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How Do AI Agents Do Human Work? Comparing AI and Human Workflows Across Diverse Occupations

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

AI agents are continually optimized for tasks related to human work, such as software engineering and professional writing, signaling a pressing trend with significant impacts on the human workforce. However, these agent developments have often not been grounded in a clear understanding of how humans execute work, to reveal what expertise agents possess and the roles they can play in diverse workflows. In this work, we study how agents do human work by presenting the first direct comparison of human and agent workers across multiple essential work-related skills: data analysis, engineering, computation, writing, and design. To better understand and compare heterogeneous computer-use activities of workers, we introduce a scalable toolkit to induce interpretable, structured workflows from either human or agent computer-use activities. Using such induced workflows, we compare how humans and agents perform the same tasks and find that: (1) While agents exhibit promise in their alignment to human workflows, they take an overwhelmingly programmatic approach across all work domains, even for open-ended, visually dependent tasks like design, creating a contrast with the UI-centric methods typically used by humans. (2) Agents produce work of inferior quality, yet often mask their deficiencies via data fabrication and misuse of advanced tools. (3) Nonetheless, agents deliver results 88.3% faster and cost 90.4-96.2% less than humans, highlighting the potential for enabling efficient collaboration by delegating easily programmable tasks to agents.


Every Activation Boosted: Scaling General Reasoner to 1 Trillion Open Language Foundation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We introduce Ling 2.0, a series reasoning-oriented language foundation built upon the principle that every activation boosts reasoning capability. Designed to scale from tens of billions to one trillion parameters under a unified Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) paradigm, Ling 2.0 emphasizes high sparsity, cross-scale consistency, and efficiency guided by empirical scaling laws. The series includes three non-thinking (instruct) models - Ling-mini-2.0, Ling-flash-2.0, and Ling-1T - ranging from 16B to 1T total parameters and achieving up to 7-fold active-compute efficiency compared with dense counterparts. Ling 2.0 integrates coordinated innovations across model architecture, pre-training, post-training, and infrastructure: a high-sparsity MoE with MTP for efficient reasoning, reasoning-oriented data and mid-training CoT activation, reinforcement-based fine-tuning (DFT, Evo-CoT), and full-scale FP8 training with fine-grained heterogeneous pipelines. At the trillion scale, Ling-1T establishes a new Pareto frontier of reasoning accuracy versus computational efficiency, demonstrating that sparse activation, when properly aligned with reasoning objectives, enables scalable and efficient intelligence. Collectively, Ling 2.0 provides a coherent, open, and efficient foundation for advancing future reasoning and thinking models, including the Ring series built upon the same base.


String Seed of Thought: Prompting LLMs for Distribution-Faithful and Diverse Generation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We introduce String Seed of Thought (SSoT), a novel prompting method for LLMs that improves Probabilistic Instruction Following (PIF). We define PIF as a task requiring an LLM to select its answer from a predefined set of options, each associated with a specific probability, such that the empirical distribution of the generated answers aligns with the target distribution when prompted multiple times. While LLMs excel at tasks with single, deterministic answers, they often fail at PIF, exhibiting biases problematic for applications requiring non-deterministic behaviors, such as human-behavior simulation, content diversification, and multiplayer games. It also harms the diversity of generated responses, a crucial factor in test-time scaling, by causing the outputs to collapse into a limited set of answers. To address this, we propose SSoT, a simple prompting method that instructs an LLM to first output a random string to generate sufficient entropy. SSoT also instructs the LLM to extract randomness by manipulating this string to derive a final answer, thereby preserving diversity while adhering to specific constraints. We demonstrate that SSoT significantly improves the PIF performance of LLMs, approaching the ideal performance of a pseudo-random number generator. Furthermore, our experiments on NoveltyBench show SSoT's benefits extend beyond closed-set tasks to open-ended tasks by enhancing response diversity.


HugAgent: Benchmarking LLMs for Simulation of Individualized Human Reasoning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Simulating human reasoning in open-ended tasks has long been a central aspiration in AI and cognitive science. While large language models now approximate human responses at scale, they remain tuned to population-level consensus, often erasing the individuality of reasoning styles and belief trajectories. To advance the vision of more human-like reasoning in machines, we introduce HugAgent (Human-Grounded Agent Benchmark), which rethinks human reasoning simulation along three dimensions: (i) from averaged to individualized reasoning, (ii) from behavioral mimicry to cognitive alignment, and (iii) from vignette-based to open-ended data. The benchmark evaluates whether a model can predict a specific person's behavioral responses and the underlying reasoning dynamics in out-of-distribution scenarios, given partial evidence of their prior views. HugAgent adopts a dual-track design: a human track that automates and scales the think-aloud method to collect ecologically valid human reasoning data, and a synthetic track for further scalability and systematic stress testing. This architecture enables low-cost, extensible expansion to new tasks and populations. Experiments with state-of-the-art language models reveal persistent adaptation gaps, positioning HugAgent as the first extensible benchmark for aligning machine reasoning with the individuality of human thought. The benchmark, along with its complete data collection pipeline and companion chatbot, is open-sourced as HugAgent (https://anonymous.4open.science/r/HugAgent) and TraceYourThinking (https://anonymous.4open.science/r/trace-your-thinking).


Bidirectional Time-Frequency Pyramid Network for Enhanced Robust EEG Classification

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Existing EEG recognition models suffer from poor cross-paradigm generalization due to dataset-specific constraints and individual variability. To overcome these limitations, we propose BITE (Bidirectional Time-Freq Pyramid Network), an end-to-end unified architecture featuring robust multistream synergy, pyramid time-frequency attention (PTFA), and bidirectional adaptive convolutions. The framework uniquely integrates: 1) Aligned time-frequency streams maintaining temporal synchronization with STFT for bidirectional modeling, 2) PTFA-based multi-scale feature enhancement amplifying critical neural patterns, 3) BiTCN with learnable fusion capturing forward/backward neural dynamics. Demonstrating enhanced robustness, BITE achieves state-of-the-art performance across four divergent paradigms (BCICIV-2A/2B, HGD, SD-SSVEP), excelling in both within-subject accuracy and cross-subject generalization. As a unified architecture, it combines robust performance across both MI and SSVEP tasks with exceptional computational efficiency. Our work validates that paradigm-aligned spectral-temporal processing is essential for reliable BCI systems. Just as its name suggests, BITE "takes a bite out of EEG." The source code is available at https://github.com/cindy-hong/BiteEEG.


Spatio-Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks for EV Charging Demand Forecasting Using Real-World Multi-Modal Data Integration

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Transportation remains a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, highlighting the urgency of transitioning toward sustainable alternatives such as Electric Vehicles (EVs). Yet, uneven spatial distribution and irregular utilization of charging infrastructure create challenges for both power grid stability and investment planning. This study introduces Traffic-Weather Graph Convolutional Network (TW-GCN), a spatio-temporal forecasting framework that combines Graph Convolutional Networks with temporal architectures to predict EV charging demand in Tennessee, United States. We utilize real-world traffic flows, weather conditions, and proprietary data provided by one of the largest U.S.-based EV infrastructure companies to capture both spatial dependencies and temporal dynamics. Extensive experiments across varying forecasting horizons, clustering strategies, and sequence lengths reveal that mid-horizon (3-hour) forecasts achieve the best balance between responsiveness and stability, with One-dimensional convo-lutional neural networks consistently outperforming other temporal models. Regional analysis shows disparities in predictive accuracy across East, Middle, and West Tennessee, reflecting how station density, Points of Interest and local demand variability shape model capabilities. The proposed TW-GCN framework advances the integration of data-driven intelligence into EV infrastructure planning while supporting sustainable mobility transitions.


Open Agent Specification (Agent Spec): A Unified Representation for AI Agents

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The proliferation of agent frameworks has led to fragmentation in how agents are defined, executed, and evaluated. Existing systems differ in their abstractions, data flow semantics, and tool integrations, making it difficult to share or reproduce workflows. We introduce Open Agent Specification (Agent Spec), a declarative language that defines AI agents and agentic workflows in a way that is compatible across frameworks, promoting reusability, portability and interoperability of AI agents. Agent Spec defines a common set of components, control and data flow semantics, and schemas that allow an agent to be defined once and executed across different runtimes. Agent Spec also introduces a standardized Evaluation harness to assess agent behavior and agentic workflows across runtimes - analogous to how HELM and related harnesses standardized LLM evaluation - so that performance, robustness, and efficiency can be compared consistently across frameworks. We demonstrate this using four distinct runtimes (LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, and WayFlow) evaluated over three different benchmarks (SimpleQA Verified, $ฯ„^2$-Bench and BIRD-SQL). We provide accompanying toolsets: a Python SDK (PyAgentSpec), a reference runtime (WayFlow), and adapters for popular frameworks (e.g., LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI). Agent Spec bridges the gap between model-centric and agent-centric standardization & evaluation, laying the groundwork for reliable, reusable, and portable agentic systems.


Bilinear relational structure fixes reversal curse and enables consistent model editing

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The reversal curse--a language model's (LM) inability to infer an unseen fact "B is A " from a learned fact "A is B"--is widely considered a fundamental limitation. We show that this is not an inherent failure but an artifact of how models encode knowledge. By training LMs from scratch on a synthetic dataset of relational knowledge graphs, we demonstrate that bilinear relational structure emerges in their hidden representations. Crucially, we also find that this bilinear structure plays a key role in consistent model editing. When a fact is updated in a LM with this structure, the edit correctly propagates to its reverse and other logically dependent facts. In contrast, models lacking this representation not only suffer from the reversal curse but also fail to generalize edits, further introducing logical inconsistencies. Our results establish that training on a relational knowledge dataset induces the emergence of bilinear internal representations, which in turn enable LMs to behave in a logically consistent manner after editing. This implies that the success of model editing depends critically not just on editing algorithms but on the underlying representational geometry of the knowledge being modified. Language models (LMs) have become powerful tools for knowledge-intensive tasks, yet their reasoning capabilities often fall short of human-level logical consistency (Berglund et al., 2024; Allen-Zhu & Li, 2025); a prominent example is the reversal curse: a model trained on "A is the parent of B" frequently fails to infer the reverse fact, "B is the child of A." This failure suggests that LMs learn shallow, directional associations rather than robust, symmetrical relationships, undermining their reliability. Ensuring logical consistency is particularly challenging in model editing, which seeks to update factual knowledge in a trained model without costly retraining from scratch.


EEG-Driven AR-Robot System for Zero-Touch Grasping Manipulation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Reliable brain-computer interface (BCI) control of robots provides an intuitive and accessible means of human-robot interaction, particularly valuable for individuals with motor impairments. However, existing BCI-Robot systems face major limitations: electroencephalography (EEG) signals are noisy and unstable, target selection is often predefined and inflexible, and most studies remain restricted to simulation without closed-loop validation. These issues hinder real-world deployment in assistive scenarios. To address them, we propose a closed-loop BCI-AR-Robot system that integrates motor imagery (MI)-based EEG decoding, augmented reality (AR) neurofeedback, and robotic grasping for zero-touch operation. A 14-channel EEG headset enabled individualized MI calibration, a smartphone-based AR interface supported multi-target navigation with direction-congruent feedback to enhance stability, and the robotic arm combined decision outputs with vision-based pose estimation for autonomous grasping. Experiments are conducted to validate the framework: MI training achieved 93.1 percent accuracy with an average information transfer rate (ITR) of 14.8 bit/min; AR neurofeedback significantly improved sustained control (SCI = 0.210) and achieved the highest ITR (21.3 bit/min) compared with static, sham, and no-AR baselines; and closed-loop grasping achieved a 97.2 percent success rate with good efficiency and strong user-reported control. These results show that AR feedback substantially stabilizes EEG-based control and that the proposed framework enables robust zero-touch grasping, advancing assistive robotic applications and future modes of human-robot interaction.


PPG-Distill: Efficient Photoplethysmography Signals Analysis via Foundation Model Distillation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Photoplethysmography (PPG) is widely used in wearable health monitoring, yet large PPG foundation models remain difficult to deploy on resource-limited devices. We present PPG-Distill, a knowledge distillation framework that transfers both global and local knowledge through prediction-, feature-, and patch-level distillation. PPG-Distill incorporates morphology distillation to preserve local waveform patterns and rhythm distillation to capture inter-patch temporal structures. On heart rate estimation and atrial fibrillation detection, PPG-Distill improves student performance by up to 21.8% while achieving 7X faster inference and reducing memory usage by 19X, enabling efficient PPG analysis on wearables.