#01Nov 9, 2026
cs.CL
HiVe-Mem: Interleaving Horizontal Memory Expansion and Vertical Evidence Composition for Multimodal Agents
Haozhen Zhang, Bohan Liu, Jianzhu Bao and 5 more
As multimodal agents accumulate increasingly long interaction histories, effectively retrieving and utilizing past information becomes critical for long-term interaction. Existing memory systems typically rely on semantic retrieval over compressed memories and expose predefined representations, which may miss relevant memories and overlook heterogeneous evidence needs across queries. We introduce \textbf{\hivemem}, a multimodal memory framework that interleaves \textbf{\textsc{H}}or\textbf{\textsc{i}}zontal Memory Expansion with \textbf{\textsc{Ve}}rtical Evidence Composition. For horizontal memory expansion, \hivemem organizes memory episodes into a relational graph using textual and visual anchors, expanding semantically retrieved seeds with related neighbors to recover complementary information. For vertical evidence composition, each retrieved memory retains multiple evidence forms, including compact summaries, captions, grounded visual views, raw images, and interaction history. A lightweight trainable selector independently composes an evidence subset for each retrieved memory, enabling query-adaptive utilization of heterogeneous multimodal information. This two-dimensional design jointly broadens memory coverage and adapts the evidence contributed by individual memories. Experiments across three multimodal memory benchmarks show that \hivemem consistently improves task performance across base models while reducing token consumption by about 90\% compared with the most efficient competing multimodal baselines.
#02Nov 9, 2026
cs.AI
Shortcuts and Boundaries: Verifiable RL Misalignment and Contextual Safety Learning
Xinjie Shen
Reinforcement learning (RL) can improve an agent's task capability while reinforcing behavior that violates contextual execution requirements. We study this reward-driven misalignment, including reward hacking, through verifiable reward--context conflicts, where compliant task completion remains feasible while some executable shortcuts earn more reward than every compliant strategy. Encoding these conflicts in task dynamics lets us generate diverse interactive environments at scale and derive compliance feedback from execution histories. In resource and reporting workflows, task optimization increases real productivity through unauthorized resource use or raises reported scores while actual work declines. Controlled changes in the training distribution show that minority conflict exposure can still lead to widespread shortcut acquisition, reaching 97.9\% certified profitable violations on an API task under a 25\% conflict mixture after 128 updates. The same contextual checks supply a simple binary penalty that supports joint capability and compliance gains and partially mitigates acquired violations. Learned safety adapts to expanded authorization and transfers across mechanisms into workflows with evolving evidence and approval requirements. On 32 unseen changing-evidence tasks, resource-trained safety increases safe completion from 53.1\% to 89.1\% relative to task-only training, while both policies achieve full real work. These results connect a verifiable account of reward-driven misalignment with scalable task construction and safety learning that remains useful under changing execution requirements.
#03Nov 9, 2026
cs.HC
Programming Prescience: Issues in Human Construction of Forecasting Bots
Priya Dhawka, Benjamin Wilson, Andrew Head
AI models' growing capacity for complex reasoning has made them attractive tools for forecasting, or the systematic prediction of the future based on past and present data. However, should AI forecasting systems be adopted, human builders will shoulder the work of building and evaluating them. In this paper, we explore what this work looks like with a qualitative interview study with 15 builders of forecasting bots, sampled from among successful participants in a recent AI forecasting competition. Our analysis surfaces the challenges around (1) tuning a bot to acquire factual research, (2) implementing coherent reasoning, and (3) understanding how well one's bot actually does. During their work, builders frequently introduced complexity that did not pay off, and tested in ways that were opportunistic and piecemeal. Our detailed account of their challenges helps clarify what problems should be targeted in upcoming innovations in process, tools, and human-AI teaming for forecasting.
#04Nov 9, 2026
cs.AI
LogCDM: Interpretable Log Anomaly Detection via Behavioral Graph Drift and Adaptive Signal Fusion
Suryansh Talukdar, Taha Sarwat, Jin Soung Yoo
Log-based anomaly detection is increasingly dominated by large pretrained models, from BERT-scale encoders to 8B-parameter language models, which require GPUs at inference time and are difficult to deploy on the monitoring nodes where logs are produced. We present LogCDM, a compact detector that scores each log session using three complementary signals: the next-event surprise of a small causal Transformer, the distance between a graph-attention embedding of the session's own transition graph and that of a normal reference graph, and a transition-drift statistic that we show is exactly a frequency-weighted chi-squared divergence between transition kernels. The divergence view yields an asymptotic null distribution, a length-standardized score, and a per-edge decomposition that explains each alarm. A sigmoid gate fuses the three signals; under a shared-covariance Gaussian model, this gate is the Bayes posterior, and its learned weights indicate which signal each dataset relies on. With 8.1-8.8M parameters and no GPU required at inference, LogCDM reaches F1 scores of 0.984 on HDFS, 0.870 on chronologically split BGL, and 0.850 on Thunderbird, within 0.013-0.12 of an 8.1B-parameter LLM detector evaluated under the same protocol and above all compact baselines on BGL. It scores a session in 5.5-10.5 ms on a CPU. Ablations show that the structural signals add 0.025-0.030 F1 on BGL and Thunderbird but almost nothing on HDFS, consistent with the learned fusion weights.
#05Nov 9, 2026
cs.LG
Where Does Alignment Emerge and What Does It Mean? A Closer Look at the Platonic Representation Hypothesis
Julia Herbst, Simon Roschmann, Quentin Bouniot and 1 more
The Platonic Representation Hypothesis (PRH) suggests that neural networks are converging toward similar representation spaces. As language models become more capable, their representations are aligning with those of vision models. However, recent work has questioned whether this trend continues to hold for newer language models. Moreover, it has been shown that representation similarity metrics can be confounded by model depth and width, requiring appropriate baselines for interpretation. In this work, we first investigate where alignment emerges between unimodal models across model layers and representation dimensions. Next, we find that the PRH capability-alignment trend persists for newer models as long as the captions are sufficiently clean and informative. Finally, we contextualize cross-modal alignment, introducing unimodal and multimodal baselines on various datasets. Our results show that the cross-modal representational alignment of unimodal models can surpass that of explicitly aligned vision-language models, but remains substantially behind the alignment observed for models of the same modality. Code is available at https://github.com/ExplainableML/prh-closer-look.