πŸ“„ Notable* Recent AI/ML arXiv Papers

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πŸ“„ On the Fragility of Self-Improving Agents: Variance, Task Order, and Underspecification
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 8/18/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18066v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Qinyuan Ye, Yu Li (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Yada Pruksachatkun, Jiaxin Zhang, Chien-Sheng Wu (possible past Salesforce (United States) affiliation)
Abstract

Memory-based self-improving agents--those that learn from an online stream of tasks and improve over time by maintaining a textual memory bank--have shown great promise in recent literature. However, the reliability aspects of these methods have been critically overlooked. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive re-evaluation of two memory-based methods, broadening the scope of evaluation along two axes: (1) including multiple runs to quantify variance, and (2) randomly shuffling the tasks to i...

πŸ“„ Against Political Polarization: A Unified Framework for Tracing Evolving Political Ideologies on Social Media
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 8/18/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17987v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Yijie Xu, Chao Wang (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Hui Xiong (possible past Baidu (China) affiliation)
Abstract

The rapid growth of social media has greatly influenced political discourse, highlighting the need to understand individual political ideologies and their temporal dynamics. This task faces challenges such as data scarcity, abundant non-political content, costly and bias-prone manual annotation, and difficulty in modeling future ideological inclinations. To address these issues, we propose TSN4PI, a unified framework for tracking the evolution of political ideologies on social media. It includes...

πŸ“„ Efficient RLVR Scheduling via Graph-Structured Online Difficulty Estimation
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 8/18/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17941v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Zhizhao Liu, Zhiliang Tian (possible past Baidu (China) affiliation), Xi Wang (possible past Tsinghua University affiliation), Zhihua Wen, Yihang Xiong, Zhiquan Lai, Dongsheng Li
Abstract

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) improves the reasoning capabilities of large language models but relies on costly rollout exploration. Assigning the same exploration budget to samples with different difficulty levels is inefficient: easy samples may receive redundant rollouts, whereas difficult but learnable samples may receive too little exploration. Existing adaptive schedulers address this mismatch through curriculum-based sample selection or non-uniform rollout allocati...

πŸ“„ StartupBench: Benchmarking General-Purpose Agents on Market-Validated End-to-End Workflows
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 8/18/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17800v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Liya Zhu, Xin Ma, Tao Liu (possible past Baidu (China) affiliation), Haodong Wang, Ge Zhang, Jingzhe Ding, Qingshui Gu, Yongjie Zhong, Jinxiang Meng, Yuan Gao (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Yunqiu Zhou, Hao Zhu (possible past Tsinghua University affiliation), Jifeng He, Yongzhi Liao, Xinyi Zhang, Chaoxin Li, Yi Zhu, Xi Lin, Duju Zeng, Xiang Gao, Wen Zhang, Yunyang Wang, Duo Wang, Huan Zhou, Zuo Wang, Jin Chen, Kaiyuan Zhang, Chuqian Yu, Tianhao Yu, Longxiang Liu, Jianbo Xue, Huimin Che, Jiahao Wang, Yujia Qin, Jiaheng Liu, Shen Yan, Xiaolong Chang, Wenhao Huang
Abstract

Recent advances in Large Language Models(LLMs) and agents have substantially improved the ability of AI systems to execute complex tasks. Yet existing benchmarks largely rely on researcher-selected tasks, leaving uncertain whether such progress extends to the work that real-world users actually demand from AI systems. We introduce \textbf{StartupBench}, an E2E agent benchmark grounded in market-validated AI startup products. Rather than defining tasks from pre-defined assumptions about useful ag...

πŸ“„ Evaluating the Diversity of AI-Generated Content with Diversity Profiles
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 8/18/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17731v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Xiuyuan Hu, Xuege Hou, Guoqing Liu, Yang Zhao (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Jieran Li, Dongbiao Sun, JosΓ© Miguel HernΓ‘ndez-Lobato (possible past University Of Cambridge affiliation), Hao Zhang (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Xue Liu
Abstract

Diversity is a fundamental criterion for evaluating generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems, yet its measurement remains inherently ambiguous. Existing approaches typically represent generated samples in an embedding space, compute pairwise distances or similarities, and aggregate them into a single scalar score. Such scalar summaries are convenient, but they often encode different inductive biases and may yield contradictory rankings of the same sample sets. In this paper, we argue that...

πŸ“„ Benchmarking Automated Security Patch Backporting: How Far Are We?
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 8/18/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17671v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Jincheng Yang, Yulong Fu, Chengwei Liu, Lyuye Zhang, Fangyuan Zhang, Bingyang Ren, Yang Liu (possible past Tsinghua University affiliation), Hui Li (possible past Baidu (China) affiliation)
Abstract

Automated security patch backporting is critical for mitigating N-day vulnerabilities. Recent tools report success rates above 80% on their respective datasets. However, these evaluations are often confined to homogeneous environments, such as one repository or specific project versions. Consequently, it remains unclear how well these tools generalize beyond their originally targeted scenarios. We present Porting Benchmark, a curated dataset of 1,234 security patch backporting cases spanning cro...

πŸ“„ Where a New Concept Must Enter: Entry Point Gates Cross-Task Usability in Unified Multimodal Models
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 8/18/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17564v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Zongyang Qiu, Yihan Wu, Kaixuan Fan, Bo Li (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Hui Xiong (possible past Baidu (China) affiliation)
Abstract

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) are motivated by the hope that understanding and generation reinforce each other but controlled ablations repeatedly find that adding a generation objective leaves understanding flat. Joint-training studies cannot settle the disagreement: with overlapping supervision, a gain cannot be attributed to the architecture rather than the data. To further investigate the relationship between the two directions in UMMs, we separate them by construction. A novel visual ent...

πŸ“„ Towards Better Agents for Multi-Turn User Interaction: The Next User Turn Is More Than Context
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 8/18/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17499v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Yiwen Zhao, Zhihao Wen, Yuchen Mao, Mingxuan Jiang, Yihao Hu, Pan Wang, Xin Zhang (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Wei Wu (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation)
Abstract

User-facing tool agents must coordinate dialogue and tool use as user goals unfold over multiple turns. Yet interactive reinforcement learning typically reduces each rollout to a terminal reward, assigning the same credit to effective elicitation, errors, and later repair. The next user turn is more than context: it also provides noisy, temporally local evidence about the preceding user-to-user segment. We introduce \textbf{F}eedback-\textbf{A}ware \textbf{C}redit \textbf{A}ssignment (\textsc{FA...

πŸ“„ SAGE: Self-Evolving Storyboard Skills via Attribution-Guided Rule Evolution
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 8/18/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17468v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Maolin Ran, Xiaoyang Lu, Jiaqi Liu, Jian Wang (possible past Baidu (China) affiliation), Weiwen Liu, Jianghao Lin, Yong Yu (possible past Shanghai Jiao Tong University affiliation), Weinan Zhang (possible past Shanghai Jiao Tong University affiliation)
Abstract

Storyboards turn screenplays into visual shot plans for automated short drama production. Professional storyboarding relies on tacit directorial expertise and remains an industrial bottleneck. Large language models can automate this step, but methods for supplying directing knowledge face three challenges: (1) Knowledge acquisition: the craft remains implicit in exemplars or must be written manually. (2) Knowledge refinement: authored knowledge is not evaluated against execution outcomes, and op...

πŸ“„ TileMix: Tile-Centric Mixed-Precision Attention for LLM Inference Acceleration
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 8/18/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17336v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Hanzhi Zhang, Qiao Zhang (possible past University Of Washington affiliation), Qinglei Cao, Heng Fan, Yan Huang (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Kewei Sha, Yunhe Feng
Abstract

Long-context prefill in large language models (LLMs) incurs substantial computation and memory traffic because dense self-attention computes quadratic query-key scores. Existing methods either use a uniform low-precision path or select token interactions, leaving spatial precision routing over hardware-aligned score tiles outside fused dense attention. We introduce TileMix, a tile-centric precision-routing kernel that makes numerical precision an executable spatial decision over score-tile group...

πŸ“„ Wuying-Browser-Agent: Real-World Centric Fundamental Long-Horizon Browser Agents
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 8/18/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17319v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Aimae Team, Tianxiang Chen, Yan Cheng (possible past Nvidia (United States) affiliation), Zhangye Han, Xiaowei Li, Chang Liu, Cheng Liu, Zhongqiang Ma, Long Peng, Xiaobing Tu, Yinggui Wang, Hongliang Wei, Chen Wu (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Daiping Xin, Kunyu Zhou, Pengyang Zhou, Peiyuan Chen, Ziyuan Chen, Yutao Deng, Chunyu Dong, Xiangyu Fu (possible past Baidu (China) affiliation), Yicheng Feng, Ruian He, Haochen Li, Miancan Liu, Zhengqin Liu, Wei Peng, Jinkui Ren, Haoyu Tan, Dong Xiao, Rongkun Xue, Shujian Yang, Xianhang Ye, Ziqi Yuan, Ziyang Yu, Linghan Zhang, Xiantao Zhang, Xuanpu Zhao, Yinan Zhao, Zhenghui Zhao, Bin Zhu, Likai Zou
Abstract

Browser agents perform well on short, clean demonstrations, but real deployment is fundamentally different: agents must sustain dozens of decisions on live websites while recovering from mistakes and navigating complex UIs. We argue that closing this gap requires alignment at every level of the pipeline, including execution, supervision, optimization, and evaluation, rather than scale alone. We present Wuying-Browser-Agent, a unified framework that addresses each of these levels. A structured br...

πŸ“„ Learning What Not to Learn: Adversarial Disentangled Prompt Tuning for Robust Vision-Language Models
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 8/18/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17306v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Yang Chen (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Zhan Zhuang, Yanbin Wei, Zebin Chen, Hua Liu, Yu Zhang (possible past Google (United States) affiliation)
Abstract

While adversarial prompt tuning can enhance robustness of vision-language models efficiently, we find that existing methods aggravate robust generalization overfitting on seen classes, leading to a rapid degradation in performance against adversarial examples of unseen classes as training progresses. We empirically identify that this degradation stems from the tendency of the model to learn pseudo-robust features (i.e., non-generalizable shortcuts). To mitigate this, we propose ADAPT (Adversaria...

πŸ“„ NeuroAbs: A Neuro-Symbolic RTL Abstraction Framework for Property Checking Acceleration
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 8/18/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17304v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Zhiyuan Yan, Xiaofeng Zhou, Ziyue Zheng, Ziyi Yang (possible past Tencent (China) affiliation), Wenbin Che, Wei Zhang (possible past Tsinghua University affiliation), Yangdi Lyu, Hongce Zhang
Abstract

Formal verification is a crucial technique for ensuring the functional correctness of hardware designs. In the context of property checking, a key challenge is how to efficiently prove a user-specified property in the face of increasingly complex RTL designs. To address this challenge, abstraction techniques are often employed to reduce system complexity and accelerate the verification process. However, prior RTL abstraction methods either require significant manual effort or rely on rule-based ...

πŸ“„ When Agents Act on Web3: An Attack-Surface Survey of MCP, Skills, and Tool Calling
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 8/18/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17275v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Rabimba Karanjai, Yang Lu (possible past Meta (United States) affiliation), Nour Diallo, Wujie Xiong, Lei Xu (possible past Tsinghua University affiliation), Weidong, Shi
Abstract

AI agents increasingly act rather than merely read: across the Model Context Protocol (MCP) ecosystem, the share of deployed tools that modify external state has risen from 27% to 65% of tool use. When agents exercise this authority on public blockchains through MCP, skills, and tool calling, the consequences of an attack are governed by the blockchain execution layer rather than by conventional software assumptions. This survey argues that four properties of that layer (irreversibility, signing...

πŸ“„ ASI-Bench: At the Dawn of Artificial Superintelligence
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 8/18/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17271v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Junwei Zhou, Zhen Sun, Binyu Li, Jiangyu Zhou, Yuexi Pan, Hengyu Wang, Honghe Ren, Xiaohan Jia, Xueyang Zhou, Xiaoyu Cao, Yongchao Chen, Yuanning Feng, Junhao Wu, Cheng Zhang, Sijia Chen, Haoyu Xue, Chengsong You, Huan Wang, Koutian Wu, Peigan Gao, Jiakun Wu, Wenzhe Li, Ergan Shang, Qingyuan Zheng, Jingjing Zhou, Ruixuan Jia, Yan Xu (possible past Peking University affiliation), Hongrui Zhang, Xiao-Han Ma, Zhengxiang Cheng, Yuexing Hao, Liting Mai, Xianglin Ji, Wenjun Zhang (possible past Shanghai Jiao Tong University affiliation), Zhuofan Chen, Yixiao Huang, Chi Wang (possible past Microsoft (United States) affiliation), Wenyue Hua, Yilun Hao, Yuantao Zhai, Ziyan Zhao, Jingyan Xie
Abstract

Artificial superintelligence (ASI) requires AI to move beyond mastering existing knowledge toward exploring the unknown, creating new knowledge, and turning new ideas into verifiable results. However, the capabilities of today's AI systems are still largely built on learning, compressing, and applying existing human knowledge. Accordingly, existing benchmarks primarily test whether AI can produce correct answers based on learned knowledge, or whether it can complete tasks under extensive human g...

πŸ“„ PACE: Policy-Attested Contract Execution for Safe AI Agents in Decentralized Finance
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 8/18/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17220v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Rabimba Karanjai, Yang Lu (possible past Meta (United States) affiliation), Richard Williamson, Hemanth Hm, Prakhar Mehrotra, Lei Xu (possible past Tsinghua University affiliation), Weidong, Shi
Abstract

Autonomous AI agents are emerging as interfaces for decentralized finance (DeFi) actions such as swaps, lending operations, and yield management. Because these agents rely on large language models (LLMs) to plan transactions, they inherit the LLM's susceptibility to prompt injection and lack of mechanisms to bind a verifier's approval to the exact transaction ultimately submitted on-chain. We present PACE (Policy-Attested Contract Execution), a transaction-level authorization framework that inte...

πŸ“„ Iterative tensor network transformations for element-wise evaluation of elementary and filtering functions
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 8/17/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17135v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Xiao Wang (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Tomohiro Hashizume, Pia Siegl, Dieter Jaksch (possible past University Of Oxford affiliation)
Abstract

Tensor networks are powerful formats for compressing large-scale data. However, their application to general data processing has been limited by the difficulty of performing nonlinear operations. Here, we introduce iterative tensor network transformations (ITNTs), a general algorithmic framework for the element-wise evaluation of elementary and nonlinear filtering functions on data encoded as tensor trains (TTs), a class of tensor networks. Our approach operates entirely in the compressed domain...

πŸ“„ The 10th AI City Challenge
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 8/17/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17044v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Zheng Tang (possible past University Of Washington affiliation), Shuo Wang (possible past Nvidia (United States) affiliation), David C. Anastasiu, Ming-Ching Chang (possible past Nvidia (United States) affiliation), Anuj Sharma (possible past Nvidia (United States) affiliation), Quan Kong, Munkhjargal Gochoo, Jun-Wei Hsieh, Tomasz Kornuta, Zhedong Zheng (possible past Baidu (China) affiliation), Renran Tian, Judah Goldfeder, Fulgencio Navarro, Yuxing Wang, Yizhou Wang (possible past Peking University affiliation), Sameer Satish Pusegaonkar, Anqi Li, Nalin Dadhich, Ridham Kachhadiya, Dhanishtha Patil, Haoquan Liang, Jiajun Li, Han Zhang (possible past Tsinghua University affiliation), Yilin Zhao, Zaid Pervaiz Bhat, Shuyu Yang, Ashutosh Kumar, Rong Wang, Rafael Martin Nieto, Peter Christiansen, Ahmed Abduljawad, Mohanrasu Shanmugam, Nadeem Shaik, Sujit Biswas, Xunlei Wu, Vidya Murali, Rama Chellappa
Abstract

The 10th AI City Challenge, held with ECCV 2026, marks a decade of community benchmarking for intelligent transportation, smart cities, and physical AI. Since its 2017 start with vehicle detection, classification, and tracking, the challenge has grown into a broad benchmark suite for multi-camera perception, multimodal reasoning, synthetic-to-real learning, generative forecasting, and privacy-preserving evaluation. The 2026 edition continued this growth with 325 registered teams, up from 245 in ...

πŸ“„ Improving the matrix multiplication exponent with modern optimization and AlphaEvolve
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 8/17/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16884v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Emilien Dupont (possible past Deepmind (United Kingdom) affiliation), Marvin Eisenberger, Borislav Kozlovskii, Abbas Mehrabian, Francisco J. R. Ruiz (possible past Deepmind (United Kingdom) affiliation), Abigail See (possible past Stanford University affiliation), Renfei Zhou, Josh Alman, Virginia Vassilevska Williams, Matej Balog (possible past Deepmind (United Kingdom) affiliation)
Abstract

The current best bounds on the matrix multiplication exponent $Ο‰$ are obtained through a refinement of the laser method called combination loss analysis (Duan et al., 2022; Williams et al., 2024; Alman et al., 2025). In this note, we address the optimization problem at the core of this approach and propose several improvements. First, we reformulate the optimization problem allowing us to solve it in a larger setting than was previously possible. Second, we leverage recent advances in machine le...

πŸ“„ HAF: Adapting Generalist VLAs to Humanoid Whole-Body Loco-manipulation via Hierarchical Action Flow and Spectral Latent RL
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 8/17/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16837v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Langzhe Gu, Chengkai Hou, Meng Li (possible past Meta (United States) affiliation), Xinhua Wang, Jiaming Liu (possible past Baidu (China) affiliation), Xinyuan Lv, Bowei Zhang, Shuanghao Bai, Guangrun Li, Jingyang He, Gaole Dai, Ziluo Ding, Zhiyuan Xu, Kuan Cheng, Jian Tang, Zhengping Che, Shanghang Zhang
Abstract

Humanoid robots hold great promise as general-purpose agents in human-centered environments, yet generalist vision-language-action (VLA) foundation models are not readily applicable to humanoid whole-body loco-manipulation. The high dimensionality and interdependence of humanoid motions make it challenging for conventional single-stage VLA architectures to coordinate locomotion, waist posture, and dual-arm manipulation effectively. Moreover, policies trained through offline behavior cloning can ...

πŸ“„ ClawGym II: Exploring Black-Box RL on Agent Harness
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 8/17/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16798v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Huatong Song, Fei Bai, Ming Yang (possible past Meta (United States) affiliation), Renyuan Li, Jia Deng (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Jujie He, Zhange Zhang, Daixuan Cheng, Yan Xing, Qi Yun, Xuxing Chen, Danyang Li, Feng Chang, Chuan Hao, Ran Tao, Jian Yang, Bryan Dai, Wayne Xin Zhao (possible past Baidu (China) affiliation), Mingjie Tang, Ji-Rong Wen
Abstract

Agent harnesses have substantially improved performance on long-horizon tasks by coordinating agent interactions with the environment. However, reinforcement learning through complex harnesses remains largely unexplored, as scaling such training to long-horizon agent tasks introduces fundamental challenges. In this work, we present a unified black-box RL framework for stable and scalable optimization of general agents through complex harnesses. Concretely, we first build a sandbox-based executio...

πŸ“„ Steering the Flow: Inverting Face Recognition Models via Gradient-Guided Flow Matching
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 8/17/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16791v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Ye Lu, Shen Wang (possible past Google (United States) affiliation), Zhaoyang Zhang, Yihan Yan, Li Liu (possible past National University Of Defense Technology affiliation), Runze Liu, Fanghui Sun
Abstract

Model Inversion Attacks (MIAs) aim to reconstruct representative training samples of target identities from face recognition models, exposing critical security vulnerabilities. Existing methods typically rely on indirect guidance or highly stochastic guidance, making it difficult to stably optimize generation trajectories toward target facial images. In this paper, we propose Steering Flow Model Inversion (SFMI), a novel two-stage white-box model inversion method that reformulates inversion as a...

πŸ“„ TRACE-Bench: Decomposing and Diagnosing Multi-Reference Image Generation
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 8/17/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16765v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Haoran Wang, Chaofan Ma, Ran Yi (possible past Shanghai Jiao Tong University affiliation), Lizhuang Ma (possible past Shanghai Jiao Tong University affiliation)
Abstract

Despite recent advances in unified multimodal models for multi-reference image generation, existing benchmarks remain organized around predefined task types (e.g., "subject composition"), which are ill-suited to this combinatorial setting and lead to fragmented coverage, uncontrolled complexity, and little diagnostic value. Recognizing that diverse multi-reference tasks share a common set of atomic operations, we adopt a capability-oriented perspective and formalize four operators: Anchor ($f$),...

πŸ“„ HarmTrace: Anchor-Calibrated Decoupled Optimization for Fine-Grained Target Identification in Harmful Memes
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 8/17/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16622v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Yujia Li (possible past University Of Toronto affiliation), Yiqun Zhang, Zihan Cheng, Yijie Huang, Tenglong Ye, Zihan Wang (possible past Tsinghua University affiliation), Xiaocui Yang, Shi Feng, Yifei Zhang, Daling Wang
Abstract

Multimodal harmful meme detection is typically formulated as image--text harmfulness classification. A model may correctly predict harmfulness while misidentifying the attacked target or its supporting evidence. We therefore extend harmful meme detection with fine-grained target identification, asking what type of target is attacked, who is targeted, and where the target appears in the meme. The model predicts harmfulness for every meme and, for harmful memes, outputs the target category, target...

πŸ“„ Physics of Agents: Statistical Mechanics Predicts Collective Behavior of AI Agents
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 8/17/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16578v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Batu El, Jinhee Paeng, Fatih Dinc, Shiye Su, Mete Erdogan, Aneesh Pappu, Haotian Ye (possible past Peking University affiliation), Wanjia Zhao, Surya Ganguli (possible past Stanford University affiliation), James Zou
Abstract

AI agents increasingly operate as part of interacting systems rather than in isolation. As agents exchange information and jointly make decisions, their interactions can improve collective reasoning but may also produce herding, polarization, or amplify shared biases. Understanding and predicting these collective dynamics is therefore important for designing effective and aligned multi-agent systems. Here, we study over 10,000 communities of language-model agents that repeatedly exchange message...

πŸ“„ Debate Training Reduces Reward Hacking in RLAIF
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 8/18/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17776v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Zachary Kenton, Lili Janzer, Rory Greig, Tian Huey Teh, Kirill Tyshchuk, Jonah Brown-Cohen, Harri Edwards (possible past Openai (United States) affiliation), Senthooran Rajamanoharan, Noah Y. Siegel, Natasha Jaques (possible past University Of California, Berkeley affiliation), Rohin Shah
Abstract

We demonstrate that RL finetuning an LLM using debate, a two-player adversarial game between a generator and a critic adjudicated by a weaker LLM judge, reduces reward hacking compared to a reinforcement learning from AI feedback (RLAIF) baseline. Reward hacking is a central obstacle in RLAIF: as training progresses, the policy learns to exploit systematic errors in its AI judge, degrading task performance, a problem that worsens precisely when the judge is weaker than the policy, the setting mo...

πŸ“„ CORAM: Coherent Orthogonal Rotation for Model Merging
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 8/18/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.17366v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Xinyi Sui, Ziran Liu, Nam Ling, Wei Wang (possible past University Of Oxford affiliation), Wei Jiang (possible past Apple (United States) affiliation)
Abstract

Merging finetuned models combines specialized capabilities without joint training or access to the original data. Most methods operate by linear arithmetic in Euclidean weight space, which cannot carry the geometry of the update. Orthogonal Model Merging (OrthoMerge) uses a single orthogonal transform for each weight matrix, but such a transform cannot change singular values. We propose CORAM, which partitions each target matrix into row slices, represents every expert slice by its singular valu...

πŸ“„ Advancing Open and Reproducible Relational Learning: RelArena-$Ξ±$, TabPFN-Rel and RPI
πŸ—“οΈ Published: 8/17/2026
πŸ”— http://arxiv.org/abs/2608.16319v1
πŸ‘₯ Authors: Adrian Hayler, Klemens FlΓΆge, Alan Arazi, Rishabh Ranjan, Jure Leskovec (possible past Stanford University affiliation), Felix Birkel, Brendan Roof, Anurag Garg, Kristina Collins, Lydia Sidhoum, Jonas KΓΌbler, Siyuan Guo, Oscar Key, Jan Hendrik Metzen, Rylee Grace, David Salinas, Arthur Cahu, Simon Bing, Benjamin JΓ€ger, Tuana Γ‡elik, Mihir Manium, Vitor Monteiro, Jake Robertson, Jerry Chen, Eliott Kalfon, TomΓ‘s Pereda, Lilly Wehrhahn, Dominik Safaric, Tobias Schroeder, Georg Grab, Diana Kriuchkova, Clara Cornu, Philipp Singer, Nick Erickson, Vahid Balazadeh, Marie Salmon, Simone Alessi, KΓΌrşat Kaya, Philipp Jund, LΓ©o Grinsztajn, Yann Lecun (possible past Meta (United States) affiliation), Bernhard SchΓΆlkopf, Madelon Hulsebos, Lennart Purucker, Sauraj Gambhir, Frank Hutter, Noah Hollmann
Abstract

This first release of Prior Labs in relational learning shows our continued commitment to open science. We open-source three pieces of software that we expect to accelerate research in the field towards meaningful real-world impact. We aim to steer further development based on feedback from, and in collaboration with, the community. Given the early stage of development, our $Ξ±$-release targets researchers and early-adopting practitioners. Over the past years, a variety of datasets and tasks for ...

*Notable papers are those with at least two authors from a "big" AI/ML lab.