#01Aug 25, 2026
cs.AI
Meta$^n$: Recursive Self-Improvement through Emergent Depth
Zae Myung Kim, Young-Jun Lee, Seungyeon Jwa and 1 more
Self-improving LLM agents refine answers, not the process that produces those answers. Systems that add a meta-level hold that level fixed, and those that edit themselves must leave part of their own editing machinery untouched to stay stable, capping the meta-depth they realize at roughly two. We present Meta$^n$, which keeps the meta-operation fixed and recurses on its input instead. That operation, $Ω$, is applied repeatedly to its own products, reading the traces of the solver stack below together with the code that produced them, then writing the next layer as a strategic pre-process and a library of callable helpers. Because $Ω$ never changes, it cannot destabilize the system, and because its input strictly grows, each layer reasons from a higher vantage than the last. Depth is set by convergence rather than fixed in advance, and an evolutionary archive searches over layer chains. Across two backbones, Meta$^n$ outperforms prior self-improving agents on all eight benchmark families. The sharpest case is ARC-AGI-2, built to resist skill memorization, where it alone scores above zero. Ablations indicate that most of the gain from recursion comes from the conditioning each layer passes to the next, and distinct layer roles emerge with depth although no prompt prescribes them. Code available at https://github.com/minnesotanlp/meta-n
#02Aug 25, 2026
cs.AI
RACE: Scalable Statistical Estimation of Functional Consistency in LLM Neurons
Runyu Wang, Bo Liu, Xiaxin Zhang and 6 more
Discovering stable neuron behavior across entire domains remains a challenge in mechanistic interpretability. Existing methods often rely on instance-level point estimates or computationally expensive procedures, which either obscure population-level variability or limit scalable domain-wide analysis. We present RACE (Residual Alignment for Consistency Estimation), a forward-pass statistical framework that evaluates the domain-wide functional consistency of Transformer neurons. Perturbation experiments demonstrate that RACE achieves superior domain specificity compared to gradient-based point estimates. Meanwhile, token-distribution-level results verify the association between the selected neurons and the target domain. Furthermore, its computational overhead is two orders of magnitude lower than that of gradient-based methods.
#03Aug 25, 2026
cs.SE
Automatic Model Card Generation Using an LLM
Tajkia Rahman Toma, Balreet Grewal, Cor-Paul Bezemer
Model cards are structured documents that summarize key information about machine learning models to improve transparency, usability, and accountability. However, they often lack a consistent structure, and many models provide no model cards, making comparison and interpretation difficult. This paper presents two contributions. First, we propose MCTidy, an LLM-based approach that reorganizes existing model cards into a standardized template to improve clarity and comparability. Second, we introduce MCGenie, an LLM-based system that generates model cards directly from model repository data. We apply MCTidy to 48 Hugging Face model cards and evaluate information retention, section alignment, hallucination, and stability. Our findings show high information retention with minimal textual loss, accurate section assignment, rare hallucinations primarily in descriptive sections, and strong stability across runs. We assess MCGenie by generating model cards for the same 48 models and assessing semantic similarity, factual correctness, and sensitivity to input resources. The generated model cards achieved high semantic similarity (mean around 0.9); over half were fully correct, and most remaining errors were minor. Generation quality depended strongly on the availability of supporting resources, particularly associated papers. Overall, our findings demonstrate the potential of LLM-based methods to enable scalable, standardized model card documentation.
#04Aug 25, 2026
cs.LG
Parameter-Efficient Self-Supervised Adaptation for EEG-FM under Fixed Computational Budgets
Meghal Dani, Stefanie Liebe
EEG foundation models pretrained via self-supervised learning promise transferable representations, but their generalization remains limited, especially across diverse clinical datasets. Full fine-tuning is impractical for resource-constrained clinical settings due to high computational requirements. In this work, we investigate whether parameter-efficient self-supervised adaptation, updating only 9% of parameters suffices to align representations to target tasks. We evaluate our method on two state-of-the-art models with different pretraining objectives: BIOT (contrastive) and CBraMod (masked reconstruction), and evaluate on three clinical EEG datasets for abnormality detection (TUAB), event classification (TUEV), and seizure detection (CHB-MIT) under both in-distribution and out-of-distribution conditions. SSL adaptation yields consistent gains over linear probing, up to 20x AUCPR. Under a fixed compute budget, peak performance requires only 20--50% of available unlabeled data. Critically, when total window count is fixed, performance remains invariant to patient count, suggesting that performance is dependent on overall temporal window diversity only. Our findings demonstrate that parameter-efficient adaptation enables effective deployment of EEG Foundation models (EEG-FM) with minimal computational overhead and data collection burden. Code available at: https://github.com/c3n-group/efficient-eeg-adapt
#05Aug 25, 2026
cs.AI
Evidence Blindness in Direct Corpus Interaction: Persistent Navigation with AtlasNav
Hongyu Guo, Zhiyu Zheng, Zhao Cao
Large language model agents are moving beyond conventional retrieval-augmented generation toward direct interaction with external corpora. Direct Corpus Interaction (DCI) keeps the full corpus accessible, yet reachable evidence can remain unusable under finite interaction budgets. Required evidence may fail to surface, a surfaced supporting document may remain unopened, or an opened document may fail to expose its decisive fragment. We call this progressive silent loss Evidence Blindness and quantify it through stage-wise evidence realization. Within the DCI paradigm, raw interaction adds little reusable corpus organization, while dynamic-workspace methods reconstruct a query-conditioned interaction space from each query and trajectory. In both cases, useful structure is recovered largely online. We instead formulate large-scale agentic search as finite-budget navigation over reusable corpus structure. We introduce AtlasNav, a persistent multi-view corpus-navigation framework that retains direct corpus interaction but organizes the corpus once into a Corpus Atlas, allowing each query to navigate adaptively rather than reconstruct shared structure. On BrowseComp-Plus, AtlasNav achieves 92.05% strict accuracy while reducing recorded online inference cost by 30.21% relative to the prior dynamic-workspace state of the art. Under matched budgets, it realizes the complete required evidence earlier and approaches the same model's evidence-supplied empirical reference more rapidly. The same representation principle remains effective under PhantomWiki's distinct corpus organization and controlled 10K-1M scaling, and transfers competitively to heterogeneous enterprise knowledge. These results show that agentic search depends not only on accessible evidence, but also on how the corpus is represented so that limited interaction becomes effective navigation.