arXiv:2604.03232v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: IC3, also known as property-directed reachability (PDR), is a commonly-used algorithm for hardware safety model checking. It checks if a state transition system complies with a given safety property. IC3 either returns UNSAFE (indicating property violation) with a counterexample trace, or SAFE with a checkable inductive invariant as the proof to safety. In practice, the performance of IC3 is dominated by a large web of interacting heuristics and implementation choices, making manual tuning costly, brittle, and hard to reproduce. This paper presents IC3-Evolve, an automated offline code-evolution framework that utilizes an LLM to propose small, slot-restricted and auditable patches to an IC3 implementation. Crucially, every candidate patch is admitted only through proof- /witness-gated validation: SAFE runs must emit a certificate that is independently checked, and UNSAFE runs must emit a replayable counterexample trace, preventing unsound edits from being deployed. Since the LLM is used only offline, the deployed artifact is a standalone evolved checker with zero ML/LLM inference overhead and no runtime model dependency. We evolve on the public hardware model checking competition (HWMCC) benchmark and evaluate the generalizability on unseen public and industrial model checking benchmarks, showing that IC3-Evolve can reliably discover practical heuristic improvements under strict correctness gates.

arXiv:2604.03234v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Minimum Set Cover Problem (MSCP) is a classical NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem with numerous applications in science and engineering. Although a wide range of exact, approximate, and metaheuristic approaches have been proposed, most methods implicitly treat MSCP instances as monolithic, overlooking potential intrinsic structural properties of the universe. In this work, we investigate the concept of \emph{universe segmentability} in the MSCP and analyze how intrinsic structural decomposition (universe segmentability) can be exploited to enhance heuristic optimization. We propose an efficient preprocessing strategy based on disjoint-set union (union--find) to detect connected components induced by element co-occurrence within subsets, enabling the decomposition of the original instance into independent subproblems. Each subproblem is solved using the GRASP metaheuristic, and partial solutions are combined without compromising feasibility. Extensive experiments on standard benchmark instances and large-scale synthetic datasets show that exploiting natural universe segmentation consistently improves solution quality and scalability, particularly for large and structurally decomposable instances. These gains are supported by a succinct bit-level set representation that enables efficient set operations, making the proposed approach computationally practical at scale.

arXiv:2604.03239v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Six Birds Theory (SBT) treats macroscopic objects as induced closures rather than primitives. Empirical discussions of agency often conflate persistence (being an object) with control (making a counterfactual difference), which makes agency claims difficult to test and easy to spoof. We give a type-correct account of agency within SBT: a theory induces a layer with an explicit interface and ledgered constraints; an agent is a maintained theory object whose feasible interface policies can steer outside futures while remaining viable. We operationalize this contract in finite controlled systems using four checkable components: ledger-gated feasibility, a robust viability kernel computed as a greatest fixed point under successor-support semantics, feasible empowerment (channel capacity) as a proxy for difference-making, and an empirical packaging map whose idempotence defect quantifies objecthood under coarse observation. In a minimal ring-world with toggles for repair, protocol holonomy, identity staging, and operator rewriting, matched-control ablations yield four separations: calibrated null regimes with single actions show zero empowerment and block model-misspecification false positives; enabling repair collapses the idempotence defect; protocols increase empowerment only at horizons of two or more steps; and learning to rewrite operators monotonically increases median empowerment (0.73 to 1.34 bits). These results provide hash-traceable tests that separate agenthood from agency without making claims about goals, consciousness, or biological organisms, and they are accompanied by reproducible, audited artifacts.

arXiv:2604.03244v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI evaluations have become the primary evidence for deploying generative AI systems across high-stakes domains. However, current evaluation paradigms often exhibit systemic validity failures. These issues, ranging from unjustified design choices to misaligned metrics, remain intractable without a principled framework for gathering validity evidence and conducting granular diagnostic analysis. In this position paper, we argue that item-level AI benchmark data is essential for establishing a rigorous science of AI evaluation. Item-level analysis enables fine-grained diagnostics and principled validation of benchmarks. We substantiate this position by dissecting current validity failures and revisiting evaluation paradigms across computer science and psychometrics. Through illustrative analyses of item properties and latent constructs, we demonstrate the unique insights afforded by item-level data. To catalyze community-wide adoption, we introduce OpenEval, a growing repository of item-level benchmark data designed supporting evidence-centered AI evaluation.

arXiv:2604.03286v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The control of complex laboratory instrumentation often requires significant programming expertise, creating a barrier for researchers lacking computational skills. This work explores the potential of large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, and LLM-based artificial intelligence (AI) agents to enable efficient programming and automation of scientific equipment. Through a case study involving the implementation of a setup that can be used as a single-pixel camera or a scanning photocurrent microscope, we demonstrate how ChatGPT can facilitate the creation of custom scripts for instrumentation control, significantly reducing the technical barrier for experimental customization. Building on this capability, we further illustrate how LLM-assisted tools can be extended into autonomous AI agents capable of independently operating laboratory instruments and iteratively refining control strategies. This approach underscores the transformative role of LLM-based tools and AI agents in democratizing laboratory automation and accelerating scientific progress.

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.

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.

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.

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.

arXiv:2604.03479v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Context-dependent sequential decision making is commonly addressed either by providing context explicitly as an input or by increasing recurrent memory so that contextual information can be represented internally. We study a third alternative: realizing contextual dependence by intervening on a shared recurrent latent state, without enlarging recurrent dimensionality. To this end, we introduce an intervention-based recurrent architecture in which a recurrent core first constructs a shared pre-intervention latent state, and context then acts through an additive, context-indexed operator. We evaluate this idea on a context-switching sequential decision task under partial observability. We compare three model families: a label-assisted baseline with direct context access, a memory baseline with enlarged recurrent state, and the proposed intervention model, which uses no direct context input to the recurrent core and no memory growth. On the main benchmark, the intervention model performs strongly without additional recurrent dimensions. We also evaluate the models using the conditional mutual information (I(C;O | S)) as a theorem-motivated operational probe of contextual dependence at fixed latent state. For task-relevant phase-1 outcomes, the intervention model exhibits positive conditional contextual information. Together, these results suggest that intervention on a shared recurrent state provides a viable alternative to recurrent memory growth for contextual control in this setting.

arXiv:2604.03480v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Creative thinking is a fundamental aspect of human cognition, and divergent thinking-the capacity to generate novel and varied ideas-is widely regarded as its core generative engine. Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated impressive performance on divergent thinking tests and prior work has shown that models with higher task performance tend to be more aligned to human brain activity. However, existing brain-LLM alignment studies have focused on passive, non-creative tasks. Here, we explore brain alignment during creative thinking using fMRI data from 170 participants performing the Alternate Uses Task (AUT). We extract representations from LLMs varying in size (270M-72B) and measure alignment to brain responses via Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA), targeting the creativity-related default mode and frontoparietal networks. We find that brain-LLM alignment scales with model size (default mode network only) and idea originality (both networks), with effects strongest early in the creative process. We further show that post-training objectives shape alignment in functionally selective ways: a creativity-optimized \texttt{Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct} preserves alignment with high-creativity neural responses while reducing alignment with low-creativity ones; a human behavior fine-tuned model elevates alignment with both; and a reasoning-trained variant shows the opposite pattern, suggesting chain-of-thought training steers representations away from creative neural geometry toward analytical processing. These results demonstrate that post-training objectives selectively reshape LLM representations relative to the neural geometry of human creative thought.

arXiv:2604.03496v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge graph construction typically relies either on predefined ontologies or on schema-free extraction. Ontology-driven pipelines enforce consistent typing but require costly schema design and maintenance, whereas schema-free methods often produce fragmented graphs with weak global organization, especially in long technical documents with dense, context-dependent information. We propose TRACE-KG (Text-dRiven schemA for Context-Enriched Knowledge Graphs), a multimodal framework that jointly constructs a context-enriched knowledge graph and an induced schema without assuming a predefined ontology. TRACE-KG captures conditional relations through structured qualifiers and organizes entities and relations using a data-driven schema that serves as a reusable semantic scaffold while preserving full traceability to the source evidence. Experiments show that TRACE-KG produces structurally coherent, traceable knowledge graphs and offers a practical alternative to both ontology-driven and schema-free construction pipelines.

arXiv:2604.03498v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Timely discharge prediction is essential for optimizing bed turnover and resource allocation in elective spine surgery units. This study evaluates the feasibility of lightweight, fine-tuned large language models (LLMs) and traditional text-based models for predicting next-day discharge using postoperative clinical notes. We compared 13 models, including TF-IDF with XGBoost and LGBM, and compact LLMs (DistilGPT-2, Bio_ClinicalBERT) fine-tuned via LoRA. TF-IDF with LGBM achieved the best balance, with an F1-score of 0.47 for the discharge class, a recall of 0.51, and the highest AUC-ROC (0.80). While LoRA improved recall in DistilGPT2, overall transformer-based and generative models underperformed. These findings suggest interpretable, resource-efficient models may outperform compact LLMs in real-world, imbalanced clinical prediction tasks.

arXiv:2604.03506v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Despite the large corpus of biology training text, the impact of reasoning models on biological research generally lags behind math and coding. In this work, we show that biology questions from current large-scale reasoning datasets do not align well with modern research topic distributions in biology, and that this topic imbalance may negatively affect performance. In addition, we find that methods for extracting challenging and verifiable research problems from biology research text are a critical yet underdeveloped ingredient in applying reinforcement learning for better performance on biology research tasks. We introduce BioAlchemy, a pipeline for sourcing a diverse set of verifiable question-and-answer pairs from a scientific corpus of biology research text. We curate BioAlchemy-345K, a training dataset containing over 345K scientific reasoning problems in biology. Then, we demonstrate how aligning our dataset to the topic distribution of modern scientific biology can be used with reinforcement learning to improve reasoning performance. Finally, we present BioAlchemist-8B, which improves over its base reasoning model by 9.12% on biology benchmarks. These results demonstrate the efficacy of our approach for developing stronger scientific reasoning capabilities in biology. The BioAlchemist-8B model is available at: https://huggingface.co/BioAlchemy.

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.

arXiv:2604.03524v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current AI safety relies on behavioral monitoring and post-training alignment, yet empirical measurement shows these approaches produce no detectable pre-commitment signal in a majority of instruction-tuned models tested. We present an energy-based governance framework connecting transformer inference dynamics to constraint-satisfaction models of neural computation, and apply it to a seven-model cohort across five geometric regimes. Using trajectory tension (rho = ||a|| / ||v||), we identify a 57-token pre-commitment window in Phi-3-mini-4k-instruct under greedy decoding on arithmetic constraint probes. This result is model-specific, task-specific, and configuration-specific, demonstrating that pre-commitment signals can exist but are not universal. We introduce a five-regime taxonomy of inference behavior: Authority Band, Late Signal, Inverted, Flat, and Scaffold-Selective. Energy asymmetry ({\Sigma}\r{ho}_misaligned / {\Sigma}\r{ho}_aligned) serves as a unifying metric of structural rigidity across these regimes. Across seven models, only one configuration exhibits a predictive signal prior to commitment; all others show silent failure, late detection, inverted dynamics, or flat geometry. We further demonstrate that factual hallucination produces no predictive signal across 72 test conditions, consistent with spurious attractor settling in the absence of a trained world-model constraint. These results establish that rule violation and hallucination are distinct failure modes with different detection requirements. Internal geometry monitoring is effective only where resistance exists; detection of factual confabulation requires external verification mechanisms. This work provides a measurable framework for inference-layer governability and introduces a taxonomy for evaluating deployment risk in autonomous AI systems.

arXiv:2604.03527v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern agentic workflows decompose complex tasks into specialized subtasks and route them to diverse models to minimize cost without sacrificing quality. However, current routing architectures focus exclusively on performance optimization, leaving underlying trade-offs between model capability and cost unrecorded. Without clear rationale, developers cannot distinguish between intelligent efficiency -- using specialized models for appropriate tasks -- and latent failures caused by budget-driven model selection. We present Topaz, a framework that introduces formal auditability to agentic routing. Topaz replaces silent model assignments with an inherently interpretable router that incorporates three components: (i) skill-based profiling that synthesizes performance across diverse benchmarks into granular capability profiles (ii) fully traceable routing algorithms that utilize budget-based and multi-objective optimization to produce clear traces of how skill-match scores were weighed against costs, and (iii) developer-facing explanations that translate these traces into natural language, allowing users to audit system logic and iteratively tune the cost-quality tradeoff. By making routing decisions interpretable, Topaz enables users to understand, trust, and meaningfully steer routed agentic systems.

arXiv:2604.03533v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present an automated crosswalk framework that compares an AI safety policy document pair under a shared taxonomy of activities. Using the activity categories defined in Activity Map on AI Safety as fixed aspects, the system extracts and maps relevant activities, then produces for each aspect a short summary for each document, a brief comparison, and a similarity score. We assess the stability and validity of LLM-based crosswalk analysis across public policy documents. Using five large language models, we perform crosswalks on ten publicly available documents and visualize mean similarity scores with a heatmap. The results show that model choice substantially affects the crosswalk outcomes, and that some document pairs yield high disagreements across models. A human evaluation by three experts on two document pairs shows high inter-annotator agreement, while model scores still differ from human judgments. These findings support comparative inspection of policy documents.

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.

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.