#01Oct 23, 2026
cs.AI
Do "True" and "False" Add Up to One? Complement Consistency in LLM-Agent Opinion Simulations
Anouar Imel, Jin Qi
In LLM-agent opinion simulations, each agent reports the probability that a claim is true after seeing its own previous probability and the probabilities reported by its neighbors, and that number becomes its state in the next round. If the number describes the agent's position rather than the sentence it was shown, then rewriting the claim as its complement and replacing every probability p with 1 - p should return the complementary answer, so the two reports should sum to one. We test this with three small open models: Qwen3-4B, Llama-3.2-3B and Gemma-3-4B. On 2,304 agent states taken from a running network simulation, Qwen's paired reports sum to 1.18 on average, and on 48 real fact-checking claims from AVeriTeC they again exceed one. A controlled benchmark of 24 worlds, each with exactly two possible outcomes, shows the same failure in all three models. The discrepancy is two to ten times larger than the change produced by a same-meaning paraphrase, and it persists under repeated sampling and across peer group sizes and report strengths. When the reports are fed back into two populations that start from complementary states, the populations do not remain mirror images: their divergence is positive after five rounds for every model. Averaging each answer with the complement of its paired answer restores consistency by construction and lowers Brier loss averaged over the two wordings, but at the final round it beats the better of the two original wordings for only one of the three models. A schedule-by-targeting experiment on the same model gives a small, stable interaction because such sweeps keep the claim wording fixed. Consistency under rewording therefore needs its own test before simulated probabilities are read as beliefs
#02Oct 23, 2026
cs.LG
PoKER: A Probability of Kill Estimation Rate Model for Air-to-Air Missiles Using Machine Learning on Stochastic Targets
Joao P. A. Dantas, Andre N. Costa, Diego Geraldo and 2 more
This work introduces PoKER, a novel probabilistic model engineered to optimize missile launch effectiveness in air-to-air scenarios, specifically within Beyond Visual Range (BVR) air combat. Unlike conventional Weapon Engagement Zone (WEZ) models that delineate zones based on static distances such as maximum, minimum, and no-escape ranges, PoKER applies machine learning to predict kill probabilities more accurately by integrating the stochastic behaviors of targets and missile miss distances. This model dynamically evaluates target behavior, greatly expanding the predictive capabilities of engagement analysis. By factoring in elements such as warhead lethality, target and shooter orientations, and the specific conditions of engagement, PoKER provides important insights into engagement dynamics and quantifies success probabilities. Consequently, it can potentially be an important tool for BVR air combat pilots, improving operational decision-making within this specialized combat domain.
#03Oct 23, 2026
cs.CL
Yalda-Embedding: Open Development of a Competitive Persian Retrieval Model
Yalda Taheri, Mohammad Hassan Heydari, Armon Rasooli
Despite advances in multilingual text representations, effective dense retrieval for Persian remains constrained by the limited availability of language-specific training resources and compact embedding models. We present Yalda Embedding, a 595.8-million-parameter Persian retrieval model adapted from Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B using more than one million query-document pairs. On eight Persian retrieval tasks from FaMTEB, the model achieves the highest macro-average among the evaluated 0.6B models, scoring 0.5488 and outperforming Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B and F2LLM-v2-0.6B on every task. It also approaches Qwen3-Embedding-4B, winning on four tasks, tying on one, and trailing by 0.0075 in macro-average. An incremental ablation study examines contrastive batch size, optimization stabilization, and relational knowledge distillation from F2LLM-v2-8B. Under the one-epoch training setup, contrastive fine-tuning alone yields a modest mean improvement over initialization and regressions on two tasks. The final distilled configuration improves all eight tasks over the non-distilled model, raising the mean from 0.4813 to 0.5488 without increasing inference-time model size. These gains include hard-negative evaluation tasks despite training without explicitly mined or supplied hard negatives. We release model weights, training and evaluation code, the pairwise dataset, and its teacher-embedded counterpart, enabling inspection of data composition and training procedures, independent evaluation, and reuse without repeating expensive teacher inference.
#04Oct 23, 2026
cs.RO
DexPort: A Hand-Held Skill Interface for Dexterous Hand Data Collection
Amber Xie, Jiawei Fu, Xiaofeng Guo and 3 more
Collecting high-quality demonstrations remains a central bottleneck for learning dexterous manipulation. Teleoperation records executable robot actions, but it requires a complete robot setup and places the burden of coordinating many finger joints on the operator. Human demonstrations are easier to collect, but their motions must be estimated and retargeted to the robot, and they do not directly provide robot actions. In this paper, we introduce DexPort, a portable data-collection interface for high-DoF robot hands. It uses the same hand hardware for collection and deployment, avoiding a hand embodiment gap, and records both commanded joint targets and measured joint states. Our key observation is that a small set of skills can support a wide range of dexterous tasks. During collection, the operator moves the hand-held interface to specify the robot wrist motion and selects or adjusts skills that coordinate the finger motion. This removes the need to control each joint independently while retaining behaviors such as precise grasping and in-hand manipulation. We collect demonstrations across several real-world tasks and in unstructured environments without a robot arm. We then use behavior cloning to train visuomotor policies directly on the recorded wrist motions and hand commands, without skill labels. We evaluate across 4 tasks: pick-and-place with diverse objects, screwing with in-hand tool use, drawer stowage which requires simultaneous grasp and pulling, and a bimanual scanning task. We collect over 2,500 demonstrations with our portable device, in both laboratory and in-the-wild settings. Across our tasks, we see an improvement from 11% to 64% when using recorded robot commands instead of states, and an improvement from 36% to 78% for task success when using in-the-wild data.
#05Oct 23, 2026
cs.CY
AI Alignment for Digital Democracy: Fairer Voters Representation against LLM Biases
Yi Qi, Srijoni Majumdar, Evangelos Pournaras
AI representation is emerging in digital democracy, assisting in voter emulation and decision-making. Large language models (LLMs) behave differently depending on the model, the prompt context, and the voter information they receive, representing some groups more accurately than others and potentially making the emulation unfair to certain groups. We investigate demographic biases in LLM-emulated electorates: how accurately LLMs represent individual votes, whether some voter groups are represented more accurately than others, and whether AI alignment can reduce these disparities without sacrificing overall accuracy. Using three U.S. presidential elections, we compare a closed-source and an open-source LLM across voters' demographic features and test AI alignment strategies toward fairer voter representation. Removing gender from the voter profile reduces the largest group error of the models by 22-42%, and removing education reduces it by 64%, whereas removing self-reported race increases the mean group error by over 40%, all without lowering accuracy. Common alignment strategies, such as repeated queries or fairness instructions, do not reduce these errors and can double them.