#01Oct 26, 2026
cs.LG
Work Agents: Systems, Capabilities, and Optimization
Zishan Xu, Enjun Du, Mingqi Gao and 13 more
As foundation models evolve from information generation to digital work execution, agents are increasingly capable of completing complex tasks across tools, applications, and workflows. However, existing research lacks a unified perspective on how agents reliably accomplish delegated work. To address this gap, we present a work-centric, system-level perspective that views work agents as systems combining foundation models and runtime harnesses to execute tasks in stateful workspaces and deliver verifiable outcomes. We introduce two complementary dimensions, work persistence and work openness, to characterize working conditions, and classify digital work into five forms according to task scope and organization. Building on this framework, we identify five core capability families required for reliable work execution and examine approaches to model optimization, harness optimization, and their joint optimization. We further analyze existing evaluation methods and metrics from the perspective of work outcomes. Finally, we discuss future research directions, including sustained work delegation, adaptation to open environments, and the interaction between work execution and capability improvement. This paper provides a unified framework for understanding, optimizing, and evaluating work agents, supporting the development of systems capable of delivering reliable, verifiable, and practically valuable work outcomes.
#02Oct 26, 2026
cs.LG
A theory of noisy linear recurrent neural network learning dynamics
John J. Vastola, Kanaka Rajan
Biological neural networks are noisy: their dynamics involve difficult-to-predict fluctuations which are likely due not just to chaos, but also to a variety of low-level biophysical processes. Despite the omnipresence of intrinsic noise, its theoretical consequences are incompletely understood, especially in the context of learning. For example, does noise meaningfully shape representation learning, or is it better viewed as a nuisance factor whose presence or absence changes little about what solution is found and when? Here, we argue that intrinsic noise can significantly modulate representation learning in recurrent neural networks (RNNs), since it can strongly break solution-space degeneracies and in some cases control whether a non-degenerate solution exists at all. We show that this is true for an analytically tractable model of noisy RNN learning with a linear activation function and white noise inputs. We find that, in the so-called rich regime (where weights are initialized with small values), noise strongly modulates the directions in which the read-in, readout, and recurrent weights align. Moreover, we find that noise produces a kind of phase transition: for sufficiently high noise, a non-degenerate solution is not even optimal if parameter scales are limited (e.g., via regularization). These results extend recent analytic work on RNN representation learning and show that noise can act as a fundamental determinant of representations.
#03Oct 26, 2026
cs.CR
Reva: Real-Time Vulnerability Detection through Contextual Probing of Large Language Models
Amine Lbath, Massih-Reza Amini
A vulnerability costs more to fix the later it is discovered. As coding agents generate code faster than developers can review it, software needs a first line of defense screening each new function in real time. LLM agents have recently become capable of finding real-world vulnerabilities by working as a security expert would: they run analysis tools, explore the surrounding code, test hypotheses and weigh the evidence before forming their own judgement. This reasoning, however, spans many model calls, so that each verdict takes minutes of compute, far too long for real-time screening. Faster detectors, which fine-tune deep learning models or prompt an LLM for a direct verdict, are less accurate: they judge a function without the context an agent gathers, and an LLM's generated verdict is unreliable even when given some of it. We present REVA (REal-time Vulnerability Analysis), an AI vulnerability detector that brings the security context and code understanding components behind agentic detectors into a single forward pass of an LLM. For each new function, REVA gives the LLM a pre-computed threat model of its module, lightweight static analysis findings and call-graph information. REVA leverages a trained probe to read the LLM's internal representations of the new function in this context. On PrimeVul's held-out test set, REVA on GLM-5.3-Flash reaches 60.0% accuracy in about one second per function. This matches VulTriage (59.2%), the state-of-the-art agentic detector, run on the same LLM, while being over 250 times faster and less than a tenth as costly. On the same prompt, the probe is 14% to 17% more accurate than the LLM's own direct verdict. Across three open LLMs, REVA is at least as accurate as VulTriage, and about 10% more accurate on two of them. An LLM's internal representations thus encode much of what agentic detectors obtain through reasoning.
#04Oct 26, 2026
cs.CV
Seeing Through Distractions: Context-Stable Attribution via the Least Core
Sai Ganesh Nagarajan, Toshinori Yamauchi, Hiroshi Kera
Shapley-value-based explanations are widely used for feature attribution in machine learning. However, in computer vision, a feature may reduce the target-class score when added to the complete genuine image, even when the predicted label remains unchanged. We formalize such features as contextual distractors and investigate their attributions under semivalues and the least core. Under a weak average marginal monotonicity assumption, we derive quantitative semivalue--least-core gap bounds and sufficient conditions based on the probability of sampling smaller contexts. We further show that shifting semivalue weights toward larger contexts decreases the signed gap. Finally, controlled image-classification experiments and evaluations on Salient ImageNet provide strong empirical support for our theoretical findings.
#05Oct 26, 2026
cs.CV
VibeVideoBench:Evaluating Multimodal Agents on Code-Driven Video Generation
Muxi Diao, Wenbin Xu, Lele Yang and 21 more
Diffusion video models produce striking clips, but they cannot reliably render an exact formula, a correct chart, a ruleconsistent game or narration synchronized to on-screen events. A different route is emerging: multimodal agents that write code to render every frame and synthesize every sound. We introduce VibeVideoBench, a benchmark for evaluating agents on code-driven video generation. Its 239 self-contained tasks in English and Chinese span 12 categories, from data stories and music-driven pieces to classroom lessons and paper explainers; each asks an agent, running in its native harness inside a sandbox, to deliver a finished MP4 with sound within one hour. Evaluation is hierarchical and evidence-based: program checks of the delivery spec, about 13k task-specific rubric checks traced to the requirements they enforce, and five quality dimensions anchored per task, judged by three VLM judge panels and validated with blind human preferences. Across nine frontier agent systems and 2,151 scored rollouts, the benchmark is far from solved: GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5 lead clearly, yet even the best system fails a core requirement on about a quarter of tasks. Whether a video arrives at all matters as much as its quality, and three quarters of the lost videos are final renders started too late, run too slowly or never started. The judges agree with each other and with human preferences on system rankings, but only moderately on individual videos.