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The AI Pyramid A Conceptual Framework for Workforce Capability in the Age of AI

arXiv:2601.06500v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) represents a qualitative shift in technological change by extending cognitive labor itself rather than merely automating routine tasks. Recent evidence shows that generative AI disproportionately affects highly educated, white collar work, challenging existing assumptions about workforce vulnerability and rendering traditional approaches to digital or AI literacy insufficient. This paper introduces the concept of AI Nativity, the capacity to integrate AI fluidly into everyday reasoning, problem solving, and decision making, and proposes the AI Pyramid, a conceptual framework for organizing human capability in an AI mediated economy. The framework distinguishes three interdependent capability layers: AI Native capability as a universal baseline for participation in AI augmented environments; AI Foundation capability for building, integrating, and sustaining AI enabled systems; and AI Deep capability for advancing frontier AI knowledge and applications. Crucially, the pyramid is not a career ladder but a system level distribution of capabilities required at scale. Building on this structure, the paper argues that effective AI workforce development requires treating capability formation as infrastructure rather than episodic training, centered on problem based learning embedded in work contexts and supported by dynamic skill ontologies and competency based measurement. The framework has implications for organizations, education systems, and governments seeking to align learning, measurement, and policy with the evolving demands of AI mediated work, while addressing productivity, resilience, and inequality at societal scale.

SafePro: Evaluating the Safety of Professional-Level AI Agents

arXiv:2601.06663v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model-based agents are rapidly evolving from simple conversational assistants into autonomous systems capable of performing complex, professional-level tasks in various domains. While these advancements promise significant productivity gains, they also introduce critical safety risks that remain under-explored. Existing safety evaluations primarily focus on simple, daily assistance tasks, failing to capture the intricate decision-making processes and potential consequences of misaligned behaviors in professional settings. To address this gap, we introduce \textbf{SafePro}, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the safety alignment of AI agents performing professional activities. SafePro features a dataset of high-complexity tasks across diverse professional domains with safety risks, developed through a rigorous iterative creation and review process. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art AI models reveals significant safety vulnerabilities and uncovers new unsafe behaviors in professional contexts. We further show that these models exhibit both insufficient safety judgment and weak safety alignment when executing complex professional tasks. In addition, we investigate safety mitigation strategies for improving agent safety in these scenarios and observe encouraging improvements. Together, our findings highlight the urgent need for robust safety mechanisms tailored to the next generation of professional AI agents.

From "Thinking" to "Justifying": Aligning High-Stakes Explainability with Professional Communication Standards

arXiv:2601.07233v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Explainable AI (XAI) in high-stakes domains should help stakeholders trust and verify system outputs. Yet Chain-of-Thought methods reason before concluding, and logical gaps or hallucinations can yield conclusions that do not reliably align with their rationale. Thus, we propose "Result -> Justify", which constrains the output communication to present a conclusion before its structured justification. We introduce SEF (Structured Explainability Framework), operationalizing professional conventions (e.g., CREAC, BLUF) via six metrics for structure and grounding. Experiments across four tasks in three domains validate this approach: all six metrics correlate with correctness (r=0.20-0.42; p

Puzzle it Out: Local-to-Global World Model for Offline Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2601.07463v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Offline multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) aims to solve cooperative decision-making problems in multi-agent systems using pre-collected datasets. Existing offline MARL methods primarily constrain training within the dataset distribution, resulting in overly conservative policies that struggle to generalize beyond the support of the data. While model-based approaches offer a promising solution by expanding the original dataset with synthetic data generated from a learned world model, the high dimensionality, non-stationarity, and complexity of multi-agent systems make it challenging to accurately estimate the transitions and reward functions in offline MARL. Given the difficulty of directly modeling joint dynamics, we propose a local-to-global (LOGO) world model, a novel framework that leverages local predictions-which are easier to estimate-to infer global state dynamics, thus improving prediction accuracy while implicitly capturing agent-wise dependencies. Using the trained world model, we generate synthetic data to augment the original dataset, expanding the effective state-action space. To ensure reliable policy learning, we further introduce an uncertainty-aware sampling mechanism that adaptively weights synthetic data by prediction uncertainty, reducing approximation error propagation to policies. In contrast to conventional ensemble-based methods, our approach requires only an additional encoder for uncertainty estimation, significantly reducing computational overhead while maintaining accuracy. Extensive experiments across 8 scenarios against 8 baselines demonstrate that our method surpasses state-of-the-art baselines on standard offline MARL benchmarks, establishing a new model-based baseline for generalizable offline multi-agent learning.

DIAGPaper: Diagnosing Valid and Specific Weaknesses in Scientific Papers via Multi-Agent Reasoning

arXiv:2601.07611v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Paper weakness identification using single-agent or multi-agent LLMs has attracted increasing attention, yet existing approaches exhibit key limitations. Many multi-agent systems simulate human roles at a surface level, missing the underlying criteria that lead experts to assess complementary intellectual aspects of a paper. Moreover, prior methods implicitly assume identified weaknesses are valid, ignoring reviewer bias, misunderstanding, and the critical role of author rebuttals in validating review quality. Finally, most systems output unranked weakness lists, rather than prioritizing the most consequential issues for users. In this work, we propose DIAGPaper, a novel multi-agent framework that addresses these challenges through three tightly integrated modules. The customizer module simulates human-defined review criteria and instantiates multiple reviewer agents with criterion-specific expertise. The rebuttal module introduces author agents that engage in structured debate with reviewer agents to validate and refine proposed weaknesses. The prioritizer module learns from large-scale human review practices to assess the severity of validated weaknesses and surfaces the top-K severest ones to users. Experiments on two benchmarks, AAAR and ReviewCritique, demonstrate that DIAGPaper substantially outperforms existing methods by producing more valid and more paper-specific weaknesses, while presenting them in a user-oriented, prioritized manner.

From Augmentation to Symbiosis: A Review of Human-AI Collaboration Frameworks, Performance, and Perils

arXiv:2601.06030v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper offers a concise, 60-year synthesis of human-AI collaboration, from Licklider's ``man-computer symbiosis" (AI as colleague) and Engelbart's ``augmenting human intellect" (AI as tool) to contemporary poles: Human-Centered AI's ``supertool" and Symbiotic Intelligence's mutual-adaptation model. We formalize the mechanism for effective teaming as a causal chain: Explainable AI (XAI) -> co-adaptation -> shared mental models (SMMs). A meta-analytic ``performance paradox" is then examined: human-AI teams tend to show negative synergy in judgment/decision tasks (underperforming AI alone) but positive synergy in content creation and problem formulation. We trace failures to the algorithm-in-the-loop dynamic, aversion/bias asymmetries, and cumulative cognitive deskilling. We conclude with a unifying framework--combining extended-self and dual-process theories--arguing that durable gains arise when AI functions as an internalized cognitive component, yielding a unitary human-XAI symbiotic agency. This resolves the paradox and delineates a forward agenda for research and practice.

Why Slop Matters

arXiv:2601.06060v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI-generated "slop" is often seen as digital pollution. We argue that this dismissal of the topic risks missing important aspects of AI Slop that deserve rigorous study. AI Slop serves a social function: it offers a supply-side solution to a variety of problems in cultural and economic demand - that, collectively, people want more content than humans can supply. We also argue that AI Slop is not mere digital detritus but has its own aesthetic value. Like other "low" cultural forms initially dismissed by critics, it nonetheless offers a legitimate means of collective sense-making, with the potential to express meaning and identity. We identify three key features of family resemblance for prototypical AI Slop: superficial competence (its veneer of quality is belied by a deeper lack of substance), asymmetry effort (it takes vastly less effort to generate than would be the case without AI), and mass producibility (it is part of a digital ecosystem of widespread generation and consumption). While AI Slop is heterogeneous and depends crucially on its medium, it tends to vary across three dimensions: instrumental utility, personalization, and surrealism. AI Slop will be an increasingly prolific and impactful part of our creative, information, and cultural economies; we should take it seriously as an object of study in its own right.

The Patient/Industry Trade-off in Medical Artificial Intelligence

arXiv:2601.06144v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare has led to many promising developments; however, increasingly, AI research is funded by the private sector leading to potential trade-offs between benefits to patients and benefits to industry. Health AI practitioners should prioritize successful adaptation into clinical practice in order to provide meaningful benefits to patients, but translation usually requires collaboration with industry. We discuss three features of AI studies that hamper the integration of AI into clinical practice from the perspective of researchers and clinicians. These include lack of clinically relevant metrics, lack of clinical trials and longitudinal studies to validate results, and lack of patient and physician involvement in the development process. For partnerships between industry and health research to be sustainable, a balance must be established between patient and industry benefit. We propose three approaches for addressing this gap: improved transparency and explainability of AI models, fostering relationships with industry partners that have a reputation for centering patient benefit in their practices, and prioritization of overall healthcare benefits. With these priorities, we can sooner realize meaningful AI technologies used by clinicians where mutua

Interoperability in AI Safety Governance: Ethics, Regulations, and Standards

arXiv:2601.06153v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This policy report draws on country studies from China, South Korea, Singapore, and the United Kingdom to identify effective tools and key barriers to interoperability in AI safety governance. It offers practical recommendations to support a globally informed yet locally grounded governance ecosystem. Interoperability is a central goal of AI governance, vital for reducing risks, fostering innovation, enhancing competitiveness, promoting standardization, and building public trust. However, structural gaps such as fragmented regulations and lack of global coordination, and conceptual gaps, including limited Global South engagement, continue to hinder progress. Focusing on three high-stakes domains - autonomous vehicles, education, and cross-border data flows - the report compares ethical, legal, and technical frameworks across the four countries. It identifies areas of convergence, divergence, and potential alignment, offering policy recommendations that support the development of interoperability mechanisms aligned with the Global Digital Compact and relevant UN resolutions. The analysis covers seven components: objectives, regulators, ethics, binding measures, targeted frameworks, technical standards, and key risks.

Toward Safe and Responsible AI Agents: A Three-Pillar Model for Transparency, Accountability, and Trustworthiness

arXiv:2601.06223v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents a conceptual and operational framework for developing and operating safe and trustworthy AI agents based on a Three-Pillar Model grounded in transparency, accountability, and trustworthiness. Building on prior work in Human-in-the-Loop systems, reinforcement learning, and collaborative AI, the framework defines an evolutionary path toward autonomous agents that balances increasing automation with appropriate human oversight. The paper argues that safe agent autonomy must be achieved through progressive validation, analogous to the staged development of autonomous driving, rather than through immediate full automation. Transparency and accountability are identified as foundational requirements for establishing user trust and for mitigating known risks in generative AI systems, including hallucinations, data bias, and goal misalignment, such as the inversion problem. The paper further describes three ongoing work streams supporting this framework: public deliberation on AI agents conducted by the Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab, cross-industry collaboration through the Safe AI Agent Consortium, and the development of open tooling for an agent operating environment aligned with the Three-Pillar Model. Together, these contributions provide both conceptual clarity and practical guidance for enabling the responsible evolution of AI agents that operate transparently, remain aligned with human values, and sustain societal trust.

$\texttt{AMEND++}$: Benchmarking Eligibility Criteria Amendments in Clinical Trials

arXiv:2601.06300v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Clinical trial amendments frequently introduce delays, increased costs, and administrative burden, with eligibility criteria being the most commonly amended component. We introduce \textit{eligibility criteria amendment prediction}, a novel NLP task that aims to forecast whether the eligibility criteria of an initial trial protocol will undergo future amendments. To support this task, we release $\texttt{AMEND++}$, a benchmark suite comprising two datasets: $\texttt{AMEND}$, which captures eligibility-criteria version histories and amendment labels from public clinical trials, and $\verb|AMEND_LLM|$, a refined subset curated using an LLM-based denoising pipeline to isolate substantive changes. We further propose $\textit{Change-Aware Masked Language Modeling}$ (CAMLM), a revision-aware pretraining strategy that leverages historical edits to learn amendment-sensitive representations. Experiments across diverse baselines show that CAMLM consistently improves amendment prediction, enabling more robust and cost-effective clinical trial design.

Human-in-the-Loop Interactive Report Generation for Chronic Disease Adherence

arXiv:2601.06364v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chronic disease management requires regular adherence feedback to prevent avoidable hospitalizations, yet clinicians lack time to produce personalized patient communications. Manual authoring preserves clinical accuracy but does not scale; AI generation scales but can undermine trust in patient-facing contexts. We present a clinician-in-the-loop interface that constrains AI to data organization and preserves physician oversight through recognition-based review. A single-page editor pairs AI-generated section drafts with time-aligned visualizations, enabling inline editing with visual evidence for each claim. This division of labor (AI organizes, clinician decides) targets both efficiency and accountability. In a pilot with three physicians reviewing 24 cases, AI successfully generated clinically personalized drafts matching physicians' manual authoring practice (overall mean 4.86/10 vs. 5.0/10 baseline), requiring minimal physician editing (mean 8.3\% content modification) with zero safety-critical issues, demonstrating effective automation of content generation. However, review time remained comparable to manual practice, revealing an accountability paradox: in high-stakes clinical contexts, professional responsibility requires complete verification regardless of AI accuracy. We contribute three interaction patterns for clinical AI collaboration: bounded generation with recognition-based review via chart-text pairing, automated urgency flagging that analyzes vital trends and adherence patterns with fail-safe escalation for missed critical monitoring tasks, and progressive disclosure controls that reduce cognitive load while maintaining oversight. These patterns indicate that clinical AI efficiency requires not only accurate models, but also mechanisms for selective verification that preserve accountability.

Benchmarking Egocentric Clinical Intent Understanding Capability for Medical Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv:2601.06750v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Medical Multimodal Large Language Models (Med-MLLMs) require egocentric clinical intent understanding for real-world deployment, yet existing benchmarks fail to evaluate this critical capability. To address these challenges, we introduce MedGaze-Bench, the first benchmark leveraging clinician gaze as a Cognitive Cursor to assess intent understanding across surgery, emergency simulation, and diagnostic interpretation. Our benchmark addresses three fundamental challenges: visual homogeneity of anatomical structures, strict temporal-causal dependencies in clinical workflows, and implicit adherence to safety protocols. We propose a Three-Dimensional Clinical Intent Framework evaluating: (1) Spatial Intent: discriminating precise targets amid visual noise, (2) Temporal Intent: inferring causal rationale through retrospective and prospective reasoning, and (3) Standard Intent: verifying protocol compliance through safety checks. Beyond accuracy metrics, we introduce Trap QA mechanisms to stress-test clinical reliability by penalizing hallucinations and cognitive sycophancy. Experiments reveal current MLLMs struggle with egocentric intent due to over-reliance on global features, leading to fabricated observations and uncritical acceptance of invalid instructions.

A Large-Scale Study on the Development and Issues of Multi-Agent AI Systems

arXiv:2601.07136v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid emergence of multi-agent AI systems (MAS), including LangChain, CrewAI, and AutoGen, has shaped how large language model (LLM) applications are developed and orchestrated. However, little is known about how these systems evolve and are maintained in practice. This paper presents the first large-scale empirical study of open-source MAS, analyzing over 42K unique commits and over 4.7K resolved issues across eight leading systems. Our analysis identifies three distinct development profiles: sustained, steady, and burst-driven. These profiles reflect substantial variation in ecosystem maturity. Perfective commits constitute 40.8% of all changes, suggesting that feature enhancement is prioritized over corrective maintenance (27.4%) and adaptive updates (24.3%). Data about issues shows that the most frequent concerns involve bugs (22%), infrastructure (14%), and agent coordination challenges (10%). Issue reporting also increased sharply across all frameworks starting in 2023. Median resolution times range from under one day to about two weeks, with distributions skewed toward fast responses but a minority of issues requiring extended attention. These results highlight both the momentum and the fragility of the current ecosystem, emphasizing the need for improved testing infrastructure, documentation quality, and maintenance practices to ensure long-term reliability and sustainability.

PulseMind: A Multi-Modal Medical Model for Real-World Clinical Diagnosis

arXiv:2601.07344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in medical multi-modal models focus on specialized image analysis like dermatology, pathology, or radiology. However, they do not fully capture the complexity of real-world clinical diagnostics, which involve heterogeneous inputs and require ongoing contextual understanding during patient-physician interactions. To bridge this gap, we introduce PulseMind, a new family of multi-modal diagnostic models that integrates a systematically curated dataset, a comprehensive evaluation benchmark, and a tailored training framework. Specifically, we first construct a diagnostic dataset, MediScope, which comprises 98,000 real-world multi-turn consultations and 601,500 medical images, spanning over 10 major clinical departments and more than 200 sub-specialties. Then, to better reflect the requirements of real-world clinical diagnosis, we develop the PulseMind Benchmark, a multi-turn diagnostic consultation benchmark with a four-dimensional evaluation protocol comprising proactiveness, accuracy, usefulness, and language quality. Finally, we design a training framework tailored for multi-modal clinical diagnostics, centered around a core component named Comparison-based Reinforcement Policy Optimization (CRPO). Compared to absolute score rewards, CRPO uses relative preference signals from multi-dimensional com-parisons to provide stable and human-aligned training guidance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PulseMind achieves competitive performance on both the diagnostic consultation benchmark and public medical benchmarks.

OS-Symphony: A Holistic Framework for Robust and Generalist Computer-Using Agent

arXiv:2601.07779v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have significantly advanced Computer-Using Agents (CUAs), current frameworks struggle with robustness in long-horizon workflows and generalization in novel domains. These limitations stem from a lack of granular control over historical visual context curation and the absence of visual-aware tutorial retrieval. To bridge these gaps, we introduce OS-Symphony, a holistic framework that comprises an Orchestrator coordinating two key innovations for robust automation: (1) a Reflection-Memory Agent that utilizes milestone-driven long-term memory to enable trajectory-level self-correction, effectively mitigating visual context loss in long-horizon tasks; (2) Versatile Tool Agents featuring a Multimodal Searcher that adopts a SeeAct paradigm to navigate a browser-based sandbox to synthesize live, visually aligned tutorials, thereby resolving fidelity issues in unseen scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that OS-Symphony delivers substantial performance gains across varying model scales, establishing new state-of-the-art results on three online benchmarks, notably achieving 65.84% on OSWorld.

Learning from Reasoning Failures via Synthetic Data Generation

arXiv:2504.14523v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Training models on synthetic data has emerged as an increasingly important strategy for improving the performance of generative AI. This approach is particularly helpful for large multimodal models (LMMs) due to the relative scarcity of high-quality paired image-text data compared to language-only data. While a variety of methods have been proposed for generating large multimodal datasets, they do not tailor the synthetic data to address specific deficiencies in the reasoning abilities of LMMs which will be trained with the generated dataset. In contrast, humans often learn in a more efficient manner by seeking out examples related to the types of reasoning where they have failed previously. Inspired by this observation, we propose a new approach for synthetic data generation which is grounded in the analysis of an existing LMM's reasoning failures. Our methodology leverages frontier models to automatically analyze errors produced by a weaker LMM and propose new examples which can be used to correct the reasoning failure via additional training, which are then further filtered to ensure high quality. We generate a large multimodal instruction tuning dataset containing over 553k examples using our approach and conduct extensive experiments demonstrating its utility for improving the performance of LMMs on multiple downstream tasks. Our results show that models trained on our synthetic data can even exceed the performance of LMMs trained on an equivalent amount of additional real data, demonstrating the high value of generating synthetic data targeted to specific reasoning failure modes in LMMs. We will make our dataset and code publicly available.

FairMedQA: Benchmarking Bias in Large Language Models for Medical Question Answering

arXiv:2505.19562v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are approaching expert-level performance in medical question answering (QA), demonstrating strong potential to improve public healthcare. However, underlying biases related to sensitive attributes such as sex and race pose life-critical risks. The extent to which such sensitive attributes affect diagnosis remains an open question and requires comprehensive empirical investigation. Additionally, even the latest Counterfactual Patient Variations (CPV) benchmark can hardly distinguish the bias levels of different LLMs. To further explore these dynamics, we propose a new benchmark, FairMedQA, and benchmark 12 representative LLMs. FairMedQA contains 4,806 counterfactual question pairs constructed from 801 clinical vignettes. Our results reveal substantial accuracy disparity ranging from 3 to 19 percentage points across sensitive demographic groups. Notably, FairMedQA exposes biases that are at least 12 percentage points larger than those identified by the latest CPV benchmark, presenting superior benchmarking sensitivity. Our results underscore an urgent need for targeted debiasing techniques and more rigorous, identity-aware validation protocols before LLMs can be safely integrated into practical clinical decision-support systems.

app.build: A Production Framework for Scaling Agentic Prompt-to-App Generation with Environment Scaffolding

arXiv:2509.03310v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present app.build (https://github.com/neondatabase/appdotbuild-agent), an open-source framework that improves LLM-based application generation through systematic validation and structured environments. Our approach combines multi-layered validation pipelines, stack-specific orchestration, and model-agnostic architecture, implemented across three reference stacks. Through evaluation on 30 generation tasks, we demonstrate that comprehensive validation achieves 73.3% viability rate with 30% reaching perfect quality scores, while open-weights models achieve 80.8% of closed-model performance when provided structured environments. The open-source framework has been adopted by the community, with over 3,000 applications generated to date. This work demonstrates that scaling reliable AI agents requires scaling environments, not just models -- providing empirical insights and complete reference implementations for production-oriented agent systems.

From Wearables to Warnings: Predicting Pain Spikes in Patients with Opioid Use Disorder

arXiv:2511.19577v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Chronic pain (CP) and opioid use disorder (OUD) are common and interrelated chronic medical conditions. Currently, there is a paucity of evidence-based integrated treatments for CP and OUD among individuals receiving medication for opioid use disorder (MOUD). Wearable devices have the potential to monitor complex patient information and inform treatment development for persons with OUD and CP, including pain variability (e.g., exacerbations of pain or pain spikes) and clinical correlates (e.g., perceived stress). However, the application of large language models (LLMs) with wearable data for understanding pain spikes, remains unexplored. Consequently, the aim of this pilot study was to examine the clinical correlates of pain spikes using a range of AI approaches. We found that machine learning models achieved relatively high accuracy (>0.7) in predicting pain spikes, while LLMs were limited in providing insights on pain spikes. Real-time monitoring through wearable devices, combined with advanced AI models, could facilitate early detection of pain spikes and support personalized interventions that may help mitigate the risk of opioid relapse, improve adherence to MOUD, and enhance the integration of CP and OUD care. Given overall limited LLM performance, these findings highlight the need to develop LLMs which can provide actionable insights in the OUD/CP context.
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