Artificial Intelligence Papers

ALT Learning-based approaches have increasingly been explored for SAT solving, with particular attention to improving branching decisions in conflict-driven clause learning (CDCL) solvers. These approaches derive branching guidance either from static structural properties of SAT formulas or from dynamic signals obtained through solver feedback and execution traces. However, these forms of supervision provide limited evidence about state-dependent branching effects, while different outcome measures may favor different branching choices. To address these limitations, we propose SAT-ACT, an outcome-derived learning framework for CDCL branching. We design three complementary outcome comparison criteria to extract action preferences from independent branching action rollouts initiated at the same solver state. The criteria identify preferences supported by the outcomes and leave comparisons unresolved when the evidence is insufficient or conflicting, instead of forcing an ordering using a prede

ALT Turning an engineering request into a simulation requires consistent geometry, physics, boundary conditions, and numerical settings. Recent agent-assisted systems automate simulation setup, but successful execution alone does not establish whether the specification preserves the intended problem or correctly handles missing information. We study whether agents can reliably construct complete executable JSON specifications for automated geometry creation, meshing, PDE solving, and result export. Our workflow combines model extraction with deterministic scientific and capability checks, explicit clarification, and validated local patches that preserve unrelated accepted fields. We evaluate specification correctness, execution completion, and numerical verification separately. On 120 template-related requests, the full workflow achieves 98.3% correct first-turn specification and decision outcomes, compared with 92.5% for schema-assisted single shot and 82.5% for model-only: gains of 5.8 a

ALT Training language-model agents to play long-horizon strategy games is hard because deterministic feedback is sparse and often arrives only at the end of a game. In-game scores can offer dense signals, but they do not reliably predict future outcomes: in 8-68% of position pairs across eight strategy games, the higher-scoring position leads to the worse outcome. We term this phenomenon scoreboard traps. In Freeciv, an open-source turn-based empire-building game where several players manage units, cities, and diplomacy over hundreds of turns, we look into better reward signals for gameplay agents. To facilitate this, we build CivHarness, an open system that saves current game states, branches on different decisions, and replays the game to future turns to provide measurable long-horizon feedback from saved positions. We use CivHarness to train CivTelescope, an LLM Judge that predicts which one of two game positions will yield the better outcome. On scoreboard-trap pairs, CivTelescope is 1

ALT Memory has become central to self-evolving LLM agents, which store and retrieve experience from past rollouts to guide future decisions. Existing systems represent this experience as free-form natural language and maintain it by rewriting, which fits tasks whose experience is narratable. However, in scientific discovery and optimization, experience is often a quantity measured by an oracle under a specific context. Rewriting it as text leaves no index for where a record should be, replaces a measurement with a description, and cannot express how interventions interact. To address this, we argue that agent memory for biomolecule optimization should instead be indexable, quantitative, and structured, and we introduce MEMIG. This memory construction framework realizes these three properties. In detail, MEMIG addresses each insight with a domain-grounded identifier and accumulates the quantitative effect measured by a property oracle, so that updates remain local and retrieval becomes an e

ALT Sparse MoE mechanism significantly improves the trade-off between model capacity and inference efficiency. However, practical deployment still requires storing all experts, resulting in substantial memory overhead. We show that expert outputs in MoE layers exhibit structured redundancy. Across different models and task categories, the stable rank and entropy effective rank of expert outputs are consistently far below the nominal number of experts, while expert output distributions also exhibit fewer effective modes. Motivated by these observations, we reformulate expert pruning as a structure-preserving expert subset selection problem and efficiently optimize it via a greedy strategy, rather than only independently scoring and ranking individual experts or exhaustively searching over expert combinations. We propose two expert pruning methods under the unified structure-preserving framework: Projection Energy Expert Pruning (PEEP), which preserves the functional subspace by maximizing w

ALT As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly multilingual, distinguishing human-written from AI-generated text is essential for maintaining information integrity. However, research remains English-centric, with limited benchmarks for low-resource languages such as Hindi. To address this gap, we introduce SHAKTI, a large-scale Hindi benchmark covering four genres, eight LLM families, multiple prompting strategies, and adversarial transformations. We evaluate its quality through human annotation and analyze linguistic, grammatical, and sentiment-based differences between human- and AI-generated texts. Building on these findings, we propose TRIDENT, a round-trip translation-based detection framework with three variants: TRIDENT-S (static threshold), TRIDENT-D (dynamic threshold), and TRIDENT-C (logistic regression using multi-distance RTT features). TRIDENT leverages semantic consistency between original and round-trip translated texts to identify AI-generated content. Extensive ex

ALT Large language models offer a promising route to register-transfer-level (RTL) design, but reliable implementations require checking and revision based on electronic design automation (EDA) tools' feedback. Existing RTL-specialized models often lack learned interaction with such EDA tools or rely on separate generation and repair components. We introduce RTL-Interact, a multi-task post-training framework that trains a single RTL-specialized model to generate RTL, construct task-appropriate EDA checks, and revise implementations using tool feedback. The framework combines automatically constructed multi-task demonstrations with staged supervision from chain-of-thought to tool-integrated reasoning. We further introduce Pattern-Aware Policy Optimization (PAPO) for multi-task reinforcement learning. PAPO augments Group Relative Policy Optimization with correctness-gated rewards that favor concise successful checking while rewarding effective revision, and uses task grouping to preserve cov

ALT LLM-guided program evolution can produce mathematical constructions, but validity, generality, and reproducibility require distinct evidence. We develop a researcher-in-the-loop discovery pipeline that combines program evolution, exact evaluation, mathematical generalization, certified nonexistence checks, and formal proof checking. We apply it to entanglement-assisted quantum error-correcting codes (EAQECCs). Starting from tasks that did not specify a family formula, evolved programs produced finite qubit constructions whose structure researchers generalized to the family [[n,1,n-1;n-q-1]]q for prime powers q≥3 at n≥2q+1 and for q=2 at odd n≥5. Lean checks the algebraic certificate underlying this family. Together with entanglement lifting, the family closes 54 gaps in archived EAQECC tables. The released evidence includes 115 verified code records, ten nonexistence results with checked DRAT proofs, family implementations, and preserved search programs for exact checks and seeded repl

ALT The ability to integrate new information and deduce its consequences is central to learning, understanding, and reasoning in large language models (LLMs). Whether information arrives during training or in-context, models must not only store local facts, but propagate their long-range implications globally. To explore information integration in LLMs, we introduce two complementary natural language benchmarks for large-scale evaluation of deductive reasoning as a function of inference depth. The first is a formal graph benchmark enabling controlled evaluation over a wide range of graph topologies and integration tasks; the second is a knowledge composition benchmark grounded in real-world knowledge graphs. We use these benchmarks to compare knowledge integration from information encoded in context versus information encoded in model weights during pretraining, evaluating a set of open models implicitly, without chain of thought. We find that accuracy decays sharply with increased composi

ALT Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate toxic content, motivating effective test-time detoxification. Existing representation steering methods often rely on static or coarse interventions and provide imprecise guidance because they inadequately model transitions between toxic and non-toxic generations. We propose Transition-Aware Reward-Guided Representation Sampling (TARGRS), a test-time framework that learns reward guidance over toxicity transitions in latent representation space. During exploration, progressive steering along the toxicity direction constructs trajectories from non-toxic to toxic states. Toxicity scores along these trajectories turn sparse annotations into dense, listwise supervision for a transition-aware token-level reward model. During inference, TARGRS uses this model to guide coarse-to-fine sampling along the opposite, non-toxic direction: coarse sampling identifies the intervention needed to reach non-toxic regions, and refinement selects a detoxified represe

ALT To accelerate materials discovery, language models must be able to address problems at the research frontier. Yet textbook- and examination-derived benchmarks primarily assess established knowledge, leaving performance on frontier research problems largely untested. We introduce FrontierMat, a benchmark of 330 problems drawn from frontier academic and industrial research in fields including aerospace, semiconductors, embodied intelligence and nuclear fusion. Every problem is validated by leading experimentalists and industry experts in its field. Each problem presents a real study and asks the model to infer a withheld outcome or draw a conclusion from selected experimental evidence. Problems are annotated by functional domain, material system and the scale of the governing mechanism; 130 require cross-scale reasoning. The strongest general-purpose model scores only 53.7%, and on matched problems, cross-scale problems score 8.7 points below single-scale ones. Half of the problems are s

ALT Genetic programming (GP) has been widely used to learn scheduling rules for dynamic flexible job shop scheduling (DFJSS). However, trained rules tend to only generalise to tasks of similar scales and distributions, and when task characteristics change, learned rules often suffer significant performance degradation. Moreover, fine-tuning pre-trained rules on new tasks often leads to catastrophic forgetting, where prior knowledge is lost. This motivates the need for GP methods that can adapt to new tasks while preserving past knowledge, leading to a lifelong learning paradigm. However, lifelong learning in GP for DFJSS remains largely under-explored. To address this gap, this paper proposes a surrogate-assisted GP method for lifelong learning to handle sequential heterogeneous DFJSS tasks with job or batch arrivals. The framework includes three key components: an adaptive two-stage training strategy to balance plasticity and stability, a task-similarity-based weighting mechanism to regul

ALT Agentic systems increasingly gate individual steps with a pointwise judge that scores a response against a criterion. Small language models are attractive for this role because they can be served and specialized efficiently. Such a judge must locate the criterion's decision boundary, but pointwise labels under-determine that boundary in fine-tuning: labeled responses to different queries differ along many dimensions at once, so they do not reveal which features decide the label. We introduce CPA (Counterfactual Pairwise Augmentation), which makes the deciding difference explicit in training. For each pointwise item, CPA synthesizes and audits a counterfactual response to the same query intended to carry the opposite label. It frames the accepted pair as a pairwise task asking which of the two responses satisfies the criterion. The judge is fine-tuned jointly on both pointwise and pairwise datasets and deployed in pointwise mode only. A second-order analysis shows when this should outpe

ALT AI agents increasingly carry out delegated tasks in parallel, with one person overseeing several of them at once. In practice, an agent often lacks information its task requires, such as an unstated preference, constraint, or specification. It can ask the human to clarify, or it can search for the information itself, for example in past records, which takes time and effort and may fail. In this paper, we study how to coordinate these decisions across several agents that share one human with limited attention. We build a stylized model in which each agent can search, ask, or continue the parts of its task that do not depend on the missing information, and we formulate the problem as a dynamic program. We first show that whether an agent should ask depends on more than its own uncertainty: an agent with other work to do can be better off asking earlier, and which question the human should answer first depends on all waiting questions, so no ranking computed agent by agent is optimal. We

ALT Agentic LLM assistants must repeatedly decide whether to answer from memory or to call a tool such as web search. Unnecessary searches cost latency and money; missing ones yield confident but unsupported answers. Prior work mostly measures verbalised confidence or trains new adaptive-retrieval methods, and rarely audits the search decisions that deployed products actually make. We introduce a benchmark of 400 multiple-choice questions that combines widely known inside-knowledge (IK) questions, which should be answered directly, with outside-knowledge (OK) questions about facts from news published after the models' training cut-offs (to our knowledge), which should trigger search or, without tools, abstention. Each item offers an abstain option, and two action-level scores, NAS and KIS, reward searching on OK questions and restraint on IK questions. Across five commercial LLMs with and without their vendors' web search, GPT-5 mini and Grok 4 Fast search on over 90% of OK but only 1% of

ALT Optimizing a proxy objective can improve human-perceived quality, but the resulting gain can vary with optimization strength. Average proxy-human correlation alone does not reveal how human-perceived quality changes as optimization strength increases. We propose PACE (Proxy Alignment and Curvature Expansion), a pre-optimization diagnostic that uses repeated human ratings to predict the human-gain curve induced by a fixed proxy. The method models proxy optimization as a KL-regularized exponential tilt. At KL radius d, the local gain is approximated by A√d+Bd, where A measures first-order proxy-human alignment and B captures the leading second-order correction along the proxy-optimization path. We estimate A and B from repeated human ratings on calibration items and test the resulting gain-curve prediction on held-out evaluation items. Across SummEval, analysis-eligible WMT MQM clusters, an OpenMEVA-MAGS ROC/WP repeated-rating slice, and a GPT-4o judge proxy experiment, PACE consistently

ALT Quantization of Large Language Models (LLMs) has be- coming increasingly important for reducing the computa- tional costs and resource requirements for practical deploy- ment.Growinginterestinthisareahasmotivatedthecommu- nity to move beyond 8-bit quantization towards 4-bit preci- sion, leading to the development of customized 4-bit formats such as MXFP4 and NVFP4. Recently, HiFloat4 (HiF4) has emerged as a competitive alternative which adopts a Block Floating-Point(BFP)formatwithathree-levelscalinghierar- chy, thereby achieving a significantly larger dynamic range. While quantization can substantially reduce memory usage and accelerate inference, it frequently introduces accuracy degradation. Calibration is therefore essential for narrowing theperformancegapbetweenlow-precisionquantizedmodels and their full-precision counterparts. Nevertheless, existing calibration methods are mainly designed and validated us- ing integer-precision formats, such as INT4, lacking support for HiF4 due t

ALT Manifold learning methods like t-SNE and UMAP preserve local neighborhoods, but they do not preserve the ranking of the neighbors inside them. Two embeddings can return the same neighbor set while disagreeing on which point is closest. This loss of order degrades downstream applications that value the order in the embedding. We propose Smooth Rank t-SNE (SR-tSNE), which adds a differentiable rank term to the standard t-SNE loss. To enable efficient training, this term uses a sigmoid rank approximation to explicitly force a point's true high-dimensional neighbors to outrank unrelated intruders and retain their original order. We also introduce Ordinal DLP (O-DLP), an extension of the Degree of Locality Preservation (DLP) metric that credits a neighbor only when it returns at its original rank. Across eight benchmarks spanning image, text, speech, remote-sensing and single-cell data, SR-tSNE outperforms 12 baselines in rank preservation and neighborhood overlap. Ablation studies demonstr

ALT Time-series foundation models (TSFMs) provide zero-shot forecasts for unseen series, but their accuracy varies across datasets. Combining several models can reduce this variability, yet zero-shot deployment provides no target labels for selecting or weighting them. We find that a model pool is useful not only as a final ensemble, but also as a probability reference for transforming each member forecast. Aligning quantiles through this pool-relative reference improves every member forecast in aggregate. Motivated by this finding, we propose QUAL (Quantile alignment), a simple label-free framework for improving and combining diverse TSFMs. QUAL first produces aligned member forecasts, then applies Huber aggregation and rearrangement to obtain a robust combined forecast without training or model modification. On GIFT-Eval, quantile alignment reduces average member MASE and CRPS by 7.4% and 9.8%. The full framework remains robust when weak forecasters enter a candidate pool whose quality c

ALT In text-to-SQL and AI-agent analytics, successful SQL execution does not establish semantic correctness under changing business definitions. We study revalidation of fixed queries after changes to refund attribution, tax treatment, eligible populations and exchange-rate dates. An executable verification profile binds the requested revision and knowledge cutoff to legal counterexample data and exact monetary comparison. A preregistered confirmation on 32 newly authored revision families and two local producer bundles retains 192 query-definition cells: 144 nonconforming, 36 finite-suite agreeing and 12 unresolved. Of the nonconforming cells, 63 agree on the current snapshot. At an eight-ledger budget, obligation-guided checking detects 137 discrepancies versus 127 for generic ordering, a paired difference of 6.9 percentage points (family bootstrap 95% interval [2.1, 13.6]; exact family sign-flip p=0.0156). Every ledger arm rejects zero of the 36 agreeing cells. Current-obligation and eq