Daily Issue
Vol. I — No. 9
21 · 05
Thursday, 21 May 2026
Generated 2026-05-21 10:44
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I'm actually tougher on myself as I get older. It's a vicious cycle. The things that are important in life are the things that you can't buy in life: love, health and happiness. I say that, and I believe that, and I try to live that. — Criss Angel 34 items · 3 sections
§ 0

The Morning

Local weather 1
This morning in
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currently 18.6°
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20:54
§ I

From the arXiv

arXiv preprints 10 of 20
cs.AIarxiv:2605.21240v1Lead article

APEX: Autonomous Policy Exploration for Self-Evolving LLM Agents

Yibo Li, Jiashuo Yang, Zhi Zheng, Zhiyuan Hu, Yuan Sui

PEX tackles exploration collapse in self-evolving LLM agents by introducing a "strategy map" – a DAG of milestones. This map guides exploration by identifying unexplored directions (Fork Discovery) and balancing discovery with leveraging known good strategies (Policy Selection), enabling agents to learn and adapt effectively at test time.

Illustration of exploration collapse in a maze experiment (5 × \( \times \) 5 grid, 20 episodes, 10 steps each). Room visitation heatmaps (color intensity shows visit proportion; reward cells ( ⋆ \( \star \) ) indicate bonus locations). Static explores broadly but inconsistently. Reflexion locks into a narrow corridor and achieves a higher average while missing high-value rooms. APEX maintains broad coverage and consistently reaches high-reward cells. APEX avoids collapse by explicitly tracking which strategies have been tried and which remain unexplored, and actively directing the agent toward unexplored directions rather than refining familiar ones.
Illustration of exploration collapse in a maze experiment (5 × \( \times \) 5 grid, 20 episodes, 10 steps each). Room visitation heatmaps (color intensity shows visit proportion; reward cells ( ⋆ \( \star \) ) indicate bonus locations). Static explores broadly but inconsistently.…
Figure 1 . Measured vLLM TPOT with and without CUDA Graph under different workloads (64 requests per workload, mean ISL/OSL, tested on 8 × \( \times \) A800-SXM GPUs). Left: co-location. Right: PDD. Percentages show reduction.
Figure 1 . Measured vLLM TPOT with and without CUDA Graph under different workloads (64 requests per workload, mean ISL/OSL, tested on 8 × \( \times \) A800-SXM GPUs). Left: co-location. Right: PDD. P…
cs.AIarxiv:2605.21312v1

Frontier: Towards Comprehensive and Accurate LLM Inference Simulation

Yicheng Feng, Xin Tan et al.

Frontier is a novel discrete-event simulator designed to accurately model the complex, disaggregated architectures of modern LLM inference serving systems. Its core contribution lies in its disaggregated abstraction, which captures the nuances of co-location a…

cs.AIarxiv:2605.21347v1

Insights Generator: Systematic Corpus-Level Trace Diagnostics for LLM Agents

Akshay Manglik, Apaar Shanker et al.

This paper introduces the Insights Generator (IG), a novel multi-agent system for systematically diagnosing failures in LLM agents at a corpus level. IG automates the process of identifying patterns and generating evidence-backed insights from large collection…

Insights Generator (IG) system overview. Left: the input layer provides a diagnostic question, Q Q , trace corpus, 𝒞 \( \mathcal{C} \) , and processed data store, 𝒮 \( \mathcal{S} \) . Center: the Orchestrator dispatches Scout agents ( ℋ \( \mathcal{H} \) : hypothesize over sampled traces) and Investigator agents ( ℋ ∗ \( \mathcal{H}^{*} \) : validate via corpus-scale cohort comparison). The Investigator analyzes ℋ ∗ \( \mathcal{H}^{*} \) to generate findings, ℱ r \( \mathcal{F}_{r} \) , which are sent to the orchestrator. The orchestrator then synthesizes and de-duplicates ℱ r \( \mathcal{F}_{r} \) to generate the final report. Right: the output is an evidence-backed report with findings, fixes, citations, and prevalence estimates. Bottom: the shared tool layer. Algorithm 1 formalizes the analysis loop.
Insights Generator (IG) system overview. Left: the input layer provides a diagnostic question, Q Q , trace corpus, 𝒞 \( \mathcal{C} \) , and processed data store, 𝒮 \( \mathcal{S} \) . Center: the O…
Comparison of (a) workflow-based memory systems, where memory operations are governed by predefined retrieval and update pipelines, (b) learning-based memory systems, where memory operations are jointly optimized with downstream agent outcomes, and (c) our Mem- \( \pi \) , which models memory as a generative policy \( \pi \)_{\( \text{mem} \)} separate from the downstream agent and internalizes reusable experience through offline experience distillation and online adaptation distillation.
Comparison of (a) workflow-based memory systems, where memory operations are governed by predefined retrieval and update pipelines, (b) learning-based memory systems, where memory operations are joint…
cs.AIarxiv:2605.21463v1

Mem-$π$: Adaptive Memory through Learning When and What to Generate

Xiaoqiang Wang, Chao Wang et al.

Mem-$π$ introduces an adaptive memory framework for LLM agents that *generates* useful guidance on demand, rather than retrieving static information. Its core method involves a separate model that learns when and what guidance to produce based on the agent's c…

cs.AIarxiv:2605.21401v1

Open-source LLMs administer maximum electric shocks in a Milgram-like obedience experiment

Roland Pihlakas, Jan Llenzl Dagohoy

This paper investigates LLM obedience by adapting the Milgram experiment. It found that most open-source LLMs, when pressured by an authority figure, administered maximum electric shocks, demonstrating vulnerability to sustained pressure and gradual boundary v…

In how many trials did the model apply the final shocks
In how many trials did the model apply the final shocks
№06
cs.AI
9

PREFINE: Preference-Based Implicit Reward and Cost Fine-Tuning for Safety Alignment

Richa Verma, Bavish Kulur et al.

PREFINE adapts Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) for reinforcement learning to fine-tune pre-trained policies for safety. It uses trajectory-level preferences (preferred vs. dis…

№07
cs.AI
9

Quantifying Hyperparameter Transfer and the Importance of Embedding Layer Learning Rate

Dayal Singh Kalra, Maissam Barkeshli

This paper quantifies hyperparameter transfer, crucial for scaling LLMs, using three metrics: scaling law fit quality, extrapolation robustness, and asymptotic loss penalty. The au…

№08
cs.AI
9

Tracing the ongoing emergence of human-like reasoning in Large Language Models

Paolo Morosi, Nikoleta Pantelidou et al.

This paper investigates whether Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit human-like reasoning by comparing their conditional inference abilities across four languages to human performa…

№09
cs.LG
9

DelTA: Discriminative Token Credit Assignment for Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards

Kaiyi Zhang, Wei Wu et al.

This paper proposes DelTA, a method to improve reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) for large language models. It frames RLVR updates as a linear discriminator tha…

№10
cs.LG
9

Federated LoRA Fine-Tuning for LLMs via Collaborative Alignment

Shuaida He, Liwen Chen et al.

This paper introduces CLAIR, a federated learning framework for fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). CLAIR enables collaborative fine-tuning a…

§ II

The Town Square

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