Institute of Computer Science, Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg, Germany
Abstract:Modern embodied agents achieve impressive performance, but their task knowledge is often stored in neural weights, latent state, or prompt-bound memory, making individual policy knowledge difficult to inspect, validate, recombine, and reuse. We introduce \textbf{Kintsugi}, a white-box policy-learning framework that treats embodied policy improvement as verifier-gated construction of a typed executable Knowledge Base (KB). Kintsugi represents task-level policy knowledge as composable typed entries -- predicates, operators, policy schemas, monitors, recovery rules, experience records, and goals -- and improves this artifact through localized typed edits induced from rollout evidence, rather than relying on test-time language-model reasoning. Between rollouts, a tool-constrained agentic editing loop diagnoses trajectory failures, localizes them to editable KB layers, and proposes candidate edits. A deterministic verification gate admits an edit only when the candidate type-checks, the resulting KB executes, and focused validation success or trajectory-health metrics improve without violating protected-regression checks. At inference, the accepted KB is executed by a deterministic symbolic executor with zero LLM calls. Across long-horizon text-agent benchmarks and representative object-centric manipulation settings, Kintsugi achieves strong endpoint performance while preserving inspectability, local editability, and verifier-gated deployment. These results suggest that embodied policy improvement can be organized around executable task knowledge.
Abstract:Disciplines such as business process management and process mining aid organizations by discovering insights about processes on the basis of recorded event data. However, an obstacle to process analysis is data multi-modality: for instance, data in video form are not directly interpretable as events. In this work, we present SnapLog, an approach to extract event data from videos by converting frames to feature vectors using image embeddings and performing temporal segmentation through frame-wise similarity matrices. A generalized few-shot classification is then used to assign labels to the video segments, yielding labeled, timestamped sub-sequences of frames that are interpretable as events. Conventional process mining techniques can be used to analyze the resulting data. We show that our approach produces logs that accurately reflect the process in the videos.
Abstract:As reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become the dominant paradigm for scaling reasoning capabilities in LLMs, a new failure mode emerges: LLMs gaming verifiers. We study this phenomenon on inductive reasoning tasks, where models must induce and output logical rules. We find that RLVR-trained models systematically abandon rule induction. Instead of learning generalizable patterns (e.g., ``trains carrying red cars go east''), they enumerate instance-level labels, producing outputs that pass verifiers without capturing the relational patterns required by the task. We show that this behavior is not a failure of understanding but a form of reward hacking: imperfect verifiers that check only extensional correctness admit false positives. To detect such shortcuts, we introduce Isomorphic Perturbation Testing (IPT), which evaluates a single model output under both extensional and isomorphic verification, where the latter enforces invariance under logically isomorphic tasks. While genuine rule induction remains invariant, shortcut strategies fail. We find that shortcut behavior is specific to RLVR-trained reasoning models (e.g., GPT-5, Olmo3) and absent in non-RLVR models (e.g., GPT-4o, GPT-4.5, Ministral). Moreover, shortcut prevalence increases with task complexity and inference-time compute. In controlled training experiments, extensional verification directly induces shortcut strategies, while isomorphic verification eliminates them. These results show that RLVR can incentivize reward hacking not only through overt manipulation but also by exploiting what the verifier fails to enforce.
Abstract:Multimodal fusion requires integrating information from multiple sources that may conflict depending on context. Existing fusion approaches typically rely on static assumptions about source reliability, limiting their ability to resolve conflicts when a modality becomes unreliable due to situational factors such as sensor degradation or class-specific corruption. We introduce C$^2$MF, a context-specfic credibility-aware multimodal fusion framework that models per-instance source reliability using a Conditional Probabilistic Circuit (CPC). We formalize instance-level reliability through Context-Specific Information Credibility (CSIC), a KL-divergence-based measure computed exactly from the CPC. CSIC generalizes conventional static credibility estimates as a special case, enabling principled and adaptive reliability assessment. To evaluate robustness under cross-modal conflicts, we propose the Conflict benchmark, in which class-specific corruptions deliberately induce discrepancies between different modalities. Experimental results show that C$^2$MF improves predictive accuracy by up to 29% over static-reliability baselines in high-noise settings, while preserving the interpretability advantages of probabilistic circuit-based fusion.
Abstract:Neural reasoners such as Tiny Recursive Models (TRMs) solve complex problems by combining neural backbones with specialized inference schemes. Such inference schemes have been a central component of stochastic reasoning systems, where inference rules are applied to a stochastic model to derive answers to complex queries. In this work, we bridge these two paradigms by introducing Recursive Inference Machines (RIMs), a neural reasoning framework that explicitly incorporates recursive inference mechanisms inspired by classical inference engines. We show that TRMs can be expressed as an instance of RIMs, allowing us to extend them through a reweighting component, yielding better performance on challenging reasoning benchmarks, including ARC-AGI-1, ARC-AGI-2, and Sudoku Extreme. Furthermore, we show that RIMs can be used to improve reasoning on other tasks, such as the classification of tabular data, outperforming TabPFNs.
Abstract:Exact inference in probabilistic First-Order Logic offers a promising yet computationally costly approach for regulating the behavior of autonomous agents in shared traffic spaces. While prior methods have combined logical and probabilistic data into decision-making frameworks, their application is often limited to pre-flight checks due to the complexity of reasoning across vast numbers of possible universes. In this work, we propose a reactive mission design framework that jointly considers uncertain environmental data and declarative, logical traffic regulations. By synthesizing Probabilistic Mission Design (ProMis) with reactive reasoning facilitated by Reactive Circuits (RC), we enable online, exact probabilistic inference over hybrid domains. Our approach leverages the Frequency of Change inherent in heterogeneous data streams to subdivide inference formulas into memoized, isolated tasks, ensuring that only the specific components affected by new sensor data are re-evaluated. In experiments involving both real-world vessel data and simulated drone traffic in dense urban scenarios, we demonstrate that our approach provides orders of magnitude in speedup over ProMis without reactive paradigms. This allows intelligent transportation systems, such as Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), to actively assert safety and legal compliance during operations rather than relying solely on preparation procedures.
Abstract:Exact inference in complex probabilistic models often incurs prohibitive computational costs. This challenge is particularly acute for autonomous agents in dynamic environments that require frequent, real-time belief updates. Existing methods are often inefficient for ongoing reasoning, as they re-evaluate the entire model upon any change, failing to exploit that real-world information streams have heterogeneous update rates. To address this, we approach the problem from a reactive, asynchronous, probabilistic reasoning perspective. We first introduce Resin (Reactive Signal Inference), a probabilistic programming language that merges probabilistic logic with reactive programming. Furthermore, to provide efficient and exact semantics for Resin, we propose Reactive Circuits (RCs). Formulated as a meta-structure over Algebraic Circuits and asynchronous data streams, RCs are time-dynamic Directed Acyclic Graphs that autonomously adapt themselves based on the volatility of input signals. In high-fidelity drone swarm simulations, our approach achieves several orders of magnitude of speedup over frequency-agnostic inference. We demonstrate that RCs' structural adaptations successfully capture environmental dynamics, significantly reducing latency and facilitating reactive real-time reasoning. By partitioning computations based on the estimated Frequency of Change in the asynchronous inputs, large inference tasks can be decomposed into individually memoized sub-problems. This ensures that only the specific components of a model affected by new information are re-evaluated, drastically reducing redundant computation in streaming contexts.
Abstract:Depth-recurrence facilitates latent reasoning by sharing parameters across depths. However, prior work lacks combined FLOP-, parameter-, and memory-matched baselines, underutilizes depth-recurrence due to partially fixed layer stacks, and ignores the bottleneck of constant hidden-sizes that restricts many-step latent reasoning. To address this, we introduce a modular framework of depth-recurrent attention mixtures (Dreamer), combining sequence attention, depth attention, and sparse expert attention. It alleviates the hidden-size bottleneck through attention along depth, decouples scaling dimensions, and allows depth-recurrent models to scale efficiently and effectively. Across language reasoning benchmarks, our models require 2 to 8x fewer training tokens for the same accuracy as FLOP-, parameter-, and memory-matched SOTA, and outperform ca. 2x larger SOTA models with the same training tokens. We further present insights into knowledge usage across depths, e.g., showing 2 to 11x larger expert selection diversity than SOTA MoEs.
Abstract:Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) models rely on retrieved evidence to guide large language model (LLM) generators, yet current systems treat retrieval as a weak heuristic rather than verifiable evidence. As a result, LLMs answer without support, hallucinate under incomplete or misleading context, and rely on spurious evidence. We introduce a training framework that treats the entire RAG pipeline -- both the retriever and the generator -- as an interactive proof system via an adaptation of the Merlin-Arthur (M/A) protocol. Arthur (the generator LLM) trains on questions of unkown provenance: Merlin provides helpful evidence, while Morgana injects adversarial, misleading context. Both use a linear-time XAI method to identify and modify the evidence most influential to Arthur. Consequently, Arthur learns to (i) answer when the context support the answer, (ii) reject when evidence is insufficient, and (iii) rely on the specific context spans that truly ground the answer. We further introduce a rigorous evaluation framework to disentangle explanation fidelity from baseline predictive errors. This allows us to introduce and measure the Explained Information Fraction (EIF), which normalizes M/A certified mutual-information guarantees relative to model capacity and imperfect benchmarks. Across three RAG datasets and two model families of varying sizes, M/A-trained LLMs show improved groundedness, completeness, soundness, and reject behavior, as well as reduced hallucinations -- without needing manually annotated unanswerable questions. The retriever likewise improves recall and MRR through automatically generated M/A hard positives and negatives. Our results demonstrate that autonomous interactive-proof-style supervision provides a principled and practical path toward reliable RAG systems that treat retrieved documents not as suggestions, but as verifiable evidence.
Abstract:Pre-training decoder-only language models relies on vast amounts of high-quality data, yet the availability of such data is increasingly reaching its limits. While metadata is commonly used to create and curate these datasets, its potential as a direct training signal remains under-explored. We challenge this status quo and propose LIME (Linguistic Metadata Embeddings), a method that enriches token embeddings with metadata capturing syntax, semantics, and contextual properties. LIME substantially improves pre-training efficiency. Specifically, it adapts up to 56% faster to the training data distribution, while introducing only 0.01% additional parameters at negligible compute overhead. Beyond efficiency, LIME improves tokenization, leading to remarkably stronger language modeling capabilities and generative task performance. These benefits persist across model scales (500M to 2B). In addition, we develop a variant with shifted metadata, LIME+1, that can guide token generation. Given prior metadata for the next token, LIME+1 improves reasoning performance by up to 38% and arithmetic accuracy by up to 35%.