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Tiny Brains, Giant Impact: Uncovering the Keystone Neurons of LLM with Just a Few Prompts

arXiv:2605.24846v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) display strong comprehensive abilities, yet the internal mechanisms that support these behaviors remain insufficiently understood. In this work, we show that across a wide range of open-weight Transformers, a subset of neurons remains consistently highly activated during inference across tasks of multiple capability dimensions. By probing along the cross-task activation strength, an extremely sparse subset is isolated, whose removal causes a collapse in model behavior, which we term keystone neurons. Our analysis reveals that keystone neurons are a stable and intrinsic neuron subset of the model that is largely established during pretraining. The parameters associated with these neurons are tightly calibrated during the training process, and their precise values are critical for the capabilities of the model. Building on these insights, we propose a supervised fine-tuning approach that updates only keystone neurons, achieving task gains comparable to or even better than full-parameter fine-tuning while better preserving performance in other capability dimensions, despite modifying a much smaller number of parameters.

Decoding ML Decision: An Agentic Reasoning Framework for Large-Scale Ranking System

arXiv:2602.18640v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modern large-scale ranking systems operate within a sophisticated landscape of competing objectives, operational constraints, and evolving product requirements. Progress in this domain is increasingly bottlenecked by the engineering context constraint: the arduous process of translating ambiguous product intent into reasonable, executable, verifiable hypotheses, rather than by modeling techniques alone. We present GEARS (Generative Engine for Agentic Ranking Systems), a framework that reframes ranking optimization as an autonomous discovery process within a programmable experimentation environment. Rather than treating optimization as static model selection, GEARS leverages Specialized Agent Skills to encapsulate ranking expert knowledge into reusable reasoning capabilities, enabling operators to steer systems via high-level intent vibe personalization. Furthermore, to ensure production reliability, the framework incorporates validation hooks to enforce statistical robustness and filter out brittle policies that overfit short-term signals. Experimental validation across diverse product surfaces demonstrates that GEARS consistently identifies superior, near-Pareto-efficient policies by synergizing algorithmic signals with deep ranking context while maintaining rigorous deployment stability.

Auditing medical multi-agent AI reveals risks of false consensus

arXiv:2510.10185v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models are increasingly being assembled into medical multi-agent systems that emulate multidisciplinary consultation through specialist roles, peer review and consensus formation. In clinical decision support, however, apparent consensus is not enough. Clinicians also need to know whether agents checked the evidence, addressed disagreement and kept uncertainty visible. Current evaluations largely score final accuracy, leaving the safety of the collaborative process untested. Here we introduce MedAgentAudit, a clinically grounded workflow audit framework for diagnosing and quantifying collaborative failure modes in medical multi-agent systems. From 3,600 execution logs, we derive an expert-validated taxonomy of ten recurrent failures spanning task comprehension, collaborative discussion, and synthesis and decision-making. We then deploy an expert-validated automated auditor as non-interventional probes across 14,400 cases, covering six multi-agent architectures, six medical text and vision datasets, and four large language model settings per modality. Across systems, collaboration yields uneven accuracy gains and frequent process failures. Unsupported observations affect 16.63% of cases and propagate downstream. In discussion, agents repeat initial views in 98.42% of cases rather than re-examining evidence, and fail to activate specialist reasoning in 42.73%. During synthesis, final answers often substitute authority or majority count for evidence checking, showing authority bias in 28.76% (rising from 35.30% to 68.75% across rounds), self-contradiction in 18.53%, contradiction neglect in 5.48% and minority suppression in 5.11%. MedAgentAudit reframes medical AI evaluation from output scoring to process-level safety and accountability, providing a practical foundation for transparent, auditable and clinician-supervised agentic systems in medicine.
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