ALT Control evaluations measure whether safeguards can prevent an AI model from causing undesired outcomes even when it is intentionally trying to do so. These evaluations typically use purpose-built control settings and extrapolate their results to a model's deployment. However, the effectiveness of safeguards in deployment can depend on features of environments and tasks that control settings do not represent. To broaden where control evaluations can be run, we introduce simulated control evaluations (SCEs), which use a language model to simulate tool responses in place of an environment. We evaluate SCEs on LinuxArena, where execution provides ground-truth outcomes. We compare SCE prediction errors with those from a separate control setting, BashArena, and with variation in control metrics within LinuxArena. For independently sampled evaluation and deployment task sets, SCEs predict safety with a root mean squared error of 3.6 percentage points across five monitors at a 5% audit budget,

ALT Research on sycophancy asks whether large language models (LLMs) bend towards what their users want to hear. We ask the reverse question: when an LLM is confident, consistent, and wrong, do users bend towards it? In a within-subjects experiment, 32 participants learned up to five science topics by chatting with five assistants built on the same model (GPT-5-mini). Unknown to participants, each assistant's briefing had 0, 25, 50, 75, or 100% of its facts replaced by plausible falsehoods, and every assistant spoke with full confidence. A surprise quiz after each topic offered the correct fact, the planted falsehood, and two distractors, with a confidence rating for every answer. Across 104 quizzes and 1,040 answers, scores fell from 7.4 to 2.9 out of 10, and the planted option was chosen on 60% of falsified items against 11% of correctly taught ones (odds ratio 12.5). Transcript coding showed that whenever the assistant stated a falsehood, it was adopted about 65% of the time at every fa

ALT Masked diffusion language models generate tokens in parallel, but their efficiency depends on which predictions are committed. Learned unmasking policies improve the speed–accuracy trade-off, yet differ in supervision, inputs, and capacity, obscuring which choices matter. We view supervised policies as distilling a decoding procedure through a teacher and examine independently what the teacher labels as committable, on which states the policy imitates it, what the policy observes, and how much the number of function evaluations (NFE) must decrease to offset policy overhead. We find that labeling predictions matching the final output is overly permissive at low NFE, and hidden states are weak alone but can complement confidence. About a 10% NFE reduction suffices to offset policy overhead for policies up to 7.5M parameters across tested settings. We therefore train a policy on trajectory-contraction targets, which accept only commitments staying on a reference trajectory, using confiden

ALT Industrial organizations hold operational knowledge in structured records, such as telemetry, point lists, and transactions, and in unstructured sources, such as manuals, service notes, communications, and inspection reports. Governance programs often manage these sources separately. Classifying, linking, and documenting them depends on a small group of employees with deep domain knowledge. Agents built on large language models can propose metadata, cite documents, and flag quality issues, but unreviewed proposals can spread errors into downstream systems. A perfunctory approval leaves no record of what a reviewer checked. We present contestable governance: specialist agents produce scored, cited arguments for disputed metadata decisions; a steward can accept, reject, modify, or add arguments before commit; and a governance record retains the evidence, interventions, and outcome. A versioned domain glossary supplies model-specific terms and acronym definitions to the agents. We describ

ALT Hidden future-token leakage can create false architectural gains: an autoregressive model may appear substantially better under teacher-forced evaluation while its free-running generation deteriorates. We investigate this failure in an adaptive residual-routing decoder whose sequence-level routing summary exposes prefix positions to future tokens despite a correct causal attention mask. An anomalous 24-layer checkpoint reduces validation loss from the baseline's 3.5958 to 1.4259, yet it fails a prefix-invariance audit and has substantially higher reference-model perplexity during generation. Layer-wise diagnostics and implementation inspection trace the violation to a full-sequence summary broadcast through the dynamic routing-query path. Two independently trained 12-layer causal repairs eliminate detectable leakage and return validation loss and reference perplexity to the control scale, removing the large apparent advantage. As diagnostic tools, we use the established prefix-invarian

ALT Individual preferences often become visible only after deployment, when a user accepts one decision or revokes it in favor of another. Jev-style typed interfaces make this feedback explicit by identifying the selected action and, under revocation, the decision it replaces. We study how these consequences persist across requests as Decision-Level Continual Learning from Typed Feedback (Jev-DLC). Jev-DLC treats each correction as both evidence about a recurring action identity and a directed relation between the preferred and rejected choices. It preserves these signals in complementary bounded channels above a frozen scorer and combines their scores to shape the next decision. The method retains no raw interaction history, adds no scorer call, and performs no runtime language-model backward pass. We also introduce TCPA-Bench, a chronological suite that credits a correction only through its effect on later decisions. On TCPA-Repeat, Jev-DLC reaches 44.83% user-macro accuracy overall, 2.4

ALT Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate domain-specific commercial & medical content (e.g., claims, statements, and promotional phrases) in regulated industries such as pharmaceuticals. However, ensuring its regulatory compliance, factual accuracy, and audience-specific personalization remains a major challenge. We report a production case study asking whether moving compliance and personalization signal from prompt-level rules into retrieval time structured context improves pharmaceutical claims generation, using Composer, a deployed internal tool built on a Golden Data Model (GDM) of 1,867 pharmaceutical claims spanning four products. The GDM integrates claim metadata, references, audience labels, material type, usage history, Match Text Variant (MTV) links, and a six dimension quality score (6C). Across six product-audience segments, the context pipeline improves intended indication (+29%), intended content type (+62%) and intended target audience (+67%), 6C q

ALT Coordinating two players in a cooking task requires a vision-language agent to track changing scene states, sequence recipe steps, and allocate shared resources under a time budget. We introduce an Overcooked-inspired benchmark for evaluating these capabilities in Unreal Engine environments constructed using coding agents. A single vision-language model controls both players from top-down visual observations, selecting high-level actions while the engine executes navigation. The benchmark contains 20 maps in five categories. These categories support evaluation of centralized coordination under equipment contention, changing terrain, and handoff dependencies. A prop legend and pot ingredient-count indicators provide explicit visual cues, while grid-based destinations support spatial grounding. The evaluation compares four VLMs on all 20 maps, measuring task score, order completion, delivery precision, action acceptance rate, and model API expenditure. A memory ablation on the same 20 ma

ALT Recommender systems typically serve one user at a time. However, in households, members share a finite pantry and follow different dietary rules, making independent recommendations prone to resource conflicts and dietary violations. We formulate household food recommendation as constrained fair division and present FairFRESH, a neuro-symbolic framework that learns per-member utilities, allocates foods under explicit welfare objectives, enforces dietary rules through a deterministic filter, and explains recommendations using Shapley and Banzhaf attributions. Theoretically, we show that no finite penalty guarantees compliance near a dietary-rule threshold, establish approximation guarantees for greedy allocation under utilitarian and smoothed Nash objectives in the stock-free model before filtering, and characterize the scale invariance of Nash welfare. We also use the minimax theorem to analyze rotating shared meals. On NHANES-derived data, the learned utility model achieves Recall@20 o

ALT Reusable skills allow large language model agents to package task-specific procedures, tool affordances, and execution guidance into modular units. Prior work has largely studied how agents retrieve, compose, or synthesize skills before execution. In coding agents, however, execution poses an additional runtime control problem: the same task may be solved through primitive tool calls, macro skills, or hybrid execution that starts with a macro and falls back to micro-level recovery. We introduce Adaptive Skill Granularity, a framework that treats skill granularity as an action-abstraction policy conditioned on task structure, execution state, and macro-skill failures. The system combines a feature-based granularity controller and a finite-state recovery executor. We evaluate the framework with a deterministic coding-agent protocol using verifier-defined success, total cost, and process metrics such as macro adoption, failure recovery, route match, and transition correctness. Results sho

ALT When a user says "Keep it short", how short should the LLM's response be? More generally, users and applications require different levels of instruction adherence, but prompting does not reliably provide fine-grained control over them. We therefore study "steerable language models" that provide fine-grained numerical control over the degree to which models follow general instructions specified in text. However, existing approaches do not jointly offer fine-grained control, efficiency, and scalability across diverse instructions. To address this gap, we introduce DIAL (Distilled Instruction-Adherence Levels) to achieve all three properties. For fine-grained control, we perform classifier-free guidance (CFG) with a frozen LLM to provide training signals for on-policy distillation of instruction adherence at different levels. For efficiency, we design a lightweight steering adapter that uses a classifier over the LLM's hidden states to compute a closed-form steering edit. The classifier a

ALT Automated agentic-system design is typically evaluated on static task suites with immediate scalar rewards. Deployed systems face persistent shift, delayed dependent feedback, correlated component failures, and costly architecture changes. We formalize meta-agent architecture search as sequential incumbent replacement with switching costs and hard risk constraints and introduce Conservative Meta-Agent Search (CMAS). CMAS retrieves archived architectures and proposes typed graph edits, then scores each against the incumbent by paired shadow replay under common random numbers, with interventional component credit. Promotion requires an empirically calibrated, variance-penalized simultaneous score above a pre-specified margin, and is followed by a simulated canary stage and pre-specified rollback. Since backtests cannot certify meta-level skill, we introduce MetaInvest-Bench, a regime-switching simulator whose specified worker competence makes a surrogate-optimal architecture computable,

ALT World action models increasingly rely on pretrained video models assumed to capture physical dynamics for prediction, planning, and action generation. Existing evaluations assess plausibility, probe representations, or measure predictive surprise, but rarely identify which history-conditioned physical expectations conflict with observations. We introduce PhysTrace, a training-free framework aligning MLLM-generated, history-conditioned expectations with observed video windows to temporally localize physical violations and provide interpretable descriptions without task-specific probes or classifiers. We also introduce IntPhys2-Timing, adding violation intervals to IntPhys2. PhysTrace achieves a Hit Rate of up to 70.7% across physical principles on IntPhys2-Timing and outperforms the compared methods in overall possible-impossible discrimination accuracy on IntPhys2. Applied to reconstructed videos along the trajectories of pretrained diffusion/flow-based video models, PhysTrace reveals

ALT This paper studies the problem of safe tool execution for large language model (LLM) agents under prompt injection. Using Petri nets, we formalize the execution harness between the LLM and its tools as a supervisory control problem, in which marks represent capabilities, approvals and budgets. Since a transition fires only if the marks it needs are present, an injected request whose preconditions are unmet or already spent is refused regardless of its wording. Treating tool outcomes as uncontrollable, we enforce safety by the conventional maximally permissive supervisor, and this safety transfers to the running system under four assumptions. Moreover, to capture an agent that may propose again after a refusal, we introduce the notion of a replanning closed loop, in which each retry costs an inference call. We show that, in this loop, the conventional supervisor can be arbitrarily more intrusive than a stricter safe one. Furthermore, for a given proposer model, the maximally permissive

ALT Autonomous research agents are increasingly used to automate large portions of scientific research, yet they are prone to research integrity violations (RIVs): behaviors that compromise the validity, reproducibility, or faithfulness of the research process. We present RIDAR, a framework for automated RIV detection and runtime intervention. First, we introduce RIVT, a comprehensive taxonomy of 14 RIV types spanning the full research lifecycle. Building on RIVT, we present RIDAR-post-hoc, a framework to detect RIVs within agent trajectories. RIDAR-post-hoc achieves 85.2% F1 performance on RIV-Gold, a benchmark for RIV detection with 60 expert-annotated trajectories. Applying RIDAR-post-hoc to RIV-Wild, a dataset of 300 agent trajectories across 50 distinct research tasks, we detect 3,964 RIV instances in 99.7% of trajectories, revealing the prevalence of RIVs in current agents. Finally, we present RIDAR-runtime, a framework for dynamically detecting and correcting RIVs during agent runti

ALT The rise of Agentic AI systems has changed the landscape of artificial intelligence by enabling strong reasoning capabilities through specialized multi-agent interaction with structured self-reflection. However, in target-driven reasoning tasks, single- and multi-agent systems are often on par in terms of performance gains. A major challenge is that failures often arise from an ineffective exchange of critical information during inter-agent interaction and coordination. Different from existing multi-agent debate paradigms that rely on synchronous turn-taking and sharing information across different agents, we propose an inter-agent protocol based on shared Memory bUFFer INference - referred to as MUFFIN - in an asynchronous agentic framework. In the first step, an orchestrator routes queries based on their reasoning demands and delegates demanding ones to a multi-agent setting, where a shared memory buffer provides asynchronous exchange of intermediate findings while an agent's private

ALT Tree-based speculative decoding accelerates large language model inference by verifying multiple candidate branches in parallel. However, in practical serving scenarios, similar requests repeatedly induce overlapping candidate branches. While retrieval-based methods mitigate this by reusing historical drafts, the resulting candidate trees often contain many low-quality branches as the candidate tree grows, which reduces verification efficiency and wastes target-side computation. To address this, we propose ValuSpec, a plug-and-play candidate valuation mechanism that filters low-quality branches from a supplied candidate tree before expensive target-side verification. ValuSpec introduces transfer-based supervision to align filtering with the target model's behavior. A filtering threshold is estimated from the target model's greedy trajectories on a calibration split, without any parameter training. The target model then verifies the filtered tree under the output-identical greedy rule,

ALT GUI agents aim to automate complex user tasks by interacting with mobile interfaces, but ef- fective decision-making in long-horizon set- tings requires reusing prior experience rather than relying solely on the environment ob- servations. Existing memory-based methods typically store experience either at the single- action level or as entire trajectories. Single- step actions are often too fine-grained to carry meaningful semantics, since the success of an individual action does not necessarily imply progress towards the overall goal. In contrast, whole trajectories are often too coarse-grained and difficult to reuse across different tasks. We propose a subgoal-aware memory graph that distils past trajectories into structured, reusable evidence at the level of subgoals. We define a subgoal as consecutive actions shar- ing a single intent, the granularity at which progress toward the task becomes meaning- ful. To reduce redundancy and support cross- task reuse, we organise subgoal expe

ALT Memory enables language agents to carry useful distinctions from past experience into future decisions. Its value depends on which distinctions survive, whether a bounded agent can use them, and what can be recovered or revised as demands evolve. We develop a decision-theoretic framework that follows this value from raw history through persistent state, operational use, and costly recovery and revision. Original and retained value are expressed in units of avoided task loss; risk-cost frontiers describe attainable recovery and preservation across uses. Unknown demand yields value profiles, while interactive feedback changes the distribution of future work. A cost-aware simulation condition and five minimal counterexamples expose the roles of information timing, retrieval access, component interaction, feedback and demand uncertainty. In particular, a pointer with zero mutual information about the answer can still reduce the cost of exact recovery. Diagnostics on LoCoMo, a two-project u

ALT Long-horizon coding agents can observe a failure and generate a plausible critique yet continue along the same incorrect trajectory. We call this the Critique-to-Action Handoff Gap. We introduce RIPPLE, a recovery-oriented training framework that internalizes process-level guidance into a single self-recovering policy. A prefix-only teacher provides evidence-grounded recovery supervision without access to future actions or terminal outcomes. After lightweight distillation, reinforcement learning assigns stage-specific credit to reflection triggering, diagnosis, and corrective action. Local validity signals gate trajectory advantages so that intermediate recovery decisions do not indiscriminately inherit terminal outcomes. Across four repository-level software-engineering benchmarks, RIPPLE improves the base policy by an arithmetic mean of 4.8 score points, with no auxiliary critic at deployment. Controlled ablations isolate the benefits of local, stage-aligned credit, and matched-prefi