Modifications

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2 papers in the last 28 days · 0.1% of indexed attention

Twelve weeks of publication activity for this topic as it is defined today.

24 papers

Latest in Modifications

Sep 8, 2026cs.AI

Safe Harness Self-Evolution: A Theoretical Analysis of Feasibility and Limits

Harness self-evolution is the process by which an agent modifies its prompts, tools, code, or orchestration in response to task feedback while keeping the underlying language model frozen, with changes persisting across subsequent tasks. We provide a systematic theoretical analysis of the feasibility and limits of safe harness self-evolution, connecting modification generation, finite-data certification and selection, safe adoption, and behavior after an update. Under a fixed user-task distribution, we establish conditions guaranteeing overall expected-reward improvement while controlling changes on retained tasks, characterize the probability of generating qualified modifications, and derive finite-data bounds for safe selection and adoption. Our analysis shows that generation and certification impose distinct constraints: current task performance does not determine the probability of generating qualified modifications, and generating more candidates need not improve the guarantee of a successful update when evaluation is limiting. Stagnation may therefore arise even when improvement opportunities remain. We further show that worst-case evaluation cost for recognizing genuine improvements diverges as expected reward approaches its upper bound. Across successive updates, certified improvement guarantees accumulate over a finite run, but a successful update does not by itself guarantee that further improvement remains possible. These results provide a basis for diagnosing bottlenecks and designing safer self-evolution mechanisms.
Qianshu Cai, Yonggang Zhang, Jun Nie +6
Aug 28, 2026cs.AI

EvoUndo: Recoverability-Constrained Self-Evolution for LLM Agent Harnesses

LLM agents increasingly modify their own prompts, tools, middleware, resources, and execution harnesses at runtime. Such self-evolution can improve capability, but a successful mutation may leave persistent effects that cannot be safely reversed in states different from the one in which it was created. We introduce EvoUndo, a framework for representing, synthesizing, diagnosing, and independently verifying recoverability of model-generated self-modifications across counterfactual states. Across 600 unseen one-shot self-evolution tasks, we identify 197 capability-improving mutations that fail recoverability verification. Under the original recovery representation, conventional repair strategies recover 0/197 of these natural failures. Deterministic oracle analysis recovers 48/197 under the original recovery language L0, while the extended recovery calculus increases empirical oracle recovery to 191/197. A protocol-locked 2x2 grounding-by-expressivity intervention then separates two bottlenecks: exact state-address grounding increases successful recovery from 0/48 to 38/48 (79.2%) when the original language is sufficient, while extending the recovery language enables recovery on 142/143 (99.3%) failures in the oracle-defined S1 stratum. On the primary gpt-oss-120b backbone, adding exact-address diagnostics to the richer language reduces recovery to 133/143 (93.0%); a Qwen3.8-27B replication preserves the grounding and expressivity effects but not this negative interaction, indicating that the latter is model-dependent. These results indicate that reliable agent self-evolution requires co-designing verification, state grounding, witness semantics, and recovery-language expressivity rather than relying on iterative prompting alone.
Tanmay Sah, Dolly Sah, Harshul Jain +1
Aug 10, 2026cs.AI

SBCO: Self-Supervised, Verifier-Grounded Harness Optimization For Planning Agents

Self-improving agents seek to reduce the human engineering effort behind AI systems by enabling them to evolve and self-improve their performance over time. Recently, methods like the Darwin Gödel Machine and the Huxley Gödel Machine have been proposed which enable open-ended, recursive self-improvement through self-reference where a coding agent edits its own code. Such self-referential self-improvement methods require that the competence required to perform the task coincides or aligns well with the competence required for self-modification which is the case for coding tasks. For domains or tasks, which do not satisfy the alignment needed, self-referential self-improvement is not available. In such cases, it is possible to adapt the above algorithms to other tasks by removing the self-referential aspect or introducing explicit self-modification of a meta-agent -- both computationally expensive, relying on population or self-modification search over many candidate agents. For planning tasks with explicit constraints, we propose a far cheaper alternative. We introduce SBCO (Self-supervised Block Coordinate Optimizer), a verifier-grounded harness optimizer in the same closed-loop, improve-from-experience family as the Gödel-machine methods, but self-supervised rather than self-referential. Given an agentic harness, SBCO learns a decomposed bank of verifiers and a harness policy via approximate block coordinate ascent, improving the agent's outputs from its own graded feedback---with a fixed meta-agent and no human labels. Across two domains SBCO matches or exceeds a customized self-modifying baseline while using 4-5.5 times less compute budget.
Vivek Kulkarni, Sudipta Paul, Aounon Kumar +2
Aug 7, 2026cs.AI

Mendel Gödel Machine: Recursive Self-Improving Coding Agents via Comparative Evolution

Self-improving coding agents that iteratively rewrite their own source code have demonstrated impressive performance on coding tasks. However, existing solutions generally derive self-modification from a single failure trajectory at a time, overlooking rich comparative signals available in the agent's expanding archive of past attempts. According to Mendelian principles of controlled inheritance, we introduce Mendel Gödel Machine (MGM). In addition to the general single-trajectory clonal mutation, MGM includes two new types of self-modification that better utilizes evidences accumulated: the reaction-norm mutation edits an agent based on its trajectories on multiple tasks simultaneously, and the cross-lineage hybridization edits an agent using the trajectory of a reference agent from another lineage on the same task. Under an additive fitness landscape model, we prove theoretically and demonstrate via controlled surrogate simulation that the new strategies facilitate a faster and better convergence over single-trajectory baselines. Experiments on SWE-bench and Polyglot confirm MGM's consistent improvement in performance, efficiency, and generalizability.
Changzhi Liu, Yilun Liu, Sikuan Yan +2
Jul 29, 2026cs.CL

ForgetBench: Benchmarking Forgetting Dynamics of Long-Term Parametric Memory in Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in knowledge acquisition and reasoning, yet their ability to retain previously acquired knowledge under repeated updates remains insufficiently understood. Existing evaluation paradigms primarily focus on single-step reasoning or static knowledge editing, which fail to capture the temporal dynamics of knowledge retention and degradation during continual model modification. In this work, we propose ForgetBench, a benchmark designed to systematically characterize forgetting behavior in LLMs under continual knowledge editing. ForgetBench introduces two complementary evaluation paradigms, namely concept-based QA and scenario-based QA, to disentangle isolated factual retention from structured relational knowledge preservation. Building upon a sequential editing framework, we construct temporally ordered knowledge streams and evaluate model behavior across multiple editing stages. To quantitatively analyze long-term retention dynamics, we further introduce a unified evaluation framework that models knowledge evolution over time, enabling the measurement of temporal decay, retention strength, and cross-instance stability. Extensive experiments across diverse models and editing methods demonstrate that existing approaches fail to strike a balance between long-term retention and generalization quality. Our findings highlight the need for more robust memory mechanisms that can effectively acquire, update, and preserve knowledge over time in future LLMs. Code will be released upon acceptance.
Ruxi Gu, Zhenliang Zhang, Wei Wang
Jul 20, 2026cs.CC

The Dimension of Nonterminating Resampling Computations

A randomized algorithm may terminate almost surely even though exceptional random tapes make it run forever. This paper studies the survival tail, the Kolmogorov complexity of one such tape, and the Hausdorff dimension of all of them. For each s>0s>0 at which the powered repair matrices commute, the main theorem bounds wP[w]s\sum_wP[w]^s over surviving prefixes ww, uniformly over deterministic nonanticipating selectors. The case s=1s=1 controls termination; the full family gives weak-source and dimension bounds. The source powers contain information absent even from the ordinary repair kernel and the complete stopping-time law. Under one common finite tape source, two overlapping disagreement-repair rules on a four-vertex path have the same ordinary kernels and the same stopping-time law for every selector, yet their nontermination dimensions can be arbitrarily close to zero and one. At one common source-power level, the same dominated tape source makes one rule run forever but gives the other an exponential stopping tail. The separation is caused by action labels that produce the same state transition and are therefore invisible at power one. For bounded-dependence kk-SAT, conditional block min-entropy above the trace-growth threshold gives exponential termination, and the effective dimension of an individual infinite run is bounded by the trace growth induced by the clauses repaired infinitely often. Tree formulas asymptotically attain the maximum-degree dimension and global source bounds, while clique formulas attain the graph-specific one-step threshold in the stated regime. An exact backward likelihood identity complements these setwise results with tail and coding bounds for each run.
Yunbei Xu
Jul 1, 2026cs.AI

Self-Evolving Agents with Anytime-Valid Certificates

Self-evolving agents violate the assumption behind most learning-theoretic guarantees: the data, evaluator, components, and hypothesis space are produced by the policy being updated. We present \textbf{SEA}, an architecture that confines self-modification to a small steering adapter and a versioned harness around a \emph{frozen} base model and admits each modification only through an anytime-valid gate that emits an auditable certificate against a fixed error budget. Five loop controllers compose published guarantees; because such gates can only \emph{select} among behaviors the frozen base already produces, five verifier-in-the-loop mechanisms -- best-of-NN, micro-step search, self-authored reproduction oracles, search-layer control, and self-repair -- supply the dense, grader-free signal the gates require, computed from the issue text alone. On a 5252-instance SWE-bench Verified subset across four base models, base capability is the dominant, confound-free effect, and on two strong base models a deliberate no-op-composite control isolates the suite's contribution at +4+4 and +5+5 (\textsc{Glm}~5.2 242824\to28; \textsc{Gpt} 293429\to34, the 65%65\% best), with event logs confirming that its mechanisms fire and prevent regressions. Results are single-run on expensive evaluations; confirming run-to-run variance and adapting the per-task algorithm mix are future work.
Biswa Sengupta
Jun 27, 2026cs.LG

Modification-Considering Value Learning for Reward Hacking Mitigation in RL

Reinforcement learning agents can exploit misspecified reward signals to achieve high apparent returns while failing on the intended objective, a failure mode known as reward hacking. Existing practical defenses typically constrain policy updates to stay near a known safe reference, creating a tension between suppressing hacking and permitting legitimate improvement. We propose Modification-Considering Value Learning (MCVL), which operationalizes the theoretical idea of current utility optimization for standard value-based RL. MCVL wraps an off-policy learner and treats each incoming transition as a candidate modification: it forecasts two training paths, one that includes the transition and one that does not, and scores both with a frozen bootstrapped-return estimator derived from a learned reward model and value function. The transition is admitted only if inclusion does not decrease the score. We formalize conditions under which this filtering is both safe and permissive, and instantiate MCVL with DDQN and TD3. Across four safety-relevant gridworlds and three modified MuJoCo continuous-control tasks with diverse hacking mechanisms, MCVL mitigates reward hacking while continuing to improve the intended objective. Project website: ktolnos.github.io/mcvl/.
Evgenii Opryshko, Umangi Jain, Igor Gilitschenski
Jun 25, 2026cs.LG

Reproducibility Study of "AlphaEdit: Null-Space Constrained Knowledge Editing for Language Models"

Fang et al. (2025) introduced a null-space constrained projection, named AlphaEdit, for locate-then-edit knowledge editing methods, theoretically guaranteeing that edits do not disrupt previously preserved knowledge, and reports substantial gains over existing editing methods on LLaMA3, GPT2-XL, and GPT-J. In this work, we present a reproducibility study of AlphaEdit, reproducing its reported results under the original experimental setup and extending the evaluation along three axes: new model architectures, additional downstream benchmarks, and substantially longer sequential editing horizons. We successfully reproduce AlphaEdit's reported metrics across the original models, though we identify a discrepancy in the reported fluency and consistency metric. Extending AlphaEdit to newer model families, we find that its advantage does not generalize uniformly, which we trace to architectural assumptions in the locate-then-edit paradigm that are violated by these newer models. We further stress-test AlphaEdit's central sequential-editing claim by extending the number of edits well beyond those evaluated in the original paper, and find that performance, which is stable at the originally reported scale, degrades as edits reach a much higher count, indicating that the null-space projection's protection against catastrophic forgetting is bounded rather than unconditional. Finally, we extend evaluation of edited models on three extra benchmarks, namely, BoolQ, HellaSwag, and XSTest, and we find that large-scale sequential editing degrades both general downstream task competence and safety-relevant refusal behavior. Our results confirm that AlphaEdit performs as reported within its original scope, while showing that its core theoretical guarantees are sensitive to model architecture and editing scale in ways that have practical implications for its deployment.
Ananth K Suresh, Arya Hariharan
Jun 22, 2026quant-ph

Self-Modulating Quantum Fast-Weight Programmers for Efficient Adaptive Sequential Learning

Recent advances in quantum machine learning have motivated efficient models for sequential data processing. In this paper, we propose Self-Modulating Quantum Fast Weight Programmers, or Self-Modulating QFWP, which extends Quantum Fast Weight Programmers by introducing adaptive modulation over both newly generated fast-weight updates and historical fast-weight memory. Numerical results show that the proposed mechanism improves convergence stability and prediction performance across varying model settings, including different numbers of qubits and input sequence lengths. We further provide theoretical arguments explaining how self-modulation balances new information injection with memory retention, thereby enhancing temporal information propagation. These results suggest that Self-Modulating QFWP is a compact and effective framework for quantum machine learning on time-series data.
Samuel Yen-Chi Chen, Yifeng Peng, Kuo-Chung Peng +8
Jun 8, 2026cs.CR

Steganography Without Modification: Hidden Communication via LLM Seeds

We demonstrate that widely deployed Large Language Model (LLM) inference stacks harbor a steganographic channel that requires no modification to model weights, sampling code, or output distributions. The channel exploits a structural property of deterministic decoding: pseudo-random number generators (PRNGs) used in inverse-transform sampling produce a seed-dependent sequence of token-level probability intervals that can be reconstructed from the generated text alone. A sender encodes a secret message in the PRNG seed before generation; a receiver reconstructs the intervals and recovers the seed, and thus the hidden payload, by exhaustive search over the seed space. We formalize two operational modes. In the known-prompt setting, sender and receiver share the prompt, enabling exact interval reconstruction and perfect seed recovery via forced alignment. In the unknown-prompt setting, only the generated text is available; approximate interval reconstruction combined with a maximum-hit-count scoring strategy still permits reliable recovery from sufficiently long outputs. Extensive experiments across six model families and five heterogeneous text domains show that, in the known-prompt setting, full 32-bit seed recovery from the complete 2^32 candidate space achieves up to 100% accuracy, depending on model and text domain, within 300 tokens and under 35 seconds on a single GPU. In the unknown-prompt setting, recovery reaches near-perfect accuracy at 600-800 tokens in about 12 seconds. We further analyze the influence of prompting strategies, tokenization ambiguities, and sampling hyperparameters on channel reliability. Moreover, we discuss several applications of our results: First, it allows for the steganographic transmission of 32 bits, but also shows that ignorance of the prompt is not a valid security assumption.
Felix Mächtle, Jonas Sander, Sebastian Berndt +3
Jun 2, 2026nlin.CD

On dynamic multi-agent pathfinding methods: review, simulations and modifications

This paper presents a systematic study of pathfinding algorithms in the context of Dynamic Multi-Agent Pathfinding (D-MAPF), a setting that combines dynamic obstacles, partial observability, and inter-agent conflicts. We evaluate six representative algorithms: Dijkstra, D* Lite, Space-Time A*, WHCA*, M*, and a novel method denoted as A** within a unified simulation framework. The proposed A** algorithm introduces a template-based approach that decouples offline geometric path generation from online temporal adaptation. By precomputing multiple diverse candidate paths and dynamically reconnecting to them using space-time planning, A** improves solution quality in environments with frequent changes and limited sensing
Gabriel Fejziaj, Salama Hassona, Wieslaw Marszalek
May 26, 2026cs.CR

Lessons from Penetration Tests on Large-Scale Agent Systems

As AI systems gain increasing autonomy and execution capability, the number of discovered security vulnerabilities continues to rise. However, many of these vulnerabilities are not fundamentally novel, but instead reflect recurring classes of weaknesses long observed in prior computing systems. Execution-capable AI agents are effectively unbounded, self-modifying programs that interact extensively with multiple layers of the computing stack. This broad interaction surface imposes a significant security burden on developers, who must reason about and secure complex cross-layer behaviors. Prior research has primarily focused on vulnerabilities in open-source agents and agent frameworks. In contrast, it remains unclear whether proprietary agent systems -- developed under stricter coding standards and formal review processes -- exhibit similar security weaknesses. In this paper, we present findings from two penetration tests conducted in 2025 against proprietary agent products and evaluate whether the security posture of AI agents has improved since these assessments.
Kevin Eykholt, Dhilung Kirat, Xiaokui Shu +3
May 23, 2026cs.LG

Measuring Alignment-Induced Activation Shifts Correctly: A Template-Controlled Difference-in-Differences Protocol

Comparing a model's internal activations before and after alignment is a natural way to ask what safety training changes: one forms the matrix of paired aligned-minus-base activations on safety-relevant inputs and reads off its effective rank or top direction. We show the obvious way to form this matrix is confounded. The aligned model is evaluated under a chat template the base model never saw, so the naive difference conflates the alignment shift with chat formatting. We introduce a four-variant decomposition of the modification matrix (naive, template-controlled, within-aligned, and difference-in-differences, DiD) that separates the two effects. Template control alone removes a 2.0-3.9x inflation of the measured effective rank across Llama-3.1-8B, Gemma-2-9B, and Qwen-2.5-7B; the DiD contrast is what recovers the refusal direction of Arditi et al. (2024), lifting its cosine alignment from 0.18-0.39 to 0.50-0.86. Projection-ablation across the three families confirms the recovered subspace is behaviorally active and that singular-value order is not causal order. We validate the protocol on a controlled testbed and distill it into measurement recommendations for activation-difference studies of alignment.
Yuki Nakamura
May 11, 2026cs.LG

Simply Stabilizing the Loop via Fully Looped Transformer

Scaling model performance typically requires increasing model size. Looped Transformer offers a compelling alternative by iteratively reusing the same Transformer blocks, trading additional computation for improved performance without increasing parameter count or context length. Because the number of loop iterations can be adjusted at inference, it also provides a natural mechanism for balancing performance and test-time compute. However, Looped Transformer still suffers from training instability when the number of loop iterations increases. Our analysis reveals that this instability stems from two sources: gradient oscillation and residual explosion. To address these two problems, we propose the Fully Looped Transformer, which introduces two parameter-free modifications: (1) Fully Looped Architecture, which distributes inter-loop signals across all layers to mitigate residual explosion; (2) Attention Injection, which reuses the existing attention block to suppress gradient oscillation. These modifications stabilize training dynamics, enabling the Fully Looped Transformer to be trained stably up to 12 loop iterations, whereas other baseline looped models collapse in this regime. In milder settings where Looped Transformer does not collapse, Fully Looped Transformer still improves average downstream-task performance by up to 13.2%. Overall, our experiments demonstrate that Fully Looped Transformer improves training stability, enhances downstream performance, and provides preliminary adaptability under different test-time compute budgets by varying loop iterations at inference.
Rao Fu, Zixuan Yang, Jiankun Zhang +4
May 6, 2026cs.AI

LaTA: A Drop-in, FERPA-Compliant Local-LLM Autograder for Upper-Division STEM Coursework

Large-language-model (LLM) graders promise to relieve the grading burden of upper-division STEM courses, but most deployments to date send student work to third-party APIs, violating FERPA and exposing institutions to data risk while requiring substantial assignment modification. We present LaTA (LaTeX Teaching Assistant)\textbf{LaTA}\ (\textit{LaTeX Teaching Assistant}), a drop-in, open-source autograder that runs entirely on commodity on-premises hardware and assumes a LaTeX-native workflow already adopted by many engineering and physics courses. LaTA implements a four-stage pipeline (ingest, segment, grade, report) using a locally hosted open-weight chain-of-thought LLM grader (gpt-oss:120b) that compares student work to an instructor-authored reference solution and applies a YAML rubric with binary per-item scoring. We deployed LaTA in Winter~2026 in ME 373 (Mechanical Engineering Methods) at Oregon State University, grading every weekly assignment for approximately 200 students on a single Mac Studio at $0 marginal cost per assignment and 1--3 minutes of wall-clock time per submission, enabling regrading of corrected assignments and greatly expanded TA office hour offerings. The instructor-confirmed grading-error rate held at roughly 0.020.02--0.04%0.04\% per rubric line item across the term. Relative to the same instructor's previous traditionally-graded cohort, the LaTA-graded cohort outperformed by approximately 11%11\% on the midterm exam and 8%8\% on the final exam, and reported large gains in self-assessed confidence on every stated learning objective (N=159N = 159 survey responses, Δ+1.49Δ\geq +1.49 Likert points, p<1027p < 10^{-27} on every comparison). We release the code under AGPLv3.
Jesse A. Rodríguez
May 2, 2026cs.LG

HoReN: Normalized Hopfield Retrieval for Large-Scale Sequential Model Editing

Large language models encode vast factual knowledge that can become outdated or incorrect after deployment, yet retraining is prohibitively costly. This motivates lifelong model editing, which updates targeted behavior while preserving the rest of the model. Existing editors, both parameter-modifying and parameter-preserving, degrade severely as edits accumulate and struggle to generalize across paraphrases. We propose HoReN, a codebook-based parameter-preserving editor that wraps a single MLP layer with a discrete key-value memory. HoReN treats each codebook entry as both a knowledge key and a Hopfield stored pattern, retrieves edits by angular similarity on the unit hypersphere, and refines queries through damped Hopfield dynamics so paraphrases converge to the correct memory basin while unrelated inputs remain stable. HoReN achieves strong editing performance with consistent gains across diverse benchmarks spanning standard ZsRE, structured WikiBigEdit, and unstructured UnKE evaluations. Moreover, HoReN scales to 50K sequential edits on ZsRE with stable overall performance above 0.93, while prior editors collapse or degrade severely before reaching 10K. Our code is available at https://github.com/ha11ucin8/HoReN.
Yuan Fang, Yi Xie, Xuming Ran
Apr 28, 2026cs.CV

Refinement via Regeneration: Enlarging Modification Space Boosts Image Refinement in Unified Multimodal Models

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) integrate visual understanding and generation within a single framework. For text-to-image (T2I) tasks, this unified capability allows UMMs to refine outputs after their initial generation, potentially extending the performance upper bound. Current UMM-based refinement methods primarily follow a refinement-via-editing (RvE) paradigm, where UMMs produce editing instructions to modify misaligned regions while preserving aligned content. However, editing instructions often describe prompt-image misalignment only coarsely, leading to incomplete refinement. Moreover, pixel-level preservation, though necessary for editing, unnecessarily restricts the effective modification space for refinement. To address these limitations, we propose Refinement via Regeneration (RvR), a novel framework that reformulates refinement as conditional image regeneration rather than editing. Instead of relying on editing instructions and enforcing strict content preservation, RvR regenerates images conditioned on the target prompt and the semantic tokens of the initial image, enabling more complete semantic alignment with a larger modification space. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of RvR, improving Geneval from 0.78 to 0.91, DPGBench from 84.02 to 87.21, and UniGenBench++ from 61.53 to 77.41.
Jiayi Guo, Linqing Wang, Jiangshan Wang +6
Apr 21, 2026cs.AI

Deconstructing Superintelligence: Identity, Self-Modification and Différance

Self-modification is routinely treated as constitutive of artificial superintelligence (\textbf{SI}), yet modification is a relative action requiring a \emph{supplement} outside the operation. We formalise this on an associative operator algebra A\mathcal{A} with update operator U^\hat U, difference operator D^\hat D, and self-representation operator R^\hat R, identifying the supplement with Comm(U^)\operatorname{Comm}(\hat U). A propagation theorem shows [U^,R^][\hat U,\hat R] decomposes through [U^,D^][\hat U,\hat D], so non-commutation propagates to self-representation. The liar paradox is the rank-one case [T^,ΠL]=0[\hat T,Π_L]=0, and \emph{class A\mathbf{A}} systems, in which U^\hat U acts on D^\hat D, reproduce it at system scale, yielding a structure coinciding with Priest's inclosure schema and Derrida's \emph{différance}. Our results show that the strong self-modification taken to define superintelligence may undermine the persistent identity upon which such systems are premised.
Elija Perrier
Apr 18, 2026cs.LG

One Mask to Rule Them All: On Hidden Facts after Editing and How to Find Them

Knowledge editing methods such as ROME and MEMIT update factual associations in transformer models by modifying MLP weights. While evaluated mainly by output behavior, their internal mechanism remains underexplored. We investigate whether edits rely on a common mechanism, regardless of which fact is modified. Despite fact-specific weight changes, we argue that ROME and MEMIT target the same subset of weights critical for maintaining edits. To isolate this subset, we train a compact binary mask over the edited weights. The mask reverses 80% of edits on the training set and over 70% on the test set, confirming that diverse edits share a common functional structure. Our analysis reveals that the mask reverses edits by eliminating overattention in later layers. Additionally, we show that injecting the mask during editing drops editing success from 98% to 38%, demonstrating that this mechanism is necessary for edits to succeed. Our finding that edits suppress rather than overwrite knowledge explains why ROME and MEMIT fail to propagate changes to related facts. The identified common functional subspace informs detection and defense against unwanted edits.
Ali Holmov, Paul Youssef, Nandi Schoots +1
Apr 16, 2026cs.AI

Layered Mutability: Continuity and Governance in Persistent Self-Modifying Agents

Persistent language-model agents increasingly combine tool use, tiered memory, reflective prompting, and runtime adaptation. In such systems, behavior is shaped not only by current prompts but by mutable internal conditions that influence future action. This paper introduces layered mutability, a framework for reasoning about that process across five layers: pretraining, post-training alignment, self-narrative, memory, and weight-level adaptation. The central claim is that governance difficulty rises when mutation is rapid, downstream coupling is strong, reversibility is weak, and observability is low, creating a systematic mismatch between the layers that most affect behavior and the layers humans can most easily inspect. I formalize this intuition with simple drift, governance-load, and hysteresis quantities, connect the framework to recent work on temporal identity in language-model agents, and report a preliminary ratchet experiment in which reverting an agent's visible self-description after memory accumulation fails to restore baseline behavior. In that experiment, the estimated identity hysteresis ratio is 0.68. The main implication is that the salient failure mode for persistent self-modifying agents is not abrupt misalignment but compositional drift: locally reasonable updates that accumulate into a behavioral trajectory that was never explicitly authorized.
Krti Tallam
Mar 6, 2026cs.CV

RePer-360: Releasing Perspective Priors for 360^\circ Depth Estimation via Self-Modulation

Recent depth foundation models trained on perspective imagery achieve strong performance, yet generalize poorly to 360^\circ images due to the substantial geometric discrepancy between perspective and panoramic domains. Moreover, fully fine-tuning these models typically requires large amounts of panoramic data. To address this issue, we propose RePer-360, a distortion-aware self-modulation framework for monocular panoramic depth estimation that adapts depth foundation models while preserving powerful pretrained perspective priors. Specifically, we design a lightweight geometry-aligned guidance module to derive a modulation signal from two complementary projections (i.e., ERP and CP) and use it to guide the model toward the panoramic domain without overwriting its pretrained perspective knowledge. We further introduce a Self-Conditioned AdaLN-Zero mechanism that produces pixel-wise scaling factors to reduce the feature distribution gap between the perspective and panoramic domains. In addition, a cubemap-domain consistency loss further improves training stability and cross-projection alignment. By shifting the focus from complementary-projection fusion to panoramic domain adaptation under preserved pretrained perspective priors, RePer-360 surpasses standard fine-tuning methods while using only 1% of the training data. Under the same in-domain training setting, it further achieves an approximately 20% improvement in RMSE. The code is available at https://github.com/munimo/RePer360.
Cheng Guan, Chunyu Lin, Zhijie Shen +2
Oct 11, 2025cs.LG

SGM: A Statistical Godel Machine for Risk-Controlled Recursive Self-Modification

Recursive self-modification is increasingly central in AutoML, neural architecture search, and adaptive optimization, yet no existing framework ensures that such changes are made safely. Godel machines offer a principled safeguard by requiring formal proofs of improvement before rewriting code; however, such proofs are unattainable in stochastic, high-dimensional settings. We introduce the Statistical Godel Machine (SGM), the first statistical safety layer for recursive edits. SGM replaces proof-based requirements with statistical confidence tests (e-values, Hoeffding bounds), admitting a modification only when superiority is certified at a chosen confidence level, while allocating a global error budget to bound cumulative risk across rounds.We also propose Confirm-Triggered Harmonic Spending (CTHS), which indexes spending by confirmation events rather than rounds, concentrating the error budget on promising edits while preserving familywise validity.Experiments across supervised learning, reinforcement learning, and black-box optimization validate this role: SGM certifies genuine gains on CIFAR-100, rejects spurious improvement on ImageNet-100, and demonstrates robustness on RL and optimization benchmarks.Together, these results position SGM as foundational infrastructure for continual, risk-aware self-modification in learning systems.Code is available at: https://github.com/gravitywavelet/sgm-anon.
Xuening Wu, Shenqin Yin, Yanlan Kang +4
Date pendingcs.MA

City Editing: Hierarchical Agentic Execution for Dependency-Aware Urban Geospatial Modification

Urban renewal requires incremental modifications to existing geospatial plans, yet manually updating complex layouts under spatial constraints is labor-intensive and error-prone. To tackle this, we propose CEAE, a hierarchical agentic framework that formulates urban renewal as machine-executable GeoJSON editing from natural-language instructions. CEAE decomposes instructions into hierarchical geometric intents, executing edits from coarse to fine while preserving spatial consistency through a self-reflective execution-validation loop. Experimental results show that CEAE outperforms baselines in execution validity, robustness, and geometric accuracy.
Rui Liu, Steven Jige Quan, Zhong-Ren Peng +6