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Metacognition is a foundational component of intelligence critical to effective learning, problem solving, decision-making, communication, and more. In recent years, it has become increasingly recognized as a cornerstone of capable, transparent AI systems. Yet while LLMs have made significant progress across diverse real-world tasks, it is not yet clear when, how, or to what extent they can exhibit or be endowed with effective metacognitive abilities, nor how such abilities can be adapted to advance the fundamental capabilities, reliability, and intelligence of AI systems. This paper bridges this gap by presenting the first comprehensive overview of the current state of knowledge on metacognition for LLMs. We analyze and taxonomize the landscape of this emerging field and summarize recent technical advancements, including methods and benchmarks to measure and evaluate LLMs' metacognitive abilities, techniques to elicit, improve, and apply metacognition in LLMs, and findings and implications of ongoing research. We also discuss applications, open questions and challenges, and promising directions for future work. Our aim is to provide a detailed and up-to-date review of this topic and stimulate meaningful research and discussion. An organized list of papers can be found at https://github.com/yale-nlp/LLM-Metacognition.

• Computation and Language
• Artificial Intelligence

We present a theoretical framework to explain the emergence of inductive reasoning abilities in Transformer language models. While previous works on Transformer learning dynamics have so far been mostly tied to specific tasks, we study a generalized class of inductive tasks that unifies several synthetic tasks known in the literature, including in-context n-grams and multi-hop reasoning. In this class, we theoretically prove that the training dynamics of attention models can be confined to a highly interpretable, low-dimensional invariant manifold. On this manifold, the learning dynamics are captured by a handful of interpretable coordinates rather than millions of parameters, making both theoretical and empirical analysis more tractable. Using this framework, we characterize how data statistics govern the competition between in-context and in-weights learning, we study how random initializations determine the `winning' circuit when multiple solutions are possible, and we demonstrate that the coordinate frame associated with the manifold can be used to automatically detect which circuits have been learned in trained models. By casting circuit formation as a low-dimensional dynamical phenomenon, we take a step toward a predictive theory of how Transformers learn.

• Machine Learning
• Artificial Intelligence

Recent work in humanoid whole-body control has found success with a simple recipe: retarget human motion to robot kinematic references, then train policies via reinforcement learning (RL) to track them. But how does this recipe transfer to dexterous manipulation? The answer is not obvious, as manipulation involves complex, contact-rich dynamics and requires delicate regulation of contact modes and forces. We present REGRIND, a minimalist retargeting-guided RL pipeline that learns dexterous manipulation policies from a single human demonstration. REGRIND retargets human hand-object motion to a robot reference that preserves hand-object spatial and contact relationships, trains a residual RL policy in simulation to track object-centric keypoints along that reference, and transfers the resulting policy zero-shot to hardware with careful system identification. The resulting policies produce fluid, human-like behavior on two different multi-fingered hands across contact-rich tool-use tasks, including operating a pair of scissors and turning a screwdriver. Through systematic hardware experiments, we identify and analyze the key factors that govern sim-to-real transfer in dexterous manipulation, offering practical guidance for retargeting-based learning in contact-rich settings. Videos and code are available at https://yunhaifeng.com/REGRIND.

• Robotics
• Artificial Intelligence
• Machine Learning

Existing studies of LLM-as-judge scoring bias work predominantly at the input-output level: they perturb inputs, measure score deltas, and propose prompt-level mitigations. We argue that the same biases admit a representation-level account in the judge's hidden state, complementary to the input-output view and operationally useful in ways it does not afford. We report three findings, across seven judges, seven bias types, and nine benchmarks. Geometry: baseline judging inputs occupy a tight activation manifold while biased inputs are displaced along a low-dimensional, type-specific subspace that sharpens with depth and is recovered consistently by three families of estimators. Causal control: steering hidden states along this subspace drives scoring in both directions, forward shifts reproducing biased scoring on clean inputs and reverse shifts restoring baseline scoring on biased ones, while matched-norm random directions produce shifts an order of magnitude smaller. Operational: a simple linear projection onto the same bias-direction features anticipates judge failures on three entirely unseen benchmarks, substantially outperforming text-based alternatives. Reading bias as activation geometry, rather than as input-output noise, unifies geometric structure, causal control, and operational prediction within a single framework. The project page is available at https://xzx34.github.io/unfair-judge/

• Machine Learning
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computation and Language

Current Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs) excel in question answering (QA) but largely operate as black boxes, providing textual answers without verifiable visual grounding. Existing explainability efforts rely on textual rationales or sparse bounding boxes, which struggle to capture complex video dynamics such as occlusions and non-rigid deformations. We propose Evidence-Backed Video Question Answering (E-VQA), a novel task requiring models to jointly output a semantic answer and precise spatio-temporal evidence: temporal segments and dense, tracked object segmentation masklets. To support this, we introduce ST-Evidence, the first human-verified benchmark for both discriminative and generative pixel-level grounding. Evaluations of state-of-the-art models reveal a critical decoupling between QA accuracy and true visual perception that scaling alone fails to bridge. To address this, we develop scalable, automated generation pipelines to create ST-Evidence-Instruct, a 160k-scale dataset bridging high-level reasoning with fine-grained grounding. Fine-tuning grounded Video LLMs on this data yields substantial gains over the corresponding size-matched UniPixel baselines (e.g., +27.2 t-mean and +13.8 J&F on a 7B model), establishing a robust baseline for explainable, evidence-backed video understanding. Code and data are available at https://github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/EVQA.

• Computer Vision
• Artificial Intelligence

This paper presents a cascaded Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA)-based multimodal fusion framework for action and activity recognition in healthcare-oriented training environments. The proposed architecture combines parameter-efficient modality-specific adaptation with sequential fusion, enabling modalities to be integrated in stages without retraining previously learned components. Rather than assuming a fixed fusion structure, the framework first integrates more closely related modalities and then incorporates additional heterogeneous modalities, supporting scalable adaptation across datasets with different modality sets.We evaluate the framework on two healthcare-oriented training environment datasets: NurViD and the Nurse Training dataset. Across these datasets, preliminary results suggest that the proposed cascaded fusion strategy improves over individual modality models and provides competitive performance relative to previously reported dataset-specific baselines. Overall, these findings indicate that cascaded LoRA-based fusion is a promising parameter-efficient approach for integrating heterogeneous modalities in medical training action and activity recognition tasks. github: https://github.com/anonymous0-ai/LoRA-Based-Cascaded-Multimodal-Fusion-.git.

• Computer Vision
• Artificial Intelligence

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has automated the design of deep learning models but traditionally requires massive computational resources, often measured in thousands of GPU-days. In this paper, we propose a frugal and memetic NAS framework designed to democratize architecture design on consumer-grade hardware. Our approach combines the global macro-search capabilities of an autoregressive Transformer controller, trained via Reinforcement Learning (RL), with the local micro-exploitation of an Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm. To prevent premature convergence during the RL phase, we introduce a dynamic entropy mechanism that forces topological exploration upon detection of performance stagnation. Evaluated on a standard GPU (NVIDIA RTX 3060), our hybrid method effectively resolves the "cold-start" problem inherent in metaheuristics. By algorithmically penalizing network depth, our framework actively mitigates model bloat: on the CIFAR-10 dataset, it discovers an efficient architecture reaching 84.85% accuracy with only $\sim$174,000 parameters (significantly smaller than standard baselines like ResNet-20) in 3 hours of search time. Furthermore, we demonstrate the framework's flexibility by applying it to credit card fraud detection, directly optimizing the F1-Score on highly imbalanced tabular data to reach a F1-Score of 0.71 with a compact network of $\sim$4,600 parameters. These results suggest that our approach can yield tailored, accessible, and highly parameter-efficient deep learning models suitable for edge deployment.

• Machine Learning
• Artificial Intelligence
• Neural and Evolutionary Computing

We introduce MM-ToolSandBox, a benchmark and evaluation framework for visually grounded tool-calling agents. The framework provides a stateful execution environment spanning 500+ tools across 16 application domains, supporting multi-image, multi-turn tasks where agents must ground progressively arriving visual inputs into executable tool calls while handling realistic conversational phenomena (goal revisions, error corrections, state mutations). An automated scenario generation pipeline produces diverse, visually grounded scenarios through information-flow-guided planning and multi-stage quality filtering, yielding 258 human-verified nominal scenarios and 50 variants targeting interactive UI applications. Evaluating 12 state-of-the-art models, from 4B open-weight to frontier proprietary systems, shows that current models still lack robust visual tool-calling capability: even the best model achieves below 50% success rate. Our failure analysis further reveals that visual precision, not only planning, is a primary bottleneck for capable models: 53% of failures stem from incorrect information extraction from images despite otherwise correct task workflows. A planning-to-precision crossover emerges with scale: smaller models fail at deciding what to do, while larger models fail at perceiving what they see, suggesting fundamentally different research directions for improving models at different capability levels. The framework and the benchmark are publicly available at https://github.com/apple/ml-mmtoolsandbox

• Computer Vision
• Artificial Intelligence

This paper proposes a human-centered artificial intelligence (HCAI) framework for AI-assisted lexicography. While generative AI offers significant opportunities to enhance lexicographic work, it also raises concerns regarding the future role of lexicographers and the preservation of linguistic and cultural diversity. Drawing on HCAI principles and previous applications in other language professions, the paper identifies four interrelated dimensions through which AI integration in lexicography can be understood and critically examined: the augmented lexicographer, the sociotechnical context of AI integration, bias, and the design of AI-powered lexicographic tools. The framework argues that AI should augment rather than replace lexicographers, combining high levels of automation with meaningful human control. It further emphasizes the importance of preserving professional agency, mitigating AI-generated biases, and designing tools around the needs of lexicographers. By doing so, the paper provides a foundation for future research and the beneficial integration of AI into lexicographic workflows.

• Computation and Language
• Artificial Intelligence

Large audio-language models (LALMs) often underperform on fine-grained, non-semantic attributes of speech, such as a speaker's emotion, despite strong performance on speech content. Improving this without the cost of retraining calls for an effective inference-time intervention, yet most existing methods intervene only after the audio encoder and operate at a relatively coarse granularity. The encoder itself, where acoustic information is first extracted from the waveform, remains largely unexplored, especially at the level of individual neurons. We introduce IAAN, Identifying and Amplifying Acoustic Neurons, a training-free and label-free method that scores each feed-forward neuron in the audio encoder by contrasting its activation on the real waveform with that on a noise reference lacking the real audio's acoustic information. IAAN then amplifies a small set of the highest-scoring neurons at inference. Across ten non-semantic speech attributes, IAAN improves average accuracy by 25.7 points on Audio-Flamingo-3, 21.4 on Qwen2.5-Omni, and 9.7 on Kimi-Audio. It also improves a model already explicitly fine-tuned to prioritize acoustic evidence. In controlled comparisons, both the encoder locus and neuron-level selectivity prove necessary for this gain. Intervening after the encoder, at the decoding side or inside the language model, yields little to no improvement, or even deteriorates accuracy. The improvement also depends on which specific neurons are amplified, not merely on their number, confirming that IAAN's acoustic score succeeds in identifying the neurons that matter. These results show that a small, precisely targeted intervention inside the audio encoder is an effective and largely untapped way to strengthen the acoustic understanding of LALMs, opening a new direction for inference-time methods that improve acoustic perception through neuron-level access to the encoder.

• Sound
• Artificial Intelligence

Long-form audio description (AD) requires more than describing visible actions: it must preserve characters, events, relationships, and story context across scenes so that blind and low-vision (BLV) audiences can follow a film. Modern video-language models (VLMs) are effective on short clips, but they often treat each moment independently, producing descriptions that miss who characters are, why events matter, and how the current scene connects to earlier narrative context. We propose StoryTeller, a training-free framework for story-aware long-form AD. Instead of relying only on local visual cues, StoryTeller maintains a verified narrative memory that carries forward story-relevant information across scenes, enabling later descriptions to remain coherent, grounded, and contextually informative. Given only raw video and a movie title, StoryTeller can optionally retrieve public movie metadata to resolve names and story context, while accepting only facts that are supported by the video through semantic filtering and VLM verification. The method requires no subtitles, scripts, AD transcripts, aligned captions, character banks, precomputed face identities, or task-specific fine-tuning. To evaluate whether generated AD preserves narrative information, we introduce StoryAD-QA, a question-answering benchmark that tests whether a language model can answer story-context questions using only the generated descriptions. Experiments on standard AD benchmarks and diverse long-form videos show that StoryTeller consistently improves narrative coherence, factual grounding, and story comprehension over strong baselines in automatic, QA-based, and human evaluations.

• Computer Vision
• Artificial Intelligence

Explainability has emerged as a critical requirement for AI-based systems, particularly in safety-critical and regulated domains. Although prior research has proposed frameworks, patterns, and user-centered approaches to support explainability, there is limited empirical understanding of how existing Requirements Engineering (RE) practices support explainability requirements across the RE lifecycle, especially in an industrial context. This paper reports early findings from an ongoing industry-based study investigating how explainability requirements are elicited, specified, and validated using established RE techniques. We conducted a multi-phase qualitative study with eight practitioners at Daimler Truck, employing think-aloud protocols and moderated group discussions across requirements elicitation, specification, and validation steps. Our preliminary analysis reveals recurring challenges across all steps, including conceptual ambiguity during elicitation, limited testability and expressiveness during specification, and fragmented validation due to vague criteria and regulatory uncertainty. These findings indicate that current RE practices provide limited support to systematically address explainability requirements. The paper contributes empirical insights into step-specific and cross-cutting challenges and outlines a research vision toward developing an empirically grounded RE framework for explainable AI-based systems.

• Software Engineering
• Artificial Intelligence

Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly reshaping workplace communication, yet whether AI-assisted writing changes how recipients actually behave, and through what channel, remains unknown. Here, in a randomized crossover field experiment, 121 employees across six companies sent work emails under three conditions over three weeks: unaided writing, GPT-5 rewriting in a playful tone, and GPT-5 rewriting in a professional tone. Across 16,880 emails, playful editing increased emotional positivity (B=+0.068, p<0.001), and professional editing decreased it (B=-0.041, p<0.001), yet neither condition directly altered open rates, reply rates, or response times. Instead, within-sender positivity strongly predicted both opening (OR=2.05) and replying (OR=3.32, p<0.001), a significant indirect pathway through which AI editing shaped behavior, in the absence of any direct effect. These findings suggest that AI-assisted communication shapes workplace engagement not through its use, but through the emotional tone of the language it produces.

• Artificial Intelligence
• Human-Computer Interaction

Prefabricated prefinished volumetric construction moves most building work into module factories, whose production floor operates as a flexible job shop. A major complication is decisive: long post-operation time-lags caused by concrete curing, watertightness ponding tests, and paint drying, during which a module is blocked while its workstation stays free. On benchmark instances grounded in an official national prefabrication guidebook, these lags inflate even the optimal reference makespan by about 67% on average, and ignoring them at decision time, then repairing to feasibility, is worse than every dispatching rule. We adapt a state-of-the-art dual-attention deep reinforcement learning solver through three minimally invasive, individually ablatable extensions: lag-aware dynamics with an admissible reward bound, two anticipatory lag feature channels, and liveness-masked operation- and station-type embeddings. With every extension disabled the implementation reproduces the original solver exactly, so all gains are attributable to the adaptations. We release a public, guidebook-grounded benchmark generator. On held-out instances the learned policy is the strongest solver-free scheduler: it reaches within about 4% of a constraint-programming reference and beats every dispatching rule and a genetic-algorithm metaheuristic, with its advantage widening under capacity contention, and a single size-mixed policy carries this lead across the trained range of factory sizes. It needs no solver, model, or license in the loop and re-plans within seconds of a disruption; where an exact solver can be deployed, that solver remains the quality ceiling, a boundary we map explicitly.

• Machine Learning
• Artificial Intelligence
• Optimisation and Control

Background: Offline reinforcement learning (RL) enables effective policies to be trained from large, previously collected datasets and subsequently improved through limited online interaction. This offline-to-online RL (O2O-RL) paradigm is particularly promising in nonstationary domains where interaction is costly or potentially hazardous. Standard O2O-RL pipelines train multiple candidate policies offline, evaluate them using off-policy or online evaluation, and then deploy and fine-tune the policy with the highest estimated value. However, as in offline pretraining, fine-tuning performance is highly sensitive to the choice of algorithm and hyperparameters, making it risky to commit to a single policy. Objectives: We study active policy selection for fine-tuning under a limited interaction budget in O2O-RL settings. To our knowledge, this is the first work to address this problem. Methods: We formulate the problem by identifying a fundamental trade-off between allocating online interactions to policy evaluation, which helps identify high-performing policies, and allocating them to fine-tuning, which improves policy performance. We then propose an approach that balances this trade-off by actively selecting policies for fine-tuning based on upper-confidence bounds on their future performance. These bounds are derived from locally linear performance forecasts fitted to observations obtained through online evaluation. Results: Across a diverse range of experiments, the proposed approach consistently outperforms existing O2O-RL baselines. Conclusions: Actively selecting and fine-tuning policies uses limited online interaction budgets more effectively than either committing to a single policy or dividing the budget equally among all policies. Our framework also advances offline RL toward practical deployment in real-world systems where online interaction is costly or risky.

• Machine Learning
• Artificial Intelligence

Following the rapid progress of generative Artificial Intelligence, there is a growing threat posed by conversational scams. These scams often span over multiple weeks or months, gradually build trust and request for money or sensitive information. Existing scam-detection systems mainly focus on isolated messages, which renders them inadequate against this evolving threat. This paper extends single-message phishing detection and presents an explainable agentic system for detecting sophisticated conversational scams. It also introduces ConScamBench-278, an initial public multi-category benchmark for conversational scam detection spanning eight scam types, released to support reproducible evaluation and future expansion. On isolated messages the single-message detector attains 100% phishing recall, while the conversation-level detector identifies all conversational scams in the public LoveFraud02 corpus (83/83) and reaches 97.8% accuracy (95% CI [95.4, 99.0]) on ConScamBench-278. Two user studies (N = 100 and N = 45) further motivate the system: participants report frequently experiencing uncertainty when judging suspicious conversations. In an uncontrolled pre/post comparison, users self-reported trust, self-confidence, and perceived need for AI-based scam detection all increased (p < 0.001, Wilcoxon signed-rank). The system also receives a System Usability Scale score of 74.7 (95% CI [72.5, 76.9]), above the established usability benchmark.

• Multiagent Systems
• Artificial Intelligence
• Cryptography and Security
• Human-Computer Interaction

Modern LLM-driven text-to-speech (TTS) and voice conversion (VC) systems produce synthetic speech that differs from the generators represented in many legacy spoofing benchmarks. This mismatch creates a temporal generalization gap that can overestimate detector robustness under real-world post-processing conditions. We bridge this gap by introducing VoxENES 2026, a bilingual (English and Spanish) benchmark of 53,628 audio samples generated using 10 contemporary speech synthesis methods and evaluated under 10 standardized post-processing conditions. Using VoxENES 2026, we benchmark eight pretrained detectors without fine-tuning and observe substantial performance degradation: the best model achieves 28.98\% EER overall, while most perform near or below random chance across modern generators and perturbations. Our results highlight the reliance on brittle artifacts in current detectors and establish VoxENES 2026 as a practical testbed for developing robust audio spoofing countermeasures.

• Sound
• Artificial Intelligence

Production LLM agents such as Claude Code and Codex operate over untrusted content, files, commands, and workspace state, making safety failures directly actionable. Red-teaming must therefore keep pace with evolving models and tools. Existing approaches mainly optimize attack success and preserve artifacts such as benchmarks, payloads, or attack programs, which record where attacks succeed but not the enabling conditions behind unsafe agent behavior. We study automated red-teaming for production LLM agents using one agentic research environment to discover reusable vulnerability knowledge about another. We present AHA, a falsifiable discovery loop that proposes a vulnerability hypothesis, constructs a falsifier, instantiates a valid attack, executes it in a sandboxed harness, reflects on the trajectory, and promotes confirmed findings into a Vulnerability Concept Graph (VCG). Each concept links an attacker-facing surface to an unsafe trajectory through a claim, enabling condition, falsifier, transfer prediction, and supporting evidence. Across Claude Code and Codex on three scenarios covering direct and indirect attacks, the discovered concepts reveal a reusable vulnerability core across models and agents. A frozen VCG requires no further search and outperforms the strongest frozen discovery baseline by 14.2 percentage points under the same single-shot protocol, while transferring across scenarios and attack channels. The resulting VCG provides an auditable artifact for production safety teams to inspect vulnerabilities, validate patches, and accumulate reusable safety knowledge. Our code is available at https://github.com/henrymao2004/Auto-research-red-teaming-in-sleep.

• Cryptography and Security
• Artificial Intelligence

Self-refinement often fails to strengthen few-shot inductive reasoning in large language models. Prompting a model to explicitly state its inferred rule does little on its own. What actually matters is a structurally enforced isolation between reasoning stages, so that information can only pass between them as a compressed symbolic state. We introduce \textbf{Hourglass reasoning}, which enforces strict context isolation between reasoning stages. The frozen LLM acts as a meta-constructor, building for each task a symbolic encoder--decoder: an Induction module compresses the support examples into a schema $φ$ (encoder) and a transient scaffold $z$; a Deduction module derives rule $T$ (decoder) from these and discards $z$; an Implementer compiles $(φ, T)$ into artifacts; an error-driven Refiner revises $(φ, T)$ and regenerates artifacts from scratch. Only $(φ, T)$ crosses stage boundaries, so all refinement stays anchored to the rule. We evaluate Hourglass across three benchmarks spanning visual abstraction, hardware synthesis, and textual rule induction, using GPT-5.5 and Gemini 3.1 Pro. On ARC-AGI-2, it raises best-of-5 accuracy by up to 14 points over an iterative-refinement baseline. On ChipBench, it nearly doubles Verilog synthesis accuracy with GPT-5.5, from 31\% to 58\%. BBEH-Linguini draws on puzzles from the International Linguistics Olympiad, a setting where prior work has shown that explicit verbalization can hurt performance. Hourglass mitigates this tendency, and on Gemini 3.1 Pro, it reverses the effect entirely. Ablations confirm that these gains come from the isolation between stages and the quality of the initial induction, not from prompt wording or the particular symbolic form used. It is how information flows through the reasoning process, rather than the language used to express it, that drives inductive reasoning in frozen LLMs.

• Artificial Intelligence

Artificial general intelligence ultimately requires agents that can reason and act in the physical world. Action models, vision-language-action policies, and world models have advanced this goal, while World Action Models (WAMs) are particularly promising because they connect candidate interventions with predicted consequences. However, progress remains fragmented: models use incompatible action spaces and prediction targets, datasets and tasks follow different conventions, and runtime systems expose limited interfaces for reuse and evaluation. We review the evolution toward WAMs and organize these limitations into three coupled gaps: model roles and representations, objectives and standardization, and system composition. Building on this analysis, we propose a co-evolution roadmap for physical intelligence centered on the \emph{embodied brain}, a long-term model target for integrating multimodal context, comparing candidate interventions, and issuing state-transition or capability requests rather than direct actuator commands. WAMs provide promising prototypes for its predictive functions, while a physical harness grounds model outputs through tools, controllers, verification, and trace logging. Shared contracts align heterogeneous models, data, tasks, and embodiments, and closed-loop post-training converts verified interaction into reusable experience. Together, these components define a modular physical-intelligence stack for adaptive and self-improving embodied agents.

• Robotics
• Artificial Intelligence

Graph retrieval-augmented generation (GraphRAG) enhances large language models with structured knowledge, yet existing systems construct knowledge graphs in a single extraction pass, producing noisy entities and brittle retrieval. RAGU, an open-source modular GraphRAG engine, addresses this by separating extraction from consolidation: entities and relations pass through two-stage typed extraction, DBSCAN-backed deduplication, LLM summarization, and Leiden community detection. A key insight motivates a compact extractor: the skills an in-pipeline LLM needs - comprehension, extraction, reasoning over context - are language skills that grow only weakly with model size, unlike factual world knowledge. Accordingly, we train Meno-Lite-0.1, a 7B model optimized for language skills, which outperforms Qwen2.5-32B on knowledge-graph construction (+12.5% relative harmonic mean) and matches it on English GraphRAG tasks. On GraphRAG-Bench (Medical), RAGU retrieves the most complete context at every factoid level (evidence recall up to 0.84 vs. $\leq$0.76) and overtakes HippoRAG2 on synthesis tasks; on multi-hop factoid QA, the apparent HippoRAG2 advantage is shown to be largely an answer-format artifact. RAGU is installable via $\texttt{pip install graph_ragu}$, runs on a single GPU, and is released under MIT. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/RaguTeam/RAGU, and the Meno-Lite-0.1 model can be obtained from https://huggingface.co/bond005/meno-lite-0.1.

• Computation and Language
• Artificial Intelligence

Network-based anomaly detection for IoT devices has matured to the point of reporting strong detection accuracy, yet most published systems stop at raising an alert and leave the question of automated enforcement to future work or to a programmable data plane that few real networks operate. This paper presents an access-control architecture that closes that loop using only standard, already-deployed protocols. Devices authenticate via IEEE 802.1X with EAP-TLS, and a RADIUS server acts as a continuous policy decision point capable of evicting an active session via a Change-of-Authorization Disconnect-Request and permanently excluding a device through certificate revocation. A central, contextual access policy engine continuously consumes the anomaly detector's output and actuates this response over a narrowly restricted channel to the RADIUS server; the same engine is designed to be extensible to other access types, though this paper evaluates only the network access-control mechanism. This mechanism is driven by an anomaly signal from a one-class detector adapted from a prior MUD/SDN-based design, replacing its per-flow multi-model pipeline with passive traffic capture and a single fused model that combines a cluster-based, a volumetric, and a protocol-signature score. On a single testbed device, the detector reaches an AUC of 0.9964 and detects all 24 evaluated attack scenarios (eight attack types at three intensities) using roughly 43$\times$ less training data than the reference design, and the resulting alerts reliably trigger the automated disconnect-then-revoke response, which we measure to evict a device from the network in 335.8\,ms on average and complete certificate revocation in a further 111.5\,ms. We report this evaluation as a demonstration of the closed-loop architecture rather than of the detector itself, and discuss multi-device generalization as a concrete next step.

• Cryptography and Security
• Artificial Intelligence

Recent foundation image and video generation models offer strong generalization and controllability, but their direct application to embodied scenarios is limited by requirements for multi-view consistency, geometric coherence, and robot embodiment constraints. Existing methods typically adapt foundation models with limited robot data, often sacrificing visual knowledge acquired during large-scale pre-training. We present Xiaomi-Robotics-U0, a 38-billion-parameter multimodal autoregressive model for unified embodied synthesis. It treats embodied generation as an extension of foundation image and video generation and jointly optimizes text-to-image generation, image editing, embodied scene generation, embodied transfer, and embodied video generation. This unified framework preserves the generalization of the pre-trained world foundation model while adapting it to embodied settings. Xiaomi-Robotics-U0 is the first model to support high-quality multi-view scene generation across multiple robot embodiments and to introduce structured, controllable embodied transfer for fine-grained editing while preserving multi-view consistency and interaction dynamics. It achieves state-of-the-art results on single-step and sequential generation tasks, outperforming GPT-Image-2.0 in human evaluations of embodied scene generation and transfer, ranking first on World Arena for embodied video generation, and improving the out-of-distribution success rate of pi_0.5 from 36.9% to 63.2% on challenging real-world manipulation tasks. These results show that foundation world models can serve both as embodied world models and scalable data engines for embodied intelligence. Code and checkpoints are available at https://robotics.xiaomi.com/xiaomi-robotics-u0.html.

• Robotics
• Artificial Intelligence

Human choice behavior, including route choice, exhibits systematic behavioral biases that deviate from the assumptions of full rationality. Cumulative prospect theory (CPT) has been widely recognized as an effective framework for characterizing such behavioral patterns. However, its large-scale application, particularly in simulation and agent-based modeling, critically depends on specifying individual-level CPT parameters, which remain a major bottleneck. Conventional approaches typically rely on surveys and controlled experiments to calibrate CPT parameters, yet these methods are difficult to generalize and often fail to capture the full diversity of human decision-making. To address this challenge, this paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) can reproduce human behavioral biases in choice-making without explicit specification of prospect-theoretic parameters. Using route choice as a representative scenario, we design a behavioral evaluation framework and systematically compare LLM-generated decisions with established human behavioral patterns predicted by CPT. Experimental results demonstrate that LLMs are capable of reproducing non-rational human choice biases and can exhibit decision behaviors consistent with prospect-theoretic effects under uncertainty. These findings suggest that generative AI models may provide a scalable alternative for modeling human decision processes and offer a promising foundation for next-generation large-scale agent-based simulation and AI-driven behavioral research.

• Artificial Intelligence
• Computation and Language
• Machine Learning
• Social and Information Networks
• Physics and Society

Aphasia following stroke commonly produces systematic naming errors with characteristic profiles, but whether general-purpose language models not designed for clinical simulation can reproduce these patterns remains untested. We investigated (1) whether lesions or controlled perturbations to a multimodal language model can reproduce different types of errors in picture naming, and (2) whether the framework can reproduce the complete error profile of individual persons with aphasia (PWAs). Using LLaVA 1.6, we evaluated perturbation configurations that varied the layer, proportion, and amount of noise applied to model units. We examined 278 PWAs on the Philadelphia Naming Test, classifying responses into seven categories using a validated neural classifier. Six of seven response categories (correct, semantic, mixed, unrelated, neologism, no response errors) emerged at clinically-comparable proportions across distinct parameter space regions, with formal paraphasia being the exception. Searching the perturbation space revealed configurations that reproduced the individual error profile in at least six of seven categories for 97.8% of PWAs and in all seven categories for 79.5% of PWAs. Monte Carlo baselines confirmed that this matching reflects joint inter-category structure rather than marginal overlap. These results establish a quantitative framework for reproducing individual aphasic error patterns in picture naming. They suggest the potential for language models to serve as digital twins of individuals with post-stroke aphasia.

• Artificial Intelligence
• Computation and Language
• Machine Learning

Extending the context length of large language models (LLMs) is critical for many real-world applications, yet standard transformers remain constrained by quadratic compute and linear memory scaling. In this work, we investigate the Associative Recurrent Memory Transformer (ARMT) as a practical approach for enabling long-context processing in LLMs, constant memory scaling, and better efficiency. We make three main contributions. First, we construct two domain-specific long-context datasets designed to evaluate realistic workloads, focusing on narrow-domain fine-tuning scenarios. Second, we propose a comprehensive training recipe for ARMT-based context extension, combining continued pre-training, synthetic long-context data generation, curriculum learning, and selective integration of associative memory into chosen model layers. Third, we present an extensive experimental study demonstrating that ARMT-augmented models: (i) process inputs well beyond their original context limits without degrading performance relative to in-limit baselines; (ii) generalize more effectively to out-of-distribution context lengths; and (iii) need 30% less FLOPs while preserving baseline performance within the original context window.

• Computation and Language
• Artificial Intelligence

Distributional reinforcement learning agents learn full return distributions that are increasingly read at face value: for interpretability, risk-sensitive control, and safety monitoring. We ask a question theory anticipates but that has not been measured directly: are the risk claims of a trained distributional agent true? Our audit combines a decision-relevant screening metric (the excess Wasserstein gap between the top two actions, which equals the mass by which first-order stochastic dominance is violated), ground truth from snapshot-restart Monte Carlo, and a statistical harness (permutation nulls, bootstrap refutation, FDR control) without which the audit itself manufactures false conclusions. Across QR-DQN, C51, and IQN on MinAtar (33 runs), 40-95% of the strongest claimed risk trade-offs are refuted at 95% confidence, the placement of the strongest claims is statistically indistinguishable from truth-blind, and essentially no claim is confirmable: for these agents, the learned "risk" reflects a training artifact rather than environment stochasticity. The artifact is structural (fully formed early in training, uncorrelated with final score, idiosyncratic to each seed) and appears unchanged at full-Atari scale, with every top Breakout claim of a pretrained near-state-of-the-art QR-DQN refuted. Positive controls of known magnitude confirm 96-100% of real claims (correlation 0.89-0.92): the reading measures the agents, not the audit. Acting on the heads' CVaR advice at their most-flagged states ranges from beneficial to significantly worse than chance. Neither training for risk nor ensembling removes the artifact, and recalibration passes the audit only by nullifying the claims: the head is uninformative, not merely miscalibrated. We release the toolkit and document two silent pitfalls that produced convincing but wrong audits of our own.

• Artificial Intelligence
• Machine Learning

There are two standard ways to spend more compute at test time: let a model reason longer, or sample more attempts and keep one. Both share a hidden limit: they are internal. Every extra token comes from the same frozen weights and the same prompt, so neither can tell the model anything it does not already know. We study a third way, interaction: the model proposes an artifact, an external instrument observes how it actually behaves, and the model revises. Each cycle imports a real observation, so interaction breaks through the ceiling the other two hit. We argue that a single variable governs this third axis, grounding, and that it must hold on both sides of the loop. The feedback that drives revision must come from an instrument that actually observes the flaw, and so must the metric that scores the result. On hard coding tasks at a fixed token budget, reasoning-only and best-of-N sampling both plateau (the latter even when an oracle picks the best sample), while every interaction strategy keeps improving; our proposer-reviewer harness reaches a perfect 100% pass rate with no run-to-run variance, and the gain holds across three model families. On rendered visual artifacts, the usual judge (a vision-language model, or VLM, reading a screenshot) rates 14 of 15 visibly broken figures "perfect," because the screenshot hides the flaws before the judge can see them. A tool that measures the real layout instead shows the loop removing 40-74% of defects across four modalities; and that same VLM, used as the reviewer, makes slide layouts worse where the measuring tool repairs them. Interaction scaling is real and distinct from reasoning and sampling, but only visible when both the feedback and the metric are grounded.

• Artificial Intelligence

Multi-scene navigation (clearing an objective in one bounded space and then crossing a portal into the next) is a defining feature of contemporary 3D games, but authoring it is laborious: every portal must have consistent endpoints on both sides, each interior must remain navigable once it is furnished, and the resulting connectivity must be kept consistent across many files. Recent large language model (LLM) and multimodal LLM (MLLM) scene generators have made single-interior synthesis dramatically cheaper, yet they produce one scene at a time and cannot, by naive repetition, yield a connected multi-scene world. We identify three obstacles that single-scene methods leave unsolved: cross-scene consistency, in-scene navigability, and the evaluation of whether a transition actually works. We present MAGIC, a prompt-to-project system that addresses all three. MAGIC is a four-stage pipeline that turns a single natural-language prompt into a runnable multi-scene game project: it plans a shared transition-aware intermediate representation, specifies each scene while enforcing portal reachability with a flood-fill validator, generates the scenes together with their transition scripts, and combines them into one project. Because existing single-scene fidelity metrics never execute a transition, we further introduce a transition-focused evaluation agent that runs each transition in play. On a new benchmark of 100 multi-scene cases, MAGIC produces an executable project for every case and reaches 0.99 precision, 0.95 recall, and 0.96 F1 on end-to-end transition identification; stage by stage, it recovers more ground-truth portals and yields markedly more navigable layouts than an LLM baseline and Holodeck. Our code is available at https://github.com/sereneee1201/MAGIC/.

• Artificial Intelligence
• Graphics

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) large language models (LLM) activate only a small number of experts during inference, but token routing introduces persistent expert hotness skew: a small set of hot experts continuously receives most tokens, while the remaining experts are lightly loaded. On 3.5D multi-chiplet systems, this skew not only causes compute imbalance but also amplifies pressure on communication, memory bandwidth, I/O, and execution queues. Therefore, the core problem is not simply to reduce token movement, but to dynamically place and reuse hot expert replicas across different memory tiers. This paper proposes HCRMap, a hot expert residency mapping framework for pressure-aware expert replica management in 3.5D MoE inference. Based on expert hotness, weight loading cost, migration overhead, and runtime resource pressure, HCRMap dynamically determines which experts should be promoted, retained, demoted, or evicted. It then maps routed token groups to suitable resident replicas, thereby jointly mitigating communication, memory, and queue bottlenecks. Experimental results show that HCRMap reduces end-to-end latency by 43.6% and 43.0% over Hydra in the prefill and decode stages, respectively; by 34.5% and 33.1% over MoEntwine; and by 46.7% and 46.0% over PIMoE.

• Artificial Intelligence