AI agents are increasingly proposed as autonomous experimenters, yet the benchmarks that test them mostly offer cheap experiments that answer at once. Experiments in physical facilities are different: they take months, occupy scarce equipment and cannot be undone. We present SlowLab, a benchmark in which an agent runs a one-year campaign in four simulated greenhouse compartments on a site whose crop, facility and prices are hidden. The agent decides when to plant which climate policy, whether to stop a crop and which measurements to read while crops grow, and at the end recommends one policy, which a private evaluator scores in weather the agent never saw. In a preregistered study on 48 unseen sites, three low-cost language-model agents ended near a standard grower setting and clearly below a Bayesian-optimisation baseline that starts from that setting. They ran the facility as two synchronous batches, so measurements taken during the season never changed what they planted, and these measurements improved no method's result. Letting other methods re-read the evidence a campaign had collected did not yield significantly better recommendations, which points to where the models start and which experiments they try. Code is released under the MIT license.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34644
Maybe not. The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) has become an oracle for millions of clinicians and health system developers worldwide. Researchers have increasingly used knowledge graphs derived from UMLS to enhance language models' factual accuracy and reasoning traceability in high-stakes tasks. Medical Question Answering (MQA) is a prime testbed for integration, with benchmarks usually involving professional exercises such as disease diagnosis and drug prescription from patient history. Despite the assumed benefits, empirical evidence shows that UMLS-based graph injection typically yields modest performance gains. This paper reviews existing MQA work, critically analyzing the selected UMLS sources and their usage with language models, and probes each of these choices in isolation. We uncover methodological issues never discussed in prior work, from low UMLS coverage to weak subgraph retrieval pipelines. Based on our findings, we provide actionable recommendations to unlock the untapped potential of UMLS as an external knowledge source.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33801
Typed decision-making tasks in agents, such as UI element selection, product recommendation, and chart matching, require models to choose from a set of discrete candidates. While prior work demonstrates that text-only System One models achieve four key properties including candidate-order invariance, scalability, and cache reuse via separate request-candidate encoding, extending them to multimodal settings where candidates are visual remains underexplored. We introduce Iris, a framework that accommodates image, text, or hybrid candidates while preserving the core decision module. We prove that order invariance and exact cache reuse hold for any per-candidate encoder under Iris, and derive the closed-form latency reduction. We construct a visual-candidate benchmark from Multimodal-Mind2Web (K=16, deduplicated, order-shuffled, three generalization splits). Independent encoding (Iris) achieves 78.4 / 72.1 / 74.8 percent accuracy with zero-flip rate under candidate reordering. Joint encoding reaches 90.6 / 89.5 / 91.6 percent but suffers an 8 to 10 percent answer-flip rate when shuffled. To bridge this gap, we propose a design that encodes each candidate conditioned on the request state without inter-candidate cross-attention; it preserves strict order invariance, enables forked cache sharing, and attains 91.7 / 86.5 / 90.0 percent accuracy at one-third of OneJev latency with calibrated null probabilities (AUROC 0.93 to 0.97). Reusing image candidates across requests cuts latency by 37x at K=256 and 191x at K=2048. On MetaEncoder benchmarks, Iris-4B achieves 100 percent on JevBench original and easy, outperforming 30B MetaEncoder and 27B OpenJev. Finally, we resolve a systems bottleneck on Ampere GPUs: reformulating Qwen3.5 patch-embedding Conv3d into its exact matrix-product form accelerates processing by 350x. Code, data, and checkpoints: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33702
Zero-shot object navigation requires an embodied agent to choose where to search while retaining evidence from previous observations. HGWM couples an LLM-generated room-anchor prior with persistent spatial-semantic memory. A coarse stage assigns visual-semantic scores to candidate headings on a 0-10 scale; a fine stage measures symbolic compatibility between observed objects, room context, and the goal prior. Phase-dependent fusion combines these scores with an LLM direction recommendation before local action selection. On HM3D v0.1, the reported HGWM configuration achieves 62.6% success rate (SR) and 31.5% success weighted by path length (SPL), compared with 58.1% and 31.2% for WMNav. On MP3D, the corresponding values are 46.8% and 17.9%, compared with 45.4% and 17.2%. The results indicate higher success point estimates and modest path-efficiency gains. On HM3D v0.2, the full model obtains 74.4% SR and 31.9% SPL. Additional component ablations reduce SR by 0.9-2.3 percentage points and SPL by 0.6-1.5 points. These are author-reported aggregate measurements. The accompanying implementation repairs pass offline tests; episode-level rerun records are not available. Evaluation is confined to simulation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32554
Dominant color extraction is a fundamental task in computer vision, with applications in design, image retrieval, and content recommendation. However, conventional algorithms based on device-oriented color spaces (e.g., RGB) and fixed quantization often fail to capture how humans perceive color differences. In this study, we propose a human-perception-based framework for dominant color extraction, built on a novel Human Color Dictionary (HCD) derived from a perceptual experiment. Participants (n=110) were sequentially shown 120 colors and asked to identify those they perceived as unique. Based on their responses, we constructed a 120 by 120 co-occurrence matrix and applied a greedy selection algorithm to derive 64 perceptually distinct colors, forming the HCD. This dictionary was integrated into RGB color histogram and K-means color extraction algorithms by initializing centroids and mapping pixel values to their nearest perceptual color using the deltaE 00 distance. Evaluation on a dataset of 4,562 images paired with expert-designed palettes demonstrated that our method improves perceptual alignment, as measured by Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) and best-match distance. Our findings suggest no meaningful gender differences in the number of uniquely perceived colors, indicating that sex does not significantly influence color perception in this task. Another key finding is that highly saturated colors are perceived as the most distinguishable, whereas dark and deep colors tend to perceptually collapse and are less reliably differentiated. The results confirm that incorporating experimentally derived human color representations ensures the generated color clusters align more closely with human perception, thus improving the usability of color palette generation in practical applications.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32473
Telephone triage is a safety critical task: from a brief intake note, a nurse must decide whether a caller needs an ambulance, an emergency department, an appointment, or self care at home. Queried directly, large language models (LLMs) are unreliable: they over-escalate routine cases and cannot justify their recommendations against an auditable clinical standard. We present the Automated LLM-based Medical Triage System (ALLMTS), which grounds every disposition in the same commercially maintained telehealth guidelines nurses use. Rather than asking an LLM to triage, ALLMTS makes it execute the guideline: it selects the appropriate guideline and evaluates its triage assessment questions. The disposition follows deterministically from the first positive answer, using the same traversal rule a nurse follows. We evaluate ALLMTS on 566 synthetic, expert-validated scenarios spanning 14 dispositions and designed to test specific guideline questions. ALLMTS achieves 0.95 accuracy, compared with 0.47 for a raw-LLM baseline. On a curated 50-scenario subset released as an open benchmark, ALLMTS reaches 0.98 accuracy, on par with the 0.944 correct disposition rate that a five nurse expert panel recorded on those same scenarios. Critically, on that subset the baselines have over-triage rates of up to 0.50 (0.44 on the full dataset), whereas ALLMTS reduces the over-triage rate to at most 0.02 while maintaining low under-triage. These results support coupling LLM language understanding with executable clinical guidelines for triage from intake notes.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32469
Large Language Model (LLM) agents have enabled automated code evolution for algorithm discovery. However, current recursive self-improvement (RSI) research for sequential recommendation faces a dilemma: general-purpose frameworks lack domain-specific feedback, while recommender-specific frameworks rely on linear evolution. Crucially, naively integrating them fails when applied to Generative Recommendation (GR). Unlike end-to-end models, GR relies on a module-cascaded pipeline (tokenization, pre-training, and alignment). In this paradigm, existing evolution methods suffer from: i) cost blindness, squandering budgets by ignoring stage-asymmetric retraining overheads; and ii) short-sighted evaluation, discarding promising upstream innovations that temporarily regress metrics before downstream adaptation. To bridge these gaps, we propose TGR-EvoDAG, a multi-agent code evolution framework tailored for GR. TGR-EvoDAG models code evolution as a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) to maintain multiple evolution branches and merge complementary innovations, unifying advanced search with rich GR diagnostic feedback. We further introduce stage-aware cost planning to optimize GPU-hour budgets, and active downstream co-adaptation to navigate temporary regressions and unlock cross-stage gains. On public Amazon datasets, TGR-EvoDAG enables the first autonomous evolution of a complete GR pipeline, improving offline metrics by up to 37.4% and Agent4Rec simulated user satisfaction by 19.7% over the strongest baseline. Furthermore, in industrial deployment on Tencent's large-scale commercial media platform, the evolved GR achieves a 12.16% relative improvement in offline Hit@1 and a statistically significant 0.40% increase in online click-through rate (CTR).
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32326
Screen Tables and Substrate Scopes are information-dense figures widely used in synthetic chemistry literature, yet automated extraction of structured reaction data from them remains challenging. We introduce RxnExBench, a multimodal benchmark for fine-grained reaction-level evaluation. Built from high-impact chemistry journals, it contains 3,565 expert-annotated reactions and 2,361 molecular structures. The dataset adopts a unified schema with 15 reaction roles and 26 core fields, supporting downstream AI-for-Chemistry tasks such as retrosynthetic planning, yield prediction, and reaction condition recommendation. RxnExBench further provides a reasoning-driven difficulty taxonomy, a modular annotation pipeline, and the Oracle-MolRec protocol, which disentangles molecular recognition from higher-level reasoning. Evaluation of 9 state-of-the-art VLMs shows that performance degrades substantially as schema complexity and reasoning demands increase. Under the Oracle-MolRec setting, results further reveal that accurate molecular recognition alone is insufficient, with multimodal integration and chemistry-aware reasoning remaining the primary bottlenecks. We release all data and code to facilitate future research in chemistry-aware multimodal understanding and AI-for-Chemistry dataset construction. The dataset and code will be released at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32221
Traversability estimation is critical for ground vehicle teleoperation, yet existing methods often neglect the human operator's preferences for speed and risk tolerance. To address this gap, we propose PATH-Net, a Preference-Aware Traversability estimation Hierarchical Network that adaptively generates preference-conditioned traversability cost maps and speed profiles for off-road teleoperation. Our framework integrates visual and geometric bird's-eye-view features with short-term historical vehicle states through a multi-head shared-backbone architecture. Our PATH-Net infers traversability cost maps while optimizing speed recommendations by using maximum entropy inverse reinforcement learning and sparse speed supervision. Our method incorporates operator preference via an asymmetric feature aggregation mechanism, splitting inference into a cost branch that prioritizes high-risk traversability regions and a speed branch that outputs preference-adjusted recommended speeds. Experiments with 15 operators across 225 teleoperated trajectories show alignment with user-specific navigation strategies, achieving modified Hausdorff distance of 0.17 m (aggressive) and 0.15 m (conservative). In the questionnaire assessment, participants reported lower NASA-TLX workload scores with PATH-Net recommendations than without recommendations, decreasing from 34.7 to 22.2. These results support preference-conditioned trajectory and speed recommendation for off-road teleoperation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30605
Existing sequential recommenders usually allocate a fixed computational budget to every item in a user's interaction history, regardless of the item's contribution to the final prediction. We challenge this de facto design with two diagnostic findings. (1) Non-uniform computational need: items within the same sequence vary drastically in how much computation they require. Most converge after shallow processing while a critical minority only stabilizes at full depth. (2) Suboptimality of fixed allocation: given oracle access to the target item, a non-uniform depth assignment consistently outranks the fixed one, indicating that existing uniform computation both wastes capacity on already-converged items and sacrifices overall recommendation quality. These observations motivate a shift from fixed-depth computation to item-level adaptive reasoning. To this end, we propose LoopRec. LoopRec recursively applies a single weight-shared block and introduces a lightweight gate at each recursion boundary that makes a binary exit-or-continue decision for every item independently. Items whose representations have sufficiently matured exit early, while those requiring deeper reasoning continue to subsequent recursions. This design converts the fixed global depth into a learned, per-item property without auxiliary depth labels, and is readily adaptable to diverse backbone architectures. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks with four backbone families demonstrate that LoopRec consistently outperforms matched fixed-depth counterparts. Further analysis reveals that LoopRec's learned allocation exhibits interpretable patterns aligned with our post-hoc oracle analysis: lower-frequency items and more recent interactions naturally receive deeper computation. Our code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.30128
This paper presents a novel strategy for UAV detection through visible (RGB) and infrared (IR) fusion, in order to improve accuracy and precision in harsh environments and weather conditions. In this research, two opposite approaches have been studied and implemented: the first concerns image-level (early) fusion, which merges two different spectra into a single image to which one detector is applied. On the other hand, the second approach, called decision-level (late) fusion, focuses on blending together the output bounding boxes of two different detection pipelines, aiming to create a common result that can be applied to both spectra simultaneously. Both strategies have been extensively tested in a dedicated environment, which included alternating low and high brightness scenes, different backgrounds (sky and ground), distances (5, 25 and 60 m), altitudes and zoom levels (1X, 2X and 4X). These tests allowed for the assessment of actual detection capabilities and system reliability in real-world applications. Furthermore, the two fusion strategies were evaluated and compared over a set of aligned images in order to highlight the better approach of the two. The results indicate that early fusion achieves better raw performance, since it incorporates the thermal information from the beginning of the training process. However, late fusion presents an innovative and useful detection workflow that can be applied in cases of sensor or frame misalignment. Both positive and negative aspects have also been pointed out and discussed, in order to give a more comprehensive overview. Finally, the paper outlines implementation considerations and practical recommendations based on operational priorities. Overall, the findings contribute to the research in RGB-IR fusion modalities, with the goal of enhancing UAV detection capabilities.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29828
Asked what to study, which career to pursue, or what product to build, large language models (LLMs) often recommend AI-related options. We ask where this tendency comes from by comparing models before and after fine-tuning and by varying how questions are asked. First, pretrained models already include explicit AI/ML terms in the recommendations of 27% of their responses, and their released instruction-tuned versions do so in 59%. Second, fine-tuning models ourselves shows that this rise is not inevitable: general instruction tuning leaves the rate unchanged, but removing the 7% of instruction examples that concern AI cuts it by 14 percentage points, below the level of the pretrained models it starts from. Data rewarding helpfulness raise it by 9 points, while data ranked by the preferences of diverse simulated users lower it by 9. Finally, with models held fixed, asking for the "best" option or for what to do "right now" raises the rate by 8 and 18 points, whereas telling the model it is an AI advisor adds 4. Overall, the tendency starts in pretraining, and what models learn afterward, together with how a question is phrased, decides how strongly it appears.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29785
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to support consequential decisions, yet their reliability under equivalent representations of uncertainty remains unclear. Existing work has documented prompt sensitivity, cognitive biases, and confidence miscalibration, but it is still unknown whether high-stakes advice changes when the same probability is expressed through complementary gain and loss frames. We introduce FrameBench-HPS, a controlled benchmark of 2,880 prompts derived from 240 high-stakes scenarios across healthcare, finance, education/career, and legal/consumer-rights domains. Across seven LLMs, gain-loss framing changes the recommendation category in 32.4% of complete groups, with most changes involving uncertainty rather than direct reversals. Human evaluation confirms corresponding shifts in perceived risk and directiveness. Robustness experiments show that framing effects persist under conversational paraphrases and exceed ordinary repeated-generation variability. Probability canonicalization substantially reduces framing sensitivity, identifying probability representation as a practical target for improving consistency in high-stakes LLM decision support.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29294
Managed and wild bees sustain roughly a third of the global food products, yet colonies face mounting stress from climate-change including extreme weather patterns, altered parasite and disease patterns. Timely assessment of colony condition such as understanding colony strength, brood area, honey and pollen storage, comb usage, is essential to adaptive management. However, manual hive frame inspection is slow, costly, and quality depends on scarce expertise. We present an artificial targeted intelligent system framework focusing on edge deployable pipeline that turns hive frame photographs into interpretable and action-oriented inspection report. The pipeline includes an object detector to detect biologically-meaningful comb-cell classes; detections are distilled into structured fact schema; facts are converted into constrained factual text; the text triggers a grounded knowledge-base for interpretations and recommendations. Knowledge-base entries are required to be triggerable by evidence expressed in the fact schema. We built our system based on open source FAIRHiveFrames-1K dataset and favour reproducible, edge-deployable models over large general purpose frontier models. We additionally release FAIRHiveText-1K dataset that turns FAIRHiveFrames-1K dataset into interchangeable facts and text interpretation of the facts, making it easy for further LLM-based research into this area. We also propose a pathway to develop the grounded knowledge-base that will be helpful in providing interpretable and actionable reports from the facts.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29283
Recent generative medication recommendation systems ultimately produce sets of drugs, but drug--drug interaction (DDI) constraints depend on the set as a whole. A natural post-hoc approach is to first predict medications and then locally repair interacting pairs by removing one drug at a time. We ask whether this local repair step itself introduces avoidable error. Using fixed medication scores from FLAME's frozen classifier on MIMIC-III, we compare increasingly strong local repair strategies with an exact global decoder while holding the scores, output size, and DDI constraint fixed. The global decoder jointly selects the highest-scoring feasible medication set using mixed-integer linear programming. Across validation and test splits, global decoding consistently achieves higher Jaccard similarity than greedy repair, degree-aware repair, and degree-aware repair strengthened with exhaustive 1-swap local search. Its advantage is small under loose DDI constraints and becomes larger as the constraint tightens; on the test split it reaches +0.0064 Jaccard over the strongest local baseline at the strict DDI operating point. The finding also holds across a fine accuracy--DDI sweep at matched realized DDI exposure and under three score representations. At the strict setting, global decoding retains more true-positive medications while removing more false positives. These results show that medication recommendation is not only a representation-learning problem: even with a frozen clinical model, how its scores are converted into a constrained medication set can materially affect the final prediction.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29228
Engineering graduates in India enter a technology sector that is being reshaped by generative AI, yet the route into that sector runs through examinations and campus placement screens that largely exclude AI. Institutions in India have an approved intake of nearly 2.9 million seats in engineering and technology for 2026-2027, but HCI research on how students prepare for AI-mediated work has drawn mostly on Western and East Asian settings. We interviewed 23 students and recent graduates of Indian engineering and computing programmes about how they used generative AI across coursework, examinations and placements, and how they judged their own readiness for work. Using reflexive thematic analysis, we report five themes, covering AI-first workplaces and AI-free placement screens, how participants prepared for placement, how they used AI in coursework, the role of faculty authority and enforcement, and participants' concerns about their readiness for work. Drawing on signaling theory, we discuss what grades and screen scores certify once AI can help produce them, and we offer recommendations for employers, institutions and AI tool designers.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29140
Radiation treatment planning requires balancing competing objectives to satisfy clinical criteria while accommodating physicians' preferences. This study aims to develop an evidence-driven, multi-agent compound AI system that integrates DRL-based automated treatment planning with LLM-based conversational plan refinement for proton PBS therapy. A policy network trained using PPO first generates multiple plans without human intervention, from which one is selected as the target plan and the others serve as references for subsequent refinements. For challenging cases requiring further adjustments, an LLM-based multi-agent system enables plan refinement through natural language interactions. The system comprises a planning agent that recommends evidence-supported adjustments, a chatbot providing a unified conversational interface, and an evaluation agent that retrieves clinical metrics and identifies constraint violations. To enhance domain-specific reasoning, the planning agent based on Qwen3-14B is designed to justify its recommendations using evidence from previously generated plans and post-trained on task-specific data using SFT and GRPO. The framework was trained and evaluated using 21 patients with H&N cancers, with 5 PPO-generated plans per patient. Of these, 50 plans were selected for instruction-guided refinement. Compared with the base LLM, the post-trained Qwen3-14B demonstrated improved instruction-following, information retrieval and domain-specific reasoning capabilities. The resulting adjustments more effectively improved user-prioritized objectives while limiting deterioration in competing objectives, yielding more clinically appropriate trade-offs in patient-specific plan refinement. The proposed compound AI system provides a user-friendly planning platform, offering a promising approach to personalized proton PBS treatment planning.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.29010
Continuous glucose monitoring supports diabetes management but requires forecasting models that are accurate, interpretable, and efficient enough for real-time deployment. We present SSMCGM-Stream, a streaming state-space model that maintains a personalized hidden state updated with each incoming glucose reading to provide constant-time forecasting, physiologically structured counterfactual reasoning, and interpretable forecasts through hidden-state attribution. Built on this foundation, SSMCGM-Agent delivers risk-aware, natural-language decision support by translating forecasts, explanations, and counterfactuals into grounded recommendations through a guarded language-model interface. Evaluated on the T1DEXI cohort, SSMCGM-Stream achieves forecasting performance comparable to strong neural baselines while substantially reducing computational cost, enabling continuous on-device diabetes decision support.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28976
Generative retrieval (GR) casts search and recommendation as autoregressive generation of discrete semantic identifiers (SIDs). SID design largely determines GR quality, but its discrete, interdependent components (SID construction, collision handling, decoding, and training) cannot be optimized end-to-end with gradients and remain largely hand-designed. We introduce a framework that improves these components through LLM-driven evolutionary program search, to our knowledge the first application of this approach to GR. A locally served, open-weight 31B model mutates executable GR components, so no proprietary LLM API is used, and a 1M-parameter proxy decoder provides fast feedback in place of repeatedly training the 1B target generator. Across 21 SID programs on NQ320K, proxy and target Recall@100 show strong rank correlation (Spearman $\rho = 0.90$). Guided by this proxy, evolution improves the seed GR on NQ320K, MSMARCO300K, and a multilingual e-commerce dataset under a fixed training recipe. On NQ320K, jointly evolving SID construction and collision handling improves Recall@1 from 55.8% to 59.3% and Recall@100 from 85.8% to 90.6%. A component study shows that proxy reliability depends on what is evolved: improvements transfer reliably for the semantic index but not for the generator's training objective or the full pipeline. LLM-driven evolutionary search is thus a practical tool for GR design, provided proxy reliability is established for the chosen search space.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28568
Asked to name a running shoe brand, language models say Nike. Asked to recommend one, they say Brooks. This paper asks where models learn that taste. Across 102 models and 42 brand categories, the brand a model picks when recommending differs from the brand it names in 26. The field moves together to a shared recommendation. The Named brands are market leaders, and the Picked brands are mostly niche and specialist. Three open training pipelines show where this forms. Pretraining already attaches the recommended brand to advice. Supervised fine-tuning teaches the model to answer and mostly leaves the pick unchanged. Preference optimization (DPO) teaches the model which answer is better, and the pick moves in all three pipelines, by 11 to 24 points. The preference data contains almost no brands. DPO moves the model's judgments toward a second set of associations even when the preferred brand is not in the preference data, and the effect reaches beyond brands. Asked to choose a sauce, models switch from ketchup to pesto. We do not know exactly how these preferences arise. We suspect they come from the judge models that decide which answers count as better during preference training. For brands, a recommendation depends less on what a model knows about them than on whether they fit this taste.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28272