Daily Papers

Financial services is a prospect industry where unlocked near-term quantum utility could yield profitable potential, and, in particular, quantum machine learning algorithms could potentially benefit businesses by improving the quality of predictive models. Quantum kernel methods have demonstrated success in financial, binary classification tasks, like fraud detection, and avoid issues found in variational quantum machine learning approaches. However, choosing a suitable quantum kernel for a classical dataset remains a challenge. We propose a hybrid, quantum multiple kernel learning (QMKL) methodology that can improve classification quality over a single kernel approach. We test the robustness of QMKL on several financially relevant datasets using both fidelity and projected quantum kernel approaches. We further demonstrate QMKL on quantum hardware using an error mitigation pipeline and show the benefits of QMKL in the large qubit regime.

Near-term quantum workloads are shaped by coupled compilation and execution choices: qubit layout, routing, basis translation, gate suppression, measurement mitigation, shot budget, and artifact reproducibility. This paper analyzes QBalance, a Python workflow library for dataset-level selection among quantum compilation, noise-suppression, and error-mitigation strategies built on the Qiskit ecosystem. The contribution is formulated as a finite multi-objective strategy-selection problem over circuits, backends, and transformation policies. The manuscript derives the implemented weighted objective, non-dominated selection rule, survival-product error proxy, Bayesian linear candidate-ordering surrogate, and distributional diagnostics. It also positions the system relative to established work on Qiskit pass-manager compilation, SABRE-style routing, randomized compiling, dynamical decoupling, zero-noise extrapolation, matrix-free measurement mitigation, circuit cutting, and Thompson sampling. The analysis shows that QBalance provides a reproducible orchestration and artifact model for quantum workflow studies. It also establishes precise limitations: the current bandit mechanism orders candidates but does not reduce the number of candidate evaluations, the custom layout heuristic is greedy and only partially topology-aware, the implemented ZNE helper is parity-centered, and the cutting integration is a hook rather than a full reconstruction pipeline.

Modern analyst agents must reason over complex, high token inputs, including dozens of retrieved documents, tool outputs, and time sensitive data. While prior work has produced tool calling benchmarks and examined factuality in knowledge augmented systems, relatively little work studies their intersection: settings where LLMs must integrate large volumes of dynamic, structured and unstructured multi tool outputs. We investigate LLM failure modes in this regime using crypto as a representative high data density domain. We introduce (1) CryptoAnalystBench, an analyst aligned benchmark of 198 production crypto and DeFi queries spanning 11 categories; (2) an agentic harness equipped with relevant crypto and DeFi tools to generate responses across multiple frontier LLMs; and (3) an evaluation pipeline with citation verification and an LLM as a judge rubric spanning four user defined success dimensions: relevance, temporal relevance, depth, and data consistency. Using human annotation, we develop a taxonomy of seven higher order error types that are not reliably captured by factuality checks or LLM based quality scoring. We find that these failures persist even in state of the art systems and can compromise high stakes decisions. Based on this taxonomy, we refine the judge rubric to better capture these errors. While the judge does not align with human annotators on precise scoring across rubric iterations, it reliably identifies critical failure modes, enabling scalable feedback for developers and researchers studying analyst style agents. We release CryptoAnalystBench with annotated queries, the evaluation pipeline, judge rubrics, and the error taxonomy, and outline mitigation strategies and open challenges in evaluating long form, multi tool augmented systems.

We introduce Mitiq, a Python package for error mitigation on noisy quantum computers. Error mitigation techniques can reduce the impact of noise on near-term quantum computers with minimal overhead in quantum resources by relying on a mixture of quantum sampling and classical post-processing techniques. Mitiq is an extensible toolkit of different error mitigation methods, including zero-noise extrapolation, probabilistic error cancellation, and Clifford data regression. The library is designed to be compatible with generic backends and interfaces with different quantum software frameworks. We describe Mitiq using code snippets to demonstrate usage and discuss features and contribution guidelines. We present several examples demonstrating error mitigation on IBM and Rigetti superconducting quantum processors as well as on noisy simulators.

The advent of instruction-tuned Large Language Models designed for coding tasks (Code LLMs) has transformed software engineering practices. However, their robustness against various input challenges remains a critical concern. This study introduces DegradePrompter, a novel method designed to systematically evaluate the robustness of instruction-tuned Code LLMs. We assess the impact of diverse input challenges on the functionality and correctness of generated code using rigorous metrics and established benchmarks. Our comprehensive evaluation includes five state-of-the-art open-source models and three production-grade closed-source models, revealing varying degrees of robustness. Open-source models demonstrate an increased susceptibility to input perturbations, resulting in declines in functional correctness ranging from 12% to 34%. In contrast, commercial models demonstrate relatively greater resilience, with performance degradation ranging from 3% to 24%. To enhance the robustness of the models against these vulnerabilities, we investigate a straightforward yet effective mitigation strategy. Our findings highlight the need for robust defense mechanisms and comprehensive evaluations during both the development and deployment phases to ensure the resilience and reliability of automated code generation systems.

Multi-agent systems (MAS) are increasingly capable of tackling complex real-world tasks, yet their reliance on inter-agent coordination, tool use, and long-horizon reasoning makes error recognition particularly challenging. Minor errors can propagate across agents, escalating into task failures while producing long, intertwined execution trajectories that impose significant costs for both human developers and automated systems to debug and analyze. Our key insight is that, despite surface differences in failure trajectories (e.g., logs), MAS errors often recur with similar structural patterns. This paper presents CORRECT, the first lightweight, training-free framework that leverages an online cache of distilled error schemata to recognize and transfer knowledge of failure structures across new requests. This cache-based reuse allows LLMs to perform targeted error localization at inference time, avoiding the need for expensive retraining while adapting to dynamic MAS deployments in subseconds. To support rigorous study in this domain, we also introduce CORRECT-Error, a large-scale dataset of over 2,000 annotated trajectories collected through a novel error-injection pipeline guided by real-world distributions, and further validated through human evaluation to ensure alignment with natural failure patterns. Experiments across seven diverse MAS applications show that CORRECT improves step-level error localization up to 19.8% over existing advances while at near-zero overhead, substantially narrowing the gap between automated and human-level error recognition.

Error slice discovery is crucial to diagnose and mitigate model errors. Current clustering or discrete attribute-based slice discovery methods face key limitations: 1) clustering results in incoherent slices, while assigning discrete attributes to slices leads to incomplete coverage of error patterns due to missing or insufficient attributes; 2) these methods lack complex reasoning, preventing them from fully explaining model biases; 3) they fail to integrate domain knowledge, limiting their usage in specialized fields \eg radiology. We propose\ladder (Language-Driven Discovery and Error Rectification), to address the limitations by: (1) leveraging the flexibility of natural language to address incompleteness, (2) employing LLM's latent domain knowledge and advanced reasoning to analyze sentences and derive testable hypotheses directly, identifying biased attributes, and form coherent error slices without clustering. Existing mitigation methods typically address only the worst-performing group, often amplifying errors in other subgroups. In contrast,\ladder generates pseudo attributes from the discovered hypotheses to mitigate errors across all biases without explicit attribute annotations or prior knowledge of bias. Rigorous evaluations on 6 datasets spanning natural and medical images -- comparing 200+ classifiers with diverse architectures, pretraining strategies, and LLMs -- show that\ladder consistently outperforms existing baselines in discovering and mitigating biases.

Safety aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to harmful fine-tuning attacks qi2023fine-- a few harmful data mixed in the fine-tuning dataset can break the LLMs's safety alignment. Existing mitigation strategies include alignment stage solutions huang2024vaccine, rosati2024representation and fine-tuning stage solutions huang2024lazy,mukhoti2023fine. However, our evaluation shows that both categories of defenses fail when some specific training hyper-parameters are chosen -- a large learning rate or a large number of training epochs in the fine-tuning stage can easily invalidate the defense, which however, is necessary to guarantee finetune performance. To this end, we propose Antidote, a post-fine-tuning stage solution, which remains \textit{agnostic to the training hyper-parameters in the fine-tuning stage}. Antidote relies on the philosophy that by removing the harmful parameters, the harmful model can be recovered from the harmful behaviors, regardless of how those harmful parameters are formed in the fine-tuning stage. With this philosophy, we introduce a one-shot pruning stage after harmful fine-tuning to remove the harmful weights that are responsible for the generation of harmful content. Despite its embarrassing simplicity, empirical results show that Antidote can reduce harmful score while maintaining accuracy on downstream tasks.Our project page is at https://huangtiansheng.github.io/Antidote_gh_page/

Modern web dashboards and enterprise applications increasingly rely on complex, distributed microservices architectures. While these architectures offer scalability, they introduce significant challenges in debugging and observability. When failures occur, they often manifest as opaque error messages to the end-user such as Something went wrong. This masks the underlying root cause which may reside in browser side exceptions, API contract violations, or server side logic failures. Existing monitoring tools capture these events in isolation but fail to correlate them effectively or provide intelligible explanations to non technical users. This paper proposes a novel system for Automated Multi Source Debugging and Natural Language Error Explanation. The proposed framework automatically collects and correlates error data from disparate sources such as browser, API, server logs and validates API contracts in real time, and utilizes Large Language Models to generate natural language explanations. This approach significantly reduces Mean Time to Resolution for support engineers and improves the user experience by transforming cryptic error codes into actionable insights.

Tool-using automation systems, from scripts and CI bots to agentic assistants, fail in recurring patterns. Common failures include unsafe side effects, invalid arguments, uncontrolled retries, and leakage of sensitive outputs. Many mitigations are model-centric and prompt-dependent, so they are brittle and do not generalize to non-LLM callers. We present Policy-First Tooling, a model-agnostic permission layer that mediates tool invocation through explicit constraints, risk-aware gating, recovery controls, and auditable explanations. The paper contributes a compact policy DSL, a runtime enforcement architecture with actionable rationale and fix hints, and a reproducible benchmark based on trace replay with controlled fault and misuse injection. In 225 controlled runs across five policy packs and three fault profiles, stricter packs improve violation prevention from 0.000 in P0 to 0.681 in P4, while task success drops from 0.356 to 0.067. Retry amplification decreases from 3.774 in P0 to 1.378 in P4, and leakage recall reaches 0.875 under injected secret outputs. These results make safety to utility trade-offs explicit and measurable.

As Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) become increasingly autonomous and complex, understanding their error modes is critical for ensuring their reliability and safety. However, research in this area has been severely hampered by the lack of large-scale, diverse datasets with precise, ground-truth error labels. To address this bottleneck, we introduce AEGIS, a novel framework for Automated Error Generation and Identification for Multi-Agent Systems. By systematically injecting controllable and traceable errors into initially successful trajectories, we create a rich dataset of realistic failures. This is achieved using a context-aware, LLM-based adaptive manipulator that performs sophisticated attacks like prompt injection and response corruption to induce specific, predefined error modes. We demonstrate the value of our dataset by exploring three distinct learning paradigms for the error identification task: Supervised Fine-Tuning, Reinforcement Learning, and Contrastive Learning. Our comprehensive experiments show that models trained on AEGIS data achieve substantial improvements across all three learning paradigms. Notably, several of our fine-tuned models demonstrate performance competitive with or superior to proprietary systems an order of magnitude larger, validating our automated data generation framework as a crucial resource for developing more robust and interpretable multi-agent systems. Our project website is available at https://kfq20.github.io/AEGIS-Website.

We tackle the challenge of training reliable code-fixing agents in real repositories, where complex builds and shifting dependencies make evaluation unstable. We developed a verifiable pipeline with success defined as post-fix build validation and improved reproducibility across ~1K real issues by pinning dependencies and disabling automatic upgrades. Building on this, we introduced a scalable simplified pipeline for large-scale reinforcement learning (RL). Using this setup, we supervised fine-tuned Qwen3-32B in the full pipeline and applied RL on top of the SFT model in the simplified environment. The SFT model distilled from GPT-4.1 trajectories performs on par while being 56x smaller, and RL added 7-20% absolute gains under matched train-test conditions. "Thinking mode" was on par or worse in our experiments. Both SFT and RL models failed to generalize across environments, highlighting the importance of matching train-test environments for building reliable real-world code-fixing agents.

Constructing large-scale datasets for the GitHub issue resolution task is crucial for both training and evaluating the software engineering capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the traditional process for creating such benchmarks is notoriously challenging and labor-intensive, particularly in the stages of setting up evaluation environments, grading test outcomes, and validating task instances. In this paper, we propose SWE-Factory, an automated pipeline designed to address these challenges. To tackle these issues, our pipeline integrates three core automated components. First, we introduce SWE-Builder, a multi-agent system that automates evaluation environment construction, which employs four specialized agents that work in a collaborative, iterative loop and leverages an environment memory pool to enhance efficiency. Second, we introduce a standardized, exit-code-based grading method that eliminates the need for manually writing custom parsers. Finally, we automate the fail2pass validation process using these reliable exit code signals. Experiments on 671 issues across four programming languages show that our pipeline can effectively construct valid task instances; for example, with GPT-4.1-mini, our SWE-Builder constructs 269 valid instances at 0.045 per instance, while with Gemini-2.5-flash, it achieves comparable performance at the lowest cost of 0.024 per instance. We also demonstrate that our exit-code-based grading achieves 100% accuracy compared to manual inspection, and our automated fail2pass validation reaches a precision of 0.92 and a recall of 1.00. We hope our automated pipeline will accelerate the collection of large-scale, high-quality GitHub issue resolution datasets for both training and evaluation. Our code and datasets are released at https://github.com/DeepSoftwareAnalytics/swe-factory.

Large language models (LLMs) can call tools effectively, yet they remain brittle in multi-turn execution: following a tool call error, smaller models often degenerate into repetitive invalid re-invocations, failing to interpret error feedback and self-correct. This brittleness hinders reliable real-world deployment, where the execution errors are inherently inevitable during tool interaction procedures. We identify a key limitation of current approaches: standard reinforcement learning (RL) treats errors as sparse negative rewards, providing no guidance on how to recover, while pre-collected synthetic error-correction datasets suffer from distribution mismatch with the model's on-policy error modes. To bridge this gap, we propose Fission-GRPO, a framework that converts execution errors into corrective supervision within the RL training loop. Our core mechanism fissions each failed trajectory into a new training instance by augmenting it with diagnostic feedback from a finetuned Error Simulator, then resampling recovery rollouts on-policy. This enables the model to learn from the precise errors it makes during exploration, rather than from static, pre-collected error cases. On the BFCL v4 Multi-Turn, Fission-GRPO improves the error recovery rate of Qwen3-8B by 5.7% absolute, crucially, yielding a 4% overall accuracy gain (42.75% to 46.75%) over GRPO and outperforming specialized tool-use agents.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) in software engineering has revealed critical limitations in existing benchmarks, particularly the widely used SWE-bench dataset. Recent studies have uncovered severe data contamination issues, e.g. SWE-bench reports 32.67% of successful patches involve direct solution leakage and 31.08% pass due to inadequate test cases. We introduce SWE-MERA, a dynamic, continuously updated benchmark designed to address these fundamental challenges through an automated collection of real-world GitHub issues and rigorous quality validation. Our approach implements a reliable pipeline that ensures quality while minimizing contamination risks, resulting in approximately 10,000 potential tasks with 300 samples currently available. Evaluation using the Aider coding agent demonstrates strong discriminative power in state-of-the-art models. We report performance across a dozen recent LLMs evaluated on tasks collected between September 2024 and June 2025.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are widely being adopted for safety-critical applications, e.g., healthcare and autonomous driving. Inherently, they are considered to be highly error-tolerant. However, recent studies have shown that hardware faults that impact the parameters of a DNN (e.g., weights) can have drastic impacts on its classification accuracy. In this paper, we perform a comprehensive error resilience analysis of DNNs subjected to hardware faults (e.g., permanent faults) in the weight memory. The outcome of this analysis is leveraged to propose a novel error mitigation technique which squashes the high-intensity faulty activation values to alleviate their impact. We achieve this by replacing the unbounded activation functions with their clipped versions. We also present a method to systematically define the clipping values of the activation functions that result in increased resilience of the networks against faults. We evaluate our technique on the AlexNet and the VGG-16 DNNs trained for the CIFAR-10 dataset. The experimental results show that our mitigation technique significantly improves the resilience of the DNNs to faults. For example, the proposed technique offers on average 68.92% improvement in the classification accuracy of resilience-optimized VGG-16 model at 1e-5 fault rate, when compared to the base network without any fault mitigation.

Finetuning large language models (LLMs) enables user-specific customization but introduces critical safety risks: even a few harmful examples can compromise safety alignment. A common mitigation strategy is to update the model more strongly on examples deemed safe, while downweighting or excluding those flagged as unsafe. However, because safety context can shift within a single example, updating the model equally on both harmful and harmless parts of a response is suboptimal-a coarse treatment we term static safety shaping. In contrast, we propose dynamic safety shaping (DSS), a framework that uses fine-grained safety signals to reinforce learning from safe segments of a response while suppressing unsafe content. To enable such fine-grained control during finetuning, we introduce a key insight: guardrail models, traditionally used for filtering, can be repurposed to evaluate partial responses, tracking how safety risk evolves throughout the response, segment by segment. This leads to the Safety Trajectory Assessment of Response (STAR), a token-level signal that enables shaping to operate dynamically over the training sequence. Building on this, we present STAR-DSS, guided by STAR scores, that robustly mitigates finetuning risks and delivers substantial safety improvements across diverse threats, datasets, and model families-all without compromising capability on intended tasks. We encourage future safety research to build on dynamic shaping principles for stronger mitigation against evolving finetuning risks.

Can small language models achieve strong tool-use performance without complex adaptation mechanisms? This paper investigates this question through Meta-Tool, a controlled empirical study comparing hypernetwork-based LoRA adaptation against carefully designed few-shot prompting. Using a Llama-3.2-3B-Instruct backbone, we evaluate four adaptation mechanisms--few-shot prompting, documentation encoding, hypernetwork-generated LoRA weights, and value-guided beam search--across four diverse benchmarks: Gorilla APIBench, Spider 2.0, WebArena, and InterCode. Our central finding is a well-supported negative result: despite generating non-trivial weight matrices, the 227.8M-parameter hypernetwork provides no measurable improvement over few-shot prompting alone. Comprehensive ablation studies reveal that few-shot examples contribute +21.5% to performance and documentation contributes +5.0%, while the hypernetwork adds 0%. A 3B model with well-designed prompts achieves 79.7% of GPT-5's average performance at 10 times lower latency. Error analysis across 722 failure cases spanning all shot counts (0--5) shows that at the 5-shot configuration (106 failures), failure modes are task-dependent: schema-heavy tasks (Spider 2.0, WebArena) show near-zero format errors with remaining failures semantic, while format errors dominate on Gorilla (100%) and InterCode (70%). These findings redirect practitioners toward prompt engineering and example curation rather than complex adaptation architectures.

Modern machine learning systems rely on complex data engineering workflows to extract, transform, and load (ELT) data into production pipelines. However, constructing these pipelines remains time-consuming and requires substantial expertise in data infrastructure and orchestration frameworks. Recent advances in large language model (LLM) agents offer a potential path toward automating these workflows, but existing approaches struggle with under-specified user intent, unreliable tool generation, and limited guarantees of executable outputs. We introduce kRAIG, an AI agent that translates natural language specifications into production-ready Kubeflow Pipelines (KFP). To resolve ambiguity in user intent, we propose ReQuesAct (Reason, Question, Act), an interaction framework that explicitly clarifies intent prior to pipeline synthesis. The system orchestrates end-to-end data movement from diverse sources and generates task-specific transformation components through a retrieval-augmented tool synthesis process. To ensure data quality and safety, kRAIG incorporates LLM-based validation stages that verify pipeline integrity prior to execution. Our framework achieves a 3x improvement in extraction and loading success and a 25 percent increase in transformation accuracy compared to state-of-the-art agentic baselines. These improvements demonstrate that structured agent workflows with explicit intent clarification and validation significantly enhance the reliability and executability of automated data engineering pipelines.

Layer-wise PTQ is a promising technique for compressing large language models (LLMs), due to its simplicity and effectiveness without requiring retraining. However, recent progress in this area is saturating, underscoring the need to revisit its core limitations and explore further improvements. We address this challenge by identifying a key limitation of existing layer-wise PTQ methods: the growth of quantization errors across layers significantly degrades performance, particularly in low-bit regimes. To address this fundamental issue, we propose Quantization Error Propagation (QEP), a general, lightweight, and scalable framework that enhances layer-wise PTQ by explicitly propagating quantization errors and compensating for accumulated errors. QEP also offers a tunable propagation mechanism that prevents overfitting and controls computational overhead, enabling the framework to adapt to various architectures and resource budgets. Extensive experiments on several LLMs demonstrate that QEP-enhanced layer-wise PTQ achieves substantially higher accuracy than existing methods. Notably, the gains are most pronounced in the extremely low-bit quantization regime.

Large-scale LLM pretraining now runs across 10^5--10^6 accelerators, making failures routine and elasticity mandatory. We posit that an elastic-native training system must jointly deliver (i) parameter consistency, (ii) low mean time to recovery (MTTR), (iii) high post-change throughput, and (iv) computation consistency. No prior system achieves all four simultaneously. To achieve these goals, we present ElasWave, which delivers per-step fault tolerance via multi-dimensional scheduling across graph, dataflow, DVFS, and RNG. ElasWave reshapes and reshards micro-batches while preserving the global batch size and gradient scale. It performs online pipeline resharding with asynchronous parameter migration and interleaves ZeRO partitions, reducing parameter recovery processes to disjoint rank-to-rank transfers. It further leverages DVFS to absorb pipeline bubbles and reshards RNG to keep computation consistency. Together, a dynamic communicator enables in-place communication group edits, while per-step in-memory snapshots support online verification and redistribution. We evaluate ElasWave on 96 NPUs and benchmark it against state-of-the-art baselines: throughput improves by 1.35times over ReCycle and 1.60times over TorchFT; communicator recovery completes within one second (up to 82times/3.6times faster than full/partial rebuilds); migration MTTR drops by as much as 51%; and convergence deviation is reduced by approximately 78%.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines are central to modern software delivery, yet their static workflows often introduce inefficiencies as systems scale. This paper proposes a reinforcement learning (RL) based approach to dynamically optimize CI/CD pipeline workflows. The pipeline is modeled as a Markov Decision Process, and an RL agent is trained to make runtime decisions such as selecting full, partial, or no test execution in order to maximize throughput while minimizing testing overhead. A configurable CI/CD simulation environment is developed to evaluate the approach across build, test, and deploy stages. Experimental results show that the RL optimized pipeline achieves up to a 30 percent improvement in throughput and approximately a 25 percent reduction in test execution time compared to static baselines, while maintaining a defect miss rate below 5 percent. The agent learns to selectively skip or abbreviate tests for low risk commits, accelerating feedback cycles without significantly increasing failure risk. These results demonstrate the potential of reinforcement learning to enable adaptive and intelligent DevOps workflows, providing a practical pathway toward more efficient, resilient, and sustainable CI/CD automation.

Advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized various fields, including communication networks, sparking an innovation wave that has led to new applications and services, and significantly enhanced solution schemes. Despite all these impressive developments, most LLMs typically require huge computational resources, resulting in terribly high energy consumption. Thus, this research study proposes an end-to-end pipeline that investigates the trade-off between energy efficiency and model performance for an LLM during fault ticket analysis in communication networks. It further evaluates the pipeline performance using two real-world datasets for the tasks of root cause analysis and response feedback in a communication network. Our results show that an appropriate combination of quantization and pruning techniques is able to reduce energy consumption while significantly improving model performance.

Error Feedback (EF) is a highly popular and immensely effective mechanism for fixing convergence issues which arise in distributed training methods (such as distributed GD or SGD) when these are enhanced with greedy communication compression techniques such as TopK. While EF was proposed almost a decade ago (Seide et al., 2014), and despite concentrated effort by the community to advance the theoretical understanding of this mechanism, there is still a lot to explore. In this work we study a modern form of error feedback called EF21 (Richtarik et al., 2021) which offers the currently best-known theoretical guarantees, under the weakest assumptions, and also works well in practice. In particular, while the theoretical communication complexity of EF21 depends on the quadratic mean of certain smoothness parameters, we improve this dependence to their arithmetic mean, which is always smaller, and can be substantially smaller, especially in heterogeneous data regimes. We take the reader on a journey of our discovery process. Starting with the idea of applying EF21 to an equivalent reformulation of the underlying problem which (unfortunately) requires (often impractical) machine cloning, we continue to the discovery of a new weighted version of EF21 which can (fortunately) be executed without any cloning, and finally circle back to an improved analysis of the original EF21 method. While this development applies to the simplest form of EF21, our approach naturally extends to more elaborate variants involving stochastic gradients and partial participation. Further, our technique improves the best-known theory of EF21 in the rare features regime (Richtarik et al., 2023). Finally, we validate our theoretical findings with suitable experiments.

Error analysis in NLP models is essential to successful model development and deployment. One common approach for diagnosing errors is to identify subpopulations in the dataset where the model produces the most errors. However, existing approaches typically define subpopulations based on pre-defined features, which requires users to form hypotheses of errors in advance. To complement these approaches, we propose iSEA, an Interactive Pipeline for Semantic Error Analysis in NLP Models, which automatically discovers semantically-grounded subpopulations with high error rates in the context of a human-in-the-loop interactive system. iSEA enables model developers to learn more about their model errors through discovered subpopulations, validate the sources of errors through interactive analysis on the discovered subpopulations, and test hypotheses about model errors by defining custom subpopulations. The tool supports semantic descriptions of error-prone subpopulations at the token and concept level, as well as pre-defined higher-level features. Through use cases and expert interviews, we demonstrate how iSEA can assist error understanding and analysis.

Large language models frequently fail to produce correct code on their first attempt, yet most benchmarks evaluate them in a single-shot setting. We investigate iterative self-repair (feeding execution errors back to the model for correction) across seven models spanning three families and both open-weight and proprietary providers: Llama 3.1 8B, Llama 3.3 70B, Llama 4 Scout (MoE, 16 experts), Llama 4 Maverick (MoE, 128 experts), Qwen3 32B, Gemini 2.5 Flash, and Gemini 2.5 Pro. On HumanEval (164 problems) and MBPP Sanitized (257 problems) with up to five attempts, self-repair universally improves pass rates: +4.9 to +17.1 pp on HumanEval and +16.0 to +30.0 pp on MBPP. Gemini 2.5 Flash achieves the highest final pass rates (96.3% HumanEval, 93.8% MBPP). Most gains concentrate in the first two rounds.Error-type analysis shows assertion errors (logical mistakes) are the hardest to repair at ~45%, while syntax and name errors are repaired at substantially higher rates, connecting to broader findings on the limits of LLM self-correction. Prior work found that weaker models fail at self-repair or require fine-tuning; we show that modern instruction-tuned models succeed with prompting alone, even at 8B scale. We also provide the first comparison of dense and MoE architectures for self-repair, and extend the repair-vs-resampling tradeoff analysis to modern models. A prompt ablation reveals chain-of-thought repair yields up to +5.5 pp additional self-repair gain (measured as improvement in repair delta) over minimal prompting for capable models.

Frontier AI developers are relying on layers of safeguards to protect against catastrophic misuse of AI systems. Anthropic guards their latest Claude 4 Opus model using one such defense pipeline, and other frontier developers including Google DeepMind and OpenAI pledge to soon deploy similar defenses. However, the security of such pipelines is unclear, with limited prior work evaluating or attacking these pipelines. We address this gap by developing and red-teaming an open-source defense pipeline. First, we find that a novel few-shot-prompted input and output classifier outperforms state-of-the-art open-weight safeguard model ShieldGemma across three attacks and two datasets, reducing the attack success rate (ASR) to 0% on the catastrophic misuse dataset ClearHarm. Second, we introduce a STaged AttaCK (STACK) procedure that achieves 71% ASR on ClearHarm in a black-box attack against the few-shot-prompted classifier pipeline. Finally, we also evaluate STACK in a transfer setting, achieving 33% ASR, providing initial evidence that it is feasible to design attacks with no access to the target pipeline. We conclude by suggesting specific mitigations that developers could use to thwart staged attacks.

Conversational agents powered by large language models (LLMs) with tool integration achieve strong performance on fixed task-oriented dialogue datasets but remain vulnerable to unanticipated, user-induced errors. Rather than focusing on error prevention, this work focuses on error recovery, which necessitates the accurate diagnosis of erroneous dialogue contexts and execution of proper recovery plans. Under realistic constraints precluding model fine-tuning or prompt modification due to significant cost and time requirements, we explore whether agents can recover from contextually flawed interactions and how their behavior can be adapted without altering model parameters and prompts. To this end, we propose Reasoning Inception (ReIn), a test-time intervention method that plants an initial reasoning into the agent's decision-making process. Specifically, an external inception module identifies predefined errors within the dialogue context and generates recovery plans, which are subsequently integrated into the agent's internal reasoning process to guide corrective actions, without modifying its parameters or system prompts. We evaluate ReIn by systematically simulating conversational failure scenarios that directly hinder successful completion of user goals: user's ambiguous and unsupported requests. Across diverse combinations of agent models and inception modules, ReIn substantially improves task success and generalizes to unseen error types. Moreover, it consistently outperforms explicit prompt-modification approaches, underscoring its utility as an efficient, on-the-fly method. In-depth analysis of its operational mechanism, particularly in relation to instruction hierarchy, indicates that jointly defining recovery tools with ReIn can serve as a safe and effective strategy for improving the resilience of conversational agents without modifying the backbone models or system prompts.

Large language models (LLMs) possess impressive linguistic capabilities but often fail to faithfully retain factual knowledge, leading to hallucinations and unreliable outputs. Understanding LLMs' knowledge deficiencies by exhaustively evaluating against full-scale knowledge bases is computationally prohibitive, especially for closed-weight models. We propose stochastic error ascent (SEA), a scalable and efficient framework for discovering knowledge deficiencies (errors) in closed-weight LLMs under a strict query budget. Rather than naively probing all knowledge candidates, SEA formulates error discovery as a stochastic optimization process: it iteratively retrieves new high-error candidates by leveraging the semantic similarity to previously observed failures. To further enhance search efficiency and coverage, SEA employs hierarchical retrieval across document and paragraph levels, and constructs a relation directed acyclic graph to model error propagation and identify systematic failure modes. Empirically, SEA uncovers 40.7x more knowledge errors than Automated Capability Discovery and 26.7% more than AutoBencher, while reducing the cost-per-error by 599x and 9x, respectively. Human evaluation confirms the high quality of generated questions, while ablation and convergence analyses validate the contribution of each component in SEA. Further analysis on the discovered errors reveals correlated failure patterns across LLM families and recurring deficits, highlighting the need for better data coverage and targeted fine-tuning in future LLM development.

Program errors can occur in any type of programming, and can manifest in a variety of ways, such as unexpected output, crashes, or performance issues. And program error diagnosis can often be too abstract or technical for developers to understand, especially for beginners. The goal of this paper is to present a novel machine-learning approach for Multi-task Program Error Repair and Explanatory Diagnosis (mPRED). A pre-trained language model is used to encode the source code, and a downstream model is specifically designed to identify and repair errors. Programs and test cases will be augmented and optimized from several perspectives. Additionally, our approach incorporates a "chain of thoughts" method, which enables the models to produce intermediate reasoning explanations before providing the final correction. To aid in visualizing and analyzing the program structure, we use a graph neural network for program structure visualization. Overall, our approach offers a promising approach for repairing program errors across different programming languages and providing helpful explanations to programmers.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to hallucination, especially during multi-hop and reasoning-intensive tasks such as mathematical problem solving. While Outcome Reward Models verify only final answers, Process Reward Models (PRMs) score each intermediate step to steer generation toward coherent solutions. We introduce PathFinder-PRM, a novel hierarchical, error-aware discriminative PRM that first classifies math and consistency errors at each step, then combines these fine-grained signals to estimate step correctness. To train PathFinder-PRM, we construct a 400K-sample dataset by enriching the human-annotated PRM800K corpus and RLHFlow Mistral traces with three-dimensional step-level labels. On PRMBench, PathFinder-PRM achieves a new state-of-the-art PRMScore of 67.7, outperforming the prior best (65.5) while using 3 times less data. When applied to reward guided greedy search, our model yields prm@8 48.3, a +1.5 point gain over the strongest baseline. These results demonstrate that decoupled error detection and reward estimation not only boost fine-grained error detection but also substantially improve end-to-end, reward-guided mathematical reasoning with greater data efficiency.

With Large Language Models (LLMs) being widely used across various tasks, detecting errors in their responses is increasingly crucial. However, little research has been conducted on error detection of LLM responses. Collecting error annotations on LLM responses is challenging due to the subjective nature of many NLP tasks, and thus previous research focuses on tasks of little practical value (e.g., word sorting) or limited error types (e.g., faithfulness in summarization). This work introduces ReaLMistake, the first error detection benchmark consisting of objective, realistic, and diverse errors made by LLMs. ReaLMistake contains three challenging and meaningful tasks that introduce objectively assessable errors in four categories (reasoning correctness, instruction-following, context-faithfulness, and parameterized knowledge), eliciting naturally observed and diverse errors in responses of GPT-4 and Llama 2 70B annotated by experts. We use ReaLMistake to evaluate error detectors based on 12 LLMs. Our findings show: 1) Top LLMs like GPT-4 and Claude 3 detect errors made by LLMs at very low recall, and all LLM-based error detectors perform much worse than humans. 2) Explanations by LLM-based error detectors lack reliability. 3) LLMs-based error detection is sensitive to small changes in prompts but remains challenging to improve. 4) Popular approaches to improving LLMs, including self-consistency and majority vote, do not improve the error detection performance. Our benchmark and code are provided at https://github.com/psunlpgroup/ReaLMistake.

Effective incident management in large-scale IT systems relies on troubleshooting guides (TSGs), but their manual execution is slow and error-prone. While recent advances in LLMs offer promise for automating incident management tasks, existing LLM-based solutions lack specialized support for several key challenges, including managing TSG quality issues, interpreting complex control flow, handling data-intensive queries, and exploiting execution parallelism. We first conducted an empirical study on 92 real-world TSGs, and, guided by our findings, we present StepFly, a novel end-to-end agentic framework for troubleshooting guide automation. Our approach features a three-stage workflow: the first stage provides a comprehensive guide together with a tool, TSG Mentor, to assist SREs in improving TSG quality; the second stage performs offline preprocessing using LLMs to extract structured execution DAGs from unstructured TSGs and to create dedicated Query Preparation Plugins (QPPs); and the third stage executes online using a DAG-guided scheduler-executor framework with a memory system to guarantee correct workflow and support parallel execution of independent steps. Our empirical evaluation on a collection of real-world TSGs and incidents demonstrates that StepFly achieves a ~94% success rate on GPT-4.1, outperforming baselines with less time and token consumption. Furthermore, it achieves a remarkable execution time reduction of 32.9% to 70.4% for parallelizable TSGs.

Beyond scratch coding, exploiting large-scale code repositories (e.g., GitHub) for practical tasks is vital in real-world software development, yet current benchmarks rarely evaluate code agents in such authentic, workflow-driven scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce GitTaskBench, a benchmark designed to systematically assess this capability via 54 realistic tasks across 7 modalities and 7 domains. Each task pairs a relevant repository with an automated, human-curated evaluation harness specifying practical success criteria. Beyond measuring execution and task success, we also propose the alpha-value metric to quantify the economic benefit of agent performance, which integrates task success rates, token cost, and average developer salaries. Experiments across three state-of-the-art agent frameworks with multiple advanced LLMs show that leveraging code repositories for complex task solving remains challenging: even the best-performing system, OpenHands+Claude 3.7, solves only 48.15% of tasks. Error analysis attributes over half of failures to seemingly mundane yet critical steps like environment setup and dependency resolution, highlighting the need for more robust workflow management and increased timeout preparedness. By releasing GitTaskBench, we aim to drive progress and attention toward repository-aware code reasoning, execution, and deployment -- moving agents closer to solving complex, end-to-end real-world tasks. The benchmark and code are open-sourced at https://github.com/QuantaAlpha/GitTaskBench.

We introduce a few-shot learning framework for error detection. We show that data augmentation (a form of weak supervision) is key to training high-quality, ML-based error detection models that require minimal human involvement. Our framework consists of two parts: (1) an expressive model to learn rich representations that capture the inherent syntactic and semantic heterogeneity of errors; and (2) a data augmentation model that, given a small seed of clean records, uses dataset-specific transformations to automatically generate additional training data. Our key insight is to learn data augmentation policies from the noisy input dataset in a weakly supervised manner. We show that our framework detects errors with an average precision of ~94% and an average recall of ~93% across a diverse array of datasets that exhibit different types and amounts of errors. We compare our approach to a comprehensive collection of error detection methods, ranging from traditional rule-based methods to ensemble-based and active learning approaches. We show that data augmentation yields an average improvement of 20 F1 points while it requires access to 3x fewer labeled examples compared to other ML approaches.

Operationalizing large language models (LLMs) for custom, repetitive data pipelines is challenging, particularly due to their unpredictable and potentially catastrophic failures. Acknowledging the inevitability of these errors, we focus on identifying when LLMs may be generating incorrect responses when used repeatedly as part of data generation pipelines. We present SPADE, a method for automatically synthesizing assertions that identify bad LLM outputs. SPADE analyzes prompt version histories to create candidate assertion functions and then selects a minimal set that fulfills both coverage and accuracy requirements. In testing across nine different real-world LLM pipelines, SPADE efficiently reduces the number of assertions by 14% and decreases false failures by 21% when compared to simpler baselines.

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has advanced automatic code generation, yet most approaches rely on direct, single-step translation from problem descriptions to code, disregarding structured software engineering practices. We introduce a lifecycle-aware framework that systematically incorporates intermediate artifacts such as requirements analysis, state machine modeling, and pseudocode into both the training and inference stages. This design aligns code generation with standard software development phases and enables more structured reasoning. Experiments show that lifecycle-level fine-tuning improves code correctness by up to 75% over the same model before fine-tuning, with performance gains compounding across intermediate stages. Multi-step inference consistently surpasses single-step generation, demonstrating the effectiveness of intermediate scaffolding. Notably, open-source LLMs, once fine-tuned under our framework, match or slightly outperform models pretrained on code. When applied to DeepSeek-Coder-1.3B, our framework yields relative CodeBLEU improvements of 34.3%, 20.0%, 11.2%, and 22.3% over ChatGPT-3.5, ChatGPT-4o-mini, DeepSeek-R1, and LLaMA-8B, respectively. Our pipeline also proves robust with up to 80\% less training data, confirming its resilience. Ablation studies further reveal that each intermediate artifact contributes distinctly to final code quality, with state machine modeling yielding the most substantial impact. Our source code and detailed experimental data are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Lifecycle-Aware-3CCB.

One of the main challenges developers face in the use of continuous integration (CI) and deployment pipelines is the occurrence of intermittent job failures, which result from unexpected non-deterministic issues (e.g., flaky tests or infrastructure problems) rather than regular code-related errors such as bugs. Prior studies developed machine learning (ML) models trained on large datasets of job logs to classify job failures as either intermittent or regular. As an alternative to costly manual labeling of large datasets, the state-of-the-art (SOTA) approach leveraged a heuristic based on non-deterministic job reruns. However, this method mislabels intermittent job failures as regular in contexts where rerunning suspicious job failures is not an explicit policy, and therefore limits the SOTA's performance in practice. In fact, our manual analysis of 2,125 job failures from 5 industrial and 1 open-source projects reveals that, on average, 32% of intermittent job failures are mislabeled as regular. To address these limitations, this paper introduces a novel approach to intermittent job failure detection using few-shot learning (FSL). Specifically, we fine-tune a small language model using a few number of manually labeled log examples to generate rich embeddings, which are then used to train an ML classifier. Our FSL-based approach achieves 70-88% F1-score with only 12 shots in all projects, outperforming the SOTA, which proved ineffective (34-52% F1-score) in 4 projects. Overall, this study underlines the importance of data quality over quantity and provides a more efficient and practical framework for the detection of intermittent job failures in organizations.

We address the problem of runtime trajectory anomaly detection, a critical capability for enabling trustworthy LLM agents. Current safety measures predominantly focus on static input/output filtering. However, we argue that ensuring LLM agents reliability requires auditing the intermediate execution process. In this work, we formulate the task of Trajectory Anomaly Detection. The goal is not merely detection, but precise error localization. This capability is essential for enabling efficient rollback-and-retry. To achieve this, we construct TrajBench, a dataset synthesized via a perturb-and-complete strategy to cover diverse procedural anomalies. Using this benchmark, we investigate the capability of models in process supervision. We observe that general-purpose LLMs, even with zero-shot prompting, struggle to identify and localize these anomalies. This reveals that generalized capabilities do not automatically translate to process reliability. To address this, we propose TrajAD, a specialized verifier trained with fine-grained process supervision. Our approach outperforms baselines, demonstrating that specialized supervision is essential for building trustworthy agents.

While Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) excel in complex reasoning, they suffer from the cascading impact of erroneous information generated by individual participants. Current solutions often resort to rigid structural engineering or expensive fine-tuning, limiting their deployability and adaptability. We propose AgentDropoutV2, a test-time rectify-or-reject pruning framework designed to dynamically optimize MAS information flow without retraining. Our approach acts as an active firewall, intercepting agent outputs and employing a retrieval-augmented rectifier to iteratively correct errors based on a failure-driven indicator pool. This mechanism allows for the precise identification of potential errors using distilled failure patterns as prior knowledge. Irreparable outputs are subsequently pruned to prevent error propagation, while a fallback strategy preserves system integrity. Empirical results on extensive math benchmarks show that AgentDropoutV2 significantly boosts the MAS's task performance, achieving an average accuracy gain of 6.3 percentage points on math benchmarks. Furthermore, the system exhibits robust generalization and adaptivity, dynamically modulating rectification efforts based on task difficulty while leveraging context-aware indicators to resolve a wide spectrum of error patterns. Our code and dataset are released at https://github.com/TonySY2/AgentDropoutV2.

Training LLMs on decentralized and wimpy computation nodes, e.g., multiple on-spot instances, lowers the training cost and enables model democratization. The inevitable challenge here is the churn of nodes due to failures and the operator's scheduling policies, leading to losing a stage - a part of the model. The conventional approaches to recover from failures are to either use checkpointing, where periodically a copy of the entire model is sent to an additional storage, or redundant computation. These approaches yield significant communication and/or computation overhead even in non-failure cases and scale poorly in settings with large models. In this paper, we propose, CheckFree, an efficient recovery method where a failing stage is substituted by a weighted average of the closest neighboring stages. In contrast to the state of the art, CheckFree requires no additional computation or storage. However, because of the nature of averaging neighbouring stages, it can only recover failures of intermediate stages. We further extend our method to CheckFree+ with out-of-order pipeline execution to tolerate crashes of the first and last stages. Thanks to out-of-order pipelining, behaviour of those stages is mimicked by their neighboring ones, which allows CheckFree+ to recover them by simply copying the weights from the immediate neighbour. To be able to recover the (de)embedding layers, CheckFree+ copies those layers to the neighboring stages, which requires relatively small storage overhead. We extensively evaluate our method on LLaMa models of model sizes from 124M to 1.5B with varying failure frequencies. In the case of low and medium failure rates (5-10%), CheckFree and CheckFree+ outperform both checkpointing and redundant computation in terms of convergence in wall-clock time by over 12%. Both of our proposals can be run via our code available at: https://github.com/gensyn-ai/CheckFree.

Error detection (ED), which aims to identify incorrect or inconsistent cell values in tabular data, is important for ensuring data quality. Recent state-of-the-art ED methods leverage the pre-trained knowledge and semantic capability embedded in large language models (LLMs) to directly label whether a cell is erroneous. However, this LLM-as-a-labeler pipeline (1) relies on the black box, implicit decision process, thus failing to provide explainability for the detection results, and (2) is highly sensitive to prompts, yielding inconsistent outputs due to inherent model stochasticity, therefore lacking robustness. To address these limitations, we propose an LLM-as-an-inducer framework that adopts LLM to induce the decision tree for ED (termed TreeED) and further ensembles multiple such trees for consensus detection (termed ForestED), thereby improving explainability and robustness. Specifically, based on prompts derived from data context, decision tree specifications and output requirements, TreeED queries the LLM to induce the decision tree skeleton, whose root-to-leaf decision paths specify the stepwise procedure for evaluating a given sample. Each tree contains three types of nodes: (1) rule nodes that perform simple validation checks (e.g., format or range), (2) Graph Neural Network (GNN) nodes that capture complex patterns (e.g., functional dependencies), and (3) leaf nodes that output the final decision types (error or clean). Furthermore, ForestED employs uncertainty-based sampling to obtain multiple row subsets, constructing a decision tree for each subset using TreeED. It then leverages an Expectation-Maximization-based algorithm that jointly estimates tree reliability and optimizes the consensus ED prediction. Extensive xperiments demonstrate that our methods are accurate, explainable and robust, achieving an average F1-score improvement of 16.1% over the best baseline.

The continuous delivery of modern software requires the execution of many automated pipeline jobs. These jobs ensure the frequent release of new software versions while detecting code problems at an early stage. For TELUS, our industrial partner in the telecommunications field, reliable job execution is crucial to minimize wasted time and streamline Continuous Deployment (CD). In this context, flaky job failures are one of the main issues hindering CD. Prior studies proposed techniques based on machine learning to automate the detection of flaky jobs. While valuable, these solutions are insufficient to address the waste associated with the diagnosis of flaky failures, which remain largely unexplored due to the wide range of underlying causes. This study examines 4,511 flaky job failures at TELUS to identify the different categories of flaky failures that we prioritize based on Recency, Frequency, and Monetary (RFM) measures. We identified 46 flaky failure categories that we analyzed using clustering and RFM measures to determine 14 priority categories for future automated diagnosis and repair research. Our findings also provide valuable insights into the evolution and impact of these categories. The identification and prioritization of flaky failure categories using RFM analysis introduce a novel approach that can be used in other contexts.

Formal specification is essential for rigorous program verification, yet writing correct specifications remains costly and difficult to automate. Although large language models (LLMs) and agents have shown promising progress, their true capabilities and failure modes remain unclear. We present the first systematic and contamination-aware study of LLM- and agent-based formal specification generation for C programs. We introduce LiveFMBench, a continuously evolving benchmark of 630 ACSL (ANSI/ISO C Specification Language)-annotated C programs, including 360 newly collected cases designed to mitigate data leakage. Using this benchmark, we evaluate direct prompting with different sampling sizes, reasoning-enabled (thinking mode) inference, the agentic pipeline, and perform a fine-grained failure analysis. Experimental results reveal that naive evaluation substantially overestimates performance because models under direct prompting may exhibit unfaithful behaviors, such as deceiving automated provers or ignoring code-context constraints; after excluding such cases, the true specification generation accuracy drops by approximately 20\%. We further find that both increased sampling and thinking mode significantly improve success rates, with smaller models benefiting more from thinking mode. Agentic pipelines are particularly effective under low sampling budgets and on harder datasets. Failure analysis further shows that incorrect loop invariants are the dominant error type, while agentic pipelines notably reduce assertion errors. These results expose fundamental limitations in current LLM-based approaches and suggest they remain far from replacing human-authored formal specifications. We release LiveFMBench at https://huggingface.co/datasets/fm-universe/Live-FM-Bench and all evaluation artifacts to support future research.

Prior work evaluates code generation bias primarily through simple conditional statements, which represent only a narrow slice of real-world programming and reveal solely overt, explicitly encoded bias. We demonstrate that this approach dramatically underestimates bias in practice by examining a more realistic task: generating machine learning (ML) pipelines. Testing both code-specialized and general-instruction large language models, we find that generated pipelines exhibit significant bias during feature selection. Sensitive attributes appear in 87.7% of cases on average, despite models demonstrably excluding irrelevant features (e.g., including "race" while dropping "favorite color" for credit scoring). This bias is substantially more prevalent than that captured by conditional statements, where sensitive attributes appear in only 59.2% of cases. These findings are robust across prompt mitigation strategies, varying numbers of attributes, and different pipeline difficulty levels. Our results challenge simple conditionals as valid proxies for bias evaluation and suggest current benchmarks underestimate bias risk in practical deployments.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capability in solving mathematical problems. However, existing approaches primarily focus on improving the quality of correct training data, e.g., distilling high-quality correct solutions from advanced models, neglecting the value contained in error data, potentially hindering the model's reflective ability. Though some studies attempt to leverage error data, they often involve complex mechanisms, such as Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to explore error nodes. In this work, we propose to enhance LLMs' reasoning ability by Learning from Errors for Mathematical Advancement (LEMMA). LEMMA constructs data consisting of an incorrect solution with an erroneous step and a reflection connection to a correct solution for fine-tuning. Specifically, we systematically analyze the model-generated error types and introduce an error-type grounded mistake augmentation method to collect diverse and representative errors. Correct solutions are either from fixing the errors or generating a fresh start. Through a model-aware smooth reflection connection, the erroneous solution is transferred to the correct one. By fine-tuning on the constructed dataset, the model is able to self-correct errors autonomously within the generation process without relying on external critique models. Experimental results demonstrate that LEMMA achieves significant performance improvements over other strong baselines.

Current language model evaluations measure what models know under ideal conditions but not how robustly they know it under realistic stress. Static benchmarks like MMLU and TruthfulQA cannot distinguish a model that lacks knowledge from one whose verification mechanisms collapse when information degrades or adversaries probe for weaknesses. We introduce the Drill-Down and Fabricate Test (DDFT), a protocol that measures epistemic robustness: a model's ability to maintain factual accuracy under progressive semantic compression and adversarial fabrication. We propose a two-system cognitive model comprising a Semantic System that generates fluent text and an Epistemic Verifier that validates factual accuracy. Our findings, based on evaluating 9 frontier models across 8 knowledge domains at 5 compression levels (1,800 turn-level evaluations), reveal that epistemic robustness is orthogonal to conventional design paradigms. Neither parameter count (r=0.083, p=0.832) nor architectural type (r=0.153, p=0.695) significantly predicts robustness, suggesting it emerges from training methodology and verification mechanisms distinct from current approaches. Error detection capability strongly predicts overall robustness (rho=-0.817, p=0.007), indicating this is the critical bottleneck. We find that flagship models exhibit brittleness despite their scale, while smaller models can achieve robust performance, challenging assumptions about the relationship between model size and reliability. The DDFT framework provides both theoretical foundation and practical tools for assessing epistemic robustness before deployment in critical applications.

Code agents are advancing rapidly, but debugging them is becoming increasingly difficult. As frameworks orchestrate parallel tool calls and multi-stage workflows over complex tasks, making the agent's state transitions and error propagation hard to observe. In these runs, an early misstep can trap the agent in unproductive loops or even cascade into fundamental errors, forming hidden error chains that make it hard to tell when the agent goes off track and why. Existing agent tracing analyses either focus on simple interaction or rely on small-scale manual inspection, which limits their scalability and usefulness for real coding workflows. We present CodeTracer, a tracing architecture that parses heterogeneous run artifacts through evolving extractors, reconstructs the full state transition history as a hierarchical trace tree with persistent memory, and performs failure onset localization to pinpoint the failure origin and its downstream chain. To enable systematic evaluation, we construct CodeTraceBench from a large collection of executed trajectories generated by four widely used code agent frameworks on diverse code tasks (e.g., bug fixing, refactoring, and terminal interaction), with supervision at both the stage and step levels for failure localization. Experiments show that CodeTracer substantially outperforms direct prompting and lightweight baselines, and that replaying its diagnostic signals consistently recovers originally failed runs under matched budgets. Our code and data are publicly available.

Optimizing the performance of large-scale software repositories demands expertise in code reasoning and software engineering (SWE) to reduce runtime while preserving program correctness. However, most benchmarks emphasize what to fix rather than how to fix code. We introduce SWE-fficiency, a benchmark for evaluating repository-level performance optimization on real workloads. Our suite contains 498 tasks across nine widely used data-science, machine-learning, and HPC repositories (e.g., numpy, pandas, scipy): given a complete codebase and a slow workload, an agent must investigate code semantics, localize bottlenecks and relevant tests, and produce a patch that matches or exceeds expert speedup while passing the same unit tests. To enable this how-to-fix evaluation, our automated pipeline scrapes GitHub pull requests for performance-improving edits, combining keyword filtering, static analysis, coverage tooling, and execution validation to both confirm expert speedup baselines and identify relevant repository unit tests. Empirical evaluation of state-of-the-art agents reveals significant underperformance. On average, agents achieve less than 0.15x the expert speedup: agents struggle in localizing optimization opportunities, reasoning about execution across functions, and maintaining correctness in proposed edits. We release the benchmark and accompanying data pipeline to facilitate research on automated performance engineering and long-horizon software reasoning.

The rapid growth in the parameter scale of large language models (LLMs) has created a high demand for efficient compression techniques. As a hardware-agnostic and highly compatible technique, low-rank compression has been widely adopted. However, existing methods typically compress each layer independently by minimizing per-layer reconstruction error, overlooking a critical limitation: the reconstruction error propagates and accumulates through the network, which leads to amplified global deviations from the full-precision baseline. To address this, we propose Self-Adaptive Error Suppression SVD (SAES-SVD), a LLMs compression framework that jointly optimizes intra-layer reconstruction and inter-layer error compensation. SAES-SVD is composed of two novel components: (1) Cumulative Error-Aware Layer Compression (CEALC), which formulates the compression objective as a combination of local reconstruction and weighted cumulative error compensation. Based on it, we derive a closed-form low-rank solution relied on second-order activation statistics, which explicitly aligns each layer's output with its full-precision counterpart to compensate for accumulated errors. (2) Adaptive Collaborative Error Suppression (ACES), which automatically adjusts the weighting coefficient to enhance the low-rank structure of the compression objective in CEALC. Specifically, the coefficient is optimized to maximize the ratio between the Frobenius norm of the compressed layer's output and that of the compression objective under a fixed rank, thus ensuring that the rank budget is utilized effectively. Extensive experiments across multiple LLM architectures and tasks show that, without fine-tuning or mixed-rank strategies, SAES-SVD consistently improves post-compression performance.

High-quality, error-free datasets are a key ingredient in building reliable, accurate, and unbiased machine learning (ML) models. However, real world datasets often suffer from errors due to sensor malfunctions, data entry mistakes, or improper data integration across multiple sources that can severely degrade model performance. Detecting and correcting these issues typically require tailor-made solutions and demand extensive domain expertise. Consequently, automation is challenging, rendering the process labor-intensive and tedious. In this study, we investigate whether Large Language Models (LLMs) can help alleviate the burden of manual data cleaning. We set up an experiment in which an LLM, paired with Python, is tasked with cleaning the training dataset to improve the performance of a learning algorithm without having the ability to modify the training pipeline or perform any feature engineering. We run this experiment on multiple Kaggle datasets that have been intentionally corrupted with errors. Our results show that LLMs can identify and correct erroneous entries, such as illogical values or outlier, by leveraging contextual information from other features within the same row, as well as feedback from previous iterations. However, they struggle to detect more complex errors that require understanding data distribution across multiple rows, such as trends and biases.

Large Language Models (LLMs) for code generation evolve rapidly through fine-tuning, merging, or new model releases. However, such updates can introduce regressions, not only in correctness but also in code quality and performance. To address this, we present ReCatcher, a regression testing framework for Python code generation. ReCatcher systematically compares two LLMs, typically a current model and a candidate update, across three dimensions: logical correctness, static code quality, and execution performance. We apply ReCatcher to assess regressions across three update scenarios, fine-tuning, merging, and model release, using CodeLlama, DeepSeek-Coder, and GPT-4o. Our evaluation shows that fine-tuning with cross-language datasets increases syntax errors by up to 12%. Merging with general-purpose models like Llama2 leads to regressions in correctness by up to 18%. GPT-4o introduces regressions of up to 50% in handling missing imports compared to GPT-3.5-turbo, while GPT-4o-mini suffers up to 80% performance degradation in execution time versus GPT-4o. Overall, logical correctness, performance, and error handling (e.g., syntax errors and missing imports) are the most regression-prone areas. Comparing ReCatcher with baseline solutions, it presents better and consistent accuracy across logical and performance aspects. ReCatcher highlights the importance of systematic regression evaluation before adopting new models, while assisting researchers and practitioners in making more informed update decisions.

This study explores enhancing grammatical error correction (GEC) through artificial error generation (AEG) using language models (LMs). Specifically, we fine-tune Llama 2-based LMs for error generation and find that this approach yields synthetic errors akin to human errors. Next, we train GEC Llama models with the help of these artificial errors and outperform previous state-of-the-art error correction models, with gains ranging between 0.8 and 6 F0.5 points across all tested languages (German, Ukrainian, and Estonian). Moreover, we demonstrate that generating errors by fine-tuning smaller sequence-to-sequence models and prompting large commercial LMs (GPT-3.5 and GPT-4) also results in synthetic errors beneficially affecting error generation models.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in downstream software engineering tasks such as Automated Program Repair (APR). In particular, there has been a lot of research on repository-level issue-resolution benchmarks such as SWE-Bench. Although there has been significant progress on this topic, we notice that in the process of solving such issues, existing agentic systems tend to hyper-localize on immediately suspicious lines of code and fix them in isolation, without a deeper understanding of the issue semantics, code semantics, or execution semantics. Consequently, many existing systems generate patches that overfit to the user issue, even when a more general fix is preferable. To address this limitation, we introduce SemAgent, a novel workflow-based procedure that leverages issue, code, and execution semantics to generate patches that are complete - identifying and fixing all lines relevant to the issue. We achieve this through a novel pipeline that (a) leverages execution semantics to retrieve relevant context, (b) comprehends issue-semantics via generalized abstraction, (c) isolates code-semantics within the context of this abstraction, and (d) leverages this understanding in a two-stage architecture: a repair stage that proposes fine-grained fixes, followed by a reviewer stage that filters relevant fixes based on the inferred issue-semantics. Our evaluations show that our methodology achieves a solve rate of 44.66% on the SWEBench-Lite benchmark beating all other workflow-based approaches, and an absolute improvement of 7.66% compared to our baseline, which lacks such deep semantic understanding. We note that our approach performs particularly well on issues requiring multi-line reasoning (and editing) and edge-case handling, suggesting that incorporating issue and code semantics into APR pipelines can lead to robust and semantically consistent repairs.

Text generation models are notoriously vulnerable to errors in the training data. With the wide-spread availability of massive amounts of web-crawled data becoming more commonplace, how can we enhance the robustness of models trained on a massive amount of noisy web-crawled text? In our work, we propose Error Norm Truncation (ENT), a robust enhancement method to the standard training objective that truncates noisy data. Compared to methods that only uses the negative log-likelihood loss to estimate data quality, our method provides a more accurate estimation by considering the distribution of non-target tokens, which is often overlooked by previous work. Through comprehensive experiments across language modeling, machine translation, and text summarization, we show that equipping text generation models with ENT improves generation quality over standard training and previous soft and hard truncation methods. Furthermore, we show that our method improves the robustness of models against two of the most detrimental types of noise in machine translation, resulting in an increase of more than 2 BLEU points over the MLE baseline when up to 50% of noise is added to the data.

Visual programs are executable code generated by large language models to address visual reasoning problems. They decompose complex questions into multiple reasoning steps and invoke specialized models for each step to solve the problems. However, these programs are prone to logic errors, with our preliminary evaluation showing that 58% of the total errors are caused by program logic errors. Debugging complex visual programs remains a major bottleneck for visual reasoning. To address this, we introduce VDebugger, a novel critic-refiner framework trained to localize and debug visual programs by tracking execution step by step. VDebugger identifies and corrects program errors leveraging detailed execution feedback, improving interpretability and accuracy. The training data is generated through an automated pipeline that injects errors into correct visual programs using a novel mask-best decoding technique. Evaluations on six datasets demonstrate VDebugger's effectiveness, showing performance improvements of up to 3.2% in downstream task accuracy. Further studies show VDebugger's ability to generalize to unseen tasks, bringing a notable improvement of 2.3% on the unseen COVR task. Code, data and models are made publicly available at https://github.com/shirley-wu/vdebugger/

Central to many self-improvement pipelines for large language models (LLMs) is the assumption that models can improve by reflecting on past mistakes. We study a phenomenon termed contextual drag: the presence of failed attempts in the context biases subsequent generations toward structurally similar errors. Across evaluations of 11 proprietary and open-weight models on 8 reasoning tasks, contextual drag induces 10-20% performance drops, and iterative self-refinement in models with severe contextual drag can collapse into self-deterioration. Structural analysis using tree edit distance reveals that subsequent reasoning trajectories inherit structurally similar error patterns from the context. We demonstrate that neither external feedback nor successful self-verification suffices to eliminate this effect. While mitigation strategies such as fallback-behavior fine-tuning and context denoising yield partial improvements, they fail to fully restore baseline performance, positioning contextual drag as a persistent failure mode in current reasoning architectures.

In industrial procurement, an LLM answer is useful only if it survives a standards check: recommended material must match operating condition, every parameter must respect a regulated threshold, and no procedure may contradict a safety clause. Partial correctness can mask safety-critical contradictions that aggregate LLM benchmarks rarely capture. We introduce IndustryBench, a 2,049-item benchmark for industrial procurement QA in Chinese, grounded in Chinese national standards (GB/T) and structured industrial product records, organized by seven capability dimensions, ten industry categories, and panel-derived difficulty tiers, with item-aligned English, Russian, and Vietnamese renderings. Our construction pipeline rejects 70.3% of LLM-generated candidates at a search-based external-verification stage, calibrating how unreliable industrial QA remains after LLM-only filtering.Our evaluation decouples raw correctness, scored by a Qwen3-Max judge validated at κ_w = 0.798 against a domain expert, from a separate safety-violation (SV) check against source texts. Across 17 models in Chinese and an 8-model intersection over four languages, we find: (i) the best system reaches only 2.083 on the 0--3 rubric, leaving substantial headroom; (ii) Standards & Terminology is the most persistent capability weakness and survives item-aligned translation; (iii) extended reasoning lowers safety-adjusted scores for 12 of 13 models, primarily by introducing unsupported safety-critical details into longer final answers; and (iv) safety-violation rates reshuffle the leaderboard -- GPT-5.4 climbs from rank 6 to rank 3 after SV adjustment, while Kimi-k2.5-1T-A32B drops seven positions.Industrial LLM evaluation therefore requires source-grounded, safety-aware diagnosis rather than aggregate accuracy. We release IndustryBench with all prompts, scoring scripts, and dataset documentation.

Reproducing buggy code is the first and crucially important step in issue resolving, as it aids in identifying the underlying problems and validating that generated patches resolve the problem. While numerous approaches have been proposed for this task, they primarily address common, widespread errors and struggle to adapt to unique, evolving errors specific to individual code repositories. To fill this gap, we propose EvoCoder, a multi-agent continuous learning framework for issue code reproduction. EvoCoder adopts a reflection mechanism that allows the LLM to continuously learn from previously resolved problems and dynamically refine its strategies to new emerging challenges. To prevent experience bloating, EvoCoder introduces a novel hierarchical experience pool that enables the model to adaptively update common and repo-specific experiences. Our experimental results show a 20\% improvement in issue reproduction rates over existing SOTA methods. Furthermore, integrating our reproduction mechanism significantly boosts the overall accuracy of the existing issue-resolving pipeline.

Data and pipeline parallelism are ubiquitous for training of Large Language Models (LLM) on distributed nodes. Driven by the need for cost-effective training, recent work explores efficient communication arrangement for end to end training. Motivated by LLM's resistance to layer skipping and layer reordering, in this paper, we explore stage (several consecutive layers) skipping in pipeline training, and challenge the conventional practice of sequential pipeline execution. We derive convergence and throughput constraints (guidelines) for pipelining with skipping and swapping pipeline stages. Based on these constraints, we propose SkipPipe, the first partial pipeline framework to reduce the end-to-end training time for LLMs while preserving the convergence. The core of SkipPipe is a path scheduling algorithm that optimizes the paths for individual microbatches and reduces idle time (due to microbatch collisions) on the distributed nodes, complying with the given stage skipping ratio. We extensively evaluate SkipPipe on LLaMa models from 500M to 8B parameters on up to 20 nodes. Our results show that SkipPipe reduces training iteration time by up to 55% compared to full pipeline. Our partial pipeline training also improves resistance to layer omission during inference, experiencing a drop in perplexity of only 7% when running only half the model. Our code is available at https://github.com/gensyn-ai/skippipe.

Automatic Question Generation (QG) often produces outputs with critical defects, such as factual hallucinations and answer mismatches. However, existing evaluation methods, including LLM-based evaluators, mainly adopt a black-box and holistic paradigm without explicit error modeling, leading to the neglect of such defects and overestimation of question quality. To address this issue, we propose ErrEval, a flexible and Error-aware Evaluation framework that enhances QG evaluation through explicit error diagnostics. Specifically, ErrEval reformulates evaluation as a two-stage process of error diagnosis followed by informed scoring. At the first stage, a lightweight plug-and-play Error Identifier detects and categorizes common errors across structural, linguistic, and content-related aspects. These diagnostic signals are then incorporated as explicit evidence to guide LLM evaluators toward more fine-grained and grounded judgments. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of ErrEval, showing that incorporating explicit diagnostics improves alignment with human judgments. Further analyses confirm that ErrEval effectively mitigates the overestimation of low-quality questions.

The rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs) has intensified the requirement for reliable safety evaluation to uncover model vulnerabilities. To this end, numerous LLM safety evaluation benchmarks are proposed. However, existing benchmarks generally rely on labor-intensive manual curation, which causes excessive time and resource consumption. They also exhibit significant redundancy and limited difficulty. To alleviate these problems, we introduce SafetyFlow, the first agent-flow system designed to automate the construction of LLM safety benchmarks. SafetyFlow can automatically build a comprehensive safety benchmark in only four days without any human intervention by orchestrating seven specialized agents, significantly reducing time and resource cost. Equipped with versatile tools, the agents of SafetyFlow ensure process and cost controllability while integrating human expertise into the automatic pipeline. The final constructed dataset, SafetyFlowBench, contains 23,446 queries with low redundancy and strong discriminative power. Our contribution includes the first fully automated benchmarking pipeline and a comprehensive safety benchmark. We evaluate the safety of 49 advanced LLMs on our dataset and conduct extensive experiments to validate our efficacy and efficiency.

The general capabilities of Large Language Models (LLM) highly rely on the composition and selection on extensive pretraining datasets, treated as commercial secrets by several institutions. To mitigate this issue, we open-source the details of a universally applicable data processing pipeline and validate its effectiveness and potential by introducing a competitive LLM baseline. Specifically, the data processing pipeline consists of broad collection to scale up and reweighting to improve quality. We then pretrain a 7B model BaichuanSEED with 3T tokens processed by our pipeline without any deliberate downstream task-related optimization, followed by an easy but effective supervised fine-tuning stage. BaichuanSEED demonstrates consistency and predictability throughout training and achieves comparable performance on comprehensive benchmarks with several commercial advanced large language models, such as Qwen1.5 and Llama3. We also conduct several heuristic experiments to discuss the potential for further optimization of downstream tasks, such as mathematics and coding.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has brought about remarkable generative capabilities but also raised concerns about their potential misuse. While strategies like supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback have enhanced their safety, these methods primarily focus on natural languages, which may not generalize to other domains. This paper introduces CodeAttack, a framework that transforms natural language inputs into code inputs, presenting a novel environment for testing the safety generalization of LLMs. Our comprehensive studies on state-of-the-art LLMs including GPT-4, Claude-2, and Llama-2 series reveal a new and universal safety vulnerability of these models against code input: CodeAttack bypasses the safety guardrails of all models more than 80\% of the time. We find that a larger distribution gap between CodeAttack and natural language leads to weaker safety generalization, such as encoding natural language input with data structures. Furthermore, we give our hypotheses about the success of CodeAttack: the misaligned bias acquired by LLMs during code training, prioritizing code completion over avoiding the potential safety risk. Finally, we analyze potential mitigation measures. These findings highlight new safety risks in the code domain and the need for more robust safety alignment algorithms to match the code capabilities of LLMs.

Amid the expanding use of pre-training data, the phenomenon of benchmark dataset leakage has become increasingly prominent, exacerbated by opaque training processes and the often undisclosed inclusion of supervised data in contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs). This issue skews benchmark effectiveness and fosters potentially unfair comparisons, impeding the field's healthy development. To address this, we introduce a detection pipeline utilizing Perplexity and N-gram accuracy, two simple and scalable metrics that gauge a model's prediction precision on benchmark, to identify potential data leakages. By analyzing 31 LLMs under the context of mathematical reasoning, we reveal substantial instances of training even test set misuse, resulting in potentially unfair comparisons. These findings prompt us to offer several recommendations regarding model documentation, benchmark setup, and future evaluations. Notably, we propose the "Benchmark Transparency Card" to encourage clear documentation of benchmark utilization, promoting transparency and healthy developments of LLMs. we have made our leaderboard, pipeline implementation, and model predictions publicly available, fostering future research.

Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate code with subtle but critical bugs, especially for complex tasks. Existing automated repair methods typically rely on superficial pass/fail signals, offering limited visibility into program behavior and hindering precise error localization. In addition, without a way to learn from prior failures, repair processes often fall into repetitive and inefficient cycles. To overcome these challenges, we present TraceCoder, a collaborative multi-agent framework that emulates the observe-analyze-repair process of human experts. The framework first instruments the code with diagnostic probes to capture fine-grained runtime traces, enabling deep insight into its internal execution. It then conducts causal analysis on these traces to accurately identify the root cause of the failure. This process is further enhanced by a novel Historical Lesson Learning Mechanism (HLLM), which distills insights from prior failed repair attempts to inform subsequent correction strategies and prevent recurrence of similar mistakes. To ensure stable convergence, a Rollback Mechanism enforces that each repair iteration constitutes a strict improvement toward the correct solution. Comprehensive experiments across multiple benchmarks show that TraceCoder achieves up to a 34.43\% relative improvement in Pass@1 accuracy over existing advanced baselines. Ablation studies verify the significance of each system component, with the iterative repair process alone contributing a 65.61\% relative gain in accuracy. Furthermore, TraceCoder significantly outperforms leading iterative methods in terms of both accuracy and cost-efficiency.

Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have improved performance in multi-modal learning, raising the question of whether these models truly understand the content they process. Crucially, can VLMs detect when a reasoning process is wrong and identify its error type? To answer this, we present MMErroR, a multi-modal benchmark of 2,013 samples, each embedding a single coherent reasoning error. These samples span 24 subdomains across six top-level domains, ensuring broad coverage and taxonomic richness. Unlike existing benchmarks that focus on answer correctness, MMErroR targets a process-level, error-centric evaluation that requires models to detect incorrect reasoning and classify the error type within both visual and linguistic contexts. We evaluate 20 advanced VLMs, even the best model (Gemini-3.0-Pro) classifies the error in only 66.47\% of cases, underscoring the challenge of identifying erroneous reasoning. Furthermore, the ability to accurately identify errors offers valuable insights into the capabilities of multi-modal reasoning models. Project Page: https://mmerror-benchmark.github.io

This study investigates various approaches to using Large Language Models (LLMs) for Text-to-SQL program synthesis, focusing on the outcomes and insights derived. Employing the popular Text-to-SQL dataset, spider, the goal was to input a natural language question along with the database schema and output the correct SQL SELECT query. The initial approach was to fine-tune a local and open-source model to generate the SELECT query. After QLoRa fine-tuning WizardLM's WizardCoder-15B model on the spider dataset, the execution accuracy for generated queries rose to a high of 61%. With the second approach, using the fine-tuned gpt-3.5-turbo-16k (Few-shot) + gpt-4-turbo (Zero-shot error correction), the execution accuracy reached a high of 82.1%. Of all the incorrect queries, most can be categorized into a seven different categories of what went wrong: selecting the wrong columns or wrong order of columns, grouping by the wrong column, predicting the wrong values in conditionals, using different aggregates than the ground truth, extra or too few JOIN clauses, inconsistencies in the Spider dataset, and lastly completely incorrect query structure. Most if not all of the queries fall into these categories and it is insightful to understanding where the faults still lie with LLM program synthesis and where they can be improved.

Not a day goes by without hearing about the impressive feats of large language models (LLMs), and equally, not a day passes without hearing about their challenges. LLMs are notoriously vulnerable to biases in their dataset, leading to issues such as toxicity. While domain-adaptive training has been employed to mitigate these issues, these techniques often address all model parameters indiscriminately during the repair process, resulting in poor repair quality and reduced model versatility. In this paper, we introduce a novel dynamic slicing-based intent-aware LLM repair strategy, IRepair. This approach selectively targets the most error-prone sections of the model for repair. Specifically, we propose dynamically slicing the model's most sensitive layers that require immediate attention, concentrating repair efforts on those areas. This method enables more effective repairs with potentially less impact on the model's overall performance by altering a smaller portion of the model. We evaluated our technique on three models from the GPT2 and GPT-Neo families, with parameters ranging from 800M to 1.6B, in a toxicity mitigation setup. Our results show that IRepair repairs errors 43.6% more effectively while causing 46% less disruption to general performance compared to the closest baseline, direct preference optimization. Our empirical analysis also reveals that errors are more concentrated in a smaller section of the model, with the top 20% of layers exhibiting 773% more error density than the remaining 80\%. This highlights the need for selective repair. Additionally, we demonstrate that a dynamic selection approach is essential for addressing errors dispersed throughout the model, ensuring a robust and efficient repair.

In this paper, we present an encoder-decoder model leveraging Flan-T5 for post-Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) Generative Speech Error Correction (GenSEC), and we refer to it as FlanEC. We explore its application within the GenSEC framework to enhance ASR outputs by mapping n-best hypotheses into a single output sentence. By utilizing n-best lists from ASR models, we aim to improve the linguistic correctness, accuracy, and grammaticality of final ASR transcriptions. Specifically, we investigate whether scaling the training data and incorporating diverse datasets can lead to significant improvements in post-ASR error correction. We evaluate FlanEC using the HyPoradise dataset, providing a comprehensive analysis of the model's effectiveness in this domain. Furthermore, we assess the proposed approach under different settings to evaluate model scalability and efficiency, offering valuable insights into the potential of instruction-tuned encoder-decoder models for this task.

This paper introduces BioAgent Bench, a benchmark dataset and an evaluation suite designed for measuring the performance and robustness of AI agents in common bioinformatics tasks. The benchmark contains curated end-to-end tasks (e.g., RNA-seq, variant calling, metagenomics) with prompts that specify concrete output artifacts to support automated assessment, including stress testing under controlled perturbations. We evaluate frontier closed-source and open-weight models across multiple agent harnesses, and use an LLM-based grader to score pipeline progress and outcome validity. We find that frontier agents can complete multi-step bioinformatics pipelines without elaborate custom scaffolding, often producing the requested final artifacts reliably. However, robustness tests reveal failure modes under controlled perturbations (corrupted inputs, decoy files, and prompt bloat), indicating that correct high-level pipeline construction does not guarantee reliable step-level reasoning. Finally, because bioinformatics workflows may involve sensitive patient data, proprietary references, or unpublished IP, closed-source models can be unsuitable under strict privacy constraints; in such settings, open-weight models may be preferable despite lower completion rates. We release the dataset and evaluation suite publicly.

Quantization has significantly improved the compute and memory efficiency of Large Language Model (LLM) training. However, existing approaches still rely on accumulating their updates in high-precision: concretely, gradient updates must be applied to a high-precision weight buffer, known as master weights. This buffer introduces substantial memory overhead, particularly for Sparse Mixture of Experts (SMoE) models, where model parameters and optimizer states dominate memory usage. To address this, we introduce the Error-Compensating Optimizer (ECO), which eliminates master weights by applying updates directly to quantized parameters. ECO quantizes weights after each step and carefully injects the resulting quantization error into the optimizer momentum, forming an error-feedback loop with no additional memory. We prove that, under standard assumptions and a decaying learning rate, ECO converges to a constant-radius neighborhood of the optimum, while naive master-weight removal can incur an error that is inversely proportional to the learning rate. We show empirical results for pretraining small Transformers (30-800M), a Gemma-3 1B model, and a 2.1B parameter Sparse MoE model with FP8 quantization, and fine-tuning DeepSeek-MoE-16B in INT4 precision. Throughout, ECO matches baselines with master weights up to near-lossless accuracy, significantly shifting the static memory vs validation loss Pareto frontier.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in reasoning and generation across domains, but still struggle with identifying and diagnosing complex errors. This stems mainly from training objectives that prioritize correct answers, limiting exposure to and learning from errors. While recent studies have begun to address this by introducing error signals, most rely on shallow, static errors, restricting improvement in deep diagnostic ability. To overcome this, we propose Hide and Seek Game (HSG), a dynamic adversarial framework for error generation and diagnosis, and evaluate it on mathematical problem-solving. HSG involves two adversarial roles: Sneaky, which "hides" by generating subtle, deceptive reasoning errors, and Diagnosis, which "seeks" to accurately detect them. Through adversarial co-evolution, both error stealth and diagnostic precision are enhanced. Experiments on several math reasoning tasks show that HSG significantly boosts error diagnosis, achieving 16.8\%--31.4\% higher accuracy than baselines like GPT-4o. We also release a challenging dataset of deceptive errors and diagnostic annotations as a benchmark for future research.

Intelligent document processing pipelines extract structured entities (tables, images, and text) from documents for use in downstream systems such as knowledge bases, retrieval-augmented generation, and analytics. A persistent limitation of existing pipelines is that extraction output is produced without any intrinsic mechanism to verify whether it faithfully represents the source. Model-internal confidence scores measure inference certainty, not correspondence to the document, and extraction errors pass silently into downstream consumers. We present Reconstruction as Validation (RaV-IDP), a document processing pipeline that introduces reconstruction as a first-class architectural component. After each entity is extracted, a dedicated reconstructor renders the extracted representation back into a form comparable to the original document region, and a comparator scores fidelity between the reconstruction and the unmodified source crop. This fidelity score is a grounded, label-free quality signal. When fidelity falls below a per-entity-type threshold, a structured GPT-4.1 vision fallback is triggered and the validation loop repeats. We enforce a bootstrap constraint: the comparator always anchors against the original document region, never against the extraction, preventing the validation from becoming circular. We further propose a per-stage evaluation framework pairing each pipeline component with an appropriate benchmark. The code pipeline is publicly available at https://github.com/pritesh-2711/RaV-IDP for experimentation and use.

As the demand for artificial intelligence (AI) grows to address complex real-world tasks, single models are often insufficient, requiring the integration of multiple models into pipelines. This paper introduces Bel Esprit, a conversational agent designed to construct AI model pipelines based on user-defined requirements. Bel Esprit employs a multi-agent framework where subagents collaborate to clarify requirements, build, validate, and populate pipelines with appropriate models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this framework in generating pipelines from ambiguous user queries, using both human-curated and synthetic data. A detailed error analysis highlights ongoing challenges in pipeline construction. Bel Esprit is available for a free trial at https://belesprit.aixplain.com.

Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) is critical for the efficient deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs). While 4-bit quantization is widely regarded as an optimal trade-off, reducing the precision to 2-bit usually triggers a catastrophic ``performance cliff.'' It remains unclear whether the underlying mechanisms differ fundamentally. Consequently, we conduct a systematic mechanistic analysis, revealing two qualitatively distinct failure modes: Signal Degradation, where the computational patterns remain intact but information precision is impaired by cumulative error; and Computation Collapse, where key components fail to function, preventing correct information processing and destroying the signal in the early layers. Guided by this diagnosis, we conduct mechanism-aware interventions, demonstrating that targeted, training-free repair can mitigate Signal Degradation, but remains ineffective for Computation Collapse. Our findings provide a systematic diagnostic framework for PTQ failures and suggest that addressing Computation Collapse requires structural reconstruction rather than mere compensation.

Unit test generation has become a promising and important use case of LLMs. However, existing evaluation benchmarks for assessing LLM unit test generation capabilities focus on function- or class-level code rather than more practical and challenging project-level codebases. To address such limitation, we propose ProjectTest, a project-level benchmark for unit test generation covering Python, Java, and JavaScript. ProjectTest features 20 moderate-sized and high-quality projects per language. We evaluate nine frontier LLMs on ProjectTest and the results show that all frontier LLMs tested exhibit moderate performance on ProjectTest on Python and Java, highlighting the difficulty of ProjectTest. We also conduct a thorough error analysis, which shows that even frontier LLMs, such as Claude-3.5-Sonnet, have significant basic yet critical errors, including compilation and cascade errors. Motivated by this observation, we further evaluate all frontier LLMs under manual error-fixing and self-error-fixing scenarios to assess their potential when equipped with error-fixing mechanisms. Our code and dataset is available at https://github.com/YiboWANG214/ProjectTest{ProjectTest}.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in tool learning. In real-world scenarios, user queries are often ambiguous and incomplete, requiring effective clarification. However, existing interactive clarification approaches face two critical limitations: reliance on manually constructed datasets and lack of error correction mechanisms during multi-turn clarification. We present AskToAct, which addresses these challenges by exploiting the structural mapping between queries and their tool invocation solutions. Our key insight is that tool parameters naturally represent explicit user intents. By systematically removing key parameters from queries while retaining them as ground truth, we enable automated construction of high-quality training data. We further enhance model robustness by fine-tuning on error-correction augmented data using selective masking mechanism, enabling dynamic error detection during clarification interactions. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that AskToAct significantly outperforms existing approaches, achieving above 79% accuracy in recovering critical unspecified intents and enhancing clarification efficiency by an average of 48.34% while maintaining high accuracy in tool invocation. Our framework exhibits robust performance across varying complexity levels and successfully generalizes to entirely unseen APIs without additional training, achieving performance comparable to GPT-4 with substantially fewer computational resources.

Deploying LLM-powered agents in enterprise scenarios such as cloud technical support demands high-quality, domain-specific skills. However, existing skill creators lack domain grounding, producing skills poorly aligned with real-world task requirements. Moreover, once deployed, there is no systematic mechanism to trace execution failures back to skill deficiencies and drive targeted refinements, leaving skill quality stagnant despite accumulating operational evidence. We introduce SkillForge, a self-evolving framework that closes an end-to-end creation-evaluation-refinement loop. To produce well-aligned initial skills, a Domain-Contextualized Skill Creator grounds skill synthesis in knowledge bases and historical support tickets. To enable continuous self-optimization, a three-stage pipeline -- Failure Analyzer, Skill Diagnostician, and Skill Optimizer -- automatically diagnoses execution failures in batch, pinpoints the underlying skill deficiencies, and rewrites the skill to eliminate them. This cycle runs iteratively, allowing skills to self-improve with every round of deployment feedback. Evaluated on five real-world cloud support scenarios spanning 1,883 tickets and 3,737 tasks, experiments show that: (1) the Domain-Contextualized Skill Creator produces substantially better initial skills than the generic skill creator, as measured by consistency with expert-authored reference responses from historical tickets; and (2) the self-evolution loop progressively improves skill quality from diverse starting points (including expert-authored, domain-created, and generic skills) across successive rounds, demonstrating that automated evolution can surpass manually curated expert knowledge.

ASR error correction is an interesting option for post processing speech recognition system outputs. These error correction models are usually trained in a supervised fashion using the decoding results of a target ASR system. This approach can be computationally intensive and the model is tuned to a specific ASR system. Recently generative large language models (LLMs) have been applied to a wide range of natural language processing tasks, as they can operate in a zero-shot or few shot fashion. In this paper we investigate using ChatGPT, a generative LLM, for ASR error correction. Based on the ASR N-best output, we propose both unconstrained and constrained, where a member of the N-best list is selected, approaches. Additionally, zero and 1-shot settings are evaluated. Experiments show that this generative LLM approach can yield performance gains for two different state-of-the-art ASR architectures, transducer and attention-encoder-decoder based, and multiple test sets.

Maybe not. We identify and analyse errors in the popular Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark. Even though MMLU is widely adopted, our analysis demonstrates numerous ground truth errors that obscure the true capabilities of LLMs. For example, we find that 57% of the analysed questions in the Virology subset contain errors. To address this issue, we introduce a comprehensive framework for identifying dataset errors using a novel error taxonomy. Then, we create MMLU-Redux, which is a subset of 3,000 manually re-annotated questions across 30 MMLU subjects. Using MMLU-Redux, we demonstrate significant discrepancies with the model performance metrics that were originally reported. Our results strongly advocate for revising MMLU's error-ridden questions to enhance its future utility and reliability as a benchmark. Therefore, we open up MMLU-Redux for additional annotation https://huggingface.co/datasets/edinburgh-dawg/mmlu-redux.

We present SQL Query Engine, an open-source, self-hosted service that translates natural language questions into validated PostgreSQL queries through a two-stage LLM pipeline. The first stage performs automatic schema introspection and SQL generation; a multi-strategy response parser extracts SQL from any LLM output format (JSON, code blocks, or raw text) without requiring structured output APIs. The second stage executes the query against PostgreSQL and, upon failure or empty results, enters an iterative self-healing loop in which the LLM diagnoses the error using full SQLSTATE codes and PostgreSQL diagnostic messages. Two mechanisms prevent regressions: early-accept returns successful queries immediately without LLM re-evaluation, and best-result tracking preserves the best partial result across retries. Schema context is cached per session in Redis, progress events stream via Redis Pub/Sub and SSE, and an OpenAI-compatible /v1/chat/completions endpoint lets existing tools work without modification. All database connections are read-only at the driver level. We evaluate across five LLM backends on a synthetic benchmark (75 questions, three databases) where the self-healing loop yields up to +9.3pp accuracy gains with zero regressions on the best model (Llama 4 Scout 17B, 57.3%), and on BIRD (437 questions, 11 databases migrated from SQLite to PostgreSQL) where the full pipeline reaches 49.0% execution accuracy (GPT-OSS-120B, +4.6pp). Source code: https://github.com/codeadeel/sqlqueryengine.

Many errors in student essays can be explained by influence from the native language (L1). L1 interference refers to errors influenced by a speaker's first language, such as using stadion instead of stadium, reflecting lexical transliteration from Russian. In this work, we address the task of detecting such errors in English essays written by Russian-speaking learners. We introduce RILEC, a large-scale dataset of over 18,000 sentences, combining expert-annotated data from REALEC with synthetic examples generated through rule-based and neural augmentation. We propose a framework for generating L1-motivated errors using generative language models optimized with PPO, prompt-based control, and rule-based patterns. Models fine-tuned on RILEC achieve strong performance, particularly on word-level interference types such as transliteration and tense semantics. We find that the proposed augmentation pipeline leads to a significant performance improvement, making it a potentially valuable tool for learners and teachers to more effectively identify and address such errors.

Test-Time Scaling (TTS) improves LLM reasoning by exploring multiple candidate responses and then operating over this set to find the best output. A tacit premise behind TTS is that sufficiently diverse candidate pools enhance reliability. In this work, we show that this assumption in TTS introduces a previously unrecognized failure mode. When candidate diversity is curtailed, even by a modest amount, TTS becomes much more likely to produce unsafe outputs. We present a reference-guided diversity reduction protocol (RefDiv) that serves as a diagnostic attack to stress test TTS pipelines. Through extensive experiments across open-source models (e.g. Qwen3, Mistral, Llama3.1, Gemma3) and two widely used TTS strategies (Monte Carlo Tree Search and Best-of-N), constraining diversity consistently signifies the rate at which TTS produces unsafe results. The effect is often stronger than that produced by prompts directly with high adversarial intent scores. This observed phenomenon also transfers across TTS strategies and to closed-source models (e.g. OpenAI o3-mini and Gemini-2.5-Pro), thus indicating that this is a general and extant property of TTS rather than a model-specific artifact. Additionally, we find that numerous widely used safety guardrail classifiers (e.g. Llama-Guard), are unable to flag the adversarial input prompts generated by RefDiv, demonstrating that existing defenses offer limited protection against this diversity-driven failure mode.

Disasters are inevitable and increasingly costly, and effective response depends on querying structured tabular data: precise, information-dense records of hazard, exposure, vulnerability, and lifeline infrastructure that underpin disaster management. Current text-to-SQL methods enable natural-language access to such tables but transfer poorly to the disaster domain, where queries span heterogeneous geospatial schemas and require reasoning over causal relations. We introduce DisasterLex, a knowledge-graph-mediated framework that inserts an Expert Knowledge Graph (EKG) of curated concepts and typed causal edges between the user query and the database, bridged to schema by concept-to-table links. The orchestration runs four stages (identifying query entities, routing to the operational domain, planning over causal edges, and grounding the SQL), restricting the schema passed to the model at each step. We instantiate it on a disaster-analytics database (36 geospatial tables, 150 columns) with an EKG of 107 concepts, 117 causal edges, and 52 concept-to-schema links, evaluated on a 75-query test set. On all seven base models spanning proprietary and open-weight families, DisasterLex beats four state-of-the-art baselines (LightRAG, HippoRAG 2, ReFoRCE, CHESS) by 1.4x to 2.75x, with absolute scores of 1.65 to 3.56 (of 5.0). Error analysis shows baseline failures cluster in routing and multi-table SQL composition, the operations our orchestration explicitly addresses. Code, data, and the EKG artifact are available at https://github.com/YimingXiao98/DisasterLex and on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20388029.

Modern distributed training relies heavily on communication compression to reduce the communication overhead. In this work, we study algorithms employing a popular class of contractive compressors in order to reduce communication overhead. However, the naive implementation often leads to unstable convergence or even exponential divergence due to the compression bias. Error Compensation (EC) is an extremely popular mechanism to mitigate the aforementioned issues during the training of models enhanced by contractive compression operators. Compared to the effectiveness of EC in the data homogeneous regime, the understanding of the practicality and theoretical foundations of EC in the data heterogeneous regime is limited. Existing convergence analyses typically rely on strong assumptions such as bounded gradients, bounded data heterogeneity, or large batch accesses, which are often infeasible in modern machine learning applications. We resolve the majority of current issues by proposing EControl, a novel mechanism that can regulate error compensation by controlling the strength of the feedback signal. We prove fast convergence for EControl in standard strongly convex, general convex, and nonconvex settings without any additional assumptions on the problem or data heterogeneity. We conduct extensive numerical evaluations to illustrate the efficacy of our method and support our theoretical findings.

Process-level Reward Models (PRMs) are crucial for complex reasoning and decision-making tasks, where each intermediate step plays an important role in the reasoning process. Since language models are prone to various types of errors during the reasoning process, PRMs are required to possess nuanced capabilities for detecting various implicit error types in real-world scenarios. However, current benchmarks primarily focus on step correctness, failing to evaluate PRMs' performance systematically. To address this gap, we introduce PRMBench, a process-level benchmark specifically designed to assess the fine-grained error detection capabilities of PRMs. PRMBench comprises 6,216 carefully designed problems and 83,456 step-level labels, evaluating models across multiple dimensions, including simplicity, soundness, and sensitivity. In our experiments on 15 models, spanning both open-source PRMs and closed-source large language models prompted as critic models, we uncover significant weaknesses in current PRMs. These findings underscore the challenges inherent in process-level evaluation and highlight key directions for future research. We hope PRMBench can be a robust bench for advancing research on PRM evaluation and development.

The increasing adoption of agentic workflows across diverse domains brings a critical need to scalably and systematically evaluate the complex traces these systems generate. Current evaluation methods depend on manual, domain-specific human analysis of lengthy workflow traces - an approach that does not scale with the growing complexity and volume of agentic outputs. Error analysis in these settings is further complicated by the interplay of external tool outputs and language model reasoning, making it more challenging than traditional software debugging. In this work, we (1) articulate the need for robust and dynamic evaluation methods for agentic workflow traces, (2) introduce a formal taxonomy of error types encountered in agentic systems, and (3) present a set of 148 large human-annotated traces (TRAIL) constructed using this taxonomy and grounded in established agentic benchmarks. To ensure ecological validity, we curate traces from both single and multi-agent systems, focusing on real-world applications such as software engineering and open-world information retrieval. Our evaluations reveal that modern long context LLMs perform poorly at trace debugging, with the best Gemini-2.5-pro model scoring a mere 11% on TRAIL. Our dataset and code are made publicly available to support and accelerate future research in scalable evaluation for agentic workflows.

Pipeline integrity is critical to industrial safety and environmental protection, with Magnetic Flux Leakage (MFL) detection being a primary non-destructive testing technology. Despite the promise of deep learning for automating MFL interpretation, progress toward reliable models has been constrained by the absence of a large-scale public dataset and benchmark, making fair comparison and reproducible evaluation difficult. We introduce PipeMFL-240K, a large-scale, meticulously annotated dataset and benchmark for complex object detection in pipeline MFL pseudo-color images. PipeMFL-240K reflects real-world inspection complexity and poses several unique challenges: (i) an extremely long-tailed distribution over 12 categories, (ii) a high prevalence of tiny objects that often comprise only a handful of pixels, and (iii) substantial intra-class variability. The dataset contains 240,320 images and 191,530 high-quality bounding-box annotations, collected from 11 pipelines spanning approximately 1,480 km. Extensive experiments are conducted with state-of-the-art object detectors to establish baselines. Results show that modern detectors still struggle with the intrinsic properties of MFL data, highlighting considerable headroom for improvement, while PipeMFL-240K provides a reliable and challenging testbed to drive future research. As the first public dataset and the first benchmark of this scale and scope for pipeline MFL inspection, it provides a critical foundation for efficient pipeline diagnostics as well as maintenance planning and is expected to accelerate algorithmic innovation and reproducible research in MFL-based pipeline integrity assessment.

Pipeline parallelism is essential for training large neural networks, but existing schedules trade off throughput, memory, and optimization consistency. Synchronous pipelines preserve forward/backward weight consistency but suffer from bubbles; asynchronous pipelines remove bubbles but introduce weight-version mismatch, typically requiring weight stashing, prediction, or correction mechanisms. We introduce PACI (Pipeline Asynchronous training with Controlled Inconsistency), a bubble-free asynchronous pipeline method that bounds forward/backward version drift without weight stashing, prediction, additional parameter copies, or global synchronization. The key idea is to use local gradient accumulation as a version-control mechanism: by slowing parameter-version evolution relative to pipeline delay, PACI limits the number of optimizer updates crossed by any micro-batch while preserving steady-state utilization. In GPT-style language-model pretraining, PACI matches the stability and final perplexity of synchronous 1F1B-flush, retains the same peak memory footprint, achieves fully utilized pipeline throughput, and improves training time-to-accuracy by up to 1.69times over the fastest flush baseline. These results show that forward/backward inconsistency need not be eliminated: when explicitly bounded, it can be safely traded for substantial efficiency gains.

Harmful fine-tuning issue qi2023fine poses serious safety concerns for Large language models' fine-tuning-as-a-service. While existing defenses huang2024vaccine,rosati2024representation have been proposed to mitigate the issue, their performances are still far away from satisfactory, and the root cause of the problem has not been fully recovered. For the first time in the literature, we in this paper show that harmful perturbation over the model weights should be the root cause of alignment-broken of harmful fine-tuning. In order to attenuate the negative impact of harmful perturbation, we propose an alignment-stage solution, dubbed Booster. Technically, along with the original alignment loss, we append a loss regularizer in the alignment stage's optimization. The regularizer ensures that the model's harmful loss reduction before/after simulated harmful perturbation is attenuated, thereby mitigating the subsequent fine-tuning risk. Empirical results show that Booster can effectively reduce the harmful score of the fine-tuned models while maintaining the performance of downstream tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/git-disl/Booster.

Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly capable of following instructions and complex reasoning, making prompting a flexible interface for adapting models without parameter updates. Yet prompt design remains labor-intensive and highly sensitive to formatting, phrasing, and instruction order, motivating automated prompt optimization methods that reduce manual effort while preserving inference-time flexibility. However, existing methods often search over prompt candidates or use fixed critique-refine pipelines driven by individual examples or small batches, limiting their ability to capture systematic error patterns and make targeted edits grounded in failure history. We propose Reflective Prompt Tuning (RPT), a framework that uses LLM function calling to simulate the iterative workflow of human prompt engineers. An LLM optimizer calls a diagnostic function that evaluates the target model over an entire optimization set, summarizes recurring failure modes, and returns a structured diagnostic report. The optimizer uses this report, together with an accumulated memory of prior reports, to revise the prompt for the next iteration. RPT further supports confidence-aware optimization by using calibration signals in diagnostic feedback and final prompt selection. Across three reasoning tasks, RPT improves over initial prompts by up to 12.9 points, remains competitive with state of the art, and improves confidence calibration. Our analyses show that RPT is especially effective on multi-hop and mathematical reasoning, producing targeted prompt revisions that align with diagnosed failure patterns and lead to gains in task performance and calibration.

We consider the task of mapping pseudocode to long programs that are functionally correct. Given test cases as a mechanism to validate programs, we search over the space of possible translations of the pseudocode to find a program that passes the validation. However, without proper credit assignment to localize the sources of program failures, it is difficult to guide search toward more promising programs. We propose to perform credit assignment based on signals from compilation errors, which constitute 88.7% of program failures. Concretely, we treat the translation of each pseudocode line as a discrete portion of the program, and whenever a synthesized program fails to compile, an error localization method tries to identify the portion of the program responsible for the failure. We then focus search over alternative translations of the pseudocode for those portions. For evaluation, we collected the SPoC dataset (Search-based Pseudocode to Code) containing 18,356 programs with human-authored pseudocode and test cases. Under a budget of 100 program compilations, performing search improves the synthesis success rate over using the top-one translation of the pseudocode from 25.6% to 44.7%.

Preference learning enhances Code LLMs beyond supervised fine-tuning by leveraging relative quality comparisons. Existing methods construct preference pairs from candidates based on test case success, treating the higher pass rate sample as positive and the lower as negative. However, this approach does not pinpoint specific errors in the code, which prevents the model from learning more informative error correction patterns, as aligning failing code as a whole lacks the granularity needed to capture meaningful error-resolution relationships. To address these issues, we propose IterPref, a new preference alignment framework that mimics human iterative debugging to refine Code LLMs. IterPref explicitly locates error regions and aligns the corresponding tokens via a tailored DPO algorithm. To generate informative pairs, we introduce the CodeFlow dataset, where samples are iteratively refined until passing tests, with modifications capturing error corrections. Extensive experiments show that a diverse suite of Code LLMs equipped with IterPref achieves significant performance gains in code generation and improves on challenging tasks like BigCodeBench. In-depth analysis reveals that IterPref yields fewer errors. Our code and data will be made publicaly available.

Modern instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress in code generation. However, these LLMs fine-tuned with standard supervised fine-tuning (SFT) sometimes generate plausible-looking but functionally incorrect code variants. This issue likely stems from the limitation of standard SFT, which treats all tokens equally during optimization and fails to emphasize the error-sensitive segments-specific code differences between correct implementations and similar incorrect variants. To address this problem, we propose Fault-Aware Fine-Tuning (FAIT), a novel fine-tuning technique that enhances LLMs' code generation by (1) extracting multi-granularity (line/token-level) differences between correct and incorrect yet similar implementations to identify error-sensitive segments, and (2) dynamically prioritizing those segments during training via dynamic loss weighting. Through extensive experiments on seven LLMs across three widely-used benchmarks, our method achieves an average relative improvement of 6.9% on pass@1 with just one epoch of training, with some enhanced 6.7B LLMs outperforming closed-source models, e.g., GPT-3.5-Turbo. Furthermore, our fine-tuning technique demonstrates strong generalization with performance improvements ranging from 3.8% to 19.1% across diverse instruction-tuned LLMs, and our ablation studies confirm the contributions of different granularities of differences and loss function components.

With the increasing scale of models, the need for efficient distributed training has become increasingly urgent. Recently, many synchronous pipeline parallelism approaches have been proposed to improve training throughput. However, these approaches still suffer from two major issues, i.e., pipeline bubbles caused by periodic flushing and extra communication due to the increasing number of pipeline stages. To this end, we propose BitPipe, a bidirectional interleaved pipeline parallelism for accelerating large models training. Specifically, a hybrid scheme of fusing interleaved pipelines with bidirectional pipelines is proposed to reduce the computational time of each single micro-batch and multiply the number of devices executing simultaneously. A V-shaped schedule with eager gradient synchronization is introduced to reduce and overlap the communication between devices. Experiments conducted on up to 32 GPUs show that BitPipe improves the training throughput of GPT-style and BERT-style models by 1.05x-1.28x compared to the state-of-the-art synchronous approaches. The code of our implementation is available at https://github.com/wuhouming/BitPipe.

CI failure logs are large (median 5k lines, max 200k in this corpus) and noisy. Coding agents that try to debug them depend on an upstream tool to reduce the log to a manageable context, but the field has had no public empirical comparison of which reductions preserve enough evidence for downstream LLM diagnosis. We introduce LogDx-CI, a benchmark that compares 11 context-reduction tools (raw, tail, grep, three RTK modes, two real LLM map-reduce summarizers, three hybrid routers) on 35 real GitHub Actions failure cases, scored by 3 LLM debugger families (Claude Haiku 4.5, Claude Sonnet 4.6, OpenAI gpt-5-mini) plus a Sonnet 4.6 tool-using agent. We report three load-bearing findings. (1)~Hybrid grep+tail routers dominate the cost-quality Pareto frontier; the top two methods score 0.670 / 0.666 at sim \0.03 per case, same-ballpark quality as standalone grep at 4.5\times fewer tokens. (2)~In the agent-loop regime, the quality range across reduction tools collapses 7\times (single-shot spread 0.42 \to agent-loop spread 0.059); the agent rescues weak contexts via follow-up tool calls. However, cost differences persist: weak contexts force the agent to issue 2--4\times more tool calls to recover. (3)~A cross-family LLM-summary pair (gpt-5-mini summarizer feeding a Claude Haiku debugger) beats the same-family pair by +0.071 averaged across four diagnoser variants, falsifying the self-call-bias hypothesis on this task. The gpt-5-mini summarizer is also the agent-loop #1 method (score 0.749) at 0.37 tool-calls per case and 10\times lower reducer cost than the Haiku summarizer (0.18 vs \$1.75 per case). All data, code, per-case bundles, and reproducibility infrastructure are public.

Most programmers make mistakes when writing code. Some of these mistakes are small and require few edits to the original program -- a class of errors recently termed last mile mistakes. These errors break the flow for experienced developers and can stump novice programmers. Existing automated repair techniques targeting this class of errors are language-specific and do not easily carry over to new languages. Transferring symbolic approaches requires substantial engineering and neural approaches require data and retraining. We introduce RING, a multilingual repair engine powered by a large language model trained on code (LLMC) such as Codex. Such a multilingual engine enables a flipped model for programming assistance, one where the programmer writes code and the AI assistance suggests fixes, compared to traditional code suggestion technology. Taking inspiration from the way programmers manually fix bugs, we show that a prompt-based strategy that conceptualizes repair as localization, transformation, and candidate ranking, can successfully repair programs in multiple languages with minimal effort. We present the first results for such a multilingual repair engine by evaluating on 6 different languages and comparing performance to language-specific repair engines. We show that RING can outperform language-specific repair engines for three of these languages.

Deploying large language models (LLMs) in real-world applications requires robust safety guard models to detect and block harmful user prompts. While large safety guard models achieve strong performance, their computational cost is substantial. To mitigate this, smaller distilled models are used, but they often underperform on "hard" examples where the larger model provides accurate predictions. We observe that many inputs can be reliably handled by the smaller model, while only a small fraction require the larger model's capacity. Motivated by this, we propose SafeRoute, a binary router that distinguishes hard examples from easy ones. Our method selectively applies the larger safety guard model to the data that the router considers hard, improving efficiency while maintaining accuracy compared to solely using the larger safety guard model. Experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that our adaptive model selection significantly enhances the trade-off between computational cost and safety performance, outperforming relevant baselines.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have substantially enhanced their mathematical reasoning abilities. However, these models still struggle with complex problems that require multiple reasoning steps, frequently leading to logical or numerical errors. While numerical mistakes can be largely addressed by integrating a code interpreter, identifying logical errors within intermediate steps is more challenging. Moreover, manually annotating these steps for training is not only expensive but also labor-intensive, requiring the expertise of professional annotators. In our study, we introduce an innovative approach that bypasses the need for process annotations (from human or GPTs) by utilizing the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) framework. This technique automatically generates both the process supervision and the step-level evaluation signals. Our method iteratively trains the policy and value models, leveraging the capabilities of a well-pretrained LLM to progressively enhance its mathematical reasoning skills. Furthermore, we propose an efficient inference strategy-step-level beam search, where the value model is crafted to assist the policy model (i.e., LLM) in navigating more effective reasoning paths, rather than solely relying on prior probabilities. The experimental results on both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets demonstrate that even without GPT-4 or human-annotated process supervision, our AlphaMath framework achieves comparable or superior results to previous state-of-the-art methods.

Critical Error Detection (CED) in machine translation aims to determine whether a translation is safe to use or contains unacceptable deviations in meaning. While the WMT21 English-German CED dataset provided the first benchmark, it is limited in scale, label balance, domain coverage, and temporal freshness. We present SynCED-EnDe, a new resource consisting of 1,000 gold-labeled and 8,000 silver-labeled sentence pairs, balanced 50/50 between error and non-error cases. SynCED-EnDe draws from diverse 2024-2025 sources (StackExchange, GOV.UK) and introduces explicit error subclasses, structured trigger flags, and fine-grained auxiliary judgments (obviousness, severity, localization complexity, contextual dependency, adequacy deviation). These enrichments enable systematic analyses of error risk and intricacy beyond binary detection. The dataset is permanently hosted on GitHub and Hugging Face, accompanied by documentation, annotation guidelines, and baseline scripts. Benchmark experiments with XLM-R and related encoders show substantial performance gains over WMT21 due to balanced labels and refined annotations. We envision SynCED-EnDe as a community resource to advance safe deployment of MT in information retrieval and conversational assistants, particularly in emerging contexts such as wearable AI devices.

Small language models are attractive for production deployment due to their low cost, fast inference, and ease of specialization. However, adapting them to a specific task remains a challenging engineering loop, driven not by training itself but by surrounding decisions: data curation, failure diagnosis, regression avoidance, and iteration control. We present Pioneer Agent, a closed-loop system that automates this lifecycle. In cold-start mode, given only a natural-language task description, the agent acquires data, constructs evaluation sets, and iteratively trains models by jointly optimizing data, hyperparameters, and learning strategy. In production mode, given a deployed model with labeled failures, it diagnoses error patterns, constructs targeted training data, and retrains under explicit regression constraints. To evaluate this setting, we introduce AdaptFT-Bench, a benchmark of synthetic inference logs with progressively increasing noise, designed to test the full adaptation loop: diagnosis, curriculum synthesis, retraining, and verification. Across eight cold-start benchmarks spanning reasoning, math, code generation, summarization, and classification, Pioneer Agent improves over base models by 1.6-83.8 points. On AdaptFT-Bench, it improves or preserves performance in all seven scenarios, while naive retraining degrades by up to 43 points. On two production-style deployments built from public benchmark tasks, it raises intent classification from 84.9% to 99.3% and Entity F1 from 0.345 to 0.810. Beyond performance gains, the agent often discovers effective training strategies, including chain-of-thought supervision, task-specific optimization, and quality-focused data curation, purely from downstream feedback.

Recently, given the docstring for the target problem and the target function signature, large language models (LLMs) have been used not only to generate source code, but also to generate test cases, consisting of test inputs and assertions (e.g., in the form of checking an actual output against the expected output). However, as shown by our empirical study on assertions generated by four LLMs for the HumanEval benchmark, over 62% of the generated assertions are incorrect (i.e., failed on the ground-truth problem solution). To detect incorrect assertions (given the docstring and the target function signature along with a sample of example inputs and outputs), in this paper, we propose a new approach named DeCon to effectively detect incorrect assertions via LLM-generated postconditions for the target problem (a postcondition is a predicate that must always be true just after the execution of the ground-truth problem solution). Our approach requires a small set of I/O examples (i.e., a sample of example inputs and outputs) for the target problem (e.g., the I/O examples included in the docstring for a target problem in HumanEval). We use the given I/O examples to filter out those LLM-generated postconditions that are violated by at least one given I/O example. We then use the remaining postconditions to detect incorrect assertions as those assertions that violate at least one remaining postcondition. Experimental results show that DeCon can detect averagely more than 64% (63% and 65.5% detected by GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, respectively) incorrect assertions generated by four state-of-the-art LLMs, and DeCon can also improve the effectiveness of these LLMs in code generation by 4% in terms of Pass@1. In addition, although DeCon might filter out correct assertions, the fault-finding ability of the remaining correct assertions decreases only slightly.

Production LLM systems require both safety moderation and PII detection under strict latency and cost constraints. This creates a trade-off: autoregressive moderators are accurate but expensive, while lightweight encoders are faster but less capable. We present GLiNER Guard (GLiGuard), a unified encoder that performs safety classification and PII detection in a single forward pass, simplifying safety pipelines. We introduce three variants: compact uni- and bi-encoders (145-147M) for high-throughput serving, and GLiGuard Omni (209M) for stronger moderation quality. Under dynamic batching on a single A100, the compact model reaches 193 requests/sec with P99 latency below 1s, achieving 1.6x higher throughput than GLiNER2. Omni remains competitive with much larger moderators on public safety benchmarks. We also release PII-Bench, a span-level benchmark for evaluating PII detection in end-to-end pipelines. Overall, encoder-based guardrails offer a practical low-cost alternative for always-on moderation. Models and benchmarks are released on HuggingFace.

Large language models (LLMs) show increasing promise in medical applications, but their ability to detect and correct errors in clinical texts -- a prerequisite for safe deployment -- remains under-evaluated, particularly beyond English. We introduce MedRECT, a cross-lingual benchmark (Japanese/English) that formulates medical error handling as three subtasks: error detection, error localization (sentence extraction), and error correction. MedRECT is built with a scalable, automated pipeline from the Japanese Medical Licensing Examinations (JMLE) and a curated English counterpart, yielding MedRECT-ja (663 texts) and MedRECT-en (458 texts) with comparable error/no-error balance. We evaluate 9 contemporary LLMs spanning proprietary, open-weight, and reasoning families. Key findings: (i) reasoning models substantially outperform standard architectures, with up to 13.5% relative improvement in error detection and 51.0% in sentence extraction; (ii) cross-lingual evaluation reveals 5-10% performance gaps from English to Japanese, with smaller disparities for reasoning models; (iii) targeted LoRA fine-tuning yields asymmetric improvements in error correction performance (Japanese: +0.078, English: +0.168) while preserving reasoning capabilities; and (iv) our fine-tuned model exceeds human expert performance on structured medical error correction tasks. To our knowledge, MedRECT is the first comprehensive cross-lingual benchmark for medical error correction, providing a reproducible framework and resources for developing safer medical LLMs across languages.

We investigate a failure mode of large language models (LLMs) in which plain-text prompts elicit excessive outputs, a phenomenon we term Overflow. Unlike jailbreaks or prompt injection, Overflow arises under ordinary interaction settings and can lead to elevated serving cost, latency, and cross-user performance degradation, particularly when scaled across many requests. Beyond usability, the stakes are economic and environmental: unnecessary tokens increase per-request cost and energy consumption, compounding into substantial operational spend and carbon footprint at scale. Moreover, Overflow represents a practical vector for compute amplification and service degradation in shared environments. We introduce BenchOverflow, a model-agnostic benchmark of nine plain-text prompting strategies that amplify output volume without adversarial suffixes or policy circumvention. Using a standardized protocol with a fixed budget of 5000 new tokens, we evaluate nine open- and closed-source models and observe pronounced rightward shifts and heavy tails in length distributions. Cap-saturation rates (CSR@1k/3k/5k) and empirical cumulative distribution functions (ECDFs) quantify tail risk; within-prompt variance and cross-model correlations show that Overflow is broadly reproducible yet heterogeneous across families and attack vectors. A lightweight mitigation-a fixed conciseness reminder-attenuates right tails and lowers CSR for all strategies across the majority of models. Our findings position length control as a measurable reliability, cost, and sustainability concern rather than a stylistic quirk. By enabling standardized comparison of length-control robustness across models, BenchOverflow provides a practical basis for selecting deployments that minimize resource waste and operating expense, and for evaluating defenses that curb compute amplification without eroding task performance.

This paper presents insights from evaluating 16 frontier large language models (LLMs) on the WebApp1K benchmark, a test suite designed to assess the ability of LLMs to generate web application code. The results reveal that while all models possess similar underlying knowledge, their performance is differentiated by the frequency of mistakes they make. By analyzing lines of code (LOC) and failure distributions, we find that writing correct code is more complex than generating incorrect code. Furthermore, prompt engineering shows limited efficacy in reducing errors beyond specific cases. These findings suggest that further advancements in coding LLM should emphasize on model reliability and mistake minimization.

We propose a new variant of the Adam optimizer [Kingma and Ba, 2014] called MICROADAM that specifically minimizes memory overheads, while maintaining theoretical convergence guarantees. We achieve this by compressing the gradient information before it is fed into the optimizer state, thereby reducing its memory footprint significantly. We control the resulting compression error via a novel instance of the classical error feedback mechanism from distributed optimization [Seide et al., 2014, Alistarh et al., 2018, Karimireddy et al., 2019] in which the error correction information is itself compressed to allow for practical memory gains. We prove that the resulting approach maintains theoretical convergence guarantees competitive to those of AMSGrad, while providing good practical performance. Specifically, we show that MICROADAM can be implemented efficiently on GPUs: on both million-scale (BERT) and billion-scale (LLaMA) models, MicroAdam provides practical convergence competitive to that of the uncompressed Adam baseline, with lower memory usage and similar running time. Our code is available at https://github.com/IST-DASLab/MicroAdam.

With the growing adoption of Large Language Model (LLM) agents in persistent, real-world roles, they naturally encounter continuous streams of tasks and inevitable failures. A key limitation, however, is their inability to systematically learn from these mistakes, forcing them to repeat identical errors in similar contexts. Unlike prior training-free methods that primarily store raw instance-level experience or focus on retrieving successful trajectories, we propose Mistake Notebook Learning (MNL), a novel memory framework that enables agents to self-curate generalizable guidance from batch-clustered failures. This mechanism allows agents to distill shared error patterns into structured "mistake notes," updating an external memory only when batch performance improves to ensure stability. To further amplify adaptability, we integrate MNL with test-time scaling, leveraging aggregated failure patterns to actively steer the search process away from known pitfalls. Experiments on mathematical reasoning, Text-to-SQL, and interactive agent benchmarks show that MNL achieves competitive performance compared to existing memory mechanisms and in-context methods in both effectiveness and efficiency. These findings position structured mistake abstraction as a critical lever for robust agent evolution, enabling continuous improvement without the cost of parameter updates. The code is available at https://github.com/Bairong-Xdynamics/MistakeNotebookLearning/tree/main.

Event detection refers to identifying event occurrences in a text and comprises of two subtasks; event identification and classification. We present EDM3, a novel approach for Event Detection that formulates three generative tasks: identification, classification, and combined detection. We show that EDM3 helps to learn transferable knowledge that can be leveraged to perform Event Detection and its subtasks concurrently, mitigating the error propagation inherent in pipelined approaches. Unlike previous dataset- or domain-specific approaches, EDM3 utilizes the existing knowledge of language models, allowing it to be trained over any classification schema. We evaluate EDM3 on multiple event detection datasets: RAMS, WikiEvents, MAVEN, and MLEE, showing that EDM3 outperforms 1) single-task performance by 8.4% on average and 2) multi-task performance without instructional prompts by 2.4% on average. We obtain SOTA results on RAMS (71.3% vs. 65.1% F-1) and competitive performance on other datasets. We analyze our approach to demonstrate its efficacy in low-resource and multi-sentence settings. We also show the effectiveness of this approach on non-standard event configurations such as multi-word and multi-class event triggers. Overall, our results show that EDM3 is a promising approach for Event Detection that has the potential for real-world applications.

When an AI agent calls an API and hits a validation error, it needs more than what went wrong -- it needs what to do next. A self-reflective API returns, on validation failure, a machine-readable recovery\_feedback.suggestions[] payload sufficient for the agent to repair the request and retry without external reasoning. On a leak-audited pilot (N{=}30 per cell, 3 LLMs, 10 adversarial tasks), structured suggestions lift task-completion rate by +36.7--40.0pp over plain-English diagnoses on Anthropic models (Fisher's exact p le 0.0022), at 1.8--2.2times better per-success token efficiency. The lift is not significant on gpt-4o-mini (p{=}0.435); a second-domain replication on a billing API confirms the pattern. The comparison only holds after auditing two undocumented classes of answer leakage in LLM benchmarks. We shipaudit\_prompt\_leakage.py as reusable CI infrastructure. Code and data: https://github.com/arquicanedo/self-reflective-apis.

When multi-agent systems (MAS) fail, identifying where the decisive error occurred is the first step for automated recovery to an earlier state. Error attribution remains a fundamental challenge due to the long interaction traces that large language model-based MAS generate. This paper presents a framework for error attribution based on conformal prediction (CP) which provides finite-sample, distribution-free coverage guarantees. We introduce new algorithms for filtration-based CP designed for sequential data such as agent trajectories. Unlike existing CP algorithms, our approach predicts sets that are contiguous sequences to enable efficient recovery and debugging. We verify our theoretical guarantees on a variety of agents and datasets, show that errors can be precisely isolated, then use prediction sets to rollback MAS to correct their own errors. Our overall approach is model-agnostic, and offers a principled uncertainty layer for MAS error attribution. We release code at https://github.com/layer6ai-labs/conformal-agent-error-attribution.

Grammatical Error Detection (GED) methods rely heavily on human annotated error corpora. However, these annotations are unavailable in many low-resource languages. In this paper, we investigate GED in this context. Leveraging the zero-shot cross-lingual transfer capabilities of multilingual pre-trained language models, we train a model using data from a diverse set of languages to generate synthetic errors in other languages. These synthetic error corpora are then used to train a GED model. Specifically we propose a two-stage fine-tuning pipeline where the GED model is first fine-tuned on multilingual synthetic data from target languages followed by fine-tuning on human-annotated GED corpora from source languages. This approach outperforms current state-of-the-art annotation-free GED methods. We also analyse the errors produced by our method and other strong baselines, finding that our approach produces errors that are more diverse and more similar to human errors.

Tool-augmented language agents frequently fail in real-world deployment due to tool malfunctions--timeouts, API exceptions, or inconsistent outputs--triggering cascading reasoning errors and task abandonment. Existing agent training pipelines optimize only for success trajectories, failing to expose models to the tool failures that dominate real-world usage. We propose PALADIN, a generalizable framework for equipping language agents with robust failure recovery capabilities. PALADIN trains on 50,000+ recovery-annotated trajectories constructed via systematic failure injection and expert demonstrations on an enhanced ToolBench dataset. Training uses LoRA-based fine-tuning to retain base capabilities while injecting recovery competence. At inference, PALADIN detects execution-time errors and retrieves the most similar case from a curated bank of 55+ failure exemplars aligned with ToolScan's taxonomy, then executes the corresponding recovery action. This approach generalizes to novel failures beyond the training distribution, retaining 95.2\% recovery performance on unseen tool APIs. Evaluation across PaladinEval and ToolReflectEval demonstrates consistent improvements in Recovery Rate (RR), Task Success Rate (TSR), Catastrophic Success Rate (CSR), and Efficiency Score (ES). PALADIN improves RR from 32.76% to 89.68% (+57% relative) over ToolBench and outperforms the strongest baseline CRITIC (76.34%) by +13.3%. Against vanilla agents, PALADIN achieves 89.86\% RR (+66% relative improvement from 23.75%). These results establish PALADIN as an effective method for building fault-tolerant agents capable of robust recovery in real-world tool environments.

Multi-LLM revision pipelines, in which a second model reviews and improves a draft produced by a first, are widely assumed to derive their gains from genuine error correction. We question this assumption with a controlled decomposition experiment that uses four matched conditions to separate second-pass gains into three additive components: re-solving, scaffold, and content. We evaluate this design across two model pairs on three benchmarks spanning knowledge-intensive MCQ and competitive programming. Our results show that the gains of multi-LLM revision are not monolithic, but depend on task structure, draft quality, and the type of draft information. On MCQ tasks, where the answer space is constrained and drafts provide little structural guidance, most gains are consistent with stronger-model re-solving, and directly routing queries to the stronger model can be more effective than revising a weak draft. On code generation tasks, however, two-stage prompting remains useful because even semantically null drafts can provide substantial structural scaffolding, while weak draft content can be harmful. Finally, role-reversed experiments show that strong drafts clearly benefit weak reviewers. Ultimately, our findings demonstrate that the utility of multi-LLM revision is dynamically bottlenecked by task structure and draft quality, necessitating more targeted pipeline designs rather than blanket revision strategies.

Current reasoning paradigms for LLMs include chain-of-thought, ReAct, and post-hoc self-critique. These paradigms rely on two assumptions that fail on long-horizon, multi-stage tasks. As a result, errors accumulate silently across reasoning steps, leaving an open question: can a reasoning system effectively detect and recover from its own failures? We present ReFlect, a harness system for LLM reasoning that creates standalone error detection and recovery logic as a deterministic wrapper around the model. Controlled experiments across 6 reasoning domains show that prompt-level self-critique produces formulaic templates that flag no issues in 90 of 100 audited reflection blocks, and the investigated LLMs wrongly accept a wrong answer in at least 76\% of cases. Our ReFlect harness achieves task success rates ranging from 41\% on gpt-4o-mini to 56\% on Claude Sonnet 4.5 across six models spanning small and frontier scale, with per-model gains over Direct CoT ranging from +7 pp on Qwen2.5-72B to +29 pp on Claude Sonnet 4.5, and additionally raises SWE-bench patch-structural quality from 0\% (Direct CoT) to between 82\% (Qwen2.5-72B) and 87\% (GPT-4o). Notably, the harness gain is inversely proportional to the model's Direct CoT task success rate (the fitted slope is -1.69 with r=-0.76): each pp lost in baseline success rate is mechanically recovered by 1.69 pp of harness gain. We spot that adding structured reasoning state and operators yields only 15.0--18.7\% pair-mean on Llama-3.3-70B and Qwen2.5-72B because models at this scale cannot reliably populate the state its operators require. ReFlect is model-agnostic, training-free, and operates entirely at inference time.

Outcome-reward reinforcement learning (RL) has proven effective at improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, standard RL assigns credit only at the level of the final answer, penalizing entire reasoning traces when the outcome is incorrect and uniformly reinforcing all steps when it is correct. As a result, correct intermediate steps may be discouraged in failed traces, while spurious steps may be reinforced in successful ones. We refer to this failure mode as the problem of credit assignment. While a natural remedy is to train a process reward model, accurately optimizing such models to identify corrective reasoning steps remains challenging. We introduce Intervention Training (InT), a training paradigm in which the model performs fine-grained credit assignment on its own reasoning traces by proposing short, targeted corrections that steer trajectories toward higher reward. Using reference solutions commonly available in mathematical reasoning datasets and exploiting the fact that verifying a model-generated solution is easier than generating a correct one from scratch, the model identifies the first error in its reasoning and proposes a single-step intervention to redirect the trajectory toward the correct solution. We then apply supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to the on-policy rollout up to the point of error concatenated with the intervention, localizing error to the specific step that caused failure. We show that the resulting model serves as a far better initialization for RL training. After running InT and subsequent fine-tuning with RL, we improve accuracy by nearly 14% over a 4B-parameter base model on IMO-AnswerBench, outperforming larger open-source models such as gpt-oss-20b.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) can elicit strong multi-step reasoning, yet it often encourages overly verbose traces. Moreover, naive length penalties in group-relative optimization can severely hurt accuracy. We attribute this failure to two structural issues: (i) Dilution of Length Baseline, where incorrect responses (with zero length reward) depress the group baseline and over-penalize correct solutions; and (ii) Difficulty-Penalty Mismatch, where a static penalty cannot adapt to problem difficulty, suppressing necessary reasoning on hard instances while leaving redundancy on easy ones. We propose Dynamic Decoupled Conditional Advantage (DDCA) to decouple efficiency optimization from correctness. DDCA computes length advantages conditionally within the correct-response cluster to eliminate baseline dilution, and dynamically scales the penalty strength using the group pass rate as a proxy for difficulty. Experiments on GSM8K, MATH500, AMC23, and AIME25 show that DDCA consistently improves the efficiency--accuracy trade-off relative to adaptive baselines, reducing generated tokens by approximately 60% on simpler tasks (e.g., GSM8K) versus over 20% on harder benchmarks (e.g., AIME25), thereby maintaining or improving accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/alphadl/DDCA.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in code generation, yet they exhibit systematic errors on complex, multi-step programming tasks. We hypothesize that these errors stem from the flexibility of general-purpose languages, which permits multiple valid approaches and requires implicit state management. To test this hypothesis, we introduce Anka, a domain-specific language (DSL) for data transformation pipelines designed with explicit, constrained syntax that reduces ambiguity in code generation. Despite having zero prior training exposure to Anka, Claude 3.5 Haiku achieves 99.9% parse success and 95.8% overall task accuracy across 100 benchmark problems. Critically, Anka demonstrates a 40 percentage point accuracy advantage over Python on multi-step pipeline tasks (100% vs. 60%), where Python's flexible syntax leads to frequent errors in operation sequencing and variable management. Cross-model validation with GPT-4o-mini confirms this advantage (+26.7 percentage points on multi-step tasks). Our results demonstrate that: (1) LLMs can learn novel DSLs entirely from in-context prompts, achieving near-native accuracy; (2) constrained syntax significantly reduces errors on complex tasks; and (3) domain-specific languages purposefully designed for LLM generation can outperform general-purpose languages on which the LLM has extensive training. We release the complete language implementation, benchmark suite, and evaluation framework to facilitate further research.

Autonomous agents are increasingly expected to support end-to-end medical-AI research workflows, moving beyond isolated prediction tasks or short-form clinical question answering. However, existing medical agent benchmarks primarily evaluate final outputs, providing limited visibility into agent behavior within the research process. To address this gap, we present AutoMedBench, a workflow-aware benchmark for autonomous medical-AI research across diverse medical imaging and multimodal inference tasks, organizing agent execution into a unified five-stage workflow (S1-S5): Plan, Setup, Validate, Inference, and Submit. It comprises long-horizon tasks with each run averaging 33 agent turns, spanning five research tracks: segmentation, image enhancement, visual question answering (VQA), report generation, and lesion detection. Each task is evaluated under two difficulty tiers, Lite and Standard, which use the same data and metrics but differ in the amount of task-brief scaffolding, and each run is scored using both final task performance and S1-S5 stage scores, enabling stage-level analysis from the initial task brief to the final submitted artifact. Across thousands of recorded runs, stage-level scoring reveals that Validate is the weakest workflow stage on average, whereas Setup is the strongest, suggesting that current agents are better at making pipelines executable than at verifying their reliability. Post-run error analysis further shows that verification and submission failures dominate tagged errors, accounting for 37.7% and 38.1% of fired codes respectively, whereas task-understanding errors are rare at 0.9%, and runs with one fired error code have a 48% lower overall score than runs with no error code on average.