Goto

Collaborating Authors

 figure show




Measuring Chain-of-Thought Monitorability Through Faithfulness and Verbosity

Meek, Austin, Sprejer, Eitan, Arcuschin, Iván, Brockmeier, Austin J., Basart, Steven

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Chain-of-thought (CoT) outputs let us read a model's step-by-step reasoning. Since any long, serial reasoning process must pass through this textual trace, the quality of the CoT is a direct window into what the model is thinking. This visibility could help us spot unsafe or misaligned behavior (monitorability), but only if the CoT is transparent about its internal reasoning (faithfulness). Fully measuring faithfulness is difficult, so researchers often focus on examining the CoT in cases where the model changes its answer after adding a cue to the input. This proxy finds some instances of unfaithfulness but loses information when the model maintains its answer, and does not investigate aspects of reasoning not tied to the cue. We extend these results to a more holistic sense of monitorability by introducing verbosity: whether the CoT lists every factor needed to solve the task. We combine faithfulness and verbosity into a single monitorability score that shows how well the CoT serves as the model's external `working memory', a property that many safety schemes based on CoT monitoring depend on. We evaluate instruction-tuned and reasoning models on BBH, GPQA, and MMLU. Our results show that models can appear faithful yet remain hard to monitor when they leave out key factors, and that monitorability differs sharply across model families. We release our evaluation code using the Inspect library to support reproducible future work.


Geometry of Decision Making in Language Models

Joshi, Abhinav, Bhatt, Divyanshu, Modi, Ashutosh

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Models (LLMs) show strong generalization across diverse tasks, yet the internal decision-making processes behind their predictions remain opaque. In this work, we study the geometry of hidden representations in LLMs through the lens of \textit{intrinsic dimension} (ID), focusing specifically on decision-making dynamics in a multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) setting. We perform a large-scale study, with 28 open-weight transformer models and estimate ID across layers using multiple estimators, while also quantifying per-layer performance on MCQA tasks. Our findings reveal a consistent ID pattern across models: early layers operate on low-dimensional manifolds, middle layers expand this space, and later layers compress it again, converging to decision-relevant representations. Together, these results suggest LLMs implicitly learn to project linguistic inputs onto structured, low-dimensional manifolds aligned with task-specific decisions, providing new geometric insights into how generalization and reasoning emerge in language models.


Wage Sentiment Indices Derived from Survey Comments via Large Language Models

Sone, Taihei

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The emergence of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has created new opportunities for economic text analysis. This study proposes a Wage Sentiment Index (WSI) constructed with Large Language Models (LLMs) to forecast wage dynamics in Japan. The analysis is based on the Economy Watchers Survey (EWS), a monthly survey conducted by the Cabinet Office of Japan that captures real-time economic assessments from workers in industries highly sensitive to business conditions. The WSI extends the framework of the Price Sentiment Index (PSI) used in prior studies, adapting it specifically to wage related sentiment. To ensure scalability and adaptability, a data architecture is also developed that enables integration of additional sources such as newspapers and social media. Experimental results demonstrate that WSI models based on LLMs significantly outperform both baseline approaches and pretrained models. These findings highlight the potential of LLM-driven sentiment indices to enhance the timeliness and effectiveness of economic policy design by governments and central banks.


CBP Searched a Record Number of Phones at the US Border Over the Past Year

WIRED

The total number of US Customs and Border Protection device searches jumped by 17 percent over the 2024 fiscal year, but more invasive forensic searches remain relatively rare. Over the Past year, United States Customs and Border Protection staff searched more phones and electronic devices at the border than ever before, according to new statistics published by the government agency. Phone searches jumped around 17 percent during the past 12 months--with a marked increase over the past six months. Newly published CBP figures show that for the full fiscal year of 2025--running from October 2024 to the end of September 2025--border agents conducted around 55,424 searches of electronic devices. This is up from around the 47,000 searches that were completed during the government's 2024 fiscal year.


DreamPRM-1.5: Unlocking the Potential of Each Instance for Multimodal Process Reward Model Training

Cao, Qi, Xie, Pengtao

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Training multimodal process reward models (PRMs) is hard due to (i) distribution shift between training set and test set and (ii) quality imbalance across training data samples. While domain-level reweighting (e.g., DreamPRM) aligns training with test-time objectives, it leaves a clear gap to an oracle upper bound (pass@N), even under a "sanity check" that uses test set data to probe headroom -- pointing to meta-level under-parameterization. We introduce DreamPRM-1.5, an instance-level reweighting framework that assigns an adaptive weight to every training example via bi-level optimization. To realize instance reweighting across scales, we develop two complementary regimes: Instance Table, which learns explicit per-sample weights and excels on small/medium data, and Instance Net, a lightweight neural network that generalizes better and scales to large corpora. A practical, stable training recipe -- time-scale matching between upper/lower updates, cold-start initialization, and bounded-range weights -- prevents divergence. Integrated with test-time scaling, DreamPRM-1.5 attains 84.6 accuracy on the MMMU validation set, 31.3 accuracy on R-Bench-V and, when paired with a leading backbone (e.g., GPT-5-mini), achieves first-place results on public multimodal reasoning leaderboards. Moreover, extensive experiments, including benchmark evaluations, baseline comparisons, and a sanity check, demonstrate that DreamPRM-1.5 closes the gap toward the oracle, achieves leading performance, and trains stably.


Online Kernel Dynamic Mode Decomposition for Streaming Time Series Forecasting with Adaptive Windowing

Salazar, Christopher, Manohar, Krithika, Banerjee, Ashis G.

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Real-time forecasting from streaming data poses critical challenges: handling non-stationary dynamics, operating under strict computational limits, and adapting rapidly without catastrophic forgetting. However, many existing approaches face trade-offs between accuracy, adaptability, and efficiency, particularly when deployed in constrained computing environments. We introduce WORK-DMD (Windowed Online Random Kernel Dynamic Mode Decomposition), a method that combines Random Fourier Features with online Dynamic Mode Decomposition to capture nonlinear dynamics through explicit feature mapping, while preserving fixed computational cost and competitive predictive accuracy across evolving data. WORK-DMD employs Sherman-Morrison updates within rolling windows, enabling continuous adaptation to evolving dynamics from only current data, eliminating the need for lengthy training or large storage requirements for historical data. Experiments on benchmark datasets across several domains show that WORK-DMD achieves higher accuracy than several state-of-the-art online forecasting methods, while requiring only a single pass through the data and demonstrating particularly strong performance in short-term forecasting. Our results show that combining kernel evaluations with adaptive matrix updates achieves strong predictive performance with minimal data requirements. This sample efficiency offers a practical alternative to deep learning for streaming forecasting applications.