Objective: Trofinetide, approved in 2023 as the first Rett syndrome treatment, lacks scalable real-world monitoring because chart review is labor-intensive. We developed a dual large language model (LLM) consensus pipeline to extract 18 treatment-response phenotypes, comprising 4 adverse effects, 13 Rett clinical features, and medication refusal, from clinical notes. Materials and Methods: We analyzed 26,763 notes from 108 patients with confirmed sustained trofinetide exposure at Texas Children's Hospital. The pipeline filters notes by keyword, classifies each through two LLMs requiring consensus, and aggregates a patient-by-timepoint matrix. Architecture and prompt were selected on a diarrhea development set, then frozen and applied to the other 17 phenotypes with the phenotype definition substituted, as an out-of-sample test. The reported prompt comparison scores 183 expert-labeled cells. Results: A prompt requiring diarrhea to be active and severe performed best (84.2 $\pm$ 0.0% accuracy; F1 = 0.674), 47 percentage points above regular-expression matching ($p < 0.0001$). Expert reviewers judged six of the pipeline's calls per phenotype, three positive and three negative, and agreed with 90.2% (92/102). The 13 Rett clinical features are manifestations of the disorder itself rather than adverse effects of trofinetide. Gross and fine motor impairment, language/communication, and stereotypy were documented present in 92-100% of patients at every visit. Discussion: In-context LLM extraction captured multi-domain treatment responses. The outcome is documented presence at each visit, not a direction-of-change judgment. Conclusion: Coupling in-context LLM reasoning with a consensus architecture offers a scalable alternative to keyword and regular-expression extraction for real-world evidence, adapting to new phenotypes and medications through configuration alone.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22062
Context: Organizations increasingly delegate code review to multi-agent large language model (LLM) pipelines billed per token. Low code quality raises human maintenance effort, but its effect on agent review cost has not been measured. Objective: We test whether baseline CodeHealth predicts the token cost of agentic review and fix beyond pull request (PR) footprint. Method: In a pre-registered observational study, we sampled 465 agent-authored PRs from 246 repositories in AIDev, jointly stratified by CodeHealth and footprint under repository caps. A frozen five-agent review-and-fix pipeline processed every PR with three different LLMs. Per LLM, we fitted a mixed model of log tokens on CodeHealth and log PR footprint, with a repository random intercept. Results: For all three LLMs the CodeHealth coefficient was negative, with 95% CI excluding zero; each CodeHealth point was associated with 3.5% to 6.1% lower token cost. CodeHealth was unrelated to PR footprint, so PR size does not explain the association. Two of three registered smells predicted fix cost; batch fixing left median CodeHealth unchanged. Exploratory analyses located the association in the review stage, where agents iterated more on unhealthy code without writing more comments. Adjusting for the size of the scored files absorbed the association, which we interpret as mediation by file size. Conclusions: A quality metric calibrated against human maintainability also predicts the inference cost of multi-agent review and fix. The effect is modest per point and not carried by PR size, so the refactoring case extends to agent-reviewed code when it changes structure and file size, not only the score. Data Availability: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21914
Multimodal objects can require different partitions under different instructions, as when products in an e-commerce catalog are grouped by color, material, or both. Retrieval-oriented embeddings may not recover these partitions, while generative clustering often relies on intermediate descriptions or iterative decisions. This paper presents CIM-Embed, a framework for learning instruction-conditioned multimodal embeddings for clustering. Supervised contrastive learning uses same-group positives and negatives from other groups, optionally including other tasks; heterogeneous structured batches accommodate tasks with different group counts. At inference, the model maps each object's image, text, and instruction directly to an embedding; HDBSCAN then forms a partition without the ground-truth cluster count. We construct ProductMIC from product metadata in Amazon Reviews 2023, comprising training data and an evaluation benchmark for instruction-conditioned clustering. The benchmark contains 5,373 products and 449 single-attribute and compositional grouping tasks spanning 50 leaf categories excluded from our training. With full-dimensional embeddings and HDBSCAN, direct within-task SupCon training achieves a mean per-task V-measure of 95.01, compared with 53.06 for WeMM 9B, the strongest general-purpose embedding baseline evaluated. Frozen product-trained encoders also improve out-of-domain conditional grouping, while controlled transfer experiments distinguish partition transfer from instruction response. We will release the code and dataset upon acceptance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21805
Sky-image irradiance forecasting is dominated by a two-stage design: a video-prediction model forecasts future sky frames, and a separately trained regressor maps those frames to irradiance. We propose a single-stage alternative that co-denoises the future sky-image and clear-sky-index sequences in one diffusion process, with an irradiance head that reads a denoised preview of the future sky rather than the noised diffusion state. The forecaster needs no regression stage and runs from sky images and deterministic covariates alone, with no measured irradiance at its input --- the situation at a site with a camera but no pyranometer. On 2023 SIRTA data the model reaches a pooled RMSE of $104.1$~W\,m$^{-2}$ and a skill score of $+0.34$ on the continuous ranked probability score (CRPS) against smart persistence, higher than any of twelve baseline configurations, and retains that skill when retrained on 2021--2022. On the model's own generated frames, a separately trained regressor reaches $150.6$~W\,m$^{-2}$ against the joint head's $104.1$: roughly $46$~W\,m$^{-2}$ that joint training recovers and a cascade discards. Point accuracy is competitive but not best: a deterministic network that also reads measured irradiance attains $97.6$~W\,m$^{-2}$. The model's CRPS skill leads that network's in every sky-condition tertile, by $0.26$ to $0.30$.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21795
Data strategy plays a central role in training large language models (LLMs). It governs the selection, weighting, and scheduling of training data, thereby determining the capabilities a model can acquire from a fixed data budget. We treat high-quality data as having high training-dependent utility, which depends on the target objective, the model, and its training state rather than on the text alone. Research in this area now spans pretraining and post-training, but related ideas use inconsistent terminology and evaluation protocols. This work reviews data strategies across the training lifecycle and formulates them as policies that allocate a training budget over candidate examples. We organise methods by their decision granularity, model dependence, and temporal adaptivity, then compare their computational requirements and empirical support. Fine-grained or state-dependent policies offer more control but incur additional scoring, search, or rollout costs. Evidence for transfer across model scales and comparable end-to-end cost remains limited. A continuously updated list of papers, along with their public implementations, is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21681
With the rise of large language models, agentic systems are becoming increasingly autonomous, as they write code, call tools, revise prompts, and propose modifications to their own components. This autonomy raises a fundamental question for safe self-improvement: can an automated gate like a reward model or an automated reviewer reliably decide whether a proposed update should be accepted? The difficulty is structural. The gate must be a terminating, computable procedure, while the property we ultimately care about, namely whether an update is a genuine semantic improvement, depends on potentially unbounded program behavior. We formalize this mismatch by modeling agents as programs and defining improvement in terms of a semantic score that need not be computable. We study two evaluation abstractions. The first is a certifier that approves or rejects an update. The second is a search procedure that, given access to a proposal generator, attempts to output some improving candidate if one exists. We show that, in the fully general setting, no terminating procedure can simultaneously guarantee reliability (never accepting a non-improvement) and non-conservatism (never missing an available improvement): self-referential constructions can force any such gate or searcher to fail. Randomized gates with bounded error face the same limit. We then identify a standard decidable regime used in practice (bounded evaluation and a finite proposal budget) under which exhaustive simulation yields a terminating search procedure with the desired guarantees. We also show the limit of this recovery: a chain of accepted updates can raise the bounded score in every round while the true score falls. Our results draw a boundary between unbounded, universal settings where correctness guarantees collapse and bounded settings where they can be recovered by design.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21646
Medical segmentation uncertainty is often evaluated with calibration error or pixel-level error-detection scores, but these metrics do not show whether uncertainty improves downstream review decisions. We propose a decision-aware evaluation protocol that separates uncertainty estimation from deferral policy and evaluates their combination under fixed review budgets: which pixels, regions, or images should be accepted, and which should be reviewed. The protocol reports fixed-budget error reduction, risk-coverage behaviour, region-level review proxies, structural failure modes, probability-derived baselines, and sensitivity to review assumptions. We instantiate it across retinal vessel, skin lesion, and polyp segmentation with multiple backbones and uncertainty estimators. Under matched inference budgets and canonical multi-layer MC Dropout, test-time augmentation (TTA) gives a stronger error-detection signal across matched MC--TTA comparisons, including architecture and dropout-placement checks. However, estimator rankings are not universal. For example, probability-derived scores remain competitive, deep ensembles can outperform TTA, learned deferral helps mainly when the base estimator is weak, and rankings can change with review unit, uncertainty target, correction assumptions, and cost model. Structural and second-observer analyses further show that boundary and thin-structure failures are partly tied to annotation ambiguity. These findings support evaluating uncertainty as an estimator-policy-review configuration, not as a standalone score map. Code: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21616
Diffusion models (DMs) have steadily demonstrated outstanding performance in high-fidelity, controllable generation across diverse scenarios, following the "pretraining-finetuning" paradigm established in LLMs. Despite these advances, conventional DMs still face critical limitations in sophisticated reasoning, autonomous exploration of generation pathways, and adaptability to complex, human-aligned objectives. Inspired by RLHF's success in LLMs, RL has recently emerged as a pivotal post-training mechanism to iteratively refine DMs through reward-driven trajectory optimization. This paper presents the first comprehensive review of RL-driven DMs and an empirical analysis of how RL reshapes the diffusion process towards experience-centric, goal-directed generation. We propose a novel technical panorama elucidating RL's multifaceted roles in diffusion-based language, multimodal, robotic, and scientific models, with a granular focus on diffusion trajectory optimization and reward engineering. Through extensive experiments on multiple task-specific benchmarks, we systematically evaluate representative methods to intuitively highlight the advantages of different RL post-training strategies. Furthermore, we reveal and dissect three crucial bottlenecks that currently hinder the real-world deployment of RL-driven DMs: reward design fragility, exploration-exploitation trade-off in high-dimensional generation spaces, and training instability under sparse rewards. Based on these perspectives, we provide a principled roadmap for the integration of RL into DMs and outline promising future research directions for robust, interpretable RL-diffusion systems. We also construct a public repository to continuously track the latest developments in this rapidly evolving field: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21539
Large language model agents solve tasks through long sequences of tool calls, and the prevailing design has a single strong model generate every step, although many steps are routine enough for a much smaller model. Existing ways of sharing this work keep the strong model as the generator: routers and collaborative agents decide which model handles each query or step, and speculative methods check a small model's drafts one step at a time, usually against the strong model's own action. We introduce SpecAgent, a collaboration protocol that turns the strong model from the author of each step into a reviewer of steps drafted by a weak model. The weak model executes read-only tool calls as it drafts, so that every step is grounded in real observations, and holds the first action that would modify the environment. The strong model then verifies the drafted segment in a single prefill pass, commits the longest prefix it judges semantically valid, and repairs the first rejected step. Because verification replaces autoregressive decoding with parallel prefill, the strong model decodes only short verdicts and occasional repairs rather than every step. On $\tau^2$-Bench, SpecAgent comes within one point of the strong model's success rate while roughly halving memory traffic and wall time, and on AutomationBench and VitaBench it recovers 44-75% of the quality gap while lowering both. In an edge-cloud deployment on MCP-Atlas with three cloud models, it closes 53-75% of the weak-strong quality gap while the strong model generates at most half as many tokens. These results suggest that a strong model need not author every step of an agent: reviewing grounded drafts retains most of its quality while cutting both latency and memory traffic.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21463
In automatic speech recognition (ASR), transcription errors with similar lexical or semantic discrepancies can have markedly different consequences for the situation conveyed by speech. Capturing these differences requires not merely contextual assessment, but an understanding of what the spoken discourse describes, establishes, or seeks to bring about. However, relying on LLM judges introduces computational cost and scoring variability. We introduce SITAR, a situational distortion metric for ASR, realized through a comprehensive end-to-end construction framework. Specifically, this framework aggregates situational severity and cumulative extent into a unified score via a bounded recursive formulation. Using targets derived from this formulation with limited offline LLM support, we train SITAR as a lightweight BERT-family regressor that scores reference-hypothesis pairs in a single forward pass, entirely free of any prohibitive runtime costs. Recognizing that introducing a new metric demands rigorous justification, we formalize a principled validation protocol spanning both extrinsic validity, assessed at macro and micro levels, and intrinsic scorer reliability. The former, evaluated across diverse datasets and models, demonstrates that SITAR reliably tracks broad capability scaling while providing orthogonal diagnostic utility, whereas the latter, examined on a purpose-built controlled benchmark, confirms the operational soundness of the scoring instrument itself. Through systematic validation, we demonstrate that SITAR holds strong potential as a practical, lightweight complement to existing ASR metrics. We will release the full recipes (code, model weights, dataset, etc.) after the internal review to support community research.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21440
Multi-agent LLM systems rely on generative models for expert execution, workflow planning, and artifact review. Yet many coordination operations require only bounded decisions, such as selecting the next expert or judging artifact quality. Profiling three representative MAS frameworks, we find that routing and review account for 31.7-43.5% of generative-LLM tokens. However, replacing these operations with low-cost decision models introduces two interface gaps: generative planners produce execution plans and handoff instructions (planning gap), while reviewers provide actionable feedback for repairing flawed artifacts (review gap), which bounded decisions alone cannot provide. We introduce Jev-LiteMAS, a multi-agent framework that bridges both gaps by combining a lightweight decision model (Jev) with generative execution and feedback. To address the planning gap, Jev selects experts dynamically from the task and prior expert outputs, using accumulated context to ground subsequent execution without a pre-generated trajectory. To address the review gap, Jev screens intermediate artifacts against task criteria: passing artifacts proceed directly, whereas flagged ones undergo LLM re-review for acceptance or corrective feedback. Across four benchmarks and two backbones, Jev-LiteMAS reduces generative-LLM tokens by 12.7-54.6% over LAS, maintaining accuracy within 1.34 percentage points and lowering latency in seven of eight settings. Grounding routing in substantive expert outputs prevents up to 18.0 points in accuracy loss.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21411
Root-cause analysis (RCA) in large-scale distributed systems is challenging because a single symptom can cross service, data, configuration, compute, and organizational boundaries. Responders must assemble incomplete evidence and coordinate experts who hold different parts of the causal path. Generic language-model agents do not solve this problem through tool access alone: they can use stale or mistimed context, interpret failed queries as absent symptoms, report unsupported system state, and overload observability services designed for human-paced use. We present Diviner (Domain-Informed Verifiable Incident Navigation through Evidence and Review), an agentic RCA system operating at Meta and organized around a four-stage reliability lifecycle. Encode combines a large corpus of reviewed incidents with service-owner expertise to produce scoped, versioned skills, workflows, typed tools, and an incident knowledge graph. Execute uses an adaptive Lead and context-isolated workers to apply relevant knowledge to point-in-time evidence and maintain evidence-linked hypotheses. Evaluate compares saved investigation trajectories with responder-reviewed outcomes to measure exact cause, useful direction, and Groundedness. Adapt uses recurring gaps and on-call feedback to derive focused operational- knowledge updates, admitting them only after replay, quality checks, and owner approval.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21281
LLM agents are used to check records against an organization's requirements, for example whether a vulnerability report is ready for investigation. Requirements often allow several ways to be met, such as a severity rating with a curator-reviewed advisory or a published advisory link. Agents fail by accepting a report after a required check has failed, or by settling for a weaker conclusion without trying another way that could still succeed. We introduce PRIME (Precommitted Rules for Inference from Minimal Evidence). Before checking, it fixes evidence routes specifying how each conclusion may be justified. A separate program records each check result and refuses any conclusion the results do not justify. It also points the agent to checks that could justify a stronger conclusion, or runs them itself. PRIME reports only conclusions authorized by its rules and ledger. With correct requirements, exact checks at known locations, and sufficient budget at stopping, completion reaches the strongest supported conclusion. On 480 public-record tasks, an agent shown the requirements reported unjustified conclusions on 26.7% of tasks, while PRIME reported none. Its directions and added checks raised the average score for justified conclusions from 30.1, with refusal alone, to the maximum of 59.2 out of 100.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22426
Cyber threat intelligence (CTI) relies on the timely identification of emerging threats, enabling organizations and security analysts to support situational awareness and decision-making. Social media platforms such as X (formerly Twitter) have become valuable CTI sources because vulnerabilities and attack activities are often discussed there before appearing in formal reports. However, the rapid growth of cybersecurity discussions on social media has created more content than domain experts can realistically review and annotate, making labeled data a major bottleneck for developing supervised learning approaches. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise as weak annotators in other domains, their effectiveness for cybersecurity tweet classification and downstream training of domain-specific pre-trained language models (PLMs) remains underexplored. To address this challenge, we propose a Teacher-Student weak supervision framework in which a selected LLM serves as a Teacher to generate weak labels for unlabeled cybersecurity tweets, enabling the training of cybersecurity-specific PLMs without large-scale manual annotation. Experimental results show that PLMs trained solely on LLM-generated labels consistently achieve F1 scores above 0.92, remaining within 3 percentage points of fully human-supervised models across all evaluated architectures. These findings suggest that LLM-based weak annotation offers a practical alternative for constructing cybersecurity-specific training data when expert annotation resources are limited.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21254
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) math corpora are routinely screened for benchmark overlap, but the reliability and data-loss costs of cleaning policies remain underexamined. We audit sixteen open RLVR math corpora comprising 1,673,514 corpus-specific training items against six benchmarks containing 1,949 questions. We evaluate eight policies based on exact, lexical, and semantic matching using 594 independently and blindly dual-reviewed training-benchmark pairs. Calibration and held-out sets have disjoint benchmark questions and training-example families. A separate review of all 83 candidate matches for 80 sampled training items measures item-level false removal. At cosine threshold 0.80, 52 of 59 sampled removals (88%) were confirmed false removals; this is not a demonstrated population rate. No semantic threshold in our preregistered grid (0.80-0.98) meets the 90% conservative-precision target on calibration. The existing judge-adjudicated policy achieves 98.1% resolved precision and 98.2% candidate-frame recall on held-out corpora. It has zero confirmed false removals among six sampled removals, with one unresolved case; this does not establish zero risk. Within the evaluated candidate frame, this policy offers a more favorable precision-recall balance than the semantic-threshold alternatives tested. Recall does not measure contamination outside the candidate frame. We release reviewed labels, per-policy decisions, and coverage accounting to support evaluation of cleaning reliability and cost rather than overlap counts alone.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21229
We present a Korean Benchmark Suite (KBS) comprising Ko-ARC, Ko-GSM8K, Ko-EQ-Bench, Ko-WinoGrande, Ko-LAMBADA, and Ko-IFEval, covering six capabilities across 9,396 items. The suite combines review, localization, direct Korean construction, and redesign for Korean, avoiding a translation-only approach to benchmark adaptation. We evaluate Korean-developed models, multilingual open models, and closed API models under protocols that account for model access, prompt format, and scoring differences. Results show that Korean benchmark scores depend on task construction, scoring rules, prompting, and model post-training. These findings suggest that Korean evaluation should report both final scores and the settings used to obtain them.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21227
Task completion alone does not determine whether a stateful agent satisfied its obligations, and a recorded judgment does not guarantee that its supporting evidence remains valid. We present AgentEval, a system that carries a contract-bound assessment record through tool execution, state and event capture, report qualification, and case maintenance. It separates what the agent did, what the evidence establishes, and whether the conclusion is supported for present use. On 32 tool-world administrations, independent checks agree on all 30 complete episodes, distinguishing satisfied, violated, and unresolved obligations; two interrupted administrations are retained. Controlled interventions on 48 evidence views expose 36 binding faults missed by hash-only checks without changing agent behavior. Scenario Studio connects reviewed cases to 12 two-turn reports with 24 independently checked answers. A separate public-benchmark study on 192 held-out executions reveals ten completed return subgoals within broader task failures and isolates the effect of missing evidence. These studies show how an executable assessment record makes scope, evidential support, and report reuse inspectable across an agent evaluation workflow.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21177
Cybersecurity interviews uncover critical security experiences, behaviors, and privacy concerns often not fully captured by conventional technical assessments. Consequently, identifying genuine self-disclosures is challenging because statements are context-dependent, categories overlap, and automated interpretations may introduce unsupported claims. Locally deployed Small Language Models (SLMs) protect sensitive participant data by keeping processing within controlled environments, but their limited reasoning capabilities make simple prompting insufficient for context-aware and factually reliable analysis. This study developed CARE-SD (Context-Adaptive Reasoning and Explanation for Self-Disclosure), a novel four-module architecture integrating context-adaptive processing, hierarchical disclosure reasoning, explanation-consistency verification, and cross-batch reconciliation. We evaluated three local SLMs, including Llama 1B, Qwen 1.5B, and Llama 3B, using 82 independently annotated cybersecurity interviews across five organizational sectors. Comparisons included conventional classifiers, three prompting strategies, larger 8B--32B models, and architectural ablations. Two independent reviewers assessed disclosure labels, factual claims, and explanation correctness. CARE-SD improved the accuracy and evidence reliability of SLMs, increasing Llama 3B Macro-F1 from 0.80 to 0.88 while reducing unsupported claims by 60\%. Remarkably, the 3B model matched the 20B reference model in category Macro-F1, demonstrating the effectiveness of the architecture without requiring a larger model.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21151
Peer review is under strain from the growth of submissions, and review comments written by humans or AI can misstate what a paper says. We introduce ReviewFact, a benchmark that labels such factual errors in review comments under one definition across NLP, machine learning, and the natural sciences, and that measures cost and latency alongside accuracy. A frontier LLM checks comments well but must read the whole paper for each check, while cheap decision models, which score whether a statement holds in a text, fall far short on whole comments that mix several implicit assertions. PremiseCheck is a framework that combines the two. An LLM rewrites each comment as explicit premises without reading the paper, and a decision model checks each premise against the paper. When each comment is checked on its own, PremiseCheck reaches accuracy comparable to GPT-5.5 across all three fields at about half its cost, and on NLP reviews at a quarter of its cost and less than half its latency.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21046
Systematic literature reviews follow the PRISMA process of screening scholarly works and extracting evidence from included studies. Deep research tools based on large language models (LLMs) can search and summarize the literature but do not record which studies are excluded or where extracted values come from. We develop a conversational multi-agent system called ReviewPilot that automates the PRISMA workflow from paper screening to information extraction. Researchers can tailor criteria and schemas through dialogue, and a project memory keeps their configurations and revisions. Each screening decision comes with its reason and each extracted value with its source. On epidemiological expert reviews, ReviewPilot outperforms a single-prompt LLM and AgentSLR across three LLMs, with screening macro F1 up to 0.776 and extraction F1 up to 0.788. Case studies in biomedicine and human-computer interaction show close agreement with human annotators, suggesting that ReviewPilot can transfer beyond epidemiology. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.21042