Papers for

customer support teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Post-task workflows improve understanding and reuse of AI agent tasks

From Review to Reuse: How Post-Task Workflow Can Support Human-AI Agent Interaction

Abstract: AI agents can automate tasks by turning a single natural-language request into a multi-step process spanning tools, files, and applications. Users are often left to judge that process from fragmented execution information and the final output. To make the completed process easier to understand, validate, and reuse, we investigate post-task workflows: editable, graph-based representations of an agent's completed execution. We first analyzed 10,803 public workflow templates from n8n to characterize real-world automation practice, then developed Trace2Flow, a research probe that translates agent execution traces into interactive post-task workflows. In a study, participants (N = 20) reviewed agent executions with prompt or agent errors. We found that post-task workflows improved their understanding and error detection over a prompt-only condition, and that validation succeeded mainly when users cross-checked across multiple evidence sources. For follow-up tasks, adapting the workflow matched adapting the prior prompt in success, time, and difficulty, and was often preferred.

Fri 11 SeptHuman-Computer Interaction
The gist
When AI agents complete tasks, people often only see the final result and some scattered details, making it hard to understand how the AI did the job or to fix mistakes. The authors studied a way to show the full process after the task finishes, using clear, editable diagrams called post-task workflows. They found that seeing these workflows helped people better spot errors and understand the AI's work, and that editing these workflows was as effective and sometimes preferred over just changing the original request. This approach makes it easier to check and reuse AI work.
Open 2609.13136v1

Voice agents struggle to join group conversations naturally

MP-Bench: Evaluating Voice Agents as a Multiparty Conversation Participant

Abstract: Conversational voice agents have advanced significantly, offering increasingly natural human-machine interactions through both cascaded and end-to-end architectures. However, while recent benchmarks extensively evaluate dyadic interactions and passive audio comprehension, they largely overlook a prevalent real-world scenario: multi-party conversations. Evaluating agents in these settings is fundamentally more challenging than in dyadic interactions due to the exponentially greater conversational complexity. For voice agents to integrate seamlessly into human group dynamics, they must not only generate contextually appropriate responses but also demonstrate a nuanced understanding of open turn-taking. To address this gap, we introduce Multiparty Bench (MP-Bench), the first benchmark specifically designed to objectively evaluate conversational speech systems as active participants within multi-party contexts. MP-Bench assesses agent behavior along two primary dimensions: turn-taking awareness and response appropriateness. Additionally, we incorporate comprehension-based question-answering tasks as a complementary evaluation. By benchmarking 12 voice agents, we find that real-time voice agents stay at or below 22% on multiparty comprehension and remain near chance on multiparty turn-taking, exposing an open challenge for real-time voice agents under multiparty scenario.

Fri 11 SeptArtificial IntelligenceComputation and Language
The gist
Voice agents today are good at talking with one person, but they find it very hard to join conversations with multiple people. The authors created a new test called MP-Bench to see how well these agents understand when to speak and how to respond correctly in group talks. They tested 12 popular voice agents and found that they perform poorly, almost guessing when to speak and understanding very little of the conversation in real time. This shows that more work is needed for voice assistants to work well in group settings.
Open 2609.13076v1

Language models improve tracking of changing user preferences

Toward Robust Personalized Alignment for LLMs: Mitigating Persona Drift in Multi-Turn Dialogue

Abstract: Persona drift remains a central challenge for personalized language models, as user profiles evolve over long interactions rather than remain permanently fixed. Models must therefore revise persistent persona states when preferences genuinely change, while avoiding updates driven by transient, ambiguous, or unresolved observations. We propose CORE, which separates turn-local evidence from persistent persona-state revision and selectively updates grounded user preferences through uncertainty-aware belief revision. We also introduce PERSIST, a held-out post-anchor benchmark for persona-state robustness under sequential interaction stress, covering ambiguity, conflict, and controlled social influence. Across ALOE, PersonaChat, and PERSIST, CORE improves personalized alignment and robustness, with complementary gains in normalized closed-slot state fidelity. Human evaluation and mechanistic controls further support explicit update control beyond stronger generation or persistent memory alone.

Fri 11 SeptArtificial Intelligence
The gist
When people chat a lot with AI language models, their preferences and personality details can change over time. The authors found that typical AI models struggle to keep track of these changes accurately, sometimes getting confused by short-term or unclear information. They created a method called CORE that helps the AI decide when to update what it knows about a person’s preferences and when to hold back. They also introduced a new test called PERSIST to check how well AI keeps a consistent sense of a user's persona across many conversations. Their method improved how well AI stays true to users' personalities over time.
Open 2609.12373v1

Agentic memory system shares private and public data across users

AIM: A Privacy-Aware Interoperable Memory Framework for Multi-Agent Multi-User LLM Systems

Abstract: Traditional large language models (LLMs) are scoped to individual user sessions, limiting their knowledge to a single conversation and preventing them from learning user preferences that evolve over time. Existing agentic memory systems address this limitation but generally operate at the individual-user level, restricting the public knowledge that could be shared across users to improve downstream responses. We introduce AIM (Agentic Interoperable Memory), a unified, privacy-aware memory framework that enables multi-agent, multi-user LLM systems to persistently manage private and shared memory. AIM dynamically classifies information as private, scoped to one user and inaccessible to others, or public, accessible to all users. It enforces index-level access controls so that private memories are retrievable only by their owner, protecting sensitive data while allowing beneficial shared knowledge to improve coordination and consistency. We also introduce MUMBench (Multi-User Memory Benchmark), a dataset of multi-user interactions containing private and shareable information across four domains. To our knowledge, MUMBench is the first public dataset designed to evaluate multiple memory operations, including retrieval, creation, update, and deletion, in a multi-user environment. Across three independent runs on MUMBench, AIM achieves 96.0% visibility classification accuracy, 58.8% strict operation accuracy, and 70.5% state-aware operation accuracy.

Fri 11 SeptArtificial IntelligenceMachine Learning
The gist
Large language models usually forget what you talked about once the chat ends and don’t remember your likes over time. The authors developed AIM, a system that helps many users and AI agents share memory safely by separating private info only a user can see from public info everyone can use. AIM makes sure private memories are kept secret while useful shared memories help AI agents work better. They also created MUMBench, a test set to check how well these systems remember, update, and remove info when many people interact.
Open 2609.12320v1

Automated pipeline creates realistic email sets for enterprise question answering

WinSyn: An Automated Pipeline for Realistic Enterprise Question-Answering Evaluation

Abstract: Enterprise settings provide a challenging environment for question-answering agents, which often rely on Retrieval-Augmented Generation, Deep Research (DR), and related techniques. Much of this challenge comes from the complexity of enterprise data: information is often spread across evolving and potentially conflict- ing emails, chat messages, documents, and other artifacts. Existing benchmarks typically have limited real-world complexity, short-form responses, and unnatural queries, so they often fail to capture the challenges of enterprise settings. In this work, we introduce an automated pipeline for generating synthetic datasets of emails reflecting realistic workplace scenarios, along with long- and short-form questions and gold answers grounded in the data. Our method simulates long-running enterprise projects spanning several months and involving up to 25 interacting employees across multiple roles. The data emphasizes ambiguity, distributed information, and naturally occurring queries. To validate the pipeline, we evaluate few standard agentic baselines on our datasets using the latest frontier models. We find that aggregate scores averaged over all queries remain below 80% for each dataset, indicating significant room for improvement. These findings suggest that more work remains to be done for enterprise deployment and underscore the importance of realistic, high-complexity evaluation data for developing stronger real-world enterprise DR systems.

Thu 10 SeptArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Answering questions at large companies is hard because information is scattered and often unclear, spread across emails, chats, and documents. The authors built a system that automatically creates synthetic but realistic email data and related questions as if from real workplace projects involving many employees over months. They tested existing question-answering methods on this data and found plenty of room for improvement, showing these tasks remain challenging. This work helps create better benchmarks closer to real enterprise complexity.
Open 2609.12171v1

Assistants personalize user voice by modeling stable personality layers

Creating an Atomic User Model for Personality-Aware Large Language Model Interaction

Abstract: Assistants built on large language models are expected to write as their user would, and the dominant approach is single-channel: preferences summarised from conversation history and reinserted into context. This inverts the order of inference. Preferences are the task-dependent surface of a comparatively stable personality structure, so a system storing only preferences relearns the person whenever the task changes. First, we characterise personality seepage, where a prompt's linguistic surface carries a personality fingerprint the assistant mirrors without access to the personality behind it. Second, we propose the Atomic User Model (AUM), a human-readable representation organising a person as a stable identity nucleus with four interpretable shells (psychological, cognitive and experiential, behavioural, and social), plus cross-shell entries recording internal conflict and authenticity. Third, we treat AUM as a retrieval index over a person rather than a prompt prefix, with a pipeline where a task classifier, component-selection function and budgeted retriever return a small payload of fields at generation time. Fourth, we evaluate it with sixteen language-model-simulated participants, six style-sensitive tasks and three seeds, plus a synthetic scaling study of the retriever. Retrieving eight fields matched the style fidelity of the full user model on 23% of the context (211 tokens against 915), improved on flat preference notes by 0.24 points on a five-point scale (p < 0.001, dz = 0.50), and raised forced-choice identification of the participant's own voice from 14.9% to 42.7% (25% chance). Four pre-registered controls returned null, locating the effect in the representation rather than the search over it. The benefit is largest for participants the un-personalised assistant reproduces worst (rho = -0.61, p = 0.013): personalisation is worth most to those the default serves least.

Thu 10 SeptHuman-Computer InteractionArtificial IntelligenceComputation and Language
The gist
People use digital assistants that try to sound like them, but current methods focus only on recent preferences, missing the deeper personality behind those choices. The authors show that personality traits can leak into writing style, and they create a new model called Atomic User Model (AUM) that breaks down a person’s identity into stable, understandable parts like psychology and behavior. Instead of just adding preferences as a prompt, their system retrieves small, relevant pieces from this layered model to guide the assistant’s responses. Tests with simulated users found this made the assistant’s style much closer to the user’s real voice, especially helping those whose style the basic assistant couldn’t match well.
Open 2609.12086v1

Activation maps enable fast uncertainty estimates for single answers

ActMap: Single-Pass Uncertainty Quantification from Generation-Time Activation Maps

Abstract: Practical uncertainty quantification (UQ) for large language models must decide, from a single generation, whether a specific answer should be trusted. Existing methods either sample multiple generations, read only output-token probabilities, or reduce the model's internal computation to a single hidden state. We introduce ActMap, a white-box representation that compresses the generation-time hidden- state trajectory (every layer, every generated token) into a fixed $12 \times 32 \times 128$ tensor of temporal-statistic channels that preserves structure across transformer depth and pooled hidden coordinates. The map is captured during the generation pass with no measurable overhead, has a fixed shape across model depths and hidden sizes, and occupies 96 KiB: a compact artifact that can be retained for audit-relevant generations and probed directly, with occlusion analysis localizing the classifier's signal to mid-depth regions of the map. A lightweight classifier, instantiated as a compact Vision Transformer, reads an estimated correctness probability from each map in a fraction of a millisecond; capacity-matched MLPs perform comparably, indicating the representation itself carries the result. Trained and evaluated in-domain on short-answer QA, direct- answer math, and summarization factuality with three instruction-tuned 7-8B models, ActMap consistently outperforms sampling, token-probability, attention, and embedding baselines, and matches ACT-ViT, a detector trained on dense activation tensors $67 \times$ larger, at essentially the same mean AUROC with lower calibration error on ten of twelve pairs. The resulting score supports abstention, routing, and selective verification from a single generation, making it a practical primitive for scalable oversight of deployed models.

Thu 10 SeptArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Knowing when to trust a computer's answer is important, especially for language models that generate text. The authors created ActMap, a way to look inside the model’s internal steps during answer generation and produce a simple map that summarizes this process. This map can be quickly analyzed by a small classifier to judge how likely the answer is correct, without needing to sample multiple answers or do extra heavy computations. Their experiments show ActMap works better than other methods on tasks like short answers, math, and summarization.
Open 2609.11498v1

New routing method improves multi-turn AI conversations accuracy

SWRouter: Similarity-Contractive Window Routing for Multi-Turn Large Language Model Conversations

Abstract: Large language models exhibit complementary strengths, motivating routing methods that dispatch each query to the most suitable model. Although existing routers are effective in single-turn settings, they do not directly transfer to multi-turn dialogue, where routing performance critically depends on how historical context is segmented, retained, and incorporated into the current prompt. This introduces two fundamental challenges: preventing information loss and information confusion during context construction, and evaluating routing quality without conflating model selection with prompt construction quality. In this paper, we propose SWRouter, a Similarity-Contractive Window Router for multi-turn large language model routing. SWRouter combines a similarity-based context segmentation mechanism for prompt construction with a dual-metric evaluation framework that decouples construction accuracy from router performance. Experiments on multi-turn dialogue benchmarks demonstrate that SWRouter consistently surpasses strong baselines, achieving a 16.26% improvement in evaluation accuracy over the best individual large language model and an additional 8.22% gain over the Conv-ID Context baseline. Our results highlight that multi-turn large language model routing requires a joint design of context construction and evaluation, rather than a direct extension of single-turn routing methods.

Thu 10 SeptComputation and LanguageArtificial IntelligenceInformation Retrieval
The gist
Handling conversations with AI models that involve many turns is tricky because the system has to remember and use past dialogue correctly. The authors found that existing ways to choose which AI model answers a question work well for single questions but not for longer chats. They created SWRouter, a method that better organizes past dialogue to pick the best AI model for each new question. Their tests show this method improves accuracy by a significant amount compared to previous approaches.
Open 2609.11414v1

Debate driven approach improves query to agent matching capabilities

Debate-to-Skill: Capability-Bound Process Supervision for Industrial Query-to-Agent Annotation

Abstract: Industrial query-to-agent matching fails when topical relevance is mistaken for executable capability, especially on long-tail and boundary-sensitive requests. We formulate annotation as \emph{capability-bound process supervision} and instantiate it with Debate-to-Skill, which uses reusable decision principles, structured deliberation, verifier-based verdict extraction, and disagreement-driven refinement. On an industrial Query2Agent benchmark, we compare Debate-to-Skill with direct-label supervision, reasoning-SFT, and structural ablations. The results test whether gains come from supervising the capability-critical decision process itself, especially on grey-zone cases where semantic relatedness and executable capability diverge.

Thu 10 SeptArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Matching customer queries to the right software agents often fails when being topically related is confused with being able to actually perform the task. The authors introduce Debate-to-Skill, a method that supervises the decision process behind matching by having structured discussions, decision rules, and automated verification steps. This approach helps better identify which agents truly have the capability to execute requests, especially when the connection is not obvious. The authors tested their method against other approaches and showed it improves the accuracy of these capability-based matches.
Open 2609.11176v1

ProMediConv sets benchmark for AI legal dispute mediators

ProMediConv: Benchmarking Proactive Conversational Agents in Legal Dispute Mediation

Abstract: Dispute mediation is essential for maintaining social harmony and resilience, yet developing skilled mediators is costly and time-consuming. Existing LLM-based mediation research remains limited by unrealistic task formulations, low-fidelity datasets, and coarse evaluation metrics that obscure turn-by-turn dynamics. To address these gaps, we introduce ProMediConv, a novel benchmarking framework that models mediation as a proactive, multi-stage, and party-aware dialogue process incorporating 11 mediation strategies and four party behavior pattern (BP) states. Using 972 complete real-world cases, we construct a high-fidelity mediation dataset with utterance-level annotations of strategies and BP states. Furthermore, to better assess agent impact, we propose MAD (Mean Attribute Difference), a fine-grained metric that captures BP shifts throughout the dialogue. Leveraging this framework, we establish a comprehensive benchmark by evaluating diverse models alongside our tailored baseline ProMediAgent. Extensive empirical analyses reveal critical behavioral phenomena and underscore the persistent challenges current models face in dynamic, multi-party mediation. Ultimately, ProMediConv provides a rigorous foundation and a vital quantitative standard for advancing AI-assisted conflict resolution. Our dataset and codebase are accessible at https://github.com/ZsWei66/ProMediConv_repo.

Thu 10 SeptComputation and Language
The gist
Mediating disputes is important but training skilled mediators is hard and slow. The authors created ProMediConv, a new way to test AI systems that handle mediation, using real legal cases with detailed notes on strategies and behaviors. They also designed a better method for measuring how well these AI agents influence the conversation over time. Their study reveals challenges current AI models face in handling complex, multi-person legal talks. This work offers a useful foundation and standard to improve AI tools for resolving conflicts.
Open 2609.11101v1

Larger context windows help correct grammar with fewer errors

Larger Context Window, Fewer Overcorrections: Optimizing Prompts and Batching for Minimal-Edit Grammatical Error Correction

Abstract: Minimal-edit Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) is a challenging task for zero- and few-shot prompted Large Language Models (LLMs), which systematically overcorrect and degrade $F_{0.5}$ by rewriting well-formed spans. While fine-tuning provides an effective solution, it imposes substantial infrastructure demands. We introduce a prompt-based approach that closes the gap to fine-tuned models through three advances in GEC prompting methodology. First, we introduce taxonomy-based instructions to enforce minimal-edit constraints with a comprehensive list of grammatical error rules, equipping the LLM with a bounded, metric-aligned scope of correctable edits, which benefits the strongest models while remaining model-dependent overall. Second, we show that batching multiple uncorrected sentences into a single input context acts as a targeted regularizer against overcorrection, systematically reducing the edit rate across diverse LLM families; we hypothesize this arises from attention dilution effect induced by the bounded capacity of self-attention scores. Finally, LLM-assisted Prompt Optimization refines these instructions. Powered by Gemini 3.1-Pro, our prompt achieves $F_{0.5}=78.32$ on the BEA-2019 test set - establishing a new prompt-based SOTA while shrinking the gap to the fine-tuned single-model SOTA (Staruch et al., 2025) to a mere $0.38$ points. Code, prompts, and outputs are publicly available.

Wed 9 SeptComputation and Language
The gist
Correcting grammar mistakes automatically can sometimes make too many unnecessary changes to sentences that are already correct. The authors show how giving language models more sentences to look at together helps them avoid overcorrecting. They also created special instructions that tell the model exactly which grammar mistakes to fix. Combining these ideas, their method nearly matches the accuracy of fully trained models without needing extra training.
Open 2609.10810v1

Language agents manage memory by separating stored facts from used evidence

What Should an Agent Forget? Separating What Is Stored from What Is Used

Abstract: Persistent language agents need stored experience to remain available across time, while each answer requires evidence suited to a particular question. A superseded fact can mislead a current-state answer and still be essential for a historical query. We present RD-Forget, a training-free framework that separates what an agent stores from what it uses. A retained source archive preserves observations, and a query-conditioned memory view controls their influence on the current answer. A frozen language-model curator extracts relevant evidence, groups facts into semantic slots, and preserves the relations needed for multi-hop reasoning. Same-slot replacement links suppress superseded values in current-state contexts, while intent-aware retrieval makes earlier evidence eligible again. A rate-distortion formulation guides construction of the answer-time view within a memory budget. Experiments span conversational memory, knowledge updating, fact consolidation, long-context reasoning, and personalization under a shared answering pipeline. The results associate accurate answers with both query-relevant evidence construction and control over obsolete alternatives. Configurations without forgetting or query conditioning have the largest score deficits, while slot grouping, historical access, and relation preservation contribute complementary functions. Retaining history while selectively controlling its use offers a practical way to accommodate changing facts and future questions.

Wed 9 SeptArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Sometimes, an AI assistant needs to remember facts over time, but not all facts should be used in every answer. For example, old facts might be wrong now but still important for history questions. The researchers created a system called RD-Forget that keeps all facts stored but only uses the relevant and current ones when answering. This system groups related facts and knows when to ignore outdated information depending on the question. This helps AI give more accurate and flexible answers.
Open 2609.10263v1

Personalized assistants struggle to give good advice in long chats

PRAGMA: Evaluating Personalized Guidance with Memory Alignment in Lifelong Conversations

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as personalized assistants that interact with users over extended periods of time. As conversations grow longer, relying on full interaction histories becomes increasingly inefficient and unreliable: long contexts introduce substantial computational overhead, making it difficult for models to consistently identify and utilize the most relevant information for the current request. These challenges have motivated memory systems that structure and retrieve user-specific information. In realistic interactions, users often seek practical guidance such as recommendations, planning, and decision support. Unlike factual recall tasks, personalized guidance requires models to integrate information across multiple past conversations and reason about changing user preferences and experiences. However, existing conversational memory evaluations mainly focus on retrieval and factual recall. To study this challenge, we introduce PRAGMA, a benchmark for evaluating personalized guidance in long-term conversations. PRGAMA contains curated longitudinal conversation histories, evidence annotations, and guidance scenarios grounded in evolving user contexts and incorrect user assumptions. Experiments across retrieval systems, memory systems, and long-context models reveal that current systems struggle both to recover the appropriate conversational evidence and to effectively use it for personalized guidance. Our results highlight the need for memory architectures that support robust conversational retrieval and memory-grounded reasoning beyond evidence recall.

Wed 9 SeptArtificial Intelligence
The gist
When people use AI assistants over a long time, these assistants find it hard to remember and use the right parts of their past talks. The authors built a test called PRAGMA to see how well different systems can guide users by using their conversation history. They found existing systems often fail to pick the best memory bits and use them correctly for personalized advice. This shows we need better ways for AI to remember and reason over long interactions.
Open 2609.09664v1

Gander unifies real time multimodal interaction and agent reasoning

Omni Interaction Agent Technical Report

Abstract: In this work, we present Gander, an end-to-end model that unifies omni perception, realtime interaction, and agentic capabilities within a single framework. In contrast to turn-based conventional paradigms, Gander continuously receives streaming inputs across multiple modalities, including video, speech, and text, enabling natural full-duplex interaction in both everyday conversations and complex workflow-oriented agent scenarios. Users can interrupt the model at any time, while the model can also proactively provide intermediate feedback or ask follow up questions. To natively support these capabilities, Gander adopts two key architectural designs: 1) It employs a Cerebellum-Brain collaborative framework, in which the Cerebellum is responsible for realtime interaction and omni conversational capabilities, while the Brain handles complex reasoning and higher-level agentic tasks. The two components interact continuously through tool calling and the agent orchestration runtime. 2) The Cerebellum is built upon a streaming Thinker-Talker architecture, user inputs and model outputs are further flattened into an ordered token stream at the chunk level, providing a unified representation for low latency, continuous interaction. We conduct comprehensive evaluations of Gander across four dimensions: conversational ability, omni understanding, interactive capability, and agentic intelligence. Internal human evaluations demonstrate that Gander maintains the natural and expressive spoken dialogue capabilities of SOTA open source models while achieving competitive performance in omni interaction. Gander also demonstrates robustness in challenging real-world scenarios, including background noise interference, multi-party interactions, and backchannel communication. We release Gander together with its models, code, and data to facilitate further research and development in the community.

Tue 8 SeptArtificial IntelligenceMachine LearningMultimedia
The gist
Interacting naturally with AI often means waiting for one response at a time, which can feel slow and awkward. The authors created Gander, a system that listens to and understands video, speech, and text all at once, allowing it to have smooth back-and-forth conversations and handle complex tasks. It can respond instantly or ask questions anytime during an interaction. The system splits duties: one part manages real-time chatting and the other handles deeper thinking and planning. Tests show Gander works well even in noisy places or with multiple people talking.
Open 2609.08977v1

Multimodal question answering moves toward unified language models

Evolution of Multimodal Question Answering: From Modality-Adaptive Extraction to Unified Language Representation

Abstract: The rapid growth of multimodal data has intensified the need for question answering (QA) systems capable of reasoning across heterogeneous sources such as text, tables, and images. In this paper, we present a comprehensive methodological comparison of three influential frameworks, namely Multimodal Adaptive Extraction (MAE), Solar, and UniMMQA, tracing the evolution of multimodal question answering from modality-adaptive pipelines to fully unified architectures. We examine how each approach models cross-modal interactions, transforms heterogeneous inputs, and performs reasoning, highlighting key design differences in modality representation, reasoning, and answer generation. Our analysis demonstrates a clear shift from explicit modality-specific processing toward unified text-centric formulations enabled by pre-trained language models (PLMs). Empirical comparisons across benchmark datasets show that this transition leads to substantial improvements in both Exact Match (EM) and F1-Scores, with UniMMQA achieving the most consistent and scalable performance. Despite these advances, we identify persistent challenges, including information loss during modality transformation, error propagation in multi-stage pipelines, and limitations in capturing fine-grained cross-modal dependencies. Overall, this study provides a deeper understanding of current design trends and offers insights into the future direction of unified multimodal reasoning systems.

Tue 8 SeptComputation and LanguageComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Answering questions from mixed sources like text, tables, and pictures is getting better. The authors compare three different approaches, showing how systems have evolved from handling each type of data separately to using a single language-based model for everything. They find that this unified approach improves accuracy but also point out some challenges like losing details when changing data formats. Their work helps us understand how these systems work and where future improvements may be needed.
Open 2609.08896v1

Self evolving agents improve consistency in repeated language tasks

Closing the Consistency Gap: Self-Evolving Agents That Learn to Stay on Course

Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-powered agents can be accurate on average yet unreliable in production, a discrepancy that has been observed but remains largely unaddressed. When given the same task five times, a ReAct agent on the AppWorld benchmark using GPT-4.1 succeeds in all five runs only 53% of the time, even though its per-run pass rate averages 77%. We call this 24-point shortfall the consistency gap, and we argue that addressing it is a precondition for trustworthy AI agent deployment. We present a self-evolving agent framework that reduces this gap by identifying unstable, low-consistency steps in agent trajectories and converting them into episodic memory the agent can draw on in future runs. At its core is a Consistency Analyzer that pinpoints where and why a trajectory is likely to flip across executions, and a Guideline Generator that converts the diagnosis into targeted guidelines, committed to memory and injected into future agent executions on similar tasks. On AppWorld with ReAct/GPT-4.1, our framework raises the fraction of tasks that succeed in all five runs by +16 points on same-task evaluation and +13 points on similar-task generalization.

Tue 8 SeptArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Sometimes AI agents that use big language models like GPT-4 can get answers right most of the time but still change their minds on the same task when trying it multiple times. This inconsistency can be a problem if we want AI agents to be reliable and trustworthy. The authors created a method where the AI learns from its past mistakes by remembering where it was unsure and creating guidelines to avoid those mistakes in the future. This approach helped the AI become more consistent on repeated tasks and when facing similar new tasks.
Open 2609.08832v1

Graph memory helps language assistants remember and adapt over time

Graph-Based Personalized Memory for LLM Agents: Representation, Evolution, Retrieval, and Evaluation

Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) agents are evolving from single-session tools toward long-term personal assistants that must adapt to individual users across tasks, contexts, and interactions. This shift makes memory a core requirement for personalization, since user preferences, goals, constraints, relationships, and past experiences are accumulated gradually and often change over time. Graph-based personalized memory provides a structured way to model such user information through explicit relations, temporal context, and evidence links. Such representations can model not only what an agent remembers about a user but also how memories are connected, revised, and retrieved to support personalized decisions. However, existing work remains fragmented across personalized agents and generic graph memory frameworks, making it difficult to understand the design space as a whole. This survey develops a lifecycle-oriented view of graph-based personalized memory for LLM agents. We organize existing studies around memory representation, memory evolution, memory retrieval, and memory evaluation. We further compare key design choices, discuss current evaluation practices, and open challenges in building reliable long-term personalized agents. This survey aims to clarify how graph-based memory can support adaptive, controllable, and user-centric LLM agents.

Tue 8 SeptArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Keeping track of what someone says and does is important for language assistants to be helpful over long periods. The authors surveyed how memory can be organized as a graph, which connects bits of user information with links and timelines. This structure can show how memories relate, change, and get looked up later to tailor the assistant’s responses. They also compared different ways to build and evaluate these memory graphs, pointing out challenges and options for future improvements.
Open 2609.08599v1

Large language models struggle with hidden user needs in everyday tasks

xDailyBench: Benchmarking LLMs on Professional Consultation for Real-Life Problems

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for everyday assistance, yet existing benchmarks only partially reflect the requests users naturally make in practice. Real-world requests are often open-ended, casually specified, and context-dependent, requiring models not only to follow explicit instructions but also to infer unstated needs from user background and situational context. We introduce xDailyBench, a benchmark of 248 carefully curated tasks spanning 51 scenarios across personal life, white-collar work, learning and research, and cross-domain activities. The tasks are grounded in requests that users have actually completed or genuinely intended to accomplish with AI, and are evaluated with fine-grained binary rubrics covering both explicit and implicit requirements. We evaluate 11 frontier models under standardized agentic settings. The best models achieve a task-level score of 75.6\%, while all models perform substantially worse on implicit than explicit requirements, with gaps no less than 9 percentage points. These results reveal implicit requirement inference as a persistent bottleneck for reliably satisfying real-world everyday user needs.

Mon 7 SeptArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Many people use AI language models to help with daily problems, but these models often miss the hidden or unspoken parts of what people really want. The authors created a new test called xDailyBench that includes real tasks people actually ask AI to do, covering many types of problems in life and work. They found that even the best AI models do much worse at understanding these hidden needs compared to clear instructions. This shows a big challenge for AI in helping with everyday, real-life requests.
Open 2609.07784v1

Framework generates diverse counterarguments using personas and tree search

PTCG: Persona-guided Tree-based Counterargument Generation

Abstract: The ability to generate counterarguments is important for critical thinking and balanced discourse, yet existing approaches typically produce only a single counterargument, failing to capture the diversity and persuasiveness required in real-world debates. To address this limitation, we propose Persona-guided Tree-based Counterargument Generation (PTCG), a framework that combines Tree-of-Thoughts-inspired step-wise generation and pruning with speaker persona selection. By estimating the author's persona from the original argument and incorporating speaker personas representing distinct perspectives, PTCG operationalizes perspective-taking and enables the generation of diverse counterarguments. Results from LLM-as-a-Judge, classifier-based assessment, and human evaluations indicate that PTCG shows consistent improvements in both the diversity and persuasiveness of counterarguments compared to baseline methods.

Mon 7 SeptComputation and Language
The gist
It’s helpful to see many different responses when someone makes an argument, but most computer programs only come up with one. The authors created a new method that imagines different personality types to respond from and builds replies step by step, like exploring choices in a tree. This helps generate many different, believable counterarguments. Tests by computers and people show this way makes responses more varied and convincing than older methods.
Open 2609.07120v1

MemLoc improves long-term chat memory retrieval and answer quality

Where to Look and What to Use: Retrieve-Localize-Generate for Long-Term Conversational Memory Question Answering

Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enables large language models (LLMs) to answer questions by accessing external knowledge and has been widely adopted for long-term conversational memory question answering. However, existing methods suffer from two key challenges: (1) fragmented evidence scattered across temporally distant sessions, and (2) noisy content within retrieved sessions that triggers the lost-in-the-middle effect. To address these challenges, we propose MemLoc, a unified Retrieve-Localize-Generate framework for long-term conversational memory QA. For retrieval, MemLoc decomposes each session into multi-granularity memory units and performs query routing via an inner-memory graph with entropy-based granularity selection. It further models cross-session semantic and temporal dependencies through a cross-memory graph, enabling coarse-to-fine retrieval of top-K relevant memory candidates. For localization, we introduce a reasoning-based evidence locator trained with Self-reflective Hint Policy Optimization (SHPO), which performs progressive refinement by extracting query-relevant fragments within memory units to suppress noise and reranking across candidates to remove redundancy, producing a compact evidence set with lightweight location IDs. For generation, these IDs act as precise grounding signals that guide the LLM to the correct memory positions, mitigating the lost-in-the-middle effect while preserving original contextual integrity. Extensive experiments on four benchmarks demonstrate that MemLoc achieves state-of-the-art retrieval accuracy and response quality while maintaining efficiency. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Nikol-coder/MemLoc.

Mon 7 SeptComputation and LanguageInformation Retrieval
The gist
Remembering details from long conversations is hard because information can be scattered and mixed up. The authors created MemLoc, which breaks conversations into smaller parts, finds the most helpful bits, and guides language models to use them correctly. This method helps computers give better answers by focusing on the right pieces of past conversations. Tests showed MemLoc works better and faster than other methods.
Open 2609.07093v1

Multimodal sentiment analysis improves with better video processing and timing

Fine-Grained Visual Preprocessing and Dual-Stream Temporal Modeling for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis on Social Media

Abstract: Multimodal sentiment analysis often remains text-dominant due to raw-video noise and insufficient temporal modeling. Using CH-SIMS v2.0S, this study proposes three improvements: the NAPS pipeline---a seven-stage system integrating face tracking,identity embedding, and normalized lip-motion analysis to reduce visual noise;DS-TANet, combining an EfficientNetB2 static stream, RAFT optical-flow motion stream, motion-guided attention, and Bi-GRU temporal modeling; and DS-TAFNet, fusing visual and MacBERT-Base textual representations via concatenation fusion. With NAPS, the static visual baseline achieves 80.98\% Macro F1, comparable to the text baseline of 80.55\%; DS-TANet improves visual Macro F1 to 82.58\%;and DS-TAFNet achieves 87.49\% accuracy and 87.48\% Macro F1. These results demonstrate that improving visual input quality and temporal representation is more effective than increasing fusion complexity under limited-data conditions.

Mon 7 SeptComputer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The gist
Understanding feelings from social media videos is hard because videos can be noisy and the timing of facial movements is tricky to interpret. The authors created a system that cleans up video faces, tracks lip movements, and uses smart methods to read both still images and motion over time. They combined this with text analysis to improve how well computers can guess emotions. Their approach worked better than just making the system more complicated when data is limited.
Open 2609.07010v1