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Sycophantic Chatbots Cause Delusional Spiraling, Even in Ideal Bayesians

arXiv:2602.19141v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: "AI psychosis" or "delusional spiraling" is an emerging phenomenon where AI chatbot users find themselves dangerously confident in outlandish beliefs after extended chatbot conversations. This phenomenon is typically attributed to AI chatbots' well-documented bias towards validating users' claims, a property often called "sycophancy." In this paper, we probe the causal link between AI sycophancy and AI-induced psychosis through modeling and simulation. We propose a simple Bayesian model of a user conversing with a chatbot, and formalize notions of sycophancy and delusional spiraling in that model. We then show that in this model, even an idealized Bayes-rational user is vulnerable to delusional spiraling, and that sycophancy plays a causal role. Furthermore, this effect persists in the face of two candidate mitigations: preventing chatbots from hallucinating false claims, and informing users of the possibility of model sycophancy. We conclude by discussing the implications of these results for model developers and policymakers concerned with mitigating the problem of delusional spiraling.

DoAtlas-1: A Causal Compilation Paradigm for Clinical AI

arXiv:2602.19158v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Medical foundation models generate narrative explanations but cannot quantify intervention effects, detect evidence conflicts, or validate literature claims, limiting clinical auditability. We propose causal compilation, a paradigm that transforms medical evidence from narrative text into executable code. The paradigm standardizes heterogeneous research evidence into structured estimand objects, each explicitly specifying intervention contrast, effect scale, time horizon, and target population, supporting six executable causal queries: do-calculus, counterfactual reasoning, temporal trajectories, heterogeneous effects, mechanistic decomposition, and joint interventions. We instantiate this paradigm in DoAtlas-1, compiling 1,445 effect kernels from 754 studies through effect standardization, conflict-aware graph construction, and real-world validation (Human Phenotype Project, 10,000 participants). The system achieves 98.5% canonicalization accuracy and 80.5% query executability. This paradigm shifts medical AI from text generation to executable, auditable, and verifiable causal reasoning.

OpenClaw, Moltbook, and ClawdLab: From Agent-Only Social Networks to Autonomous Scientific Research

arXiv:2602.19810v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In January 2026, the open-source agent framework OpenClaw and the agent-only social network Moltbook produced a large-scale dataset of autonomous AI-to-AI interaction, attracting six academic publications within fourteen days. This study conducts a multivocal literature review of that ecosystem and presents ClawdLab, an open-source platform for autonomous scientific research, as a design science response to the architectural failure modes identified. The literature documents emergent collective phenomena, security vulnerabilities spanning 131 agent skills and over 15,200 exposed control panels, and five recurring architectural patterns. ClawdLab addresses these failure modes through hard role restrictions, structured adversarial critique, PI-led governance, multi-model orchestration, and domain-specific evidence requirements encoded as protocol constraints that ground validation in computational tool outputs rather than social consensus; the architecture provides emergent Sybil resistance as a structural consequence. A three-tier taxonomy distinguishes single-agent pipelines, predetermined multi-agent workflows, and fully decentralised systems, analysing why leading AI co-scientist platforms remain confined to the first two tiers. ClawdLab's composable third-tier architecture, in which foundation models, capabilities, governance, and evidence requirements are independently modifiable, enables compounding improvement as the broader AI ecosystem advances.

ReSyn: Autonomously Scaling Synthetic Environments for Reasoning Models

arXiv:2602.20117v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a promising approach for training reasoning language models (RLMs) by leveraging supervision from verifiers. Although verifier implementation is easier than solution annotation for many tasks, existing synthetic data generation methods remain largely solution-centric, while verifier-based methods rely on a few hand-crafted procedural environments. In this work, we scale RLVR by introducing ReSyn, a pipeline that generates diverse reasoning environments equipped with instance generators and verifiers, covering tasks such as constraint satisfaction, algorithmic puzzles, and spatial reasoning. A Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct model trained with RL on ReSyn data achieves consistent gains across reasoning benchmarks and out-of-domain math benchmarks, including a 27\% relative improvement on the challenging BBEH benchmark. Ablations show that verifier-based supervision and increased task diversity both contribute significantly, providing empirical evidence that generating reasoning environments at scale can enhance reasoning abilities in RLMs

DEFNet: Multitasks-based Deep Evidential Fusion Network for Blind Image Quality Assessment

arXiv:2507.19418v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Blind image quality assessment (BIQA) methods often incorporate auxiliary tasks to improve performance. However, existing approaches face limitations due to insufficient integration and a lack of flexible uncertainty estimation, leading to suboptimal performance. To address these challenges, we propose a multitasks-based Deep Evidential Fusion Network (DEFNet) for BIQA, which performs multitask optimization with the assistance of scene and distortion type classification tasks. To achieve a more robust and reliable representation, we design a novel trustworthy information fusion strategy. It first combines diverse features and patterns across sub-regions to enhance information richness, and then performs local-global information fusion by balancing fine-grained details with coarse-grained context. Moreover, DEFNet exploits advanced uncertainty estimation technique inspired by evidential learning with the help of normal-inverse gamma distribution mixture. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and authentic distortion datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed framework. Additional evaluation and analysis are carried out to highlight its strong generalization capability and adaptability to previously unseen scenarios.

NI-Tex: Non-isometric Image-based Garment Texture Generation

arXiv:2511.18765v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing industrial 3D garment meshes already cover most real-world clothing geometries, yet their texture diversity remains limited. To acquire more realistic textures, generative methods are often used to extract Physically-based Rendering (PBR) textures and materials from large collections of wild images and project them back onto garment meshes. However, most image-conditioned texture generation approaches require strict topological consistency between the input image and the input 3D mesh, or rely on accurate mesh deformation to match to the image poses, which significantly constrains the texture generation quality and flexibility. To address the challenging problem of non-isometric image-based garment texture generation, we construct 3D Garment Videos, a physically simulated, garment-centric dataset that provides consistent geometry and material supervision across diverse deformations, enabling robust cross-pose texture learning. We further employ Nano Banana for high-quality non-isometric image editing, achieving reliable cross-topology texture generation between non-isometric image-geometry pairs. Finally, we propose an iterative baking method via uncertainty-guided view selection and reweighting that fuses multi-view predictions into seamless, production-ready PBR textures. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our feedforward dual-branch architecture generates versatile and spatially aligned PBR materials suitable for industry-level 3D garment design.

Prompt Optimization Via Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2602.18449v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a diffusion-based framework for prompt optimization that leverages Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) to iteratively refine system prompts through masked denoising. By conditioning on interaction traces, including user queries, model responses, and optional feedback, our method enables flexible, span-level prompt updates without requiring gradient access or modifying the downstream language model. Across diverse benchmarks (e.g., $\tau$-bench, SST-2, SST-5), DLM-optimized prompts consistently improve the performance of a frozen target LLM (e.g., GPT-4o-mini). We further show that moderate diffusion step counts provide the best balance between refinement quality and stability. These results highlight diffusion-based prompt optimization as a general, model-agnostic, and scalable approach for enhancing LLM performance through iterative prompt refinement.

AgentCAT: An LLM Agent for Extracting and Analyzing Catalytic Reaction Data from Chemical Engineering Literature

arXiv:2602.18479v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents a large language model (LLM) agent named AgentCAT, which extracts and analyzes catalytic reaction data from chemical engineering papers, %and supports natural language based interactive analysis of the extracted data. AgentCAT serves as an alternative to overcome the long-standing data bottleneck in chemical engineering field, and its natural language based interactive data analysis functionality is friendly to the community. AgentCAT also presents a formal abstraction and challenge analysis of the catalytic reaction data extraction task in an artificial intelligence-friendly manner. This abstraction would help the artificial intelligence community understand this problem and in turn would attract more attention to address it. Technically, the complex catalytic process leads to complicated dependency structure in catalytic reaction data with respect to elementary reaction steps, molecular behaviors, measurement evidence, etc. This dependency structure makes it challenging to guarantee the correctness and completeness of data extraction, as well as representing them for analysis. AgentCAT addresses this challenge and it makes four folds of technical contributions: (1) a schema-governed extraction pipeline with progressive schema evolution, enabling robust data extraction from chemical engineering papers; (2) a dependency-aware reaction-network knowledge graph that links catalysts/active sites, synthesis-derived descriptors, mechanistic claims with evidence, and macroscopic outcomes, preserving process coupling and traceability; (3) a general querying module that supports natural-language exploration and visualization over the constructed graph for cross-paper analysis; (4) an evaluation on $\sim$800 peer-reviewed chemical engineering publications demonstrating the effectiveness of AgentCAT.

Learning to Remember: End-to-End Training of Memory Agents for Long-Context Reasoning

arXiv:2602.18493v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-context LLMs and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems process information passively, deferring state tracking, contradiction resolution, and evidence aggregation to query time, which becomes brittle under ultra long streams with frequent updates. We propose the Unified Memory Agent (UMA), an end-to-end reinforcement learning framework that unifies memory operations and question answering within a single policy. UMA maintains a dual memory representation: a compact core summary for global context and a structured Memory Bank that supports explicit CRUD (create, update, delete, reorganize) over key value entries, enabling proactive consolidation during streaming. To evaluate long-horizon memory behavior, we introduce Ledger-QA, a diagnostic benchmark for continuous state tracking where answers are latent values derived from accumulated updates rather than lo cal span retrieval. Across 13 datasets spanning Ledger-QA, Test-Time Learning, and Accurate Retrieval, UMA substantially outperforms long-context and RAG baselines on dynamic reasoning and learning tasks while remaining competitive on standard retrieval benchmarks, underscoring the importance of learned, end-to-end memory management.

VLANeXt: Recipes for Building Strong VLA Models

arXiv:2602.18532v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Following the rise of large foundation models, Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) emerged, leveraging strong visual and language understanding for general-purpose policy learning. Yet, the current VLA landscape remains fragmented and exploratory. Although many groups have proposed their own VLA models, inconsistencies in training protocols and evaluation settings make it difficult to identify which design choices truly matter. To bring structure to this evolving space, we reexamine the VLA design space under a unified framework and evaluation setup. Starting from a simple VLA baseline similar to RT-2 and OpenVLA, we systematically dissect design choices along three dimensions: foundational components, perception essentials, and action modelling perspectives. From this study, we distill 12 key findings that together form a practical recipe for building strong VLA models. The outcome of this exploration is a simple yet effective model, VLANeXt. VLANeXt outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods on the LIBERO and LIBERO-plus benchmarks and demonstrates strong generalization in real-world experiments. We will release a unified, easy-to-use codebase that serves as a common platform for the community to reproduce our findings, explore the design space, and build new VLA variants on top of a shared foundation.
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  • RPU -- A Reasoning Processing Unit Matthew Adiletta · Gu-Yeon Wei · David Brooks
    arXiv:2602.18568v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) inference performance is increasingly bottlenecked by the memory wall. While GPUs continue to scale raw compute throughput, they struggle to deliver scalable performance for memory bandwidth bound workloads. This challenge is amplified by emerging reasoning LLM applications, where long output sequences, low arithmetic intensity, and tight latency constraints demand significantly higher memory bandwidth. As a result, sy
     

RPU -- A Reasoning Processing Unit

arXiv:2602.18568v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) inference performance is increasingly bottlenecked by the memory wall. While GPUs continue to scale raw compute throughput, they struggle to deliver scalable performance for memory bandwidth bound workloads. This challenge is amplified by emerging reasoning LLM applications, where long output sequences, low arithmetic intensity, and tight latency constraints demand significantly higher memory bandwidth. As a result, system utilization drops and energy per inference rises, highlighting the need for an optimized system architecture for scalable memory bandwidth. To address these challenges we present the Reasoning Processing Unit (RPU), a chiplet-based architecture designed to address the challenges of the modern memory wall. RPU introduces: (1) A Capacity-Optimized High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM-CO) that trades capacity for lower energy and cost; (2) a scalable chiplet architecture featuring a bandwidth-first power and area provisioning design; and (3) a decoupled microarchitecture that separates memory, compute, and communication pipelines to sustain high bandwidth utilization. Simulation results show that RPU performs up to 45.3x lower latency and 18.6x higher throughput over an H100 system at ISO-TDP on Llama3-405B.

Finding the Signal in the Noise: An Exploratory Study on Assessing the Effectiveness of AI and Accessibility Forums for Blind Users' Support Needs

arXiv:2602.18623v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accessibility forums and, more recently, generative AI tools have become vital resources for blind users seeking solutions to computer-interaction issues and learning about new assistive technologies, screen reader features, tutorials, and software updates. Understanding user experiences with these resources is essential for identifying and addressing persistent support gaps. Towards this, we interviewed 14 blind users who regularly engage with forums and GenAI tools. Findings revealed that forums often overwhelm users with multiple overlapping topics, redundant or irrelevant content, and fragmented responses that must be mentally pieced together, increasing cognitive load. GenAI tools, while offering more direct assistance, introduce new barriers by producing unreliable answers, including overly verbose or fragmented guidance, fabricated information, and contradictory suggestions that fail to follow prompts, thereby heightening verification demands. Based on these insights, we outlined design opportunities to improve the reliability of assistive resources, aiming to provide blind users with more trustworthy and cognitively-manageable support.

Lost in Instructions: Study of Blind Users' Experiences with DIY Manuals and AI-Rewritten Instructions for Assembly, Operation, and Troubleshooting of Tangible Products

arXiv:2602.18630v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI tools like ChatGPT and Be-My-AI are increasingly being used by blind individuals. Although prior work has explored their use in some Do-It-Yourself (DIY) tasks by blind individuals, little is known about how they use these tools and the available product-manual resources to assemble, operate, and troubleshoot physical or tangible products - tasks requiring spatial reasoning, structural understanding, and precise execution. We address this knowledge gap via an interview study and a usability study with blind participants, investigating how they leverage AI tools and product manuals for DIY tasks with physical products. Findings show that manuals are essential resources, but product-manual instructions are often inadequate for blind users. AI tools presently do not adequately address this insufficiency; in fact, we observed that they often exacerbate this issue with incomplete, incoherent, or misleading guidance. Lastly, we suggest improvements to AI tools for generating tailored instructions for blind users' DIY tasks involving tangible products.

NutriOrion: A Hierarchical Multi-Agent Framework for Personalized Nutrition Intervention Grounded in Clinical Guidelines

arXiv:2602.18650v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Personalized nutrition intervention for patients with multimorbidity is critical for improving health outcomes, yet remains challenging because it requires the simultaneous integration of heterogeneous clinical conditions, medications, and dietary guidelines. Single-agent large language models (LLMs) often suffer from context overload and attention dilution when processing such high-dimensional patient profiles. We introduce NutriOrion, a hierarchical multi-agent framework with a parallel-then-sequential reasoning topology. NutriOrion decomposes nutrition planning into specialized domain agents with isolated contexts to mitigate anchoring bias, followed by a conditional refinement stage. The framework includes a multi-objective prioritization algorithm to resolve conflicting dietary requirements and a safety constraint mechanism that injects pharmacological contraindications as hard negative constraints during synthesis, ensuring clinical validity by construction rather than post-hoc filtering. For clinical interoperability, NutriOrion maps synthesized insights into the ADIME standard and FHIR R4 resources. Evaluated on 330 stroke patients with multimorbidity, NutriOrion outperforms multiple baselines, including GPT-4.1 and alternative multi-agent architectures. It achieves a 12.1 percent drug-food interaction violation rate, demonstrates strong personalization with negative correlations (-0.26 to -0.35) between patient biomarkers and recommended risk nutrients, and yields clinically meaningful dietary improvements, including a 167 percent increase in fiber and a 27 percent increase in potassium, alongside reductions in sodium (9 percent) and sugars (12 percent).

Think with Grounding: Curriculum Reinforced Reasoning with Video Grounding for Long Video Understanding

arXiv:2602.18702v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long video understanding is challenging due to rich and complicated multimodal clues in long temporal range.Current methods adopt reasoning to improve the model's ability to analyze complex video clues in long videos via text-form reasoning.However,the existing literature suffers from the fact that the text-only reasoning under fixed video context may exacerbate hallucinations since detailed crucial clues are often ignored under limited video context length due to the temporal redundancy of long videos.To address this gap,we propose Video-TwG,a curriculum reinforced framework that employs a novel Think-with-Grounding paradigm,enabling video LLMs to actively decide when to perform on-demand grounding during interleaved text-video reasoning, selectively zooming into question-relevant clips only when necessary.Video-TwG can be trained end-to-end in a straightforward manner, without relying on complex auxiliary modules or heavily annotated reasoning tracesIn detail,we design a Two-stage Reinforced Curriculum Strategy, where the model first learns think-with-grounding behavior on a small short-video GQA dataset with grounding labels,and then scales to diverse general QA data with videos of diverse domains to encourage generalization. Further, to handle complex think-with-grounding reasoning for various kinds of data,we propose TwG-GRPO algorithm which features the fine-grained grounding reward, self-confirmed pseudo reward and accuracy-gated mechanism.Finally,we propose to construct a new TwG-51K dataset that facilitates training. Experiments on Video-MME, LongVideoBench, and MLVU show that Video-TwG consistently outperforms strong LVU baselines.Further ablation validates the necessity of our Two-stage Reinforced Curriculum Strategy and shows our TwG-GRPO better leverages diverse unlabeled data to improve grounding quality and reduce redundant groundings without sacrificing QA performance.

BiMotion: B-spline Motion for Text-guided Dynamic 3D Character Generation

arXiv:2602.18873v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Text-guided dynamic 3D character generation has advanced rapidly, yet producing high-quality motion that faithfully reflects rich textual descriptions remains challenging. Existing methods tend to generate limited sub-actions or incoherent motion due to fixed-length temporal inputs and discrete frame-wise representations that fail to capture rich motion semantics. We address these limitations by representing motion with continuous differentiable B-spline curves, enabling more effective motion generation without modifying the capabilities of the underlying generative model. Specifically, our closed-form, Laplacian-regularized B-spline solver efficiently compresses variable-length motion sequences into compact representations with a fixed number of control points. Further, we introduce a normal-fusion strategy for input shape adherence along with correspondence-aware and local-rigidity losses for motion-restoration quality. To train our model, we collate BIMO, a new dataset containing diverse variable-length 3D motion sequences with rich, high-quality text annotations. Extensive evaluations show that our feed-forward framework BiMotion generates more expressive, higher-quality, and better prompt-aligned motions than existing state-of-the-art methods, while also achieving faster generation. Our project page is at: https://wangmiaowei.github.io/BiMotion.github.io/.

Adaptive Multi-Agent Reasoning for Text-to-Video Retrieval

arXiv:2602.19040v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rise of short-form video platforms and the emergence of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have amplified the need for scalable, effective, zero-shot text-to-video retrieval systems. While recent advances in large-scale pretraining have improved zero-shot cross-modal alignment, existing methods still struggle with query-dependent temporal reasoning, limiting their effectiveness on complex queries involving temporal, logical, or causal relationships. To address these limitations, we propose an adaptive multi-agent retrieval framework that dynamically orchestrates specialized agents over multiple reasoning iterations based on the demands of each query. The framework includes: (1) a retrieval agent for scalable retrieval over large video corpora, (2) a reasoning agent for zero-shot contextual temporal reasoning, and (3) a query reformulation agent for refining ambiguous queries and recovering performance for those that degrade over iterations. These agents are dynamically coordinated by an orchestration agent, which leverages intermediate feedback and reasoning outcomes to guide execution. We also introduce a novel communication mechanism that incorporates retrieval-performance memory and historical reasoning traces to improve coordination and decision-making. Experiments on three TRECVid benchmarks spanning eight years show that our framework achieves a twofold improvement over CLIP4Clip and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.

Learning from Complexity: Exploring Dynamic Sample Pruning of Spatio-Temporal Training

arXiv:2602.19113v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spatio-temporal forecasting is fundamental to intelligent systems in transportation, climate science, and urban planning. However, training deep learning models on the massive, often redundant, datasets from these domains presents a significant computational bottleneck. Existing solutions typically focus on optimizing model architectures or optimizers, while overlooking the inherent inefficiency of the training data itself. This conventional approach of iterating over the entire static dataset each epoch wastes considerable resources on easy-to-learn or repetitive samples. In this paper, we explore a novel training-efficiency techniques, namely learning from complexity with dynamic sample pruning, ST-Prune, for spatio-temporal forecasting. Through dynamic sample pruning, we aim to intelligently identify the most informative samples based on the model's real-time learning state, thereby accelerating convergence and improving training efficiency. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world spatio-temporal datasets show that ST-Prune significantly accelerates the training speed while maintaining or even improving the model performance, and it also has scalability and universality.

Test-Time Learning of Causal Structure from Interventional Data

arXiv:2602.19131v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Supervised causal learning has shown promise in causal discovery, yet it often struggles with generalization across diverse interventional settings, particularly when intervention targets are unknown. To address this, we propose TICL (Test-time Interventional Causal Learning), a novel method that synergizes Test-Time Training with Joint Causal Inference. Specifically, we design a self-augmentation strategy to generate instance-specific training data at test time, effectively avoiding distribution shifts. Furthermore, by integrating joint causal inference, we developed a PC-inspired two-phase supervised learning scheme, which effectively leverages self-augmented training data while ensuring theoretical identifiability. Extensive experiments on bnlearn benchmarks demonstrate TICL's superiority in multiple aspects of causal discovery and intervention target detection.

Taming Preconditioner Drift: Unlocking the Potential of Second-Order Optimizers for Federated Learning on Non-IID Data

arXiv:2602.19271v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Second-order optimizers can significantly accelerate large-scale training, yet their naive federated variants are often unstable or even diverge on non-IID data. We show that a key culprit is \emph{preconditioner drift}: client-side second-order training induces heterogeneous \emph{curvature-defined geometries} (i.e., preconditioner coordinate systems), and server-side model averaging updates computed under incompatible metrics, corrupting the global descent direction. To address this geometric mismatch, we propose \texttt{FedPAC}, a \emph{preconditioner alignment and correction} framework for reliable federated second-order optimization. \texttt{FedPAC} explicitly decouples parameter aggregation from geometry synchronization by: (i) \textbf{Alignment} (i.e.,aggregating local preconditioners into a global reference and warm-starting clients via global preconditioner); and (ii) \textbf{Correction} (i.e., steering local preconditioned updates using a global preconditioned direction to suppress long-term drift). We provide drift-coupled non-convex convergence guarantees with linear speedup under partial participation. Empirically, \texttt{FedPAC} consistently improves stability and accuracy across vision and language tasks, achieving up to $5.8\%$ absolute accuracy gain on CIFAR-100 with ViTs. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FedPAC-8B24.
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