Jiayu He, Yifan Li, Oliver R. Runswick, Ernest N. Kamavuako, Yunjie Jia, Peter D. Hodkinson, Yang Gao
Rover-mounted robotic arms can extend human reach during lunar sample handling, but continuous joystick teleoperation requires repeated visual-motor alignment while operators may also need to monitor system states. This paper presents a gaze-assisted supervisory control framework in which gaze nominates a rock or placement target, explicit confirmation authorizes the action, and the robot performs bounded autonomous grasp-and-place execution. The framework was evaluated against manual joystick teleoperation in a mission-analog virtual reality study with 16 participants. The study used a 2 x 2 x 3 within-subject design varying control mode, placement difficulty, and concurrent monitoring load. Mean recorded task completion time decreased from 47.65 to 18.43 s per rock, with 72.5% of this difference arising during grasping. Under the tested auditory monitoring conditions, gaze-assisted supervisory control showed less average proportional slowing, with no detected control-mode difference in monitoring-response accuracy or speed. The rate of gaze shifts between core areas of interest decreased from 49.98 to 27.73 shifts/min, while the raw NASA Task Load Index score decreased from 32.54 to 18.26. However, the benefit was task dependent. In precision placement, manual control yielded lower mean placement error and a higher placement success rate. These findings support a mixed-initiative allocation in which gaze enables rapid task-level intention specification and autonomous execution, while precision-critical stages retain manual refinement.
Self-improving AI systems can revise the designs that govern their own behavior. Yet existing approaches center improvement on selected parent agents and their evolutionary experience, leaving the broader population largely underused. We identify a substantial gap between population coverage (i.e., the tasks solved by at least one evolved variant) and the performance of the best individual agent. This gap shows that useful capabilities and diagnostic evidence emerge across the population without being consolidated into its leading agents. These observations motivate the view from nowhere, a principle for agent evolution: an agent should be improved by interpreting its behavior through population-wide patterns of success, failure, and prior self-modification. We instantiate this principle as Population-Centered Evolution (PCE). PCE distils task records and modification histories from the population into a population block, which captures recurring failures, complementary successes, and the effects of previously attempted modifications to guide improvements to a selected parent's harness. Under matched models, initial harnesses, and evolution schedules, PCE achieves 72.1% success on SWE-bench Verified and 96.7% on Polyglot, improving over a strong group-evolution baseline by 3.2 and 5.9 percentage points. In our evaluation, PCE reduces the gap between population coverage and best-agent performance by one-third on SWE-bench and closes it on Polyglot. These results suggest that treating the population as evidence, not merely as candidates for selection, provides a complementary principle for agent evolution.
Joshua Brakensiek, David Conlon, Venkatesan Guruswami, Xiaoyu He, Jiaxi Nie, Maya Sankar, Hung-Hsun Hans Yu
In the study of constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs), the non-redundancy of a relation measures the maximum number of clauses in a CSP instance which can be logically independent. In the last few years, CSP non-redundancy has found a number of applications including in query complexity, sparsification, kernelization and streaming. In this paper, we present a novel technique for upper-bounding the non-redundancy of some relations using locally decodable codes (LDCs) and locally correctable codes (LCCs). More precisely, known limitations on the structure of 2-query LDCs and LCCs can be translated into limitations on the size of certain non-redundant CSP instances. This technique builds on a technique used by Brakensiek and Guruswami [STOC 2025] to bound non-redundancy via techniques from matching vector codes. Using LDCs and LCCs, we give improved upper bounds on non-redundancy of the BCK predicate pioneered by Bessiere, Carbonnel, and Katsirelos [AAAI 2020] as well as its well-studied Boolean variant. We also give the first example of a Boolean predicate whose non-redundancy is provably not of the form $n^{k\pm o(1)}$ for some positive integer $k$.
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has significantly improved large language model reasoning, but existing RL fine-tuning methods rely heavily on heuristic techniques such as entropy regularization and reweighting to maintain stability. In practice, they often suffer from late-stage performance collapse, leading to degraded reasoning quality and unstable training. We identify a key factor behind this instability: a small fraction of tokens, termed spurious tokens (around 0.01%), which contribute little to the reasoning outcome but receive disproportionately amplified gradient updates due to inheriting the full sequence-level reward. We present a unified framework for evaluating token-level optimization impacts across spurious risk, gradient norms, and entropy changes. Building on the analysis of token characteristics that severely disrupt optimization, we propose the Silencing Spurious Tokens (S2T) mechanism to efficiently suppress their gradient perturbations. Incorporating this mechanism into a group-based objective, we propose Spurious-Token-Aware Policy Optimization (STAPO), which promotes stable and effective large-scale model refinement. Across six mathematical benchmarks and three model scales, STAPO consistently demonstrates superior entropy stability and achieves average accuracy improvements over baselines including GRPO, 20-Entropy, and JustRL under two widely-adopted evaluation settings.
Kai Ma, Tianle Sun, Shun Zhou, Boyao Yang, Ningyu He, Haoyu Wang
Many decentralized exchanges use automated market makers (AMMs) to trade assets against liquidity pools. Modern AMMs allow third-party contracts, called Hooks, to customize this process. However, Hooks can impose additional deductions that fee breakdowns based on standard pool parameters do not itemize. We present, to the best of our knowledge, the first large-scale empirical study of the production Hook ecosystem, focusing on these undisclosed settlement charges. Our study covers 7,873 Hook deployments, 50,011 pools, and 296M pool events on Uniswap v4 and PancakeSwap Infinity across Ethereum and BNB Smart Chain (BSC) through August 1, 2026. We develop a bytecode analysis that reconstructs how Hooks change traders' payments and receipts, separating charges from exchanged assets and standard fees. We then reconstruct historical settlements to measure charging frequency and economic burden. We find that direct settlement adjustment is the dominant Hook capability, supported by 71.37% of registered Hooks. Charging capability is widespread and often exercised: 24.30% of Hooks can impose undisclosed deductions, and these deductions occur in 59.23% of accounted swaps involving such Hooks. These charges generate millions of dollars in revenue, with $3.97M recorded across Hooks with available token prices. These findings reveal a gap between standard fee displays and actual trading costs, motivating explicit disclosure of Hook deductions alongside standard fees.
The success of the transformer architecture is in large part due to its use of attention layers. An attention layer follows the standard neural network paradigm: it takes the residual stream as input and thereby produces context-dependent query, key, and value vectors. However, we find that model performance meaningfully improves when deeper layers learn only a context-free value vector to preserve the original token information, without drawing on any context from the residual stream. When the model has access to this context-free value vector, adding back the context-dependent component provides little additional benefit for aggregate benchmark performance. Such context-free value vectors can be stored as sparse model parameters, eliminating the need to recompute or persistently cache these values. Through systematic ablations on the key design choices for such context-free value vectors, we propose Bank of Values (BoV), a new way of computing value vectors in attention by learning a lookup table of token-specific value vectors for each of the last third of layers. Across 135M and 780M models, BoV improves validation loss over standard attention and, at 780M, the average score across 21 benchmarks, matching the previous best method that adds token information to the value vector with less compute and memory.
Large language models (LLMs) reliably perform entity copying, in which a model copies tokens referring to an entity, termed entity tokens, from the prompt into its output to answer a question. Although entity copying is straightforward for most LLMs, existing research does not provide a systematic account of which layers specialize in this fundamental task or how other tokens in the same sequence, termed context tokens, influence the model's ability to copy the entity tokens. To address these questions, we conduct experiments on Qwen3-8B using two novel methods: genie-in-a-bottle, which controls exactly which layers can participate in an entity-copying task, and attention lobotomy, which cuts off specific tokens' attention to entity tokens without affecting the remaining attention distribution. We find that two distinct groups of layers in the second half of the model are both necessary and sufficient for entity copying. Moreover, in addition to the decoding position's attention to entity tokens, context tokens' attention to entity tokens also proves necessary for copying the exact tokens, even though context tokens do not store entity information themselves unless they satisfy particular semantic properties. Our findings establish the critical role of late layers in entity copying under the guidance of context tokens, calling for future work on how models propagate and consume entity information.
Hongcheng Gao, Zelin Zheng, Alex Zhou, Jay Zhu, Shijia Ge, Yazhe Wang, Xiping Li, Jianshu Zeng 等 21 位作者
Embodied agents are expected to accomplish real-world goals by deciding for themselves how and when to interact with their surroundings. For many such goals, changing the physical state of the world is the means rather than the end: the agent changes the state of a system through interaction, observes the feedback, and explores until it either achieves the goal itself (e.g., discovering physical laws) or learns what the goal requires; it acts to know. Manipulation benchmarks stop at acting to change, with the target state given; scientific discovery benchmarks evaluate knowing but replace physical experimentation with symbolic actions or numerical queries. We introduce EmbodiedLab, a benchmark in which a robot must act to know. Quantitative science experiments make this setting controllable: the parameters of the system are resampled for every instance, so the result cannot be known in advance, yet it can be scored exactly. Across 30 experiments in five disciplines on 14 apparatus platforms, the agent receives an objective and the apparatus, chooses its own procedure, and operates a physics-based simulated laboratory, reading the instruments through its cameras. Evaluation checks what the agent came to know, grounded in readings recorded during the episode, as well as the physical state the task requires; every experiment is verified to be solvable. We evaluate six frontier models in their developers' coding agents with native observation and control, with added perception and motion planning, and with manipulation skills distilled from the strongest agents. With native control, even the strongest agent succeeds less than half the time; for every agent, most failures arise in interacting with the apparatus, and manipulation skills help weaker agents more than perception and planning. The benchmark and its evaluation code are available at https://github.com/HexaFuture/EmbodiedLab.
Siyuan Yang, Junning Lyu, Xiaoyu He, Lakmal Seneviratne, Shaoming He
This paper studies UAV swarm search in GNSS-denied maritime environments, where inter-UAV ranging drives cooperative localization and uncertainty propagates along the multi-hop reference chain, affecting connectivity, collision avoidance, and search effectiveness. We propose an uncertainty-aware control barrier function (CBF) framework approximating cascading localization covariance through Fisher information matrices. First, the cascading covariance model captures how ranging noise and neighbor uncertainty accumulate along the localization chain. Second, uncertainty-tightened CBFs incorporate the covariance model and its rate into margins for connectivity maintenance and collision avoidance, with conditional invariance and graceful-degradation bounds. Third, a hierarchical Voronoi-target strategy with formation keeping supports efficient forward-looking coverage. The distributed controller is validated with a standard unbiased extended Kalman filter in the loop. The framework is demonstrated on several polygon shapes and swarm sizes from 6 to 30 sUAVs. An estimator-in-the-loop run completes the search in 302.5 s, 20 Monte Carlo deployments confirm repeatable completion with all local QPs feasible and containment in at least 98.97% of UAV-frames, and six MBZIRC runs provide estimator-in-the-loop evidence. The source code is publicly available.
Keyu He, Qianou Ma, Valerie Chen, Wayne Chi, Tongshuang Wu School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
Understanding how developers interact with AI coding assistants requires more than chat logs or git histories in isolation; it requires reconstructing the full context: which prompt led to which edit, what the developer tried and discarded, and how their strategy evolved over time. We present RECAP (Replay and Examine Captured AI Programming), an open-source platform that (1) passively records AI chat sessions and fine-grained code edits inside VS Code without disrupting the developer’s workflow, (2) merges them into a unified timeline for interactive session replay, and (3) exposes an extensible analysis layer, with example modules for behavioral classification and AI reliance measurement. Deployed in a university software engineering course, RECAP captured 2,034 prompts and 8,239 code edits from 41 students across a multi-week project. We demonstrate how the platform’s linked data and replay capabilities enable analyses of developer-AI interaction patterns that no single data source could support.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations) · 2026 · 正式发表
Ziqiang Zhang, Jing Ma, Zilong Wang, Jiayuan Chen, Yi Qiao, Yu He, Wei Zhang, Dai Cheng 等 9 位作者
Pricing automation in large-scale tourism is challenging because travel orders are highly unstructured, while pricing policies are complex, rapidly evolving, and inherently open-ended. Traditional rule engines are brittle and costly to maintain, whereas unconstrained LLM agents lack the reliability and auditability required for financial decisions. We present a production-grade LLM-powered pricing system with a strict decision boundary: LLMs perform structured extraction and bounded policy/path selection, while all numeric pricing, including total-price computation, is executed deterministically. Policies are compiled into interpretable condition trees, enabling open-ended support for new clauses and evolving rules without code changes, while exposing auditable artifacts for human-in-the-loop control. Periodic fine-tuning on logged traces further improves tree induction and path matching. Deployed at a municipal state-owned tourism enterprise across 7 scenic sites and 12 business categories with 1,500+ operators and 1,000+ active policies, the system processed 3,960 orders in six months, reduced the order management team from 15-20 to 3, and cut per-order handling time from 10 minutes to <2 minutes.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track) · 2026 · 正式发表
Realizing endogenous narrative evolution in LLM-based multi-agent systems is hindered by the inherent stochasticity of generative emergence. In particular, long-horizon simulations suffer from social memory stacking, where conflicting relational states accumulate without resolution, and narrative-spatial dissonance, where spatial logic detaches from the evolving plot. To bridge this gap, we propose EvoSpark, a framework specifically designed to sustain logically coherent long-horizon narratives within Endogenous Interactive Agent Societies. To ensure consistency, the Stratified Narrative Memory employs a Role Socio-Evolutionary Base as living cognition, dynamically metabolizing experiences to resolve historical conflicts. Complementarily, a Generative Mise-en-Scène mechanism enforces Role-Location-Plot alignment, synchronizing character presence with the narrative flow. Underpinning these is the Unified Narrative Operation Engine, which integrates an Emergent Character Grounding Protocol to transform stochastic sparking into persistent characters. This engine establishes a substrate that expands a minimal premise into an open-ended, evolving story world. Experiments demonstrate that EvoSpark significantly outperforms baselines across diverse paradigms, enabling the sustained generation of expressive and coherent narrative experiences.
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cs.CL · cs.MA
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Muyu He Collinear AI, Anand Kumar Collinear AI, Soumyadeep Bakshi, James Zou Stanford University, Nazneen Rajani
Despite rapid progress in building conversational AI agents, robustness is still largely untested. Small shifts in user behavior, such as being more impatient, incoherent, or skeptical, can cause sharp drops in agent performance, revealing how brittle current AI agents are. Today’s benchmarks fail to capture this fragility: agents may perform well under standard evaluations but degrade spectacularly in more realistic and varied settings. We address this robustness testing gap by introducing TraitBasis, a lightweight, model-agnostic method for systematically stress testing AI agents. TraitBasis learns directions in activation space corresponding to steerable user traits (e.g., impatience or incoherence), which can be controlled, scaled, composed, and applied at inference time without any fine-tuning or extra data. Using TraitBasis, we extend τ-Bench to τ-bench, where user behaviors are altered via controlled trait vectors. We observe an average 4%–20% performance degradation on τ-bench across frontier models, highlighting the lack of robustness of current AI agents to variations in user behavior. Together, these results highlight both the critical role of robustness testing and the promise of TraitBasis as a simple, data-efficient, and compositional tool. By powering simulation-driven stress tests and training loops, TraitBasis opens the door to building AI agents that remain reliable in the unpredictable dynamics of real-world human interactions. We plan to open-source τ-bench, across four domains: airline, retail, telecom, and telehealth, so the community can systematically QA their agents under realistic, behaviorally diverse intents and trait scenarios.
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cs.CL · cs.AI
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Qingyu Ren, Qianyu He, Powei Chang, Jie Zeng, Zeye Sun, Fei Yu Ant Group, Jiaqing Liang Fudan University, Yanghua Xiao Fudan University
Language models often struggle to follow multi-constraint instructions that are crucial for real-world applications. Existing reinforcement learning (RL) approaches suffer from dependency on external supervision and sparse reward signals from multi-constraint tasks. We propose a label-free self-supervised RL framework that eliminates dependency on external supervision by deriving reward signals directly from instructions and generating pseudo-labels for reward model training. Our approach introduces constraint decomposition strategies and efficient constraint-wise binary classification to address sparse reward challenges while maintaining computational efficiency. Experiments show that our approach generalizes well, achieving strong improvements across 3 in-domain and 5 out-of-domain datasets, including challenging agentic and multi-turn instruction following. We will open-source our code and data to facilitate future research.
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cs.CL · cs.AI
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Qianyu He, Junting Lu, Yikai Zhang, Siyu Yuan, Xiaojun Meng Large Model Data Technology Lab, Huawei Technologies Ltd., Jiansheng Wei, Jiaqing Liang Fudan University, Yanghua Xiao Fudan University
Metaphor reasoning is an essential cognitive ability that maps knowledge from familiar domains to more abstract domains. This ability functions as a meta-ability underlying many types of reasoning. However, existing work rarely investigates how metaphor reasoning affects other reasoning abilities. To bridge this gap, we systematically study how metaphor reasoning, particularly through metaphorical riddles, can enhance broader reasoning abilities in large language models. We propose MetaR, an automated system for synthesizing metaphorical riddles that satisfy five quality dimensions: diverse, balanced, reasoning-oriented, challenging, and verifiable. Leveraging that answer categories determine riddle categories, we employ a hierarchical answer taxonomy for the former three criteria and a multi-agent refinement framework for the latter two, generating a high-quality dataset. Training with reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards using only thousands of metaphorical riddles, we demonstrate improvements across six out-of-distribution reasoning domains. Analysis reveals transfer effectiveness depends on model scale and pattern-target domain alignment. The datasets and code are publicly available at https://github.com/Abbey4799/MetaR.
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cs.CL · cs.MA
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Powei Chang, Jin Xiao, Guanglei Yue Fudan University, Qianyu He, Yanghua Xiao Fudan University, Deqing Yang Fudan University, Jiaqing Liang Fudan University
Quotation recommendation enriches writing by suggesting quotations that fit a given context, but prior systems largely focus on topical relevance and overlook what makes quotes memorable. Based on a user study, we find that preferred quotations are often unexpected yet rational, motivating the goal of selecting quotes that are contextually novel while semantically coherent. We propose NovelQR, which (1) uses a generative label agent to map quotations and contexts into multi-dimensional deep-meaning labels for label-enhanced retrieval, and (2) reranks candidates with a token-level novelty estimator that mitigates auto-regressive continuation bias. Experiments on bilingual datasets across diverse domains show that NovelQR is preferred by human judges and improves overall recommendation quality over strong baselines, while achieving competitive novelty estimation.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Jiameng Huang, Zhi Zhang, Zhenyu He, Jiacheng Sun Huawei Noah's Ark Lab, Di He Peking University and Microsoft
Lifelong learning investigates how models adapt when exposed to a potentially infinite stream of data. Most conventional approaches focus on updating model parameters (i.e., the neural network weights) as the underlying data distribution evolves over time. However, in natural language processing, model parameters are not the only components that matter. The tokenizer, a foundational part of the system, is usually assumed to remain fixed in lifelong learning scenarios. In this work, we challenge the validity of this assumption: as language evolves, a static tokenizer fragments newly emerging lexical items, reducing compression efficiency and consequently degrading the model performance. We introduce the Temporal Drift Tokenizer (Ted-Tok), which maintains an evolving vocabulary that adapts to emerging linguistic patterns over time. This adaptivity is driven by time-weighted frequency estimators that smooth short-term fluctuations to capture persistent linguistic trends, and a principled addition-deletion strategy targeting sink tokens. Across multiple domains, Ted-Tok consistently improves compression and task performance, with gains increasing under stronger drift, underscoring the role of tokenizer adaptivity in lifelong learning.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Keyu He, Tejas Srinivasan University of Southern California, Brihi Joshi, Xiang Ren University of Southern California, Jesse Thomason University of Southern California and Amazon, Swabha Swayamdipta University of Southern California
When people query Vision-Language Models (VLMs) but cannot see the accompanying visual context (e.g. for blind and low-vision users), augmenting VLM predictions with natural language explanations can signal which model predictions are reliable. However, prior work has found that explanations can easily convince users that inaccurate VLM predictions are correct. To remedy undesirable overreliance on VLM predictions, we propose evaluating two complementary qualities of VLM-generated explanations via two quality scoring functions. We propose Visual Fidelity, which captures how faithful an explanation is to the visual context, and Contrastiveness, which captures how well the explanation identifies visual details that distinguish the model’s prediction from plausible alternatives. On the A-OKVQA, VizWiz, and MMMU-Pro tasks, these quality scoring functions are better calibrated with model correctness than existing explanation qualities. We conduct a user study in which participants have to decide whether a VLM prediction is accurate without viewing its visual context. We observe that showing our quality scores alongside VLM explanations improves participants’ accuracy at predicting VLM correctness by 11.1%, including a 15.4% reduction in the rate of falsely believing incorrect predictions. These findings highlight the utility of explanation quality scores in fostering appropriate reliance on VLM predictions.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表