#01Nov 6, 2026
cs.CL
Are These Programmers Ripe Enough to Eat? Evaluating How LLMs Handle Lexical Knowledge Conflicts in Translation
Dongxu Wu, Sara Court, Micha Elsner
External lexical resources can help large language models (LLMs) translate texts in low-resource languages and specialized domains, but these resources may conflict with models' prior lexical knowledge. To isolate this conflict, we construct a controlled Mandarin-to-English translation task in which familiar source words are assigned new meanings within and across semantic categories. We treat these prompt-supplied meanings as contextual knowledge (CK) and systematically evaluate the effects of word frequency, sentence context, and prompt framing on the translated outputs. Across nine models, CK reliance is greater for less frequent source words and in sentence contexts that support the supplied meanings. Prompt framing can reduce CK reliance, but seven of nine models favor CK even when explicitly instructed to ignore the supplied meanings. Within model families, larger models are more likely than smaller models to utilize CK in their outputs. Three follow-up experiments further show that modal weakening lowers CK reliance, the effect of repetition depends on prompt layout, and the effect of reasoning varies across models. Overall, our controlled study reveals how CK reliance varies across conditions and models, motivating new methods to detect and evaluate lexical conflicts and guide models' lexical choices in LLM-based translation.
#02Nov 6, 2026
cs.CV
FlowMoP: Stochastic Multi-Person Motion Prediction
Aadya Agrawal, Ho Kei Cheng, Alexander Schwing
Predicting the future motion of multiple people is inherently stochastic: the same observed history admits many plausible continuations depending on intent, coordination, and social context. Yet the dominant paradigm in multi-person 3D motion prediction remains deterministic, with existing methods producing a fixed number of outputs per agent. In contrast, we present a conditional flow matching framework that jointly generates diverse future motions for multiple agents, modeling both global trajectories and root-relative poses. A B-spline reparameterization compresses the generative state space while enforcing temporal smoothness, and a dual-stream transformer conditions each agent's predictions on observed neighbor motion for interaction-aware forecasting. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on CMU-Mocap (UMPM) and 3DPW, outperforming deterministic baselines on joint position error, pose error, and final displacement error despite producing a full predictive distribution. We additionally establish the first motion prediction baseline on WorldPose, a large-scale professional soccer dataset, where social conditioning demonstrably concentrates predictive uncertainty along interaction-constrained directions.
#03Nov 6, 2026
cs.LG
From PAC bounds on the generalization error to PAC bounds on the parameter estimation error
Mihaly Petreczky, John Leth, Emma Lukacs and 1 more
Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) bounds on the generalization error (the difference between the empirical prediction error computed on the training data and its expectation) are an established tool in statistical machine learning, and there have been several extensions of these bounds to dynamical systems. In parallel, in recent years, there has been growing interest in finite-sample bounds for parameter estimation error in system identification. The latter bounds tend to be algorithm-specific, relying on reformulating the identification algorithm as a least-squares regression problem. This is in contrast to classical PAC bounds, which are algorithm-agnostic and can be applied to any identification algorithm based on minimizing a cost function involving the empirical loss. In this paper, we show how oracle bounds derived from PAC bounds can be used to derive finite-sample bounds for dynamical systems. As an illustration of this approach, we present finite-sample parameter-estimation bounds for linear and bilinear systems with bounded inputs and noise. These bounds apply to identification algorithms based on minimizing a regularized empirical loss function. The key ingredient is to establish an oracle inequality, i.e., an inequality between the true prediction error of the learned model and the minimum achievable true prediction error, and then use either the convexity of the true loss or system-theoretic properties of the loss function to derive bounds on the parameter estimation error. We also analyze the rates of the obtained bounds and compare them with those of classical asymptotic results.
#04Nov 6, 2026
cs.AI
Test-Time Compute Scales Better with Parallel Agent Teams
Junlin Wang, Haozhe Chen, Ang Li and 2 more
Test-time scaling improves the performance of a fixed model by spending more computation at inference. There are two common ways to spend it on agents when a verifier can score every attempt. Best-of-N sampling runs many independent agents and keeps the best result but saturates quickly. One large team of collaborating agents can score higher but stops improving as it grows. Can we get the best of both? Our method, parallel agent teams, does so by sampling many small teams in parallel and keeping the best team's result. We test it on 12 long-horizon tasks from GPU kernels and formal proofs to exploit development. With a 27B model and a budget of 100 agents, parallel teams of ten beat parallel agents on 10 of 12 tasks and beat one team of 100 on all four tasks where we ran such large teams. At equal dollar cost the same parallel teams beat a frontier model on half the tasks. A simple statistical model shows that individual agents lose because their many samples have a low mean and that one large team loses because a single sample gets no gain from variance. Sampling many small teams in parallel balances a high mean with the gain from variance. Parallel agent teams thus offer a more effective way to scale test-time compute.
#05Nov 6, 2026
cs.AI
Ensemble Methodology for Reference-Free Confidence Estimation in LLM-based Code Summarization
Marco Colombo, Balaji A Jayaram, Sowmyakumari Selvaraj and 5 more
This paper describes an approach and use case to estimate the correctness of LLM-generated COBOL summaries without access to human-authored references. The core intuition is that inter-model agreement on semantics is informative about truth, and that an LLM-as-judge can provide higher-fidelity pairwise assessments than traditional string- or embedding-based metrics. We operationalise this intuition with (i) controlled summary generation from diverse models; (ii) a LLM evaluator that compares pairs of summaries and emits structured judgments; and (iii) a calibrated aggregation rule that combines supportive evidence while penalising only corroborated contradictions.