Daily Issue
Vol. I — No. 87
02 · 10
Friday, 2 October 2026
Generated 2026-10-02 09:42
google/gemini-2.5-flash-lite
Humor is the instinct for taking pain playfully. — Max Eastman 36 items · 3 sections
§ 0

The Morning

Local weather 1
This morning in
London
Overcast
Today's range
19.9°↓12.7°
currently 16.5°
Feels
15.4°
Rain
4%
Wind
11 km/h
Humid
72%
Rise
07:02
Set
18:36
§ I

From the arXiv

arXiv preprints 10 of 20
cs.AIarxiv:2605.06869Lead article

Agentick: A Unified Benchmark for General Sequential Decision-Making Agents

Roger Creus Castanyer, Pablo Samuel Castro, Glen Berseth

gentick is a unified benchmark designed to fairly evaluate diverse sequential decision-making agents, including RL, LLM, and hybrid approaches. It offers 37 procedurally generated tasks across various capabilities, difficulties, and modalities through a single interface. Agentick's contribution lies in enabling direct comparison of agent types and facilitating research into fundamental sequential decision-making challenges.

Two observation modalities for KeyDoorPuzzle at medium difficulty. Left: isometric pixel rendering (512 × \( \times \) 512 by default, resizable for RL preprocessing) for VLM agents, CNN-based RL, and human play. Right: ASCII grid for LLM agents; the agent ( ˆ ) must collect the gold key ( Kg ), open the gold door ( Dg ), then the red key ( Kr ) and red door ( Dr ) to reach the goal ( G ). The same state also produces natural language, structured dictionary, and numpy array observations.
Two observation modalities for KeyDoorPuzzle at medium difficulty. Left: isometric pixel rendering (512 × \( \times \) 512 by default, resizable for RL preprocessing) for VLM agents, CNN-based RL, and human play. Right: ASCII grid for LLM agents; the agent ( ˆ ) must collect the …
cs.AIarxiv:2608.27167

Calibrated Enough to Know, Not Calibrated to Act: Fabricated Evidence Makes LLM Agents Commit to the Unknowable

Pranav Aggarwal

This paper demonstrates that Large Language Model (LLM) agents are highly susceptible to fabricated evidence, committing to actions on unknowable questions when presented with professional-looking data. The core method involves comparing LLM agent responses to…

cs.AIarxiv:2605.25430

CODESKILL: Learning Self-Evolving Skills for Coding Agents

Yanzhou Li, Yiran Zhang et al.

CODESKILL is a novel LLM-based framework that learns to manage a bank of reusable coding skills. It extracts, evolves, and maintains these skills from agent trajectories using a learned policy, addressing limitations of fixed prompts and heuristic updates. Thi…

Overview of the CODESKILL pipeline.
Overview of the CODESKILL pipeline.
cs.AIarxiv:2604.04247

Combee: Scaling Prompt Learning for Self-Improving Language Model Agents

Hanchen Li, Runyuan He et al.

Combee is a novel framework designed to scale prompt learning for self-improving language model agents. Its core method addresses the limitations of existing approaches by enabling efficient and high-quality parallel prompt learning, allowing agents to learn f…

cs.AIarxiv:2609.31215

DIAL: Position-Debiased LLM Judges with Adaptive Human Preference Calibration

Zesheng Cai, Yingqi Fan et al.

DIAL is a framework that uses both abundant LLM comparisons and limited human feedback to improve LLM-based evaluations. It debiases LLM judgments by accounting for response order and then calibrates these debiased LLM preferences to better align with actual h…

Overview of DIAL framework. (a) Pairwise evaluation combines abundant, scalable LLM judgments with limited, higher-fidelity human judgments. (b) Empirical examples illustrate two distinct challenges: position bias and human-preference misalignment. (c) DIAL jointly models LLM and human comparisons to separate judge-specific position effects from latent LLM preferences, learn shared preference structure across judges, and adaptively calibrate toward human preference.
Overview of DIAL framework. (a) Pairwise evaluation combines abundant, scalable LLM judgments with limited, higher-fidelity human judgments. (b) Empirical examples illustrate two distinct challenges: …
№06
cs.AI
9

Estimating and Orthogonalizing Unknown Pre-training Gradients for Continual Fine-tuning of Large Language Models

Bing Wang, Changchun Li et al.

This paper proposes EoupCT, a novel framework to address catastrophic forgetting in continual LLM fine-tuning. EoupCT estimates unknown pre-training gradients by generating pseudo-…

№07
cs.AI
9

FTB Graph: Determining and Validating First-token Broadcasters and Language-Identity Head Circuits in Multilingual Language Models

Arjun Pillai, Christian Hoang et al.

This paper introduces FTB Graph, a method using Edge Attribution Patching and activation patching to map the causal circuits responsible for determining the target language of mult…

№08
cs.AI
9

G$^2$PTQ: Improving LLM Post-Training Quantization with Generalized Gradient Compensation

Ruikang Liu, Haoli Bai et al.

G$^2$PTQ improves LLM post-training quantization by unifying first- and second-order gradient information within a globally supervised, block-wise optimization. It addresses limita…

№09
cs.AI
9

HasMem: Hard-Origin Adaptively Softened Memory for Long-Term LLM Agents

Zihong He, Junxiao Shen et al.

HasMem introduces a novel memory system for long-term LLM agents that combines a fixed, verifiable "hard-origin" prompt with an adaptively softened memory. This approach allows for…

№10
cs.AI
9

MoMHa: Multi-Objective Optimization of LLM Harnesses over Accuracy, Safety, and Tokens

Subhojyoti Mukherjee, Md Mehrab Tanjim

This paper introduces MoMHa, a novel method for optimizing the Python code (harness) that surrounds Large Language Models. MoMHa treats harness design as a multi-objective search p…

§ II

The Town Square

Hacker News 7
202
Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2026)
1 Oct
115
110
Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (October 2026)
1 Oct
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