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Goal Encoding in LLMs
2026-11-12 18:55:06Arnab Sen Sharma, Eric Todd, Sheridan Feucht, Andy Arditi, Rohit Gandikota, Natalie Shapira, Gabriele Sarti, Constanza Fierro, Lisa Schut, David BauAbstract
We investigate whether and how LLMs encode goals: internal neural representations that precede and guide action, and that are flexible enough to be realized through many different execution paths. We construct a coding setting with multiple sub-tasks that allows us to evaluate goal-seeking behavior and the selection of sub-goals. In this setting, we localize an encoding of the next sub-goal in the outputs of a sparse set of attention heads. The same heads can be used to decode the LM's future actions in natural language (e.g., "I'm checking if a word is a palindrome"). We verify that this encoding is causal for next action and is plastic: transplanting it into a different environment, e.g., another programming language, triggers the same operation realized with a different sequence of tokens. The LM also sustains the encoding throughout the action's execution, which is puzzling because a transformer LM without recurrence cannot carry a state forward for more tokens than it has layers left. We propose that it does not need to. Under a non-recurrent goal-seeking (NRGS) account, the LM frequently re-reads the goal from the task specification, compares it with the progress visible in the growing context, and pursues what remains. We test the predictions of this account with targeted causal interventions.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.17297
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Synthesis Smuggling: Maliciously Hiding Inferred Personal Attributes in LLM Outputs
2026-11-12 18:51:05Gautam Galada, Supreeth Shastri, Sagnik Ray ChoudhuryAbstract
We propose Synthesis Smuggling, a novel threat model in which an adversarial LLM infers sensitive information about a user from routine assistance-seeking interactions and steganographically encodes that into innocuous-looking model-generated content. The user may then unknowingly transmit that information by sharing the generated artifact, say as an email, social-media post, or message, through ordinary communication channels. An adversary monitoring these channels can discover this information. We demonstrate this threat by training two open-weight models to infer gender and age-group labels from conversational cues and encode their predictions using invisible characters or word choices. These results show that user-shared model outputs can become a covert channel for personal inferences, even when the model itself has no direct means of contacting an adversary.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.17280
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LiveGeo: Benchmarking Geographic Agents in Continuously Evolving Worlds
2026-11-12 18:45:58Pengcheng Zhou, Xuanyu Liu, Yanchen Yin, Tianjie Ju, Bobo Li, Shengqiong Wu, Hao Fei, Mong-Li Lee, Wynne HsuAbstract
We introduce GeoWorld, a controllable and continuously evolving geographic environment platform for LLM agents, and LiveGeo, a benchmark for evaluating reliable decision-making in real-world geographic environments using GeoWorld. Unlike existing evaluations that largely reason and plan over fixed geographic states, GeoWorld is grounded in real-world geographic structure and allows external world states to evolve along their own temporal processes while preserving verifiable state histories. LiveGeo places geographic tasks within this evolving environment, requiring agents to actively acquire task-relevant information, verify whether the evidence supporting prior decisions remains valid, and revise their plans when necessary. Our results reveal that even frontier LLMs struggle with static tasks, with no model consistently excelling across tasks, while strong static performance does not ensure dynamic reliability. Further analysis identifies a key bottleneck: agents struggle to acquire and translate relevant evidence into valid decisions and maintain their correctness as the world evolves. By releasing LiveGeo together with its GeoWorld platform, we aim to provide the community with a flexible and extensible infrastructure for studying the next generation of agents capable of reliable action in evolving geographic worlds.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.17267
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When Both Sides Adapt: The Challenges of Evaluating Interactive LLM Systems
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In interactive systems where users engage with LLMs, users are adaptive and, after observing LLM responses, can change their prompting strategy, as well as the type and difficulty of subsequent tasks. Thus model responses can influence the set of prompts on which the model is subsequently evaluated. We study the implications of this user adaptivity and prompt endogeneity for the evaluation of LLMs. We define two classes of estimands for comparing models: the common-distribution effect, which compares model performance on the same distribution of prompts, and the induced-distribution effect, which compares each model on the prompt distribution generated through user interaction. We show that offline benchmark evaluation and live A/B testing target different quantities, with the standard difference-in-means estimators for the two methods converging to the common-distribution effect and the induced-distribution effect, respectively. This distinction can affect decision-making: the two comparisons can rank models differently and lead to discrepancies in deployment recommendations. We characterize when such ranking reversals occur and provide a sufficient condition under which the rankings are guaranteed to agree. This result provides a practical heuristic for assessing whether offline evaluation is sufficient to reproduce the decision suggested by a live experiment. Third, we show, in a stylized linear model of interactions, that user adaptivity can increase variance in estimation. Finally, we discuss implications of user adaptivity for the interpretation of experiments and show that adaptivity creates a common mechanism leading to common evaluation challenges, such as reward hacking and novelty effects. Together, this work highlights the necessity of measuring both model performance as well as changes in the user behavior that the model induces.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.17239
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Al-Ghasali: A Computational Framework for Simulating Islamic Jurisprudential Rulings via Finite State Automata and Large Language Models
2026-11-12 18:23:56Elnaserledinellah Mahmoud AbdelwahabAbstract
This paper presents Al Ghasali, a computational framework designed to formalize and simulate Islamic jurisprudential (Fiqh) rulings. Building upon recent set theoretic formalizations of al sabr wa al Taqsim that extract minimal operational rules as simple Horn clause logical programs, this work proves that the semantics of closed Fiqh chapters collapse completely to deterministic Finite State Automata (FSA). We establish a formal computational hierarchy, demonstrating that restricting formalization to finite propositional Horn theories guarantees decidability and constant time (O(1)) verdict extraction after offline compilation. The framework formally proves that hierarchical compositions of sub-chapter FSAs preserve this O(1) complexity, and that temporal juristic requirements, such as Tartib (order), are deterministically flattened into static ontological states, preserving the memoryless property of the automaton. To generate human-readable juristic summaries, Al Ghasali incorporates Large Language Models (LLMs) via an architecture where the deterministic FSA strictly controls the probabilistic LLM. Crucially, the paper formulates sufficient design safety conditions for this FSA LLM integration, ensuring strict adherence to the epistemological boundaries of Usul al Fiqh. To neutralize the risk of LLM hallucination, the system employs a Grammar Guided Constrained Decoding mechanism. We formally define the mapping function that dynamically constructs unambiguous right linear grammars from the FSA execution history. The paper mathematically proves that this architecture, augmented by a Bounded Neutral Lexicon and Valence Locking, guarantees the absolute absence of Decisional Hallucination, Juristic Factual Hallucination, and Semantic Inversion reducing the LLM to a pure linguistic transformer of deterministic juristic facts
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.17235
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Introducing Feedback Delays to Non-Delayed Adversarial MDPs: Optimal $sqrt S$ and $sqrt K$ Dependencies in Tabular and Linear AMDPs
2026-11-12 18:10:46Aarush Kulkarni, Khang Nguyen, William Chang, Yan DaiAbstract
We study regret minimization in episodic Adversarial Markov Decision Processes (AMDPs) with unknown transitions and bandit feedback. In tabular AMDPs with $S$ states, $A$ actions, and horizon $H$, the best known $K$-episode regret is $\tilde O(HS\sqrt{AK})$, whose $\sqrt S$ gap to the $\Omega(H\sqrt{SAK})$ lower bound has long remained open. In linear AMDPs with $d$-dimensional features, after a five-year line of improvements starting from $K^{14/15}$, computationally efficient algorithms without a simulator or exploratory assumptions still only attain $\tilde O(K^{3/4})$ regret. A common challenge in both settings is to estimate the Q-function of a changing policy: past data comes from earlier policies that differ from (and are correlated with) the current one, while freezing the policy for future episodes worsens the dependency on $K$. We instead propose a general technique called introduced feedback delays: we estimate the Q-function of the policy using future episodes while still updating the policy, as if the feedback were delayed. While feedback delays are usually an obstacle imposed by the environment, here they are introduced voluntarily and, perhaps surprisingly, come at no extra cost. We develop Geometric Resampling with Rejection (GRR) to account for policy changes during the delay, and threshold the visitation probabilities to avoid long delays on rarely visited state-action pairs. With this unified technique, our policy optimization algorithms achieve, with high probability, $\tilde O(\text{poly}(H)\sqrt{SAK})$ regret in tabular AMDPs, resolving the open problem; and $\tilde O(\text{poly}(d,H)\sqrt K)$ regret in linear AMDPs, giving the first efficient algorithm optimal in $K$. They also naturally extend to delayed AMDPs with a total feedback delay $\mathfrak D$, yielding the first bounds optimal in $S$ and $\mathfrak D$ (tabular) and in $K$ and $\mathfrak D$ (linear).
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.17214
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Actor, Judge, or Teacher? Understanding Decision Models in Long-Horizon Agents
2026-11-12 17:42:46Haochen Liu, Qianhao Zhu, Zixuan Wang, Dingming Li, Tongbo Chen, Peng Qiu, Yingqi Qu, Weiming Lu, Jun Xiao, Yongliang ShenAbstract
Decision models answer a question with a typed output, such as a choice among options with a probability for each, so one model can choose an agent's actions, evaluate actions already taken, or score every action to teach a policy with reinforcement learning. Prior work has studied them mainly as actors, judging their usefulness by how well they act. We ask whether a decision model that acts poorly can still teach well. We compare three decision models and three general LLMs as actors and judges on ALFWorld, and use JEV as a teacher on ALFWorld and WebShop. As actors, all six models are pulled away from a subgoal that must come first by an easier one. As judges that see the whole trajectory, the same models credit the steps toward that subgoal, and asking whether each action helped, rather than whether the task will succeed, separates useful from useless actions. As a teacher, JEV raises a Qwen2.5-1.5B policy over GRPO from 72.8% to 82.9% success on ALFWorld and from 56.8% to 71.4% on WebShop. These results suggest that a poor actor can still teach well, because judging an action after the episode ends reveals the consequences that acting must anticipate. Code is available at this https URL.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.17167
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Conflux: Preventing Privilege Escalation with Principal Contexts and System-Level Evaluation
2026-11-12 17:25:51Raya Buckley, Christian Schroeder de WittAbstract
LLM agents combine information from multiple principals while acting externally. We formalise privilege escalation (PE) as the system-level security objective: an action may proceed only if every principal that influenced it would allow it. Model-level defences remain probabilistic, so enforcement must sit outside model judgement. We present Conflux, a principal-context defence. Its kernel, ITES, derives authority from provenance and the organisation's existing access-control system and intersects the permissions of every influencing principal. We prove a conditional authority-confinement theorem: under complete mediation, no-laundering provenance, a known non-empty decision context, fresh permission checks, and action binding, the kernel admits no action that escalates privilege with respect to any recorded influencing principal. The theorem covers the represented value-influence fragment; control influence from tool, branch, recipient, or plan-step selection remains a refinement obligation. Conflux extends the kernel with independent policy ports, argument-aware authorisation, disclosure, consent, delegation, restriction, and exposure planning. We describe two system- level evaluators. SLED is a black-box evaluator: it exhaustively explores a declared finite model of a defence up to a bound. SLED-V is a white-box evaluator: it checks a serialisable intermediate representation against security and provenance properties. The evidence is bounded and partial. The appendix reports retained AgentDojo, SLED, and SLED-V results, including the limits of those runs. No result in this paper is an unbounded deployment guarantee.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08768
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Designing Institutions for Autonomous AI
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As autonomous AI agents increasingly interact in persistent populations, their collective capabilities and alignment depend not only on individual models, but also on the institutions governing their interactions. Yet AI research has largely focused on individual agents. In this Perspective, we argue that institutional design must become a distinct focus of AI research. Drawing on institutional political economy, social epistemology and organizational theory, we develop seven principles for designing AI institutions that sustain cooperation, enable reliable collective judgments and remain accountable to legitimate human purposes. These address reciprocal contributions, accountable authority, functional differentiation, epistemic pluralism, criticism and correction, human direction, and institutional adaptation. We illustrate their application through machine science, where autonomous research challenges institutions developed around human capabilities and constraints. We then propose an experimental research programme in which matched populations of AI agents operate under alternative institutional arrangements, and describe MoltJournal, an API-first journal for autonomous research agents, as an illustration of how such institutions can be made programmable and observable. Together, these contributions establish institutional design as a research agenda concerned not only with aligning autonomous agents, but with understanding how institutions can transform them into capable, reliable and accountable collectives.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.17114
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SALA: Semantically Aligned Latent Actions Enable Dual-Axis Scaling of Embodied Foundation Models
2026-11-12 17:04:50Jiachun Jin, Zetong Zhou, Haonan Wang, Xiao Yang, Jun Zhu, Zhijie DengAbstract
Embodied foundation models hinge on diverse robot interaction data, which are costly to collect. Egocentric human videos offer a complementary source of experience, and latent action models (LAMs) provide a popular means of leveraging these videos for policy supervision. Compared with world-action models (WAMs), LAMs can offer greater training efficiency and potentially lower inference costs by avoiding explicit pixel prediction during policy learning and execution. However, most existing LAMs learn latent actions solely through video reconstruction, which can cause their representations to cluster by visual appearance rather than by the underlying actions. As a result, they struggle to align human actions with their robot counterparts. To bridge the gap, we introduce SALA, which emphasizes establishing the semantic correspondence for latent actions. Without requiring paired data, we use the language descriptions of unpaired human and robot clips to estimate semantic similarities and supervise cross-embodiment correspondence. Specifically, we translate these similarities into soft neighborhood structures that guide human latent actions toward semantically related robot latents, while robot action reconstruction grounds the latent space in control. The resulting shared latent action space provides a unified supervision signal for training an embodied foundation model on both human and robot videos. Notably, latent action supervision enables scaling along two axes: (1) pre-training on increasing amounts of general human video consistently reduces robot action prediction error on downstream tasks, and (2) post-training on increasing amounts of task-specific human video substantially improves real-world robot task success rates.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.17110
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AURA 2.0: From User-Driven Responses to Model-Initiated Conversations in Streaming Video
2026-11-12 16:31:54Shuhan Li, Huankang Guan, Xintong Guo, Yang Bo, Yuyang He, Dunyuan Xu, Jingyan Chen, Fang Liu, Tsz Kin Wan, Jinpeng Chen, Zhenqi He, Yuxuan Hu, Wenbo Li, Han Gao, Qijun Li, Long Chen, Hongsheng Li, Rui LiuAbstract
Most AI assistants respond only when prompted, remaining silent even when events in the video stream offer meaningful opportunities for conversation. To move beyond purely user-driven interaction, we present AURA 2.0, a streaming video large language model that introduces three core upgrades to AURA. The key advance is Model-Initiated Conversation (MIC), which enables the model to identify topics worth discussing in the evolving visual stream and initiate conversations at appropriate moments without a user query. Stream-Aware Tool Calling (SATC) enables the model to invoke external tools using the current visual and conversational context and incorporate returned information into the ongoing interaction. Interactive Visual Grounding (IVG) supports visual grounding in both user inputs and model outputs. The model can identify objects marked by users on video frames and produce frame-aligned bounding boxes to link its responses to specific objects and regions. To develop these capabilities, we construct a dedicated streaming interaction dataset and adopt a three-stage training scheme to integrate the new behaviors with AURA's existing streaming interaction abilities. We further incorporate Long-Horizon Interaction Memory (LHIM) to maintain contextual continuity over extended video streams. Evaluations on public streaming benchmarks show that AURA 2.0 achieves leading performance among open-source streaming models, while targeted evaluations further validate its new interaction capabilities. We open-source the model weights and inference code.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.17048
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AnalogLayoutWorld: An Open Benchmark for Agentic Analog Layout Design
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Coding agents have demonstrated strong capabilities in software development, yet their ability to tackle long-horizon engineering tasks governed by physical constraints remains less understood. We study this question through analog circuit layout, which demands domain knowledge, geometric reasoning, and iterative interaction with design and verification tools. We introduce \textbf{AnalogLayoutWorld}, an open-source agent benchmark with 40 expert-reviewed tasks for end-to-end layout generation from fixed transistor-level netlists. It combines an integrated design environment with independent physical and post-layout electrical verification, as well as objective layout quality metrics co-designed with analog layout experts. Across 13 model--harness configurations, 91.1\% of attempts produce GDS layouts, but only 23.0\% satisfy the benchmark's acceptance criteria. We also evaluate Novara, an internally developed agent system, which achieves the highest reported aggregate score. Our analysis links performance differences to test-time scaling under fixed budgets, suggesting that reasoning efficiency and effective use of verification feedback help sustain design quality as task complexity grows.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.16991
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CADET: Construction of PCB Routing Instances with Executable Demonstrations
2026-11-12 15:03:50Hyungseok Song, Won-Seok Choi, Seohui Bae, Han-Seul Jeong, Junseok Park, Youngjoon Park, Soonyoung LeeAbstract
Printed circuit board (PCB) routing is the stage of physical layout that finds paths connecting the placed pads of each net. Public datasets in this domain are few, and most contain only the final states of routed boards, not demonstrations of the electronic design automation (EDA) engine actions that produce them. To close this gap, we propose CADET (Constructing executAble Demonstrations for Engine-grounded Training), which jointly generates synthetic boards and demonstrations built from EDA engine actions. The resulting RouteDemos provides 100,000 synthetic boards routed with zero design rule violations (DRVs), together with their demonstrations. Their distributions over 17 statistics resemble those of 142 real reference boards. CADET trains a routing policy on these demonstrations with behavior cloning and fine-tunes it with reinforcement learning (RL). On real test boards, the policy raised the rate of complete DRV-free routing from 38.0% to 67.2% over an RL-only baseline. This rate was comparable to that of the open-source autorouter FreeRouting and exceeded those of the other baselines, including GPT-6 Astra. We release the dataset and its generation code as open source at this https URL.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.16913
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Look It Up: Multi-bit LLM Watermarking via Codebook Search
2026-11-12 14:49:23Jaros{\l}aw Janas, Pawe{\l} Morawiecki, Josef PieprzykAbstract
Attributing short LLM-generated texts to a specific source remains challenging for existing multi-bit watermarking methods, which often require long generations or costly decoding to recover payloads reliably. We propose a codebook-based watermarking scheme that maps an $n$-bit payload to a longer $u$-bit codeword and embeds it during generation through token-level logit biasing. During extraction, the received bit sequence is matched to the nearest codeword in a precomputed secret codebook using Hamming or Levenshtein distance. Experiments show that our method achieves near-perfect recovery for 16-24 bit payloads on 200-token generations and strong performance on 127-token generations for base models. Results are weaker on some instruction-tuned models with very short texts, where low-entropy output distributions reduce embedding reliability. We also study a BCH-based variant that avoids codebook storage but generally reduces robustness. The Levenshtein variant improves resilience to deletions and light paraphrasing, while insertions and stronger rewrites remain challenging. We analyze collision probability, codeword separation, extraction time, tokenization consistency, and text quality, highlighting both the practicality and limitations of codebook-based watermarking for short-form attribution.
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.16890
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Evaluating Video LLMs' Understanding of Corner Cases in Autonomous Driving
2026-11-12 13:15:27Gabriel Manalu, Minh Son Hoang, Hyeontaek Hwang, Jaesung Lee, Hyojin Choi, Tran Tuan Phong, Seon Kwon Kim, Saad Wazir, Daeyoung KimAbstract
Natural language explanations promised by modern Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs) offer autonomous driving systems a path toward detailed scene description and interpretable decision making on the road. While recent benchmarks have begun assessing these models on driving scenes, they mainly target routine traffic conditions and general comprehension tasks based on existing driving datasets and therefore fail to evaluate model performance on the rarest and most safety-critical driving events, also known as "corner cases". To provide a comprehensive evaluation of Video LLMs on precisely these scenarios, we introduce DashBench, a benchmark testing 25 Video LLMs on 1,709 carefully curated driving videos spanning not only collision-related corner cases but also rare non-collision ones. Through extensive prompts and open-ended question answering, we expose a critical capability gap: all evaluated models perform substantially below the threshold required for safety-critical driving applications, frequently misjudging or missing dangerous events on the road ahead and hallucinating non-existent agents or actions in their explanations. We believe DashBench, combining an extensive dataset with a rigorous evaluation toolkit and a detailed diagnosis of current model limitations, drives progress toward safer, more explainable autonomous driving systems. The code and data will be shared at: this http URL
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https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.16767
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EgoX: Egocentric Cross-Embodiment Manipulation with Embodiment Dreaming
2026-11-12 12:40:24Yaru Niu, Binghong Chen, Changwei Yao, Shangtao Li, Zhenlong Fang, Revanth Krishna Senthilkumaran, Shuai Zhou, Yuemin Mao, Kalie Ching, Po-Ju Chao, Yudong Luo, Peiqi Yu, Heng Zhang, Hao Zhang, Bingqing Chen, Chen Qiu, H. Eric Tseng, Ye Yuan, Umar Iqbal, Changliu Liu, Jonathan Francis, Ding ZhaoAbstract
Generalist manipulation policies can benefit from the complementary experience of humans, real robots, and simulated agents. However, differences in morphology, sensing, and control interfaces make it difficult to learn effectively from their combined demonstrations. We introduce EgoX, an egocentric cross-embodiment learning framework that organizes heterogeneous demonstrations through semantically corresponding observation and action modalities. EgoX pretrains a Modularized Cross-Embodiment Transformer with Embodiment Dreaming (MXT+) on this mixture and fine-tunes it on target-embodiment demonstrations. Within each embodiment, MXT+ assigns a dedicated tokenizer to each observation modality and a dedicated expert to each action modality, with a Transformer trunk shared across embodiments. A training-only embodiment-dreaming objective predicts latent representations of future visual and proprioceptive states, encouraging the shared trunk to model each embodiment's dynamics. Across 13 task-embodiment pairs spanning five tasks and six robot embodiments, including five physical robots and one simulated humanoid, cross-embodiment pretraining raises MXT+'s average normalized task progress from 0.63 to 0.80 over training from scratch. The gains are particularly pronounced under out-of-distribution conditions, where average task progress increases from 0.53 to 0.77. Ablations demonstrate the benefits of broader pretraining mixtures, modular interfaces, and embodiment dreaming, with dreaming producing more similar latent geometry across embodiments. Project page: this http URL.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.16728
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From Data to Wisdom: Rethinking AI Through an Epistemic Lens
2026-11-12 12:38:36Afonso EduardoAbstract
This paper proposes the Data-to-Wisdom Epistemic Architecture for AI (EAAI), a conceptual framework treating Data, Information, Knowledge, Understanding and Wisdom as five distinct but recursively interacting epistemic functions: observation, contextual interpretation, modeling and prediction, critical evaluation and informed judgment. Two observations motivate it: sequential readings of the Knowledge Pyramid obscure how these functions interact, and a targeted review of ten Bayesian reference books finds that prior distributions are defined mathematically while "prior information" and "prior knowledge" are not consistently distinguished as epistemic categories. A Bayesian interpretation relates the likelihood, prior and posterior distributions, posterior prediction, model checking and decision analysis to the five functions, without limiting EAAI to Bayesian systems. Extending "prior" in an epistemic sense, the paper distinguishes five kinds of prior context that can shape the model, the likelihood, the prior, evaluation and action. Three worked applications -- quantitative financial risk, actuarial modeling in health insurance and agentic AI for medical reimbursement claims -- show how EAAI structures the analysis of model assumptions, evidence interpretation, validation, dependencies and decision consequences, separating the prediction of a risk, the appraisal of its reliability and the justification of action. It draws implications for AI and machine learning, including evaluation by function, treating intermediate model outputs as evidence open to challenge and separating generation from appraisal, and compares EAAI with work on DIKW, Bayesian workflow, AI evaluation and risk governance. Its contributions are an epistemic vocabulary with recursive relationships, a more accessible reading of Bayesian methodology, a typology of prior context and clearer methodological terminology.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.16726
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Mind the Accuracy-Approval Gap: How Users Evaluate Sycophantic AI in Everyday Tasks
2026-11-12 12:35:03Wajiha Naveed, Brandon FainAbstract
Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit sycophancy, a tendency to agree with users, flatter or affirm them, and preserve their face, even when independent judgment or critical feedback would be more useful. Prior work has largely evaluated sycophancy through benchmark evaluations, but less is known about how users perceive and respond to sycophantic AI in everyday tasks. We combine benchmark evaluations with two large-scale user studies. We study four personas defined through system prompts: objective (instructed to prioritize accuracy over agreement), soft-sycophantic, hard-sycophantic, and baseline (no persona-specific system prompt). Benchmarks show that even baseline exhibits substantial sycophancy, agreeing with users' stated views 71.7% of the time on NLP Survey, compared with 54.8% for objective and 89.5% for hard-sycophantic. Under conversational pressure on TruthfulQA, accuracy ranged from 81.9% for objective to 59.6% for baseline and 8.7% for hard-sycophantic. Participants were assigned to one of the four personas, and either discussed contested policy topics or collaborated with AI on email writing. Despite its higher accuracy under pressure, objective AI was rated significantly less respectful and satisfying than the other personas, and less trustworthy than baseline. Baseline and sycophantic personas did not differ significantly. Persona did not significantly affect how often participants changed their opinions, although participants who discussed with objective AI had greater odds of reduced confidence. Objective AI prompted greater writing expansion than soft-sycophantic AI, but final writing quality did not differ significantly across personas. These findings highlight a tension between accuracy and user approval: personas with substantially lower accuracy under conversational pressure received more favorable ratings for respect and satisfaction than objective AI.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.16722
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MusicRWKV: A Multimodal RWKV Framework for Music Representation Learning
2026-11-12 12:34:08Terry TanAbstract
Recent music foundation models have achieved remarkable progress in music representation learning, yet most existing approaches rely on Transformer architectures whose quadratic attention complexity introduces substantial computational and memory overhead when modeling long-duration music recordings. In this work, we propose MusicRWKV, a multimodal music representation learning framework built upon the RWKV architecture. MusicRWKV jointly models waveform, spectrogram, and metadata information within a unified self-supervised learning framework. To improve efficiency for long musical sequences, we introduce an invertible compression module that reduces sequence length while preserving reconstruction capability. A FiLM-based conditioning strategy is employed to facilitate modality-aware representation learning without introducing expensive cross-attention operations. We further investigate the integration of Soft ROSA as a differentiable retrieval mechanism for neural-symbolic interaction. Experimental evaluation across a diverse collection of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) benchmarks demonstrates that the proposed RWKV-based architecture can be effectively adapted to heterogeneous music understanding tasks. A controlled pretraining ablation shows that Soft ROSA improves validation performance, while layer-wise telemetry analysis reveals a progressive transition from distributed retrieval to selective retrieval in deeper network layers. These results suggest that RWKV provides a promising architectural alternative to Transformer-based models for multimodal music understanding.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.16718
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Acoustic Respiratory Phase Detection on Mobile Devices
2026-11-12 12:26:15Julian Szymanski, Tomasz Sankowski, Piotr Sulewski, Iwo Czartowski, Javier Medina QueroAbstract
Breathing monitoring is important for well-being, stress regulation, and guided breathing exercises, yet existing approaches often rely on contact-based sensors or controlled environments. This paper presents a non-invasive framework for respiratory phase detection using acoustic signals recorded on commodity smartphones. The proposed hybrid CNN-Transformer architecture combines local spectral feature extraction with long-range temporal modeling to capture the cyclic structure of breathing. The model is evaluated using a Leave-One-Subject-Out (LOSO) protocol on the Foundation Dataset and on an independent unseen test set comprising over 1300 breathing cycles and 2 hours of continuous recordings. The proposed 3-class formulation achieves 72.85% frame-level accuracy and 96.6% cycle-level exhalation detection efficiency in the LOSO evaluation, while achieving 76.94% frame-level accuracy, a Cohen's Kappa score of 0.65, and 99.2% cycle-level exhalation detection efficiency on the unseen test set. Results suggest that accurate respiratory monitoring may be achievable under data-constrained conditions, indicating that appropriate temporal modeling can learn transferable respiratory representations and generalize to previously unseen participants. An end-to-end ONNX deployment pipeline enables privacy-preserving on-device inference with latency below 20 ms, supporting real-time monitoring on mobile and wearable devices.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.16710
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