#01Nov 10, 2026
cs.LG
Continual-ARC: Measuring Skill Acquisition over a Working Lifetime
Daniel Lenton
Agent harnesses have emerged as a promising mechanism for continual learning, alongside test-time parametric learning. However, the current benchmarks have several limitations: they generally focus on a single applied domain, serve each instance only once, and assume a single family of learner, so memory-based and weight-based systems are rarely compared on the same scale. We propose Continual-ARC, a lifelong stream built from the three ARC-AGI editions, whose tasks need no domain knowledge. The same tasks return after dormant gaps with fresh instances, while new tasks keep arriving. On each instance, the learner may pay for demonstrations, submit answers, or act inside the harness, with retries permitted on incorrect submissions, which are paid for. Each instance is scored based on the share of this feedback budget consumed. Since a learner may keep anything between instances, memory-based and weight-based systems are scored on the same scale. After the stream, the learner is frozen and tested on fresh instances of the tasks it met, which measures memorization, and on unseen tasks, which measures generalization. We run an agent harness with frozen weights, with and without persistence, on Qwen3.5-9B and GLM-5.3 Flash, comparing them with two prompting floors, a program-induction method and Qwen3.5-9B's weights trained to imitate GLM-5.3 Flash. Persistence in the harness generally does not improve memorization unless provided with explicit expert guidance. Most harness-based methods still learn less than a floor that simply caches each task's demonstrations, across all models we tested. No harness-based method gains on unseen tasks, whereas weight-based learning shows substantial gains. This opens the door to future weight-based continual learning that could teach models to drive harnesses in new domains.
#02Nov 10, 2026
cs.AI
Comparative Analysis of Agent Evaluation Frameworks: Stability, Detection, and Discovery in Enterprise Analytics Agents
Howard Zhang, Chuck Arvin, Logan Brown and 3 more
Deploying LLM-based analytics agents in enterprise settings requires evaluation frameworks that can reliably detect failures across complex, multi-tool workflows. We present a three-phase comparative study of three evaluation frameworks, each representing a distinct evaluation paradigm (trace-based LLM judging, text-only LLM judging with red-teaming, and deterministic heuristics), applied to two analytics agents in a controlled research setting using frozen execution traces. Phase 1 quantifies evaluation harness stability through repeated measurements, finding that 97% of configurations meet the stability threshold and that stability patterns are agent-independent. Phase 2 measures known risk detection on 72 ground-truth test cases, where the trace-based framework achieves the best precision-recall balance (F1=0.90) while text-only evaluation matches on recall but generates 5x more false alarms. Phase 3 evaluates unknown risk discovery, uncovering 24 novel failures with zero overlap between functional testing and security red-teaming. Our results demonstrate that (1) the information available to the evaluation harness determines evaluation quality, (2) functional and security evaluation are complementary, and (3) LLM-based evaluation harnesses surface subtle errors that human reviewers miss. We recommend a two-framework strategy: trace-based evaluation for functional assessment and adversarial red-teaming for security validation.
#03Nov 10, 2026
cs.CV
Toward Foundation Detection Models via Example-Based Grounding in EM-DETR
Sheethal Bhat, Bogdan Georgescu, Awais Mansoor and 3 more
DeepLearning (DL)-based Computer-Aided Diagnostic (CAD) systems have shown great promise in supporting clinicians, but their performance heavily depends on the availability of large, well-annotated datasets. In medical lesion detection, the scarcity of comprehensive, stan dardized annotations and the heterogeneity of existing datasets limit the development of robust foundation models. In this work, we introduce a novel approach to building a multi-domain foundation model for le sion detection by integrating diverse medical image datasets annotated for both anatomical structures and abnormalities. We first propose a student-teacher training strategy to effectively combine datasets with heterogeneous label spaces, mitigating catastrophic forgetting, and im proving feature learning. In addition, building on our previously pro posed example-based EM-DETR framework, we adapt it to jointly learn from multiple domain-specific datasets, enabling fine-grained, example driven detection across modalities. Our model achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results, with image-level AUC scores exceeding previous SOTA by 1% point on four key findings in CXRs. We achieve a leading mAP50 in CXRs and mammography, surpassing EM-DETR trained on a single dataset by 2-3% points. This approach paves the way for scalable foundation models in medical imaging that leverage heterogeneous data while maintaining robust and generalizable performance.
#04Nov 10, 2026
cs.AI
Re-Search: Dissecting LLM Ideation Through a Two-Player Questioning Game
Muhan Gao, Hangxiao Zhu, Xinqi Su and 3 more
Research ideation is iterative: researchers refine their ideas step by step based on feedback. Yet existing evaluations obscure this search process, making it difficult to understand how LLMs explore the space of research ideas and what limits their progress. We introduce Re-Search, which adapts the format of Twenty Questions to research ideation: given only the research problem of a published paper, a model must rediscover the paper's core idea by asking yes-or-no questions. Built from 200 ICML 2026 papers, Re-Search tracks how a model's idea evolves as it asks questions and receives binary oracle feedback, isolating ideation from execution. Across six recent LLMs, nearly all progress happens within the first 30 of 100 questions, which largely decide how the game ends; after that, most models plateau. Through controlled interventions on the candidate questions and the hypothesis space, we find that the bottleneck is generation, not judgment: models recognize a good idea or a good question when one is offered, but often cannot produce it on their own. We further analyze the ideation traces and find that models fail by either over-exploiting one direction or over-exploring too many. These findings point to concrete design principles for autoresearch systems: since models can judge candidates they cannot produce, enriching the search with externally sourced ideas and questions may be more effective than improving any single model's generation ability.
#05Nov 10, 2026
cs.CV
BoviShift: A Six-Year Multi-Attribute Audit of Visual Cattle Phenotyping Across Animals and Time
Mobasshir Bhuiya Shagor, Nilambar Halder Tonmoy, Md Saef Ullah Miah
Computer vision offers a scalable, non-contact means of estimating livestock traits, but correlated images and video frames make reliable evaluation difficult. Image-random splitting can place views of the same animal in both training and test sets, while deployment further requires transfer to animals captured in future years. We introduce BoviShift, a corpus reconstructed from six consecutive annual cohorts of an operational cattle marketplace collected from 2021 to 2026. It contains 2{,}657 cattle, 10{,}610 still images, and 2{,}566 walk-around videos across nine recorded breed categories. We evaluate three splitting strategies through four configurations: image-random and pooled cattle-disjoint splits over the same development cohorts, followed by separate future-2025 and locked future-2026 evaluations. Using a fixed ResNet-50 multi-task baseline, we assess weight, age, height, breed, and coat color. Differences between image-random and cattle-disjoint splitting are task-dependent rather than a universal leakage penalty. Future-cohort behavior is also attribute- and cohort-specific: breed declines relative to pooled evaluation; mean weight and age performance fails to beat constant baselines in 2025; height remains above baseline; and color transfers well to 2025 but degrades in 2026. Multi-task training improves all five point estimates in a single-seed ablation, still-view aggregation helps selectively, and zero-shot video-frame aggregation exposes a still-to-video domain gap. To our knowledge, BoviShift is the longest-spanning cattle-vision resource combining consecutive annual cohorts with physical and visual attributes.