arXiv:2610.31685v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based multimodal emotion reasoning systems perform well on standard benchmarks, but improving them through instruction tuning can be computationally expensive. Agentic pipelines built from frozen models avoid this cost, but introduce a different challenge: when a prediction is wrong, the system must identify which agent or stage caused the error. We address this problem with an agentic framework for traceable multimodal emotion reasoning and prompt-space adaptation. Modality-specific perception agents analyze visual, acoustic, and lexical inputs and post evidence-cited observations to a shared board. An integration agent combines these observations with retrieved multimodal examples to produce an emotion description, label set, and supporting citations, while an MLLM critic can request one revision before the output is finalized. For incorrect predictions, a separate evidence-grounded verification stage applies deterministic checks to verify that cited evidence and references are valid, and an entailment check to determine whether the final claims are supported by that evidence. Detected failures are then grouped by the responsible component and failure type, converted into targeted prompt patches, and accepted only after validation on a held-out set. This adapts the agent prompts without updating model weights. On the MER2025 dataset, targeted prompt adaptation outperforms the frozen static pipeline on all four MLLMs, ranging from 2B to 38B parameters, and matches or outperforms undifferentiated reflection baselines on each of them: VideoLLaMA3-2B, Phi-3.5-vision-instruct, Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct, and InternVL2.5-38B. It improves F-score by 0.6--2.2 points depending on the backbone, including an increase from 52.3 to 54.5 on Qwen2.5-VL-7B.

arXiv:2610.31686v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Activation interventions can make a language model produce a target answer, but can the model use the intended condition in other computations? We study this question in Qwen3.5-27B on tool-use tasks where time or permissions determine eligibility and selection. Across 32 fresh worlds, two case-specific residual-writing variants raise familiar target-selection correctness from 35/128 to 119/128 and from 33/128 to 114/128. Yet these gains disappear when familiar facts and identifiers are recombined within the same selection task, while selection of previously rewarded identifiers increases. The gains persist across output formats but yield little improvement in independent judgments about whether a candidate is eligible or should be selected. Internal edits can nevertheless change how a source fact affects a judgment: in a prespecified secondary comparison, an early-layer source patch changes 50/64 judgments when that source is used, with one adverse change among 64 cases where it is not. This selective effect does not ensure correct complete actions. Together, these results separate target-selection control, condition-sensitive judgments, and complete-action correctness. Evaluating how an edited state is used, rather than only its trained answer, exposes these differences.

arXiv:2610.31687v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models are increasingly used to simulate and probe human behavior, e.g., for surveys. For these applications, a key property is that outputs satisfy distributional alignment: to match its output distribution with some reference (in this case, human) distribution. An obstacle in achieving distributional alignment is generalizing from small training data. In this work, we study (1) how to distributionally align LLMs; and (2) how aligned LLMs might generalize to unseen samples and unrelated topics and tasks. Using two large-scale benchmarks, we find that LLMs can indeed achieve distributional alignment and generalize to unseen questions of the same domain. Cross-topic generalization depends on the relationship between topics (e.g., questions about politics are related to trust in institutions). However, aligned LLMs can degrade in surprising ways (e.g., lose their creative ability), suggesting that its generalization properties are inherently unpredictable and unstable.

arXiv:2610.31702v1 Announce Type: cross 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 and predicts the radio map for the same scene query. To capture the causal structure of wireless propagation outward from the transmitter (Tx), we adopt ripple-ordered autoregressive modeling. We further introduce importance-aware aggregation to exploit heterogeneous contextual knowledge distributed across clients under the context length constraint. We provide theoretical analysis and conduct extensive experiments on a public indoor RME benchmark. The experimental results show that Poly-Ripple consistently outperforms representative ICL baselines, while aligning with our theoretical analysis.

arXiv:2610.31703v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Most questions that reach an HPC help desk have already been answered in the center's user guides or in a ticket someone else filed last semester; users still file new tickets because the guides are hard to navigate and the ticket history is not theirs to search. We present an assistant that answers from both sources: an orchestrator calls two tools over the Model Context Protocol, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) over the live documentation and a Llama-3-8B model fine-tuned with QLoRA on 11,244 query-resolution pairs mined from historical tickets, and merges their answers. Every model runs on-premises or on the university's hosted LLM service because ticket data may not leave the institution. On 400 held-out tickets from Purdue's Rosen Center for Advanced Computing, disjoint from training and free of near-duplicates, and evaluated by two judges from model families that generated none of the answers, fine-tuning on resolutions rewritten into self-service guidance is the clear winner in agreement with RCAC's resolutions (BERTScore F1 improves from 0.06 to 0.27 over the base model) and is judged most correct on average. The end-to-end system does not improve on its tools, although they are complementary: choosing the better answer per question would exceed either tool (judged correctness 3.41 versus 3.20, an oracle bound), while the merge follows the documentation tool in 78% of answers. Returning one tool's answer instead recovers the fine-tuned tool's quality (3.19 versus 2.66), but neither a learned selector nor an LLM verifier beats that tool alone.

arXiv:2610.31710v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Context compaction lets long-horizon coding agents continue beyond their context windows, but can erase the state needed to finish a task. Prior evaluations measure efficiency, retained information, or end-to-end success, leaving the effect of a specific history replacement difficult to isolate. Compact-Bench pairs full-history and summary-only continuations from a shared repository state, and evaluates recurring details and successive production compactions. It covers 35 SWE-bench repairs, 146 agentic sessions, and 106 production chains. Across 14 summarizer backbones, stable damage ranges from 5-64% of 22 full-history successes: Claude Opus 4.8 preserves the most repairs, while DeepSeek-Flash damages the most. With Kimi-K3 as summarizer, the Kimi Code prompt preserves the most task continuations (19/22), whereas Claude Code retains the most recurring details (15.0%). LLM summaries retain at most 16.0% of recurring details, compared with 79.1% for mechanical extraction; production summaries retain 15.7% at the first boundary. Failures recur across methods: one repair is damaged by 13/14 backbones, and another by all 5 prompts. These results show that reliable compaction requires preserving the progress needed to complete a task, and that retaining relevant information alone does not ensure successful continuation. Code is available at https://github.com/cai-jianfeng/compact-bench and data is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/caijanfeng/compact-bench.

arXiv:2610.31711v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spreadsheets are the lingua franca of modern finance, driving valuation, forecast, audit, and many other core workflows of the industry. As LLM agents advance to automate knowledge work, spreadsheet construction is a natural and pertinent testbed. However, most existing spreadsheet benchmarks evaluate agents on fill-in-the-blank style tasks, where an agent performs minor edits in otherwise complete spreadsheets. This protocol fails to capture the most central and time-consuming part of the spreadsheet workflow: the modeling decisions, format design, and sheet layout regular knowledge workers need to toil through to build a workbook from scratch. We introduce MBABench-2.0, a benchmark of 101 original spreadsheet construction tasks, the hardest of which is estimated to take 33 hours for a modeler with 3+ years of experience. Unlike coding or math, where a unit test or a final answer can verify an agent's output, the quality of a financial spreadsheet that concerns readability, maintainability, or auditability, is not so simply verifiable. To holistically evaluate spreadsheet construction, we introduce 129 criteria spanning 12 categories that operationalize quality beyond the accuracy of the spreadsheet. Evaluating over 20 agents across 8 models and 4 harness types, we find that frontier agents rarely construct spreadsheets that are both accurate and meet our quality criteria: the top agent achieves a pass rate of only 16% on the benchmark. The benchmark demonstrates a substantial gap in spreadsheet building capability of current agents.

arXiv:2610.31712v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mobile GUI agents frequently perform repetitive tasks with similar interaction procedures. Reusing previous executions can reduce redundant LLM inference and execution overhead, but variations in user instructions and execution environments may invalidate previously successful actions. We systematically characterize these variations into six representative categories and observe that such changes do not necessarily invalidate entire procedures: individual transitions can remain reusable when validated against the current task context and interface state. Based on this insight, we propose graph-text templates for selective execution-trace reuse. The graph captures UI states and action transitions, while the text encodes task intent, procedural structure, and typed slots for variable content. A record-template-replay framework constructs templates from verified executions and leverages the current instruction and live UI state to reuse, adapt, or discard individual transitions. Given an execution trace, our framework reduces LLM inference token consumption by approximately 80% on average across five base agents on AndroidWorld, with most agents achieving at least 1.5-fold execution speedup over LLM-only execution. In real-device evaluations on Android and HarmonyOS, our framework achieves action reuse ratios of 70.7-79.8% while maintaining over 2-fold execution speedup in most evaluated configurations.

arXiv:2610.31715v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Coding agents can be guided with instruction files in a repository. We examine this emerging practice through a census of popular, active GitHub repositories in thirteen languages, treating each repository's root AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md as one instruction set. Agent instructions appear in of repositories and of the most-starred; where both files exist, CLAUDE.md usually points to AGENTS.md. We analyse statements using model-assisted annotation and human review. The annotations reveal a practical mix of project knowledge and rules about code, building and workflow. Collaboration rules name concrete requirements, from test plans to commit formats, yet of directives give no reason. Projects disagree on AI attribution: commit-message rules more often prohibit it than require it, while pull-request rules more often require disclosure. A third of instruction sets have a generator-associated signature, a tool-inserted block, shared text or an AI-marked creation commit; four in five are edited after creation. Prespecified tests associate repository popularity with rules on pull requests and AI contributions. Exploratory analyses link activity to process-oriented content and show that LLM and agent projects are over-represented among adopters. The models agree much more closely with each other than with the human reviewer's topic assignments, a caution for automated annotation. We release the annotations, taxonomies and pointers to the analysed file versions.