#01Nov 5, 2026
cs.AI
SwarmEvolve: Latent Agent Swarms for Evolutionary Discovery and Optimization
Qile Jiang, George Em Karniadakis
LLM-guided evolutionary search uses AI agents to improve programs for mathematical and computational problems by iteratively refining solutions and combining high-scoring methods. However, the process is often slow because the LLM generates a long textual chain of thought for each round and must repeat this generation many times to maintain population diversity. We present SwarmEvolve, a framework in which hundreds of low-cost agents per round work in swarms, reason in latent space without decoding to text, and share information by passing KV caches. Each swarm studies the problem from a different angle. A novelty filter keeps the most distinct agent ideas by directly measuring the distances between the agents' hidden state vectors. Crossover of ideas happens naturally in latent space, as a summarizer agent receives the combined KV caches of all swarm members. On 21 problems in mathematical discovery and scientific computing, SwarmEvolve gets the highest average score and needs a median of only 3 to 8 minutes to reach the best scores that other state-of-the-art frameworks reach in 60 minutes. On several problems, SwarmEvolve with Qwen3 8B improves on the solutions that AlphaEvolve first found with frontier LLMs. Our work shows that agent swarms that communicate in latent space offer a fast, low-cost approach to program search for scientific problems.
#02Nov 5, 2026
cs.RO
Failure Prediction and Classification in Vision-Language-Action Models Via Calibrated Latent Probing
Michal P. Podolinsky, Yunhao Yang, Daniel Little and 6 more
Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) enable general-purpose embodied intelligence, but their performance is brittle under distribution shift, where unanticipated failures can damage equipment or endanger people. Deploying VLAs in real-world systems therefore requires a runtime monitor that is timely, calibrated, and informative while being efficient enough to run on the edge. Existing methods fail to fulfill these requirements. We present VLA-Tug, a lightweight probe over the latent layers of a VLA backbone that improves early failure detection and bounds the missed-detection and false-alarm rates, with minimal inference overhead. We show that supervising on the pre-failure segment of a trajectory increases early failure detection at matched false-positive rates by up to 30% over the strongest learned baseline. Under shift to unseen tasks, the bounds on missed-detection and false-alarm rates remain valid in up to 86% of runs, versus at most 21% for baselines. Unlike existing methods, VLA-Tug predicts the failure mode to enable corrective actions, raising top-3 accuracy on unseen tasks by up to 44% over a majority baseline. VLA-Tug enables real-time monitoring where the well-timed and informative probe supports lightweight steering that improves task success. We release a dataset of 3,180 annotated manipulation episodes to support future work on latent failure detection in VLAs at https://vla-tug.github.io.
#03Nov 5, 2026
cs.LG
Same Behavior, Different Mechanism: What Finite Experiments Can Certify About Integrated Information
Linqian Wu, Diaoxuan He
Interpretability, AI auditing and assessments of machine consciousness increasingly rest on mechanism-level quantities: functionals of a system's causal transition law that describe how it computes, not what it outputs. Experiments see that law only through finite, partial and noisy interventions. We ask when such a quantity is identifiable from an experiment's access, continuous in the mechanism and certifiable from finite data, and answer exactly for a deliberately demanding case - the integrated information $\varphi$ of integrated information theory - in stochastic networks of four and five units with known ground truth. Behavior can be silent: a recurrent and a feed-forward network with identical input-output laws at their response delay carry 0.28 and 0 bits, yet internal recordings separate them within 4-53 trials. Partial access can be just as blind: in our examples, units left out of a one-step recording impose precision floors of 0.30-1.02 bits that no sample size lowers, and in all-but-self parity networks, recordings of any length see several hidden units only through the product of their fidelities - a symmetry that one intervention broke in exact checks. The measure has sharp edges: because $\varphi$ selects a partition, and the cause and effect it specifies, by one criterion and reports another, infinitesimal changes of mechanism that cross an edge change it by 25-100% at 99% of the edges we found in random networks, and about 1% of surrogate models that fit interventional data almost perfectly misreport it by more than 20%. One-sided claims survive: the same data certify a lower bound on both sides of an edge, and we prove $\varphi>1.004$ bits throughout a 64-dimensional region of mechanisms and certify it from about $10^7$ controlled transitions with false-certificate probability at most $α$. Measurability is thus a design question with computable answers.
#04Nov 5, 2026
cs.LG
Spectral and Subspace Dynamics of LoRA in Supervised Fine-Tuning and Reinforcement Learning
Chenruo Liu, Zihan Wang, Yijun Dong and 1 more
Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) is commonly used in both supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL), often under similar optimizer settings. Yet, how the different dynamics of the two stages manifest in the low-rank increment that LoRA optimizes remains unclear. Tracking the singular spectrum and subspaces of LoRA updates on mathematical reasoning tasks, we find that RL concentrates the spectrum at every learning rate, while SFT expands it at moderate learning rates; moreover, RL rotates the singular subspaces much faster than SFT at small learning rates. Interpolating between SFT and RL one ingredient at a time, we pinpoint group-mean baseline subtraction as the source of both contrasts. A quadratic multi-index model updated via LoRA unveils the underlying mechanism: group-mean baseline subtraction tilts the balance between two competing forces, coherent fitting and gradient noise, toward spectral concentration and faster subspace rotation, while forcing the risk-favorable learning rate to be low. Guided by these dynamics, we tailor LoRA updates to each stage: in SFT, we flatten the spectrum of the full update to spread adaptation across singular directions, whereas in RL, we flatten the part of the update outside the current LoRA increment span to promote subspace rotation. Experiments on mathematical reasoning tasks across multiple models show that the respective configurations for SFT and RL yield the best performance among the compared methods in most evaluated settings.
#05Nov 5, 2026
cs.LG
Hybrid Machine Learning for Imbalanced Landing-Phase Safety Event Prediction from Flight Data
Taha Asghar, Bilal Mufti, Syed Qasim Zaheer and 1 more
Landing-phase safety-event prediction requires the detection of rare abnormal approaches within strongly imbalanced multivariate flight data. Capturing coupled temporal behavior while distinguishing event-specific signatures across airport operating contexts remains a central modeling challenge. This study proposes an interpretable hybrid feature-fusion framework for multiclass landing-phase safety-event prediction. A long short-term memory (LSTM) autoencoder trained on nominal flight windows characterizes deviations from routine approach behavior. Its continuous reconstruction-error descriptor is fused with parameter-specific statistical flight-history features and supplied to a class-weighted XGBoost classifier to distinguish Normal, Speed High, Path High, and Flaps Late windows. The framework is evaluated using 53,750 NASA DASHlink approach windows from three arrival airports. Pooled and airport-specific learning strategies are compared alongside component-level benchmarks, repeated pipeline retraining, and feature-attribution analysis. The results demonstrate strong class-balanced detection, with mean macro recall above 0.90 across all airports under repeated partitioning and retraining. Component comparisons establish the importance of class weighting and show that continuous feature fusion outperforms reconstruction-error-only and hard-gate alternatives. Airport-level comparisons reveal benefits from local specialization at the two airports with larger datasets and from pooled training at the airport with the smallest dataset. Feature attributions associate predictions with operationally relevant vertical-path, configuration, speed, and approach-context variables. The framework provides an interpretable approach to rare-event detection and practical guidance for adapting flight-data monitoring models to airport-level data availability.