arXiv:2603.28986v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current Autonomous Scientific Research (ASR) systems, despite leveraging large language models (LLMs) and agentic architectures, remain constrained by fixed workflows and toolsets that prevent adaptation to evolving tasks and environments. We introduce Mimosa, an evolving multi-agent framework that automatically synthesizes task-specific multi-agent workflows and iteratively refines them through experimental feedback. Mimosa leverages the Model Context Protocol (MCP) for dynamic tool discovery, generates workflow topologies via a meta-orchestrator, executes subtasks through code-generating agents that invoke available tools and scientific software libraries, and scores executions with an LLM-based judge whose feedback drives workflow refinement. On ScienceAgentBench, Mimosa achieves a success rate of 43.1% with DeepSeek-V3.2, surpassing both single-agent baselines and static multi-agent configurations. Our results further reveal that models respond heterogeneously to multi-agent decomposition and iterative learning, indicating that the benefits of workflow evolution depend on the capabilities of the underlying execution model. Beyond these benchmarks, Mimosa modular architecture and tool-agnostic design make it readily extensible, and its fully logged execution traces and archived workflows support auditability by preserving every analytical step for inspection and potential replication. Combined with domain-expert guidance, the framework has the potential to automate a broad range of computationally accessible scientific tasks across disciplines. Released as a fully open-source platform, Mimosa aims to provide an open foundation for community-driven ASR.

arXiv:2603.29020v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable evaluation of AI agents operating in complex, real-world environments requires methodologies that are robust, transparent, and contextually aligned with the tasks agents are intended to perform. This study identifies persistent shortcomings in existing AI agent evaluation practices that are particularly acute in web agent evaluation, as exemplified by our audit of WebVoyager, including task-framing ambiguity and operational variability that hinder meaningful and reproducible performance comparisons. To address these challenges, we introduce Emergence WebVoyager, an enhanced version of the WebVoyager benchmark that standardizes evaluation methodology through clear guidelines for task instantiation, failure handling, annotation, and reporting. Emergence WebVoyager achieves an inter-annotator agreement of 95.9\%, indicating improved clarity and reliability in both task formulation and evaluation. Applying this framework to evaluate OpenAI Operator reveals substantial performance variation across domains and task types, with an overall success rate of 68.6\%, substantially lower than the 87\% previously reported by OpenAI, demonstrating the utility of our approach for more rigorous and comparable web agent evaluation.

arXiv:2603.29085v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) remain brittle on multi-hop question answering (MHQA), where answering requires combining evidence across documents through retrieval and reasoning. Iterative retrieval systems can fail by locking onto an early low-recall trajectory and amplifying downstream errors, while planning-only approaches may produce static query sets that cannot adapt when intermediate evidence changes. We propose \textbf{Planned Active Retrieval and Reasoning RAG (PAR$^2$-RAG)}, a two-stage framework that separates \emph{coverage} from \emph{commitment}. PAR$^2$-RAG first performs breadth-first anchoring to build a high-recall evidence frontier, then applies depth-first refinement with evidence sufficiency control in an iterative loop. Across four MHQA benchmarks, PAR$^2$-RAG consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines, compared with IRCoT, PAR$^2$-RAG achieves up to \textbf{23.5\%} higher accuracy, with retrieval gains of up to \textbf{10.5\%} in NDCG.

arXiv:2603.29139v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled agentic systems that translate natural language intent into executable scientific visualization (SciVis) tasks. Despite rapid progress, the community lacks a principled and reproducible benchmark for evaluating these emerging SciVis agents in realistic, multi-step analysis settings. We present SciVisAgentBench, a comprehensive and extensible benchmark for evaluating scientific data analysis and visualization agents. Our benchmark is grounded in a structured taxonomy spanning four dimensions: application domain, data type, complexity level, and visualization operation. It currently comprises 108 expert-crafted cases covering diverse SciVis scenarios. To enable reliable assessment, we introduce a multimodal outcome-centric evaluation pipeline that combines LLM-based judging with deterministic evaluators, including image-based metrics, code checkers, rule-based verifiers, and case-specific evaluators. We also conduct a validity study with 12 SciVis experts to examine the agreement between human and LLM judges. Using this framework, we evaluate representative SciVis agents and general-purpose coding agents to establish initial baselines and reveal capability gaps. SciVisAgentBench is designed as a living benchmark to support systematic comparison, diagnose failure modes, and drive progress in agentic SciVis. The benchmark is available at https://scivisagentbench.github.io/.

arXiv:2603.29791v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Although many AI applications of interest require specialized multi-modal models, relevant data to train such models is inherently scarce or inaccessible. Filling these gaps with human annotators is prohibitively expensive, error-prone, and time-consuming, leading model builders to increasingly consider synthetic data as a scalable alternative. However, existing synthetic data generation methods often rely on manual prompts, evolutionary algorithms, or extensive seed data from the target distribution - limiting their scalability, explainability, and control. In this paper, we introduce Simula: a novel reasoning-driven framework for data generation and evaluation. It employs a seedless, agentic approach to generate synthetic datasets at scale, allowing users to define desired dataset characteristics through an explainable and controllable process that enables fine-grained resource allocation. We show the efficacy of our approach on a variety of datasets, rigorously testing both intrinsic and downstream properties. Our work (1) offers guidelines for synthetic data mechanism design, (2) provides insights into generating and evaluating synthetic data at scale, and (3) unlocks new opportunities for developing and deploying AI in domains where data scarcity or privacy concerns are paramount.

arXiv:2603.29848v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a comprehensive validation framework for LLM-based agentic systems that provides systematic diagnosis and improvement of reliability failures. The framework includes fifteen failure-detection tools and two root-cause analysis modules that jointly uncover weaknesses across input handling, prompt design, and output generation. It integrates lightweight rule-based checks with LLM-as-a-judge assessments to support structured incident detection, classification, and repair. We applied the framework to IBM CUGA, evaluating its performance on the AppWorld and WebArena benchmarks. The analysis revealed recurrent planner misalignments, schema violations, brittle prompt dependencies, and more. Based on these insights, we refined both prompting and coding strategies, maintaining CUGA's benchmark results while enabling mid-sized models such as Llama 4 and Mistral Medium to achieve notable accuracy gains, substantially narrowing the gap with frontier models. Beyond quantitative validation, we conducted an exploratory study that fed the framework's diagnostic outputs and agent description into an LLM for self-reflection and prioritization. This interactive analysis produced actionable insights on recurring failure patterns and focus areas for improvement, demonstrating how validation itself can evolve into an agentic, dialogue-driven process. These results show a path toward scalable, quality assurance, and adaptive validation in production agentic systems, offering a foundation for more robust, interpretable, and self-improving agentic architectures.

arXiv:2603.29871v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In user-agent interaction scenarios such as recommendation, brainstorming, and code suggestion, Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate sets of candidate recommendations where the objective is to maximize the collective utility of the entire set rather than individual candidates independently. However, existing reinforcement learning post-training paradigms, such as Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), typically assign the same set-level scalar reward to every candidate in the set. This leads to noisy training signals where poor candidates free-ride on the high reward produced by a single strong peer, resulting in suboptimal exploration. To address this, we propose Shapley-Enhanced GRPO (ShapE-GRPO). By leveraging the permutation-invariant nature of set-level utility, we derive a Shapley-enhanced formulation from cooperative game theory to decompose set-level rewards into granular, candidate-specific signals. We show that our formulation preserves the fundamental axioms of the Shapley value while remaining computationally efficient with polynomial-time complexity. Empirically, ShapE-GRPO consistently outperforms standard GRPO across diverse datasets with accelerated convergence during training.

arXiv:2603.29895v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a new theory of categorization based on an information-theoretic rational analysis. To evaluate this theory, we investigate how well it can account for key findings from classic categorization experiments conducted by Hayes-Roth and Hayes-Roth (1977), Medin and Schaffer (1978), and Smith and Minda (1998). We find that it explains the human categorization behavior at least as well (or better) than the independent cue and context models (Medin & Schaffer, 1978), the rational model of categorization (Anderson, 1991), and a hierarchical Dirichlet process model (Griffiths et al., 2007).

arXiv:2603.29915v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-hoc explanation methods are widely used to interpret black-box predictions, but their generation is often computationally expensive and their reliability is not guaranteed. We propose epistemic uncertainty as a low-cost proxy for explanation reliability: high epistemic uncertainty identifies regions where the decision boundary is poorly defined and where explanations become unstable and unfaithful. This insight enables two complementary use cases: `improving worst-case explanations' (routing samples to cheap or expensive XAI methods based on expected explanation reliability), and `recalling high-quality explanations' (deferring explanation generation for uncertain samples under constrained budget). Across four tabular datasets, five diverse architectures, and four XAI methods, we observe a strong negative correlation between epistemic uncertainty and explanation stability. Further analysis shows that epistemic uncertainty distinguishes not only stable from unstable explanations, but also faithful from unfaithful ones. Experiments on image classification confirm that our findings generalize beyond tabular data.

arXiv:2603.30031v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current autonomous AI agents, driven primarily by Large Language Models (LLMs), operate in a state of cognitive weightlessness: they process information without an intrinsic sense of network topology, temporal pacing, or epistemic limits. Consequently, heuristic agentic loops (e.g., ReAct) can exhibit failure modes in interactive environments, including excessive tool use under congestion, prolonged deliberation under time decay, and brittle behavior under ambiguous evidence. In this paper, we propose the Triadic Cognitive Architecture (TCA), a unified mathematical framework that grounds machine reasoning in continuous-time physics. By synthesizing nonlinear filtering theory, Riemannian routing geometry, and optimal control, we formally define the concept of Cognitive Friction. We map the agent's deliberation process to a coupled stochastic control problem where information acquisition is path-dependent and physically constrained. Rather than relying on arbitrary heuristic stop-tokens, the TCA uses an HJB-motivated stopping boundary and instantiates a rollout-based approximation of belief-dependent value-of-information with a net-utility halting condition. Through empirical validation in a simulated Emergency Medical Diagnostic Grid (EMDG), we demonstrate that while greedy baselines over-deliberate under latency and congestion costs, the triadic policy reduces time-to-action while improving patient viability without degrading diagnostic accuracy in this environment.

arXiv:2603.28776v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning to generate images with internally repeated and periodic structures poses a fundamental challenge for machine learning and computer vision models, which are typically optimised for local texture statistics and semantic realism rather than global structural consistency. This limitation is particularly pronounced in applications requiring strict control over repetition scale, spacing, and boundary coherence, such as microtopographical biomaterial surfaces. In this work, biomaterial design serves as a use case to study conditional generation of repeated patterns under weak supervision and class imbalance. We propose DF-ACBlurGAN, a structure-aware conditional generative adversarial network that explicitly reasons about long-range repetition during training. The approach integrates frequency-domain repetition scale estimation, scale-adaptive Gaussian blurring, and unit-cell reconstruction to balance sharp local features with stable global periodicity. Conditioning on experimentally derived biological response labels, the model synthesises designs aligned with target functional outcomes. Evaluation across multiple biomaterial datasets demonstrates improved repetition consistency and controllable structural variation compared to conventional generative approaches.

arXiv:2603.28887v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Data-driven autonomous driving simulation has long been constrained by its heavy reliance on pre-recorded driving logs or spatial priors, such as HD maps. This fundamental dependency severely limits scalability, restricting open-ended generation capabilities to the finite scale of existing collected datasets. To break this bottleneck, we present OccSim, the first occupancy world model-driven 3D simulator. OccSim obviates the requirement for continuous logs or HD maps; conditioned only on a single initial frame and a sequence of future ego-actions, it can stably generate over 3,000 continuous frames, enabling the continuous construction of large-scale 3D occupancy maps spanning over 4 kilometers for simulation. This represents an >80x improvement in stable generation length over previous state-of-the-art occupancy world models. OccSim is powered by two modules: W-DiT based static occupancy world model and the Layout Generator. W-DiT handles the ultra-long-horizon generation of static environments by explicitly introducing known rigid transformations in architecture design, while the Layout Generator populates the dynamic foreground with reactive agents based on the synthesized road topology. With these designs, OccSim can synthesize massive, diverse simulation streams. Extensive experiments demonstrate its downstream utility: data collected directly from OccSim can pre-train 4D semantic occupancy forecasting models to achieve up to 67% zero-shot performance on unseen data, outperforming previous asset-based simulator by 11%. When scaling the OccSim dataset to 5x the size, the zero-shot performance increases to about 74%, while the improvement over asset-based simulators expands to 22.1%.

arXiv:2603.28963v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-agent traffic simulation is central to developing and testing autonomous driving systems. Recent data-driven simulators have achieved promising results, but rely heavily on supervised learning from labeled trajectories or semantic annotations, making it costly to scale their performance. Meanwhile, large amounts of unlabeled sensor data can be collected at scale but remain largely unused by existing traffic simulation frameworks. This raises a key question: How can a method harness unlabeled data to improve traffic simulation performance? In this work, we propose AutoWorld, a traffic simulation framework that employs a world model learned from unlabeled occupancy representations of LiDAR data. Given world model samples, AutoWorld constructs a coarse-to-fine predictive scene context as input to a multi-agent motion generation model. To promote sample diversity, AutoWorld uses a cascaded Determinantal Point Process framework to guide the sampling processes of both the world model and the motion model. Furthermore, we designed a motion-aware latent supervision objective that enhances AutoWorld's representation of scene dynamics. Experiments on the WOSAC benchmark show that AutoWorld ranks first on the leaderboard according to the primary Realism Meta Metric (RMM). We further show that simulation performance consistently improves with the inclusion of unlabeled LiDAR data, and study the efficacy of each component with ablations. Our method paves the way for scaling traffic simulation realism without additional labeling. Our project page contains additional visualizations and released code.

arXiv:2603.29140v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Finite state machines (FSM) are executable formal specifications of reactive systems. These machines are designed based on systems' requirements. The requirements are often recorded in textual documents written in natural languages. FSMs play a crucial role in different phases of the model-driven system engineering (MDE). For example, they serve to automate testing activities. FSM quality is critical: the lower the quality of FSM, the higher the number of faults surviving the testing phase and the higher the risk of failure of the systems in production, which could lead to catastrophic scenarios. Therefore, this paper leverages recent advances in the domain of LLM to propose an LLM-based framework for designing FSMs from requirements. The framework also suggests an expert-centric approach based on FSM mutation and test generation for repairing the FSMs produced by LLMs. This paper also provides an experimental analysis and evaluation of LLM's capacities in performing the tasks presented in the framework and FSM repair via various methods. The paper presents experimental results with simulated data. These results and methods bring a new analysis and vision of LLMs that are useful for further development of machine learning technology and its applications to MDE.

arXiv:2603.29328v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Backdoor attacks on federated learning (FL) are most often evaluated with synthetic corner patches or out-of-distribution (OOD) patterns that are unlikely to arise in practice. In this paper, we revisit the backdoor threat to standard FL (a single global model) under a more realistic setting where triggers must be semantically meaningful, in-distribution, and visually plausible. We propose SABLE, a Semantics-Aware Backdoor for LEarning in federated settings, which constructs natural, content-consistent triggers (e.g., semantic attribute changes such as sunglasses) and optimizes an aggregation-aware malicious objective with feature separation and parameter regularization to keep attacker updates close to benign ones. We instantiate SABLE on CelebA hair-color classification and the German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark (GTSRB), poisoning only a small, interpretable subset of each malicious client's local data while otherwise following the standard FL protocol. Across heterogeneous client partitions and multiple aggregation rules (FedAvg, Trimmed Mean, MultiKrum, and FLAME), our semantics-driven triggers achieve high targeted attack success rates while preserving benign test accuracy. These results show that semantics-aligned backdoors remain a potent and practical threat in federated learning, and that robustness claims based solely on synthetic patch triggers can be overly optimistic.

arXiv:2603.29535v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) features such as image editing, object removal, and prompt-guided image transformation are increasingly integrated into mobile applications. However, deploying Large Vision Models (LVMs) for such tasks on resource-constrained devices remains challenging due to their high memory and compute requirements. While Low-Rank Adapters (LoRAs) enable parameter-efficient task adaptation, existing Mobile deployment pipelines typically compile separate model binaries for each LoRA + a copy of the foundation model, resulting in redundant storage and increased runtime overhead. In this work, we present a unified framework for enabling multi-task GenAI inference on edge devices using a single shared model. Our key idea is to treat LoRA weights as runtime inputs rather than embedding them into the compiled model graph, allowing dynamic task switching at runtime without recompilation. Then, to support efficient on-device execution, we introduce QUAD (Quantization with Unified Adaptive Distillation), a quantizationaware training strategy that aligns multiple LoRA adapters under a shared quantization profile. We implement the proposed system with a lightweight runtime stack compatible with mobile NPUs and evaluate it across multiple chipsets. Experimental results demonstrate up to 6x and 4x reduction in memory footprint and latency improvements, respectively, while maintaining high visual quality across multiple GenAI tasks.

arXiv:2603.29694v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Skin cancer, particularly melanoma, remains a major cause of morbidity and mortality, making early detection critical. AI-driven dermatology systems often rely on skin lesion segmentation as a preprocessing step to delineate the lesion from surrounding skin and support downstream analysis. While fairness concerns regarding skin tone have been widely studied for lesion classification, the influence of skin tone on the segmentation stage remains under-quantified and is frequently assessed using coarse, discrete skin tone categories. In this work, we evaluate three strong segmentation architectures (UNet, DeepLabV3 with a ResNet50 backbone, and DINOv2) on two public dermoscopic datasets (HAM10000 and ISIC2017) and introduce a continuous pigment or contrast analysis that treats pixel-wise ITA values as distributions. Using Wasserstein distances between within-image distributions for skin-only, lesion-only, and whole-image regions, we quantify lesion skin contrast and relate it to segmentation performance across multiple metrics. Within the range represented in these datasets, global skin tone metrics (Fitzpatrick grouping or mean ITA) show weak association with segmentation quality. In contrast, low lesion-skin contrast is consistently associated with larger segmentation errors in models, indicating that boundary ambiguity and low contrast are key drivers of failure. These findings suggest that fairness improvements in dermoscopic segmentation should prioritize robust handling of low-contrast lesions, and the distribution-based pigment measures provide a more informative audit signal than discrete skin-tone categories.

arXiv:2603.29852v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce VectorGym, a comprehensive benchmark suite for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) that spans generation from text and sketches, complex editing, and visual understanding. VectorGym addresses the lack of realistic, challenging benchmarks aligned with professional design workflows. Our benchmark comprises four tasks with expert human-authored annotations: the novel Sketch2SVG task (VG-Sketch); a new SVG editing dataset (VG-Edit) featuring complex, multi-step edits with higher-order primitives; Text2SVG generation (VG-Text); and SVG captioning (VG-Cap). Unlike prior benchmarks that rely on synthetic edits, VectorGym provides gold-standard human annotations that require semantic understanding and design intent. We also propose a multi-task reinforcement learning approach that jointly optimizes across all four tasks using rendering-based rewards. Our method, built on GRPO with curriculum learning, trains a Qwen3-VL 8B model that achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source models, surpassing much larger models including Qwen3-VL 235B and matching GPT-4o. We also introduce a VLM-as-a-Judge metric for SVG generation, validated through human correlation studies. Our evaluation of frontier VLMs reveals significant performance gaps, positioning VectorGym as a rigorous framework for advancing visual code generation. VectorGym is publicly available on huggingface.co/datasets/ServiceNow/VectorGym.

arXiv:2603.29865v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Wildfires cause major losses worldwide, and the frequency of fire-weather conditions is likely to increase in many regions. We study the allocation of suppression resources over time on a graph-based representation of a landscape to slow down fire propagation. Our contributions are theoretical and methodological. First, we prove that this problem and related variants in the literature are NP-complete, including cases without resource-timing constraints. Second, we propose a new mixed-integer programming (MIP) formulation that obtains state-of-the-art results, showing that MIP is a competitive approach contrary to earlier findings. Third, showing that existing benchmarks lack realism and difficulty, we introduce a physics-grounded instance generator based on Rothermel's surface fire spread model. We use these diverse instances to benchmark the literature, identifying the specific conditions where each algorithm succeeds or fails.

arXiv:2603.29944v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantum sensing technologies offer transformative potential for ultra-sensitive biomedical sensing, yet their clinical translation remains constrained by classical noise limits and a reliance on macroscopic ensembles. We propose a unifying generational framework to organize the evolving landscape of quantum biosensors based on their utilization of quantum resources. First-generation devices utilize discrete energy levels for signal transduction but follow classical scaling laws. Second-generation sensors exploit quantum coherence to reach the standard quantum limit, while third-generation architectures leverage entanglement and spin squeezing to approach Heisenberg-limited precision. We further define an emerging fourth generation characterized by the end-to-end integration of quantum sensing with quantum learning and variational circuits, enabling adaptive inference directly within the quantum domain. By analyzing critical parameters such as bandwidth matching and sensor-tissue proximity, we identify key technological bottlenecks and propose a roadmap for transitioning from measuring physical observables to extracting structured biological information with quantum-enhanced intelligence.