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artificial intelligence

2,594 papers

#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

HeadWiseKV: Budgeted Per-Head Cache Residency for Hybrid Long-Context Language Models

Long-context inference retains a growing key--value (KV) cache during decoding, which consumes substantial GPU memory and can reduce generation throughput. This bottleneck remains in hybrid language models because their residual global-attention layers can dominate context-dependent cache demand. We study how to allocate this state under an aggregate KV-residency budget. We introduce HeadWiseKV, a training-free framework that compresses the residual global KV caches of hybrid language models while preserving their native local, recurrent, and linear paths. It assigns each physical KV head a static, multilevel history window, making cache demand predictable before serving. We formulate this allocation as a restricted operational rate--distortion problem and propose SeqCalib as the core policy-generation algorithm in HeadWiseKV. SeqCalib processes layers in execution order and conditions each decision on the lower-layer policy used at deployment, thereby accounting for interactions across depth. A grouped-cache runtime materializes the selected policy as actual per-head KV residency rather than a mask over a full cache. We evaluate downstream quality across four hybrid long-context models and study physical residency and serving behavior on Qwen3.6-27B. HeadWiseKV retains near-Full-KV RULER and LoCoMo quality across the evaluated models. In the fixed-model systems study, it reduces sampled peak device memory by 8.59\% at a 112K context length and extends the largest verified successful context from 114K to 161K.

Renjie Xie, Juncheng Yang, Aoting Hu et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

ClaimReceipt: Verifying Evidence Sufficiency and Coverage in Agent Evaluations

Agent evaluations face two distinct evidentiary questions: whether a reported claim is recomputable from retained evidence (sufficiency), and whether the retained records cover the committed experiment set (coverage). Generic logs and hash-linked transcripts answer neither reliably. We introduce ClaimReceipt, a claim-relative receipt specification and selective verifier that binds typed transaction evidence to a signed experiment manifest and returns PASS, INVALID, or INCONCLUSIVE per claim. We freeze the specification before implementation (SHA-256 18d109...b81). On 1,392 historical buyer--seller records, a CR-2 verifier reproduces all five manually labeled audit verdicts, exactly replays 600 deterministic and 792 post-generation records, makes every one of 13 declared field groups non-redundant under tested ablations, and returns the expected result on 11/11 semantic faults with 0/8 false positives. We then run a separate prospective CR-3 epoch: 30 assignments are committed before inference, terminal receipts are signed and chained, and private evidence is encrypted for an auditor. Complete evidence yields coverage and accounting PASS; withholding one terminal receipt returns INCONCLUSIVE_COVERAGE, while withholding all private openings preserves coverage and protocol verification but makes economic claims inconclusive, exactly matching a preregistered prediction. Receipt instrumentation adds 0.021% of model-inference time and 9.9 KB per transaction. A specification-legibility probe indicates that our own frozen specification is not yet unambiguous to an independent reader. Claim verification therefore requires both claim-sufficient evidence and a committed universe against which omissions become visible.

Peiying Zhu, Sidi Chang · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

When Agents Implement Systems: A Case Study in Defects, Detection, and Evaluation Rigor

As LLM coding agents increasingly perform end-to-end engineering work, we lack empirical characterization of how they behave on systems-level requirements: schema design, async orchestration, configuration correctness, and retrieval-filtering trade-offs. We present a case study of one such agent implementing a multi-component data system against a detailed pre-existing specification. Storage technologies, schema, entity-resolution algorithm, and retrieval-filtering strategy were fixed in advance; the agent autonomy was in the implementation, in diagnosing and fixing defects it introduced, and in interaction-design choices left open. Over a single session, we catalog five such defects, categorized by constraint violated and detection method. We further evaluate, on the public HotpotQA benchmark, the one retrieval trade-off specified in that architecture: restricting candidates to a graph-identified entity set before ranking versus unfiltered search. We substitute the benchmark gold evidence labels for entity identification, since we lacked LLM access to run that stage, and report standard recall rather than the benchmark own accuracy metrics. Across retrieval budgets from 1 to 10 and 100 questions against a pooled corpus of 2994 paragraphs, filtered recall reaches its ceiling by a budget of 3, expected once candidates are restricted to the gold paragraphs themselves, while unfiltered search recovers all required evidence only 69 percent of the time even at a budget of 10, a gap that holds at every budget tested, with sign test p less than 0.0001. We close with a discussion of where the agent autonomy succeeded versus required correction, including one instance where a claimed performance fix was never re-measured on the regression that motivated it.

Phanindra Reddy Madduru · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

Benchmarking Language Models for Statistical Problem Formulation

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as assistants for statistical and data science work, yet existing evaluations largely assume the analysis target is already specified. In practice, users arrive with informal goals and heterogeneous data, leaving the model to decide what statistical task is implied and which data are relevant. We first formalize this upstream step as Statistical Problem Formulation and decompose it into two subtasks: (1) Statistical Problem Classification and (2) Variable Identification&Role Assignment. We then introduce StatFormBench, a benchmark built from five cross-domain statistics textbooks and a data science case library, covering diverse problem types, data representations, and scenario styles. It contains 1,013 samples spanning 20 coarse-grained and 85 fine-grained statistical problem categories. Across 14 open- and closed-source LLMs, the best zero-shot models reach only 72.0 fine-grained classification accuracy and 63.2 variable set overlap. No model performs consistently best across the two subtasks, while enhanced prompting strategies yield only limited or inconsistent gains. We release the benchmark data on Hugging Face at https://huggingface.co/datasets/THU-CongLab/StatFormBench and the evaluation code on GitHub at https://github.com/THU-CongLab/StatFormBench.

Chen Wang, Jun-Zhe Zhao, Xin Cong et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

Post-Training Ternarization of Qwen3-4B Capability, Effective Bit Budget, Storage Compression, and Deployment

Ultra-low-bit language models can reduce storage and memory bandwidth, but a nominal"1.58-bit"label does not fully describe the stored representation, retained capability, or runtime behavior. We study an end-to-end post-training conversion of Qwen, an instruction-tuned 4B-parameter model, using KOTMS rotation, E2M-ATQ ternarization, and GPTQ-style error compensation from TWLA. The experiment is weight-only: activations remain at 16-bit precision, so ILA-AMP is omitted. We evaluate effective bit accounting, task capability retention, perplexity, calibration sensitivity, checkpoint composition, and deployment behavior. The final conversion uses 1.641 effective bits per weight for quantized linear weights, with 81.62% of model parameters targeted. Across ten scored capability comparisons, accuracy falls from 64.5% to 54.7%. Degradation is uneven: BoolQ retains 84.6% chance-corrected teacher performance, while ARC-Challenge retains 43.8%. Perplexity rises from 13.639 to 18.748 on WikiText-2, 24.700 to 31.992 on PTB, and 19.831 to 28.966 on C4. A subsequent packing run preserves the ternary planes and scales, reducing reported model size from 8.29 GiB to 3.96 GiB with essentially unchanged perplexity. A separate third-party packing attempt was lossy and is excluded from the primary artifact claim. The packed artifact has not been benchmarked end-to-end for task accuracy or generation throughput. A preliminary Triton GEMV microbenchmark is 4.6x slower than FP16 cuBLAS on one tested shape. We therefore do not claim that compression alone yields faster inference.

AI OneBit, A. Malik, Poojith et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Looped Transformers under the Jacobian Lens: Does the Global Workspace Survive Recurrence?

Recent work identifies a mid-depth band of verbalisable, causally potent representations in a standard feedforward transformer --- a functional analogue of a global workspace. Whether the same workspace functionality emerges when depth is implemented through recurrence rather than a stack of distinct layers remains unknown. Looped and depth-recurrent transformers provide a direct test of this question because they reuse the same weights across depth. We extend the Jacobian lens to iterated architectures using a virtual-unrolling adapter. We apply the full workspace suite --- lens fitting, readout, and eleven causal experiment families --- to Ouro-2.6B (48 layers looped 4 times, deeply supervised) and Huginn-0125 (a 4-layer core recurred 16 times, trained for latent reasoning), using Qwen3.6-27B (64 untied layers) as the standard baseline. We find that a workspace forms in the iterated part of each architecture, but that recurrence changes how it can be accessed. Ouro reconstructs workspace content in every loop, and linear transport cannot carry that content across loop boundaries; writes and ablations must therefore span every remaining loop. Huginn carries content forward across all sixteen recurrences, while reads, writes, and ablations act only within a sliding window of roughly two recurrences. Whether newly injected content can be verbalised tracks explicit per-iteration supervision; whether existing content can be steered does not.

Wenlong Wang, Fergal Reid · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

The Ceiling Is in the Channel: Auditing Learner Gaps and Measurement Frontiers in Clinical Prediction

Clinical prediction can saturate for two different reasons: a fitted learner may fail to extract available information, or the recorded variables may impose a population frontier. We separate these quantities through the \emph{learner gap} and the \emph{measurement-channel ceiling}. Optimal balanced accuracy is characterized by total-variation separation, yielding architecture invariance, a sharp partial-identification result under replacement contamination, a cross-fitted ceiling estimator, and exact conditions for multimodal decision improvement. We add two finite-sample diagnostics, namely a label-permutation optimism floor and an underfit curve, and validate the audit on three real cohorts: UCI readmission ($n=99{,}343$), BRFSS diabetes ($n=253{,}680$), and NHANES HbA1c ($n=10{,}219$). Well-tuned gradient boosting nearly reaches the estimated frontier in UCI and BRFSS, whereas deliberately or practically deficient learners retain large gaps. NHANES yields a null difference between questionnaire and measured marginal frontiers but a significant joint complementarity gain, refining the simplistic claim that an objective modality must dominate. Across all cohorts, modest AUROC gains coexist with substantially larger Bayes decision-flip rates, and several architectures estimate similar frontiers while their achieved balanced accuracy differs sharply. A PRISMA-guided synthesis of 104 clinical tasks then shows that the same channel-level regularities recur across more than 18 disease categories: a broad but non-universal structured-clinical region, diminishing same-channel gains across model families, and higher performance when measurement channels change. The framework converts saturation from an empirical observation into an auditable decision: improve the learner when headroom remains; improve measurement when it does not.

Sayeed Shafayet Chowdhury, Nusrat Jahan, Snehasis Mukhopadhyay et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Epistemic Sybil Resistance: Multiplying AI Agents Without Multiplying Evidence

Multi-agent AI systems improve inference by spawning agents and synthesizing reports. But another agent is not another observation: apparently independent reports may descend from the same evidence, and genuinely independent evidence can produce nearly identical reports. We formalize this as an epistemic Sybil problem. A report Z is an epistemic Sybil extension relative to reports R when I(Theta; Z | R) = 0. No report-only aggregator can generally distinguish replication from independent corroboration: identical reports can warrant different posteriors under unobserved ancestry. A Gaussian shared-root model shows common ancestry does not imply complete redundancy. Repeated extraction adds information toward a source-level ceiling, and correlated extraction errors, which a shared base model can induce among independent agents, lower that ceiling further. We test these predictions with more than 20,000 controlled LLM-agent report and extraction calls on synthetic evidentiary documents. Holding one evidence root fixed while report multiplicity rises from 1 to 32 collapses naive posterior coverage from 0.940 to 0.263. Holding report count fixed while evidence-root multiplicity rises from 1 to 16 closes the gap, and the aggregators are statistically indistinguishable at k = 16. The agent's replicate extraction errors are correlated (gamma_cal = 0.719, estimated out of sample), and a correlated-extraction aggregator restores calibration accordingly. A controlled manipulation isolates representation similarity from evidential ancestry. It changes a report-space deduplication mechanism's mean inferred cluster count by 1.425 (95% CI [1.363, 1.485]), whereas a fourfold change in true ancestry changes it by only 0.040 ([-0.045, 0.120]). Collective inference should therefore track evidential ancestry and dependence, not agent or report multiplicity or similarity.

Marc Bara · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Belief-Calibrated Optimization: An Explicit World Model for Agentic Optimization

The performance of an LLM agent depends on the scaffold around a frozen model. A common way to improve that scaffold is to use a coding agent as an optimizer: it reads current scores and traces and iteratively edits the source, producing a new candidate each round. Each edit is chosen according to a belief about how the environment will respond: what went wrong, and which change should help. That belief is typically implicit. It lives in the coding agent's reasoning on the current call, or remains latent in its parameters, rather than as something written down. Later calls therefore see scores and traces, but they do not use that belief. We introduce Belief-Calibrated Optimization (BCO), a method that writes that belief down as a persistent in-context document and continually revises that document as new candidates are evaluated. The resulting document is a world model: the current account of how the environment responds to edits. Added to an otherwise standard loop, BCO reaches a higher train passrate than a matched control that lacks only the world model, on five benchmarks spanning memory QA, tool-use QA, code-as-action app agents, and terminal agents. The gap remains on every held-out split, which is not used to select the candidate. After a target-model swap, in which the frozen model is replaced and the scaffold is not, the selected BCO scaffold leads on the tasks we test, except where context-window overruns leave it unfinished. An offline ablation then asks whether that gap comes from what the world model says. A fresh predictor given the accumulated document forecasts how the environment will respond more accurately than predictors given either no document or a same-form copy whose content has been falsified. The comparison indicates that the document carries reusable information in its content, not only in its form.

Yuhan Chen, Zhihua Tian, Mahavir Dabas et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

The Memory Trust Gap: Capability-Dependent Failures in Persistent-Memory Agents

Persistent memory supports personalized agents, but a stale stored fact can override current authoritative evidence without warning. We study when this harm begins as model capability changes. We evaluate a frozen, closed-set, action-scored benchmark with 2 suites that represent 2 different meanings of "no memory" (a Benefit suite, unsolvable without the stored fact, and a Safety suite, in which an authoritative tool always holds the correct value), on a same-family model-size series (Qwen3 0.6/1.7/4/8B). The Memory Trust Gap reflects over-trust rather than confusion. In the Benefit suite, models answer with the stale value 0.92-1.00 of the time at every scale. In the Safety suite, harm below the no-memory baseline under the trap conditions ($\Delta_{\mathrm{mem}}$) is capability-gated, with the larger models collapsing most once a stale note is made to look current. In a $2\times2\times2\times2$ factorial, which feature triggers over-trust depends on both the feature and model scale. Removing a label amplifies over-trust at every size, and a recency feature (stale dated newer) fools the larger models harder. Source authority is weak and scale-flat, and position changes from positive to negative across the Qwen3 model-size series. We confirm these scale interactions with direct cross-size contrast tests rather than overlapping per-model intervals. Mitigation is likewise capability-dependent: exposing metadata improves accuracy for the capable models, but only pre-resolving the conflict restores accuracy for the 2 smaller checkpoints. The same pattern appears on the capable models in an independent Llama-Instruct model-size series and on 2 external datasets (RGB, MisBench). A framing control finds no consistent advantage for the memory label: at the 3 smaller scales, models trust a stale document more than a stale memory; at 8B, the difference is not significant.

Jundong Hu, Shekar Ramachandran · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

SSAKG 2.0: An Open-Source Package for Structural Associative Sequence Memory and Context-Based Retrieval

This article presents SSAKG 2.0, an open-source software package for constructing and operating Structural Sequential Associative Knowledge Graphs (SSAKGs). An SSAKG represents objects as graph vertices and ordered sequences as structural patterns of graph connections. The resulting sparse graph is used as an associative memory in which complete sequences can be reconstructed from a partial, unordered context. Version 2.0 introduces new algorithms that exploit individual bits of computer memory to efficiently search graph connections. The package is implemented in Python, while performance-critical graph operations are implemented in C and exposed through a Python interface. This hybrid implementation provides a flexible high-level programming environment while reducing the memory and computational overhead associated with large sparse graphs. The algorithms were evaluated using randomly generated numerical sequences, sequences derived from sentences in the NLTK corpus, and mRNA sequences. The experiments demonstrate the ability of the package to store and reconstruct sequences from partial contexts and provide a basis for evaluating the effects of graph density, sequence length, and memory size on retrieval performance. SSAKG 2.0 is distributed under the Apache 2.0 open-source license. The package includes documentation and reproducible examples and is publicly available through GitHub and the Python Package Index (PyPI).

Przemys{\l}aw Stok{\l}osa, Janusz A. Starzyk, Pawe{\l} Raif · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Architecting Conversational Data Systems for Stateless LLM APIs: The Hydration Proxy Pattern

As enterprise platforms transition to conversational reasoning interfaces, the stateless nature of LLM APIs creates an architectural gap. While statelessness enables horizontal scalability for AI providers, it forces client applications to manage the entire burden of conversational state and semantic memory. The work identifies the Hydration Proxy Pattern, an architecture that decouples session persistence from the reasoning engine. The framework ensures platform sovereignty over conversational data while enabling secure, multi-stage semantic grounding. We further propose the Context Stabilization Mandate to resolve the tradeoff between sovereign state management and KV caching.

Joseph Axisa · 0 citations

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