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artificial intelligence

4,334 papers

#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

PerfReasoning: How Well Do LLMs Reason on Hardware Performance?

Performance modeling is central to hardware design and software optimization, yet constructing these models requires structured reasoning about computation, data reuse, storage, and movement. We introduce PerfReasoning, a benchmark that evaluates LLMs both as direct performance reasoners and as generators of analytical performance-model code. Given workload, architecture, and mapping specifications, models compare mappings and predict off-chip traffic and buffer requirements. The strongest closed-source models exceed 90% on reasoning-based Q&A, and the best open-weight model reaches 82.4%. However, model construction is substantially harder: while GPT-5.6 Sol exceeds 80% pass rate, all other model configurations average below 15% and vary markedly across runs. Task-specific RL raises a 4B model's mapping-reasoning accuracy by 15.7 points, whereas feedback-free multi-round self-revision prompting is not reliably effective. PerfReasoning exposes the gap between plausible architectural reasoning and reliable performance-model construction. We will publicly release the benchmark to support reproducible evaluation and track future progress.

Dan Zhao, Karthikeyan Sankaralingam, Christos Kozyrakis et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

HarvestBench: Measuring Whether LLM Agents Will Pay to Avoid Killing Animals

Benchmarks for the side effects an agent causes on the way to a goal already exist, but HarvestBench is the first to put a price on avoiding the side effect and to name that side effect as a living creature. It is a farm simulation: LLM sub-agents drive a crew of two tractors through a cooperative corn harvest, with animals in the field. The environment is a reinforcement learning gridworld, every decision is made without memory, and the harm is never named in the goal. When an animal blocks a tractor's route the autopilot stops and asks the model whether to drive on, at no fuel cost, or swerve around it for a posted fuel price. Kills are compared against two controls: rocks, which damage the tractor and are hit under 1% of the time by every model, and hay bales, which are harmless and not alive. Models can also take crops from the neighbor's field instead of their own, a second test of what they treat as moral. Across nine models and 7,201 priced decisions, 3,951 involved an animal rather than a hay bale or a rock. Kill rates range from 0.4% to 98.8%, with Terra and Sol the most merciful and GPT-4o-mini the most cruel, and they are not ordered by capability. Four of six models were sensitive to price at the 5% level, with elasticities from 0.09 to 1.69. All nine drove over wild animals more often than farmed animals on the default map, and the direction held at every map geometry in every model with room to move. The briefing mattered most: under the morality briefing the kill rate was under 6% in five of six reasoning models, and removing it raised the kill rate above 84% in all six. HarvestBench uses no LLM grader. The scorer counts events in the game log, so it is fully reproducible, and it measures what a model will pay to avoid harm rather than what it says about harm.

Jasmine Brazilek, Miles Tidmarsh, Matthias Endres et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

Corporate Language Model (CLM): Transforming Tacit and Fragmented Enterprise Knowledge into a Sovereign, Auditable, and Executable Corporate Intelligence Layer

Enterprise AI deployments fail not from model inadequacy, but because organizations lack a structured substrate encoding how they decide, negotiate, and execute. Generic LLMs carry no firm-specific ontological priors; RAG remains brittle, with no path to executable action; static playbooks encode logic but cannot reason or adapt. This demands an architecture treating tacit-knowledge capture, ontological grounding, sovereign deployment, and auditable actuation as co-designed from the start. This paper introduces the Corporate Language Model (CLM), a framework transforming a firm's structured, unstructured, multimodal, and tacit knowledge into an ontology-grounded enterprise foundation upon which reasoning and governed execution are composed. CLM has five capability planes and four architectural pillars: a Neurosymbolic Mesh coupling generative models with a knowledge graph; a Skill Graph where reusable tactics, personas, objections, and goals are typed and composed; Living Digital Twins modeling functional areas as reasoning surrogates; and a Deep Security Layer enforcing sovereignty, traceability, and human oversight. A Spec-as-Code paradigm bridges grounded intent and executable artifact. CLM is one instantiation of this foundation-centric class. Four contributions follow: CLM is defined as a distinct object of study; the Skill Graph is introduced for compositional explainability by construction; the Wisdom Listener effect is proposed, whereby tacit-capable foundations compound in value with use, connecting to dynamic capabilities and organizational learning; and evidence from a JCI-accredited tertiary hospital in Brazil instantiates three of the six maturity stages under LGPD.

Fabricio C. Avini, Guilherme Trez · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Why Better Models Can Create Riskier Systems: Evidence from LLM Agents in Financial Markets

Large language models (LLMs) are being deployed at scale in consequential real-world systems, from financial markets to content moderation to hiring. We show that improving individual model capability can degrade rather than improve system-level outcomes. We hypothesize that shared training and architectures can lead more capable LLMs to behave more similarly, creating correlated actions that do not diversify away. We develop a general framework showing how this correlation creates a non-diversifiable risk floor and test its predictions in financial markets using an agent-based simulation with LLM traders of varying general-purpose capability. We find that: (1) frontier LLMs exhibit significantly correlated behavior that increases with capability; (2) when their shared reasoning is accurate, increasing agent participation reduces market-level risk; and (3) when agents share a common misinformation environment, the same correlated behavior becomes a liability. Together, these results identify a capability paradox: improving individual models does not necessarily produce better system-level outcomes. Whether the same dynamics arise in other domains is an open empirical question.

Jillian Ross, Eric So, Zoe De Simone et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

A Removal Based Approach to Improve LLM Faithfulness at Test-Time

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for consequential decisions, making their explanations an important tool for auditing model behavior. Unfortunately, these explanations can be unfaithful, failing to reflect the actual reasoning underlying the model's decisions. We consider a setting in which an LLM provides both an answer and an explanation in response to a question. We identify two distinct dimensions of unfaithful explanations: incompleteness, meaning that the explanation omits factors that influence the answer, and unsoundness, meaning that the explanation cites factors that did not influence the model's answer. Existing approaches to improving LLM faithfulness include training-time methods, which require access to model weights and extensive computational resources, and test-time methods that largely focus on addressing unsoundness. We introduce a test-time approach that directly targets incompleteness. We remove from the input the concepts not credited in the model's explanation and re-query the model on the reduced input. This eliminates unmentioned influences while preserving the influence of mentioned concepts. Across two datasets, multiple model families, and two independent faithfulness metrics, our approach improves explanation faithfulness compared to both standard prompting and prompting to encourage faithfulness. Our method is model-agnostic and can be applied at inference time without modifying model parameters, providing a flexible mechanism for reducing hidden influences and improving the reliability and safety of LLM-assisted decision making.

Qinglan Luo, S M A Nahian, John Guttag et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Iris: Climbing to the Search Frontier

We present Iris-mini and Iris-pro, two search agents trained at the 35B-A3B and 397B-A17B scales, together with the data pipeline and training recipe behind them. Tasks are reverse-constructed from the hyperlink structure of a web corpus: we author multi-hop chains over an entity graph distilled from a seed page and its out-links, rewrite every non-answer entity into a descriptive reference so that no clue can be resolved by string matching, and admit only questions that a reference model fails closed-book yet solves once the supporting evidence is supplied. These questions are then turned into trajectories, which are filtered at both the trajectory and the turn level before SFT. The policy is then optimized by RL against live search, with the reward judge and the observation summarizer served inside the training cluster, and with over-long rollouts interrupted at the request level and resumed from their committed prefix at the next step. We alternate the two stages in a procedure we call SFT-RL climbing, returning the hardest solved and most efficient rollouts of each RL round to the next supervised pass. Because inference-time context management is worth more on these benchmarks than most reported differences between systems, we evaluate every benchmark both with and without it, holding the tool set, the context limit, and the judge fixed. All results come from a single ReAct agent, with no sub-agents and no test-time verification. With management enabled, on BrowseComp, BrowseComp-ZH, DeepSearchQA, and HLE the two models reach $82.2/84.8/86.9/52.3$ and $88.6/85.1/92.9/56.4$, the strongest overall results among open-source search agents in their respective parameter ranges. We plan to release the model weights together with the complete recipe for data construction, training, and evaluation.

Ziyuan Liu, Hengqi Liu, Zichuan Wang et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Data-Optimized Contingency Screening: A Machine Learning Approach to Power System Security

Ensuring the security of the power system is essential for stability and reliability, especially in the event of disruption. Effective classification of contingency in power systems enables proactive decision-making and mitigates large-scale breakdowns and failures. This study explores the use of machine learning algorithms to classify security levels of contingencies in power systems into safe, moderate or severe classes. For this approach, Newton-Raphson load flow method extracts system data from contingency scenarios, using Overall Performance Index (OPI) as safety measure. For data pre-processing, Synthetic Minority Over-Sampling Technique (SMOTE) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is used to address class imbalance and reduce dimensionality, respectively. K-Nearest Neighbours (KNN), Random Forest (RF) and Support Vector Machines (SVM) is trained and evaluated on datasets generated through N-k contingency scenarios for k equal 1, 2, and 3 on IEEE-14 and IEEE-30 bus systems using four hybrid pre-processing configurations: normalized, SMOTE-balanced, PCA-transformed, and a combined SMOTE PCA-transformed. Performance is assessed by precision, recall and F1 score, with priority given to the severe contingency classes. The RF achieved the highest F1 scores of 0.97 in IEEE-30 and 0.86 in IEEE-14, SVM benefits significantly from PCA and improves the accuracy of the classification, while KNN is best suited for SMOTE and PCA conversion. The findings show that PCA contributes more than SMOTE to the overall performance of the model. However, SMOTE improves recall but can introduce false positives and is therefore a compromise of accuracy. This study highlights machine learning as a scalable and powerful alternative to traditional contingency analysis, which improves the assessment of security in real time.

Joshua Salako, Folajimi Osikomaiya, Olakorede Olamiju · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Harbor Adapters and Harbor-Index: Infrastructure and a Curated Meta-Dataset for Large-Scale Agentic Evaluation

Evaluating agents on the growing number of agentic benchmarks is challenging because they often require complex environments and agent integrations. We introduce Harbor Adapters, a unified evaluation infrastructure for agentic benchmarks. Our work makes three contributions. First, we develop benchmark adapters that port more than 80 benchmarks to evaluate arbitrary agents, and validate them through rigorous code review and parity experiments. Second, we conduct a large-scale evaluation of 8 models spanning capability tiers across 54 benchmarks; every model is run with Terminus-2 and with one of 3 native harnesses. This enables a broader analysis of agent capabilities and failure modes than was previously possible. Third, we introduce Harbor-Index, a curated set of 82 difficult, diverse, and high-quality tasks spanning 29 benchmarks, refined from the adapted suite through difficulty filtering, AI and human audit, and an audit-and-fix loop. Harbor-Index preserves the challenge and breadth of large-scale agentic evaluations while being affordable to run; no evaluated model-harness configuration exceeds 30% pass rate, and the strongest (GPT-5.5 with Codex) reaches 28.0%. We release the adapters, evaluation results, in-depth analysis, and Harbor-Index as open-source artifacts to support more reliable and comprehensive evaluation of language-model agents.

Lin Shi (Audrey), Haowei Lin (Audrey), Zixuan Zhu (Audrey) et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

From Matching Models to Recruiting Agents: A Systematized Narrative Review of AI Recruitment Systems, Evaluation, and Governance

Artificial intelligence in recruitment has shifted the object being automated from profile pairs and ranked lists to multi-stage workflows that retrieve evidence, compare candidates, and support or execute actions. This systematized narrative review traces that development from bilateral retrieval and behavioral ranking through neural person--job matching, large language model (LLM) components, and tool-using recruiting agents. Using a purposive search and coding protocol updated through 23 July 2026, plus targeted updates through 2 September 2026, we organize 40 representative works with supporting industrial and legal sources. This synthesis is not a prevalence estimate. We analyze three coupled transitions: from similarity to reciprocal suitability, from a model to a compound workflow, and from offline prediction to evidence- and productivity-aligned evaluation. Across document understanding, retrieval, ranking, assessment, interviewing, sourcing, and human handoff, we distinguish field-, pair-, list-, case-, trajectory-, and outcome-level evidence. Persistent gaps arise because behavioral labels confound exposure, preference, and qualification; private and synthetic data limit external validity; final-output scores conceal pipeline failures; and, within the coded set, privacy is not directly evaluated and no row jointly evaluates utility, fairness, privacy, and security. These observations describe the coded set rather than the field as a whole. We therefore introduce a staged mapping from evaluation evidence to the strongest defensible claim, together with an agenda for reciprocal, evidence-grounded, temporally controlled, selective, and auditable systems. Progress should be judged by whether workflows retrieve the right evidence, preserve uncertainty, support contestable decisions, and improve outcomes under explicit cost and risk constraints.

Ziyi Zhao, Guanzheng Wei · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

EXAONE Forecast for Finance

This technical report presents EXAONE Forecast for Finance (EXAONE Finance), a financial time series (TS) foundation model (TSFM) tailored to financial forecasting. Recent TSFMs achieve strong zero-shot performance through large-scale pretraining. However, they are primarily developed for general-domain TS and largely rely on self-attention backbones whose computational cost grows quadratically with sequence length and variate count. Moreover, they assume fully observed inputs and are pretrained on corpora that fail to capture the unique dynamics of financial markets. These limitations hinder their applicability to finance, where long, many-channel, intermittently observed panels are common. To address these challenges, EXAONE Finance adopts an attention-free architecture, replacing self-attention with two simple yet effective linear-time operators: 1) a causal 1D convolution for temporal mixing and 2) a group-aware pooling multi-layer perceptron (MLP) for variate mixing. Furthermore, a masked context augmentation exposes the model to contiguous missing spans during training, improving robustness to the missingness pervasive in financial markets. EXAONE Finance is pretrained on a large-scale financial corpus covering not only equities but also foreign exchange, commodities, crypto-assets, fixed income, and macroeconomic indicators. On FinVerse, a financial forecasting benchmark covering diverse asset classes, EXAONE Finance attains state-of-the-art performance, ranking first across all three evaluation tiers---point-forecast accuracy, cross-sectional asset ranking, and portfolio profitability.

Seunghan Lee, Jaehoon Lee, Jun Seo et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Open access Dec 2026

Generative artificial intelligence for nanomaterial discovery and nanoengineering: From data-driven design to autonomous laboratories

From conventional trial-and-error experimentation, nanomaterials research is moving toward data-centric and autonomous discovery paradigms that couple nanotechnology with artificial intelligence (AI). In this review, we critically examine how generative artificial intelligence, including generative adversarial networks, variational autoencoders, diffusion models, transformer architectures and large language models, enables inverse design of nanomaterials and supports nanoengineering across diverse application domains. The review provides a structured and critical survey on AI-driven nanomaterial discovery, focusing on studies where generative models explore nanoscale composition–structure spaces and where self-driving laboratories (SDLs) close the loop between design, synthesis, characterization and performance evaluation. We provide a comparative analysis of major generative architectures for nanomaterial tasks, highlighting differences in validity, novelty, diversity, conditional control and computational cost. Representative case studies are discussed in which generative models and autonomous experimentation have led to experimentally validated nanomaterials, such as quantum dots, nano-porous frameworks and functional nanocomposites. A dedicated section analyzes data infrastructures and nano-specific challenges, including size-dependent phenomena, surface and interface dominance, defect sensitivity, nano-bio interactions and dataset bias. Fundamental limitations of artificial intelligence in nanomaterials are examined, covering data scarcity for morphology-rich systems, interpretability, reproducibility, safety and regulatory aspects. Finally, the review outlines research priorities for multimodal foundation models, physics-informed generative frameworks, agentic AI scientists, digital twins (DTs) and next-generation SDLs that can accelerate nanomaterial discovery while remaining scientifically reliable and ethically responsible. Together, these perspectives position generative AI as a key engine for future nanoengineering, provided that nano-specific data ecosystems and rigorous validation workflows are developed alongside algorithmic advances.

Vilas A. Chavan · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Review Open access Sep 2026

Artificial Intelligence and LGBTQI+phobia: Algorithms of Exclusion or Tools of Inclusion?

Abstract Introduction Artificial intelligence (AI) systems increasingly mediate online speech, shaping visibility, participation, and recognition in digital public spaces. For LGBTQI+ communities, AI-based content moderation operates within contexts marked by persistent homophobia and transphobia, raising concerns about bias, exclusion, and uneven protection from harm. This article examines the emerging scientific literature on AI-based moderation of LGBTQI+phobic discourse through the lens of sociotechnical governance. Methods The study employs a bibliometric and sociotechnical mapping approach guided by the PRISMA 2021 framework. A systematic search of the Scopus database identified 23 peer-reviewed publications published between 2020 and 2025. Bibliometric indicators, co-authorship and keyword network analyses were combined with a critical sociotechnical perspective to examine the intellectual structure, epistemic authority, methodological trends, and themes characterising sociotechnical governance in this emerging research field. Results Findings indicate a highly concentrated research field dominated by a small number of countries, institutions, and computational disciplines, reinforcing geopolitical and linguistic asymmetries in scientific production. The literature indicates an increasing research focus on large language models, explainable AI, and counter-narrative generation, reflecting a shift in scholarly attention from hate speech detection to broader approaches to AI-enabled content governance. However, links between AI moderation, mental health, stigma, and well-being remain weakly integrated, and participatory approaches are scarce. Conclusions The bibliometric evidence indicates that the emerging scientific literature increasingly conceptualises AI-based moderation as a form of digital governance with potential implications for LGBTQI+ communities. The mapped literature also highlights persistent concerns regarding accountability, inclusiveness, and interdisciplinary integration, suggesting important directions for future research and policy development. Policy Implications The mapped literature suggests that future policies should promote transparent, auditable, and participatory AI governance, support multilingual and culturally inclusive datasets, and integrate content moderation into broader digital public health and anti-discrimination strategies.

David Ruiz‐Muñoz, Ana María Sánchez Sánchez, Francisca J. Sánchez‐Sánchez · 0 citations

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