Nomad: Autonomous Exploration and Discovery

We introduce Nomad, a system for autonomous data exploration and insight discovery. Given a corpus of documents, databases, or other data sources, users rarely know the full set of questions, hypotheses, or connections that could be explored. As a result, query-driven question answering and prompt-driven deep-research systems remain limited by human framing and often fail to cover the broader insight space. Nomad addresses this problem with an exploration-first architecture. It constructs an explicit Exploration Map over the domain and systematically traverses it to balance breadth and depth. It generates and selects hypotheses and investigates them with an explorer agent that can use document search, web search, and database tools. Candidate insights are then checked by an independent verifier before entering a reporting pipeline that produces cited reports and higher-level meta-reports. We also present a comprehensive evaluation framework for autonomous discovery systems that measures trustworthiness, report quality, and diversity. Using a corpus of selected UN and WHO reports, we show that Nomad produces more trustworthy and higher-quality reports than baselines, while also producing more diverse insights over several runs. Nomad is a step toward autonomous systems that not only answer user questions or conduct directed research, but also discover which questions, research directions, and insights are worth surfacing in the first place.

UK AISI Alignment Evaluation Case-Study

This technical report presents methods developed by the UK AI Security Institute for assessing whether advanced AI systems reliably follow intended goals. Specifically, we evaluate whether frontier models sabotage safety research when deployed as coding assistants within an AI lab. Applying our methods to four frontier models, we find no confirmed instances of research sabotage. However, we observe that Claude Opus 4.5 Preview (a pre-release snapshot of Opus 4.5) and Sonnet 4.5 frequently refuse to engage with safety-relevant research tasks, citing concerns about research direction, involvement in self-training, and research scope. We additionally find that Opus 4.5 Preview shows reduced unprompted evaluation awareness compared to Sonnet 4.5, while both models can distinguish evaluation from deployment scenarios when prompted. Our evaluation framework builds on Petri, an open-source LLM auditing tool, with a custom scaffold designed to simulate realistic internal deployment of a coding agent. We validate that this scaffold produces trajectories that all tested models fail to reliably distinguish from real deployment data. We test models across scenarios varying in research motivation, activity type, replacement threat, and model autonomy. Finally, we discuss limitations including scenario coverage and evaluation awareness.

Are Finer Citations Always Better? Rethinking Granularity for Attributed Generation

Citation granularity - whether to cite individual sentences, paragraphs, or documents - is a critical design choice in attributed generation. While fine-grained citations are often preferred for precise human verification, their impact on model performance remains under-explored. We analyze four model scales (8B-120B) and demonstrate that enforcing fine-grained citations degrades attribution quality by 16-276% compared to the best-performing granularity. We observe a consistent performance pattern where attribution quality peaks at intermediate granularities (paragraph-level). Our analysis suggests that fine-grained (sentence-level) citations disrupt necessary semantic dependencies for attributing evidence to answer claims, while excessively coarse citations (multi-paragraph) introduce distracting noise. Importantly, the magnitude of this performance gap varies non-monotonically with model scale: fine-grained constraints disproportionately penalize larger models, suggesting that atomic citation units disrupt the multi-sentence information synthesis at which these models excel. Strikingly, citation-optimal granularity leads to substantial gains in attribution quality while preserving or even improving answer correctness. Overall, our findings demonstrate that optimizing solely for human verification via fine-grained citation disregards model constraints, compromising both attribution faithfulness and generation reliability. Instead, effective attribution requires aligning citation granularity with the model's natural semantic scope.

APEX-EM: Non-Parametric Online Learning for Autonomous Agents via Structured Procedural-Episodic Experience Replay

LLM-based autonomous agents lack persistent procedural memory: they re-derive solutions from scratch even when structurally identical tasks have been solved before. We present \textbf{APEX-EM}, a non-parametric online learning framework that accumulates, retrieves, and reuses structured procedural plans without modifying model weights. APEX-EM introduces: (1) a \emph{structured experience representation} encoding the full procedural-episodic trace of each execution -- planning steps, artifacts, iteration history with error analysis, and quality scores; (2) a \emph{Plan-Retrieve-Generate-Iterate-Ingest} (PRGII) workflow with Task Verifiers providing multi-dimensional reward signals; and (3) a \emph{dual-outcome Experience Memory} with hybrid retrieval combining semantic search, structural signature matching, and plan DAG traversal -- enabling cross-domain transfer between tasks sharing no lexical overlap but analogous operational structure. Successful experiences serve as positive in-context examples; failures as negative examples with structured error annotations. We evaluate on BigCodeBench~\cite{zhuo2025bigcodebench}, KGQAGen-10k~\cite{zhang2025kgqagen}, and Humanity's Last Exam~\cite{phan2025hle} using Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Opus 4.5. On KGQAGen-10k, APEX-EM achieves 89.6\% accuracy versus 41.3\% without memory (+48.3pp), surpassing the oracle-retrieval upper bound (84.9\%). On BigCodeBench, it reaches 83.3\% SR from a 53.9\% baseline (+29.4pp), exceeding MemRL's~\cite{memrl2025} +11.0pp gain under comparable frozen-backbone conditions (noting backbone differences controlled for in our analysis). On HLE, entity graph retrieval reaches 48.0\% from 25.2\% (+22.8pp). Ablations show component value is task-dependent: rich judge feedback is negligible for code generation but critical for structured queries (+10.3pp), while binary-signal iteration partially compensates for weaker feedback.

Extending MONA in Camera Dropbox: Reproduction, Learned Approval, and Design Implications for Reward-Hacking Mitigation

Myopic Optimization with Non-myopic Approval (MONA) mitigates multi-step reward hacking by restricting the agent's planning horizon while supplying far-sighted approval as a training signal~\cite{farquhar2025mona}. The original paper identifies a critical open question: how the method of constructing approval -- particularly the degree to which approval depends on achieved outcomes -- affects whether MONA's safety guarantees hold. We present a reproduction-first extension of the public MONA Camera Dropbox environment that (i)~repackages the released codebase as a standard Python project with scripted PPO training, (ii)~confirms the published contrast between ordinary RL (91.5\% reward-hacking rate) and oracle MONA (0.0\% hacking rate) using the released reference arrays, and (iii)~introduces a modular learned-approval suite spanning oracle, noisy, misspecified, learned, and calibrated approval mechanisms. In reduced-budget pilot sweeps across approval methods, horizons, dataset sizes, and calibration strategies, the best calibrated learned-overseer run achieves zero observed reward hacking but substantially lower intended-behavior rates than oracle MONA (11.9\% vs.\ 99.9\%), consistent with under-optimization rather than re-emergent hacking. These results operationalize the MONA paper's approval-spectrum conjecture as a runnable experimental object and suggest that the central engineering challenge shifts from proving MONA's concept to building learned approval models that preserve sufficient foresight without reopening reward-hacking channels. Code, configurations, and reproduction commands are publicly available. https://github.com/codernate92/mona-camera-dropbox-repro

Improving Attributed Long-form Question Answering with Intent Awareness

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used to generate comprehensive, knowledge-intensive reports. However, while these models are trained on diverse academic papers and reports, they are not exposed to the reasoning processes and intents that guide authors in crafting these documents. We hypothesize that enhancing a model's intent awareness can significantly improve the quality of generated long-form reports. We develop and employ structured, tag-based schemes to better elicit underlying implicit intents to write or cite. We demonstrate that these extracted intents enhance both zero-shot generation capabilities in LLMs and enable the creation of high-quality synthetic data for fine-tuning smaller models. Our experiments reveal improved performance across various challenging scientific report generation tasks, with an average improvement of +2.9 and +12.3 absolute points for large and small models over baselines, respectively. Furthermore, our analysis illuminates how intent awareness enhances model citation usage and substantially improves report readability.

Agent-Driven Autonomous Reinforcement Learning Research: Iterative Policy Improvement for Quadruped Locomotion

This paper documents a case study in agent-driven autonomous reinforcement learning research for quadruped locomotion. The setting was not a fully self-starting research system. A human provided high-level directives through an agentic coding environment, while an agent carried out most of the execution loop: reading code, diagnosing failures, editing reward and terrain configurations, launching and monitoring jobs, analyzing intermediate metrics, and proposing the next wave of experiments. Across more than 70 experiments organized into fourteen waves on a DHAV1 12-DoF quadruped in Isaac Lab, the agent progressed from early rough-terrain runs with mean reward around 7 to a best logged Wave 12 run, exp063, with velocity error 0.263 and 97\% timeout over 2000 iterations, independently reproduced five times across different GPUs. The archive also records several concrete autonomous research decisions: isolating PhysX deadlocks to terrain sets containing boxes and stair-like primitives, porting four reward terms from openly available reference implementations \cite{deeprobotics, rlsar}, correcting Isaac Sim import and bootstrapping issues, reducing environment count for diagnosis, terminating hung runs, and pivoting effort away from HIM after repeated terrain=0.0 outcomes. Relative to the AutoResearch paradigm \cite{autoresearch}, this case study operates in a more failure-prone robotics RL setting with multi-GPU experiment management and simulator-specific engineering constraints. The contribution is empirical and documentary: it shows that an agent can materially execute the iterative RL research loop in this domain with limited human intervention, while also making clear where human direction still shaped the agenda.

On associative neural networks for sparse patterns with huge capacities

Generalized Hopfield models with higher-order or exponential interaction terms are known to have substantially larger storage capacities than the classical quadratic model. On the other hand, associative memories for sparse patterns, such as the Willshaw and Amari models, already outperform the classical Hopfield model in the sparse regime. In this paper we combine these two mechanisms. We introduce higher-order versions of sparse associative memory models and study their storage capacities. For fixed interaction order $n$, we obtain storage capacities of polynomial order in the system size. When the interaction order is allowed to grow logarithmically with the number of neurons, this yields super-polynomial capacities. We also discuss an analogue in the Gripon--Berrou architecture which was formulated for non-sparse messages (see \cite{griponc}). Our results show that the capacity increase caused by higher-order interactions persists in the sparse setting, although the precise storage scale depends on the underlying architecture.

DAGverse: Building Document-Grounded Semantic DAGs from Scientific Papers

Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) are widely used to represent structured knowledge in scientific and technical domains. However, datasets for real-world DAGs remain scarce because constructing them typically requires expert interpretation of domain documents. We study Doc2SemDAG construction: recovering a preferred semantic DAG from a document together with the cited evidence and context that explain it. This problem is challenging because a document may admit multiple plausible abstractions, the intended structure is often implicit, and the supporting evidence is scattered across prose, equations, captions, and figures. To address these challenges, we leverage scientific papers containing explicit DAG figures as a natural source of supervision. In this setting, the DAG figure provides the DAG structure, while the accompanying text provides context and explanation. We introduce DAGverse, a framework for constructing document-grounded semantic DAGs from online scientific papers. Its core component, DAGverse-Pipeline, is a semi-automatic system designed to produce high-precision semantic DAG examples through figure classification, graph reconstruction, semantic grounding, and validation. As a case study, we test the framework for causal DAGs and release DAGverse-1, a dataset of 108 expert-validated semantic DAGs with graph-level, node-level, and edge-level evidence. Experiments show that DAGverse-Pipeline outperforms existing Vision-Language Models on DAG classification and annotation. DAGverse provides a foundation for document-grounded DAG benchmarks and opens new directions for studying structured reasoning grounded in real-world evidence.

Where Do Your Citations Come From? Citation-Constellation: A Free, Open-Source, No-Code, and Auditable Tool for Citation Network Decomposition with Complementary BARON and HEROCON Scores

Standard citation metrics treat all citations as equal, obscuring the social and structural pathways through which scholarly influence propagates. I introduce Citation-Constellation, a freely available no-code tool for citation network analysis with two complementary bibliometric scores that decompose a researcher's citation profile by network proximity between citing and cited authors. BARON (Boundary-Anchored Research Outreach Network score) is a strict binary metric counting only citations from outside the detected collaborative network. HEROCON (Holistic Equilibrated Research Outreach CONstellation score) applies graduated weights assigning partial credit to in-group citations based on relationship proximity. The gap between scores serves as a diagnostic of inner-circle dependence. An extended abstract with full details appears in the paper. The tool implements this through a phased architecture: (1) self-citation analysis, (2) co-authorship graph traversal, (3) temporal institutional affiliation matching via ROR, and (4) AI-agent-driven venue governance extraction using a local LLM. Phases 1-3 are fully operational; Phase 4 is under development. Key design choices include ORCID-validated author identity resolution, an UNKNOWN classification for citations with insufficient metadata, and comprehensive audit trails documenting every classification decision. A no-code web interface enables researchers to compute scores without programming, installation, or registration. I present these scores as structural diagnostics, not quality indicators. BARON and HEROCON describe where in the social graph citations originate. They should not be used for hiring, promotion, or funding decisions. HEROCON weights are experimental and require empirical calibration.