Automated Thematic Analysis for Clinical Qualitative Data: Iterative Codebook Refinement with Full Provenance
arXiv:2603.08989v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Thematic analysis (TA) is widely used in health research to extract patterns from patient interviews, yet manual TA faces challenges in scalability and reproducibility. LLM-based automation can help, but existing approaches produce codebooks with limited...
Cognitively Layered Data Synthesis for Domain Adaptation of LLMs to Space Situational Awareness
arXiv:2603.09231v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional performance on general-purpose tasks. however, transferring them to complex engineering domains such as space situational awareness (SSA) remains challenging owing to insufficient structural alignment with mission chains, the absence...
DataFactory: Collaborative Multi-Agent Framework for Advanced Table Question Answering
arXiv:2603.09152v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Table Question Answering (TableQA) enables natural language interaction with structured tabular data. However, existing large language model (LLM) approaches face critical limitations: context length constraints that restrict data handling capabilities, hallucination issues that compromise answer...
A Consensus-Driven Multi-LLM Pipeline for Missing-Person Investigations
arXiv:2603.08954v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The first 72 hours of a missing-person investigation are critical for successful recovery. Guardian is an end-to-end system designed to support missing-child investigation and early search planning. This paper presents the Guardian LLM Pipeline, a...
EsoLang-Bench: Evaluating Genuine Reasoning in Large Language Models via Esoteric Programming Languages
arXiv:2603.09678v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models achieve near-ceiling performance on code generation benchmarks, yet these results increasingly reflect memorization rather than genuine reasoning. We introduce EsoLang-Bench, a benchmark using five esoteric programming languages (Brainfuck, Befunge-98, Whitespace, Unlambda, and...
ConFu: Contemplate the Future for Better Speculative Sampling
arXiv:2603.08899v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speculative decoding has emerged as a powerful approach to accelerate large language model (LLM) inference by employing lightweight draft models to propose candidate tokens that are subsequently verified by the target model. The effectiveness of...
Common Sense vs. Morality: The Curious Case of Narrative Focus Bias in LLMs
arXiv:2603.09434v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across diverse real-world applications and user communities. As such, it is crucial that these models remain both morally grounded and knowledge-aware. In this work, we uncover a critical...
LLM as a Meta-Judge: Synthetic Data for NLP Evaluation Metric Validation
arXiv:2603.09403v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Validating evaluation metrics for NLG typically relies on expensive and time-consuming human annotations, which predominantly exist only for English datasets. We propose \textit{LLM as a Meta-Judge}, a scalable framework that utilizes LLMs to generate synthetic...
DEO: Training-Free Direct Embedding Optimization for Negation-Aware Retrieval
arXiv:2603.09185v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) have enabled diverse retrieval methods. However, existing retrieval methods often fail to accurately retrieve results for negation and exclusion queries. To address this limitation,...
DuplexCascade: Full-Duplex Speech-to-Speech Dialogue with VAD-Free Cascaded ASR-LLM-TTS Pipeline and Micro-Turn Optimization
arXiv:2603.09180v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spoken dialog systems with cascaded ASR-LLM-TTS modules retain strong LLM intelligence, but VAD segmentation often forces half-duplex turns and brittle control. On the other hand, VAD-free end-to-end model support full-duplex interaction but is hard to...
Reading, Not Thinking: Understanding and Bridging the Modality Gap When Text Becomes Pixels in Multimodal LLMs
arXiv:2603.09095v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can process text presented as images, yet they often perform worse than when the same content is provided as textual tokens. We systematically diagnose this "modality gap" by evaluating seven...
Learning When to Sample: Confidence-Aware Self-Consistency for Efficient LLM Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
arXiv:2603.08999v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong reasoning performance through chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, yet often generate unnecessarily long reasoning paths that incur high inference cost. Recent self-consistency-based approaches further improve accuracy but require sampling and aggregating...
One Language, Two Scripts: Probing Script-Invariance in LLM Concept Representations
arXiv:2603.08869v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Do the features learned by Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) represent abstract meaning, or are they tied to how text is written? We investigate this question using Serbian digraphia as a controlled testbed: Serbian is written interchangeably...
PRECEPT: Planning Resilience via Experience, Context Engineering & Probing Trajectories A Unified Framework for Test-Time Adaptation with Compositional Rule Learning and Pareto-Guided Prompt Evolution
arXiv:2603.09641v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents that store knowledge as natural language suffer steep retrieval degradation as condition count grows, often struggle to compose learned rules reliably, and typically lack explicit mechanisms to detect stale or adversarial knowledge. We...
The Reasoning Trap -- Logical Reasoning as a Mechanistic Pathway to Situational Awareness
arXiv:2603.09200v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Situational awareness, the capacity of an AI system to recognize its own nature, understand its training and deployment context, and reason strategically about its circumstances, is widely considered among the most dangerous emergent capabilities in...
Explainable Innovation Engine: Dual-Tree Agent-RAG with Methods-as-Nodes and Verifiable Write-Back
arXiv:2603.09192v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves factual grounding, yet most systems rely on flat chunk retrieval and provide limited control over multi-step synthesis. We propose an Explainable Innovation Engine that upgrades the knowledge unit from text chunks...
EPOCH: An Agentic Protocol for Multi-Round System Optimization
arXiv:2603.09049v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous agents are increasingly used to improve prompts, code, and machine learning systems through iterative execution and feedback. Yet existing approaches are usually designed as task-specific optimization loops rather than as a unified protocol for...
PrivPRISM: Automatically Detecting Discrepancies Between Google Play Data Safety Declarations and Developer Privacy Policies
arXiv:2603.09214v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: End-users seldom read verbose privacy policies, leading app stores like Google Play to mandate simplified data safety declarations as a user-friendly alternative. However, these self-declared disclosures often contradict the full privacy policies, deceiving users about...
Interpretable Markov-Based Spatiotemporal Risk Surfaces for Missing-Child Search Planning with Reinforcement Learning and LLM-Based Quality Assurance
arXiv:2603.08933v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The first 72 hours of a missing-child investigation are critical for successful recovery. However, law enforcement agencies often face fragmented, unstructured data and a lack of dynamic, geospatial predictive tools. Our system, Guardian, provides an...
Quantifying the Accuracy and Cost Impact of Design Decisions in Budget-Constrained Agentic LLM Search
arXiv:2603.08877v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems combine iterative search, planning prompts, and retrieval backends, but deployed settings impose explicit budgets on tool calls and completion tokens. We present a controlled measurement study of how search depth,...
LDP: An Identity-Aware Protocol for Multi-Agent LLM Systems
arXiv:2603.08852v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As multi-agent AI systems grow in complexity, the protocols connecting them constrain their capabilities. Current protocols such as A2A and MCP do not expose model-level properties as first-class primitives, ignoring properties fundamental to effective delegation:...
MASEval: Extending Multi-Agent Evaluation from Models to Systems
arXiv:2603.08835v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid adoption of LLM-based agentic systems has produced a rich ecosystem of frameworks (smolagents, LangGraph, AutoGen, CAMEL, LlamaIndex, i.a.). Yet existing benchmarks are model-centric: they fix the agentic setup and do not compare other...
Modelling the Diachronic Emergence of Phoneme Frequency Distributions
arXiv:2603.09503v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Phoneme frequency distributions exhibit robust statistical regularities across languages, including exponential-tailed rank-frequency patterns and a negative relationship between phonemic inventory size and the relative entropy of the distribution. The origin of these patterns remains largely...
You Didn't Have to Say It like That: Subliminal Learning from Faithful Paraphrases
arXiv:2603.09517v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When language models are trained on synthetic data, they (student model) can covertly acquire behavioral traits from the data-generating model (teacher model). Subliminal learning refers to the transmission of traits from a teacher to a...
ALARM: Audio-Language Alignment for Reasoning Models
arXiv:2603.09556v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large audio language models (ALMs) extend LLMs with auditory understanding. A common approach freezes the LLM and trains only an adapter on self-generated targets. However, this fails for reasoning LLMs (RLMs) whose built-in chain-of-thought traces...
Tracking Cancer Through Text: Longitudinal Extraction From Radiology Reports Using Open-Source Large Language Models
arXiv:2603.09638v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Radiology reports capture crucial longitudinal information on tumor burden, treatment response, and disease progression, yet their unstructured narrative format complicates automated analysis. While large language models (LLMs) have advanced clinical text processing, most state-of-the-art systems...
Thinking to Recall: How Reasoning Unlocks Parametric Knowledge in LLMs
arXiv:2603.09906v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While reasoning in LLMs plays a natural role in math, code generation, and multi-hop factual questions, its effect on simple, single-hop factual questions remains unclear. Such questions do not require step-by-step logical decomposition, making the...
CREATE: Testing LLMs for Associative Creativity
arXiv:2603.09970v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A key component of creativity is associative reasoning: the ability to draw novel yet meaningful connections between concepts. We introduce CREATE, a benchmark designed to evaluate models' capacity for creative associative reasoning. CREATE requires models...
Self-hosted Lecture-to-Quiz: Local LLM MCQ Generation with Deterministic Quality Control
arXiv:2603.08729v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present an end-to-end self-hosted (API-free) pipeline, where API-free means that lecture content is not sent to any external LLM service, that converts lecture PDFs into multiple-choice questions (MCQs) using a local LLM plus deterministic...
Fish Audio S2 Technical Report
arXiv:2603.08823v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce Fish Audio S2, an open-sourced text-to-speech system featuring multi-speaker, multi-turn generation, and, most importantly, instruction-following control via natural-language descriptions. To scale training, we develop a multi-stage training recipe together with a staged data...