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CogBias: Measuring and Mitigating Cognitive Bias in Large Language Models

arXiv:2604.01366v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes decision-making contexts. While prior work has shown that LLMs exhibit cognitive biases behaviorally, whether these biases correspond to identifiable internal representations and can be mitigated through targeted intervention remains an open question. We define LLM cognitive bias as systematic, reproducible deviations from correct answers in tasks with computable ground-truth baselines, and introduce LLM CogBias, a benchmark organized around four families of cognitive biases: Judgment, Information Processing, Social, and Response. We evaluate three LLMs and find that cognitive biases emerge systematically across all four families, with magnitudes and debiasing responses that are strongly family-dependent: prompt-level debiasing substantially reduces Response biases but backfires for Judgment biases. Using linear probes under a contrastive design, we show that these biases are encoded as linearly separable directions in model activation space. Finally, we apply activation steering to modulate biased behavior, achieving 26--32\% reduction in bias score (fraction of biased responses) while preserving downstream capability on 25 benchmarks (Llama: negligible degradation; Qwen: up to $-$19.0pp for Judgment biases). Despite near-orthogonal bias representations across models (mean cosine similarity 0.01), steering reduces bias at similar rates across architectures ($r(246)$=.621, $p$
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Can LLMs Predict Academic Collaboration? Topology Heuristics vs. LLM-Based Link Prediction on Real Co-authorship Networks

arXiv:2604.01379v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Can large language models (LLMs) predict which researchers will collaborate? We study this question through link prediction on real-world co-authorship networks from OpenAlex (9.96M authors, 108.7M edges), evaluating whether LLMs can predict future scientific collaborations using only author profiles, without access to graph structure. Using Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct across three historical eras of AI research, we find that LLMs and topology heuristics capture distinct signals and are strongest in complementary settings. On new-edge prediction under natural class imbalance, the LLM achieves AUROC 0.714--0.789, outperforming Common Neighbors, Jaccard, and Preferential Attachment, with recall up to 92.9\%; under balanced evaluation, the LLM outperforms \emph{all} topology heuristics in every era (AUROC 0.601--0.658 vs.\ best-heuristic 0.525--0.538); on continued edges, the LLM (0.687) is competitive with Adamic-Adar (0.684). Critically, 78.6--82.7\% of new collaborations occur between authors with no common neighbor -- a blind spot where all topology heuristics score zero but the LLM still achieves AUROC 0.652 by reasoning from author metadata alone. A temporal metadata ablation reveals that research concepts are the dominant signal (removing concepts drops AUROC by 0.047--0.084). Providing pre-computed graph features to the LLM \emph{degrades} performance due to anchoring effects, confirming that LLMs and topology methods should operate as separate, complementary channels. A socio-cultural ablation finds that name-inferred ethnicity and institutional country do not predict collaboration beyond topology, reflecting the demographic homogeneity of AI research. A node2vec baseline achieves AUROC comparable to Adamic-Adar, establishing that LLMs access a fundamentally different information channel -- author metadata -- rather than encoding the same structural signal differently.
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Rethinking SNN Online Training and Deployment: Gradient-Coherent Learning via Hybrid-Driven LIF Model

arXiv:2410.07547v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are considered to have enormous potential in the future development of Artificial Intelligence due to their brain-inspired and energy-efficient properties. Compared to vanilla Spatial-Temporal Back-propagation (STBP) training methods, online training can effectively avoid the risk of GPU memory explosion. However, current online learning frameworks cannot tackle the gradient discrepancy problem between the forward and backward process, merely aiming to optimize the GPU memory, resulting in no performance advantages compared to the STBP-based models in the inference stage. To address the aforementioned challenges, we propose Hybrid-Driven Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (HD-LIF) model family for efficient online learning, which respectively adopt different spiking calculation mechanism in the upper-region and lower-region of the firing threshold. We theoretically point out that our learning framework can effectively separate temporal gradients and address the misalignment problem of surrogate gradients, as well as achieving full-stage optimization towards learning precision, memory complexity and power consumption. Experimental results have demonstrated that our scheme is enable to achieve state-of-the-art performance for multiple evaluation metrics, breaking through the traditional paradigm of SNN online training and deployment. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/hzc1208/HD_LIF}{here}.
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Debug2Fix: Supercharging Coding Agents with Interactive Debugging Capabilities

arXiv:2602.18571v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While significant progress has been made in automating various aspects of software development through coding agents, there is still significant room for improvement in their bug fixing capabilities. Debugging and investigation of runtime behavior remains largely a manual, developer-driven process. Popular coding agents typically rely on either static analysis of the code or iterative test-fix cycles, which is akin to trial and error debugging. We posit that there is a wealth of rich runtime information that developers routinely access while debugging code, which agents are currently deprived of due to design limitations. Despite how prevalent debuggers are in modern IDEs and command-line tools, they have surprisingly not made their way into coding agents. In this work, we introduce Debug2Fix, a novel framework that incorporates interactive debugging as a core component of a software engineering agent via a subagent architecture. We incorporate debuggers for Java and Python into our agent framework and evaluate against GitBug-Java and SWE-Bench-Live and achieve >20% improvement in performance compared to the baseline for certain models. Furthermore, using our framework, we're able to make weaker models like GPT-5 and Claude Haiku 4.5 match or exceed the performances of stronger models like Claude Sonnet 4.5, showing that better tool design is often just as important as switching to a more expensive model. Finally, we conduct systematic ablations demonstrating the importance of both the subagent architecture and debugger integration.
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