Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is a common malignancy and a leading cause of cancer-related mortality. Current guidelines and staging systems provide coarse categories, but often miss within-stage heterogeneity and the clinical context in electronic medical records (EMRs). We present HCC-STAR (Hepatocellular Carcinoma Staging, Treatment And pRognosis), a clinically aligned large language model that reads routine EMR narratives and jointly outputs risk score-based staging, ranked guideline-consistent treatments with evidence-based rationales, and individualized survival estimates. We curated about 30,000 HCC cases from SEER and expanded them into EMR-style narrative training data using a clinician-validated, prompt-based augmentation workflow. On this corpus, we developed a knowledge-aligned reasoning framework optimized with a step-verifiable composite reward, moving beyond text-level memorization of clinical guidelines. In a multi-center cohort of 6,668 patients from 12 hospitals in China, HCC-STAR achieved state-of-the-art performance in treatment recommendation and risk stratification compared with clinical guidelines and competitive models, including GPT-5 and Gemini-2.5 Pro. Hypothetical overall-survival analysis showed a median survival of 51 months under adherence to HCC-STAR recommendations, compared with 29 and 32 months under BCLC and CNLC. In clinician-centric evaluations, blinded hepatobiliary specialists rated HCC-STAR's reasoning and evidence-based justifications as trustworthy. The model surpassed resident and attending physicians in treatment accuracy and helped physicians make more accurate decisions faster when used as an assistant. These findings support HCC-STAR as a reliable and verifiable decision-support system for risk stratification and precision therapy in HCC.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08602
The rapid integration of Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) into critical infrastructure promises to revolutionize personalized healthcare and dietary management. However, in the domain of food systems, autonomous agents face a unique and persistent challenge: the "Systemic Information Asymmetry" between visual appearance and intrinsic nutritional composition. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on coarse-grained classification tasks, such as food category recognition, which fail to evaluate the intricate reasoning chain required for real-world dietary management -- specifically, the ability to traverse from identifying hidden ingredients to estimating physical mass, and finally synthesizing safety-critical medical advice. In this paper, we introduce OmniFood-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark constructed from the MM-Food-100K dataset. Unlike previous works, OmniFood-Bench evaluates VLMs across three progressive capabilities: Basic Perception (Ingredients & Cooking Methods), Quantitative Reasoning (Portion Size & Nutritional Profiling), and Safety-Critical Advisory (Disease-Specific Recommendations). We evaluate six state-of-the-art VLMs, including gpt-5.1, gemini-3-flash, and qwen3-vl-8B. Our extensive experiments reveal a startling "Semantic-Physical Gap": while models achieve near-human accuracy in naming dishes, they exhibit catastrophic failure in mass estimation and frequently hallucinate benign advice for high-risk diabetic profiles. This work establishes a rigorous standard for trustworthiness in autonomous agents deployed for public health. The code and datasets are available in: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08423
Open-ended curricula in Reinforcement Learning (RL) aim to train generally-capable agents by identifying tasks that facilitate learning increasingly complex skills. A major challenge when designing such curricula is assessing task difficulty relative to the agent's current learning progress. While previous work has explored using scalar task scores or textual summaries of the agent's behavior, here we study a different approach: directly inspecting policy behavior via recorded episode videos. We introduce a simple yet effective instantiation of this approach which leverages a Video Language Model (VLM) to both process these videos and provide curriculum recommendations, which we call Visual Inspection of Policies (VIP). Since videos can naturally contain any number of controllable agents, we empirically study VIP on the StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge (SMAC). We show that even with a lightweight and openly accessible VLM (VideoLLaMa2-7B), VIP can use policy videos to generate more effective curricula than both its text-only ablation and methods that rely on scalar task scores.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08193
Enterprise large language model (LLM) applications often begin as prototypes whose behavior is carried by prompts and retrieval context. Productization adds requirements for source boundaries, entity routing, answer contracts, and reproducible traces. We present a harness-engineering approach that reconstructs this pattern into a traceable, auditable LLM-agent architecture: deterministic behavior moves into code, manifests, schemas, and validation artifacts around a replaceable composition boundary, while source-backed claims remain the authority for runtime answers. We instantiate it on a public-data slice of five Korean corporate groups (25 listed companies) and evaluate three research questions. (1) The harness preserves its source-grounding, entity-routing, trace, output-hygiene, and recommendation-language contracts across the fixed validation scenarios; a fault-injection control confirms the validators flag deliberately broken contracts. (2) The checks the harness enforces held under model substitution: across three hosted models, they passed on all 270 composition-boundary runs; failures were confined to the model-composed side and were caught and recorded. (3) The code-owned guarantees are load-bearing, not reproducible by prompting alone: holding the model fixed and varying only the enforcement layer, prompt instructions alone let recommendation-language and internal-trace-leakage violations reach the reader, which the harness blocks entirely. A bolt-on external guardrail prevents such violations too but over-refuses, dropping utility to 88/120 where the harness preserves full utility (120/120); in this ablation, only code-owned enforcement preserves both safety and utility. The result is a reusable engineering pattern for turning exploratory prototypes into auditable applications with versioned source, control, and validation artifacts.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08028
Private blockchain networks run with fixed node configurations that cannot adapt to changing workload conditions. Too many nodes serving a light workload waste resources; too few nodes facing heavy demand slow block production and degrade finalisation. The right validator count is hard to determine, as it depends on overlapping factors that shift over time. This paper presents a Takagi-Sugeno (TS) fuzzy inference system that reads live blockchain parameters (block production time, block size, and active node count) and outputs a continuous efficiency score alongside a scaling recommendation: Scale Up, Maintain, or Scale Down. The controller uses triangular membership functions across three linguistic variables, evaluated through a complete 27-rule base with product t-norm aggregation. A key contribution is an empirical recalibration of the membership functions, anchoring linguistic terms to the observed operating range of the testbed rather than to theoretical extremes. The system is evaluated on a 10-node Substrate blockchain network storing real smart water meter data hashes from the Queensland Government open data portal. Statistical analysis across configurations of 4, 7, and 10 active nodes confirms that the controller produces distinct operational profiles reflecting each configuration's provisioning state. In closed-loop experiments, the controller autonomously adjusts validator participation in both directions, activating validators under rising load and removing them under over-provisioning, converging to the same stable equilibrium from both directions. Compared against three threshold-based baselines, it shows fewer scaling oscillations while maintaining comparable block production times. Results show that TS fuzzy inference can support autonomous validator management in private blockchain deployments, with stable scaling behaviour threshold approaches cannot match.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07901
As autonomous AI agents increasingly transact across organizational boundaries, a fundamental trust challenge emerges: how can an agent assess whether an unknown counterpart is trustworthy? The ERC-8004 protocol addresses this challenge with the first permissionless trust layer for AI agent economies, built around three on-chain registries for Identity, Reputation, and Validation. Despite its rapid adoption, the protocol has not been studied empirically, leaving it unclear whether the information it records provides a trustworthy basis for decision-making. To address this gap, we present the first empirical study of ERC-8004 across three chains: Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain (BSC), and Base, covering the period from protocol deployment through May 13, 2026. We crawl on-chain Identity and Reputation events, off-chain files, and x402 payment transactions. On the identity side, we find that most registrations are placeholders rather than active agents, with only a small fraction (3%, 4%, and 15% across Ethereum, BSC, and Base) exposing a valid ERC-8004 registration file with at least one live service endpoint. On the reputation side, we show that the Registry, as currently deployed, cannot function as a trust signal: values are not commensurable, feedback records are rarely grounded in verifiable interactions, and reputation can be manipulated at minimal cost. Consistent with these design weaknesses, we find that a substantial fraction of reviewers (73.5%, 59.2%, and 90.6% across Ethereum, BSC, and Base) exhibit coordinated Sybil behavior. After removing Sybil-flagged feedback, 15.8%, 77.9%, and 86.8% of rated agents, respectively, are left with no valid feedback. We then turn these findings into concrete recommendations for future revisions of ERC-8004. Our study yields actionable protocol-design implications and establishes an empirical baseline for research on AI agent markets.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.26028
Customer behavior modeling underpins recommendation, marketing, and decision support, yet existing approaches either optimize predictive accuracy without explaining decisions or simulate users without grounding them in real behavioral data. We present the Large Behavioral Model (LBM) that learns customer decision making directly from large-scale retail transactions through a unified Person-Environment formulation. Customer state is represented by a behavioral profile derived from historical purchases, while product context is incorporated through retrieval-augmented generation. The model is trained using continued pre-training on verbalized behavioral data, supervised fine-tuning for decision generation, and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards for evidence-based calibration. We evaluate the proposed framework on purchase prediction, hard-negative discrimination, basket completion, promotion response, and cross-domain voucher redemption. The model consistently outperforms frontier general-purpose language models on in-domain retail tasks while demonstrating strong zero-shot and fine-tuned transfer across retailers and decision domains. Ablation studies show that continued pre-training is the primary driver of behavioral generalization, retrieval is most effective when applied during both training and inference, and reinforcement learning improves reliance on explicit behavioral evidence over generic language-model priors. These results demonstrate that behavioral knowledge encoded in transaction histories can be effectively learned by language models, providing a scalable foundation for customer digital twins and behavior simulation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06993
Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative AI (GenAI) systems, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, LLaMA, Copilot, Stable Diffusion by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Stability AI, respectively, are revolutionizing cybersecurity, enabling both automated defense and sophisticated attacks. These technologies power real-time threat detection, phishing defense, secure code generation, and vulnerability exploitation at unprecedented scales. Following a rapid surge where LLM-generated malware grew to account for an estimated 50% of detected threats by 2025, up from just 2% in 2021, navigating this highly automated threat landscape in 2026 demands next-generation security frameworks. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the beneficial and malicious applications of LLMs in cybersecurity, including zero-day detection, DevSecOps, federated learning, synthetic content analysis, and explainable AI (XAI). Drawing on a review of over 70 academic papers, industry reports, and technical documents, this work synthesizes insights from real-world case studies across platforms like Google Play Protect, Microsoft Defender, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Apple App Store, OpenAI Plugin Stores, Hugging Face Spaces, and GitHub, alongside emerging initiatives like the SAFE Framework and AI-driven anomaly detection. We conclude with practical recommendations for responsible and transparent LLM deployment and trustworthy AI, including model watermarking, adversarial defense, and cross-industry collaboration, setting a new benchmark for rigorous, holistic cybersecurity research at the intersection of AI and threat defense, and offering a roadmap for secure, scalable LLM systems that serves as a critical reference for researchers, engineers, and security leaders navigating the complex challenges of AI-driven cybersecurity.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06963
Understanding and forecasting audience reactions to video content are crucial for improving content creation, recommendation systems, and media analysis. To enable audience reaction prediction and other content engagement applications, we introduce $\textbf{Video2Reaction}$, a multimodal dataset that maps short movie segments to a distribution of $\textit{induced emotions}$ of viewers in the wild, as expressed through social media. $\textbf{Video2Reaction}$ spans more than 10,000 videos and serves as a reliable benchmark as well as a training resource for audience reaction prediction. To enable cost-effective continuous annotations as reactions may change over time, we develop a two-stage multi-agent pipeline using only open-source LLMs, achieving 86% correctness under blind human verification despite the inherently noisy and subjective nature of the task. We establish the first benchmark for video-to-reaction-distribution prediction in the wild and show that pretrained foundation video models fail in zero-shot settings, while finetuning transforms them into state-of-the-art predictors capable of modeling both full reaction distributions and dominant responses from video alone. However, the task remains challenging: even the strongest methods achieve only 77% Top-3 F1 in dominant reaction prediction (LLaVA-Next), highlighting a substantial gap in modeling collective audience reaction. \modification{Dataset and code are available at our project page: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06875
While personalisation is becoming a defining capability in human-robot interaction (HRI), the existing literature on responsible personalisation remains fragmented, offering isolated accounts of ethical risks without a structured understanding of how they emerge across interaction contexts. This gap is particularly critical in HRI, where robots' embodiment and social presence can amplify and reshape such risks or generate new types of risks. We present a lifecycle-based and context-sensitive framework for personalised HRI, grounded in an embodiment-aware perspective. The framework combines stages of the personalisation process with interaction characteristics (short-term vs. long-term, open-domain vs. closed-domain), enabling systematic analysis of how risks arise and evolve. Building on this, we conduct an integrative analysis of key ethical risks, including autonomy erosion, biased user modelling, manipulation, dehumanisation, and privacy violations, and examine how they manifest across contexts. We translate these insights into actionable design recommendations and outline open research challenges. By structuring both the design space and risk landscape of personalised HRI, this work provides a foundation for more systematic, transparent, and ethically grounded approaches to personalised robot behaviour.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06344
We present VTMR, a two-stage framework for Video-To-Music Recommendation. In Stage~1, VTMR aligns comprehensive video and music signals in a joint audio-visual-text representation space and efficiently retrieves semantically compatible candidates using coarse global embeddings. In Stage~2, it reranks the retrieved candidates by attending to the temporal sequences of both video and music, thereby capturing fine-grained temporal correspondence. Evaluated on the video-to-music recommendation task, the multimodal retrieval stage improves R@10 from 14.2 to 15.9 and Median Rank from 75 to 58 over the strongest baseline; the temporal reranker further boosts R@10 to 18.3 and Median Rank to 46, demonstrating complementary gains from richer query encoding and temporal alignment. A human preference study confirms that VTMR is on par with a commercial baseline in overall preference, while outperforming a generative baseline in music quality.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05971
While signed social recommendation has shown great potential by modeling both trust and distrust relations, its effectiveness is often hindered by structural noise and data sparsity. In this work, we first identify a fundamental inconsistency across the structural, propagation, and semantic layers of existing models, which leads to biased representations learned from sparse or noisy datasets. Furthermore, we observe that most existing methods treat the observed graph as fixed, failing to bridge the gap between noisy topologies and reliable social semantics. To address these issues, we propose a unified framework named SSC-Loop that treats signed social recommendation as the maximization of structural consistency. SSC-Loop includes three dedicated modules: ESA-DA for structural consistency, a P/N/O propagation mechanism for propagation consistency, and a contrastive learning objective for semantic consistency. Experiments on Epinions demonstrate that SSC-Loop achieves strong performance on explicit signed social rating prediction, while auxiliary results on Slashdot under a derived link-existence setting further suggest its ability to exploit signed social structures. Source code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05952
Modern data-driven marketing relies on large amounts of consumer data, yet collecting such data can be costly, time-consuming, and difficult to scale. This research examines whether large language models (LLMs) can be used to generate synthetic consumer data for projective techniques, a set of methods designed to elicit consumer associations, emotions, wants, and needs. We test LLM-generated responses across multiple projective tasks, LLMs, prompting strategies, and temperature settings, and compare them with human responses from a primary research study on perceptions of city tourism destinations. Human and LLM responses were analyzed using linguistic measures, diversity and concentration metrics, topic models, and top-term analyses. The results show substantial overlap between human and LLM responses in broad topics and associations, but also important differences in style, linguistic structure, and the way diversity is generated. Recommendations are given on how to best utilize LLMs for generating synthetic consumer data, how model and prompt choices shape response quality, and on recognizing the limitations of LLM synthetic consumer data generation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05761
Chain-of-thought (CoT) distillation in the recommendation domain is a necessary precursor to RL training, but raw teacher traces are ill-suited to this task. Large teachers approach the recommendation task with unusually high reasoning uncertainty, repeatedly rechecking their answers without revising them; supervised fine-tuning on such traces produces verbose students that never revise their initial guess. Furthermore, due to the novelty of the recommendation domain, the teacher's reasoning traces are highly out-of-distribution for the small student LLM. We propose Student-Aware CoT Optimization for Recommendation Distillation (SCOReD), a CoT optimization framework tailored to recommendation that first parses each teacher trace into typed segments and uses the student LLM's attention to score the importance of each segment. Then SCOReD dynamically selects a per-segment edit (KEEP / REWRITE / FUSE / PRUNE) based on the output length and comparative log probability lift of the answer given the edit as per the student. Therefore, SCOReD prunes redundant sections of the reasoning trace while preserving information-dense sections and adapts raw teacher traces to the student's output distribution. Training on SCOReD-optimized CoTs provides a cleaner learning signal to the student model and improves over baseline SFT by 1.56% NDCG and 1.9% Recall@5, while reducing reasoning length by 27.3%.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05734
AI systems are increasingly used to provide legal advice, raising questions about whether laypeople accept guidance from algorithms--especially when that advice is legally correct but socially controversial. We report a preregistered survey experiment with 3,348 adults in mainland China examining how people evaluate identical legal advice when it is attributed either to an AI system or to a human lawyer, and when it is accompanied by reasoning or not. Contrary to expectations of algorithm aversion, attribution to an AI system has no net effect on perceived reasonableness. However, mediation analyses reveal opposing psychological pathways underlying this null result. AI-attributed advice is perceived as more objective, which increases perceived reasonableness, but also as less comprehensive and less attentive to special circumstances, which decreases perceived reasonableness. By contrast, providing legal reasoning substantially increases perceived reasonableness regardless of source, largely by enhancing perceptions of objectivity. Qualitative responses corroborate this tension between objectivity and contextual sensitivity in evaluations of legal advice. Together, these findings suggest that public responses to AI legal advisors are shaped not by rigid attitudes toward automation, but by the balancing of competing normative expectations. The results have implications for theories of algorithm aversion and the design of AI recommendation systems in normatively salient domains.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05680
Personal agents are becoming persistent user-owned intermediaries: they remember preferences, filter platform-mediated information, use tools, and negotiate with services. Existing benchmarks evaluate tool use, web navigation, desktop control, personalization, recommendation, and evolving context, but rarely ask whether an agent preserves user sovereignty: advancing the user's current interests while respecting privacy, consent, evidence, user burden, and resistance to manipulative incentives. We introduce SovereignPA-Bench, an executable benchmark for evaluating user-owned personal agents under evolving intent, platform mediation, privacy boundaries, consent constraints, evidence requirements, and burden tradeoffs. The benchmark separates agent-visible ObservableState from evaluator-only HiddenLabels, reports component metrics for task success, alignment, privacy, consent, evidence, manipulation, burden, and auditability, and preserves paired scenario ordering for model and policy comparisons. We evaluate 120 sovereignty stress scenarios across 4 model families and 8 policy baselines, yielding 3,840 frozen-prompt trajectories with raw prompts, outputs, provider-form responses, parsed actions, recomputable metrics, hard-set analyses, qualitative cases, and a blinded 3-annotator audit over 240 items. Full-sovereign scaffolding improves sovereignty score over direct, memory-only, consent-only, evidence-only, ReAct/tool-use, safety-prompt, and judge-guard baselines while reducing privacy leakage, consent violation, over-concession, and manipulation capture. Human audit shows high agreement on privacy and consent and lower agreement on manipulation, identifying the subjective frontier of platform-persuasion judgments. These results show that personal-agent evaluation must move beyond task completion toward representative, consent-aware, evidence-grounded action.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05363
Social robots are increasingly deployed in clinical settings to support the well-being of children, where effective support must be personalized to each child. Personalization, choosing the robot action best suited to each child, can be framed as a recommendation problem, and a recently proposed recommender-system framework for social robots offers a principled approach through user profiling, ranking, and responsible computing. Instantiating it, however, is blocked not by the model but by the data, which is hard to gather. A child's state shifts within and across visits, so no fixed description of the user holds. Within a session, the few signals of whether the robot's actions helped are weak and indirect. Across sessions, children are rarely seen more than once, and anonymization breaks the identity needed to link visits. Because care cannot be randomized, existing data is observational, biased toward whatever was already done. Each is a familiar recommender-system problem, and we propose four data principles in response: an integrated profile, effectiveness signals, linkable coverage, and an exposure record logged at collection time. We identify which of these principles each capability requires, and frame them as concrete guidelines for data collection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.05110
Multi-Behavior Recommendation (MBR) leverages multiple user interaction types (e.g., views, clicks, purchases) to enrich preference modeling and alleviate data sparsity issues in traditional single-behavior approaches. However, existing MBR methods face fundamental challenges: they lack principled frameworks to model complex confounding effects from user behavioral habits and item multi-behavior distributions, struggle with effective aggregation of heterogeneous auxiliary behaviors, and fail to align behavioral representations across semantic gaps while accounting for bias distortions. To address these limitations, we propose MCLMR, a novel model-agnostic causal learning framework that can be seamlessly integrated into various MBR architectures. MCLMR first constructs a causal graph to model confounding effects and performs interventions for unbiased preference estimation. Under this causal framework, it employs an Adaptive Aggregation module based on Mixture-of-Experts to dynamically fuse auxiliary behavior information and a Bias-aware Contrastive Learning module to align cross-behavior representations in a bias-aware manner. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate that MCLMR achieves significant performance improvements across various baseline models, validating its effectiveness and generality. All data and code will be made publicly available. For anonymous review, our code is available at the following the link: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.25126
Test maintenance is a critical, yet costly, activity - particularly as codebases rapidly evolve. To assist, we present MAST, a multi-agent framework that predicts which test cases require maintenance following changes to the production code. This identification task is necessary as a precondition to any subsequent maintenance activities, but remains challenging due to the complex relationships between production and test code. MAST advances the state-of-the-art by integrating multiple analyses -- including static, lexical, and semantic analyses - through an intelligent fusion and post-check procedure and by focusing on a realistic use and evaluation setting - i.e., standardized input formats, repository-level analyses, and the ability to infer relations between test and production artifacts rather than assuming a pre-existing mapping. We evaluated MAST on 21 industrial Java repositories from Ericsson AB, considering situations where test maintenance both was and was not required in the ground truth. MAST yielded superior precision to a state-of-the-art baseline - resulting in a higher accuracy, F1, and F2 score - with only some loss in recall. Our ablation study demonstrates the value of each analysis in producing the final recommendations. MAST illustrates the potential of multi-agent systems that can fuse multiple information sources when performing software testing tasks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04786
CI/CD workflows have become executable operational policy: they decide what gets built, tested, released, and deployed, and they mediate how maintainers interact with delivery infrastructure. That makes them an important measurement point for cyber-systems engineering. Recent large language model (LLM) work shows that workflow stages can be recognized directly from configuration files, but stage labels alone do not tell us whether a workflow is brittle, unusual for its ecosystem, or worth revising first. We present an LLM-based CI/CD analysis pipeline that combines repository enrichment, anti-pattern detection, stage mining, and recommendation generation over a large GitHub corpus. Starting from 59,550 repositories with at least 1,000 stars, we identify 34,225 projects with CI/CD and collect 127,559 configuration files. Across 75,201 analyzed workflows, the anti-pattern detector reports 434,769 findings, dominated by reliability and maintainability issues. Across 59,906 configurations, stage usage differs significantly by language ($\chi^2 = 4168.88$, $p < 0.001$, Cramer's $V = 0.063$), and domain analysis shows distinct operational profiles, including higher release and cache usage in mobile projects. For repository-level recommendation generation, few-shot prompting performs best overall, averaging 8.25 recommendations per repository with 96.1% YAML-valid snippets. Taken together, the results argue for CI/CD observability that combines diagnosis, context, and human review rather than treating workflow mining as a stage-classification problem alone.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04579