Section

AI

AI breakthroughs, model releases, research, and industry moves.

Automating and Scaling Behavioral Scientific Research on AI Agents

arXiv:2608.10030v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As AI agents are increasingly deployed in complex environments, understanding their behaviors becomes critical. Yet behavioral scientific research on AI agents remains manual and labor-intensive. We introduce AEROBAT, the first multi-agent system to automate behavioral scientific research on AI agents. Given an arbitrary target behavior by its user, AEROBAT automatically executes a full pipeline of behavioral scientific research---generating hypotheses about the behavior, designing and executing controlled experiments, making behavioral assessments, analyzing the results, and writing reports. For 12 target behaviors, we used AEROBAT to generate and test 79 hypotheses: designing 1,240 controlled experiments and executing 23,512 simulation rounds in total. Moderate-to-strong statistical evidence was found for 26 hypotheses, including some novel ones. In sum, our results demonstrate that automated behavioral scientific research on AI agents can complement and extend the reach of manual research.

arXiv cs.AI · 1 day ago

FlowScout: From Execution Feedback to Reliable Tool-Using Agent Workflows

arXiv:2608.10039v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic workflows have become an important abstraction for building reliable LLM-based automation systems by organizing large language models (LLMs), tools, and control logic into explicit execution structures. However, constructing high-quality agentic workflows remains largely manual and requires substantial domain expertise. Recent studies have explored automatic agentic workflow generation from historical task-solving records, but they mainly produce LLM-centric workflows, where real tool executions are abstracted and simulated by LLM nodes, limiting the usability and stability of generated workflows. To address these limitations, we propose FlowScout, an execution-guided framework for generating tool-integrated agentic workflows from historical task-solving records. Specifically, FlowScout represents an agentic workflow as a directed graph composed of LLM nodes, tool-calling nodes, and dependency edges. It first mines a common tool coordination skeleton from historical records to construct an initial workflow, and then refines the workflow topology through Monte Carlo tree search guided by execution feedback. We evaluate FlowScout on four representative task domains and compare it with three baselines, i.e., PM4Py, ReAct and AFlow. Experimental results show that agentic workflows generated by FlowScout improve tool invocation correctness by at least 92.69% and execution quality by at least 17.66% over the baselines, while achieving lower performance variation across repeated runs.

arXiv cs.LG · 1 day ago

DOCSCHISEL: Adaptive Tool Documentation Optimization Framework for LLM Agents

arXiv:2608.10037v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly rely on external tools to accomplish complex real-world tasks, making tool documentation a critical grounding resource for LLM agents. Existing studies mainly focus on improving the tool-use capabilities of LLM agents, while largely treating tool documentation as a fixed input. Although several recent works attempt to optimize tool documentation through rewriting or compression, little is known about how the information contained in tool documentation affects agent performance across different settings. To bridge this gap, we conduct a large-scale empirical study on tool documentation for LLM agents. Our study reveals substantial heterogeneity in the information fields provided by existing tool documentation. Moreover, the effectiveness of different information fields is highly dependent on the task domain, LLM backbone, and agent paradigm, indicating that no fixed tool documentation can consistently generalize across diverse agent settings. Motivated by these findings, we propose DocsChisel, an adaptive tool documentation optimization framework for LLM agents. DocsChisel analyzes failed execution traces of a target LLM agent to identify documentation-related issues, and iteratively optimizes tool documentation by adding, removing, and refining information fields for each tool. We evaluate DocsChisel against two state-of-the-art baselines, i.e., EasyTool and DRAFT. Experimental results show that DocsChisel improves the task success rate of LLM agents by 95.89% over the original tool documentation and by 75.15%, on average, over existing baselines, while incurring limited optimization time and token overhead

arXiv cs.LG · 1 day ago

Uncertainty-Aware Ensemble Deep Randomized Neural Networks for Classification

arXiv:2608.10007v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The current state-of-the-art (SOTA) deep randomized neural networks, such as deep Random Vector Functional Link (dRVFL) and ensemble deep RVFL (edRVFL), treat all training samples uniformly, which limits their robustness and effectiveness when applied to real-world datasets containing noise and outliers. Furthermore, the propagation of contaminated features across hidden layers negatively influences the decision-making capability of these models. To overcome these limitations, we propose intuitionistic fuzzy dRVFL (IF-dRVFL) and intuitionistic fuzzy edRVFL (IF-edRVFL) frameworks that enhance model robustness. The proposed models unify intuitionistic fuzzy theory to exploit sample neighborhood information in the kernel space by jointly considering membership and non-membership degrees for each sample. Membership degrees are computed based on the distance of samples from their respective class centroids, while non-membership degrees quantify sample heterogeneity within local neighborhoods. These measures are employed to assign adaptive weights to training samples, enabling effective discrimination among clean, noisy, and outlier data points. Extensive experiments conducted on UCI and KEEL benchmark datasets, with and without the presence of Gaussian noise, demonstrate the superiority of the proposed IF-dRVFL and IF-edRVFL models over existing SOTA fuzzy and non-fuzzy approaches. The source code is available at https://github.com/mtanveer1/IF-edRVFL.

arXiv cs.LG · 1 day ago

UserToolBench: A User-Profile-Hidden Benchmark for Personalized Decision Making in Tool-Use LLMs

arXiv:2608.10042v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tool-use LLMs are increasingly asked to act on users' behalf, but existing benchmarks usually focus on profile recall, style imitation, generic tool use, or response-level personalization. We introduce UserToolBench , a benchmark for personalized decision making in tool-use LLMs. UserToolBench tests whether a model can infer latent user preferences from interaction history, recognize when clarification is needed, and produce user-aligned tool-call trajectories under incomplete information. The benchmark is built from privacy-sanitized real interaction traces and combines structured persona profiles, public API-style tool ecosystems, and long-horizon multi-turn trajectories. It includes 10 user profiles, 36 tool sets, 1,065 turns, 170 unique tools, and evaluation-focused task types covering lack-of-information, single-tool, and multi-tool settings. Experiments with strong tool-use LLMs show that current models still have difficulty with personalized delegation. Multi-tool coordination, missing-constraint inference, and long-horizon behavioral consistency remain major bottlenecks. These results suggest that personalization evaluation should move beyond asking whether outputs sound user-specific and instead ask whether LLMs make correct decisions for the users they represent.

arXiv cs.LG · 1 day ago

Physics-Informed Machine Learning in Prognostics and Health Management: A Systematic Literature Review

arXiv:2608.10047v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In modern industry, keeping complex systems reliable, safe, and efficient hinges on Prognostics and Health Management (PHM). Machine Learning (ML) has largely driven advancements in diagnostics and prognostics, yet purely data-driven models face inherent limitations, such as poor generalization, an inability to infer causal relationships, and a lack of interpretability. Physics-Informed Machine Learning (PIML) helps mitigate these limitations by incorporating prior physical knowledge directly into the ML pipeline, thereby fostering growing interest in its application to PHM. This work investigates how PIML is being leveraged in the context of PHM through a systematic literature review of 212 studies. The review introduces a four-class classification scheme, consisting of observational bias, inductive bias, learning bias, and hybrid approaches, and further categorizes studies by PHM task. Across all four classes, the reviewed studies consistently demonstrate improved predictive performance over conventional baselines across a broad range of assets, although the literature is heavily skewed toward lithium-ion batteries and bearings, and dominated by problem-specific solutions. Overall, the review indicates that physics-informed approaches already provide tangible benefits, whereas claims of improvements concerning some of the aforementioned limitations lack sufficient supporting evidence. Future research should prioritize transferable design patterns, benchmarks comparing integration strategies, and uncertainty-aware models that are lightweight and robust enough for online deployment in real-world settings.

arXiv cs.LG · 1 day ago

ChronoSSM: Training for Temporally Aware Representations in Autoregressive State Space Models

arXiv:2608.10120v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern sequence models, from Transformers to State Space Models, have enabled powerful generative modeling across diverse domains, yet they are typically trained to predict what happens while treating when it happens as a secondary concern. In data-mining settings where events are associated with explicit timing information, this separation can limit temporal reasoning, anomaly detection, and faithful reconstruction of event chronology. A common strategy is to treat timing as an auxiliary signal, training a separate timing model using representations learned solely for event prediction. However, this two-stage approach implicitly assumes that representations optimized for event prediction already contain sufficient temporal structure. We introduce ChronoSSM, an autoregressive State Space Model (SSM) that jointly models events and timestamps with a shared backbone trained using combined token and temporal generation objectives. We compare the joint regime, where temporal supervision updates the backbone, with the two-stage regime, where timing is learned only using the frozen event representations. Across four domains spanning dense and partial timestamp supervision, joint training consistently makes inter-arrival information more recoverable from frozen representations without any systematic degradation in content-generation quality overall. Our results show that temporal supervision can produce more temporally informative representations without materially degrading autoregressive event modeling.

arXiv cs.LG · 1 day ago

CurveFP: Rational-Radix Logarithmic Datatypes with Closed Products for Language Models

arXiv:2608.10010v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Low-precision datatypes reduce language-model cost, but most formats optimize scalar fidelity while leaving the arithmetic induced by their products unchanged. We introduce CurveFP, a closed-product codebook family that distributes quantized magnitudes across interleaved logarithmic curves under compact block scales. A rational radix tunes dynamic range against local resolution, while uniform curve indices make every nonzero product algebraically closed. Product formation becomes an exact sign XOR and integer-index update, and a derived finite phase count determines the accumulation schedule. We instantiate this algebra as CurveFP eight E4C3/E5C2 for training and CurveFP seven E3C3 for compact deployment. In evaluation, CurveFP seven beats tensor-wise FP8 perplexity on four 7B--9B models with one fewer element bit and stays within 1.32\% of native quality. CurveFP eight lowers operand NMSE in all 36 paired forward and backward GEMM comparisons. Across three matched 128.3M-parameter triplets, every mode completes 3B-token pretraining per seed; CurveFP eight reaches mean BF16-inference perplexity 22.5366 versus 22.5407 for FP8 and incurs a lower format-induced penalty in all three seeds. A 36-cell downstream matrix finds lower WikiText-103 perplexity for the CurveFP eight-trained checkpoints in all 12 seed-format comparisons, with mixed PG-19 and task deltas. Together, these results establish CurveFP as an arithmetic co-design that combines FP8-class numerical behavior, seven-bit inference, and a substantially simpler product path.

arXiv cs.LG · 1 day ago

Transformer Geometry Observatory TGO-IV: Developmental Topology Observatory

arXiv:2608.09997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformers have had a profound impact on the world of language processing and computer vision. As efforts to answer the million-dollar question of ``How does a Transformer learn?" have been increasing, existing interpretability studies primarily analyze representations at isolated layers or the network as a whole, while the developmental evolution of individual representations and its manifolds across transformer layers remains underexplored. With this work, we aim at providing a comprehensive analysis of the evolution of representations as the representation point cloud transforms across the layers; thereby attempting to isolate layers or establish a trend which comes closer to justifying how and when raw input representations evolve into task-relevant feature representations. Thus, Transformer Geometry Observatory-TGO-IV introduces a topological framework for analysing the evolution of Transformer representations through the lens of Persistent Homology. Rather than studying local geometric properties alone, TGO-IV constructs Vietoris--Rips simplicial complexes from token-level representation point clouds and investigates the evolution of their persistent topological signatures across Transformer layers. The proposed framework comprises complementary topological observatories including Persistence Diagrams, Barcode Diagrams, Betti Curves, Persistence Landscapes, Bottleneck Distance, and Wasserstein Distance, enabling a comprehensive analysis of how the global topology of representation point clouds develops throughout the forward pass.

arXiv cs.LG · 1 day ago

Observational Policy Ranking for SMB Financial Guidance from Multi-Action Accounting Logs

arXiv:2608.10050v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Small and medium-sized businesses need timely financial guidance, yet historical accounting logs record self-selected and often co-occurring business changes rather than randomized recommendations. We formulate this setting as observational policy ranking: from pre-decision financial information, a policy selects one of 34 ledger-derived business-change categories for a target financial KPI. Using 85,078 company-month observations from 7,505 firms, we introduce Covariate-Adjusted Residual Policy Learning (CAR-PL), an action-wise R-learner that operates directly on multi-hot logs and regularizes selection by observational support. We compare CAR-PL with an uplift T-Learner, a conservative contextual value model, a zero-shot LLM, and non-personalized references on company-disjoint held-out firms under a shared model-assisted scoring rule. CAR-PL has the highest Gross Profit point estimate (0.084), the T-Learner has the highest Revenue point estimate (0.085), and the contextual value model has the highest Quick Ratio point estimate (0.062). CAR-PL and the T-Learner are not statistically separated on either growth KPI in matched company-clustered comparisons, while CAR-PL selects 33-34 categories and produces less concentrated selections across the catalog. Outcome-model-only scoring retains the same KPI-level point-estimate leader or top pair, and category rankings remain similar when the all-zero treatment reference is replaced by the most common training co-action pattern. These findings support objective-specific ranking of SMB financial guidance from multi-action accounting logs.

arXiv cs.LG · 1 day ago

Closed-Loop LLM Co-Pilots for Digital Agriculture

arXiv:2608.09949v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study evaluates the application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in complex biological systems, evolving from data analysis to autonomous, AI-guided experimentation. The framework is driven by data from a 49-channel phytosensor network, encompassing multispectral, electrochemical, and dielectric modalities. To enhance accessibility, the system provides real-time natural-language interpretation for both specialists and non-experts. However, its core advantage lies in the transition from human-in-the-loop analysis to autonomous control. Processing biophysical data, the LLM evaluates plant physiology and triggers hardware actuators to optimize microclimates, execute phenotyping protocols, or induce controlled stress scenarios. This closed-loop architecture establishes a direct AI-biology interface, enabling data-driven exploration of complex biosystems and ecologies. The framework was validated across three case studies, based on a vertical farm and a single-plant setup and deciphered complex micro- and macro-fluctuations in plant physiology. Agents in a production-scale deployment executed multi-parameter optimization, balancing biomass accumulation, chlorophyll content, and energy consumption. The LLM processed biosensing telemetry to modulate full-spectrum, 450 nm, and 660 nm lighting at 2-hour intervals. Compared to periodic control, the system in minimal-time mode reduced the production cycle by 35%. In the energy-optimization mode, it reduced energy consumption by 18% with only a marginal increase in cultivation time, exploiting physiological inertia via light pulses. Finally, the agents autonomously developed an unforeseen strategy of dark-induced chlorophyll accumulation, resulting in a 67.9% energy saving. This framework transforms LLMs into autonomous co-pilots for digital agriculture, improving the cost-to-value ratio and lowering computational and expert-labor constraints.

arXiv cs.AI · 1 day ago

ReCBM: Uncertainty-Gated Relational Reasoning for Concept Bottleneck Models

arXiv:2608.10004v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) provide an interpretable framework by grounding predictions in human-understandable concepts, enabling semantic inspection and test-time intervention. Recent variants have improved CBMs through richer concept representations, uncertainty estimation, and dependency modeling. However, robust reasoning under unreliable concept states remains underexplored. Without such reasoning, misleading semantic evidence can propagate through the bottleneck, compromising both explanations and downstream predictions. To address this issue, we propose ReCBM, an uncertainty-gated relational reasoning framework for CBMs. ReCBM introduces semantically defined concept relations into the bottleneck and uses uncertainty to guide their refinement. By modeling co-occurrence, implication, and exclusion, ReCBM specifies how evidence is exchanged across concepts, while uncertainty modulates the contribution of each concept during this process. Experiments across diverse datasets showed that ReCBM improved concept and task recovery under missing and flipped concepts, supported uncertainty-aware intervention, and extracted compact task-relevant concept subsets without degrading downstream performance.

arXiv cs.AI · 1 day ago

The CASE Framework: A Multi-Disciplinary Control Architecture for Governing Enterprise Agentic AI

arXiv:2608.10153v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Enterprises are deploying autonomous AI agents faster than they can govern them, and prevailing approaches stretch a single discipline, typically DevSecOps built for deterministic automation, across every scale of agency. We argue that agentic AI governance is four problems, not one, each with a mature governing science. The CASE framework assigns Control theory to the individual agent (intent as setpoint, guardrails as feedback, evaluation as observation), complex Adaptive systems theory to agent collectives (where emergence makes single-agent assurance non-compositional), Supervisory cybernetics to human-agent teams (where the Law of Requisite Variety shows unaided human oversight fails structurally), and Engineering operations to fleets (extending error budgets to decision quality so autonomy becomes a controlled variable). We formalize each layer, derive cross-layer coupling conditions, including a zero-touch deployment paradox where excellence at one-layer strains the others, and trace twenty-plus enterprise controls to their classical constructs. Three empirical studies validate the thesis: 82 percent of documented production agent failures are multi-layer trajectories; none of 22 ecosystem tools offers full Layer 2 (emergence) coverage; and all 35 scored public deployments fall in the lowest maturity band. We name this mismatch, risk realized at the emergence layer against capability barely offered and practice absent, the Emergence Gap. A five-level maturity model with a non-compensatory bottleneck-weighted index and assessment instrument operationalizes CASE as a scientific rather than process maturity model, grounded in production enterprise agentic platforms. As EU AI Act Article 14 makes effective human oversight a legal requirement, only architectures satisfying requisite variety can make oversight real rather than ceremonial.

arXiv cs.AI · 1 day ago

SBCO: Self-Supervised, Verifier-Grounded Harness Optimization For Planning Agents

arXiv:2608.10157v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-improving agents seek to reduce the human engineering effort behind AI systems by enabling them to evolve and self-improve their performance over time. Recently, methods like the Darwin G\"odel Machine and the Huxley G\"odel Machine have been proposed which enable open-ended, recursive self-improvement through self-reference where a coding agent edits its own code. Such self-referential self-improvement methods require that the competence required to perform the task coincides or aligns well with the competence required for self-modification which is the case for coding tasks. For domains or tasks, which do not satisfy the alignment needed, self-referential self-improvement is not available. In such cases, it is possible to adapt the above algorithms to other tasks by removing the self-referential aspect or introducing explicit self-modification of a meta-agent -- both computationally expensive, relying on population or self-modification search over many candidate agents. For planning tasks with explicit constraints, we propose a far cheaper alternative. We introduce SBCO (Self-supervised Block Coordinate Optimizer), a verifier-grounded harness optimizer in the same closed-loop, improve-from-experience family as the G\"odel-machine methods, but self-supervised rather than self-referential. Given an agentic harness, SBCO learns a decomposed bank of verifiers and a harness policy via approximate block coordinate ascent, improving the agent's outputs from its own graded feedback---with a fixed meta-agent and no human labels. Across two domains SBCO matches or exceeds a customized self-modifying baseline while using 4-5.5 times less compute budget.

arXiv cs.AI · 1 day ago

Post-Hoc Sparse Coding of Latent Communication Between Vision-Language Model Agents

arXiv:2608.10198v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent-space communication allows heterogeneous vision-language model agents to exchange continuous representations without serializing visual and reasoning states into text. Vision Wormhole realizes this approach by translating visual features into a universal latent representation that can be consumed by another model, but every message is transported as a dense tensor of the same size regardless of its content. A fixed-capacity dense tensor therefore need not have a fixed effective information density: some messages may use only a small fraction of the available representational degrees of freedom. This observation suggests that the communication channel may be substantially compressible. We study its redundancy by fitting a post-hoc sparse autoencoder to frozen Vision Wormhole activations and measuring reconstruction, downstream utility, feature reuse, and token-level interventions across nine reasoning benchmarks. Relative to the original float32 transport, a uint16-index/float16-value sparse payload with k=4 active coefficients per token reduces the transmitted bytes by 128x. In a single-run evaluation, the seven-task non-AIME mean accuracy changes from 49.85% to 49.77%. The fitted 4096-element dictionary uses only 50 features, and task-level active sets have a mean pairwise Jaccard similarity of 0.906. These measurements establish strong post-hoc compressibility relative to the original transport, but do not yet isolate the incremental contribution of sparse coding from position selection, reduced precision, low-rank structure, or SAE optimization effects. The results motivate matched-payload comparisons and communication mechanisms whose payload adapts to the information used by each message.

arXiv cs.AI · 1 day ago

TRACE: Trustworthy Retrieval-Augmented Conversational Engine

arXiv:2608.10176v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Public service chatbots are expected to deliver recommendations from an underlying public service directory, while also making sure that the recommendations respect explicit user constraints. In practice, public service directories are noisy and inconsistent, and general-purpose large language model (LLM) or AI-based chatbots frequently generate unreliable recommendations, citing unverified sources from the web. We investigate the impact of retrieval quality on constraint-aware recommendation in public service conversational systems built over noisy and heterogeneous service directories. We propose TRACE (Trustworthy Retrieval-Augmented Conversational Engine), a retrieval-based, constraint-aware framework that parses input user queries into structural and semantic constraints for downstream retrieval, with the help of a dual data representation schema. Using a curated statewide pantry directory and a synthetic query benchmark, we evaluate multiple knowledge-representation variants with and without knowledge graphs (KGs). We experiment with several open-source LLMs and a proprietary model, showing that strengthening retrieval substantially improves user constraint satisfaction while reducing hallucinated recommendations. Performance differences across LLMs narrowed in our experiments as retrieval quality improved, making results less sensitive to model size. These findings suggest that the quality of retrieval is key for robust public service conversational systems.

arXiv cs.AI · 1 day ago