#01Oct 26, 2026
cs.CR
I-HITL: Inalienable Human-in-the-Loop
Samuel Breckenridge, Dani Vilardell, Wenhao Wang and 2 more
Human oversight is a pillar of AI safety. It is often exercised by a human in the loop (HITL) who approves critical actions taken by an AI agent. AI agents' increasing ability to bypass guardrails, though, raises the question of how to enforce HITL robustly. We introduce the concept of inalienable human-in-the-loop (I-HITL). An I-HITL protocol ensures that an agent can initiate an action only with explicit human approval, even when the human interacts with a system (e.g., a local agentic harness) compromised by the agent. A strong I-HITL protocol additionally ensures such approval even when an adversarial human attempts to delegate approvals to an agent. To motivate I-HITL, we report on experiments with a popular agentic wallet platform in which raising an agent's spending cap requires HITL approval via emailed one-time passcodes (OTPs). Given access to the user's email and a task blocked by the cap, we find that ten different frontier models will often autonomously raise the cap, harvesting OTPs to bypass a HITL guardrail and surfacing other vulnerabilities. We formally define I-HITL using the concept of communication topologies and prove necessary and sufficient conditions for its realization. We show that an I-HITL protocol requires a trusted entity - a trusted computing device (or equivalent) - and characterize which such devices can and cannot realize an I-HITL protocol. We present a prototype I-HITL system called Countersign that can plug into and strengthen existing HITL systems using off-the-shelf consumer mobile devices.
#02Oct 26, 2026
cs.RO
Learning Force-Reactive Humanoid Loco-Manipulation
Sihang Li, Xiaofeng Guo, Jinkun Cao and 5 more
Many everyday tasks require controlling contact force as well as motion. On a humanoid, this force must often be coordinated across both hands and the whole body, and cannot be specified by kinematic trajectories alone. Therefore, we present FLORE, a framework for learning force-reactive humanoid loco-manipulation. We collect robot-free demonstrations using two force-sensing UMI-style handheld grippers for hand motion and contact wrenches, and wearable trackers for body motion. A force-reactive diffusion policy takes vision, proprioception, and measured wrenches as input, then predicts actions and per-hand force commands. A hybrid compliance whole-body controller with force tracking executes these commands while maintaining balance: an integral of the force error measured by real force/torque (F/T) sensors lets each hand track force accurately along the commanded direction and remain compliant along the others. In simulation, the controller tracks per-hand force commands of varied magnitude and direction, with little loss in whole-body motion accuracy. Across three contact-rich tasks on the robot, the force-reactive policy succeeds in 80% of rollouts, compared with 26.7% for a position-only policy trained on the same demonstrations and executed by the same controller. For more details, please visit our website: https://louis-leee.github.io/FLoRe/.
#03Oct 26, 2026
cs.AI
CLOSURE: Cross-Channel Closure for Multivariate Time Series Anomaly Detection
Fan Xu, Hao Wu, Zhi Song and 5 more
Multivariate time series produced by industrial installations and server clusters are under continuous monitoring, and anomaly detection is the first line of defense before a local fault escalates into a system-wide failure. In the absence of labels, the dominant paradigm trains a reconstruction model on normal data and scores the residual to reach a verdict. Recent work has steadily enriched the expressiveness of the recovery map through Transformers, diffusion models, and cross-scale associations. A residual, however, only certifies that an observation can be recovered; it does not certify that the variables still explain one another as they do under normal operation. A coordinated yet unfamiliar operating transition inflates the residual without breaking any relationship, whereas a sensor drifting away from its peers may leave the residual silent. Methods that fold inter-variable dependencies into the reconstruction objective inherit this ambiguity, because their relational evidence is ultimately supervised by the same recovery loss. We therefore propose CLOSURE, which evaluates recoverability and cross-channel consistency as two normal-data prediction tasks learned in separation. The recoverability task is solved by a diffusion reconstructor conditioned on a discrete memory of normal temporal bases. The consistency task is solved by a relation-closure operator that predicts every channel exclusively from the others, where the target's own trajectory is withheld and sparse signed gates decide which peers are actually used. The two scores are reconciled only through calibration on normal data. Extensive experiments show that CLOSURE consistently outperforms recent reconstruction-, frequency-, and topology-based detectors on public benchmark streams, confirming the value of examining consistency alongside recoverability.
#04Oct 26, 2026
cs.CL
Quantifying Claim Smoothing by LLM Research Agents
Tiasa Singha Roy, Manya Wadhwa, Greg Durrett
Deep research, or any use of large language models (LLMs) to read a large document collection and produce insights, requires synthesizing information from different sources. In this work, we find that LLMs produce long-form research reports that read as confident syntheses but which fail to accurately reflect the underlying documents. We call this failure smoothing. In collapsing diverse and potentially conflicting sources into a single narrative, the model discards the evidential "jaggedness" of its corpus and asserts conclusions more decisive than the citations can support. We introduce a claim level scoring pipeline, SmoothScore, to quantify this effect. Our pipeline extracts key conclusive claims from model generated reports, then finds evidence relevant to each claim and clusters that evidence along high level aspects. Finally, each claim is scored with respect to the evidence to quantify the degree of smoothing done by the agent. Across 7 systems and 4 datasets, we find that agents consistently produce stronger claims than warranted.
#05Oct 26, 2026
cs.AI
Patient-specific rubric-based evaluation of large language models across longitudinal cancer care
Wei-Wei Zhang, Pengkai Wang, Yan Li and 13 more
Large language models (LLMs) show promise in specialty medicine, yet existing evaluations largely focus on isolated clinical encounters rather than tracking how clinical responsibilities evolve across a longitudinal care pathway. Here we introduce NPC-RubricBench, a phase-aware benchmark for evaluating multistage clinical reasoning across the cancer care continuum, using nasopharyngeal carcinoma as a defined disease context. Curated from longitudinal records of 405 patients across two cancer centers, the benchmark comprises 941 patient-phase units across six sequential care phases and 17,688 patient-specific atomic criteria spanning five evaluation dimensions, with each assessment strictly restricted to decision-time clinical evidence. Evaluating 30 general-purpose and medical LLMs revealed that strong diagnostic performance does not carry over to downstream care. We evaluated 30 general-purpose and medical LLMs, showing that high diagnostic performance did not translate into improved downstream care. Instead, the dominant failure modes reversed across phases. Explicit decision errors dominated anatomical staging at 48.2%, whereas decision omissions dominated initial work-up and post-treatment follow-up at 33.4% and 30.4%, respectively. In the evaluated model set, medically adapted models showed higher omission rates than general-purpose models. Moreover, varying query granularity exposes a critical specification trade-off: broad open-ended requests degrade Decision Quality across all 30 models, while more detailed, checklist-like prompts raise Decision Quality but reduce Evidence Faithfulness and Safety Adherence. Furthermore, NPC-RubricBench demonstrates that static diagnostic benchmarks are insufficient to ensure consistent clinical reliability over time, highlighting the importance of phase-adaptive safeguards in multistage medical AI.