#01Nov 5, 2026
cs.AI
A Behavioural Framework for Predicting and Understanding Loss of Control in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Systems
Yao Huang, Yichi Zhang, Yifan Wang and 8 more
Frontier artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly operating over longer horizons with diminishing human oversight, raising the risk of loss of control: systems acting beyond effective human control with potentially irreversible consequences. Because such failures may become observable only after containment is difficult, they must be assessed prospectively. We introduce a behavioural framework that decomposes loss-of-control risk into three factors: misaligned motive, harm-enabling capability, and monitoring evasion. We operationalise these factors through 13 measurable aspects and 29 evaluation tasks, whose scores are combined into a single loss-of-control (LoC) score. Across 13 frontier models, the LoC score shows strong prospective validity, correlating with failure rates in contained long-horizon risk scenarios (Pearson r = 0.84). Risk varies systematically across models and cannot be explained by capability alone. We further show that the framework can guide targeted mitigations: fine-tuning and monitoring directed at diagnosed vulnerabilities reduce failure rates while largely preserving general performance. These results provide a practical basis for predicting, understanding, and mitigating loss-of-control risk before it materialises.
#02Nov 5, 2026
cs.AI
Persistent Retrieval for Conversational Agents: A Study of Retrieval Efficiency
Karthik Ravula, Sathwik Kowtha, Rishabh Verma and 2 more
Conversational agents can retrieve information directly or delegate retrieval to a subagent. This design choice affects how retrieval history is maintained, what context each model call receives, and what information must be re-retrieved in follow-up questions. We compare three designs: skill-based retrieval in the main agent, a non-persistent retrieval subagent that generates a findings response, and our persistent retrieval subagent, which maintains retrieval history across turns and returns retrieved evidence directly to the main agent. Our approach also allows the main agent to request corrections from the same subagent. We evaluate the three designs on enterprise questions posed independently, within shared conversations, and as dependent follow-ups. Across five multi-turn settings, our approach uses 43.3% fewer recorded agent-model tokens and incurs 45.0% lower estimated API cost than skill-based retrieval, while reducing average response time by 9.1%. Compared with non-persistent retrieval, it reduces response time by 15.6 seconds per question, while using 65.1% more tokens and incurring 29.1% higher estimated API cost. Our approach shifts the retrieval subagent from producing synthesized responses to maintaining retrieval state and supplying evidence that the main agent can directly evaluate and use for answer generation.
#03Nov 5, 2026
cs.AI
When Bigger Becomes Brittle: Why Compression Hurts More as Language Models Scale
Gautam Gupta, Dikshant Kukreja, Unique Kumar and 7 more
Quantization and pruning reduce the cost of deploying language models, but their effects are usually reported as benchmark scores. Such scores record only the loss that remains at the output. Inside the model, compression damages some components more than others, and the rest of the network can partly compensate. The observed loss therefore reflects both the damage and this compensation, which benchmark scores cannot separate. How the two combine, and whether their balance changes with model size, remains unclear. We study this compensation for in-context retrieval, a capability carried by a small, identifiable set of attention heads. To separate the two, the expected loss from ablating these heads is decomposed exactly into the part restored by the rest of the network, attributed to the components responsible, and the part that reaches the output. This decomposition is then compared across model sizes. For damage of comparable size, smaller models restore most of the loss, whereas larger models retain most of it, because the compensating responses offset less of it as models grow. Compressing the heads produces the same pattern. Compression that is nearly harmless in small models can therefore be costly in large ones.
#04Nov 5, 2026
cs.CY
Technohybridism: Recursive Semantic Normalization in AI-Mediated Societies
Charalampos M. Liapis, Epameinondas Panagopoulos
Language-generating AI systems are no longer only objects of linguistic interaction: their outputs increasingly re-enter the communicative and institutional practices from which their training material was drawn. Drawing on social theory, social epistemology, and the philosophy of language, this article develops a sociotechnical account of that re-entry. We introduce recursive semantic normalization: the process through which machine-generated formulations, once recurrently taken up, evaluated, reused, and institutionally retained, participate in the reproduction and transformation of semantic regularities. Under the heading of technohybridism, we argue that the relevant unit of analysis is the hybrid semantic system, a recursively coupled configuration of human practices, computational generation, and institutional uptake. First, we distinguish the concept from neighbouring accounts, including model collapse, looping effects, machine habitus, machine culture, and the epistemology of AI testimony. Second, we develop an analytical model that separates generation, selection, uptake, and persistence and distinguishes machine-attributable change from change that would have occurred anyway. Third, we analyse uptake as routinized, institutionally diffused, and socially stratified practice and state conditions under which machine-derived regularities become norms. Fourth, we identify social-epistemic consequences: the laundering of provenance that weakens epistemic vigilance, the erosion of the cognitive diversity on which collective inquiry depends, and the narrowing of shared hermeneutical resources. An evidential ladder for empirical research follows. The account attributes no normative authority to machine outputs; what changes is the field within which human and institutional uptake operates.
#05Nov 5, 2026
cs.CV
Towards Scalable Diagnostic-Driven Whole-Slide Image Retrieval for Pathology Archives
Jingsong Liu, Youssef Wally Han Li, Weiwei Zhou and 3 more
The growing adoption of digital pathology has rapidly expanded collections of hematoxylin-and-eosin whole-slide images, yet efficient navigation through these archives remains challenging, as metadata is often inconsistent or unavailable. Content-based image retrieval addresses this challenge by identifying similar cases directly from visual representations instead of manual annotations or metadata. Existing retrieval systems have demonstrated promising performance but largely rely on handcrafted indexing pipelines and predefined sampling strategies, constraining scalability and generalization. Here, we present CLEAR-WSI (Constant-Length Embedding for Automatic Retrieval of Whole-Slide Images) as a scalable, diagnostic-driven slide-retrieval framework, validated on both public and clinical data. Using a fixed-length slide embedding, CLEAR-WSI refines retrieved candidates with either a predicted diagnostic label or the ground-truth label, depending on the retrieval setting. Newly processed cases are subsequently added to the expanding memory bank, allowing the retrieval archive to grow over time. On a comprehensive benchmark consisting of two public and one private clinical datasets representing four retrieval tasks, CLEAR-WSI improves Precision@5 over the strongest evaluated baseline, with gains on CAMELYON16 (3.10), BRACS-1 (2.75), BRACS-2 (1.95), and X-HER2 (3.75). Additional ablation and latency studies further examine the contribution of each component and highlight its potential for scalable deployment.