Research Papers

arXiv:2605.28354v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training large language models as retrieval-augmented reasoning agents typically combines reinforcement learning with an SFT cold start distilled from a stronger model. However, this paradigm overlooks two fundamental factors: the dependency structure among sub-skills, and the possibility that distillation is not the only route to capability acquisition. We study this through Plan, a structured agentic behavior for multi-hop retrieval that decomposes a question into ordered sub-questions before any retrieval is performed, so that each search step can be anchored to a pre-designed sub-question instead of drifting under the influence of partially relevant documents retrieved earlier. However, across three model families spanning 3B to 14B parameters, we find that an identical reward signal induces qualitatively different RL failure modes. This phenomenon indicates that successful training hinges not only on reward design but also on model-s

arXiv:2605.28359v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating whether large language model (LLM) agents can profit in capital markets is increasingly framed as end-to-end trading: place an agent in a historical market, let it trade, and measure portfolio returns. This setup is vulnerable to two evaluation failures. First, long backtests often overlap with the knowledge cutoffs of frontier LLMs, allowing memorized tickers, dates, prices, and market narratives to substitute for investment reasoning. Second, raw returns are a noisy proxy for stock-selection ability, since positive performance may come from market beta, style exposure, or favorable regimes rather than genuine alpha. We introduce KTD-Fin (Knowing-To-Doing Financial Benchmark), an end-to-end stock-market trading benchmark that addresses both issues. KTD-Fin uses a data-side masking protocol to anonymize key identifiers and calendar information consistently across prompts and tools, separating historical market memory from inves

arXiv:2605.28360v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automatic prompt optimization (APO) has driven significant gains in LLM-based agentic workflows. However, existing methods treat each task's prompt as a monolithic, instance-blind string optimized through global edits, producing brittle updates and preventing the reuse of learned sub-behaviors. We propose Prompt Codebooks (PCO), a novel compositional prompt optimization framework that recasts APO as discrete learning over a finite vocabulary of natural-language instincts - atomic, reusable instruction units. PCO organizes prompt-construction knowledge in a discrete codebook and routes each input to a small subset of entries via an LLM-based encoder; a generator composes them into a prompt for the frozen target model; a critic emits a structured verdict that decomposes by attribution into per-variable textual gradients, jointly training the encoder, generator, and codebook under a language-valued min-max objective. The resulting routing is

arXiv:2605.28369v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: E-commerce platforms have begun recruiting crowdsourced jurors to adjudicate massive volumes of transaction disputes. Unlike formal legal judgment, E-commerce dispute verdicts require grounding pivotal clues from redundant, multi-round, multimodal evidence and making decisions under flexible platform-specific conventions. These characteristics render existing methods insufficient for this scenario. To bridge this gap, we introduce a pioneering task, E-commerce Dispute Verdicts (EDV), and present VerdictBench, a multimodal benchmark comprising 6,000 real-world cases designed to reflect crowdsourced jury decisions. Building upon this, we propose CyberJurors, a multi-agent framework to clarify the dispute logic and regulate the verdict process. At the individual level, Individual Verdict Chain-of-Thought decomposes the EDV task into four structured reasoning stages, enabling fine-grained clue perception and clarifying causal logic between pi

arXiv:2605.28371v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Industrial Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) provides a representative case study for a broader challenge in applied machine learning: translating published papers into executable, benchmark-ready implementations. Reproducing under-specified methods in PHM is particularly difficult due to restricted access to industrial datasets, incomplete reporting of preprocessing and evaluation protocols, and implicit design choices (e.g., windowing, target construction, data splits) that critically affect performance. Existing paper-to-code systems generate implementations for individual papers, but these artifacts are often not directly comparable due to inconsistencies in assumptions and evaluation settings. We introduce \emph{agentic, framework-based PHM paper reproduction}, where an agent translates a paper into a shared PHM benchmark framework via a \emph{slot-binding interface}. This interface maps equations and protocol descriptions into

arXiv:2605.28388v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) is empirically shown to notably enhance the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs), particularly in mathematics and programming. However, the mechanistic role of Sample Difficulty in RLVR remains poorly understood. In this paper, we investigate RLVR through the lens of difficulty-wise and one-sample analysis. We find that sample difficulty has a non-monotonic effect on RLVR: easy and medium-difficulty problems yield the strongest and most stable reasoning improvements, whereas overly hard problems often provide weak learning signals, induce degenerate behaviors such as answer repetition or skipping necessary computation, and can ultimately degrade the model's pre-existing capabilities. Beyond the obverse of response, we further analyze the model's internal feature dynamics using Temporal Sparse Autoencoders (T-SAE). Easy problems mainly reinforce direct-answer and basic-c

arXiv:2605.28390v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Test-time skill evolving is regarded as a new paradigm for enhancing deployed agentic systems. Existing works mainly focus on hard-coded skill evolving strategies or parametric learning that rely on expensive parameter updates in the underlying LLMs. In this paper, we demonstrate that test-time refinement of the skill evolving framework itself is necessary for continuous improvement of the agent systems in different downstream scenarios, and lightweight algorithmic adaptation is feasible. Specifically, we propose HiSME, a lightweight hierarchical skill meta-evolving solution that jointly optimizes skills and the skill evolving strategy by learning meta-skills from agents' task execution traces. Experiments on diverse agentic benchmarks show that meta-evolving can produce a higher-quality skill library than pure skill evolving and can derive diverse meta-skills for different scenarios, thereby facilitating future continual experience learn

arXiv:2605.28398v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hybrid-reasoning large language models (LLMs) expose explicit controls over reasoning effort, allowing users or systems to trade off answer quality against inference cost. However, existing methods for adaptive thinking-mode selection are typically evaluated under different models, datasets, and implementation assumptions, making it difficult to compare their practical behavior. We introduce HRBench, a unified evaluation framework for studying thinking-mode switching in hybrid-reasoning LLMs. HRBench organizes the design space along two axes: three switching strategy families, prompt-based selection, external routing, and speculative execution, and four training regimes, training-free, SFT, offline and online RL, yielding 12 controlled evaluation settings. We evaluate these settings across 6 LLMs, from Qwen3.5-2B to Kimi-K2.5-1.1T, and 5 reasoning benchmarks covering mathematics, science, and code, while reimplementing 12+ representative

arXiv:2605.28409v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training using online reinforcement learning (RL) is an important training step for LLMs, including code-generating models. However, online RL for code generation involves LLM inference and verification of the generated output, which can take considerable time and resources. In this paper, we explore the application of offline RL to code-generating models by leveraging existing code datasets. Our experiments demonstrate that offline RL is an effective training strategy for improving LLM performance. We show that offline RL can be especially beneficial for small LLMs and challenging coding problems.

arXiv:2605.28456v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing Visual Speech Recognition (VSR) systems commonly rely on left-to-right autoregressive decoding, which can force premature decisions on visually ambiguous tokens before sufficient context is available. We propose DLLM-VSR, to the best of our knowledge, the first Diffusion Large Language Model (DLLM)-based VSR framework, formulating transcription as iterative masked denoising with flexible-order decoding. With confidence-based unmasking, DLLM-VSR commits high-confidence positions early and uses the committed tokens as bidirectional context to refine ambiguous ones. To adapt DLLMs to VSR, we introduce a two-stage masked-denoising training strategy that separates visual-to-text content alignment from length modeling. We further observe a performance gap with oracle-length decoding, which assumes access to the true transcript length, indicating that reducing target-length uncertainty can improve DLLM-based VSR. To reduce this gap, we

arXiv:2605.28483v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Linking learning resources to a structured competency framework is key to enabling competency-based search and curriculum analytics in Learning Management Systems (LMS). However, manual tagging is labor-intensive, and fully automatic methods often lack transparency. In this paper, we present an end-to-end alignment pipeline that uses a large language model (LLM) as a constrained, evidence-producing tagger. LMS resources -both instructional content and assessments -are first segmented into meaningful pedagogical fragments. For each fragment, a small set of candidate competencies is retrieved from structured competency profiles enriched with graph-based context. The LLM then selects the most relevant competencies from this set and provides supporting evidence spans from the fragment text. These predictions are refined using the structure of the competency graph and aggregated at the resource level. We evaluate our approach on a dataset buil

arXiv:2605.28520v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurately forecasting the impact of salient financial events on markets is critical for investors and policymakers. However, existing multimodal time-series models typically fuse text and prices symmetrically, without an explicit way to decide when event text is truly predictive, and thus struggle to exploit the directional event-to-price structure and the heterogeneous roles of textual and price signals. In this work, we propose GS-Fuse, a multimodal event-based forecasting framework that employs (i) a Granger-supervised, causal-aware gated fusion module, which learns to open toward event text only when it provides incremental predictive value beyond historical prices, and (ii) a multi-granularity alignment mechanism that jointly aligns high-level event representations and fine-grained textual cues with future market trajectories. Built as a flexible, plug-and-play adapter on top of off-the-shelf large language models and time-series fo

arXiv:2605.28524v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great capability in processing graph tasks such as fraud detection. However, most existing methods rely heavily on rich text attributes, which poses difficulties for this domain due to the lack of textual data. Although some pioneering methods attempt to overcome it, their textualization of graph structures via hard prompts easily leads to feature distortion. Additionally, fraud detection often exhibits multi-relational complexity, where current methods struggle to capture this deep semantic information. To address these challenges, we propose LLM-GNN Soft Prompt Framework (LGSPF). Specifically, LGSPF bridges the graph structure and semantic space using soft prompt to eliminate reliance on text. We further introduce a parallel Graph Neural Network (GNN) encoder to translate multi-relational topologies into graph tokens for fine-grained LLM fraud comprehension. Through end-to-end opt

arXiv:2605.28526v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Masked language modeling has become a standard pretraining objective for training encoder-based language models. In this approach, certain tokens in the input are masked, and the model learns to predict them using the surrounding context. This process enables the model to capture both syntactic and semantic properties of language. Conventionally, the tokens selected for masking are chosen at random, which may not always yield the most effective learning signals. In this work, we examine a token masking strategy based on entropy distribution. We use the model's entropy over token predictions to identify which tokens should be masked. This method aims to target tokens that are more informative and uncertain to improve the training efficacy. We also propose a novel self-masking approach that enhances training efficiency without relying on an external reference model. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves an average perfor

arXiv:2605.27666v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As AI systems become increasingly conversational, a gap emerges wherein explanations are studied as static artifacts, yet in practice, are experienced as dialogue. In this provocation, we argue that the conversational layer around an explanation is not incidental to its effectiveness, but a critical constituent. Drawing on three illustrative scenarios, we invite the CUI community to study explanations as interactive, conversational exchanges shaped by timing, tone, persona and conversational history, and introduce our vision for Human-Centered Conversational XAI (HC2XAI).