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Evaluating Artificial Intelligence Through a Christian Understanding of Human Flourishing

arXiv:2604.03356v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) alignment is fundamentally a formation problem, not only a safety problem. As Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly mediate moral deliberation and spiritual inquiry, they do more than provide information; they function as instruments of digital catechesis, actively shaping and ordering human understanding, decision-making, and moral reflection. To make this formative influence visible and measurable, we introduce the Flourishing AI Benchmark: Christian Single-Turn (FAI-C-ST), a framework designed to evaluate Frontier Model responses against a Christian understanding of human flourishing across seven dimensions. By comparing 20 Frontier Models against both pluralistic and Christian-specific criteria, we show that current AI systems are not worldview-neutral. Instead, they default to a Procedural Secularism that lacks the grounding necessary to sustain theological coherence, resulting in a systematic performance decline of approximately 17 points across all dimensions of flourishing. Most critically, there is a 31-point decline in the Faith and Spirituality dimension. These findings suggest that the performance gap in values alignment is not a technical limitation, but arises from training objectives that prioritize broad acceptability and safety over deep, internally coherent moral or theological reasoning.

VERT: Reliable LLM Judges for Radiology Report Evaluation

arXiv:2604.03376v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current literature on radiology report evaluation has focused primarily on designing LLM-based metrics and fine-tuning small models for chest X-rays. However, it remains unclear whether these approaches are robust when applied to reports from other modalities and anatomies. Which model and prompt configurations are best suited to serve as LLM judges for radiology evaluation? We conduct a thorough correlation analysis between expert and LLM-based ratings. We compare three existing LLM-as-a-judge metrics (RadFact, GREEN, and FineRadScore) alongside VERT, our proposed LLM-based metric, using open- and closed-source models (reasoning and non-reasoning) of different sizes across two expert-annotated datasets, RadEval and RaTE-Eval, spanning multiple modalities and anatomies. We further evaluate few-shot approaches, ensembling, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning using RaTE-Eval. To better understand metric behavior, we perform a systematic error detection and categorization study to assess alignment of these metrics against expert judgments and identify areas of lower and higher agreement. Our results show that VERT improves correlation with radiologist judgments by up to 11.7% relative to GREEN. Furthermore, fine-tuning Qwen3 30B yield gains of up to 25% using only 1,300 training samples. The fine-tuned model also reduces inference time up to 37.2 times. These findings highlight the effectiveness of LLM-based judges and demonstrate that reliable evaluation can be achieved with lightweight adaptation.

Hume's Representational Conditions for Causal Judgment: What Bayesian Formalization Abstracted Away

arXiv:2604.03387v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hume's account of causal judgment presupposes three representational conditions: experiential grounding (ideas must trace to impressions), structured retrieval (association must operate through organized networks exceeding pairwise connection), and vivacity transfer (inference must produce felt conviction, not merely updated probability). This paper extracts these conditions from Hume's texts and argues that they are integral to his causal psychology. It then traces their fate through the formalization trajectory from Hume to Bayesian epistemology and predictive processing, showing that later frameworks preserve the updating structure of Hume's insight while abstracting away these further representational conditions. Large language models serve as an illustrative contemporary case: they exhibit a form of statistical updating without satisfying the three conditions, thereby making visible requirements that were previously background assumptions in Hume's framework.

TABQAWORLD: Optimizing Multimodal Reasoning for Multi-Turn Table Question Answering

arXiv:2604.03393v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal reasoning has emerged as a powerful framework for enhancing reasoning capabilities of reasoning models. While multi-turn table reasoning methods have improved reasoning accuracy through tool use and reward modeling, they rely on fixed text serialization for table state readouts. This introduces representation errors in table encoding that significantly accumulate over multiple turns. Such accumulation is alleviated by tabular grounding methods in the expense of inference compute and cost, rendering real world deployment impractical. To address this, we introduce TABQAWORLD, a table reasoning framework that jointly optimizes tabular action through representation and estimation. For representation, TABQAWORLD employs an action-conditioned multimodal selection policy, which dynamically switches between visual and textual representations to maximize table state readout reliability. For estimation, TABQAWORLD optimizes stepwise reasoning trajectory through table metadata including dimension, data types and key values, safely planning trajectory and compressing low-complexity actions to reduce conversation turns and latency. Designed as a training-free framework, empirical evaluations show that TABQAWORLD achieves state-of-the-art performance with 4.87% accuracy improvements over baselines, with 5.42% accuracy gain and 33.35% inference latency reduction over static settings, establishing a new standard for reliable and efficient table reasoning.

ActionNex: A Virtual Outage Manager for Cloud

arXiv:2604.03512v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Outage management in large-scale cloud operations remains heavily manual, requiring rapid triage, cross-team coordination, and experience-driven decisions under partial observability. We present \textbf{ActionNex}, a production-grade agentic system that supports end-to-end outage assistance, including real-time updates, knowledge distillation, and role- and stage-conditioned next-best action recommendations. ActionNex ingests multimodal operational signals (e.g., outage content, telemetry, and human communications) and compresses them into critical events that represent meaningful state transitions. It couples this perception layer with a hierarchical memory subsystem: long-term Key-Condition-Action (KCA) knowledge distilled from playbooks and historical executions, episodic memory of prior outages, and working memory of the live context. A reasoning agent aligns current critical events to preconditions, retrieves relevant memories, and generates actionable recommendations; executed human actions serve as an implicit feedback signal to enable continual self-evolution in a human-agent hybrid system. We evaluate ActionNex on eight real Azure outages (8M tokens, 4,000 critical events) using two complementary ground-truth action sets, achieving 71.4\% precision and 52.8-54.8\% recall. The system has been piloted in production and has received positive early feedback.

Towards the AI Historian: Agentic Information Extraction from Primary Sources

arXiv:2604.03553v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI is supporting, accelerating, and automating scientific discovery across a diverse set of fields. However, AI adoption in historical research remains limited due to the lack of solutions designed for historians. In this technical progress report, we introduce the first module of Chronos, an AI Historian under development. This module enables historians to convert image scans of primary sources into data through natural-language interactions. Rather than imposing a fixed extraction pipeline powered by a vision-language model (VLM), it allows historians to adapt workflows for heterogeneous source corpora, evaluate the performance of AI models on specific tasks, and iteratively refine workflows through natural-language interaction with the Chronos agent. The module is open-source and ready to be used by historical researchers on their own sources.

When Do Hallucinations Arise? A Graph Perspective on the Evolution of Path Reuse and Path Compression

arXiv:2604.03557v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning hallucinations in large language models (LLMs) often appear as fluent yet unsupported conclusions that violate either the given context or underlying factual knowledge. Although such failures are widely observed, the mechanisms by which decoder-only Transformers produce them remain poorly understood. We model next-token prediction as a graph search process over an underlying graph, where entities correspond to nodes and learned transitions form edges. From this perspective, contextual reasoning is a constrained search over a sampled subgraph (intrinsic reasoning), while context-free queries rely on memorized structures in the underlying graph (extrinsic reasoning). We show that reasoning hallucinations arise from two fundamental mechanisms: \textbf{Path Reuse}, where memorized knowledge overrides contextual constraints during early training, and \textbf{Path Compression}, where frequently traversed multi-step paths collapse into shortcut edges in later training. Together, these mechanisms provide a unified explanation for reasoning hallucinations in LLMs and connected to well-known behaviors observed in downstream applications.

When Adaptive Rewards Hurt: Causal Probing and the Switching-Stability Dilemma in LLM-Guided LEO Satellite Scheduling

arXiv:2604.03562v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adaptive reward design for deep reinforcement learning (DRL) in multi-beam LEO satellite scheduling is motivated by the intuition that regime-aware reward weights should outperform static ones. We systematically test this intuition and uncover a switching-stability dilemma: near-constant reward weights (342.1 Mbps) outperform carefully-tuned dynamic weights (103.3+/-96.8 Mbps) because PPO requires a quasistationary reward signal for value function convergence. Weight adaptation-regardless of quality-degrades performance by repeatedly restarting convergence. To understand why specific weights matter, we introduce a single-variable causal probing method that independently perturbs each reward term by +/-20% and measures PPO response after 50k steps. Probing reveals counterintuitive leverage: a +20% increase in the switching penalty yields +157 Mbps for polar handover and +130 Mbps for hot-cold regimes-findings inaccessible to human experts or trained MLPs without systematic probing. We evaluate four MDP architect variants (fixed, rule-based, learned MLP, finetuned LLM) across known and novel traffic regimes. The MLP achieves 357.9 Mbps on known regimes and 325.2 Mbps on novel regimes, while the fine-tuned LLM collapses to 45.3+/-43.0 Mbps due to weight oscillation rather than lack of domain knowledge-output consistency, not knowledge, is the binding constraint. Our findings provide an empirically-grounded roadmap for LLM-DRL integration in communication systems, identifying where LLMs add irreplaceable value (natural language intent understanding) versus where simpler methods suffice.

A Multimodal Foundation Model of Spatial Transcriptomics and Histology for Biological Discovery and Clinical Prediction

arXiv:2604.03630v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spatial transcriptomics (ST) enables gene expression mapping within anatomical context but remains costly and low-throughput. Hematoxylin and eosin (H\&E) staining offers rich morphology yet lacks molecular resolution. We present \textbf{\ours} (\textbf{S}patial \textbf{T}ranscriptomics and hist\textbf{O}logy \textbf{R}epresentation \textbf{M}odel), a foundation model trained on 1.2 million spatially resolved transcriptomic profiles with matched histology across 18 organs. Using a hierarchical architecture integrating morphological features, gene expression, and spatial context, STORM bridges imaging and omics through robust molecular--morphological representations. STORM enhances spatial domain discovery, producing biologically coherent tissue maps, and outperforms existing methods in predicting spatial gene expression from H\&E images across 11 tumor types. The model is platform-agnostic, performing consistently across Visium, Xenium, Visium HD, and CosMx. Applied to 23 independent cohorts comprising 7,245 patients, STORM significantly improves immunotherapy response prediction and prognostication over established biomarkers, providing a scalable framework for spatially informed discovery and clinical precision medicine.

Single-agent vs. Multi-agents for Automated Video Analysis of On-Screen Collaborative Learning Behaviors

arXiv:2604.03631v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-screen learning behavior provides valuable insights into how students seek, use, and create information during learning. Analyzing on-screen behavioral engagement is essential for capturing students' cognitive and collaborative processes. The recent development of Vision Language Models (VLMs) offers new opportunities to automate the labor-intensive manual coding often required for multimodal video data analysis. In this study, we compared the performance of both leading closed-source VLMs (Claude-3.7-Sonnet, GPT-4.1) and open-source VLM (Qwen2.5-VL-72B) in single- and multi-agent settings for automated coding of screen recordings in collaborative learning contexts based on the ICAP framework. In particular, we proposed and compared two multi-agent frameworks: 1) a three-agent workflow multi-agent system (MAS) that segments screen videos by scene and detects on-screen behaviors using cursor-informed VLM prompting with evidence-based verification; 2) an autonomous-decision MAS inspired by ReAct that iteratively interleaves reasoning, tool-like operations (segmentation/ classification/ validation), and observation-driven self-correction to produce interpretable on-screen behavior labels. Experimental results demonstrated that the two proposed MAS frameworks achieved viable performance, outperforming the single VLMs in scene and action detection tasks. It is worth noting that the workflow-based agent achieved best on scene detection, and the autonomous-decision MAS achieved best on action detection. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of VLM-based Multi-agent System for video analysis and contributes a scalable framework for multimodal data analytics.

Beyond Retrieval: Modeling Confidence Decay and Deterministic Agentic Platforms in Generative Engine Optimization

arXiv:2604.03656v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is rapidly reshaping digital marketing paradigms in the era of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, current GEO strategies predominantly rely on Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which inherently suffers from probabilistic hallucinations and the "zero-click" paradox, failing to establish sustainable commercial trust. In this paper, we systematically deconstruct the probabilistic flaws of existing RAG-based GEO and propose a paradigm shift towards deterministic multi-agent intent routing. First, we mathematically formulate Semantic Entropy Drift (SED) to model the dynamic decay of confidence curves in LLMs over continuous temporal and contextual perturbations. To rigorously quantify optimization value in black-box commercial engines, we introduce the Isomorphic Attribution Regression (IAR) model, leveraging a Multi-Agent System (MAS) probe with strict human-in-the-loop physical isolation to enforce hallucination penalties. Furthermore, we architect the Deterministic Agent Handoff (DAH) protocol, conceptualizing an Agentic Trust Brokerage (ATB) ecosystem where LLMs function solely as intent routers rather than final answer generators. We empirically validate this architecture using EasyNote, an industrial AI meeting minutes product by Yishu Technology. By routing the intent of "knowledge graph mapping on an infinite canvas" directly to its specialized proprietary agent via DAH, we demonstrate the reduction of vertical task hallucination rates to near zero. This work establishes a foundational theoretical framework for next-generation GEO and paves the way for a well-ordered, deterministic human-AI collaboration ecosystem.

TableVision: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Spatially Grounded Reasoning over Complex Hierarchical Tables

arXiv:2604.03660v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Structured tables are essential for conveying high-density information in professional domains such as finance, healthcare, and scientific research. Despite the progress in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), reasoning performance remains limited for complex tables with hierarchical layouts. In this paper, we identify a critical Perception Bottleneck through quantitative analysis. We find that as task complexity scales, the number of involved discrete visual regions increases disproportionately. This processing density leads to an internal "Perceptual Overload," where MLLMs struggle to maintain accurate spatial attention during implicit generation. To address this bottleneck, we introduce TableVision, a large-scale, trajectory-aware benchmark designed for spatially grounded reasoning. TableVision stratifies tabular tasks into three cognitive levels (Perception, Reasoning, and Analysis) across 13 sub-categories. By utilizing a rendering-based deterministic grounding pipeline, the dataset explicitly couples multi-step logical deductions with pixel-perfect spatial ground truths, comprising 6,799 high-fidelity reasoning trajectories. Our empirical results, supported by diagnostic probing, demonstrate that explicit spatial constraints significantly recover the reasoning potential of MLLMs. Furthermore, our two-stage decoupled framework achieves a robust 12.3% overall accuracy improvement on the test set. TableVision provides a rigorous testbed and a fresh perspective on the synergy between perception and logic in document understanding.

Decomposing Communication Gain and Delay Cost Under Cross-Timestep Delays in Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2604.03785v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Communication is essential for coordination in \emph{cooperative} multi-agent reinforcement learning under partial observability, yet \emph{cross-timestep} delays cause messages to arrive multiple timesteps after generation, inducing temporal misalignment and making information stale when consumed. We formalize this setting as a delayed-communication partially observable Markov game (DeComm-POMG) and decompose a message's effect into \emph{communication gain} and \emph{delay cost}, yielding the Communication Gain and Delay Cost (CGDC) metric. We further establish a value-loss bound showing that the degradation induced by delayed messages is upper-bounded by a discounted accumulation of an information gap between the action distributions induced by timely versus delayed messages. Guided by CGDC, we propose \textbf{CDCMA}, an actor--critic framework that requests messages only when predicted CGDC is positive, predicts future observations to reduce misalignment at consumption, and fuses delayed messages via CGDC-guided attention. Experiments on no-teammate-vision variants of Cooperative Navigation and Predator Prey, and on SMAC maps across multiple delay levels show consistent improvements in performance, robustness, and generalization, with ablations validating each component.

FeynmanBench: Benchmarking Multimodal LLMs on Diagrammatic Physics Reasoning

arXiv:2604.03893v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Breakthroughs in frontier theory often depend on the combination of concrete diagrammatic notations with rigorous logic. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) show promise in general scientific tasks, current benchmarks often focus on local information extraction rather than the global structural logic inherent in formal scientific notations. In this work, we introduce FeynmanBench, the first benchmark centered on Feynman diagram tasks. It is designed to evaluate AI's capacity for multistep diagrammatic reasoning, which requires satisfying conservation laws and symmetry constraints, identifying graph topology, converting between diagrammatic and algebraic representations, and constructing scattering amplitudes under specific conventions and gauges. To support large-scale and reproducible evaluation, we developed an automated pipeline producing diverse Feynman diagrams along with verifiable topological annotations and amplitude results. Our database spans the electromagnetic, weak, and strong interactions of the Standard Model, encompasses over 100 distinct types and includes more than 2000 tasks. Experiments on state-of-the-art MLLMs reveal systematic failure modes, including unstable enforcement of physical constraints and violations of global topological conditions, highlighting the need for physics-grounded benchmarks for visual reasoning over scientific notation. FeynmanBench provides a logically rigorous test of whether AI can effectively engage in scientific discovery, particularly within theoretical physics.
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