freshcrate
Skin:/

freshcrate research — Latest AI Agent Papers & Models

Live from arXiv and HuggingFace. Cached 1 hour. new= published within 7 days. Abstract links expand inline. PwC = Papers With Code.

Agent Research

  • arXivYanzhe Chen et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    Foundation vision-language models (VLMs) exhibit broad intelligence about the world, yet translating this intelligence into robot control remains challenging. We present Show-Harness, an Embodied Harness that enables VLMs to "play" robots through a compact semantic interface linking intent to action. Show-Harness exposes discrete semantic action units that VLMs can naturally reason over, while embodiment-specific interpreters deterministically ground them into local robot actions, keeping the VL

  • arXivZixiang Chen et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    Real-world GUI usage frequently involves workflows that span multiple devices and platforms, requiring the transfer of intermediate results, maintenance of shared state, and coordination across heterogeneous environments. However, existing GUI benchmarks overwhelmingly evaluate agents on single-device, statically defined tasks, thus leaving such cross-device capabilities largely unexamined, resulting in an overly optimistic assessment of agents' readiness for real-world usage. We introduce Jarvi

  • arXivRui Sun et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has advanced language-model reasoning in domains such as mathematics and code, where objective answers are inexpensive to check. Diagnostic reasoning over complex data lacks this advantage: establishing the true cause of an anomaly often requires costly expert investigation and may remain ambiguous after the fact. We ask whether this asymmetry of verification can instead be engineered. We sample an intervention, inject it into a controlled si

  • arXivChen Qian et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    In high-stakes domains such as legal practice, a language-model answer is only useful to the extent that a reader can verify each claim against the source the system cites. Current grounded-generation pipelines score the answer as a whole, so a correct conclusion can rest on fabricated or loosely matched citations and still score well. Closing this gap requires both a system built for per-claim verification and an evaluation that measures it. We introduce GANDR (Grounded ANswer DRafter), a two-a

  • arXivYuhang Li et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    Persistent language agents need stored experience to remain available across time, while each answer requires evidence suited to a particular question. A superseded fact can mislead a current-state answer and still be essential for a historical query. We present RD-Forget, a training-free framework that separates what an agent stores from what it uses. A retained source archive preserves observations, and a query-conditioned memory view controls their influence on the current answer. A frozen la

  • arXivMark Marron et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    Traditional software delivery assumes a static paradigm: code is constructed prior to execution and deployed as a fixed artifact. We present Agentic Just-In-Time Software Construction (A-JIT), a paradigm that replaces static binaries with dynamic, software systems that can perpetually evolve to meet changing demands. In A-JIT, an application is an integrated assembly comprising code, a runtime harness, and an embedded AI agent that continuously observes system usage and live execution traces. Mu

  • arXivTianzhu Zhang et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    AI agents are increasingly involved in network automation, where they can initiate configuration changes through mediated operational interfaces and assess the resulting state. Nonetheless, operational networks usually span many devices and administrative domains. Realizing an operator's intent requires coordinating agents with distinct authority scopes that define the resources they can access, the operations they can invoke, and the network state they can observe. This division limits the blas

  • arXivRyan Lum et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    AI systems become more useful when they can adapt to the people using them, but in multi-agent systems, useful context learned by one agent often remains unavailable to others. We present kernel-managed shared memory, a system-level abstraction in which specialized agents write structured, tagged memories while the agent-system kernel, not individual agents, governs retrieval, privacy enforcement, and prompt injection. We implement and evaluate this design on AIOS and compare it against three al

LLM & Foundation Models

  • arXivYiling Ma et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    A research idea may be novel, coherent, and scientifically plausible, yet its proposed method may remain insufficiently specified for faithful implementation. We study the codification readiness of implementation-facing research-method specifications, defined by whether they provide sufficient methodological information for a competent implementer or coding agent to construct the intended method without unsupported assumptions. We construct evidence-grounded specifications and their supported re

  • arXivBlake Stenstrom et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    Enterprises deploy systems, not checkpoints. Usable capability depends jointly on weights, serving route, precision, output contract, and harness, yet all 18 audited benchmarks score advertised model identifiers. We treat this as measurement error and give a protocol that makes it reportable. It has three parts. A gold-blind capability-binding preflight verifies that a route can execute the evaluation contract before any task reaches it; a reliability-inclusive first-pass scoring rule keeps fail

  • arXivMehrnaz Mofakhami et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    Reasoning language models have made substantial advances on a variety of complex tasks, yet their capabilities remain overwhelmingly English-centric: models primarily reason in English regardless of the language they are prompted in. This is inaccessible for non-English-speaking users, risks losing the intent of the original question, and forgoes knowledge more readily expressed in the target language. In this work, we advance L2 reasoning, the ability of a model to reason consistently in the la

  • arXivHongming Zhang et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities, they often struggle with extremely long contexts due to fixed context limits. To address this, sequential approaches like MemAgent extend the effective context by reading text in segments and iteratively updating a fixed-size memory. However, this sequential paradigm suffers from high latency and requires costly reinforcement learning (RL) training, which can lead to overfitting on specific datasets. To overcome these

  • arXivRobin Huo et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    Self-supervised speech foundation models are now used in a wide array of downstream applications, including traditional speech recognition and as the basis for tokens in speech-aware language models. Attempts to understand their usefulness have largely focused on probing their representations' ability to discriminate phonemes and words. However, discriminative ability for words need not imply specialized representation of words per se. Good discrimination of words may be explained by good encodi

  • arXivAyan Majumdar et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    The growing complexity of content moderation policies presents a critical challenge for their consistent operationalization. While foundation models possess the basic capabilities needed to confront this challenge, whether they can reliably moderate online content remains an unanswered question. In this paper, we systematically compare two competing paradigms for Vision-Language Model (VLM) guidance: an instruction-driven approach where models reason from policy precepts, and an example-driven a

  • arXivLinghan Zhong et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    Exception Related Code (ERC), which includes throw statements, conditions (if statements) that guard those throw statements, and try/catch blocks, is an essential component of software systems, allowing developers to detect and handle exceptional states that deviate from the expected program behavior. However, manually writing ERC across large codebases is tedious. We propose a novel task: retrofitting existing code with ERC. Namely, given code (without ERC) and Exceptional Behavior Tests (EBTs)

  • arXivNada Esmaeil et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    This paper describes the Rosetta system for Subtask 1 (Context-Aware English-to-Dialectal Arabic Dialogue Translation) of the AlexandriaX shared task, participating in both constrained and unconstrained tracks. The approach fine-tunes a LoRA adapter on NileChat-3B using structured system/user prompts that condition generation on dialect and dialogue context. For the unconstrained track, the adapter is additionally pretrained on MADAR and PADIC. Rosetta ranked 4th in the constrained track (spBLEU

Machine Learning (cs.LG)

  • arXivPhil Assheton et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    We present a simple decomposition of a neural-network-based normalizing flow that naturally uncovers a pivotal statistic (or something close) in the presence of nuisance parameters, based only on a sample generator from the distribution of interest. We show that the statistic is near-pivotal in the sense of minimum average KL-divergence of its $p$-values versus uniform and we argue that it can be expected to have good power when the dimension of the statistic equals the dimension of the paramete

  • arXivP. M. Aronow et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    We prove the gap-entropy conjecture for fixed-confidence best-arm identification with independent unit-variance Gaussian arms, means in $[0,1]$, and a unique optimal arm. For each suboptimal arm $i$, let $Δ_i=μ_*-μ_i$ be its gap from the optimal mean, and write $H=\sum_{i\ne *}Δ_i^{-2}$. Let $p_r$ be the fraction of $H$ contributed by arms with $2^{-(r+1)}<Δ_i\le2^{-r}$, and let $\mathrm{Ent}(I)=\sum_{r:p_r>0} p_r\log(1/p_r)$. Among all algorithms that identify the optimal arm with probabi

  • arXivXiaoyu Li et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    Language generation in the limit asks for valid unseen elements from every exhaustive positive presentation of an unknown infinite language. We characterize this task for arbitrary families over a countable universe. Generation is possible exactly when each target can be assigned a finite positive witness so that the targets activated by any finite sample have an infinite common intersection. The necessary direction follows from a universal normalization: a search through unconfirmed histories c

  • arXivAshwin Nayak et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    We determine the optimal sample complexity of low-rank quantum state tomography when each measurement may act jointly on at most $t$ samples. For sufficiently small $\varepsilon$, estimating an unknown state on $\mathbb{C}^d$ of rank at most $r$ to trace norm error $\varepsilon$ with constant success probability requires, and is achievable with, $$ Θ\left( \frac{dr}{\varepsilon^2} \max\left\{1,\frac r{\sqrt t}\right\} \right)$$ samples. The lower bound allows the protocol to choose each joint me

  • arXivMenachem Finkelstein et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    Credit default prediction is a tabular classification problem in which modest gains in F1 translate directly into reduced financial exposure. We ask whether Instantaneous Quantum Polynomial-time (IQP) circuits can produce features that improve a classifier over both its raw classical baseline and Kernel PCA - the strongest unsupervised classical non-linear alternative - at an equal feature budget. The dataset provides 23 financial attributes per client; for an n-qubit circuit we select n of them

  • arXivSiddharth Gupta et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    In real-time colonoscopy, ground-truth annotations are unavailable at inference, so polyp segmentation models can fail silently. We propose Referee-Based Quality Estimation (RBQE), a reference-free framework measuring agreement between a primary segmentation model and an independently trained referee on the same image. RBQE is evaluated on a standardized 1,223-image external benchmark drawn from four public datasets, using four referee configurations chosen to separate two design axes: referee i

Retrieval & RAG

  • arXivKostia Kudriavtsev et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    Enterprise data lakes accumulate tables faster than human stewards can document or classify them, leaving columns with missing descriptions and unassigned governance labels. This documentation debt undermines data discovery, access control, and regulatory compliance. We present Glyph, a production system that frames two coupled problems, column description generation and column type annotation for data classification, as cooperating LLM agents orchestrated as stateful graphs. The Descriptor grou

  • arXivLin Huang et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    We present the PACE, a framework for retrieval-augmented dialogue serving that formalizes Perceived Time-to-First-Response (PTFR) as a QoE objective and minimizes it under quality/cost constraints. Unlike prior work on cascaded routing, semantic caching, or adaptive retrieval, PACE jointly controls which answer source composes the response and what fills the waiting window. Deployed on a humanoid-robot sales service, it combines three mechanisms: a load-adaptive cascading router, a joint path-fi

  • arXivXi Shi et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    LLM serving systems already reuse KV caches, but only when the reused text sits at the very start of the prompt. Two growing workloads break this condition: a retrieval-augmented generation server assembles a different set of retrieved chunks for every query, and a multi-agent coordinator reads reports written by other agents. Reused inside a new prompt, a cache carries the wrong positions and never attended to the other sources. The cache may also have been written by a different checkpoint of

  • arXivDaniel Alejandro Coll Tejeda et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    Graph-based retrieval can improve multi-hop question answering, but existing approaches often incur high query-time costs and produce diffuse, oversized contexts that reduce generation efficiency. We present LiteRAG, a graph-based retrieval method that replaces expensive retrieval-time LLM control with query-conditioned algorithmic exploration and reasoning-chain context construction. On DistComp, a benchmark for multi-hop retrieval over distributed-systems papers, LiteRAG attains the highest ov

  • arXivArquimedes Canedo et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    A graph retrieval-augmented generation pipeline chooses which triples to put in the prompt, a syntax to write them in, an order to write them in, and a sentence telling the model what to do with them. We vary all four over six large language models and two knowledge-graph question answering benchmarks. Two of the four choices move the answer and the other two are flat. The first is whether the answer path, the triples needed to reach the answer, is in the prompt at all. Holding the number of tri

Code Generation

  • arXivLinghan Zhong et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    Exception Related Code (ERC), which includes throw statements, conditions (if statements) that guard those throw statements, and try/catch blocks, is an essential component of software systems, allowing developers to detect and handle exceptional states that deviate from the expected program behavior. However, manually writing ERC across large codebases is tedious. We propose a novel task: retrofitting existing code with ERC. Namely, given code (without ERC) and Exceptional Behavior Tests (EBTs)

  • arXivMinh Le-Anh et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    Repository-level code generation requires generated code to be compatible not only with the target repository but also with its dependency environment. Existing retrieval-based methods mainly retrieve context from the local repository, leaving external API usage dependent on the model's pretrained knowledge, which can be insufficient for unseen or version-specific APIs. Moreover, current retrieval strategies largely focus on one-hop evidence and overlook the structural relationships among code c

  • arXivDongdong Zhao et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    Code generation benchmarks are widely used to evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs), but benchmark data leakage into training sets can inflate performance and undermine evaluation validity. DetectLeak, a method specifically designed for code generation benchmark leakage detection, relies on perplexity scores to identify likely leaked samples. However, perplexity mainly reflects general familiarity with code patterns and may perform poorly on complex or rare samples. It also overlooks other usefu

  • arXivJinyang Li et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    Large language models (LLMs) have been ex- ploited to generate malware, but the effective- ness of guardrails for code generation secu- rity remains unclear. We introduce CS-Guard, the first benchmark to systematically evalu- ate guardrails for code generation security. It covers 1) text-to-code generation with 1000 high-quality malware-generation prompts, 7 jailbreak attacks, and a novel fictional scenario attack (FSA) that embeds malicious intent in a legitimate fictional software-development

  • arXivAsma Hamidi et al.PwC2026-09-08
    abstract

    Test adequacy criteria are widely used to evaluate and guide software testing. Although prior research has extensively examined these criteria using human-written programs, faults, and tests, the increasing adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) for code generation raises important questions about their effectiveness in detecting LLM-induced faults. To investigate this, we conduct an empirical study involving 5 LLMs and 4 benchmarks, simulating end-to-end workflows in which both code and tests

Safety & Alignment

  • arXivRavi Ranjan et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    Large Language Models (LLMs) can memorize and reproduce sensitive, copyrighted, or otherwise undesirable training content, creating privacy, safety, and regulatory concerns. Machine unlearning offers a practical alternative to full retraining, but many existing methods apply broad or fixed parameter updates that can degrade utility and remain brittle under deployment changes such as post-training quantization, where forgotten knowledge may partially re-emerge. We propose Forgetting Only What Mat

  • arXivShih-Yu Lai et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    Animation and VFX pre-production review requires teams to translate loosely specified creative intent--briefs, evolving specifications, heterogeneous references, and verbal decisions--into revisions that junior artists can execute without repeated clarification. In practice, criteria drift across iterations, review judgments lose their evidential basis, and the reasoning behind a request rarely survives the senior-junior handoff. We contribute a design framework for intent-evidence-action alignm

  • arXivRui Liu et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    Feature transformation improves predictive performance on tabular data by constructing informative abstractions from raw features. Recent generative approaches encode transformation knowledge into continuous embedding spaces for efficient exploration of candidate strategies, but face three key limitations: (1) overlooking hierarchical relationships between low-level features, operations, and high-level abstractions; (2) enforcing order-sensitive embeddings on inherently permutation-invariant tra

  • arXivMingbo Yang et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    In-context learning (ICL) is widely used in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) and achieves strong performance across a wide range of multimodal tasks. However, existing multimodal ICL methods often rely on surface level imitation of in-context demonstrations, making it difficult for MLLMs to align their responses with the reasoning path required by the given multimodal input. This limitation becomes more pronounced in complex multimodal tasks, thereby restricting further improvements in M

  • arXivJing Guan et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    Large language models remain fragile against malicious fine-tuning, motivating training-time defenses against harmful persona drift. Preventative Steering injects undesirable-trait persona vectors during fine-tuning and removes them at evaluation time, yet the mechanism behind its lasting protection remains unclear. Analyzing its temporal optimization dynamics, we find that the defense emerges from an early compensatory adaptation phase followed by a steady-state phase where the corrective signa

Trending Datasets

Benchmarks & Evals

  • arXivYiling Ma et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    A research idea may be novel, coherent, and scientifically plausible, yet its proposed method may remain insufficiently specified for faithful implementation. We study the codification readiness of implementation-facing research-method specifications, defined by whether they provide sufficient methodological information for a competent implementer or coding agent to construct the intended method without unsupported assumptions. We construct evidence-grounded specifications and their supported re

  • arXivBlake Stenstrom et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    Enterprises deploy systems, not checkpoints. Usable capability depends jointly on weights, serving route, precision, output contract, and harness, yet all 18 audited benchmarks score advertised model identifiers. We treat this as measurement error and give a protocol that makes it reportable. It has three parts. A gold-blind capability-binding preflight verifies that a route can execute the evaluation contract before any task reaches it; a reliability-inclusive first-pass scoring rule keeps fail

  • arXivAndy Zeyi Liu et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) world models learn a compact latent representation of the world that supports prediction and planning, but their capability to learn physics and generate physically realistic dynamics remains hitherto untested. In this work, we introduce SemiGroup-JEPA (SG-JEPA), which extends the LeWorldModel framework by supplying the parameter governing the physics to the temporal model via action-conditioning and jointly training an encoder and predictor through

  • arXivZixiang Chen et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    Real-world GUI usage frequently involves workflows that span multiple devices and platforms, requiring the transfer of intermediate results, maintenance of shared state, and coordination across heterogeneous environments. However, existing GUI benchmarks overwhelmingly evaluate agents on single-device, statically defined tasks, thus leaving such cross-device capabilities largely unexamined, resulting in an overly optimistic assessment of agents' readiness for real-world usage. We introduce Jarvi

  • arXivMehrnaz Mofakhami et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    Reasoning language models have made substantial advances on a variety of complex tasks, yet their capabilities remain overwhelmingly English-centric: models primarily reason in English regardless of the language they are prompted in. This is inaccessible for non-English-speaking users, risks losing the intent of the original question, and forgoes knowledge more readily expressed in the target language. In this work, we advance L2 reasoning, the ability of a model to reason consistently in the la

Tool Use & MCP

  • arXivN'Zolieh Ismaël Mahassadi et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    ReDoS vulnerabilities are a type of denial of service software weakness that occurs when a regex is used to validate user-supplied input. In some cases, the regex matching process can take exponential time, leading to a denial of service. In this study, we examine and compare the effectiveness of five publicly-available regex detection tools, and one regex correction tool, using three datasets. We further perform an empirical analysis of all ReDoS vulnerabilities reported to the NVD database in

  • arXivNan Lu et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    We study offline inference for the optimal value in reinforcement learning. Two new nuisances are derived as fixed points of a self-induced Bellman equation, in which we approximate the maximum Bellman operator by its softmax correspondence. We propose a debiased estimator through the Neyman orthogonality and establish its asymptotic normality under diverging horizons even when the behavior policy changes with time, as long as the nuisances have the statistical rates that can be achieved by many

  • arXivNikol Rummel et al.PwC2026-09-09
    abstract

    The rapid adoption of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT has sparked intense debate about their risks and opportunities for education, as well as the ways researchers should investigate them. In this paper, we approach these discussions through an analogy with the Thermomix, a smart kitchen appliance that has similarly provoked both enthusiasm and critique. By mapping Thermomix use cases onto examples of learning with generative AI, and situating them within the ICAP and SAMR frameworks, we sho

  • arXivDuncan Stewardson et al.PwC2026-09-08
    abstract

    Average treatment effect (ATE) estimation in observational studies is a fundamental statistical tool used frequently in social science, medicine, and other fields. These fields often work with sensitive data where privacy protections are important, so a differentially private mechanism for ATE estimation is highly desirable. Here we present two propensity score-based algorithms for ATE estimation on observational data, one improving the inverse probability weighting (IPW) method used in prior wo

  • arXivHamed Jafarzadeh Asl et al.PwC2026-09-08
    abstract

    In-vehicle assistants must translate natural-language requests into accurate vehicle function calls under strict memory and latency constraints, making small language models (SLMs) attractive for on-device deployment. For such models, a key design choice is how the available function surface is presented. Two approaches are to represent each function with a dedicated Functional Token (FT) or provide function schemas directly in the prompt. FTs enable compact inference but are restricted to funct

Data fetched server-side from arXiv, HuggingFace, and Papers With Code. Cached 1 hour. Raw JSON →