Papers for

enterprise chatbot 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.

Textual reinforcement learning improves large language model decision context

TextualRL: Textual Reinforcement Learning for Context Management

Abstract: LLM agents can adapt to task feedback by revising the textual context that guides their behavior, without changing their model parameters. However, turning execution rewards into reusable context updates is challenging: individual trajectories offer limited comparative evidence about what to change, while task-specific fixes may overgeneralize when incorporated into a shared context. We introduce TextualRL, a gradient-free reinforcement learning framework that treats a group of rollouts from the same task under the same context, rather than an isolated trajectory, as the unit of policy critique. Groupwise Policy Critique contrasts successful and failed rollouts within a task; when outcomes are uniform, it draws on cross-task evidence to identify behaviors worth preserving or formulate repair hypotheses. Cross-Group Policy Update reviews the resulting proposals against evidence pooled across groups, including observations that yield no proposed edit, to refine their content and applicability. Reviewed proposals form a bounded textual patch, with adoption of the candidate context determined by held-out validation rewards. Together, these components establish a reward-driven policy optimization loop in which multiple attempts jointly inform reusable context updates. We evaluate TextualRL with five target agents on six benchmarks. Averaged over the six benchmarks, TextualRL improves test accuracy over the base model by 24.4 and 15.3 percentage points for GPT-5.5 and Qwen3.8-27B, respectively.

Tue 13 OctComputation and LanguageArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Large language models (LLMs) can improve how they complete tasks by changing the text they use to guide themselves, instead of changing their own brains. But it’s hard to know exactly what text to change just by looking at individual attempts, which might not show the full picture. The authors developed TextualRL, a method that looks at groups of attempts together, compares successes and failures, and uses evidence from many tasks to find helpful text changes. Their approach updates the guiding text in a way that leads to better task performance. Tests showed significant accuracy improvements in multiple models and benchmarks.
Open → 2610.18216v1

Memory in AI agents may omit or add unsupported facts

Memory Is a Derivation: The Distributed-Evidence Paradox in Long-Term Agents

Abstract: Long-running LLM agents compress past interactions into persistent memories that may be reused as premises for later tasks. This creates a distinct derivation problem: whether the memory actually follows from what the interaction history supports. Relevant evidence may be scattered across earlier interactions, while compression can introduce relations or event status that the history never established. A valid memory may therefore appear unsupported because its citations omit relevant evidence, while individually supported facts may be composed into a stronger statement the history never established. We characterize this problem through three coupled requirements: (1) Evidence scope; (2) Compositional validity; (3) Admission reliability. We therefore ask whether the interaction history available at write time supports what enters persistent memory. We introduce DerivAudit, a framework for auditing whether a memory is actually supported by the history available when it was written. The audit separates three questions: whether supporting evidence lies beyond writer-provided citations, whether the composed memory introduces unsupported meaning, and how write-time admission decisions affect later memory use. Across two natural memory corpora, audits using broader pre-write history recover support for nearly 60% of memories that appear unsupported from citations alone, while 17-21% remain unsupported after expansion. Yet broader evidence does not by itself make admission reliable: unsupported memories are still frequently admitted across verification models, and evidence expansion alone worsens it on two backbones.

Mon 28 SeptArtificial Intelligence
The gist
When AI agents remember past conversations, they compress lots of details into shorter memory facts to use later. But sometimes these memory facts seem to come from the past talks but actually leave out some important details or mix facts in ways the original talks didn’t really support. The authors call this the distributed-evidence paradox. They created a method, DerivAudit, to check if what’s remembered really can be traced back to the past conversations available when the memory was made. They found that expanding the search for evidence helps explain many memories but doesn’t solve errors introduced during memory creation.
Open → 2609.36130v1

Cross domain entity recognition improves type accuracy with confusion analysis

Mitigating Entity Type Confusion in Cross-Domain NER via Multidimensional Quantification and Reasoning Enhancement

Abstract: Cross-domain Named Entity Recognition (CD-NER) aims to transfer the rich knowledge in the source domain to the target domain. Recent studies adopting decomposition or generation paradigms have achieved significant performance improvements, demonstrating high accuracy in entity span detection. However, during entity type classification, models severely suffer from entity type confusion, the erroneous tendency that models classify entities of one type in the text as another similar but incorrect type. To address this issue, we first propose a Multidimensional Confusion Quantification Model (MCQM) that quantifies a model's confusion extent between entity types from three dimensions: source-target hierarchy analysis, semantic similarity analysis, and explicit data evaluation. Moreover, we propose the Progressive Bidirectional Reasoning Chain (PBRC). PBRC leverages the source-target hierarchy and confusion analysis from the MCQM to prompt the LLM to generate two-stage reasoning information. The two-stage reasoning information is utilized to augment the knowledge of the model, significantly mitigating entity type confusion and improving the model's generalization performance. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves new state-of-the-art results on all domains of the CrossNER dataset.

Mon 21 SeptComputation and LanguageArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Named Entity Recognition (NER) systems often get confused when identifying the exact type of an entity, especially when moving from one domain to another. The authors show that by carefully measuring how often and why these confusions happen, they can guide a language model to think through its classification in steps, reducing mistakes. Their approach significantly improves accuracy in recognizing different named entities across various topics. This means computers better understand what's being talked about, even when the subject changes.
Open → 2609.24357v1

Combined method improves long input response speed and accuracy

Fine-Tuning a KV Cache Concatenation-Aware Model or Recomputing KV Caches? Why Not Both?

Abstract: In Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems, a large number of retrieved chunks are concatenated to form the input context so that users can receive high-quality responses based on external knowledge. As a result, the input context length increases substantially, leading to a larger prefill workload and, in turn, a longer time to first token (TTFT). While previous works that reuse precomputed key-value (KV) caches effectively reduce TTFT for long-context inputs, it remains unclear whether response quality is preserved when the input context becomes very long. In this paper, we propose a combined approach that (i) fine-tunes the model while taking KV cache concatenation into account and (ii) selectively recomputes a subset of the KV caches. By applying both techniques, we demonstrate improved accuracy for long-context inputs. Experiments on the RULER benchmark show that, for a 124k-token input, our method improves the RULER score by 9.7 point over the baseline that recomputes KV caches only. Moreover, TTFT is reduced by 80% compared with full attention.

Wed 9 SeptMachine LearningArtificial IntelligenceComputation and Language
The gist
When language models answer questions using lots of information, processing everything takes a long time before the first answer word appears. The authors looked into ways to speed this up without losing answer quality by teaching the model to handle joined information chunks better and only updating some parts as needed. Their approach made responses more accurate and much faster when dealing with very long inputs. This could help systems that rely on pulling in large external knowledge collections to give better and quicker answers.
Open → 2609.09768v1