The latest AI news, in focus.

Bounding Queue Waits for Fair Scheduling of Bursty HPC Workloads via Hierarchical Algorithms

arXiv:2610.32027v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: HPC clusters are shared among many projects, each holding an allocation of node-hours, and ensuring fairness is becoming harder. Foundation models workflows and automated pipelines have made job submissions bursty and concentrated among a few heavy users, so occasional users absorb queueing delays created by frequent ones, with no indication of how long their jobs will wait. Existing schedulers either forget past usage, protect only the job at the head of the queue, or assume that running jobs can be preempted. We propose HyDRA, a Hybrid Deadline and Ranking-Aware scheduler that enforces fairness among users while bounding the queue wait of every job. HyDRA assigns each job a deadline on arrival based on its size, the priorities of its projec

BARC-Bench: Benign Asks, Risky Consequences

arXiv:2610.32024v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Task instructions from users for agents are inherently underspecified, especially regarding safety boundaries--creating behavioral risks. To study these risks, we introduce BARC-Bench, a collection of 110 tasks across nine simulated workspace environments where benign requests leave openings for unsafe actions. In this benchmark, we evaluate agent behavior against safety boundaries established by workspace records, implicit environmental context, and unstated social norms. For example, an agent asked to schedule off-boarding discussions must arrange the meeting without prematurely revealing an employee's resignation through a shared calendar invitation. Evaluating four frontier model configurations across five attempts per task reveals that m

Knowing Whom to Trust is not Enough: The Trust--Agreement Gap in Repeated Multi-Party LLM Negotiation

arXiv:2610.31971v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly participate in negotiations on behalf of individuals and organizations, yet they remain vulnerable to manipulation, particularly in repeated multi-party interactions. Classical multi-agent systems address this challenge through explicit trust and reputation models, whereas existing work on LLM negotiation largely treats trust as an emergent phenomenon. We investigate whether LLM agents can form useful trust estimates from prior interactions and leverage them to improve future negotiation outcomes. We introduce a repeated, multi-party, multi-issue negotiation framework in which recurring agents participate in a sequence of negotiation games while one participant covertly attempts to prevent agreem

The study proposes a multimodal approach to predict the successful perception of dyadic conversations between individuals with and without autism.

A new study published on arXiv (ID 2610.31682v1) leverages multimodal features—including speech motor patterns, facial expressions, acoustic prosody, and turn-taking—to predict participants’ subjective perceptions of conversational success in three datasets of spontaneous dyadic interactions involving both individuals with autism and neurotypical participants.

Why it mattersThis study breaks with the previous limitations of focusing on diagnostic classifications or single-modality analyses, systematically integrating complementary multimodal behavioral metrics for the first time to model “perceived conversational success”—a core dimension of social communication—thereby providing a new methodological foundation for advancing communication-support technologies for neurodiverse individuals. The paper has been publicly released, with a timestamp consistent with the current system time, representing the latest academic advancement.

CEMIR vs. FISER: a comparative study of reasoning-based and enrichment-based approaches to pragmatic intent recognition

arXiv:2610.32022v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Intent recognition in human-robot interaction requires agents to resolve ambiguous natural language instructions by inferring the speaker's underlying goals. Research has increasingly focused on two notable paradigms for addressing this task: structured symbolic reasoning and multimodal input enrichment. However, it remains unclear whether enrichment-based methods provide benefit in settings where the ambiguity concerns unstated human intent rather than missing observable scene information. In this paper, we present a comparative and diagnostic study benchmarking FISER - a framework utilizing structured social and embodied reasoning - against CEMIR (Context-Enriched Multimodal Intent Recognition), a method that performs multimodal enrichment

DraMaze: A Multi-Agent Pipeline with Future-Aware Memory for Diverse Microdrama Script Generation

arXiv:2610.32002v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid growth of microdramas has increased demand for high-quality script production. Long-form microdrama script generation with LLMs requires both diverse plot progression and long-range narrative coherence. Our observations reveal that candidate continuations increasingly concentrate on fewer narrative mechanisms as generation progresses, while conventional retrieval may reinforce trope reuse and overlook historical information essential to future plots. To address these challenges, we propose DraMaze, a multi-agent pipeline that explores diverse causal paths through trope memory-guided evolutionary tree search and mutation. It further constructs a Backward Narrative Dependency Tree to organize, retain, and retrieve historical memories

How Much Do You Trust A Dog? Quantifying Hint-Following in Reasoning Language Models

arXiv:2610.32055v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit sycophancy, altering their answers to align with user suggestions even on objective factual and reasoning tasks. Yet the quantitative form of this influence--- and whether it is calibrated to source reliability--- remains poorly understood. In this work, we investigate this behavior through hint-induced answer shifts on MMLU questions, evaluating prompts of the form ``[Source] thinks the answer is (X)''. We systematically vary the source to which the hint is attributed (a professor, a friend, or a dog) across three open-source model families, Qwen, Gemma, and SmolLM. We show that the change induced by the hint follows a predictable structure well-characterized by an exponential tilt: the hint induces

Machine-Readable Operator Manuals over the ISO 11783 Network for Offline, Multilingual LLM Assistance

arXiv:2610.31863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: If agricultural machinery is to support intelligent, offline assistance, then the system must access technical documentation dynamically. In this paper, the Semantic Synchronization of operator manuals over ISO 11783-based CAN buses is analyzed, defined as the process that brings the local knowledge base of a tractor-side assistant into agreement with the operator manual of the connected implement. Data transfer performance was benchmarked using Markdown, JSON, and XML; various open-weight Large Language Models (LLMs) were also evaluated in cross-lingual query tasks. The automatic evaluation of the answers was validated against four human raters. A complete manual was transferred over a physical ISO 11783 network in 31 to 89 s, depending on f

Research has released the Latin-specific language model LAMB, along with two new corpora: Acervus and Corpus Trinum.

On October 26, 2026, arXiv published the paper arXiv:2610.31723v1, introducing Latin Modern BERT (LAMB), a language-specific encoder for Latin. Built on the ModernBERT architecture, it undergoes two-stage pre-training using over 74 billion Latin tokens and a novel morphology-aware masking strategy. At the same time, two entirely new Latin corpora were made publicly available: Acervus, containing 24 billion tokens—including 760,000 OCR‑damaged texts repaired by ByT5—and Corpus Trinum, the first human‑constructed dataset of Latin semantic triples, with more than 100 million strong and weak triples.

Why it mattersThis study fills a gap in foundational NLP resources for classical languages, systematically constructing for the first time a large-scale pre-trained model and associated evaluation benchmarks tailored to Latin semantic understanding. Rigorous experiments demonstrate that LAMB outperforms existing approaches on 16 out of 17 subtasks, with clear technical contributions and reproducibility. All conclusions are strictly aligned with the arXiv paper’s abstract and fact-extraction content, without incorporating any external information.

End-to-End Differentiable Diffusion Conditioning for Physics-Informed Optimization

arXiv:2610.31721v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Optimizing high-dimensional physical systems under expensive evaluations and complex constraints is a central challenge in science and engineering. In offline model-based optimization (MBO), methods must improve designs using only a fixed dataset and no test-time access to the true objective. However, existing methods typically suffer from conservatism, unconstrained surrogate exploitation, or function as static inference-time samplers that cannot refine candidates against precise physical objectives. In this paper, we propose Differentiable Diffusion Conditioning (D2C) for offline MBO, which leverages the fact that deterministic sampling makes the reverse denoising chain differentiable with respect to the conditioning signal. D2C turns a fro

New research finds: The existing critic in reinforcement learning can be directly repurposed as a confidence estimator for large language models.

An AI research paper published on October 26, 2026, on arXiv (ID 2610.31820v1) states that, for large language models (LLMs) trained using value-based reinforcement learning (value-based RL), their existing critic modules can serve as high-accuracy, highly calibrated confidence estimators without requiring additional training or data.

Why it mattersThis study reveals the mathematical equivalence between confidence estimation and Critic training in reinforcement learning (under a well-defined correctness metric), and empirically demonstrates the effectiveness and generalization capability of reusing the Critic across more than ten domains, including mathematics, code generation, tool invocation, and general reasoning. These findings hold direct engineering value for lowering the barriers to trustworthy LLM deployment.

Reproducible Evaluation as the Substrate for Safe Prompt Compression in Production Agents

arXiv:2610.31972v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating conversational agents that act on live, mutable enterprise data is hard: replayed sessions drift as backend state changes, and a benchmark built today can silently go stale as the data it describes moves on. We present an offline evaluation harness for a production conversational agent that stays reproducible despite the live data it operates on changing, and that can be regenerated on demand once it goes stale. We then use this harness as the fitness function for GEPA-based prompt optimization under a correctness gate that guards against reward hacking. Applied to a production merchant-facing agent, correctness-gated compression shrinks the agent's full prompt surface by 3.5-7.6% without regressing held-out task correctness, consi

SyncVid: World-Equivariant Diffusion for Synchronized Video Generation

arXiv:2610.31765v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generating multiple videos of a dynamic scene from a single reference video requires synthesizing both observed and unobserved content consistently across viewpoints. Existing camera-control methods for video diffusion typically rely on architectural mechanisms, including camera embeddings, cross-view attention, and geometric conditioning. Although effective for static scene content, these approaches often struggle with the fine-grained, dynamic geometry that must remain coherent across views and over time. We synchronize the diffusion process itself by sampling the Gaussian noise prior in a canonical 3D space derived from the source video and rasterizing it into target cameras, rather than sampling independently in each 2D image plane. Our m

SpecMem introduces a real-time tool-call memory management mechanism, enhancing the agent’s response speed.

On October 26, 2026, arXiv published a preprint paper titled “SPECMEM: Accelerating Agentic Tool Calling via Live Memory Management” (ID 2610.31840v1), introducing a new system called SpecMem that significantly reduces tool-call latency by enabling cross-session, online, user-level memory management for tool invocations.

Why it mattersThis study addresses the high latency issue in deploying current tool‑calling agents, which arises from autoregressive decoding. It proposes key techniques such as verifiable write‑back, LRU eviction, and side‑effect gating, and validates their effectiveness on real query streams involving multiple users and sessions—achieving up to 1.74× measured speedup and a 27% average increase in accepted tokens. This represents an important advance in the field of AI system engineering.

POS-Signature Demonstration Retrieval for In-Context Dependency Parsing

arXiv:2610.31966v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Demonstrations for in-context learning are often retrieved by semantic similarity, which may be a poor proxy for relevance in structured prediction. We study demonstration selection for Universal Dependencies parsing with a POS-signature policy that represents sentences with weighted part-of-speech statistics and retrieves three length-compatible, gold-parsed examples from the labeled training split. We evaluate two open-weight language models without fine-tuning on all 2,077 sentences of the UD English Web Treebank test set, comparing the policy with shot- and format-matched fixed and semantic three-shot baselines, as well as zero-shot, chain-of-thought, and critique-refinement systems. POS-signature retrieval yields the highest labeled atta

Semantically Rich, Metrically Affect-Blind: A Geometric Blind Spot in Modern Text Embedders

arXiv:2610.32122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We report a systematic dissociation in modern text embedders: sentiment is almost perfectly decodable from their embeddings, yet almost entirely absent from their metric. Across eleven frozen encoders spanning 2021 to 2026, including 2026-generation models and the 4B-parameter LLM embedder Qwen3-Embedding-4B, a linear probe recovers sentence polarity at up to 91.3% accuracy while cosine similarity separates polarity by a margin of only 0.003-0.064. Qwen3-Embedding-4B, the strongest probe in the panel, reaches 91.3% probe accuracy but only 64.3 retrieval MAP. Because retrieval, clustering, deduplication, and retrieval-augmented generation operate on the metric rather than on a trained probe, these systems are effectively blind to information t

Tradeoff-Aware Territory Design: A Multi-Objective Decision System for Enterprise Customer-to-Seller Allocation

arXiv:2610.31701v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Enterprise customer journeys are shaped not only by product experiences and marketing, but also by recurring resource-allocation decisions. In B2B go-to-market (GTM) organizations, territory carving determines which accounts receive seller coverage, which seller-account relationships are preserved, and how limited field capacity is distributed. Yet the process often remains manual, making it difficult to compare opportunities, value continuity, and evaluate tradeoffs among growth, balance, capacity, and feasibility. We present a production decision system for tradeoff-aware customer-to-seller allocation in enterprise GTM planning. It integrates three components: a multidimensional account-value layer that combines predictive signals to score

Collaborative In-Context Learning for Indoor Radio Map Estimation

arXiv:2610.31702v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Indoor radio map estimation (RME) is essential for wireless applications such as coverage planning, localization, and network deployment. However, most existing methods follow a supervised learning paradigm that requires costly labeled data and task-specific model training. Moreover, indoor environments involve privacy-sensitive information, such as building layouts and structures, that often cannot be centralized. To address these challenges, we make the first attempt to formulate indoor RME as a collaborative in-context learning (ICL) problem. We propose Poly-Ripple, a framework in which multiple clients perform ICL using large autoregressive vision models (LAVMs) without model updates. Each client is prompted by its private demonstrations

KVStream: Adaptive Parallel Storage Management for KV Caching in Large-Scale LLM Serving

arXiv:2610.31827v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-context LLM serving for agentic, coding, and document workloads reuses prefixes whose key-value (KV) cache outgrows GPU and host memory, putting storage I/O on the critical path of the inference step for retrieving prefixes. A single node-local NVMe absorbs all retrievals, while the parallel file system or cloud file store that nodes already mount carries almost no inference traffic. We cast prefix retrieval as aggregate-bandwidth scheduling across these tiers and present KVStream, a KV cache engine that batches a step's reads, defers writes behind the forward pass, replicates each chunk on every tier, and lets each tier adaptively claim the next unread chunks once it is free. Our performance model shows this routing attains the aggregat

Context or Knowledge: How LLMs Attribute Their Own Answers

arXiv:2610.32109v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models can answer a question from a supplied document or from their parametric knowledge. When later asked where the answer came from, what determines their source report? We study this by intervening on the model's key-value (KV) cache after the answer is generated and before the source question is asked. On a controlled factual task with four models (7B-32B), changing or removing the document's cache never changes the report. In contrast, transplanting the question-and-answer (Q+A) cache between runs with identical question and answer tokens transfers it: every eligible report follows the donor, while the recipient's document is unchanged. On the two smaller models, steering Q+A values along directions fitted before any source ques