Abstract:Recent advances in persistent personal-agent frameworks are making human-centered agent networks realistic deployment targets: each user can be served by an AI agent that acts on the user's behalf, maintains state, and communicates with other agents through social and task relations. In these networks, everyday tool use becomes multi-party owned-agent collaboration over personal workspaces, where files, records, tools, and policies are not directly visible across owners. Existing agent benchmarks study tool use and collaboration, but they do not provide an end-to-end sandbox for verifiable cross-user agent collaboration with realistic user digital workspaces or test how harmful actions can travel through the human-centered agent network. We introduce WeClawArena, an auditable benchmark and runtime sandbox for multi-party owned-agent collaboration over personal workspaces. WeClawArena targets collaborative tool-use tasks in which personal workspaces serve as both operational tools and personal constraints. The benchmark contains 124 base tasks across six cross-user task domains and expands them into 620 scenario variants, with one benign control and four attack-vector variants per base task. The sandbox records peer messages, tool calls, resource operations, governed decisions, and final workspace states. WeClawArena reports utility and attack success rate separately and audits attack success from bounded runtime evidence, supporting diagnosis of task breakdown, privacy leakage, poisoned evidence, and invalid authority paths.
Abstract:Hallucination is the reliability bottleneck for LLM-based agents, and fact attribution verifiers are the last line of defense -- yet today's verifiers emit only opaque binary labels, leaving agents unable to self-correct and operators unable to audit. We present SEVA, a structured verification agent that emits evidence alignments, step-by-step reasoning chains, calibrated confidence, and a six-category error diagnosis with actionable fixes. Training such an agent with RL is non-trivial: standard binary reward on multi-component output triggers advantage collapse -- within-group reward variance vanishes and the GRPO gradient disappears. We resolve this with a process reward that decomposes verification quality into five independent components weighted 70/30 toward process signals, restoring the gradient and inducing an implicit curriculum -- the agent first masters verification behavior (alignment 0.917 -> 0.997, format 72% -> 100%), then outcomes (F1 64.9 -> 69.0). Structured output further enables a Verify -> Reflect -> Probe -> Refine self-evolution loop, which over four rounds on a 7B model surfaces an unexpected structural finding: each round produces a benchmark-specialist, not a generalist (+15 pp on HaluEval, -10 to -14 pp on TruthfulQA in the same model, persistent at 4x data). On ClearFacts, SEVA-3B matches GPT-4o-mini (69.0 vs. 69.8 F1) while producing substantially richer, auditable output -- confirming a principle that should generalize: for any RL task with multi-component generation, reward granularity must match output granularity.
Abstract:Long-term conversational memory is a retrieval workload classical IR was not built for: the index grows during the query stream, query types shift intra-session, and the latency budget per retrieval is sub-10 ms. Lucene-class engines treat the index as static and the query as stateless, leaving the workload's structure unexploited. AgentIR treats fusion as a per-query decision along two axes: which fusion to apply (BM25, Dense, RRF, or agent-aware RRF), and whether the ~52 ms dense channel is worth running at all. The second axis is a confidence-triggered cascade router that decides from the BM25 top-k margin alone and re-tunes across workloads without retraining. On LongMemEval (n=500), where the dense channel does add information, the cascade skips 63% of queries at parity LLM-judged accuracy (2.67x faster under two judges, paired bootstrap p>=0.88); per-qtype thresholds extend this to 5.76x under 5-fold cross-validation. On LoCoMo (n=1,982), where BM25 alone is already the strongest single system, the same trigger auto-tunes to a 100% skip rate (132x faster, +0.089 Hit@5). Capacity on a shared 8-core VM rises from ~154 to ~1,400 concurrent agents (9x). Underneath the cascade, a time-partitioned index does O(log 1/epsilon) work independent of corpus size: 1234x corpus growth costs only 3.6x latency, ending in 1769x over sequential at sub-100 us p50 on 5M records. At parity quality with Lucene on 9 BEIR datasets up to 8.8M docs, the substrate runs 10x geo-mean over Pyserini 8T and 11x over PISA-1T BlockMax-WAND; an A100 reaches 1.8-39x over Pyserini 8T; chunked index build sustains 56.8K docs/sec on MS MARCO. Three subtle BM25/GPU correctness pitfalls that silently regress nDCG@10 by 6-8x are documented and fixed; post-fix CPU and GPU agree within 0.0002 nDCG@10 on all eight datasets that fit a single A100.
Abstract:Tool-use language agents are evaluated on benchmarks that assume clean inputs, unambiguous tool registries, and reliable APIs. Real deployments violate all these assumptions: user typos propagate into hallucinated tool names, a misconfigured request timeout can stall an agent indefinitely, and duplicate tool names across servers can freeze an SDK. We study these failures as a sim-to-real gap in the tool-use partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP), where deployment noise enters through the observation, action space, reward-relevant metadata, or transition dynamics. We introduce RobustBench-TC, a benchmark with 22 perturbation types organized by these four POMDP components, each grounded in a verified GitHub issue or documented tool-calling failure. Across 21 models from 1.5B to 32B parameters (including the closed-source o4-mini), the robustness profile is sharply uneven: observation perturbations reduce accuracy by less than 5%, while reward-relevant and transition perturbations reduce accuracy by roughly 40% and 30%, respectively; scale alone does not close these gaps. We then propose ToolRL-DR, a domain-randomization reinforcement learning (RL) recipe that trains a tool-use agent on perturbation-augmented trajectories spanning the three statically encodable POMDP components. On a 3B backbone, ToolRL-DR-Full retains roughly three-quarters of clean accuracy and reaches an aggregate perturbed accuracy comparable to open-source 14B function-calling baselines while substantially narrowing the gap to o4-mini. It closes approximately 27% of the Transition gap despite never seeing transition perturbations in training, suggesting that RL on adversarial static tool-use inputs induces a more persistent retry policy that transfers to unseen runtime failures. The dataset, code and benchmark leaderboard are publicly available.
Abstract:Reasoning LLMs produce thousands of chain-of-thought tokens whose KV cache must reside in scarce GPU HBM. The dominant response -- permanently evicting low-importance tokens -- is catastrophic for reasoning: accuracy collapses to 0-2.5% when half the cache is removed. We ask a different question: must every token live in HBM, or can some live elsewhere? We introduce a semantics-aware memory hierarchy that sorts tokens into four tiers -- HBM, DDR, compressed, and evicted -- using cumulative attention scoring. Low-importance tokens are moved to CPU memory rather than destroyed; before each attention step they are prefetched back at full precision, contributing exactly the same terms as if they had never left the GPU. We formalize this as zero-approximation-error offloading and derive our central finding: accuracy depends solely on how many tokens are permanently discarded (the eviction ratio), not on how many remain in HBM. A controlled 3x3 grid over HBM and eviction ratios confirms this across three model scales (7B-32B) and four benchmarks. With only 3% eviction, the hierarchy retains 91% of full-cache accuracy on GSM8K and 71% on MATH-500 (n=200); at 14B scale it matches the uncompressed baseline (90% vs. 86%) while halving HBM occupancy. A head-to-head reproduction of R-KV -- the current SOTA eviction method -- on our setup achieves only 0-32% at comparable budgets. A system prototype with real GPU-CPU data movement shows that the price of this preservation is modest -- 5-7% transfer overhead -- and scaling analysis projects 2-48 GB HBM savings at production batch sizes.
Abstract:Large language models represent the same reasoning in vastly different surface forms -- English prose, Python code, mathematical notation -- yet whether they share a common internal substrate across these symbolic systems remains unknown. We introduce the TriForm Benchmark (18 concepts x 6 forms x 3 instances = 324 stimuli) and study five LLMs (1.6B-8B) across three architecture families. Using permutation-corrected RSA, cross-form probing, and activation patching, we find converging evidence for a Format-Agnostic Reasoning Subspace (FARS) in middle layers. We make FARS concrete: concept-centroid PCA extracts a 10-dimensional subspace that amplifies concept structure 3x while suppressing form information to near zero. Replacing only these 10 dimensions during cross-form patching preserves 90-96% of model output -- far exceeding both full activation replacement (44-56%) and variance-maximizing PCA (60-74%) -- while ablating them causes targeted disruption. FARS generalizes to held-out concepts and converges across architectures (CCA > 0.79 for all model pairs), providing within-modality evidence for the Platonic Representation Hypothesis. We further discover a declarative-procedural asymmetry: representations are far more compatible between prose and mathematics than between either and code, suggesting that the critical axis of divergence is not linguistic vs. formal but declarative vs. procedural.
Abstract:Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting assumes that generated reasoning reflects a model's internal computation. We show this assumption is wrong in a specific, measurable way: models internally detect their own reasoning errors but outwardly express confidence in them. A linear probe on hidden states predicts trace correctness with 0.95 AUROC -- from the very first reasoning step (0.79) -- while verbalized confidence for wrong traces is 4.55/5, nearly identical to correct ones (4.87/5). A text-surface classifier achieves only 0.59 on the same data, confirming a 0.20-point gap invisible in the generated text. This hidden error awareness holds across three model families (Qwen, Llama, Phi), 1.5B-72B parameters, and RL-trained reasoning models (DeepSeek-R1, 0.852 AUROC). The natural question is whether this signal can fix the errors it detects. It cannot. Four interventions -- activation steering, probe-guided best-of-N, self-correction, and activation patching -- all fail; patching destroys output coherence entirely. The signal is diagnostic, not causal: a readout of computation quality, not a lever to redirect it. This delineates a boundary for mechanistic interpretability: error representations during reasoning are fundamentally different from the factual knowledge representations that prior work has successfully edited.
Abstract:LLM agents call tools, query databases, delegate tasks, and trigger external side effects. Once an agent system can act in the world, the question is no longer only whether harmful actions can be prevented--it is whether those actions remain answerable after deployment. We distinguish accountability (the ability to determine compliance and assign responsibility), auditability (the system property that makes accountability possible), and auditing (the process of reconstructing behavior from trustworthy evidence). Our claim is direct: no agent system can be accountable without auditability. To make this operational, we define five dimensions of agent auditability, i.e., action recoverability, lifecycle coverage, policy checkability, responsibility attribution, and evidence integrity, and identify three mechanism classes (detect, enforce, recover) whose temporal information-and-intervention constraints explain why, in practice, no single approach suffices. We support the position with layered evidence rather than a single benchmark: lower-bound ecosystem measurements suggest that even basic security prerequisites for auditability are widely unmet (617 security findings across six prominent open-source projects); runtime feasibility results show that pre-execution mediation with tamper-evident records adds only 8.3 ms median overhead; and controlled recovery experiments show that responsibility-relevant information can be partially recovered even when conventional logs are missing. We propose an Auditability Card for agent systems and identify six open research problems organized by mechanism class.
Abstract:Medical image retrieval (MIR) is a critical component of computer-aided diagnosis, yet existing systems suffer from three persistent limitations: uniform feature encoding that fails to account for the varying clinical importance of anatomical structures, ambiguous similarity metrics based on coarse classification labels, and an exclusive focus on global image similarity that cannot meet the clinical demand for fine-grained region-specific retrieval. We propose HMAR (Hierarchical Modality-Aware Expert and Dynamic Routing), an adaptive retrieval framework built on a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture. HMAR employs a dual-expert mechanism: Expert0 extracts global features for holistic similarity matching, while Expert1 learns position-invariant local representations for precise lesion-region retrieval. A two-stage contrastive learning strategy eliminates the need for expensive bounding-box annotations, and a sliding-window matching algorithm enables dense local comparison at inference time. Hash codes are generated via Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (KAN) layers for efficient Hamming-distance search. Experiments on the RadioImageNet-CT dataset (16 clinical patterns, 29,903 images) show that HMAR achieves mean Average Precision (mAP) of 0.711 and 0.724 for 64-bit and 128-bit hash codes, improving over the state-of-the-art ACIR method by 0.7% and 1.1%, respectively.