OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Progressive Ideation using an Agentic AI Framework for Human-AI Co-Creation
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2026
Year: 2026

The generation of truly novel and diverse ideas is important for contemporary engineering design, yet it remains a significant cognitive challenge for novice designers. Current 'single-spurt' AI systems exacerbate this challenge by producing a high volume of semantically clustered ideas. We propose MIDAS (Meta-cognitive Ideation through Distributed Agentic AI System), a novel framework that replaces the single-AI paradigm with a distributed 'team' of specialized AI agents designed to emulate the human meta-cognitive ideation workflow. This agentic system progressively refines ideas and assesses each one for both global novelty (against existing solutions) and local novelty (against previously generated ideas). MIDAS, therefore, demonstrates a viable and progressive paradigm for true human-AI co-creation, elevating the human designer from a passive filterer to a participatory, active, collaborative partner.
Security in the Age of AI Teammates: An Empirical Study of Agentic Pull Requests on GitHub
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2026
Year: 2026

Autonomous coding agents are increasingly deployed as AI teammates in modern software engineering, independently authoring pull requests (PRs) that modify production code at scale. This study aims to systematically characterize how autonomous coding agents contribute to software security in practice, how these security-related contributions are reviewed and accepted, and which observable signals are associated with PR rejection. We conduct a large-scale empirical analysis of agent-authored PRs using the AIDev dataset, comprising of over 33,000 curated PRs from popular GitHub repositories. Security-relevant PRs are identified using a keyword filtering strategy, followed by manual validation, resulting in 1,293 confirmed security-related agentic-PRs. We then analyze prevalence, acceptance outcomes, and review latency across autonomous agents, programming ecosystems, and types of code changes. Moreover, we apply qualitative open coding to identify recurring security-related actions and underlying intents, and examine review metadata to identify early signals associated with PR rejection. Security-related Agentic-PRs constitute a meaningful share of agent activity (approximately 4\%). Rather than focusing solely on narrow vulnerability fixes, agents most frequently perform supportive security hardening activities, including testing, documentation, configuration, and improved error handling. Compared to non-security PRs, security-related Agentic-PRs exhibit lower merge rates and longer review latency, reflecting heightened human scrutiny, with variation across agents and programming ecosystems. PR rejection is more strongly associated with PR complexity and verbosity than with explicit security topics.
MAESTRO: Multi-Agent Evaluation Suite for Testing, Reliability, and Observability
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2026
Year: 2026

We present MAESTRO, an evaluation suite for the testing, reliability, and observability of LLM-based MAS. MAESTRO standardizes MAS configuration and execution through a unified interface, supports integrating both native and third-party MAS via a repository of examples and lightweight adapters, and exports framework-agnostic execution traces together with system-level signals (e.g., latency, cost, and failures). We instantiate MAESTRO with 12 representative MAS spanning popular agentic frameworks and interaction patterns, and conduct controlled experiments across repeated runs, backend models, and tool configurations. Our case studies show that MAS executions can be structurally stable yet temporally variable, leading to substantial run-to-run variance in performance and reliability. We further find that MAS architecture is the dominant driver of resource profiles, reproducibility, and cost-latency-accuracy trade-off, often outweighing changes in backend models or tool settings. Overall, MAESTRO enables systematic evaluation and provides empirical guidance for designing and optimizing agentic systems.
Noise-Aware Named Entity Recognition for Historical VET Documents
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

This paper addresses Named Entity Recognition (NER) in the domain of Vocational Education and Training (VET), focusing on historical, digitized documents that suffer from OCR-induced noise. We propose a robust NER approach leveraging Noise-Aware Training (NAT) with synthetically injected OCR errors, transfer learning, and multi-stage fine-tuning. Three complementary strategies, training on noisy, clean, and artificial data, are systematically compared. Our method is one of the first to recognize multiple entity types in VET documents. It is applied to German documents but transferable to arbitrary languages. Experimental results demonstrate that domain-specific and noise-aware fine-tuning substantially increases robustness and accuracy under noisy conditions. We provide publicly available code for reproducible noise-aware NER in domain-specific contexts.
Federated Customization of Large Models: Approaches, Experiments, and Insights
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

In this article, we explore federated customization of large models and highlight the key challenges it poses within the federated learning framework. We review several popular large model customization techniques, including full fine-tuning, efficient fine-tuning, prompt engineering, prefix-tuning, knowledge distillation, and retrieval-augmented generation. Then, we discuss how these techniques can be implemented within the federated learning framework. Moreover, we conduct experiments on federated prefix-tuning, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first trial to apply prefix-tuning in the federated learning setting. The conducted experiments validate its feasibility with performance close to centralized approaches. Further comparison with three other federated customization methods demonstrated its competitive performance, satisfactory efficiency, and consistent robustness.
Cloud-Native Generative AI for Automated Planogram Synthesis: A Diffusion Model Approach for Multi-Store Retail Optimization
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Planogram creation is a significant challenge for retail, requiring an average of 30 hours per complex layout. This paper introduces a cloud-native architecture using diffusion models to automatically generate store-specific planograms. Unlike conventional optimization methods that reorganize existing layouts, our system learns from successful shelf arrangements across multiple retail locations to create new planogram configurations. The architecture combines cloud-based model training via AWS with edge deployment for real-time inference. The diffusion model integrates retail-specific constraints through a modified loss function. Simulation-based analysis demonstrates the system reduces planogram design time by 98.3% (from 30 to 0.5 hours) while achieving 94.4% constraint satisfaction. Economic analysis reveals a 97.5% reduction in creation expenses with a 4.4-month break-even period. The cloud-native architecture scales linearly, supporting up to 10,000 concurrent store requests. This work demonstrates the viability of generative AI for automated retail space optimization.
Cost-Performance Analysis of Cloud-Based Retail Point-of-Sale Systems: A Comparative Study of Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2026
Year: 2026

Althoughthereislittleempiricalresearchonplatform-specific performance for retail workloads, the digital transformation of the retail industry has accelerated the adoption of cloud-based Point-of-Sale (POS) systems. This paper presents a systematic, repeatable comparison of POS workload deployments on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure using real-time API endpoints and open-source benchmarking code. Using free-tier cloud resources, we offer a transparent methodology for POS workload evaluation that small retailers and researchers can use. Our approach measures important performance metrics like response latency, throughput, and scalability while estimating operational costs based on actual resource usage and current public cloud pricing because there is no direct billing under free-tier usage. All the tables and figures in this study are generated directly from code outputs, ensuring that the experimental data and the reported results are consistent. Our analysis shows that GCP achieves 23.0% faster response times at baseline load, while Azure shows 71.9% higher cost efficiency for steady-state operations. We look at the architectural components that lead to these differences and provide a helpful framework for merchants considering cloud point-of-sale implementation. This study establishes a strong, open benchmarking methodology for retail cloud applications and offers the first comprehensive, code-driven comparison of workloads unique to point-of-sale systems across leading cloud platforms.
LLM-Based Agentic Exploration for Robot Navigation & Manipulation with Skill Orchestration
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2026
Year: 2026

This paper presents an end-to-end LLM-based agentic exploration system for an indoor shopping task, evaluated in both Gazebo simulation and a corresponding real-world corridor layout. The robot incrementally builds a lightweight semantic map by detecting signboards at junctions and storing direction-to-POI relations together with estimated junction poses, while AprilTags provide repeatable anchors for approach and alignment. Given a natural-language shopping request, an LLM produces a constrained discrete action at each junction (direction and whether to enter a store), and a ROS finite-state main controller executes the decision by gating modular motion primitives, including local-costmap-based obstacle avoidance, AprilTag approaching, store entry, and grasping. Qualitative results show that the integrated stack can perform end-to-end task execution from user instruction to multi-store navigation and object retrieval, while remaining modular and debuggable through its text-based map and logged decision history.
A Parameterized-Complexity Framework for Finding Local Optima
Venue: arXiv cs.CC 2026
Year: 2026

Local search is a fundamental optimization technique that is both widely used in practice and deeply studied in theory, yet its computational complexity remains poorly understood. The traditional frameworks, PLS and the standard algorithm problem, introduced by Johnson, Papadimitriou, and Yannakakis (1988) fail to capture the methodology of local search algorithms: PLS is concerned with finding a local optimum and not with using local search, while the standard algorithm problem restricts each improvement step to follow a fixed pivoting rule. In this work, we introduce a novel formulation of local search which provides a middle ground between these models. In particular, the task is to output not only a local optimum but also a chain of local improvements leading to it. With this framework, we aim to capture the challenge in designing a good pivoting rule. Especially, when combined with the parameterized complexity paradigm, it enables both strong lower bounds and meaningful tractability results. Unlike previous works that combined parameterized complexity with local search, our framework targets the whole task of finding a local optimum and not only a single improvement step. Focusing on two representative meta-problems -- Subset Weight Optimization Problem with the $c$-swap neighborhood and Weighted Circuit with the flip neighborhood -- we establish fixed-parameter tractability results related to the number of distinct weights, while ruling out an analogous result when parameterized by the distance to the nearest optimum via a new type of reduction.
Improving Scientific Document Retrieval with Academic Concept Index
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2026
Year: 2026

Adapting general-domain retrievers to scientific domains is challenging due to the scarcity of large-scale domain-specific relevance annotations and the substantial mismatch in vocabulary and information needs. Recent approaches address these issues through two independent directions that leverage large language models (LLMs): (1) generating synthetic queries for fine-tuning, and (2) generating auxiliary contexts to support relevance matching. However, both directions overlook the diverse academic concepts embedded within scientific documents, often producing redundant or conceptually narrow queries and contexts. To address this limitation, we introduce an academic concept index, which extracts key concepts from papers and organizes them guided by an academic taxonomy. This structured index serves as a foundation for improving both directions. First, we enhance the synthetic query generation with concept coverage-based generation (CCQGen), which adaptively conditions LLMs on uncovered concepts to generate complementary queries with broader concept coverage. Second, we strengthen the context augmentation with concept-focused auxiliary contexts (CCExpand), which leverages a set of document snippets that serve as concise responses to the concept-aware CCQGen queries. Extensive experiments show that incorporating the academic concept index into both query generation and context augmentation leads to higher-quality queries, better conceptual alignment, and improved retrieval performance.
Benchmarking ERP Analysis: Manual Features, Deep Learning, and Foundation Models
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2026
Year: 2026

Event-related potential (ERP), a specialized paradigm of electroencephalographic (EEG), reflects neurological responses to external stimuli or events, generally associated with the brain's processing of specific cognitive tasks. ERP plays a critical role in cognitive analysis, the detection of neurological diseases, and the assessment of psychological states. Recent years have seen substantial advances in deep learning-based methods for spontaneous EEG and other non-time-locked task-related EEG signals. However, their effectiveness on ERP data remains underexplored, and many existing ERP studies still rely heavily on manually extracted features. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive benchmark study that systematically compares traditional manual features (followed by a linear classifier), deep learning models, and pre-trained EEG foundation models for ERP analysis. We establish a unified data preprocessing and training pipeline and evaluate these approaches on two representative tasks, ERP stimulus classification and ERP-based brain disease detection, across 12 publicly available datasets. Furthermore, we investigate various patch-embedding strategies within advanced Transformer architectures to identify embedding designs that better suit ERP data. Our study provides a landmark framework to guide method selection and tailored model design for future ERP analysis. The code is available at https://github.com/DL4mHealth/ERP-Benchmark.
Priority-Aware Multi-Robot Coverage Path Planning
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2026
Year: 2026

Multi-robot systems are widely used for coverage tasks that require efficient coordination across large environments. In Multi-Robot Coverage Path Planning (MCPP), the objective is typically to minimize the makespan by generating non-overlapping paths for full-area coverage. However, most existing methods assume uniform importance across regions, limiting their effectiveness in scenarios where some zones require faster attention. We introduce the Priority-Aware MCPP (PA-MCPP) problem, where a subset of the environment is designated as prioritized zones with associated weights. The goal is to minimize, in lexicographic order, the total priority-weighted latency of zone coverage and the overall makespan. To address this, we propose a scalable two-phase framework combining (1) greedy zone assignment with local search, spanning-tree-based path planning, and (2) Steiner-tree-guided residual coverage. Experiments across diverse scenarios demonstrate that our method significantly reduces priority-weighted latency compared to standard MCPP baselines, while maintaining competitive makespan. Sensitivity analyses further show that the method scales well with the number of robots and that zone coverage behavior can be effectively controlled by adjusting priority weights.
Beyond IVR: Benchmarking Customer Support LLM Agents for Business-Adherence
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2026
Year: 2026

Traditional customer support systems, such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR), rely on rigid scripts and lack the flexibility required for handling complex, policy-driven tasks. While large language model (LLM) agents offer a promising alternative, evaluating their ability to act in accordance with business rules and real-world support workflows remains an open challenge. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on tool usage or task completion, overlooking an agent's capacity to adhere to multi-step policies, navigate task dependencies, and remain robust to unpredictable user or environment behavior. In this work, we introduce JourneyBench, a benchmark designed to assess policy-aware agents in customer support. JourneyBench leverages graph representations to generate diverse, realistic support scenarios and proposes the User Journey Coverage Score, a novel metric to measure policy adherence. We evaluate multiple state-of-the-art LLMs using two agent designs: a Static-Prompt Agent (SPA) and a Dynamic-Prompt Agent (DPA) that explicitly models policy control. Across 703 conversations in three domains, we show that DPA significantly boosts policy adherence, even allowing smaller models like GPT-4o-mini to outperform more capable ones like GPT-4o. Our findings demonstrate the importance of structured orchestration and establish JourneyBench as a critical resource to advance AI-driven customer support beyond IVR-era limitations.
Traffic-Aware Optimal Taxi Placement Using Graph Neural Network-Based Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

In the context of smart city transportation, efficient matching of taxi supply with passenger demand requires real-time integration of urban traffic network data and mobility patterns. Conventional taxi hotspot prediction models often rely solely on historical demand, overlooking dynamic influences such as traffic congestion, road incidents, and public events. This paper presents a traffic-aware, graph-based reinforcement learning (RL) framework for optimal taxi placement in metropolitan environments. The urban road network is modeled as a graph where intersections represent nodes, road segments serve as edges, and node attributes capture historical demand, event proximity, and real-time congestion scores obtained from live traffic APIs. Graph Neural Network (GNN) embeddings are employed to encode spatial-temporal dependencies within the traffic network, which are then used by a Q-learning agent to recommend optimal taxi hotspots. The reward mechanism jointly optimizes passenger waiting time, driver travel distance, and congestion avoidance. Experiments on a simulated Delhi taxi dataset, generated using real geospatial boundaries and historic ride-hailing request patterns, demonstrate that the proposed model reduced passenger waiting time by about 56% and reduced travel distance by 38% compared to baseline stochastic selection. The proposed approach is adaptable to multi-modal transport systems and can be integrated into smart city platforms for real-time urban mobility optimization.
Do Chatbot LLMs Talk Too Much? The YapBench Benchmark
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini increasingly act as general-purpose copilots, yet they often respond with unnecessary length on simple requests, adding redundant explanations, hedging, or boilerplate that increases cognitive load and inflates token-based inference cost. Prior work suggests that preference-based post-training and LLM-judged evaluations can induce systematic length bias, where longer answers are rewarded even at comparable quality. We introduce YapBench, a lightweight benchmark for quantifying user-visible over-generation on brevity-ideal prompts. Each item consists of a single-turn prompt, a curated minimal-sufficient baseline answer, and a category label. Our primary metric, YapScore, measures excess response length beyond the baseline in characters, enabling comparisons across models without relying on any specific tokenizer. We summarize model performance via the YapIndex, a uniformly weighted average of category-level median YapScores. YapBench contains over three hundred English prompts spanning three common brevity-ideal settings: (A) minimal or ambiguous inputs where the ideal behavior is a short clarification, (B) closed-form factual questions with short stable answers, and (C) one-line coding tasks where a single command or snippet suffices. Evaluating 76 assistant LLMs, we observe an order-of-magnitude spread in median excess length and distinct category-specific failure modes, including vacuum-filling on ambiguous inputs and explanation or formatting overhead on one-line technical requests. We release the benchmark and maintain a live leaderboard for tracking verbosity behavior over time.
Avatar Forcing: Real-Time Interactive Head Avatar Generation for Natural Conversation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Talking head generation creates lifelike avatars from static portraits for virtual communication and content creation. However, current models do not yet convey the feeling of truly interactive communication, often generating one-way responses that lack emotional engagement. We identify two key challenges toward truly interactive avatars: generating motion in real-time under causal constraints and learning expressive, vibrant reactions without additional labeled data. To address these challenges, we propose Avatar Forcing, a new framework for interactive head avatar generation that models real-time user-avatar interactions through diffusion forcing. This design allows the avatar to process real-time multimodal inputs, including the user's audio and motion, with low latency for instant reactions to both verbal and non-verbal cues such as speech, nods, and laughter. Furthermore, we introduce a direct preference optimization method that leverages synthetic losing samples constructed by dropping user conditions, enabling label-free learning of expressive interaction. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework enables real-time interaction with low latency (approximately 500ms), achieving 6.8X speedup compared to the baseline, and produces reactive and expressive avatar motion, which is preferred over 80% against the baseline.
IRPM: Intergroup Relative Preference Modeling for Pointwise Generative Reward Models
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2026
Year: 2026

Generative Reward Models (GRMs) have demonstrated strong performance in reward modeling, due to their interpretability and potential for refinement through reinforcement learning (RL). However, widely used pairwise GRMs create a computational bottleneck in reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), when calibrating or aggregating preference signals over n candidates, often incurring O(n^2) pairwise judgments. To address this issue, we propose Intergroup Relative Preference Modeling (IRPM), an RL-based method that extends the Bradley--Terry preference-learning paradigm via intergroup comparisons to train pointwise GRMs from pairwise preference data. IRPM derives pointwise reward for each response by contrasting groups of chosen vs. rejected samples, enabling pointwise scores comparable across candidate sets and O(n) reward evaluation for a variable number of candidates during RL training, while preserving interpretability and scalability. Experiments show that IRPM achieves state-of-the-art performance among pointwise GRMs on RM-Bench, JudgeBench and RewardBench, and approaches the performance of leading pairwise GRMs. In addition, IRPM achieves substantial gains in post-training evaluations, demonstrating its effectiveness.