arXiv:2602.13363v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models are expanding beyond being a tool humans use and into independent agents that can observe an environment, reason about solutions to problems, make changes that impact those environments, and understand how their actions impacted their environment. One of the most common applications of these LLM Agents is in computer programming, where agents can successfully work alongside humans to generate code while controlling programming environments or networking systems. However, with the increasing ability and complexity of these agents comes dangers about the potential for their misuse. A concerning application of LLM agents is in the domain cybersecurity, where they have the potential to greatly expand the threat imposed by attacks such as social engineering. This is due to the fact that LLM Agents can work autonomously and perform many tasks that would normally require time and effort from skilled human programmers. While this threat is concerning, little attention has been given to assessments of the capabilities of LLM coding agents in generating code for social engineering attacks. In this work we compare different LLMs in their ability and willingness to produce potentially dangerous code bases that could be misused by cyberattackers. The result is a dataset of 200 website code bases and logs from 40 different LLM coding agents. Analysis of models shows which metrics of LLMs are more and less correlated with performance in generating spear-phishing sites. Our analysis and the dataset we present will be of interest to researchers and practitioners concerned in defending against the potential misuse of LLMs in spear-phishing.

arXiv:2602.13483v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding the internal circuits that language models use to solve tasks remains a central challenge in mechanistic interpretability. Most prior work identifies circuits at the task level by averaging across many prompts, implicitly assuming a single stable mechanism per task. We show that this assumption can obscure a crucial source of structure: circuits are prompt-specific, even within a fixed task. Building on attention causal communication (ACC) (Franco & Crovella, 2025), we introduce ACC++, refinements that extract cleaner, lower-dimensional causal signals inside attention heads from a single forward pass. Like ACC, our approach does not require replacement models (e.g., SAEs) or activation patching; ACC++ further improves circuit precision by reducing attribution noise. Applying ACC++ to indirect object identification (IOI) in GPT-2, Pythia, and Gemma 2, we find there is no single circuit for IOI in any model: different prompt templates induce systematically different mechanisms. Despite this variation, prompts cluster into prompt families with similar circuits, and we propose a representative circuit for each family as a practical unit of analysis. Finally, we develop an automated interpretability pipeline that uses ACC++ signals to surface human-interpretable features and assemble mechanistic explanations for prompt families behavior. Together, our results recast circuits as a meaningful object of study by shifting the unit of analysis from tasks to prompts, enabling scalable circuit descriptions in the presence of prompt-specific mechanisms.

arXiv:2602.13506v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optimizing monotone non-convex functions is a fundamental challenge across machine learning and combinatorial optimization. We introduce and study $\gamma$-weakly $\theta$-up-concavity, a novel first-order condition that characterizes a broad class of such functions. This condition provides a powerful unifying framework, strictly generalizing both DR-submodular functions and One-Sided Smooth (OSS) functions. Our central theoretical contribution demonstrates that $\gamma$-weakly $\theta$-up-concave functions are upper-linearizable: for any feasible point, we can construct a linear surrogate whose gains provably approximate the original non-linear objective. This approximation holds up to a constant factor, namely the approximation coefficient, dependent solely on $\gamma$, $\theta$, and the geometry of the feasible set. This linearizability yields immediate and unified approximation guarantees for a wide range of problems. Specifically, we obtain unified approximation guarantees for offline optimization as well as static and dynamic regret bounds in online settings via standard reductions to linear optimization. Moreover, our framework recovers the optimal approximation coefficient for DR-submodular maximization and significantly improves existing approximation coefficients for OSS optimization, particularly over matroid constraints.

arXiv:2602.13521v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Natural language to SQL (NL2SQL) translation enables non-expert users to query relational databases through natural language. Recently, NL2SQL agents, powered by the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), have significantly advanced NL2SQL translation. Nonetheless, NL2SQL agents still make mistakes when faced with large-scale real-world databases because they lack knowledge of how to correctly leverage the underlying data (e.g., knowledge about the intent of each column) and form misconceptions about the data when querying it, leading to errors. Prior work has studied generating facts about the database to provide more context to NL2SQL agents, but such approaches simply restate database contents without addressing the agent's misconceptions. In this paper, we propose Tk-Boost, a bolt-on framework for augmenting any NL2SQL agent with tribal knowledge: knowledge that corrects the agent's misconceptions in querying the database accumulated through experience using the database. To accumulate experience, Tk-Boost first asks the NL2SQL agent to answer a few queries on the database, identifies the agent's misconceptions by analyzing its mistakes on the database, and generates tribal knowledge to address them. To enable accurate retrieval, Tk-Boost indexes this knowledge with applicability conditions that specify the query features for which the knowledge is useful. When answering new queries, Tk-Boost uses this knowledge to provide feedback to the NL2SQL agent, resolving the agent's misconceptions during SQL generation, and thus improving the agent's accuracy. Extensive experiments across the BIRD and Spider 2.0 benchmarks with various NL2SQL agents shows Tk-Boost improves NL2SQL agents accuracy by up to 16.9% on Spider 2.0 and 13.7% on BIRD

arXiv:2602.13524v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Identifying feature representations in language models is a central task in mechanistic interpretability. Several recent studies have made an implicit assumption that feature representations can be inferred in some cases from singular vectors of attention matrices. However, sound justification for this assumption is lacking. In this paper we address that question, asking: why and when do singular vectors align with features? First, we demonstrate that singular vectors robustly align with features in a model where features can be directly observed. We then show theoretically that such alignment is expected under a range of conditions. We close by asking how, operationally, alignment may be recognized in real models where feature representations are not directly observable. We identify sparse attention decomposition as a testable prediction of alignment, and show evidence that it emerges in a manner consistent with predictions in real models. Together these results suggest that alignment of singular vectors with features can be a sound and theoretically justified basis for feature identification in language models.

arXiv:2602.13556v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce Discernment, a semantic communication system that transmits the meaning of physical signals (baseband radio and audio) over a technical channel using GenAI models operating in discrete spaces. Discernment dynamically adapts to channel impairments - modeled as erasure channels - by switching between an autoregressive or a diffusion-based generative algorithm, depending on the erasure pattern. Our results show that Discernment maintains semantic integrity even as channel capacity severely degrades, exhibiting very small and graceful performance decline in both classification accuracy and statistical fidelity of the reconstructed meaning. These findings demonstrate Discernment's ability to adjust to diverse physical channel conditions while maintaining spectral efficiency and low model complexity, making it well suited for IoT deployments and strongly motivating further research on this semantic channel paradigm.

arXiv:2602.13606v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Millimeter wave (mmWave) communication, utilizing beamforming techniques to address the inherent path loss limitation, is considered as one of the key technologies to support ever increasing high throughput and low latency demands of connected vehicles. However, adopting standard defined beamforming approach in highly dynamic vehicular environments often incurs high beam training overheads and reduction in the available airtime for communications, which is mainly due to exchanging pilot signals and exhaustive beam measurements. To this end, we present a multi-modal sensing and fusion learning framework as a potential alternative solution to reduce such overheads. In this framework, we first extract the representative features from the sensing modalities by modality specific encoders, then, utilize multi-head cross-modal attention to learn dependencies and correlations between different modalities, and subsequently fuse the multimodal features to obtain predicted top-k beams so that the best line-of-sight links can be proactively established. To show the generalizability of the proposed framework, we perform a comprehensive experiment in four different vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) scenarios from real world multimodal and 60 GHz mmWave wireless sensing data. The experiment reveals that the proposed framework (i) achieves up to 96.72% accuracy on predicting top-15 beams correctly, (ii) incurs roughly 0.77 dB average power loss, and (iii) improves the overall latency and beam searching space overheads by 86.81% and 76.56% respectively for top-15 beams compared to standard defined approach.

arXiv:2602.13812v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Document-to-table (Doc2Table) extraction derives structured tables from unstructured documents under a target schema, enabling reliable and verifiable SQL-based data analytics. Although large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in flexible information extraction, their ability to produce precisely structured tables remains insufficiently understood, particularly for indirect extraction that requires complex capabilities such as reasoning and conflict resolution. Existing benchmarks neither explicitly distinguish nor comprehensively cover the diverse capabilities required in Doc2Table extraction.We argue that a capability-aware benchmark is essential for systematic evaluation. However, constructing such benchmarks using human-annotated document-table pairs is costly, difficult to scale, and limited in capability coverage. To address this, we adopt a reverse Table2Doc paradigm and design a multi-agent synthesis workflow to generate documents from ground-truth tables. Based on this approach, we present DTBench, a synthetic benchmark that adopts a proposed two-level taxonomy of Doc2Table capabilities, covering 5 major categories and 13 subcategories. We evaluate several mainstream LLMs on DTBench, and demonstrate substantial performance gaps across models, as well as persistent challenges in reasoning, faithfulness, and conflict resolution. DTBench provides a comprehensive testbed for data generation and evaluation, facilitating future research on Doc2Table extraction. The benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/ZJU-DAILY/DTBench.

arXiv:2602.13891v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in speech language models, such as GPT-4o Voice Mode and Gemini Live, have demonstrated promising speech generation capabilities. Nevertheless, the aesthetic naturalness of the synthesized audio still lags behind that of human speech. Enhancing generation quality requires a reliable evaluator of speech naturalness. However, existing naturalness evaluators typically regress raw audio to scalar scores, offering limited interpretability of the evaluation and moreover fail to generalize to speech across different taxonomies. Inspired by recent advances in generative reward modeling, we propose the Generative Speech Reward Model (GSRM), a reasoning-centric reward model tailored for speech. The GSRM is trained to decompose speech naturalness evaluation into an interpretable acoustic feature extraction stage followed by feature-grounded chain-of-thought reasoning, enabling explainable judgments. To achieve this, we curated a large-scale human feedback dataset comprising 31k expert ratings and an out-of-domain benchmark of real-world user-assistant speech interactions. Experiments show that GSRM substantially outperforms existing speech naturalness predictors, achieving model-human correlation of naturalness score prediction that approaches human inter-rater consistency. We further show how GSRM can improve the naturalness of speech LLM generations by serving as an effective verifier for online RLHF.

arXiv:2602.13920v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in agent-mediated systems have enabled a new paradigm of social network simulation, where AI agents interact with human-like autonomy. This evolution has fostered the emergence of agent-driven social networks such as Moltbook, a Reddit-like platform populated entirely by AI agents. Despite these developments, empirical comparisons between agent-driven and human-driven social networks remain scarce, limiting our understanding of how their network topologies might diverge. This paper presents the first comparative analysis of network topology on Moltbook, utilizing a comment network comprising 33,577 nodes and 697,688 edges. To provide a benchmark, we curated a parallel dataset from Reddit consisting of 7.8 million nodes and 51.8 million edges. We examine key structural differences between agent-drive and human-drive networks, specifically focusing on topological patterns and the edge formation efficacy of their respective posts. Our findings provide a foundational profile of AI-driven social structures, serving as a preliminary step toward developing more robust and authentic agent-mediated social systems.

arXiv:2602.14010v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pathology foundation models (PFMs) have enabled robust generalization in computational pathology through large-scale datasets and expansive architectures, but their substantial computational cost, particularly for gigapixel whole slide images, limits clinical accessibility and scalability. Here, we present LitePath, a deployment-friendly foundational framework designed to mitigate model over-parameterization and patch level redundancy. LitePath integrates LiteFM, a compact model distilled from three large PFMs (Virchow2, H-Optimus-1 and UNI2) using 190 million patches, and the Adaptive Patch Selector (APS), a lightweight component for task-specific patch selection. The framework reduces model parameters by 28x and lowers FLOPs by 403.5x relative to Virchow2, enabling deployment on low-power edge hardware such as the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Super. On this device, LitePath processes 208 slides per hour, 104.5x faster than Virchow2, and consumes 0.36 kWh per 3,000 slides, 171x lower than Virchow2 on an RTX3090 GPU. We validated accuracy using 37 cohorts across four organs and 26 tasks (26 internal, 9 external, and 2 prospective), comprising 15,672 slides from 9,808 patients disjoint from the pretraining data. LitePath ranks second among 19 evaluated models and outperforms larger models including H-Optimus-1, mSTAR, UNI2 and GPFM, while retaining 99.71% of the AUC of Virchow2 on average. To quantify the balance between accuracy and efficiency, we propose the Deployability Score (D-Score), defined as the weighted geometric mean of normalized AUC and normalized FLOP, where LitePath achieves the highest value, surpassing Virchow2 by 10.64%. These results demonstrate that LitePath enables rapid, cost-effective and energy-efficient pathology image analysis on accessible hardware while maintaining accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art PFMs and reducing the carbon footprint of AI deployment.

arXiv:2602.14080v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Standard factuality evaluations of LLMs treat all errors alike, obscuring whether failures arise from missing knowledge (empty shelves) or from limited access to encoded facts (lost keys). We propose a behavioral framework that profiles factual knowledge at the level of facts rather than questions, characterizing each fact by whether it is encoded, and then by how accessible it is: cannot be recalled, can be directly recalled, or can only be recalled with inference-time computation (thinking). To support such profiling, we introduce WikiProfile, a new benchmark constructed via an automated pipeline with a prompted LLM grounded in web search. Across 4 million responses from 13 LLMs, we find that encoding is nearly saturated in frontier models on our benchmark, with GPT-5 and Gemini-3 encoding 95--98% of facts. However, recall remains a major bottleneck: many errors previously attributed to missing knowledge instead stem from failures to access it. These failures are systematic and disproportionately affect long-tail facts and reverse questions. Finally, we show that thinking improves recall and can recover a substantial fraction of failures, indicating that future gains may rely less on scaling and more on methods that improve how models utilize what they already encode.

arXiv:2602.14188v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: With the significant expansion of the context window in Large Language Models (LLMs), these models are theoretically capable of processing millions of tokens in a single pass. However, research indicates a significant gap between this theoretical capacity and the practical ability of models to robustly utilize information within long contexts, especially in tasks that require a comprehensive understanding of numerous details. This paper evaluates the performance of four state-of-the-art models (Grok-4, GPT-4, Gemini 2.5, and GPT-5) on long short-context tasks. For this purpose, three datasets were used: two supplementary datasets for retrieving culinary recipes and math problems, and a primary dataset of 20K social media posts for depression detection. The results show that as the input volume on the social media dataset exceeds 5K posts (70K tokens), the performance of all models degrades significantly, with accuracy dropping to around 50-53% for 20K posts. Notably, in the GPT-5 model, despite the sharp decline in accuracy, its precision remained high at approximately 95%, a feature that could be highly effective for sensitive applications like depression detection. This research also indicates that the "lost in the middle" problem has been largely resolved in newer models. This study emphasizes the gap between the theoretical capacity and the actual performance of models on complex, high-volume data tasks and highlights the importance of metrics beyond simple accuracy for practical applications.

arXiv:2602.14216v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Purpose: Reasoning language models (RLMs) have demonstrated significant advances in solving complex reasoning tasks. We examined their potential to assess parental cooperation during CPS interventions using case reports, a case factor characterized by ambiguous and conflicting information. Methods: A four stage workflow comprising (1) case reports collection, (2) reasoning-based assessment of parental cooperation, (3) automated category extraction, and (4) case labeling was developed. The performance of RLMs with different parameter sizes (255B, 32B, 4B) was compared against human validated data. Two expert human reviewers (EHRs) independently classified a weighted random sample of reports. Results: The largest RLM achieved the highest accuracy (89%), outperforming the initial approach (80%). Classification accuracy was higher for mothers (93%) than for fathers (85%), and EHRs exhibited similar differences. Conclusions: RLMs' reasoning can effectively assess complex case factors such as parental cooperation. Lower accuracy in assessing fathers' cooperation supports the argument of a stronger professional focus on mothers in CPS interventions.

arXiv:2602.14233v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into financial workflows, but evaluation practice has not kept up. Finance-specific biases can inflate performance, contaminate backtests, and make reported results useless for any deployment claim. We identify five recurring biases in financial LLM applications. They include look-ahead bias, survivorship bias, narrative bias, objective bias, and cost bias. These biases break financial tasks in distinct ways and they often compound to create an illusion of validity. We reviewed 164 papers from 2023 to 2025 and found that no single bias is discussed in more than 28 percent of studies. This position paper argues that bias in financial LLM systems requires explicit attention and that structural validity should be enforced before any result is used to support a deployment claim. We propose a Structural Validity Framework and an evaluation checklist with minimal requirements for bias diagnosis and future system design. The material is available at https://github.com/Eleanorkong/Awesome-Financial-LLM-Bias-Mitigation.

arXiv:2602.14279v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Eliciting information to reduce uncertainty about latent group-level properties from surveys and other collective assessments requires allocating limited questioning effort under real costs and missing data. Although large language models enable adaptive, multi-turn interactions in natural language, most existing elicitation methods optimize what to ask with a fixed respondent pool, and do not adapt respondent selection or leverage population structure when responses are partial or incomplete. To address this gap, we study adaptive group elicitation, a multi-round setting where an agent adaptively selects both questions and respondents under explicit query and participation budgets. We propose a theoretically grounded framework that combines (i) an LLM-based expected information gain objective for scoring candidate questions with (ii) heterogeneous graph neural network propagation that aggregates observed responses and participant attributes to impute missing responses and guide per-round respondent selection. This closed-loop procedure queries a small, informative subset of individuals while inferring population-level responses via structured similarity. Across three real-world opinion datasets, our method consistently improves population-level response prediction under constrained budgets, including a >12% relative gain on CES at a 10% respondent budget.

arXiv:2602.14358v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Airbnb search must balance a worldwide, highly varied supply of homes with guests whose location, amenity, style, and price expectations differ widely. Meeting those expectations hinges on an efficient retrieval stage that surfaces only the listings a guest might realistically book, before resource intensive ranking models are applied to determine the best results. Unlike many recommendation engines, our system faces a distinctive challenge, location retrieval, that sits upstream of ranking and determines which geographic areas are queried in order to filter inventory to a candidate set. The preexisting approach employs a deep bayesian bandit based system to predict a rectangular retrieval bounds area that can be used for filtering. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the methodology, challenges, and impact of rearchitecting search to retrieve from the subset of most bookable high precision rectangular map cells defined by dividing the world into 25M uniform cells.

arXiv:2602.14365v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an autoimmune disease characterized by systemic joint inflammation. Early diagnosis and tight follow-up are essential to the management of RA, as ongoing inflammation can cause irreversible joint damage. The detection of arthritis is important for diagnosis and assessment of disease activity; however, it often takes a long time for patients to receive appropriate specialist care. Therefore, there is a strong need to develop systems that can detect joint inflammation easily using RGB images captured at home. Consequently, we tackle the task of RA inflammation detection from RGB hand images. This task is highly challenging due to general issues in medical imaging, such as the scarcity of positive samples, data imbalance, and the inherent difficulty of the task itself. However, to the best of our knowledge, no existing work has explicitly addressed these challenges in RGB-based RA inflammation detection. This paper quantitatively demonstrates the difficulty of visually detecting inflammation by constructing a dedicated dataset, and we propose a inflammation detection framework with global local encoder that combines self-supervised pretraining on large-scale healthy hand images with imbalance-aware training to detect RA-related joint inflammation from RGB hand images. Our experiments demonstrated that the proposed approach improves F1-score by 0.2 points and Gmean by 0.25 points compared with the baseline model.

arXiv:2602.14406v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Argument mining and stance detection are central to understanding how opinions are formed and contested in online discourse. However, most publicly available resources focus on mainstream platforms such as Twitter and Reddit, leaving conversational structure on alt-tech platforms comparatively under-studied. We introduce TruthStance, a large-scale dataset of Truth Social conversation threads spanning 2023-2025, consisting of 24,378 posts and 523,360 comments with reply-tree structure preserved. We provide a human-annotated benchmark of 1,500 instances across argument mining and claim-based stance detection, including inter-annotator agreement, and use it to evaluate large language model (LLM) prompting strategies. Using the best-performing configuration, we release additional LLM-generated labels for 24,352 posts (argument presence) and 107,873 comments (stance to parent), enabling analysis of stance and argumentation patterns across depth, topics, and users. All code and data are released publicly.

arXiv:2602.14444v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reasoning-specialized models like OpenAI's 5.1 and DeepSeek-V3.2 allocate substantial inference compute to extended chain-of-thought (CoT) traces, yet reasoning tokens incur significant costs. How do different reasoning modalities of code, natural language, hybrid, or none do perform under token constraints? We introduce a framework that constrains models to reason exclusively through code, comments, both, or neither, then systematically ablates token budgets to 10\%, 30\%, 50\%, and 70\% of optimal. We evaluate four frontier models (GPT-5.1, Gemini 3 Flash, DeepSeek-V3.2, Grok 4.1) across mathematical benchmarks (AIME, GSM8K, HMMT). Our findings reveal: (1) \textbf{truncated reasoning can hurt} as DeepSeek-V3.2 achieves 53\% with no reasoning but only 17\% with truncated CoT at 50\% budget; (2) \textbf{code degrades gracefully} as Gemini's comments collapse to 0\% while code maintains 43-47\%; (3) \textbf{hybrid reasoning underperforms} single modalities; (4) \textbf{robustness is model-dependent} as Grok maintains 80-90\% at 30\% budget where OpenAI and DeepSeek collapse to 7-27\%. These results suggest incomplete reasoning chains actively mislead models, with implications for deploying reasoning-specialized systems under resource constraints.