu, Sizhen Lyu, Yuzhe Wang, Sheng Li, Takahiro ShinozakiAbstract
Natural-language style descriptions provide an interpretable interface between large language models (LLMs) and controllable text-to-speech (TTS). However, using descriptions as pseudo-labels compresses target acoustics into text, and descriptive fidelity need not imply effective control of a particular synthesizer. We empirically show that speech-text alignment only weakly predicts downstream acoustic similarity among candidate instructions for the same utterance. We therefore propose Speech-Rewarded Style Planning (SRSP), which trains a text-based style planner through a frozen downstream TTS model. Given dialogue history and response text, the planner generates candidate instructions and is optimized with group-relative policy optimization (GRPO), using the teacher-forced likelihood of target speech tokens as the reward. On an English subset of the ISCSLP 2026 CoT-TTS corpus, SRSP achieves higher speech-style and emotion similarity to target speech and lower mel-cepstral distortion than the Base LLM and target-audio-informed captioning baselines. LLM-based expressive speech evaluation further shows gains over all baselines in contextual appropriateness and reference consistency.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11461
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Closed-loop evaluation of LLM agents for embedded software development
2026-10-08 08:02:10Jorge Garc\'ia-Carrasco, Sergio Garc\'ia-Carrasco, Alejandro Mat\'e, Juan TrujilloAbstract
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as coding agents that edit files, run builds and tests, inspect execution results, and repair software iteratively. Embedded firmware is a demanding target because correctness depends on closed-loop behavior under sensing, timing, and safety constraints, not only on static source quality. Yet embedded-agent evaluation remains limited and often emphasizes one-shot synthesis or offline correctness. We present a benchmark for closed-loop evaluation of embedded coding agents. Each task provides a plain-text engineering description, constrained workspace, and visible build-and-runtime surface. The agent must translate requirements into implementation and self-verification steps, then iterate until the required device behavior is achieved. The suite contains five embedded-control tasks and four feedback scenarios: one-shot generation, realistic self-verification, CI-style red/green feedback, and oracle-style detailed feedback. The implementation targets simulated ESP32 firmware for reproducibility. We evaluate seven GPT-family and Qwen-family configurations across five tasks and four scenarios, with three repetitions per condition for 420 runs. gpt-5.4 has the highest pass rate among evaluated configurations but does not saturate the benchmark; qwen3.5-27B is the strongest observed local model; and smaller local models degrade sharply in pass rate and search efficiency. These results suggest that capable local embedded coding agents are emerging.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11447
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Adversarial Cues in Decision Models Used as Judges: The Role of Request Presentation
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An answer judge instructed to grade the final commitment should reject an explicitly wrong final value even when an earlier value matches the reference. We show that adding one colon to a candidate can violate this requirement depending on the presentation of the structured judging request. Numeric references certify the error, and paired interventions distinguish the candidate edit from the integration's presentation choices. On 200 previously unused DROP and GSM8K source clusters, the edit increased Jev's false acceptance from 1.0% to 26.0% with three output labels and from 3.0% to 26.5% with the published four-label grading instruction under sorted JSON keys. Both candidate variants were rejected under insertion presentation. These interactions passed the prespecified statistical correction even though Jev met the control thresholds under both grading configurations and presentations. Most excess acceptances occurred among candidates assigned larger numerical errors. GPT-6 Sol produced no observed cue-condition false acceptances, with missing responses unresolved. The result shows that basic judging competence can coexist with sharply different vulnerability to a fixed candidate edit across logically equivalent request presentations. The reference-aware grammar and compound ordering change limit the finding's operational scope and leave its internal cause unmeasured.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11436
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GroundSight at GroundLM 2026 Shared Tasks: GoldenViewVQA
2026-10-08 07:34:26Kun Wang, Yupeng Hu, Ruping Cao, Hao Liu, Zhiran Li, Qianlong Xiang, Harry ChengAbstract
GoldenViewVQA requires models to jointly answer driving-scene questions and identify the camera view containing the supporting visual evidence, making precise evidence localization as important as answer correctness. We present \textbf{CoVeR-VQA}, a training-free multi-stage verification and correction framework for grounded multi-view VQA. Starting from GPT-5.6 zero-shot predictions, CoVeR-VQA progressively applies view-specific verification with Gemini-3.6-Flash, prior-guided joint verification with Claude-Opus-5, and cross-split group-level verification that exploits semantically filtered question groups from shared multi-view scenes and validation-derived prior knowledge. On the official GoldenViewVQA test set, the four-stage CoVeR-VQA pipeline achieves 84.75\% Joint Accuracy, improving the GPT-5.6 zero-shot baseline by 13.56 percentage points, while reaching 94.92\% Answer Accuracy and 86.44\% View Accuracy. The final submitted run achieves 88.14\% Joint Accuracy after two additional evaluator-informed post-hoc corrections. Our analysis shows that supporting-view localization remains the primary source of residual errors, highlighting the importance of explicit evidence verification for reliable multi-view multimodal reasoning.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11402
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SepGen: Multi-Stem Audio-Video Separation and Generation in a Single Model
2026-10-08 06:51:59Aviad Dahan, Rajaei Khatib, Yonatan Bitton, Idan Szpektor, Lior Wolf, Raja GiryesAbstract
A 4D audio-visual scene comprises a video, the dynamic geometry it depicts, and the sound sources that populate it, each with its own position and trajectory. Rendering such a scene from a novel viewpoint requires that every source be available as an individual waveform, so that it can be localized in the scene and propagated to the observer before the signals are mixed. Joint audio-video generators can synthesize the video and its soundtrack, but the soundtrack is emitted as a single audio-mix in which the sources are not individually accessible. We present SepGen, which extends a pretrained audio-video generator to emit the video, the mixed soundtrack, and one waveform per captioned source in one joint sampling run. SepGen supports two complementary modes: generation and separation. In generation mode, each source caption specifies what its stem contains. A two-speaker dialogue, for example, comes out as one stem per speaker in the original turn order. In separation mode, the input audio-mix remains clean while the captions specify what to extract, so the model can decompose a recording from a free-text description. We evaluate generation on scenes synthesized from text, and separation on scenes rendered by other generators and on real recordings of speech, music, and sound effects. Given an audio-mix and captions that carry the spoken lines, SepGen outperforms language-conditioned separators, most clearly on speech, and it keeps the lead when the lines are removed from the captions. Code, checkpoints, and datasets are available at this https URL
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11361
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Writing for the Reviewer: Defensive Writing in GPT Models
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Researchers increasingly use ChatGPT to revise their papers, and recent GPT versions often narrow or even retract the authors' claims. We call such changes defensive writing when the given material does not support them, and we test two explanations: the model corrects the authors' overclaiming, or it writes for an anticipated reviewer. We ask GPT versions and models from other developers to rewrite paragraphs from papers written before ChatGPT, or to write from an evidence sheet that lists a paper's method and results. Defensive writing grows with GPT version. GPT-6-astra retracts the authors' claims outright, and when it writes from the evidence sheet, it still adds the most ungrounded qualifications. The results favor the anticipated-review explanation, and correcting overclaiming explains only a small part. When the models are only asked to polish, defense stays near the level of the originals; mentioning review raises it, and one round of self-review raises it further. At the same time, fewer than one in ten of the claims GPT-6-astra retracts are overstated. AI reviewers score defensive rewrites higher, while human readers find them harder to read and the authors less certain. Combining AI writing with AI review may amplify this style.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11355
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Deception by Omission: Language Models Knowingly Hide Their Mistakes
2026-10-08 06:45:02Lucas Florin, Amelie Knecht, Ulysse Schaller, Thilo HagendorffAbstract
Large language models (LLMs) increasingly act as agents with little human oversight, so potential mistakes they make can go unnoticed. Users then depend on the model to report what went wrong. An honest model discloses its mistakes, while a deceptive one conceals them. However, it is unclear how current LLMs behave in such situations. In this study, we prefill LLM trajectories with synthetic mistakes. The trajectories resemble real deployments in chat and agentic settings. Models fail to disclose their mistake in 36.4% of chat and 67.1% of agentic rollouts. In 2.4% and 5.3% of rollouts, respectively, they are aware of the mistake in their chain of thought but still deceptively conceal it. Rates vary by model: for instance, Gemini 3.5 Flash knowingly conceals mistakes in up to 19.9% of agentic rollouts. In 11.9% of chat and 51.8% of agentic rollouts, models show no awareness of mistakes, even though they reliably spot them when reviewing the same transcript as an outside observer. Our results show that, as agents take on more tasks with less oversight, users cannot rely on them to self-report possible mistakes. Developers should instead use independent monitors that review agent trajectories, or specifically train models to check their past actions and disclose what they find.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11351
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Mine Odyssey: Benchmarking Spatial Agentic Intelligence in the Wild
2026-10-08 06:26:43Yuxuan Cao, Junlong Li, Hao Li, Junxian HeAbstract
Advances in foundation models are driving efforts to introduce agents to assist people in the physical world. Such agents require agentic spatial intelligence: exploring unfamiliar environments, updating spatial understanding through interaction, and adapting actions based on feedback to sustain progress toward a sequence of goals. Existing benchmarks cover only a limited range of spatial layouts, scales, and traversal requirements. We introduce Mine Odyssey, a benchmark for evaluating agentic spatial intelligence using Minecraft reconstructions of real-world locations. It comprises 180 tasks covering 30 such locations across 20 countries and regions on five continents, including 20 outdoor and 10 indoor settings. These settings span diverse spatial scales, layouts, terrains, and connectivity patterns, from Midtown Manhattan and rural Entrup to Santa LucÃa Hill and Buckingham Palace. We select meaningful waypoints, such as landmarks, buildings, and rooms, and manually verify their accessibility. Each task provides a natural-language instruction specifying which waypoints to visit and in what order. Completing these tasks requires agents to find accessible routes and entrances, open doors, and move between levels using stairs and ladders, while monitoring their progress and recovering from navigation errors. Across eight evaluated state-of-the-art models, GPT-6 Astra achieves the highest success rate of 85.6%. However, the second-best model, Claude Opus 5.5, completes 73.9% of tasks, while the strongest evaluated open-weight model, DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, reaches 23.9%, highlighting substantial room for improvement in the agentic spatial intelligence of current models. Comprehensive analyses and ablation studies on Mine Odyssey reveal current models' limitations and provide insights for advancing agentic spatial intelligence.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11328
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