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Papers

May 5, 2026cs.LG

Efficiently Aligning Language Models with Online Natural Language Feedback

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has been used to elicit impressive performance from language models in many domains. But, broadly beneficial deployments of AI may require us to train models with strong capabilities in "fuzzy", hard-to-supervise domains. In this paper, we develop methods to align language models in fuzzy domains where human experts are still able to provide high-quality supervision signal, but only for a small number of model outputs, using online natural language feedback. Specifically, we train models by iteratively optimizing against proxy reward signals, stopping at the point of over-optimization, collecting fresh expert supervision, and updating the proxy reward. We construct proxy reward models from language models using in-context learning (ICL) and fine-tuning. We test our methods by eliciting creative writing and alignment research capabilities in Qwen3-8B and Haiku 4.5 respectively. For Qwen3-8B, ICL methods recover up to 35% of performance with 50x fewer expert samples, while fine-tuning methods recover 80% with up to 20x fewer samples and 100% with 3x fewer samples. For Haiku 4.5, ICL methods recover up to 35% of performance with 30x fewer samples, and fine-tuning methods recover 100% with 10x fewer samples. Our results suggest that online natural language feedback can substantially improve the data efficiency of expert supervision.
Christine Ye, Joe Benton
May 7, 2026cs.AI

CircuitFormer: A Circuit Language Model for Analog Topology Design from Natural Language Prompt

Automating analog circuit design remains a longstanding challenge in Electronic Design Automation (EDA). While Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized software code generation, their application to analog hardware design is hindered by two critical limitations: (i) the scarcity of analog design datasets containing natural language description of a design and its corresponding netlist, and (ii) the inefficiency of general-purpose tokenizers (e.g., Byte Pair Encoding (BPE)) in capturing the inherent graph structure of circuits. To bridge this gap, first, we curate the largest annotated dataset of analog circuit netlists to date, comprising 31,341 netlist-natural language description pairs across all major circuit classes. Furthermore, we propose Circuit Tokenizer (CKT), a novel circuit graph tokenizer designed to encode netlist connectivity by explicitly mining frequent subcircuits. In terms of scalability, CKT overcomes the bottleneck of prior circuit graph serialization methods where vocabulary size scales linearly with maximum number of components in the dataset, n_max, (O(n_max)); instead, CKT decouples vocabulary growth from circuit complexity, achieving a constant O(1) complexity. Empirically, CKT outperforms standard BPE on circuit topology representation, reducing sequence length by 57% and achieving a 2.3x superior compression ratio using a compact, fixed vocabulary of size 512. Leveraging this optimized tokenization, we train a circuit-specific language model, CircuitFormer, a 511M parameter encoder-decoder transformer. Our model achieves 100% syntactic correctness and an 83% functional success rate across all major analog circuit categories, outperforming state-of-the-art open-source LLMs by 10% and 14%, respectively, while requiring 240x fewer parameters. The dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/touhid314/cktformer-dataset.
Md Touhidul Islam, Sujan Kumar Saha, Farimah Farahmandi +1
May 31, 2026cs.HC

pcbGPT: Automatic PCB Schematic Synthesis from Natural Language Requirements

Translating natural-language hardware requirements into correct printed circuit board (PCB) schematics remains difficult in embedded, IoT, and wearable development. Designers must choose compatible components, interpret datasheets, add support circuitry, and expose correct interfaces before layout and prototyping can begin, while many such circuits cannot be validated through straightforward simulation. We present pcbGPT, a grounded system for generating editable KiCad schematics from natural-language specifications. pcbGPT represents circuits in a Python DSL and combines tool-augmented synthesis with component-library search, datasheet-grounded design knowledge, execution-based checking, structural and semantic validation, and an interactive web workflow that supports iterative refinement and synchronization with KiCad projects. We evaluate the system on 20 embedded schematic-generation tasks with reference implementations, required components, and interface constraints that enable automatic comparison. The best model reaches overall pass@1 of 0.90 and pass@5 of 1.00; pass@1 is 1.00 on basic and easy tasks, 0.91 on medium tasks, and 0.72 on hard tasks. These results, together with failure analysis, show that pcbGPT can already generate useful, reviewable first-draft schematics for early prototyping, but is not yet reliable enough to replace expert review.
Tobias King, Steven Kehrberg, Michael Beigl +1
Apr 22, 2026cs.AI

InVitroVision: a Multi-Modal AI Model for Automated Description of Embryo Development using Natural Language

The application of artificial intelligence (AI) in IVF has shown promise in improving consistency and standardization of decisions, but often relies on annotated data and does not make use of the multimodal nature of IVF data. We investigated whether foundational vision-language models can be fine-tuned to predict natural language descriptions of embryo morphology and development. Using a publicly available embryo time-lapse dataset, we fine-tuned PaliGemma-2, a multi-modal vision-language model, with only 1,000 images and corresponding captions, describing embryo morphology, embryonic cell cycle and developmental stage. Our results show that the fine-tuned model, InVitroVision, outperformed a commercial model, ChatGPT 5.2, and base models in overall metrics, with performance improving with larger training datasets. This study demonstrates the potential of foundational vision-language models to generalize to IVF tasks with limited data, enabling the prediction of natural language descriptions of embryo morphology and development. This approach may facilitate the use of large language models to retrieve information and scientific evidence from relevant publications and guidelines, and has implications for few-shot adaptation to multiple downstream tasks in IVF.
Nicklas Neu, Thomas Ebner, Jasmin Primus +4
Aug 4, 2026cs.LG

Bi-semantic Chemical Embedder for Joint Representation Learning of SMILES and Natural Language

Transformer models have revolutionized natural language processing (NLP), and text-based molecular representations like SMILES have successfully extended these architectures to chemistry. However, domain-adaptive pre-training often causes models to overfit to chemical syntax, catastrophically forgetting their foundational semantic capabilities. To address this challenge, we introduce CheMatE, a chemistry-oriented embedding model that jointly captures molecular structure and domain-specific natural language within the same representation space. Built on a ModernBERT backbone, CheMatE learns bi-semantic representations through a two-stage training procedure: continued masked language modeling (MLM) followed by a Matryoshka contrastive learning stage via Multiple Negative Ranking Loss (MNRL). First, we train the model using MLM on a novel, large-scale corpus of SMILES-annotated, long-context scientific documents that were constructed and curated from FineWeb and ChemPile (comprising 10.4B and 11.5B tokens, respectively). Subsequently, the model undergoes contrastive learning using a synthetic dataset of SMILES-text pairs algorithmically derived from our original training corpus. This design exposes the model to SMILES-enriched scientific literature, enabling bi-semantic understanding. We evaluate CheMatE across a range of downstream tasks covering molecular property prediction and scientific language understanding. Our results demonstrate that coupling our custom-curated datasets with this sequential training strategy yields robust, highly transferable representations. By effectively unifying structural and contextual signals within a single text-based framework, CheMatE achieves competitive performance across both specialized chemistry models and general-purpose language model baselines.
David Ming Segura, Jeremy Goumaz, Joshua W. Sin +2
May 8, 2026cs.CV

Learning to Track Instance from Single Nature Language Description

How to achieve vision-language (VL) tracking using natural language descriptions from a video sequence \textbf{without relying on any bounding-box ground truth}? In this work, we achieve this goal by tackling \textit{self-supervised VL tracking}, which aims to evaluate tracking capabilities guided by natural language descriptions. We introduce \textbf{\tracker}, a novel self-supervised VL tracker that is capable of tracking any referred object by a language description. Unlike traditional methods that equally fuse all language and visual tokens, we propose an efficient Dynamic Token Aggregation Module, which treats each visual token \textbf{unequally}. The module consists of three main steps: i) Based on an anchor token, it selects multiple important target tokens from the template frame. ii) The selected target tokens are merged according to their attention scores and aggregated into the language tokens, thereby eliminating redundant visual token noise and enhancing semantic alignment. iii) Finally, the fused language tokens serve as guiding signals to extract potential target tokens from the search frame and propagate them to subsequent frames, enhancing temporal prompts and encouraging the tracker to autonomously learn instance tracking from unlabeled videos. This new modeling approach enables the effective self-supervised learning of language-guided tracking representations without the need for large-scale bounding box annotations. Extensive experiments on VL tracking benchmarks show that {\tracker} surpasses SOTA self-supervised methods.
Yaozong Zheng, Bineng Zhong, Qihua Liang +3
May 24, 2026cs.AI

VeriSimpl: Robust Optimization Modeling from Natural Language using Simplification-based Verification

Natural language interfaces can greatly benefit the accessibility and usability of optimization modeling, and recent advances in large language models (LLMs) show promise in automatically translating textual problem descriptions into executable solver formulations. However, a key challenge for existing approaches is to ensure that the inferred formulation correctly implements the intended task, even if it may execute without errors. We introduce VeriSimpl, a solver LLM framework for robust natural-language-to-optimization formalization. Our approach is based on the idea of simplification-based verification, where the optimization solver is leveraged to generate simplified diagnostic queries about a candidate formulation to allow the LLM to tractably reason about the correctness of the formulation with respect to the task description. We present such simplification strategies along different dimensions with respect to problem constraints and decision variables, which allow the LLM to reason locally under fixed global contexts. Evaluations on a range of optimization benchmarks show how our approach provides consistent improvements in accuracy over existing methods, while also providing a novel high-precision self-verification signal.
Sumaya Abdul Rahman, Seckhen Ariel Andrade Cuellar, Ghani Raissov +1
Jun 3, 2026cs.CL

SANE Schema-aware Natural-language Evaluation of Biological Data

High-throughput microscopy generates large, structured datasets capturing cellular responses to pharmacological perturbations, but accessing these datasets typically requires SQL expertise. Large language models offer a natural-language alternative, yet their tendency to hallucinate raises concerns about result reliability . We present SANE Schema-Aware Natural-language Evaluation, a novel paradigm for domain-specific text-to-SQL evaluation: schema-grounded, automatically generated benchmarks tied to real and specific experimental structure. SANE makes evaluation more scalable, systematic, and reproducible. Using SANE, we evaluate a few-shot large language model and show that, under constrained schemas with structured prompting and guardrails, accurate query generation is achievable without any model training or fine-tuning. Most failures stem from ambiguous or underspecified inputs and manifest as overly cautious clarification requests or answers to queries that should first be disambiguated, rather than incorrect SQL generation. These results indicate that few-shot large language models can provide reliable database access in well-defined domains when combined with schema-aware prompting.
Rolf Gattung, Martin Krueger, Markus Reischl
Jun 22, 2026cs.CL

Bagpiper-TTS: Natural Language Guided Universal Speech Synthesis

Classical TTS systems typically rely on rigid input formats and predefined metadata slots, limiting their ability to fulfill flexible user requirements. This paper introduces Bagpiper-TTS, a universal speech synthesis system that deals with diverse natural language user requests. Given a natural language prompt, Bagpiper-TTS first reasons over the users' intent to derive a rich caption, i.e., a comprehensive textual blueprint encompassing both transcription and nuanced metadata. Subsequently, this caption guides the synthesis of the target speech. Our model inherently supports a broad spectrum of tasks besides classical TTS applications, including multi-talker, intent-to-speech, role-play synthesis, singing voice synthesis, and more. Experimental results demonstrate that Bagpiper-TTS achieves an 1.7% Word Error Rate (WER) on the Seed-TTS-Eval benchmark and match the performance of dedicated models in both LLM-as-a-judge and human subjective evaluations across multiple applications.
Jinchuan Tian, Haoran Wang, Siddhant Arora +6
Sep 16, 2026cs.AI

Which LLM is Best for Translating Natural Language Goals to PDDL

Bridging the gap between human intent and machine execution remains a challenge in automated planning, where expressing goals in formal languages like PDDL restricts accessibility to non-experts. This paper empirically evaluates whether current Large Language Models (LLMs) can reliably translate natural language testing goals, written in informal language by video game testers, into well-formed PDDL targets suitable for classical planning. We present a carefully designed prompt template, integrating insights from iterative experimentation, aimed at maximizing both accuracy and response coherence from multiple state-of-the-art LLMs. Six contemporary models are systematically assessed on correctness, speed, and error tendencies using real-world, domain-specific benchmarks. All models demonstrate high correctness, exceeding 92%, with Gemini 2.5 Flash achieving the highest accuracy at 96% and the lowest incidence of false positives, while GPT-4.1 leads in response speed. Despite these advances, critical distinctions exist in model performance, and occasional failures arise from language ambiguity and limitations in domain representation. Our analysis underscores both the significant progress and ongoing gaps in enabling LLMs to act as robust bridges between natural language objectives and automated planning pipelines.
Tomas Balyo, Lukas Chrpa, G. Michael Youngblood
Sep 16, 2026cs.RO

VLM-MPPI: Grounding Natural Language in Behaviorally Diverse Trajectories for Aerial Navigation

We present a hierarchical UAV navigation framework that aligns natural-language intent with dynamically feasible flight behaviors in cluttered indoor environments. To bridge the gap between abstract semantics and low-level control, we employ a parallelized ensemble of six behavior-conditioned Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) planners. Crucially, by designing mode-specific guiding costs and sampling biases, we induce distinct trajectory modes that converge to unique behavioral means, yielding a compact set of intentionally diverse candidates rather than mere stochastic variations. We project these 3D candidates onto the onboard first-person-view RGB stream, turning language grounding into a visual action selection problem. A pretrained vision--language model (VLM) asynchronously selects the candidate index given the overlaid FPV image and a natural-language prompt, while MPPI replans at 20Hz and a PID-based low-level controller tracks the selected trajectory. We implement the full pipeline in NVIDIA Isaac Sim and on a real-world quadrotor platform equipped with LiDAR and RGB sensing. Experiments in both simulation and real-world flights show semantically meaningful behavior diversity, robust language alignment despite VLM latency, and safe, repeatable flight across all modes, achieving 100% task success in our evaluated scenarios.
Hanbing Zhang, Fangguo Zhao, Zerui Li +3
Jul 25, 2026cs.LG

Verbalized Particle Posterior: Bayesian Inference over Natural Language Hypotheses

Verbalized Machine Learning (VML) parameterizes a model as a natural-language prompt that an LLM evaluates as f(x; theta). The framework is interpretable, but it commits to a single hypothesis with no measure of uncertainty, and that hypothesis varies substantially across optimization runs on the same data. We propose the Verbalized Particle Posterior (VPP), which treats verbalized learning as a Bayesian inference problem: maintain a population of natural-language hypotheses as particles, update them with Metropolis-Hastings (VPP-MH) or Sequential Monte Carlo (VPP-SMC), and predict by Bayesian model averaging. Both algorithms treat the LLM as a black box, requiring no access to logits or gradients. A distinctive consequence follows. In classical Bayesian learning, model selection sits outside the posterior; in VPP both model structure and parameters share a single language space, and the posterior ranges over both. We evaluate VPP on regression, classification, and rule-discovery benchmarks. It improves over a single VML run on every benchmark and matches or exceeds an oracle-best ensemble of independent VML runs on most, while eliminating the catastrophic single-run failures that VML occasionally produces. Because each particle is a human-readable hypothesis, the posterior is itself something a reader can inspect, seeing in plain text which explanations the data supported and which it ruled out.
Yan Zhang, Shikan Lian, Shibo Li
May 1, 2026cs.LG

RunAgent: Interpreting Natural-Language Plans with Constraint-Guided Execution

Humans solve problems by executing targeted plans, yet large language models (LLMs) remain unreliable for structured workflow execution. We propose RunAgent, a multi-agent plan execution platform that interprets natural-language plans while enforcing stepwise execution through constraints and rubrics. RunAgent bridges the expressiveness of natural language with the determinism of programming via an agentic language with explicit control constructs (e.g., \texttt{IF}, \texttt{GOTO}, \texttt{FORALL}). Beyond verifying syntactic and semantic verification of the step output, which is performed based on the specific instruction of each step, RunAgent autonomously derives and validates constraints based on the description of the task and its instance at each step. RunAgent also dynamically selects among LLM-based reasoning, tool usage, and code generation and execution (e.g., in Python), and incorporates error correction mechanisms to ensure correctness. Finally, RunAgent filters the context history by retaining only relevant information during the execution of each step. Evaluations on Natural-plan and SciBench Datasets demonstrate that RunAgent outperforms baseline LLMs and state-of-the-art PlanGEN methods.
Arunabh Srivastava, Mohammad A., Khojastepour +2
Feb 27, 2026cs.AI

SleepLM: Natural-Language Intelligence for Human Sleep

We present SleepLM, a family of sleep-language foundation models that enable human sleep alignment, interpretation, and interaction with natural language. Despite the critical role of sleep, learning-based sleep analysis systems operate in closed label spaces (e.g., predefined stages or events) and fail to describe, query, or generalize to novel sleep phenomena. SleepLM bridges natural language and multimodal polysomnography, enabling language-grounded representations of sleep physiology. To support this alignment, we introduce a multilevel sleep caption generation pipeline that enables the curation of the first large-scale sleep-text dataset, comprising over 100K hours of data from more than 10,000 individuals. Furthermore, we present a unified pretraining objective that combines contrastive alignment, caption generation, and signal reconstruction to better capture physiological fidelity and cross-modal interactions. Extensive experiments on real-world sleep understanding tasks verify that SleepLM outperforms state-of-the-art in zero-shot and few-shot learning, cross-modal retrieval, and sleep captioning. Importantly, SleepLM also exhibits intriguing capabilities including language-guided event localization, targeted insight generation, and zero-shot generalization to unseen tasks. All code and data will be open-sourced.
Zongzhe Xu, Zitao Shuai, Eideen Mozaffari +3
Date pendingcs.AI

Improving Natural-Language Combinatorial-Optimization Accuracy in Resource-Constrained Language Models via Formal Abstractions

Combinatorial scheduling poses a significant challenge for language models, requiring them to identify feasible solutions within exponentially large search spaces while satisfying complex constraints. This challenge is especially pronounced in resource-constrained settings, where larger language models are impractical and selection is limited to smaller models which often fail to preserve feasibility when scheduling directly from natural language. To address these limitations, we introduce SDDL, a neuro-symbolic framework that translates natural-language scheduling problems into compact, solver-aligned representations of tasks, resources, constraints, and objectives, while delegating low-level modeling and search to a deterministic compiler and external solver. On a 300-instance, multi-family subset of scheduling problems, SDDL improves independently verified feasibility for every resource-constrained model tested. The two strongest SDDL configurations reach 55.3% and 28.3%, up from direct-generation baselines of 23.7% and 1.3% and solver-code baselines of 21.7% and 7.0%, with a 0.0% median optimality gap among feasible schedules. By expressing problem structure rather than generating solutions or solver code, SDDL enables smaller models to approach the strongest evaluated direct- and solver-code configurations, including substantially larger frontier models.
Shrenil Shaun Sharma, Avi Sharma
Jun 1, 2026cs.RO

SCOPE: Real-Time Natural Language Camera Agent at the Edge

Deploying language-driven agents in robotics requires evaluations that reflect real-world task demands: natural-language instructions with reproducible outcomes. Such agents must connect language models to callable perception and control tools, and be assessed using deployment-critical metrics including latency, accuracy, and error modes. We present SCOPE (Simulation and Camera Operations for Perception and Evaluation), a modular agent for natural-language, open-vocabulary pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) camera control and visual scene understanding, designed explicitly for edge deployment. SCOPE operates both in a Blender-based simulation environment and on a physical PTZ camera, executing all perception, planning, and control locally at the deployment site using edge-accessible compute. We release a 536-task benchmark spanning QA, single- and multi-step commands, counting, spatial reasoning, descriptions, and optical character recognition in a Blender-based simulation environment that exposes realistic PTZ control affordances. Execution traces are combined with an LM-as-Judge to evaluate latency, accuracy, and error modes. We evaluate 19 planner-perception model combinations pairing Qwen3 small language models (SLMs) with Moondream and Qwen vision-language models (VLMs). Stronger SLMs substantially reduce hallucinations and improve tool routing, leading to more reliable closed-loop behavior. Once a sufficiently capable SLM is used, perception becomes the dominant performance bottleneck. Mixture-of-Experts models on both the planning and perception side consistently match or exceed dense alternatives at latencies and memory footprints comparable to much smaller networks. Quantization provides additional efficiency gains with minimal accuracy degradation, identifying a practical, sim-to-real validated design point for real-time, edge-feasible language-driven PTZ control.
Nikolaj Hindsbo, Sina Ehsani, Pragyana Mishra
Apr 20, 2026cs.AI

From Natural Language to Executable Narsese: A Neuro-Symbolic Benchmark and Pipeline for Reasoning with NARS

Large language models (LLMs) are highly capable at language generation, but they remain unreliable when reasoning requires explicit symbolic structure, multi-step inference, and interpretable uncertainty. This paper presents a neuro-symbolic framework for translating natural-language reasoning problems into executable formal representations using first-order logic (FOL) and Narsese, the language of the Non-Axiomatic Reasoning System (NARS). To support this direction, we introduce NARS-Reasoning-v0.1, a benchmark of natural-language reasoning problems paired with FOL forms, executable Narsese programs, and three gold labels: True, False, and Uncertain. We develop a deterministic compilation pipeline from FOL to executable Narsese and validate retained examples through runtime execution in OpenNARS for Applications (ONA), ensuring that the symbolic targets are not only syntactically well formed but also behaviorally aligned with the intended answer. We further present Language-Structured Perception (LSP), a formulation in which an LLM is trained to produce reasoning-relevant symbolic structure rather than only a final verbal response. As an initial proof of concept, we also train and release a Phi-2 LoRA adapter on NARS-Reasoning-v0.1 for three-label reasoning classification, showing that the benchmark can support supervised adaptation in addition to executable evaluation. Overall, the paper positions executable symbolic generation and execution-based validation as a practical path toward more reliable neuro-symbolic reasoning systems.
Mina Gabriel, Pei Wang
Jul 13, 2026cs.CL

Communicating Chess Strategies in Natural Language

Chess engines have long achieved superhuman playing strength. However, the underlying strategy behind their move suggestions is difficult for human players, even skilled ones, to comprehend. Motivated by this, we propose the task of chess strategy verbalization, which is to describe chess strategies in natural language. We design (i) a pipeline for verbalizing strategies and (ii) an evaluation framework for objective evaluation of generated strategy descriptions. Our experiments show that natural language is a promising and interpretable medium for communicating strategic information to both human and LLM players. We glean additional interesting insights, including (a) the importance of evaluating strategies beyond the main line, (b) the limitations of pure concept-based descriptions, and (c) the limitations of relying on LLMs rather than humans for evaluation.
Langyuan Cui, Chun Kai Ling, Hwee Tou Ng
Jul 14, 2026cs.SE

Faithful Autoformalization of Natural Language Assertions

Formal contracts are essential for software testing and verification, yet writing them remains labor-intensive and error-prone. LLMs offer a promising path toward autoformalization: synthesizing executable assertions from natural-language specifications and thereby bridging the gap between informal developer intent and formal executable specifications. We present Monty: an autoformalization framework for assertions that tackles the challenges of expectations of validity of assertions and ambiguity in natural-language. Our techniques are based on filtering formalizations using a novel conformance score metric and validity scores obtained from testing the code against formalized assertions. We evaluate our approach on 541 assertion-generation tasks derived from 22 collection-like Java classes, and show that our technique produces the ground truth more reliably (improving upto 20 points in precision on average) than when using LLMs naively to translate assertions.
Hongyi Liu, Madhusudan Parthasarathy, Adithya Murali
Jul 24, 2026cs.AI

NL2SHACL-Bench: A Benchmark Suite for Natural Language to SHACL Translation

SHACL is a core technology for validating the conformance of RDF knowledge graphs (KGs). Yet, authoring SHACL shapes requires technical expertise that most domain experts lack. Translating natural language requirements into SHACL (NL2SHACL) would lower this barrier. However, there is no dedicated benchmark for NL2SHACL, and evaluating generated shapes requires methods beyond string comparison, as semantically equivalent shapes can differ in serialisation and structure. To tackle these challenges, we present NL2SHACL-Bench, a benchmark suite for natural language to SHACL translation. Using NL2SHACL-Bench, we evaluate four state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) for this task. Our results show that current LLMs are highly capable of generating syntactically valid SHACL, but still struggle to produce semantically equivalent constraints for complex logical and structural patterns. This indicates that NL2SHACL-Bench provides a meaningful basis for measuring advances in the NL2SHACL state of the art.
Yuchen Zhou, Niels Bobet, Maribel Acosta
Aug 11, 2026cs.AI

Evaluating Rational Contracting in Natural Language

The emergence of language-based AI agents promises to transform the scope of machine economic activity. Instead of just proposing bids or following hard-coded protocols, such agents can be used to negotiate and execute agreements in open-ended natural language. However, most evaluations of these abilities have focused on one-off exchanges or simple economic games, leaving open the rich space of time-extended, contingent, and incomplete contracts made expressible by language; they also focus on raw profit, without measuring the qualities required for trustworthy contracting. We address this by formulating a rational framework for how agents should negotiate and perform natural language contracts in uncertain multi-step environments. Within this framework, we develop metrics and baselines for quantifying rational and cooperative play. To evaluate how agents perform at such contracting, we instantiate our framework in ContractSim, an evaluation suite where two players negotiate and execute a multi-turn supplier contract under environmental and inter-player uncertainty. Across six environments and three supplier settings (catering, hotel cleaning, and AI hosting) we find that current LLM-based agents reach agreement reliably, and negotiate efficient contracts when environmental uncertainty is low. However, under high uncertainty, they often fail to negotiate satisfiable, efficient, or mutually beneficial contracts. They are also frequently uncooperative when executing contracts, violating contract terms for additional profit even when contracts are easy to satisfy. These findings highlight room for improvement in the design of language agents that can negotiate, interpret, and execute contracts both rationally and cooperatively.
Bhavyesh Sajja, Max Kleiman-Weiner, Roger Zimmermann +1
Date pendingcs.AI

QuantumQUBO Agent: Automating Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) Formulation Generation from Natural Language

Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) is a central formulation for combinatorial optimization and has gained increasing attention due to its compatibility with quantum, hybrid quantum-classical, and quantum-inspired solvers. However, translating natural-language problem descriptions into correct QUBO formulations remains difficult, requiring the identification of binary variables, constraints, objective functions, penalty terms, and suitable penalty weights. This process is time-consuming and often demands substantial domain expertise. To address this challenge, we propose an end-to-end multi-agent framework that automatically generates QUBO formulations from natural-language problem descriptions, supported by structured or unstructured test cases. To evaluate its performance, We also introduce QUBOBench, a benchmark containing 100 combinatorial optimization problems across 12 application domains, curated from peer-reviewed literature, competitions, and canonical NP-hard problems. Experimental results show that our framework achieves 68% accuracy on QUBOBench, outperforming a direct single-call baseline by 22%. Further analysis identifies iterative self-repair as the most important component contributing to improved performance. The data and code are open-sourced at https://quitttcat.github.io/QuantumQUBOAgent.
Niloy Kumar Mondal, Md Rizwan Parvez
Jun 2, 2026cs.AI

SMAC-Talk: A Natural Language Extension of the StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge for Large Language Models

As LLMs become more widely deployed, they are increasingly expected to work alongside other AI agents rather than operating in isolation. Effective coordination in these settings requires agents to communicate, share information and make decisions under uncertainty. We introduce SMAC-Talk, a natural language extension of the StarCraft Multi-Agent Challenge for evaluating LLM-based agents in cooperative multi-agent environments. The environment has several key features such as decentralized control, partial observability and long-horizon decision making. SMAC-Talk includes a natural language communication channel which is used to probe agent coordination and trust. We use this communication channel to construct different evaluation scenarios, including settings with an embedded deceptive communicator that tries to disrupt and deceive allies through communication alone. We provide three agents for benchmarking using 4 models from the Qwen3.5 family and study how reasoning structure, memory and model scale affect coordination between agents. We release SMAC-Talk as an open benchmark to support the research community in developing and evaluating LLM agents in cooperative multi-agent settings.
Joel Sol, Homayoun Najjaran
May 18, 2026cs.CV

Incantation: Natural Language as the Action Interface for Multi-Entity Video World Models

Modern interactive video world models have achieved impressive visual fidelity, yet lack fine-grained multi-entity control and cross-entity, cross-world generalization. We trace this gap to the action interface: standard control protocols (e.g. animation IDs, device inputs, scene-level captions) bind action semantics to specific entities or engines at design time. We propose natural language as the interface to unlock expressiveness that no prior interface can achieve, and we present Incantation, the first interactive video world model with per-latent-frame (0.25 s) natural-language conditioning that supports simultaneous multi-entity control and concept-level cross-entity transfer beyond any fixed rendering pipeline. We pair a pretrained bidirectional video backbone with frame-local text cross-attention, and enable real-time long-horizon streaming through ODE-initialized Self-Forcing distillation with a RoPE-decoupled sliding KV-cache. We surpass the Action-Index baseline on cross-entity transfer (89% vs. 43%) and out-of-vocabulary prompts (90% vs. 0%), and our 2-step student sustains 19.7 FPS at 480p with stable FVD over 2-hour rollouts. We further apply the same architecture and training recipe to The King of Fighters, changing only the per-entity action vocabulary slots. We have released a preview subset of the Incantation dataset at https://huggingface.co/datasets/zhush/incantation-elden-ring-scenes, containing manually collected Elden Ring player-boss combat clips with structured action-oriented metadata. Larger-scale Elden Ring and KOF data will be released with the full project.
Shangwen Zhu, Qianyu Peng, Zhao Pu +12
Sep 8, 2026cs.AI

EvolveScaler: Synthesizing Information-Evolution Contexts via Executable State Machines and Natural-Language Rendering

In persistent interactions, long contexts may encode an evolving process rather than a fixed record: later events can revise or revoke earlier information, changing what remains valid and what conclusions follow. We call this setting information evolution (IE). Solving IE requires identifying valid records, applying updates in order, and reconstructing the query-relevant state from the event history. Existing text-first synthesis pipelines make such data difficult to verify because state transitions and answer logic remain implicit. We introduce EvolveScaler, a code-driven framework that defines information evolution before rendering it as natural language. Human-authored operational specifications define state transitions, record validity, difficulty controls, and executable answer logic; a strong LLM then synthesizes a self-contained simulator from each specification. Executing validated simulators produces natural-language multi-turn event histories, while deterministic replay computes reference answers and atomic checklists. We instantiate EvolveScaler with 117 task prototypes and 159 final-question operators across five difficulty levels spanning approximately 7 to 1,200 events per instance, yielding about 35,100 training examples and 585 validated evaluation instances. On the very_long tier, the strongest model reaches 59.3% avg@5, while six models score below 10%. Training an internal A3B model on 6,000 EvolveScaler examples improves performance over its base checkpoint on all eight independently constructed out-of-distribution benchmarks, with a 5.25-point average gain. These results show that code-driven IE synthesis provides both challenging evaluation and transferable training supervision.
Ziliang Zhao, Zenan Xu, Shuting Wang +6
May 31, 2026cs.CL

Benchmarking Local LLMs for Natural-Language-to-SQL Querying in Biopharmaceutical Manufacturing: An Empirical Benchmark on Consumer-Grade Hardware

Biopharmaceutical manufacturing organizations operate under regulatory frameworks such as FDA guidance, EU Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP), and the EU AI Act, which can restrict the use of cloud-based artificial intelligence systems. Locally deployed large language models (LLMs) offer a privacy-preserving alternative, but their suitability for pharmaceutical manufacturing tasks remains underexplored. This study evaluates four open-source LLMs (Qwen 2.5 Coder 7B, Llama 3.1 8B, Mistral 7B, and Meditron 7B) deployed locally via Ollama for natural-language-to-SQL generation over a pharmaceutical manufacturing database. A FastAPI-based evaluation platform, PharmaBatchDB AI, was developed using a synthetic Microsoft SQL Server database containing approximately 63,000 records across Batch, Manufacturing Execution System (MES), and Clean-In-Place (CIP) modules. Models were benchmarked on 60 domain-specific natural-language questions using metrics including SQL extraction rate, SQL compliance, factual consistency, ROUGE-L, hallucination rate, throughput, and latency. Qwen 2.5 Coder 7B, Llama 3.1 8B, and Mistral 7B generated SQL for all evaluation tasks, while Meditron 7B failed on nearly all tasks due to context-window limitations and poor SQL generation capability. Llama 3.1 8B achieved the highest SQL compliance, whereas Qwen 2.5 Coder 7B achieved the strongest overall text similarity and factual consistency. Performance differences between the two leading models were not statistically significant. The results show that code-tuned general-purpose LLMs outperform a domain-specific biomedical model on structured query generation for pharmaceutical manufacturing data. Although fully local, GxP-aligned NLQ systems are feasible on consumer hardware, current performance levels still require human oversight and downstream validation for regulated use.
Sagar Bhetwal, Rajan Bastakoti, Nirajan Acharya +2
Jul 16, 2026cs.CL

CityLLM: A framework for natural-language querying of semantic 3D city models

Semantic 3D city models provide rich geometric and semantic information, but remain challenging for non-experts and interdisciplinary researchers to access and query due to their complex structures and specialized data formats. To address this issue, we present CityLLM, a framework for natural-language querying of semantic 3D city models alongside complementary urban datasets. The framework combines spatial and graph databases within an LLM-based workflow that supports iterative query refinement and cross-database chaining. We evaluate CityLLM on a CityJSON dataset of Rotterdam (853 LoD2 buildings) using GPT-OSS, Gemini 3.1, and GPT-5.4, along with selected variants, across multiple metrics: answer correctness, visualization correctness, query success, and retry attempts. A total of 54 natural-language queries are curated across four scenarios: spatial, graph, cross-database, and conversational. Results show strong overall performance, with answer correctness ranging from 85.2% to 100%, visualization correctness from 92.9% to 100%, a 100% query success rate, and fewer than three retries across all 54 queries. Overall, the findings suggest that CityLLM provides a lightweight and extensible approach for conversational access to semantic 3D city data.
Rabindra Lamsal, Sisi Zlatanova, Johnson Xuesong Shen
Apr 20, 2026cs.CL

Automatic Slide Updating with User-Defined Dynamic Templates and Natural Language Instructions

Presentation slides are a primary medium for data-driven reporting, yet keeping complex, analytics-style decks up to date remains labor-intensive. Existing automation methods mostly follow fixed template filling and cannot support dynamic updates for diverse, user-authored slide decks. We therefore define "Dynamic Slide Update via Natural Language Instructions on User-provided Templates" and introduce DynaSlide, a large-scale benchmark with 20,036 real-world instruction-execution triples (source slide, user instruction, target slide) grounded in a shared external database and built from business reporting slides under bring-your-own-template (BYO-template) conditions. To tackle this task, we propose SlideAgent, an agent-based framework that combines multimodal slide parsing, natural language instruction grounding, and tool-augmented reasoning for tables, charts, and textual conclusions. SlideAgent updates content while preserving layout and style, providing a strong reference baseline on DynaSlide. We further design end-to-end and component-level evaluation protocols that reveal key challenges and opportunities for future research. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/XiaoZhou2024/SlideAgent.
Kun Zhou, Jiakai He, Wenmian Yang +3
Oct 17, 2025cs.CL

POPI: Personalizing LLMs via Optimized Natural Language Preference Inference

Large language models (LLMs) are typically aligned with population-level preferences, despite substantial variation across individual users. We introduce POPI, a user-level personalization framework that separates the problem into two components connected by a natural-language interface: a shared inference model that distills heterogeneous user signals into a concise preference summary, and a shared generator that conditions on this summary to produce personalized responses. Both components are trained under a unified preference-optimization objective, with reinforcement learning handling the non-differentiable inference step. This objective decomposes into generator approximation error and summary informativeness, revealing how a single loss simultaneously drives accurate generation and informative summarization. Because the interface is natural language, learned summaries can be inferred once per user and reused across different generators -- including frozen, black-box commercial APIs. Across four personalization benchmarks, POPI generally improves personalization quality while reducing context overhead by up to an order of magnitude.
Yizhuo Chen, Xin Liu, Ruijie Wang +7
Jun 12, 2026cs.RO

Optimality-Preserving Decomposition for Scalable QAOA in Natural-Language-Guided Multi-Drone Assignment

As multi-drone fleets scale, zone assignment rapidly evolves into an intractable NP-hard combinatorial problem that overwhelms classical exhaustive search. While quantum optimization promises to shatter these classical bottlenecks, mapping complex spatial tasks from human intent to restricted quantum hardware remains a severe challenge. To bridge this gap, we present an end-to-end framework integrating a fine-tuned Large Language Model (LLM) front-end with a highly scalable, domain-specific quantum-classical backend. The front-end utilizes Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to translate free-form natural language instructions into structurally robust Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) constraints without false negatives. To overcome the strict qubit limits of near-term quantum devices, our framework features a novel constraint-preserving graph partitioner and a compressed separator-based dynamic programming (DP) merge. By structurally encoding constraints via W-state initialization and XY-mixers in Conditional Value-at-Risk Quantum Approximate Optimization (CVaR-QAOA), the pipeline stays highly compact. Empirical results demonstrate that this architecture circumvents classical scaling walls, recovering the global optimum on 100% of idealized oracle cases and 96.3% under real QAOA sampling, enabling natural-language-guided task allocation at previously intractable scales.
Junyeop Bang, Byongho Lee, Dohyun An +1