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arXiv:2608.14550v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI efficiency has recently taken the spotlight in both academy and industry due to massive model scales, high energy demands, and environmental costs. While reporting Floating Point Operations (FLOPs) is a traditional approach for assessing computational costs, the relationship between FLOPs and execution time is not straightforward, as layers with the same number of FLOPs may not have the same execution time because some operations are more easily parallelized than others. This paper sets out to replicate the original experiments from a study that proposed the $\alpha-FLOPs$ estimation formula to verify whether the results remain applicable on newer, more powerful hardware. During the replication process, we identify limitations in the replication materials provided by the original study, including a lack of specific dependency details and transparency regarding regression data. Our results validate the thesis that raw FLOPs alone are not an appropriate metric for execution time, as spatial dimensions remain more easily parallelized than kernel dimensions. However, fine-grained measurements reveal that the relationship is much less straightforward than previously shown, with newer hardware exhibiting instabilities and discontinuities in execution time, including jumps and oscillations, that the $\alpha-FLOPs$ formula generally underestimates. Ultimately, this work validates the empirical findings from the original study but shows negative results when applying the $\alpha-FLOPs$ estimation. We also highlight the critical need for complete and accurate replication packages for research on hardware-dependent efficiency assessment and provide a complete replication package for our implementation to facilitate further study.
arXiv:2608.14552v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evaluated and used in medicine, but clinical usefulness depends on answer accuracy and whether confidence tracks evidence quality and uncertainty. We developed a controlled, psychophysics-inspired clinical benchmark to test diagnostic choice and confidence behavior in a medical LLM. The benchmark focused on probable Alzheimer-type neurocognitive disorder (AT-NCD) versus depression-related cognitive impairment (DRCI). We generated 45 synthetic vignettes varying evidence strength, conflicting evidence, and missing information. Each vignette was presented under three prompt variants, yielding 135 trials. In a pilot run with gpt-4.1-nano, all trials produced valid structured outputs. Across forced-choice trials, diagnostic accuracy was 93.5%, mean confidence was 78.4%, and AUROC2 was 0.876. Confidence increased with evidence distance from the diagnostic boundary, decreased when information was missing, and remained higher on correct than incorrect trials after adjustment for evidence strength and prompt format. These findings indicate partial metacognitive sensitivity rather than globally uninformative confidence. However, errors clustered in moderate, conflicting AT-NCD cases, where the model shifted toward DRCI and retained more confidence than empirical accuracy justified. Model comparison suggested that confidence quality should be measured directly rather than inferred from benchmark accuracy or model capability alone. This study establishes a reproducible framework for evaluating evidence sensitivity, metacognitive sensitivity, and localized calibration failure in medical LLMs.
arXiv:2608.14558v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current multimodal models have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in recognizing static visual and auditory content. However, their capacity for abstract perceptual reasoning, inferring unseen information from dynamic, generative processes, remains a critical and underexplored frontier. In this paper, we introduce The Unwritten Benchmark, a new challenge designed to probe this abstract perceptual and cognitive ability. We define the core task as acousto-kinematic word inference: models must decipher words, across 3 different writing styles, being written solely from the audio of pen scratches and the video of hand movements, without any visible ink trace. Our evaluation results reveal a profound gap between human and machine performance: while human participants achieve high ordered letter accuracy (over 80%), leading Multimodal Machine Learning Models, including GPT-4o and Gemini 2.5-Pro, struggle significantly, failing to surpass 10%. Furthermore, we identify a paradoxical fusion effect in the models, where providing both modalities often degrades performance rather than improving it. This finding indicates a fundamental breakdown in their ability to synthesize complementary perceptual cues for this cognitive task. These findings highlight significant limitations in both cross-modal causal reasoning and the understanding of the micro-kinematics essential for such cognitive and intuitive perceptual reasoning.
arXiv:2608.14559v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Effective communication in multi-agent reinforcement learning requires agents to decide not only \textit{what} to communicate, but when? Existing approaches either communicate at every timestep or learn a binary gate through REINFORCE policy gradients \cite{singh2019}, a high-variance signal that produces unstable and uninterpretable gating behavior. I propose a principled alternative: agents communicate only when the KL divergence between their learned belief distributions exceeds a fixed threshold. Each agent maintains a belief distribution over a latent world state computed as a softmax over its LSTM hidden state, and communicates only when belief disagreement is large enough to justify information exchange. I evaluate this approach on the Predator-Prey benchmark from IC3Net \cite{singh2019} across two environment sizes with 5 seeds each, and on MPE simple\_spread \cite{lowe2017}, comparing against IC3Net, CommNet, and an independent controller. On PP 10$\times$10, IC3Net outperforms KL-belief at all thresholds. On the harder PP 20$\times$20, a threshold ablation over $\varepsilon \in \{0.1, 0.3, 0.5, 1.0\}$ reveals an inverted U-shape: $\varepsilon=0.5$ achieves 73.84 average steps and 42\% success rate versus IC3Net's 75.31 steps and 31\%, a gap of 1.47 steps and 11 percentage points with tighter seed variance. On MPE, the belief head improves mean reward by 12 points and reduces variance by 26$\times$ even when gating is inactive, suggesting two orthogonal contributions: principled gating when beliefs can converge, and improved latent representations that benefit coordination regardless.