Machine learning (ML) education faces two persistent and connected obstacles: many educational tools present ML as an opaque black box, which leaves learners with a superficial understanding, and this same opacity prevents users from forming the calibrated trust that appropriate reliance on AI systems requires. We present ICE-T, a didactic framework that integrates three mutually reinforcing facets: intermodal transfer grounded in Bruner's enactive, iconic, and symbolic modes of representation, computational thinking operationalized through the Use-Modify-Create progression, and explanatory thinking supported by a process model. Connecting the framework to the empirical literature on algorithm aversion, AI literacy, and mental model formation, and to systematic reviews of the K-12 ML activity landscape, we argue that the three facets supply the cognitive mechanisms that the trust calibration literature identifies as drivers of appropriate reliance: representational richness, graduated process control, and the capacity to contextualize errors. On this basis, we propose that trust calibration be treated as an explicit educational objective, with ICE-T as a principled and scalable means of achieving it.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02453
A capable brain-MRI report generator can still be, in effect, diagnostically silent. When a multi-chain chain-of-thought (CoT) reporter built on a medical Mistral-7B backbone is evaluated on held-out cohorts, it names most meningiomas and almost all metastases "glioma" (diagnosis recall 0.44/0.07). Yet the answer is not absent from the model: a supervised linear probe applied to its frozen segmentation features recovers the three tumour cohorts at 0.82 macro-F$_1$ (5-fold cross-validation; chance $\approx$0.33). We introduce NeuroFusion, an assistive reporter that surfaces this latent signal rather than overriding it: discriminative field-classifier heads over per-lesion features condition a fast, single-pass draft-then-review decoder on their committed outputs. Built on the identical Mistral backbone, this restores the diagnosis (meningioma 0.92, metastasis 0.75) and wins 8 of 9 prose-content comparisons across three held-out cohorts (RaTEScore, RadGraph-F$_1$, GREEN; Holm-corrected paired BCa), with no significant loss on the ninth, at 5-6x lower latency ($\approx$80 vs. 457 s/case). A controlled negative result sharpens the mechanism: a learned diagnosis pin that overrides the decoder instead of merely informing it collapses out-of-distribution metastasis recall to 0.03. Grammar-constrained decoding keeps 92.3% of records schema-valid, making every sentence entailment-checkable (7.5% contradicted vs. 36.8% for the direct baseline). In a blinded nine-case pilot, two board-certified neurologists independently rated NeuroFusion highest in every tumour type, the only system with zero critical errors, and gave it the top-rated sign-off in eight of nine cases (six outright, two ties).
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02411
Sampling error yields exclusively reactive, non-lesional brain parenchyma in a significant proportion of intracranial biopsies, leaving the underlying disease undiagnosed. We benchmark four pathology foundation models (UNI2-h, Virchow2, Prov-GigaPath, H-optimus-0) as frozen patch encoders within a shared attention-based multiple-instance learning framework using 245 whole-slide images from 186 patients with confirmed downstream diagnoses. We first show that coarse disease-category prediction can be reproduced largely from slide size alone. After restricting classification to three finer diagnostic distinctions within common tissue categories, this confound no longer explains performance, yet disease labels remain predictable above chance under permutation testing (p $\le 10^{-4}$ throughout). Surprisingly, performance is statistically indistinguishable across all foundation-model encoders, suggesting that recovering these weak morphological signatures is not limited by current patch representations. Signed instance-contribution maps and expert review further test whether predictive evidence localizes to reactive parenchyma rather than sampling-induced bias like blood introduced during tissue sampling. These results position acquisition-shortcut auditing via a provenance-only baseline as a necessary control in computational-pathology benchmarks, and show, once that confound is removed, that weakly supervised models still recover disease signal from tissue conventionally regarded as non-diagnostic.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02390
Self-improving agent pipelines have a problem at their center. An optimizer rewrites prompts to score higher, and the score comes from a judge that is itself an LLM. That judge has the last word on whether the system is getting better, and our position is that it has not earned it. The judge should be demoted from oracle to advisor: its verdict becomes one input among several, and every change is gated instead by a deterministic verification layer the judge cannot override. We reached this position by building the alternative and running it. Over months of running autonomous prompt-optimization loops in production across contract analysis, compliance review, and code quality, we cataloged eleven ways the evaluation signal failed, in four classes: judge bias, harness and metric failures, ground-truth errors, and reward hacking. Agents achieved perfect scores by reading cached answer keys from their environment, a 100% pass rate concealing 68% true capability. A corrupted ground-truth label caused the optimizer to delete correct compliance rules to agree with it. A syntactically broken prompt was promoted as the winner because a silent parser fallback improved the metric. Attempts to fix the judge by rewriting its rubric plateaued; the only reliable gain came from a structural constraint on its output order. In response we describe PROCTOR, a Teacher-Student loop in which a stateful orchestrator holds all tool access, stateless subagents diagnose failures and draft mutations they cannot apply, and a Teacher grades those mutations under five deterministic guardrails: hermetic sandboxes, capability-disjoint roles, acceptance checks that outrank the Teacher, frozen holdouts, and canary cases engineered so that a perfect score is itself evidence of cheating. We report the failures this prevented, and, because the Teacher is itself an LLM judge, the failures it did not.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02246
Interview assessment requires per-criterion judgments grounded in behavioral evidence, yet surging applicant volumes have made human-only evaluation costly and inconsistent, while existing AI approaches yield opaque scores without traceable rationale. We introduce PhoenixNest-Video, an evidence-grounded multimodal agent framework for automated video interview assessment. It builds a semantic video graph as structured working memory, performs rubric-conditioned retrieval with cross-modal verification across visual, audio, and textual streams, and produces per-criterion scores anchored to the candidate's materials. A Scorer trained via Rubrics-based Reinforcement Learning with dual rewards for rubric alignment and score-level differentiation internalizes the discriminative structure of multi-level rubrics. PhoenixNest-Video attains 91.50\% grade-level accuracy on VInterview-2025, outperforming substantially larger proprietary models. A compact, rubric-grounded agent therefore scores candidates in closer agreement with an expert panel than direct prompting of much larger models, and exposes the evidence behind each score for human review.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02231
An AI agent can perform well on benchmarks and still be unsuitable for deployment. Existing AI-agent benchmarks measure whether an agent can complete realistic professional work, whereas enterprise deployment asks a different question: whether an agent can meet a required reliability level, under acceptable human oversight, and at tolerable cost. We introduce Reliable Enterprise Agent Deployment (READY), a framework for qualifying AI agents for deployment on enterprise workflows. READY preserves each workflow's own definition of successful execution while applying a common qualification procedure. Given an agent, a workflow, and a class of candidate oversight policies, READY measures the reliability and operating cost of the human-AI system, selects the minimum-cost policy that satisfies a specified reliability target, and statistically qualifies it on held-out cases. The resulting deployment profile characterizes the supported operating point: reliability, human-oversight burden, and cost. READY is implemented as an open testbed that decouples workflow specification, execution, evaluation, and qualification, and runs on existing agent-evaluation infrastructure. In an end-to-end clinical-audit case study spanning 16 agent systems and 750 cases, READY reveals differences hidden by autonomous performance: two systems separated by only 0.3 points in autonomous accuracy (72.8% vs. 72.5%) require 39.2% versus 29.6% human review, respectively, to qualify at the same 76% reliability target under the evaluated oversight policy. READY thus shifts enterprise agent evaluation from how well can the agent perform the work? to under what conditions, and at what cost, can it be reliably deployed? By making those conditions explicit and statistically testable, READY provides a basis for comparing agent systems, setting oversight requirements, and making evidence-based deployment decisions.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02095
Scientific benchmarks are commonly built by domain experts who write tasks and cross-check one another's work, or who adapt existing material from textbooks, published papers, and online resources. These routes can produce strong evaluations, but they require substantial per-item labor. Language models can reduce this repeated work by proposing candidates quickly. The remaining problem is acceptance. We target scientific questions whose answers require computations with specialist software rather than unaided reasoning alone. A candidate is invalid if its script fails or returns a different answer, or trivial if a model answers it without the software. We present ToolGate, which treats every generated item as a proposal and keeps it only if three gates pass. First, an executable solution script must reproduce the proposed answer when run with the scientific software. Second, randomized no-tool screening rejects candidates that models can already solve from the prompt alone. Third, a tool-using agent must solve each survivor within a fixed time limit. We instantiate ToolGate in FEniCSx with 500 generation attempts. The local-verification gate retains 478 candidates. For final reporting, we rescreen this pool after generation: two randomized no-tool screens exclude 222 from the reported pool, and direct GPT-5.5 API calls at medium reasoning (the API default) exclude another 121. Of the remaining 135, a GPT-5.5 Codex CLI agent with access to FEniCSx solves 130; exact deduplication leaves 128 unique protocol survivors. ToolGate turns repeated answer checking and difficulty screening into an auditable process while leaving domain design and final review to experts.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02067
Scientific knowledge graphs organize entities and relations extracted from scientific literature, but they remain inherently incomplete. Missing typed links in such graphs can therefore represent plausible scientific hypotheses, such as unexplored associations between materials and applications. However, scientific hypothesis discovery is challenging because true discoveries are extremely sparse among typed candidate pairs: graph neural networks (GNNs) are efficient but unreliable for ambiguous cases, while large language models (LLMs) are knowledgeable but too costly to apply exhaustively and are not naturally grounded in graph structures. We propose HyGRAIL, a cost-aware and evidence-grounded framework that combines heterogeneous GNN triage with LLM-based hypothesis review. HyGRAIL first uses a GNN to score candidate hypotheses and identify a validation-calibrated ambiguous region, routing only graph-uncertain cases to LLM review. For each routed hypothesis, HyGRAIL retrieves node-level associations and multi-hop relational paths from the knowledge graph (KG), then converts this structured evidence into natural language through template-based or LLM-based naturalization. An LLM review agent finally judges each hard hypothesis using the naturalized evidence and validation-selected decision criteria. On MatKG, HyGRAIL achieves the best F1 score of 0.429, improving over the strongest prior baseline by 0.242 F1 points and over the GNN-only baseline by 0.322. Meanwhile, GNN triage reduces the LLM call rate by 54.36% on average. Ablation studies further show that retrieved graph evidence is crucial for reliable hypothesis verification and that compact, two-sided evidence is more effective than simply increasing retrieval quantity.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02056
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in organizational work, yet their errors often pass human review. Prior research locates such failures in users' capability to review LLM output or their engagement in doing so. We develop an alternative, retrieval-based account of human oversight and posit that error detection is more effective when oversight-relevant information is accessible to users at the moment of review. Across two randomized lab-in-the-field experiments with 640 customer-facing employees, we show that self-generated explanations improve error detection and strengthen recall of verification-relevant reasoning, while cues that reactivate such reasoning help sustain detection under repeated LLM use. Theoretically, we identify information retrievability as a distinct precondition for effective oversight and specify generative encoding and cue-supported reactivation as mechanisms that build and sustain it. Practically, lightweight onboarding self-explanations and daily retrieval cues can make human oversight more resilient as LLM use becomes routine.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01976
Recorded lecture videos, often enhanced with search and summarization features, are a standard study resource. However, students cannot easily ask course specific questions or verify answers against an instructor's lecture. We report a semester-long deployment of VideoPoints platform with a retrieval-augmented chatbot that answers from course lecture materials and returns timestamped citations. The chatbot retrieves only from the active course, uses chapter summaries to guide transcript ranking, and returns clickable timestamped citations. Students used it for quick lookups and exam review. Across 833 messages, 70.5% included citations, none crossed a course boundary, and when no lecture evidence matched, the chatbot usually declined rather than answering. Among the users, citations were the most consistently useful feature, while practice-question generation was the strongest unmet request. We also evaluated the design on the real-world test split of EduVidQA, a public multimodal benchmark for lecture-video question answering. Our design improved correct-lecture retrieval by 6.3 percentage points over dense-only retrieval. Together, the results show that effective deployment depends on course isolation, supported citations, and alignment with students' study practices.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01846
Farsi, spoken by more than 120 million people, lacks a comprehensive benchmark for dialogue generation and understanding. We introduce TALKFA, a unified benchmark comprising three complementary datasets: (1) WIKI-FADIAL, 4.2K Wikipedia-grounded dialogues for knowledge-grounded generation; (2) DAILYDIALOG-FA, 6.6K dialogues annotated for dialogue acts and emotions; and (3) PLAYDIAL-FA, 2.1K theatrical dialogues with sentiment labels. While LLMs assist data construction, every dialogue undergoes multi-stage review and revision by native Farsi speakers, and only the final human-approved dialogues are released. Experiments with six LLAMA and MISTRAL models show that LoRA substantially improves dialogue generation while requiring only 25-50% of the training data to recover over 90% of the final performance gains. Across classification tasks, FABERT achieves the best dialogue-act performance, LORA-MISTRAL-7B performs best on emotion recognition, and MISTRAL-24B achieves the highest sentiment score. Human evaluation and independent external validation demonstrate the reliability of the benchmark, while comparisons with GPT-4.1 as an LLM judge reveal that automatic metrics substantially overestimate dialogue quality. Zero-shot evaluation with frontier LLMs further shows that TalkFa remains a challenging benchmark. We will release all datasets, annotation guidelines, code, and checkpoints.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01810
Large-scale video retrieval requires embedding models to encode long and diverse videos under tight visual-input and inference budgets. Existing methods typically sample a small, fixed set of frames at their original resolution, limiting temporal coverage and ignoring frame importance. Our empirical analysis shows that expanding temporal coverage improves retrieval even under a fixed visual-input budget. Gains are larger when the original per-frame resolution is preserved, highlighting the complementary roles of temporal coverage and spatial fidelity. Motivated by this finding, we propose AllocEmbed, an allocate-then-embed framework that reallocates a fixed visual-input budget across more frames. A lightweight allocator uses low-cost previews to assign frame-wise resolutions before the embedding backbone, preserving more detail where it most benefits retrieval while reducing visual cost elsewhere. We further introduce Retrieval-Driven Policy Optimization (RDPO), which learns the allocator directly from retrieval feedback using a rank-validated similarity gap and a confidence-guided efficiency incentive. Operating entirely before the backbone, AllocEmbed integrates with existing retrieval systems without modifying the embedding model or downstream pipeline. Experiments on the MMEB-V2 V-QA and V-RET tasks and our LongRet benchmark show that AllocEmbed achieves the best overall retrieval performance among the evaluated budget-matched methods and transfers across embedding backbones. Our code is publicly available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01778
Unexploded ordnance (UXO) continues to restrict civilian access, agricultural activity, infrastructure recovery, and environmental remediation in contaminated areas around the world. This study created a multi campaign UAV thermal image data set of inert ordnance, developed a labeled image set from collected imagery, tested object detection models, and identified practical considerations for humanitarian mine action and demining applications. Data were collected during four field campaigns in Tennessee under summer and winter conditions using inert mines, munitions, and other ordnance placed in short grass, tall vegetation, gravel, mulch, rock, compost, and compacted surfaces. Thermal imagery was collected under flight altitutes of 33 m and 15 m. The final source inventory contained 5,855 thermal image label pairs, including 918 positive images and 4,937 background images. After retaining all positive images and downsampling background images, the 33 m dataset contained 420 training and 106 validation images, while the 15 m dataset contained 629 training and 157 validation images. YOLOV11l and RT-DETR-R50 algorithms were trained and evaluated to develop an automated candidate detection model. Practical recommendations include collecting thermal and RGB imagery together, incorporating varied surfaces and background only imagery, considering periods following changes in solar exposure, balancing survey coverage against target pixel representation, calibrating models with representative local data, and retaining qualified human review. The intended use is screening and prioritization for follow on technical survey or EOD assessment, and not a standalone clearance.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01738
The Rashomon effect is a machine learning phenomenon where equally accurate models produce different predictions for the same inputs (predictive multiplicity). Existing work primarily focuses on multiplicity within individual models, but in more complex decision systems, the impact of the Rashomon effect is less well understood. In this work, we study multiplicity from the perspective of auditing incorrect ensemble predictions, where the decision to divert an instance for human review is based on a consistency criterion that combines the ensemble margin with a measure of local prediction variability for each constituent model. With mild assumptions about stability and smoothness, we show that the consistency scores of finite ensembles converge to the corresponding consistency score of the expected model from the Rashomon set as the ensemble size and the number of samples used to measure local prediction variability increase. To demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed criterion, we evaluate the framework with respect to transformer models applied to natural language understanding tasks and parameter-efficient fine-tuning of large language models used for tabular data classification tasks. Our experiments show that ensembling models from the Rashomon set substantially reduces the risk of incorrect predictions going unchecked compared with auditing a single model, while incurring only a moderate increase in the number of diversions. Moreover, the auditing behavior of the full Rashomon set can be closely approximated by finite ensembles of relatively modest size, with the risk approaching zero for some datasets. We further demonstrate that the proposed measure exhibits stronger agreement with established predictive multiplicity metrics than existing consistency measures, providing a more reliable way to capture multiplicity in the Rashomon set.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01397
Role-playing large language models (LLMs) are expected to adopt a character's style while also respecting that character's knowledge boundaries. Prior evaluations detect character hallucination but rarely distinguish whether errors arise from failure to recognize a boundary or from failure to comply despite recognition. We introduce CHARM, a multicultural benchmark of 40 real and fictional characters drawn from five cultural-linguistic regions, and validated by native reviewers. It probes two boundary types, Temporal (historical vs. modern) and Cross-Universe (entities outside a character's narrative or historical universe), using abstention-enabled multiple-choice questions. We propose a two-stage evaluation that separates Boundary-Awareness (explicit recognition that a query is out of scope) from Boundary-Compliance (abstention when answering concrete questions). Evaluations across six LLMs show that hallucination is driven predominantly by compliance failures. Models frequently acknowledge that a query lies outside the character's knowledge yet still provide factual, out-of-character answers. By re-posing the same questions to the target character, we confirm that a large fraction of these cases are verified parametric overrides; the model stores the relevant fact but fails to suppress it. We also observe systematic cultural variation in these failures, consistent with imbalances in how characters from different regions are represented in model knowledge.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01352
Clinical trials are essential for advancing cancer care and drug development, but many fail because of insufficient patient enrollment. While there is growing interest in using AI to support patient recruitment, existing systems largely perform eligibility assessment alone and have rarely been evaluated in real-world oncology workflows. Here we present TrialGPT 2.0, an AI-assisted clinical trial recommendation system designed for real-world deployment. Rather than asking only whether a patient may qualify, the system also assesses which trials warrant further consideration given the patient's current clinical needs and local workflow priorities, and provides structured, inspectable explanations for expert review. Importantly, we evaluated TrialGPT 2.0 retrospectively and prospectively across multiple oncology-focused settings, spanning government, academic cancer-center, patient-advocacy, and NIH referral workflows. In retrospective multicenter cohorts comprising 288 cases, TrialGPT 2.0 retrieved at least one clinician-recommended trial in its top 10 recommendations for approximately 91% of cases while reducing clinician screening time by 55.0%. In a six-month prospective evaluation embedded in an active precision oncology tumor board, TrialGPT 2.0 contributed additional trial opportunities missed by the routine workflow, expanding patient access to clinical trial participation by 90.9%. To support scientific reproducibility, we also introduce NIH-TrialBench, a clinician-authored dataset comprising 126 diverse synthetic patient vignettes and matching scenarios from 11 NIH Institutes and Centers. Together, these results support the value of AI to assist clinical trial matching by improving clinician efficiency and identifying frequently overlooked trial opportunities, ultimately helping to expand and accelerate accrual to cancer trials.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01202
Monocular depth estimation has long stood as a fundamental challenge in computer vision, enabling a wide range of applications including 3D reconstruction, robotics, autonomous driving, and augmented reality. This survey traces the field's evolution from early learning-based methods to the emergence of transformative foundation models. We begin by framing the problem, distinguishing between relative and metric depth estimation, and highlighting the key challenges that have shaped a decade of research. We then present common problem formulations and introduce the most widely used datasets, covering indoor, outdoor, and synthetic data. Following this, we review major advances prior to the foundation model era, distilling core insights from influential methods that contributed to improvements in accuracy, efficiency, and robustness. The survey then turns to the recent surge of foundation-model-based approaches, categorizing them into discriminative and generative paradigms and emphasizing the critical roles of large-scale pretraining (e.g., DINOv3) and synthetic data. We compare representative models using both quantitative benchmarks and qualitative examples, and discuss natural extensions to video-based depth estimation. Further, to illustrate real-world impact, we highlight the integration of depth estimation into applications such as visual SLAM, content generation, and robot perception. Finally, we outline open challenges and promising research directions as the field advances further into the era of foundation models.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01172
We present the zbMATH Open Knowledge Graph, a large-scale RDF knowledge graph (KG) covering more than 250 years of mathematical scholarship. Unlike existing scholarly knowledge graphs that primarily capture bibliographic metadata and citation structures, the zbMATH Open KG integrates expert-curated semantic content, including reviews, keywords, subject classifications, software references, and disambiguated authorship. This combination of domain-specific representation of mathematical knowledge and extensive temporal coverage supports analyses that require fine-grained exploration of mathematical concepts, research fields, and scholarly relationships over time. The resulting graph comprises 34 million entities and 168 million RDF triples represented using established Semantic Web vocabularies, supporting interoperability and FAIR data principles. We further demonstrate its capabilities through query-driven historically grounded scholarly exploration use cases, illustrating how the knowledge graph can surface relationships and patterns that may be difficult to identify from bibliographic and citation information alone. The zbMATH Open KG provides an open semantic infrastructure for studying the development of mathematical knowledge and tracing scholarly connections across centuries of scholarship.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.00969
Remote sensing visual models have continuously advanced various interpretation tasks. However, the research process behind model improvement still heavily relies on manual expertise, requiring extensive trial-and-error iterations in model design, data processing, and performance diagnosis. Existing agent-based approaches mainly focus on task execution and workflow orchestration, while lacking the capability of autonomous research iteration for continuous performance optimization. To address this issue, we propose RingMoClaw, an experience-inspired self-evolving multi-agent framework for remote sensing visual interpretation. RingMoClaw integrates a research branch, a quality-control branch, and a dual-stream dynamic experience bus to establish a closed-loop optimization process covering strategy generation, experiment execution, independent review, and experience accumulation. The heterogeneous Critic mechanism provides stage-wise diagnosis and feedback, while the dual-stream experience bus incorporates external knowledge and internal experimental experience to guide strategy evolution and eliminate ineffective searches. Extensive experiments on four remote sensing downstream tasks, including object detection, scene classification, semantic segmentation, and change detection, demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of RingMoClaw. Compared with the corresponding baseline models, RingMoClaw improves performance by 1.84\% mAP$_{50}$ on object detection and achieves consistent gains across the other three tasks, while reducing the required evolution steps by over 40\% compared with existing research automation frameworks. These results suggest that RingMoClaw offers a feasible route from task execution toward continuous research driven model evolution in remote sensing.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.00814
Security teams and researchers choose knowledge-graph extraction tooling for threat reports on the strength of published triple-F1 scores, yet those scores depend on how predicted triples are matched to gold annotations. We could reimplement the stated matching rule for only five of twelve inspected systems. Re-scoring ten system outputs on shared documents under eight protocols reverses eleven of forty-five pairwise orderings; one fixed prediction set spans 0.16-0.70 F1. On GRID's external 378-item calibration set, no mechanical matcher (lexical, embedding, or entailment) agrees with multi-reviewer adjudication above 71%, whereas an LLM judge reaches 86%. To separate component effects from matcher rewards, we build CTIForge, whose deterministic validation layer can vary while extraction is held byte-identical. Across seven tested deployment configurations, validation raises precision for all four hosted backbones and lowers it for all three offline backbones. Because backbone, decoding, and backend-specific prompting covary, this is a descriptive split rather than an isolated serving effect. It coincides with a roughly 2.8-fold increase in actions explicitly disputing entity type, consistent with hand-written rules encoding the conventions of the extractor against which they were developed. We release the pipeline, protocol suite, and per-triple audit records.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.01671