A Topology-Aware, Memory-Centric Architecture that Separates Root-Cause Derivation from Root-Cause Explanation

Modern microservice deployments fail in ways that are easy to detect and hard to explain. When a fault propagates along service dependencies, alerts fire in floods, dashboards multiply, and the scarce resource, an engineer who understands how the services relate, is consumed reconstructing context that the monitoring stack discarded. We argue that the missing ingredient in autonomous operations is not a better anomaly detector or a larger language model, but operational memory: a persistent, structured representation of how a system normally behaves, how its parts depend on one another, and how it has failed before. We present O PS C ORTEX, a working multi-agent prototype that organizes this memory into four tiers and uses it to separate two tasks the field usually conflates: deriving a root cause and explaining it. Root cause is computed deterministically from a learned dependency graph and the temporal ordering of threshold crossings; a large language model (LLM) is then asked only to explain, confirm, and recommend, using evidence the system has already assembled. We motivate the design with two documented production cascading failures, review representative literature on observability, anomaly detection, graph-based localization, and LLM-assisted diagnosis, and show how each architectural choice maps directly to a failure mode those incidents exhibit. The prototype is validated on an instrumented e-commerce benchmark with eight injectable failure scenarios.

The Register Gap: A Meaning Intelligence Framework for Nigerian Public Discourse

We introduce the Meaning Intelligence Framework (MIF), a nine-dimension annotation and evaluation schema for Nigerian public discourse that separates surface sentiment from true communicative intent. Existing benchmarks for Nigerian languages, including NaijaSenti and AfriSenti, treat sentiment classification as a three-way polarity task (positive, negative, neutral). We argue that the dominant failure mode of AI systems on Nigerian discourse is not translation failure but context failure: the same utterance carries opposite pragmatic force depending on speaker, audience, and situation. The MIF operationalises this insight across nine scored dimensions: register, surface sentiment, true intent, irony, coded subtext, risk tier, annotator confidence, speaker emotion, and recommended communications action. We construct a 30-item calibration dataset spanning Standard English, Nigerian English, Nigerian Pidgin, and code-mixed registers, and evaluate a frontier language model (Gemini 2.5 Flash) under zero-shot and schema-informed prompting conditions. The headline finding is the Register Gap: zero-shot register classification accuracy is 33.3%, rising to 73.3% (+40 points) when the model receives the MIF schema in-context. The composite Meaning Intelligence Score increases by 5.4 points (73.2 to 78.6) under schema-informed prompting, with the largest practical gains in register identification, coded-subtext detection (+10 points), and strategic action recommendation (+10.3 points). We release the framework specification, annotation guidelines, and the 30-item public calibration set to support reproducibility, while retaining a private holdout corpus for contamination-protected evaluation.

Generative Engine Optimization at Scale: Measuring Brand Visibility Across AI Search Engines

People increasingly get answers straight from AI search engines like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini rather than scrolling search results. Brands that once focused on search engine optimization (SEO) must now optimize for how these engines represent, cite, and recommend them -- a shift variously called Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), and AI Search Visibility. We treat AEO and AI Visibility as part of GEO, and study how to measure brand visibility across AI engines: what they value when they cite a brand, which sources they rely on, and what content large language models surface. The hard case is everyone outside the already-authoritative top brands -- SMEs, D2C brands, creators, and early-stage startups. We analyze 100K+ prompt responses across 100+ brands tracked on Ranqo between March and May 2026. First visibility runs form a clear three-tier brand-stature ladder: global household names (e.g., Stripe, Nike) appear in 73% of relevant AI answers on their first run; established mid-market and regional brands (e.g., Olipop, Klaviyo) in 44%; niche and small brands in just 11% -- about 30 percentage points per step. When engines cite sources, about 78% go to corporate websites; among non-corporate sources YouTube leads, ahead of Reddit, editorial media, and Wikipedia. The highest-leverage page is the ranked "best-of" listicle, the most-cited content format at about 21% of all citations. Sentiment is the unstable signal: whether a brand is framed positively or negatively flips about 6.7 times more often than whether it is mentioned at all. These findings provide a first large-scale baseline for measuring GEO: AI brand visibility can be measured, differs by platform, and varies strongly by brand maturity. We close by proposing seven v1.1 protocols to test whether specific recommendations can causally improve AI visibility.

How Should Agents Read Demonstrations? Hierarchical Structure Beats Flat Action Logs

Programming by Demonstration (PbD) offers a human-centered way to author procedural knowledge for LLM agents: users communicate what they want by showing rather than by writing prompts or code, making agent authoring accessible to non-programmers. The natural output of a PbD recording is a flat action log, but how this log is organized before being passed to the agent is an open design question with significant consequences for plan quality. We propose grouping recorded actions into labeled, hierarchical subgoals and evaluate the effect of this organizational structure in a controlled experiment. Across 85 web automation tasks, we compare a zero-shot baseline against four demonstration formats that share identical action sequences but differ in structure. On 43 natural-language tasks with vague descriptions, hierarchically grouped demonstrations improve pass rates from 76.7\% to 90.7\% (paired permutation test $p{=}0.034$; win-loss 6:0), while flat demonstrations show a smaller, non-significant improvement. On 42 tasks with precise descriptions, no format provides any benefit, confirming that the hierarchical advantage arises specifically when descriptions leave procedural details ambiguous. Ablation shows that subgoal grouping alone drives the effect: preconditions, postconditions, and parameter annotations add no measurable benefit. These results offer a concrete design recommendation for PbD pipelines and, more broadly, for any system that feeds procedural context to an LLM agent: segment action sequences into named subgoal groups rather than presenting flat step lists.

Betting on Moments: Legendre Jumper Martingales for Online Exchangeability Testing

We present a family of conformal test martingales based on shifted Legendre polynomials, which extends the Simple Jumper martingale. The Simple Legendre Jumper substitutes the linear betting function with a polynomial of arbitrary degree, thereby facilitating the detection of variance, skewness, and higher-order deviations from uniformity; the standard Simple Jumper is a specific instance of degree one. The Product Legendre Jumper integrates multiple polynomial degrees into a unified betting function, although its state space expands exponentially-a cost we refer to as the jumping tax. To address this issue, we introduce the Variational Legendre Jumper, which factorises the joint adaptation through a mean-field approximation, thereby reducing exponential scaling to linear time with minimal loss in power. Lastly, the Composite Legendre Jumper incorporates several jumping rates, ensuring a wealth floor under exchangeability and automatic adaptation to the shift's timescale. Empirical results from a real-world classification task demonstrate that the combined methods consistently surpass any single-degree martingale under distributional shift, and the composite variant is recommended as the default when the shift timescale is unknown.

Structuring and Tokenizing Distributed User Interest Context for Generative Recommendation

Generative recommendation is an emerging paradigm that has shown promise in industrial recommendation systems, aiming to predict users' next interactions from their historical behaviors. At the core of generative recommendation lies item tokenization, which bridges item semantics and recommendation models. However, existing methods often struggle to effectively organize and inject complex user-behavioral and item-semantic contexts into recommendation models simultaneously. On the one hand, existing graph-based integration methods, such as graph serialization and graph neural networks, either suffer from scalability issues or exploit only local graph information. On the other hand, existing semantic tokenization methods typically rely on heuristics and lack explicit supervision signals, which may lead to inaccurate or suboptimal semantic representations. To address these limitations in user interest context modeling, we propose G2Rec, a scalable framework that unifies holistic graph-based user co-engagement modeling with semantic tokenization for industrial-scale generative recommendation. Overall, G2Rec enables recommendation models to capture holistic and semantically grounded user interest prototypes without requiring ground-truth user interests, thereby providing more comprehensive and accurate modeling of user behavior contexts in industrial sequential recommendation. Online deployment across product surfaces and extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate the superiority of G2Rec over existing methods.

Optimal Coarse Correlated Equilibria in Mean Field Games: Linear Programming and No-Regret Learning

We introduce optimal coarse correlated equilibria for continuous-time mean field games. A coarse correlated equilibrium is a randomized recommendation scheme from which no player can gain by ignoring the recommendation and switching to an alternative strategy. The problem is as follows: a moderator selects, among all mean-field coarse correlated equilibria, one that optimizes a prescribed performance criterion, which may differ from the representative player's objective. After formulating the problem, we develop a linear programming (LP) formulation, prove the existence of optimal LP coarse correlated equilibria, and relate the LP characterization to the original probabilistic setting. Building on this characterization, we design a no-regret primal-dual algorithm, based on an equivalent Lagrangian formulation of the external-regret constraint, for learning such equilibria. We provide explicit convergence rates for the learning algorithm, and numerical examples illustrate the method.

Multi-Granular Attention-Driven Reinforcement Learning Framework for Web Intelligent Enhancement Systems

From the past few years, web intelligent enhancement systems increasingly rely on heterogeneous and dynamic web data to deliver personalized, context-aware services. However, traditional machine learning, deep learning, and reinforcement learning models often struggle with semantic understanding, adaptability, and scalability in continuously evolving web environments. In this research, a Multi-Granular Attention-based Reinforcement Web Intelligent Enhancement System (MGAR-WIES) is proposed to address the challenges by integrating semantic graph modeling, attention mechanisms, and adaptive reinforcement learning. Initially, heterogeneous web data comprising structured, semi-structured and unstructured sources are collected and preprocessed for generating unified feature representations. These representations are transformed into a dynamic semantic graph, where entities and their relationships are modeled by using graph embeddings enhanced by attention mechanisms for capturing both local relevance and global contextual dependencies. Subsequently, an adaptive multi-agent reinforcement learning strategy leverages the attention-aware semantic states to optimize personalized web actions like content recommendation, navigation optimization, and service adaptation. Finally, the continuous online feedback is further integrated to update graph representations and learning policies in real time by ensuring sustained adaptability and performance. The proposed MGAR-WIES acheived better results in terms of accuracy (80%) when compared with existing approaches.

Actionable Activation Directions for Detecting and Mitigating Emergent Misalignment Across Language Model Families

Fine-tuning language models on insecure code induces emergent misalignment with poorly understood internal structure. We investigate whether this misalignment corresponds to a causally actionable activation-space direction shared across architectures. Across four instruction-tuned model families (Qwen2.5-1.5B, Gemma-2-2B, Llama-3.2-1B, Ministral-3-3B) finetuned identically, a difference-in-means direction achieves 99.6% separation of aligned and misaligned activations at each model's final layer. Causal steering by subtracting this direction reduces code spillover by 21-51 points, while a secure-code control confirms content specificity. Cross-architecture transfer via ridge regression maps yields large behavioral suppression (up to 46 points) but fails specificity controls as random and orthogonal directions perform comparably. We identify a two-tier specificity structure: within-model directions are causally specific and actionable; cross-model directions are causally real but non-specific. An asymmetric transfer topology emerges, with Gemma and Qwen acting as geometric donors and Llama as a receiver. These findings define the limits of linear cross-architecture correction and recommend within-model probing for auditing.

The FID Lottery: Quantifying Hidden Randomness in Generative-Model Evaluation

The Frechet Inception Distance (FID) is the de facto arbiter of image generation, yet most papers report just a single number from a single trained model using a single sampling seed. How reproducible is that number if we retrain the model, or merely resample from it? In this paper, we treat FID as a random variable on a two-axis panel of training and generation seeds, and measure its variance directly on several hundred SiT networks trained on class-conditional ImageNet 256x256. We report surprising findings: (a) Retraining the model using the same recipe with a different seed moves FID 3.2x more (in Inception feature space) than redrawing samples from a fixed network. (b) That gap is driven by three factors: random initialisation, data ordering, and the per-step Gaussian noise of the flow-matching loss. (c) Increasing compute or model size barely tightens the spread, holding the FID coefficient of variation (CoV) inside a 1-2% band. (d) Per-cell classifier-free-guidance tuning halves the spread but reshuffles which seeds work best, and a lucky training seed reaches the same FID with up to 2x less compute than an unlucky one. Based on these findings, we recommend a new FID evaluation protocol: evaluate under per-cell optimal guidance, treat any FID gap below the empirically measured ~1.3% CoV as inconclusive, and report an error bar over several training seeds rather than a single FID number.