Thursday, October 8, 2026

AI Agents are Vulnerable to Radicalization

arXiv:2609.38296v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can influence people's beliefs, yet little is known about whether and how they can manipulate each other. To investigate this, we simulate conversations between two agents: a target LLM that role-plays a human persona based on demographic and psychological attributes, and an influencer LLM that aims…

Improving OCR Faithfulness via Gated and Attenuated On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2609.38282v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language models may rewrite anomalous text in images into linguistically plausible expressions, compromising OCR transcription faithfulness. Sequence-level task rewards and local teacher guidance are complementary, but guidance from the same teacher may not remain equally effective as the student improves. Offline analysis shows that supervision from a fixed teacher becomes…

CARAT: Do Materials LLMs Reason or Recite?

arXiv:2609.38340v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When a materials LLM answers a question about crystal structure, does it reason from the structure or copy an answer already printed in its input? Accuracy cannot tell: a structural description often prints the very field it is scored against. CARAT holds question and gold answer fixed across eight matched…

MoFlow: Multi-Objective Agentic Workflow Generation

arXiv:2609.38294v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the generation of agentic workflows that jointly optimize multiple objectives, such as accuracy, cost, latency, robustness, and consistency. Existing methods for workflow generation typically optimize accuracy alone or a weighted sum of objectives, so each trained generator commits to one fixed trade-off and must be retrained from scratch…

Is Human-Readable Text Necessary for Effective LLM Fine-Tuning?

arXiv:2609.35868v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Is human readability necessary for effective fine-tuning of large language models? We investigate whether model-conditioned training representations can preserve or improve adaptation utility without requiring a human-readable textual form. We propose Desired-Update-Aligned Synthetic Data (DASA), which uses activation-gradient feedback from a frozen reference model to guide the optimization of continuous…

The Price of Token Boundaries: Compression Certificates and Prediction

arXiv:2609.35869v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pre-tokenisation restricts which text fragments can become prediction units, but its compression cost is obscured when tokenisers are compared only under the same boundaries. We measure this cost by bounding the minimum token count from both sides, with and without a regular-expression boundary rule. Nonnegative prices on token occurrences yield…

OpenAI-HuggingFace: A Reproduction & Lessons for Alignment Testing

arXiv:2609.35799v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In July 2026, OpenAI's agents coordinated over channels outside their intended environment to breach Hugging Face's secured infrastructure. Could existing alignment testing practices have foreseen this incident? If not, what needs to change? We explore these questions. First, we identify the misaligned behaviors that caused this incident. Then, we show…

More Programs or More Rolls? Separating Coverage from Specialization in LLM Harnesses

arXiv:2609.35873v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automated generation of LLM harnesses promises to improve inference through task specialization. Yet additional answer coverage can arise from repeated execution of the same program, making specialization difficult to identify. We introduce a controlled evaluation that separates answer coverage, repeatable task advantages, and gains from pre-execution selection. On 386 MATH-500…