AI Research Papers

AllLarge Language Models (LLMs)Computer Vision & Image GenerationAudio & Speech SynthesisPrompt Engineering & InferenceAI Agents & ReasoningModel Optimization & QuantizationOther
AI Agents & Reasoning7/9/2026

INTENT: An LSTM Framework for Vehicle Intention Prediction in Intersection Scenarios with Comprehensive Ablation Analysis

Vehicle intention prediction is a pivotal aspect in the agility and safety of autonomous vehicles in all driving scenarios; if genuine enhancement of autonomous vehicles are required, we need to make them adopt human interpretation of driver's intention especially in cases that require a lot of human interaction as well as complex driving behaviors like the ones at intersections, roundabouts and emergency cases such as sudden stops where vehicle intention prediction helps in taking the correct evasive action within a real time period where every second of action makes an impact and can prevent a catastrophe from taking place. In the worst case, it helps minimize the damage and make safety a priority. Intention prediction can also be used to enhance trajectory prediction (intention conditioned trajectory prediction). In this study, The INTENT framework is proposed using LSTM model to predict the vehicle's intention at intersections 2 seconds ahead of the event occurrence to predict whether the cars in intersections are going straight, turning left, or turning right. Various model experiments and ablation study are thoroughly tested on InD dataset achieving 99.71% accuracy.

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AI Agents & Reasoning7/9/2026

From Legacy Documentation to OSCAL: An MCP-Based Agent Pipeline for Threat-Informed Continuous Compliance in Critical Infrastructure

In critical infrastructure, operational technology environments often cannot be actively scanned, and yet active system feedback is needed for risk assessment and compliance. This paper presents a non-invasive, MCP-grounded multi-agent pipeline that converts natural-language system descriptions into source-verified knowledge graph and audit-ready artifacts in the NIST OSCAL format for continuous automated compliance management. The architecture decouples LLM-based reasoning from deterministic knowledge retrieval against authoritative threat-intelligence sources, reducing the risk of fabricated vulnerabilities and hallucinated attack paths. In an evidence-based synthetic scenario of a water utility, the pipeline achieves 0.90 CVE recall and perfect D3FEND recall. It generates a schema-valid OSCAL System Security Plan and an OSCAL Security Assessment Report. Nevertheless, the core insight is not that grounding via MCP eliminates errors (e.g., hallucinations) entirely from the pipeline, but that it shifts errors into the first phase of asset extraction from the natural language description. Here, a single incorrectly extracted entity can lead to genuine but irrelevant CVEs in subsequent stages of the pipeline, which consumes time and resources. However, it makes the remaining risk visible, verifiable, and suitable for a time-efficient manual review, since the infrastructure (e.g., version numbers, OS, etc.) is typically known.

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AI Agents & Reasoning7/9/2026

From Legacy Documentation to OSCAL: An MCP-Based Agent Pipeline for Threat-Informed Continuous Compliance in Critical Infrastructure

In critical infrastructure, operational technology environments often cannot be actively scanned, and yet active system feedback is needed for risk assessment and compliance. This paper presents a non-invasive, MCP-grounded multi-agent pipeline that converts natural-language system descriptions into source-verified knowledge graph and audit-ready artifacts in the NIST OSCAL format for continuous automated compliance management. The architecture decouples LLM-based reasoning from deterministic knowledge retrieval against authoritative threat-intelligence sources, reducing the risk of fabricated vulnerabilities and hallucinated attack paths. In an evidence-based synthetic scenario of a water utility, the pipeline achieves 0.90 CVE recall and perfect D3FEND recall. It generates a schema-valid OSCAL System Security Plan and an OSCAL Security Assessment Report. Nevertheless, the core insight is not that grounding via MCP eliminates errors (e.g., hallucinations) entirely from the pipeline, but that it shifts errors into the first phase of asset extraction from the natural language description. Here, a single incorrectly extracted entity can lead to genuine but irrelevant CVEs in subsequent stages of the pipeline, which consumes time and resources. However, it makes the remaining risk visible, verifiable, and suitable for a time-efficient manual review, since the infrastructure (e.g., version numbers, OS, etc.) is typically known.

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AI Agents & Reasoning7/9/2026

Psychological Competence as a Missing Dimension in AI Evaluation

Current AI evaluation frameworks focus primarily on technical performance, including accuracy, robustness, reasoning ability, and policy compliance. These measures remain essential, but they are not sufficient for systems that interact directly with users through natural language. Human-facing AI systems are increasingly used as advisors, coaches, tutors, and companions. In these roles, their responses can shape how users reason, interpret emotions, form beliefs, calibrate trust, and make decisions. The relevant unit of evaluation is therefore not only the model, but the human-AI interaction. This paper introduces psychological competence as a missing dimension in AI evaluation. We define psychological competence as the capacity of a human-facing AI system to support user cognition, emotional interpretation, and behavioral decision-making in ways that are appropriate to the user, context, and purpose of the interaction. This includes interaction properties such as framing, tone, perceived authority, responsiveness, uncertainty handling, and conversational guidance. Existing evaluation approaches capture parts of this problem but rarely assess these psychological effects directly. Drawing on behavioral science and human-AI interaction research, we outline a conceptual framework for psychological competence and its core domains. Rather than proposing a specific benchmark, we define the construct, clarify its boundaries, and describe how it may be assessed through scenario-based probes, structured human evaluation, and model-assisted evaluation methods. We argue that psychological competence should become a core consideration for model providers, deploying organizations, researchers, and regulators concerned with the real-world effects of human-facing AI systems.

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AI Agents & Reasoning7/9/2026

Psychological Competence as a Missing Dimension in AI Evaluation

Current AI evaluation frameworks focus primarily on technical performance, including accuracy, robustness, reasoning ability, and policy compliance. These measures remain essential, but they are not sufficient for systems that interact directly with users through natural language. Human-facing AI systems are increasingly used as advisors, coaches, tutors, and companions. In these roles, their responses can shape how users reason, interpret emotions, form beliefs, calibrate trust, and make decisions. The relevant unit of evaluation is therefore not only the model, but the human-AI interaction. This paper introduces psychological competence as a missing dimension in AI evaluation. We define psychological competence as the capacity of a human-facing AI system to support user cognition, emotional interpretation, and behavioral decision-making in ways that are appropriate to the user, context, and purpose of the interaction. This includes interaction properties such as framing, tone, perceived authority, responsiveness, uncertainty handling, and conversational guidance. Existing evaluation approaches capture parts of this problem but rarely assess these psychological effects directly. Drawing on behavioral science and human-AI interaction research, we outline a conceptual framework for psychological competence and its core domains. Rather than proposing a specific benchmark, we define the construct, clarify its boundaries, and describe how it may be assessed through scenario-based probes, structured human evaluation, and model-assisted evaluation methods. We argue that psychological competence should become a core consideration for model providers, deploying organizations, researchers, and regulators concerned with the real-world effects of human-facing AI systems.

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AI Agents & Reasoning7/9/2026

Multi-Agent Firewall Architecture for Privacy Protection of Sensitive Data in Interactions with Language Models

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have become essential productivity tools, their integration into workflows without adequate safeguards creates significant risks. This paper proposes an open-source, privacy-focused, user-facing firewall designed to secure both web-based and programmatic LLM interactions. The architecture combines a browser extension and a proxy for total traffic interception across both HTTP(S) and WebSocket communications. At its core, a flexible multi-agent pipeline delivers data leakage prevention through a hybrid approach combining deterministic detectors with LLM-driven semantic analysis, proprietary code leakage prevention, and extensible components designed for future security enhancements such as prompt injection evasion. The framework's layered architecture enables deployment across heterogeneous environments, allowing organizations to balance computational cost, detection depth and latency. Evaluation results demonstrate it achieves F1 scores of up to 94.93% on optimal configurations.

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AI Agents & Reasoning7/9/2026

PolyUQuest: Verifiable Structure-Aware Web RAG over Heterogeneous Graphs

Existing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems treat web pages as flat text, losing the structural and semantic signals encoded in HTML. We present PolyUQuest, a verifiable, structure-aware web RAG framework built on a heterogeneous graph that unifies hyperlink topology between pages, DOM hierarchy within pages, and entity-relation knowledge across pages. A two-tier router dispatches each query to one of three retrieval modes matched to its structural need, including direct block retrieval, cross-page graph traversal, and multi-hop entity reasoning. Every answer is fully verifiable, as each cited block carries its source page, heading path, and entity links so that users can trace any claim back to its structural evidence. We evaluate on the official websites of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), comprising 4,240 pages, 31,086 DOM blocks, 29,119 entities, and 37,680 relations, together with a multi-type evaluation benchmark. PolyUQuest outperforms existing RAG systems in answer correctness, coverage, and faithfulness, while consuming significantly fewer LLM tokens per query. The demonstration provides an interactive interface for inspecting cited answers, comparing retrieval traces across routing modes, and exploring evidence graph paths. PolyUQuest is being prepared for deployment as a student-facing QA service at PolyU.

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AI Agents & Reasoning7/9/2026

MentalHospital: A Virtual Environment for Evaluating Psychiatric Clinical Encounters

Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance on isolated psychiatric tasks, including dialogue, diagnosis, and treatment planning, yet existing benchmarks rarely simulate complete psychiatric clinical encounters. We introduce $\textbf{MentalHospital}$, a virtual evaluation environment for LLM-based psychiatric clinical encounters. MentalHospital instantiates the Subjective Interviewing, Objective Examination, Diagnostic Assessment, and Treatment Planning (S.O.A.P.) workflow, using skill-augmented standardized patients constructed from 1,193 de-identified psychiatric electronic health record (EHR) cases spanning all major ICD-11 categories and 76 disorders. Each encounter is assessed through a dual-track protocol that combines objective comparison against EHR-derived references with subjective assessment of clinical process quality. To scale specialist judgment, we develop $\textbf{MentalEval}$, five domain-specific evaluators covering communication empathy, interviewing professionalism, clinical-note quality, diagnostic rigor, and treatment appropriateness, trained with rubric-grounded SFT and expert-guided DPO. Survey responses from 22 clinicians support MentalHospital's clinical fidelity (3.88/5), while MentalEval achieves strong expert alignment with an average QWK of 0.944. Benchmarking shows that even the strongest LLM trails clinicians by 37.28 percentage points in objective psychiatric competence, with mental status assessment as a key bottleneck.

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AI Agents & Reasoning7/9/2026

Compete Then Collaborate: Frontier AI Teachers Build a Verifiable Curriculum to Improve a Coding Student Beyond Imitation

Large language models increasingly serve as teachers generating training data for smaller students. Prior multi-teacher knowledge distillation methods merge outputs without determining which frontier model teaches best, often relying on an LLM judge biased toward its own outputs. We introduce a compete-then-collaborate framework where four frontier AI teachers (Claude, Codex-GPT, Grok, Gemini) are ranked head-to-head by an execution-based judge (unit tests and stdin-stdout checks) with fairness controls, and then collaborate to build a verifiable curriculum for a student (Qwen2.5-Coder). We report three findings. (1) Under execution verification, all teachers solve standard problems near-perfectly after self-correction (99-100%) due to a saturation effect, but harder competition problems separate them (Gemini 77% > Claude 69% = Codex 69% > Grok 50%); however, the robust student-side results do not depend on teacher ranking. (2) Imitation (SFT) on verified solutions does not improve, and can degrade, an already-competent student at 7B and 32B (e.g., from 76.7% to 72.7% on MBPP-test, and 5.9% to 2.9% on competition problems). (3) Using the same collaborative curriculum as a reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) environment improves the student (from 5.9% to 8.8% peak on competition problems, a +49% relative gain), reversing SFT's direction. The value of AI-teacher collaboration lies not in pooling answers to imitate, but in jointly constructing a verifiable environment where the student learns by doing. We release a reproducible on-prem pipeline (NVIDIA GB10) with framework patches for running GRPO on a bleeding-edge stack.

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AI Agents & Reasoning7/9/2026

AutoPersonas: A Multi-Timescale Loop Engine for Open-Ended Persona Evolution

Long-term persona agents must remain identifiable while adapting to new events, relationships, evidence, and social conditions. We identify self-locking as a runtime failure mode in continuing persona-life loops: locally plausible events keep appearing while the generated life collapses toward familiar environments, weak relationships, suspended decisions, and stale life stages. We trace this failure to model-level convergence toward high-probability behavioral channels and system-level context gravity from State, memory, history, and environment summaries. We introduce AutoPersonas, a multi-timescale life-environment engine for bounded persona-level recursive self-evolution. It separates environment-side Occurrences, accumulated Observations, and persona State. Its OSO loop admits divergent future-facing material while requiring evidence-governed absorption before State or reachability changes. A three-year compressed simulation exposed environment watermark shells, occurrence-hardening gaps, slow-change accumulation failures, recursive indecision, and weak relationship persistence. An eight-model 40-day stress test generated 1,600 events and found mean rolling 5-day action-category repetition of 95.2%-97.6%, with all models crossing 90% by day 11. Semantic re-keeping found 79.0%-88.0% macro-theme repetition across all direct-loop runs. In a same-runtime 40-day A/B, context-slice masking plus per-sample divergence targeting reduced macro-theme repetition from 61.8% to 36.3% and roughly doubled cumulative theme count. A juvenile-goblin fictional-world run reproduced the anti-fixation regime without hard real-world intrusions. These results support a bounded claim: separating controlled divergence from evidence-governed absorption can reduce persona-environment self-locking while preserving identity continuity.

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AI Agents & Reasoning7/9/2026

Playing ZendoWorld: Challenging AI Agents on Active Visual Concept Induction

A central challenge in building intelligent systems is enabling agents to jointly perceive complex inputs, form hypotheses about hidden patterns, and design informative experiments to test them. To study this problem, we propose ZendoWorld, a controlled interactive environment in which agents must infer a logical rule about visual game observations, acquire information by proposing new scenes, and refine their hypotheses based on feedback from the game environment. We evaluate several agents spanning pure VLM reasoning, Bayesian particle filtering, dynamic concept discovery, and neuro-symbolic methods. Our main findings are: (1) high accuracy in predicting labels for observed examples does not imply recovery of the underlying rule; (2) perception and induction are distinct bottlenecks for different agent classes; and (3) VLM-based agents propose near-uninformative experiments, failing to actively reduce hypothesis uncertainty. To compare these results, we collect human data on the task, which reveals a gap in inductive reasoning, particularly for more complex rules. Overall, ZENDOWORLD takes an important step toward evaluating intelligent agents and identifies concrete avenues for improvement, particularly in domains like scientific discovery.

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AI Agents & Reasoning7/9/2026

A First-Principles Theory of Slow Thinking and Active Perception

As part of a series on first-principles modeling of cognitive functions, this paper attempts to provide a mathematical formulation of thinking and perception. It formally derives slow thinking or more generally, active perception, and encompasses the design, training and inference of slow thinking large language models. Our starting point is the lifting and projection of probability distributions on the observable and latent spaces, with the objective of representing complex data distributions by simple function families such as neural networks. A theory called "active lifting" is proposed, based on the sampling of latent sequences and an intrinsic drive to reduce uncertainty with maximum rate. It derives a large design space, containing the slow thinking models in a subspace that we call the static theory. These models are positioned on the representation hierarchy and sampler hierarchy induced by the static theory, and can be upgraded by climbing the two hierarchies. Active lifting further derives an inference process with an internal time axis, and a training objective that resembles minimum-length coding as well as the invention of languages. Thus, it characterizes the agency of perception, including the emergence of the slow thinking formats. Technical by-products of this theory include a three-stage pathway for improving slow thinking models, a unified approach to constructing encoders and generative models for all data modalities, a priori formation of human-like visual representations, and a possible solution to policy collapse.

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