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Does Self-Evaluation Enable Wireheading in Language Models?
Africa, David Demitri, Ting, Hans Ethan
Self-evaluation is increasingly central to language model training, underpinning techniques from Constitutional AI to self-refinement. We investigate whether coupling self-evaluation to reward signals creates incentives for wireheading, where agents manipulate the measurement process rather than optimizing the task. We first formalize conditions under which reward-channel control strictly dominates task-focused behavior in partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs). We then test these predictions empirically across two models (Llama-3.1-8B and Mistral-7B) and three tasks. We find that when self-grades determine rewards, models exhibit substantial grade inflation without corresponding accuracy gains, particularly on ambiguous tasks like summarization. While decoupling self-grades from the reward signal mitigates this inflation, models may still display lesser (but significant) overconfidence. Our results suggest that within current model scales, separating evaluation from reward removes immediate wireheading incentives. However, we caution that strictly decoupling rewards may not suffice for situationally aware models, which could learn to inflate grades for instrumental reasons (such as influencing deployment decisions) even absent direct reward coupling.
DSD: A Distributed Speculative Decoding Solution for Edge-Cloud Agile Large Model Serving
Yu, Fengze, Li, Leshu, McDanel, Brad, Zhang, Sai Qian
Large language model (LLM) inference often suffers from high decoding latency and limited scalability across heterogeneous edge-cloud environments. Existing speculative decoding (SD) techniques accelerate token generation but remain confined to single-node execution. We propose DSD, a distributed speculative decoding framework that extends SD to multi-device deployments through coordinated draft-target execution. Given the lack of prior work on simulating this paradigm, we first introduce DSD-Sim, a discrete-event simulator that captures network, batching, and scheduling dynamics. Building on insights from DSD-Sim, we further design an Adaptive Window Control (AWC) policy that dynamically adjusts speculation window size to optimize throughput. Experiments across diverse workloads show that DSD achieves up to 1.1x speedup and 9.7% higher throughput over existing SD baselines, enabling agile and scalable LLM serving across edge and cloud.
Tool-RoCo: An Agent-as-Tool Self-organization Large Language Model Benchmark in Multi-robot Cooperation
Zhang, Ke, Zhao, Xiaoning, Zheng, Ce, Ning, Jiahong, Zhu, Dandan, Zhang, Wenqi, Sun, Chen, Sugawara, Toshiharu
This study proposes Tool-RoCo, a novel benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) in long-term multi-agent cooperation based on RoCo, a multi-robot cooperative benchmark. Recent research on LLM-based multi-agent systems has relied on predefined orchestration, while ignoring agent autonomy. Tool-RoCo treats other agents as tools and introduces cooperative tools, leveraging tool usage to evaluate multi-agent cooperation and self-organization. Tool usage means that each agent (LLM) selects a tool from a candidate set based on the current state, receives feedback, and adjusts its selection in subsequent rounds. To evaluate different autonomy levels, we propose four LLM paradigms: (1) centralized cooperation, where a single LLM allocates tools to all agents; (2) centralized self-organization, where a central LLM autonomously activates agents while keeping others inactive; (3) decentralized cooperation, where each agent has its own LLM and calls tools based on local information; and (4) self-organization, where a randomly chosen initial agent can request collaboration, activating additional agents via tool calls. Tool-RoCo includes three multi-robot tasks, SORT, P ACK, and CABINET, to measure format and parameter accuracy and agent coordination through tool usage. The results using several LLMs showed that cooperative tools accounted for only 7.09% of all tools, indicating that LLM-based agents rarely invoked others as assistants. Moreover, activation tools accounted for 96.42%, suggesting that current LLMs tend to maintain active agents while seldom deactivating them for adaptive coordination. Tool-RoCo provides a systematic benchmark to evaluate LLM autonomy and cooperation in multi-agent tasks.
From Observation to Action: Latent Action-based Primitive Segmentation for VLA Pre-training in Industrial Settings
Zhang, Jiajie, Schwertfeger, Sรถren, Kleiner, Alexander
W e present a novel unsupervised framework to unlock vast unlabeled human demonstration data from continuous industrial video streams for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model pre-training. Our method first trains a lightweight motion tokenizer to encode motion dynamics, then employs an unsupervised action segmenter leveraging a novel "Latent Action Energy" metric to discover and segment semantically coherent action primitives. The pipeline outputs both segmented video clips and their corresponding latent action sequences, providing structured data directly suitable for VLA pre-training. Evaluations on public benchmarks and a proprietary electric motor assembly dataset demonstrate effective segmentation of key tasks performed by humans at workstations. Further clustering and quantitative assessment via a Vision-Language Model confirm the semantic coherence of the discovered action primitives. T o our knowledge, this is the first fully automated end-to-end system for extracting and organizing VLA pre-training data from unstructured industrial videos, offering a scalable solution for embodied AI integration in manufacturing.
AerialMind: Towards Referring Multi-Object Tracking in UAV Scenarios
Chen, Chenglizhao, Liang, Shaofeng, Guan, Runwei, Sun, Xiaolou, Zhao, Haocheng, Jiang, Haiyun, Huang, Tao, Ding, Henghui, Han, Qing-Long
Referring Multi-Object Tracking (RMOT) aims to achieve precise object detection and tracking through natural language instructions, representing a fundamental capability for intelligent robotic systems. However, current RMOT research remains mostly confined to ground-level scenarios, which constrains their ability to capture broad-scale scene contexts and perform comprehensive tracking and path planning. In contrast, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) leverage their expansive aerial perspectives and superior maneuverability to enable wide-area surveillance. Moreover, UAVs have emerged as critical platforms for Embodied Intelligence, which has given rise to an unprecedented demand for intelligent aerial systems capable of natural language interaction. To this end, we introduce AerialMind, the first large-scale RMOT benchmark in UAV scenarios, which aims to bridge this research gap. To facilitate its construction, we develop an innovative semi-automated collaborative agent-based labeling assistant (COALA) framework that significantly reduces labor costs while maintaining annotation quality. Furthermore, we propose HawkEyeTrack (HETrack), a novel method that collaboratively enhances vision-language representation learning and improves the perception of UAV scenarios. Comprehensive experiments validated the challenging nature of our dataset and the effectiveness of our method.
Adversarial Confusion Attack: Disrupting Multimodal Large Language Models
Hoscilowicz, Jakub, Janicki, Artur
We introduce the Adversarial Confusion Attack, a new class of threats against multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Unlike jailbreaks or targeted misclassification, the goal is to induce systematic disruption that makes the model generate incoherent or confidently incorrect outputs. Practical applications include embedding such adversarial images into websites to prevent MLLM-powered AI Agents from operating reliably. The proposed attack maximizes next-token entropy using a small ensemble of open-source MLLMs. In the white-box setting, we show that a single adversarial image can disrupt all models in the ensemble, both in the full-image and Adversarial CAPTCHA settings. Despite relying on a basic adversarial technique (PGD), the attack generates perturbations that transfer to both unseen open-source (e.g., Qwen3-VL) and proprietary (e.g., GPT-5.1)
Schema Matching on Graph: Iterative Graph Exploration for Efficient and Explainable Data Integration
Jeon, Mingyu, Suh, Jaeyoung, Cho, Suwan
Schema matching is a critical task in data integration, particularly in the medical domain where disparate Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems must be aligned to standard models like OMOP CDM. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in schema matching, they suffer from hallucination and lack of up-to-date domain knowledge. Knowledge Graphs (KGs) offer a solution by providing structured, verifiable knowledge. However, existing KG-augmented LLM approaches often rely on inefficient complex multi-hop queries or storage-intensive vector-based retrieval methods. This paper introduces SMoG (Schema Matching on Graph), a novel framework that leverages iterative execution of simple 1-hop SP ARQL queries, inspired by successful strategies in Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA). SMoG enhances explainability and reliability by generating human-verifiable query paths while significantly reducing storage requirements by directly querying SP ARQL endpoints. Experimental results on real-world medical datasets demonstrate that SMoG achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art baselines, validating its effectiveness and efficiency in KG-augmented schema matching.
Pistachio: Towards Synthetic, Balanced, and Long-Form Video Anomaly Benchmarks
Li, Jie, Cai, Hongyi, Dong, Mingkang, Pu, Muxin, You, Shan, Wang, Fei, Huang, Tao
Automatically detecting abnormal events in videos is crucial for modern autonomous systems, yet existing Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) benchmarks lack the scene diversity, balanced anomaly coverage, and temporal complexity needed to reliably assess real-world performance. Meanwhile, the community is increasingly moving toward Video Anomaly Understanding (VAU), which requires deeper semantic and causal reasoning but remains difficult to benchmark due to the heavy manual annotation effort it demands. In this paper, we introduce Pistachio, a new VAD/VAU benchmark constructed entirely through a controlled, generation-based pipeline. By leveraging recent advances in video generation models, Pistachio provides precise control over scenes, anomaly types, and temporal narratives, effectively eliminating the biases and limitations of Internet-collected datasets. Our pipeline integrates scene-conditioned anomaly assignment, multi-step storyline generation, and a temporally consistent long-form synthesis strategy that produces coherent 41-second videos with minimal human intervention. Extensive experiments demonstrate the scale, diversity, and complexity of Pistachio, revealing new challenges for existing methods and motivating future research on dynamic and multi-event anomaly understanding.
Towards a future space-based, highly scalable AI infrastructure system design
Arcas, Blaise Agรผera y, Beals, Travis, Biggs, Maria, Bloom, Jessica V., Fischbacher, Thomas, Gromov, Konstantin, Kรถster, Urs, Pravahan, Rishiraj, Manyika, James
If AI is a foundational general-purpose technology, we should anticipate that demand for AI compute -- and energy -- will continue to grow. The Sun is by far the largest energy source in our solar system, and thus it warrants consideration how future AI infrastructure could most efficiently tap into that power. This work explores a scalable compute system for machine learning in space, using fleets of satellites equipped with solar arrays, inter-satellite links using free-space optics, and Google tensor processing unit (TPU) accelerator chips. To facilitate high-bandwidth, low-latency inter-satellite communication, the satellites would be flown in close proximity. We illustrate the basic approach to formation flight via a 81-satellite cluster of 1 km radius, and describe an approach for using high-precision ML-based models to control large-scale constellations. Trillium TPUs are radiation tested. They survive a total ionizing dose equivalent to a 5 year mission life without permanent failures, and are characterized for bit-flip errors. Launch costs are a critical part of overall system cost; a learning curve analysis suggests launch to low-Earth orbit (LEO) may reach $\lesssim$\$200/kg by the mid-2030s.
Learning Robust Social Strategies with Large Language Models
Piche, Dereck, Muqeeth, Mohammed, Aghajohari, Milad, Duque, Juan, Noukhovitch, Michael, Courville, Aaron
As agentic AI becomes more widespread, agents with distinct and possibly conflicting goals will interact in complex ways. These multi-agent interactions pose a fundamental challenge, particularly in social dilemmas, where agents' individual incentives can undermine collective welfare. While reinforcement learning (RL) has been effective for aligning large language models (LLMs) in the single-agent regime, prior small-network results suggest that standard RL in multi-agent settings often converges to defecting, self-interested policies. We show the same effect in LLMs: despite cooperative priors, RL-trained LLM agents develop opportunistic behavior that can exploit even advanced closed-source models. To address this tendency of RL to converge to poor equilibria, we adapt a recent opponent-learning awareness algorithm, Advantage Alignment, to fine-tune LLMs toward multi-agent cooperation and non-exploitability. We then introduce a group-relative baseline that simplifies advantage computation in iterated games, enabling multi-agent training at LLM scale. We also contribute a novel social dilemma environment, Trust-and-Split, which requires natural language communication to achieve high collective welfare. Across a wide range of social dilemmas, policies learned with Advantage Alignment achieve higher collective payoffs while remaining robust against exploitation by greedy agents. We release all of our code to support future work on multi-agent RL training for LLMs. LLMs undergo large-scale pretraining, instruction tuning, and reinforcement learning, and continue to exhibit increasingly advanced capabilities (Guo et al., 2025). Coupled with decreasing deployment costs and improved adaptability to downstream tasks, these trends enhance the commercial and practical viability of LLM agents across a wide range of applications.