#01Aug 17, 2026
cs.AI
What Do Compliance Detectors Read? An Audit of Activation Probes and Guard Models
Saisab Sadhu, Aadit Sengupta, Vinay Kumar Sankarapu and 1 more
Regulatory compliance monitoring in deployed language models is increasingly implemented as a legal and audit control, checking model outputs against written rules spanning data protection, healthcare, financial regulation, and platform policy. Such monitoring is meaningful only if a detector's verdict depends on the stated rule rather than on surface features of the scenario. We show this condition fails across the current class of compliance detectors, a failure we call rule blindness. Deleting, permuting, or substituting the governing rule leaves detection accuracy unchanged for every guard and activation probe we test, including a policy-conditioned guard that correctly cites the governing clause yet barely changes its verdict when that clause is swapped for its permissive counterpart. A purpose-built benchmark crossing two rules with two scenarios, so that neither alone predicts the label, confirms the failure under a design no prior benchmark rules out, and shows that step by step reasoning, not any fast detector we test, is what escapes it. Auditing at scale requires a retraining-free detector, so we introduce the Internal Compliance Score (ICS): a training-free activation readout calibrated from ten labelled pairs and scored by a single projection. We hold ICS to the same scrutiny as the guards it audits: a pre-registered criterion for beating trivial baselines is not met, and a bag-of-words model matches its pooled generalisation exactly. It remains useful because it is inexpensive, letting us audit four deployed guard models, an 8B zero-shot judge, and thirteen benchmarks, and it raises the mechanically verified pass rate when used to rank candidate responses, though an adaptive white-box attack removes this gain. We release the counterfactual protocol and crossed-rule benchmark so rule blindness can be tested in future probe and guard claims.
#02Aug 17, 2026
cs.DM
The canonical facets of multi-separator polytopes
Bjoern Andres, Silvia Di Gregorio, Jannik Irmai and 2 more
We initiate a polyhedral study of the graph multi-separator problem proposed by Irmai et al. (2024) as an alternative to the lifted multicut problem for application to the task of image segmentation. Starting with an integer linear program (ILP) formulation and the multi-separator polytope spanned by its feasible solutions, we characterize in terms of efficiently-decidable, graph-theoretic conditions all facets induced by inequalities of the ILP. We proceed by strengthening these inequalities and describing additional facets of some multi-separator polytopes induced by the stronger inequalities. Specifically, we obtain a totally dual integral description of the multi-separator polytope for paths in the case where separation is considered for all vertex pairs. Finally, we relate the multi-separator polytope to the boolean quadric polytope, showing that facets induced by odd-cycle inequalities do not transfer generally, and to the lifted multicut polytope, showing that either polytope is a projection of a face of the other.
#03Aug 17, 2026
cs.SC
AutoSR: Automatic Symbolic Regression by Searching Research States
Kejia Zhang, Youran Sun, Xinyu Ren and 2 more
We introduce Automatic Symbolic Regression (AutoSR), a fully automated system that instantiates Research-Space Symbolic Regression by searching persistent scientific investigations rather than isolated equations. Finite, noisy data often yield numerically competitive expressions that imply very different behavior outside the observed regime, making numerical fit and syntactic complexity insufficient measures of scientific credibility. Existing approaches largely focus on improving expressions, yet the search typically retains little beyond the resulting formula and score, losing the scientific record, such as motivations and probes, that inform what to try next. AutoSR preserves this record in a \textbf{Research State}, coupling each candidate equation with the reasoning, computational evidence, and independent review developed along its branch. Proposer--reviewer agents develop these states under progressive-widening Monte Carlo tree search (PW-MCTS), which allocates computation across competing investigations, while the accumulated research record is ultimately synthesized into a final report that explains the leading relation and the basis for its selection. Across nine selected challenges from two benchmark suites, AutoSR recovers algebraically equivalent relations in every case, including three cp3-bench problems that no published system recovers and six structurally diverse LSR-Transform problems. Overall, AutoSR extends symbolic regression from equation-level search toward automated scientific investigation, allowing scientific knowledge and accumulated evidence to shape both what is explored and how the resulting equation is justified.
#04Aug 17, 2026
cs.RO
When State Becomes an Attack Surface: State-Semantic Injection in LLM-Driven Embodied Agents
Jiawei Liu, Jiacheng Guo, Tian Zhang and 7 more
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated capabilities in in-context learning, task decomposition, step-by-step reasoning, and code generation, driving their gradual evolution from text generation models into the core of agents capable of perceiving environments, invoking tools, and executing tasks. Traditional LLM Agents typically obtain information through webpages, documents, databases, or external tools and generate corresponding invocation sequences according to user goals; when this technology is further integrated with robotic systems, large language models begin to undertake functions such as task understanding, high-level planning, and behavioral decision-making. SayCan combines the task reasoning capability of language models with the affordances of robotic skills, while Code as Policies and ProgPrompt generate robot task plans through policy code and programmatic prompting, respectively, and VoxPoser uses language models and vision-language models to construct three-dimensional value maps to guide robotic manipulation \cite{6,7,8,9}. Vision-language-action models such as PaLM-E, RT-2, and GR00T N1 further strengthen the connection among language, visual perception, and robotic actions \cite{10,11,12}. In such LLM-driven embodied agents, the model not only needs to understand user instructions, but also needs to combine scene states, object attributes, spatial relations, and execution feedback to complete task grounding, and then hand the generated action plan to skill libraries, motion planners, or controllers for execution.
#05Aug 17, 2026
cs.AI
Policy Iteration with Human Feedback: Bringing Post-Training RL to In-context Learning
Minh-Ha Nguyen, Cathy Shyr
Generative pretraining established reusable task representations; later work on language-based task conditioning and in-context learning showed that a fixed model could adapt its behavior from instructions and demonstrations. Policy Iteration with Human Feedback (PIHF) builds on this development and the recurrent evaluate-and-improve structure of generalized policy iteration. PIHF uses a pretrained language model as its execution substrate and moves persistent revision to a versioned natural-language policy and tool set. A language-model critic and clinical expert review complete-panel reasoning and tool-use trajectories to localize recurrent failures and form candidate revisions; the expert may reinterpret the evidence and retains authority over admission and rollback, while Recall@1 and Recall@5 validate outcomes after candidate execution. Across cumulative ablations and ultra-rare-disease benchmarks, a PIHF-derived policy improved Recall@1 in one proprietary executor and three open-weight executors spanning 3 to 49 billion active parameters. Gains were 32.7 percentage points for GPT-5.4 and 31.1 points for Qwen3.6-35B, a difference of 1.7 points. These results support the feasibility of using pretrained language models as fixed-weight execution substrates for expert-guided policy development in rare-disease diagnosis.