Large language models are moving from helping write up research to helping do it, which makes it important to know how the scientific text they produce differs from human writing. Work on this question has stayed mostly at the surface, using lexical and stylistic cues that light paraphrasing erases. We look instead at rhetorical structure, the sequence of argumentative moves through which a text makes its case. We study research-article introductions under Swales' CARS model, and compare original introductions from published linguistics articles with generated counterparts of the same papers. We find that human-written introductions are more flexible in which moves they use and in what order, while the generated ones are more uniform. Giving the models the CARS definitions makes them more rigid.
Tool-using large language model (LLM) agents turn generated text into real side effects, so poisoned tool metadata, retrieved pages, memory, and reusable skills can steer the next call. Vetting an artifact before admission does not settle this. A safe variant and a leaking variant can produce the same admission evidence, and a sound gate then cannot relax that site for either. We make that condition precise, which leaves the last boundary a deployment can still act on. We present Provenance-Aware Capability Enforcement (PACE), which mediates every tool call immediately before it executes. Path confinement proposes an executable cut of represented influence paths, while capability and effect verification checks schema-defined effects against authority compiled from the authenticated request. We distinguish the certified execution contract from the evaluated configuration, which can restore an authorized call after a proposed block or apply a declared repair. Confinement requires the final action to preserve the certified cut. On eight executable agent-security benchmarks with three target-model families, the evaluated configuration gives strictly lowest attack success in 62 of 79 eligible attack columns and ties in 14; full-benchmark native utility loses at most three points relative to the undefended agent. A complete ablation over 1167 paired cases attributes most security gains to effect verification and refusal control to boundary adaptation. A reduced-scale adaptive search succeeds on 0/30 out-of-authority targets against the defense.
When developers change one component of an agent, such as its controller, a learned model or its verifier, they usually judge the change by an aggregate task score. That score cannot tell whether improvement was attainable, which component lost value, or what the agent's own checks certify. We introduce a claim-specific verification audit for modular agents that plan, act, check and refine. Instead of scoring the agent, the audit scores the evidence: each conclusion is recorded with the evidence behind it, one of four verdicts (supported, unsupported, unresolved or not evaluated) and the boundary within which it holds. Three tools supply that evidence. Oracle policies measure attainable improvement under an explicitly stated action set, so that a low value can be traced to the evaluation rather than to the environment. Replacing one component at a time with a perfect counterpart locates lost value, with null results read as unresolved whenever a downstream component could mask them. A separate test asks whether the verifier's score identifies the quantity it is read as bounding. Applied to a constrained portfolio-allocation agent in a synthetic market with known hidden regimes, the audit shows that the value of perfect regime information depends on the action set used to measure it, that the scenario generator discards most of the regime signal while better local fidelity does not improve decisions, and that the runtime verifier can be bypassed with no visible change in outcomes. The contribution is the protocol and the evidential distinctions it enforces; the empirical findings are specific to the agent and environment studied.
Regulatory compliance checking - deciding whether a target document satisfies the obligations of a regulation - requires interpreting dense legal text, identifying which provisions apply, and grounding each decision in explicit evidence. We present ARCCS, an end-to-end, automated, agentic, and regulation-agnostic Legal NLP system for compliance checking. ARCCS decomposes raw regulatory text into atomic, traceable requirements and evaluates a target document against them using retrieved evidence, confidence scores, and human-interpretable justifications. This design decouples compliance assessment from any fixed regulatory template or predefined rule set, enabling the pipeline to operate over regulations of varying size and structure. We evaluate ARCCS in two complementary settings. First, in a GDPR policy-document evaluation, LLM-based judges find its decisions and justifications legally and evidentially consistent in up to 96.67% of the assessed cases. Second, on an EU public-procurement benchmark comprising more than 1,200 individual rule checks, the system attains 98.8% accuracy in violation detection. ARCCS is, to our knowledge, the first fully open-source system for end-to-end regulatory compliance checking and auditable report generation.
Reinforcement learning offers the prospect of a reusable sequential decision-making mechanism for spacecraft trajectory design, motivating policy interfaces that connect learned decisions to the underlying maneuver geometry. This paper develops Reachability Analysis-Informed Reinforcement Learning (RARL) for deterministic multi-impulse interplanetary transfers, placing intermediate waypoint selection at the center of the learned decision process. Local first-order reachability maps bounded velocity perturbations into an ellipsoidal set of next-node positions, within which the policy selects its waypoint. Lambert reconstruction then determines the corresponding maneuver to reach this selected waypoint along a dynamically consistent ballistic arc, coupling learned transfer-geometry selection with classical astrodynamics. A terminal two-impulse reconstruction completes the rendezvous, supported by a linear maneuver-demand assessment used for reward shaping. Numerical studies characterize this interface on a two-body Earth-Mars benchmark. Across three independent training runs, RARL achieves a mean maneuver cost of 10.23 km/s, 1.72% above a validated local sequential convex programming reference. Training over dispersed initial states extends policy reuse across a departure family with fixed target state and transfer duration. Each of the three independently trained multi-state policies completes all 10,000 held-out Monte Carlo departures without impulse-cap violations, compared with a mean feasibility rate of 6.49% for single-state policies. This broader sampled feasibility is accompanied by a 0.61% increase in mean nominal maneuver cost, without further training across departures. These results demonstrate that a reachability-informed decision interface supports benchmark-quality trajectory construction and policy reuse across dispersed departure conditions.
We study the classical single-machine scheduling problem of minimizing the sum of completion times of jobs in a non-clairvoyant setting, where the processing time of each job remains unknown until its completion. This is a hard problem for which no constant competitive algorithm is possible. Inspired by robust optimization and learning-augmented algorithms, we introduce a novel robustness framework that leverages structural information provided by a classification model to overcome this limitation. Specifically, we assume that jobs are partitioned into classes and we have access to the confusion matrix of the classifier, whose entry (k,) indicates the number of jobs predicted to belong to class~k but that actually belong to class~. In this manner, we are able to characterize uncertainty as a set of permutations within each predicted class, rather than as a collection of discrete numerical scenarios, avoiding the computational difficulty of classical robust metrics, such as Min-Max and Min-Max Regret. In addition to these worst-case metrics, we also consider the expected objective over all scenarios. We first propose an optimal non-adaptive strategy that is oblivious with respect to all three robust criteria. We then investigate adaptive and randomized algorithms, showing that they can outperform the optimal non-adaptive strategy when the matrix exhibits particular structural properties.
This paper presents the European Crisis Management Ontology (ECMO), a modular OWL-based ontology intended as a cross-sectoral reference for disaster risk reduction and response. ECMO is designed to be organised as a network of ontological modules. Among the modules, ECMO-CORE captures fundamental crisis management concepts such as hazard, event, exposure, impact, and response measure and uses ontology design patterns and the OWL2 punning technique to resolve ambiguities between hazard types and event manifestations. In addition, domain-specific modules are defined as in the case of the public health module aligned with SNOMED CT and ICD-11. To demonstrate the resource's utility, we used ECMO to represent the data of the Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources system of the Joint Research Centre to generate an end-to-end pipeline that populates an ECMO-compliant knowledge graph from unstructured epidemiological news. Initial results demonstrate that ECMO provides the formal guardrails necessary for consistent and unified knowledge representation and integration. The ontology is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20070268 and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.
Reinforcement learning for trading often struggles to balance upside participation with drawdown control. Profit-only policies can collapse toward passive long exposure on upward-drifting assets, while aggressively risk-penalized rewards can become too defensive during volatile periods. This paper proposes PPO-HRAP, a hybrid regime-aware policy that combines Proximal Policy Optimization with an interpretable regime prior. The agent observes both market features and portfolio-state variables, receives a reward combining portfolio log return, VIX-conditioned drawdown-increase penalty, target-exposure deviation, and turnover cost, and executes a blended action between the PPO actor output and a regime-derived target exposure. On the held-out 2020-2022 SPY test window, PPO-HRAP achieves 27.62% total return, 8.48% annualized return, 0.6447 Sharpe ratio, 0.8588 Sortino ratio, and 0.4592 Calmar ratio, while reducing maximum drawdown from 34.10% for Buy and Hold to 18.47%. Across five SPY seeds, PPO-HRAP remains stable with mean total return 0.2725 0.0109 and mean Sharpe ratio 0.6219 0.0565. Single-run cross-asset tests on QQQ and DIA further show that the proposed method ranks first on total return and Sharpe ratio for all three reported assets. These results suggest that blending learned actions with a volatility-aware regime prior is a practical way to improve risk-adjusted trading behavior, although the current policy still incurs high turnover and cross-asset robustness beyond SPY remains limited to single-run evidence.
Patient-specific clinical question answering requires locating the right evidence within long, heterogeneous longitudinal clinical records in which relevant facts may be scattered across encounters, repeated in copied-forward notes, or expressed using different clinical terminology. We evaluated whether biomedical reranking can improve evidence selection and downstream answer quality in a locally deployed retrieval-augmented generation pipeline for longitudinal clinical notes. The pipeline combines PubMedBERT dense retrieval, BM25 lexical retrieval, weighted reciprocal-rank fusion, and MedCPT cross-encoder reranking. Across 1,000 open- and closed-ended question-answer pairs from a cohort of 200 bariatric surgery patients, reranking increased exact source-chunk retrieval within the top 10 items, Hit@10 from 46.6% to 60.6% and mean reciprocal rank from 0.2371 to 0.3252. With Qwen3-8B generation, local judge-assessed answer correctness increased from 44.8% to 48.6%. These results show that biomedical reranking can improve the placement of relevant clinical evidence within a limited context window, although gains in retrieval do not translate proportionally into gains in answer correctness.
Safety-aligned large language models (LLMs) often refuse a harmful request but comply once the same goal is spread over several turns. Preference objectives score whole responses to single prompts, so their training loss alone cannot control risk on unseen histories. Our analysis gives sufficient conditions under which suppression at supervised single-turn contexts yields a bound on multi-turn trajectory risk. The bound accounts for coverage, transfer slack, and leakage, and characterizes contraction relative to a base-policy risk budget evaluated on the trained policy's contexts. TRACE (Trajectory Return Attribution and Contrastive Erasure) turns this principle into a token-level objective. On the safe response, each token is weighted by the discounted return of a refusal-attributable advantage. The advantage compares a frozen reference model with its refusal-ablated copy, allowing earlier response tokens to receive credit from later refusal-related evidence. At high-gap positions on rejected responses, TRACE combines the observed token with policy-selected alternatives in the erasure target. A gradient-norm penalty replaces the retain set. Across five open-weight models and seven multi-turn attacks, TRACE gives the lowest attack success rate (ASR) in all 35 model and attack pairs, while the model utility evaluated on MMLU and HellaSwag drop by at most 1.23 points. Source code can be found in the supplemental material.
We introduce the Clifford Sheaf Neural Network (CSNN), an equivariant sheaf neural network for geometric graphs that places a Clifford algebra on each stalk of a cellular sheaf and transports multivector features along edges. The canonical choice of restriction map for sheaves with algebra-valued stalks is algebra homomorphism. Adding the constraint of equivariance, the naive choice becomes versor conjugation. However, versor conjugation is expressively weak, so we drop algebra homomorphism and arrive at the K-term sandwich. The resulting sheaf Laplacian is positive semidefinite by construction, needs no versor constraint, and still mixes grades. Our main contribution characterizes the resulting family of restriction maps along three axes: which grades a map couples, how much of the endomorphism space it reaches, and how well it is conditioned. The K-term sandwich spans half of the endomorphism space, and in Cl(3, 0, 0) it corresponds to the maps that commute with the central pseudoscalar. The number of terms controls expressivity. CSNN is the reversion member, a first-order model by construction and the grade-mixing corner of this family, developed as a sheaf construction for graph-level equivariant regression.
Generative modeling has shown strong promise for multivariate time mseries (MTS) forecasting, especially scale to high-dimensional settings. Diffusion-based methods achieve competitive performance but typically require many sampling steps at inference. VAE-based non-iterative forecasting frameworks have therefore emerged as an efficient alternative. Within this line of work, vector quantization (VQ) enables controllable latent space modeling by mapping multivariate series into compact discrete representations. Existing VQ-based forecasting methods, however, typically rely on autoregressive (AR) token generation, which suffers from exposure bias and training-inference mismatch. Flow matching provides an efficient non-autoregressive alternative for latent forecasting, but existing formulations usually initialize transport from a generic Gaussian prior. We instead observe that the trained VQ codebook already captures representative latent prototypes and can thus serve as a more informative prior for flow matching. Based on this insight, we propose ProtoFlow, a forecasting framework that combines vector-quantized autoencoding with Prototype-prior Flow matching. Our method first maps multivariate sequences into a discrete latent space, then constructs a structured prior from the learned codebook, and finally learns a DiT-based rectified flow to transport samples from this prior to future latent representations conditioned on historical observations. By replacing generic noise initialization with a learned prototype prior, ProtoFlow avoids the rollout mismatch of AR token prediction and promotes faster training convergence. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that it consistently achieves superior forecasting performance with efficient inference.
Model collapse arises when generative models are trained on synthetic data produced by earlier models. The phenomenon has attracted considerable attention because of its societal and technical implications. However, previous studies have reached seemingly contradictory conclusions: replacing real data with synthetic data causes collapse (Shumailov et al.), yet accumulating real data alongside synthetic data can prevent it. For diffusion models, we study an intermediate regime typical of finite-budget pipelines: all past datasets and the real data are kept, but each new model is trained on a fixed-size sample from this growing pool, so the real fraction vanishes without any data being removed. Experiments on a 2D spiral dataset as well as the image benchmarks (MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CIFAR-10) show that replacement protocol degrades dataset rapidly as in the literature, whereas the fixed budget degrades only partially, sparing some features. A linear-response model of the multi-generational parameter dynamics, analyzed by stochastic recursion, confirms that the two protocols differ: some features will be fragile and lost within a few generations for both protocols, while some will be robust and preserved over practically unbounded horizons under the fixed budget protocol.
Evaluating candidate architectures in neural architecture search (NAS) faces an inherent trade-off: on the one hand, reliable performance labels are limited because training and evaluating architectures is costly; on the other hand, zero-cost proxies (ZCPs) are cheap to compute at large scale but can be noisy. Yet, how to effectively combine these two sources of supervision remains unclear. In this paper, we propose PPNAS, a novel prediction-powered inference (PPI) approach for NAS. PPNAS fuses (1) a small set of architectures with observed performance labels and (2) a large set of architectures with ZCP information. To combine these two sources of supervision, PPNAS exploits the ordinal information provided by ZCPs to construct additional pairwise ranking supervision, while PPI debiases systematic discrepancies between ZCP-based and true performance rankings. We evaluate PPNAS in end-to-end predictor-based NAS, where it achieves state-of-the-art under limited evaluation budgets. To the best of our knowledge, PPNAS is the first prediction-powered approach for label-efficient NAS.
LLM arenas turn pairwise human preferences into model rankings. Those preferences may reflect how an answer is presented as well as what it says. We take a stylometric approach to 137,293 decisive French-language votes from the July 2026 Compar:IA release; the primary formatting analysis includes 137,113 battles across 116 models, and the joint estimates use the 127,092 battles with all required measurements. For each battle, we reconstruct the response visible when the user voted. We then compare the raw ranking with rankings adjusted for formatting, length, readability, vocabulary variety, and sentence structure. Presentation is associated with winning, but length, bold text, and lists tend to occur together, making their individual contributions hard to separate. Across the measured features, two associations change least across specifications: bold usage (+11.0% win odds per standard deviation in the joint model) and moving-average type-token ratio (MATTR), a measure of vocabulary variety that is less sensitive to answer length (+16.8%). The bold association is substantially smaller in observed multi-turn conversations, whereas the MATTR association changes little; because users choose whether to continue, this difference is descriptive rather than causal. The full adjustment moves 36 of 116 models by at least ten ranks. Yet comparisons with external benchmarks do not show that adjusted rankings better measure capability. We therefore recommend publishing raw and adjusted rankings side by side as a transparent sensitivity analysis.
Generative models have made rapid progress in ordered crystal structure prediction, yet many functional materials are intrinsically disordered, with substitutional mixing, vacancies, or interstitial species controlling their properties. Existing crystal generators either assume deterministic site occupations or require site-level disorder annotations, which are often unavailable when the chemical formula is the primary input. We formulate disordered crystal structure prediction through an Occupancy Distribution Matrix (ODM), a continuous site-by-species representation that unifies ordered crystals, solid solutions, vacancy disorder, and interstitial occupancy. A valid ODM must satisfy coupled site-wise occupancy, mass-conservation, and non-negativity constraints, placing each sample on a formula-dependent transportation polytope. We propose Entropic Polytope Flow (EP-Flow), a marginal-constrained flow matching framework that canonicalizes heterogeneous polytopes into a shared double-centered space, learns a marginal-preserving flow, and recovers feasible occupancies through a Sinkhorn inverse map. By jointly generating occupancies, fractional coordinates, and lattice parameters, EP-Flow achieves state-of-the-art performance on formula-conditioned disordered CSP benchmarks derived from COD and MPDS, substantially outperforming adapted ordered-crystal generators. Analyses further show that EP-Flow recovers sparse and chemically meaningful local disorder patterns rather than merely matching global composition statistics.
Professional work often starts with a brief request that leaves the professional to work out what is needed, which documents matter, and whether the request's premise holds. We introduce DAYJOB, a benchmark of 130 tasks built by professionals in healthcare (50) and finance (80). The tasks are estimated to take a professional 13.6 hours on average in healthcare and 16.6 in finance. Each task is a containerized Harbor environment with an expert rubric of binary criteria (median 47.5 and 57.5 per task) that an agentic judge applies to the delivered files, and an attempt passes only if it meets every criterion. Across 30 model configurations from 13 developers, the strongest, Claude Opus 5.5, passes 24.7% of healthcare and 23.9% of finance attempts, and the median configuration passes 0.6% and 2.5%. In case studies, agents accept premises that the record contradicts and carry wrong inputs through otherwise consistent analyses. We release all healthcare tasks, 50 of the 80 finance tasks, the evaluation harness, and the leaderboard.
Federated LLM fine-tuning enables large models to be adapted using private and geographically distributed data at the network edge, creating recurring and deadline-sensitive communication workloads across access and transport networks. This challenge is particularly relevant in mobile RANs, where wireless variability, mobility, and device heterogeneity cause model updates to arrive asynchronously. Although these updates belong to the same learning round and share a common destination and deadline, conventional transport networks treat them as independent device-originated flows, hiding their underlying structure and limiting the ability to efficiently provision transport resources. This mismatch is particularly problematic for optical circuit switching and all-photonics transport, which benefit from predictable and schedulable traffic demands. We argue that future RANs should act as learning-aware traffic shapers by exposing the communication structure of distributed model adaptation to the transport layer. Through in-network aggregation at the gNB, asynchronous UE updates can be transformed into fewer aggregate transfers with bounded size and delivery requirements. Once shaped in this way, federated LLM traffic becomes a suitable candidate for selectively provisioned optical connectivity, where high-capacity paths can be established during aggregate-transfer windows and released between learning rounds. The resulting architecture combines the flexibility of packet-based mobile access with dynamically provisioned optical capacity, illustrating a broader approach for coordinating distributed AI workloads across programmable access and transport networks.
Most current grasp synthesis systems are trained offline and remain fixed during deployment. While this works well when deployment conditions resemble the training data, performance can degrade when robots encounter conditions they have not seen before, such as unfamiliar objects. In this work, we present a continual-learning framework for single-view 6-DoF grasp synthesis for a parallel-jaw gripper in cluttered scenes. Rather than finetuning a large parametric model, our method adapts through memory in a learned embedding space: grasp outcomes update future grasp scores, while optional user demonstrations are recalled and transferred to new scenes as additional candidate grasps. We evaluate our method in simulation and in extensive real-world experiments comprising over 1500 grasp trials. We show that our method matches the performance of existing 6-DoF grasping baselines even before adaptation, improves online on unseen objects from categories absent or underrepresented during training, and supports long-horizon continual learning with limited forgetting. In real-world experiments, our method reaches over 90\% success rates on several challenging object categories after only 50 online grasp attempts. Videos and code at https://giuschio.github.io/cl_grasping/.
Ireland's smart metering programme records electricity use at 30-minute resolution, with smart meters installed in over 80\% of households as of late 2025. While this is useful for billing of smart, time-of-use tariffs, it is too coarse to capture use of domestic appliances. We present a label-free disaggregation system that breaks usage data into 9 appliance categories by combining event detection for high-power loads with questionnaire-guided estimation. Our evaluation draws on four datasets: a calibration household with a commercial comparator, two public benchmarks (UK-DALE and REFIT) with per-appliance sub-metering, and a smart meter dataset of more than 4,800 years of use from 2,968 Irish consumers. Compared against two independently developed disaggregation systems our hybrid method combining analysis of usage data with questionnaire results, achieves the lowest whole-decomposition error on all buildings across the datasets, with better month-level performance over 54 paired months (p<0.001, Holm-corrected). Our method provides useful advice on a household's energy consumption patterns and advice on how to reduce or shift usage on some appliances in order to reduce costs.
