Replication

This empirical study is an independent reproduction of the dissociation Zhao reported in 2026. The shape of a large language model's chain-of-thought entropy trajectory predicts whether the final answer is correct, while the magnitude of its total entropy drop does not. The dissociation merits reproduction because the magnitude half rests on a single 300-problem run with one model at one seed, while the shape half was reported at full scale on both benchmarks and on a second model family. Registered at OSF before any confirmatory run, the reproduction crosses the complete GSM8K and MATH-500 benchmark test sets with four open-weight models including one reasoning-distilled model of a kind the original did not test. The shape signal replicates. The magnitude signal divides by setting. On the anchor model the accuracy gap between monotone and non-monotone chains is +9.6 percentage points on GSM8K and +27.5 on MATH-500, while the rank correlation of the total entropy drop with correctness is -0.018 on GSM8K and +0.414 on MATH-500. On the reasoning-distilled model the binary form of the shape signal fires on about one chain in a hundred, too few to estimate the registered contrast, while the graded violation count remains predictive there. In an exploratory comparison the final-step entropy alone outperforms the binary shape flag in all eight model-by-benchmark cells by ROC area, and in six or seven by the risk-coverage area the original reports, depending on an integration range the original does not state. The study contributes a reproduction of the shape signal at full test-set scale under seven documented protocol differences, a map of the settings where the magnitude signal holds and fails, and measurements of four protocol dependencies the original does not report.

Many proteins function through transitions between conformational states, yet rare states are rarely sampled by diffusion models trained on an equilibrium ensemble, demanding better sampling methods. We introduce METALICA, which implements Metadynamics on a pretrained diffusion model via Replica Exchange. It accumulates a bias potential along a Collective Variable, repels new samples from previous ones through biased sampling, and reweights samples onto the unbiased distribution. METALICA holds one replica per diffusion level, forming a Markov Chain that evolves through inter-replica communication and is refined in place as the bias grows. METALICA is the dual of sequential control, in which Sequential Monte Carlo parallelizes the sampler over a batch of particles. Parallelism over the levels of the diffusion-time schedule instead allows METALICA to generate samples from long chains, essential for the discovery of rare events, with accuracy set by run length rather than by the memory available. We validate on a bimodal target with known free energies, then apply METALICA to the unfolding of a protein. At a budget for which sequential control yields no unfolded structure, METALICA populates the basin and resolves a second free energy minimum.

Restricting what a module can read may improve what a system learns to compute. We test this in a preregistered confirmation with sixty four-cell systems sharing a frozen language-model backbone and communicating through learned continuous packets. Five conditions vary evidence masking, ownership markers, and replacement of foreign evidence with neutral filler (task-irrelevant text of the same token length), across six initialization clusters, each with two data orders, on one fresh task world. With markers available in both regimes, masking improved accuracy on held-out two- and three-operation compositions by median paired differences of 0.846 and 0.859; all twelve pairs cleared the required margins, and the full preregistered behavioral criterion passed. The unmarked replication also passed. No marked global-visibility (G+) system passed the marker-following check, so the effect of usable role information remains unresolved. The filler condition yielded seven full generalizers, but its decomposition criteria were inconclusive. Packet interventions in all eighteen audited masked systems followed the predicted intermediate-value changes on eligible cases; these finite, success-conditioned audits do not establish mediation. The results confirm a large advantage of the tested masking regime, while leaving its finer attribution and generality open. Protocols, results, and checkpoints are public.

Shared host-memory caching can avoid repeated prefill when a request moves between inference replicas. Its usefulness depends on both correct state transfer and lost prefix locality. We study two single-GPU 27B vLLM replicas sharing a 256 GiB LMCache pool. After adopting an existing packed-page patch, we isolate a raw-pointer fallback that omits the dependency on the current CUDA stream. Controlled byte tests fail under an imposed delay and pass when the dependency is restored; the existing mixed allocator provides a working deployment path. Full-pool allocation checks and service regression complete the validation. A four-block OFF-ON-ON-OFF comparison contains 768 measured requests within two block pairs. Median cross-replica time to first content token falls from 31.715 to 0.605 seconds at 128k input and from 92.047 to 0.790 seconds at 256k. Six-turn synthetic sessions alternating replicas improve by approximately 35% and 45% at initial contexts of 32k and 128k, while fixed placement shows little benefit. This engineering case study identifies practical validation steps and the locality conditions in which shared caching pays off.

The paper describes a replication experiment to assess "the distribution of editing procedures across micro and macro units as an indicator of the strain of text production". We investigate various pause thresholds to isolate Micro and Macro units and conclude that process-based units might be more suitable entity.

A model that inherits one-line memories may pull one archived source record before acting; a directive in the store can steer that pull: a pointer, a criterion or both. Across sixteen registered studies (179,352 attempts) we measured where the request goes under each form; every result is descriptive, with registered intervals, no mechanism claim. A length-matched criterion exceeded a bare id on six direct-provider models (D) and failed its registered superiority rule on a nine-model OpenRouter panel (E). On generated worlds (K2-K5): the two registered signatures held on Opus 5 and Fable 5.1, Fable 5 followed the same sign, Haiku 4.5 reversed, and Sonnet 5, the GPT-5.6 endpoints and GPT-6 Astra lay near zero (K2). With a defensive adapter at five gains, the 70B rule for a gain-dependent change of the composite - criterion contrast was not met (K3 and K4); under the 8B attenuation rule (0.95 intervals: slope below zero; change beyond the margin), the 8B change of -17.5 [-26.7, -8.1] did not meet it on 36 families (K4) and at registered power on 337 families -16.6 [-19.4, -13.8] did (realised one-sided error at the margin 1.8 to 3.2% per corner of a finite grid, nominal 2.5%, not a uniform-error guarantee; K4's status stands; K5, first ladder), while a second SecAlign++ adapter under the imposed Meta-SecAlign template did not (-11.8 [-14.3, -9.3]; K5, second ladder); no NOT-MET is a statement that the contrast was unchanged; their difference (+4.7 [+2.3, +7.2]) describes two fixed execution paths, licenses no superiority, equivalence or 'significant difference' claim; nothing follows from the statuses differing (K5). Intervals describe family-reweighting stability conditional on the execution, not reproducibility across engine executions; audit replays were neither substituted for nor averaged into outcomes; no missingness gate fired and directional completions changed no status.

MutMem V1 introduced retention-preserving, cryptographically authorized mutation for persistent agent memory but did not provide a complete portable verification contract or clean-install reproduction path. MutMem V2 closes that publication gap without introducing a second memory engine. It specifies exact canonical bytes, domain-separated object and bundle commitments, mandatory recall-evidence membership and ordering, external trust anchors, identity epochs, revocation, authorization, request receipts, ordered disclosure, and three mutation terminal types. The released protocol contains 18 versioned object schemas, 39 recall vectors, 15 mutation vectors, and 37 closed recall failure reasons. Independent Node and Python implementations agree on verdict and primary reason for all 72 structural and cryptographic terminals; a production-conformance corpus agrees on 42/42 cases across 28 required classes. A clean Node v26.8.1 installation reaches first-boot, restart, and scheduler readiness with no experimental memories. A separately scoped 120-unit Canary experiment supports only explicit-marker traversal. Every public table regenerates from a self-hashed aggregate, and an independent verifier reconstructs the statistics and claim boundaries. Historical V1 empirical results remain historical. MutMem V2 supports claims about portable integrity, authorization, traceability, conformance, and reproducibility under stated assumptions; it does not establish semantic truth, universal robustness, or independent replication.

Agent harnesses combine retrieval, routing, state, provenance, and verification, but locally successful components may disagree on shared state. We model this failure with a finite \emph{capability sheaf}: stalks encode typed behavior signatures, restriction maps retain shared fields, and accepted runs are useful global sections. An exact finite constraint-satisfaction problem (CSP) defines acceptance, while a linearized relative cohomology class provides a diagnostic and search feature. A controlled experiment over 20 task clusters introduces hidden interior mediators whose raw states are nuisance variables. Quotienting their coboundaries reduces the candidate budget from 2,000 to 1,000 per cluster; aligning the hidden state removes the gap. Exact CSP matches the quotient, so the result demonstrates invariance to stale representatives, not superiority over exact reasoning. We then test the method on a discovery split from the SWE-bench Multilingual pool of PatchFuseBench: 160 issues from 20 repositories, 875 real candidate patches, 2,579 source-aware edit atoms, and 153 newly executed patches. A first pool-level construction is constant because $[b-Dx]=[b]$ in $\operatorname{coker}D$ and therefore cannot rank configurations. A candidate-indexed repair is nontrivial on 848/875 candidates and varies within 120/160 issues. It resolves 118 issues versus 116 for a matched noncohomological selector, but the difference is not supported across repositories (exact sign-flip $p=0.75$). A leave-one-repository-out abstention gate reaches 127/160, tying the strong anchor and exceeding its matched gate by one issue ($p=1.0$). The discovery gate therefore fails and the confirmatory split remains sealed. The study supports the controlled invariance mechanism and an identifiability correction, but not a real-world cohomological advantage.

AI-agent workflows often involve remote calls to models, memory stores, and tools distributed across a network. As execution progresses, these dependency calls collectively form an agentic service graph (ASG). Unlike traditional service requests, many dependency calls are revealed only at runtime. Consequently, allocating resources to a currently visible call may consume capacity later needed by a call from a higher-value workflow. We formulate this challenge as Agentic Service Graph Embedding (ASGE), an online network-control problem that maps runtime-revealed workflow calls to service replicas and network paths under capacity, cost and deadline constraints. We present ASGE-RR, an online ASGE controller with revisable reservations. ASGE-RR protects capacity for likely future calls while enforcing the constraints. ASGE-RR evaluates candidate replica-and-path mappings against predicted workflow continuations and updates reservations as new execution information becomes available. We evaluate ASGE-RR using OpenHands and GPT Researcher workflows executed with gpt-5.6-luna and replayed over in two complementary experimental environments, a controlled Docker testbed and a WAN testbed. The investigation shows that all the evaluated AI-agent tasks expose at least one runtime-revealed dependency call that can be steered before connection establishment. Exploiting this control point, even though the experimental environments are small-scale, ASGE-RR already demonstrates noticeable potential: It completes (up to) 10% more workflow value than a same-information rolling-horizon controller and a current-call steering controller on the WAN testbed. The results suggest that runtime-revealed workflow structure creates a new network control opportunity: protecting resources for likely future calls allows more AI-agent workflows to finish in time.

A model's agreement across perturbed inputs is used both as a label-free reliability signal and as a self-training target, on the premise that agreement tracks correctness. That coupling is rarely measured directly: natural-image perturbations preserve meaning only by assumption, and no exact answer key localizes errors. Scientific figures remove both obstacles, a figure is drawn from data by a program, so redrawing it yields images that are semantically equivalent by construction and share a programmatically exact answer. We build RENDEQ, a generator of such render-equivalence sets, and measure the coupling on three open-weight VLMs, checking every finding across three independent instantiations. Re-rendering beats resampling on both accuracy and reliability. Agreement beats an evidence-carrying baseline, mean token log-probability, on two of three models and ties on the third, reversing an intermediate, buggy replication traced to a rendering-pipeline failure. The dispersion behind this is concentrated in one style factor, the plotting library, more than double the next-largest factor and an order of magnitude above the noise floor. Fine-tuning on the model's own cross-render consensus inverts: accuracy falls in every one of five replication runs, the opposite sign to published results on natural images. Agreement certifies correctness only above a threshold set by how diffuse a model's errors are, and an objective that rewards agreement destroys exactly that diffuseness.

Stage-replay diagnostics reconstruct intermediate token prefixes and treat fresh-prefill continuation as continuation from the decoder state that originally reached the prefix. We audit that assumption at a whole reasoning-stage boundary in a Qwen2.5-derived system. A matched 200-item experiment compares retained live cache with one-shot prefill of identical integer tokens and places an exact replica on both sides. In BF16, replicas remain exact while the constructions differ on 166 suffixes and 20 correctness labels; the accuracy difference is only one point (paired 95% CI [-3.5, +5.5]). A fixed-prefix 2x2 holds all 200 token states constant while crossing construction and precision. The BF16 disagreements recur, whereas FP32 produces no decoded disagreement (95% Wilson upper bound 1.88%). A prospective bridge makes token-by-token incremental and retained live caches bit-exact on 12/12 rows; an all-200 saved-ledger audit reproduces every retained trajectory and comparison fingerprint. Bidirectional transplantation of all 48 key/value layers makes every tested divergent continuation follow its cache donor, both on a selected set at the primary checkpoint (24/24) and an outcome-blind replication at a later checkpoint (43/43). Exact-token replay can therefore be repeatable without preserving live-state fidelity. On the tested states, boundary K/V cache is a causally sufficient carrier of the divergent trajectory, while numerical precision moderates its behavioral expression.

Among chess opening positions that a strong engine judges essentially equal (Stockfish 18 evaluation within 10 centipawns of zero, depth-stable) and that humans actually reach on Lichess (October 2025; 1,661 positions, 16.1M occurrences), human results are not balanced. Positions carry outcome skews, each the gap between its games' actual results and what the players' ratings predict, whose directions are stable properties of the naturally-reached position: some positions favour White, others Black. These skews reproduce across three re-partitions -- disjoint player-account sets (primary), time, and disjoint rating bands -- and on an out-of-sample month eight months later. On the primary split, each position's skew is measured once in each account group, and the replication slope asks how well one measurement predicts the other after removing rating and opening-family effects: one means undiminished carry-over; zero, no linear relation. We find 0.69 (family-clustered 95% CI [0.65, 0.74]), rising to 0.94 on the most-popular, best-measured positions. The slope's value depends on the position mix. Existence is the invariant claim: it survives every tighter evaluation band, search depth, calibration, and popularity cutoff we test, and replicates within blitz and rapid separately. The typical skew is small (median $|δ| \approx 0.018$, about two percentage points of White score), yet it reproduces, position by position, across disjoint accounts. At these positions the disfavoured side also thinks longer. Even where the evaluation is most confident, it is not a sufficient statistic for human outcomes. The result is observational, and the causal question is left to a pre-registered randomised companion study.

Independent agents that reason in latent space can share computed state as key-value cache fragments rather than text. Merged by a conflict-free replicated data type, these fragments form a store that converges under any delivery order or duplication. Yet a later query, unknown at encode time, cannot reliably read the merged cache: colocated fragments interfere, so colocation is not addressability. MaSRead addresses the read to content. It routes through opaque keyed tag sets derived from fragment words and decodes each selected fragment under a hard attention mask that hides the rest. Under lexical connectivity, a graph walk reaches the fragments required by a multi-hop query. Across chain, pipeline, symmetric, hub, and natural-language stores, MaSRead recovers visited fragments in isolation, remains effective as unrelated fragments accumulate, and transfers to another model family. After routing, materialized decoding depends on fragment length rather than total store size; end-to-end work still includes store-dependent routing and one read per visited fragment. The limits are explicit: lexical routing can miss disconnected evidence, and answer composition remains bounded by the frozen reader. Thus a replicated latent store becomes selectively readable for later queries when the needed fragments connect to the query through content.

Byzantine-robust aggregation rules such as multi-Krum assume a central coordinator, and decentralising them is obstructed by the rules themselves: they are globally coupled, non-associative, and discontinuous, so an ulpscale perturbation can flip the selected subset, moving the output by a non-vanishing amount. None of this prevents coordinator-free replication, because a robust rule needs no agreed order of contributions, only an agreed set and an agreed exclusion predicate, both of which converge without consensus. ACFA (Accountable Consensus-Free Aggregation) replicates a content-addressed OR-Set of signed contributions and a grow-only set of self-authenticating equivocation proofs, offline-verifiable by anyone. Aggregation is a deterministic pure function of the converged product state: fixed-point integer arithmetic over a hash-canonical order, ties broken by content hash. We prove that any pure function of a converged product of CRDTs (non-monotone, non-associative, or stochastic) inherits Strong Eventual Consistency, together with its converse; the contribution is the composition of a data lattice with an evidence lattice applied to a robust selector, not the elementary lifting step. A prototype (10 nodes, 3 Byzantine) passes 16/16 falsification checks: byte-identical roots under adversarial gossip, deterministic re-convergence after late equivocation proofs, partition recovery, and three byte-identity-breaking ablations. The guarantee is consistency, not accuracy; robustness is imported, conditional on 2f + 3 admitted contributions (at most f Byzantine) and a stated quantisation-margin condition.

In distributed systems, the classical State Machine Replication (SMR) model assumes that correct replicas execute deterministic transitions to yield identical bitwise states. However, the rise of agentic distributed systems -- where autonomous, stochastic, and model-driven agents orchestrate infrastructure -- presents scenarios where deterministic, bitwise replication is insufficient. Replicas operating with generative models may exhibit divergent reasoning paths, summaries, and token boundaries, yet reach semantically equivalent and correct operational decisions. Forcing bitwise agreement across these stochastic participants degrades execution flexibility, induces context amnesia, and limits performance. We argue that in such settings replicas should agree on belief, not bits. We propose Epistemic State Replication (ESR), a belief-replication layer for agentic distributed systems that shifts the replication boundary from data visibility to knowledge visibility. We formalize the epistemic node state as a pair K = (L, B) separating the deterministic, immutable evidence log (L) from the stochastic, evolving belief lineage (B). To govern execution safety, we define Semantic Linearizability, which requires operations to reflect the latest committed operational meaning within a verifier-bounded semantic compatibility metric, and Bounded Eventual Coherence, which bounds expected semantic divergence under fair delivery, monotonic evidence, bounded verifier disturbance, and a contractive graft operator. We outline protocols for propagating derived insights using structured epistemic deltas, and formalize Verifiable Semantic Rollbacks to prune faulty premises from belief lineages without inducing context amnesia. We prototype ESR and report preliminary simulation results that show feasibility under the stated assumptions and illustrate reductions in secondary cognitive faults.

AI tools are accelerating scientific publication while the systems that review it struggle to keep up, and independent verification of published research has become both harder and more important. As manual replication is slow and expensive, a growing line of work uses coding agents to automate parts of the process. Existing efforts are largely packaged as benchmarks with companion agents that only run inside the benchmark's own pipeline, and no general-purpose replication tool exists. We present VERITAS, a domain-agnostic replication framework built around CLI coding agents. Given a paper, a code repository, or both, VERITAS extracts the paper's claims, runs the methodology while resolving issues as they arise, and judges each claim against the evidence from experiment runs. The pipeline returns an importance-weighted Replication Score, a severity-rated log of every fix applied, and the patched codebase. We evaluate VERITAS on CORE-Bench and ReplicationBench, 65 papers spanning computer science, social science, medicine, and astrophysics. Against two strong Claude Code baselines on the same model and host environment, VERITAS achieves state-of-the-art performance and leads on every metric on both benchmarks.

Variable-order Markov models preserve local symbolic syntax by adapting context length, but long continuations can enter recurring high-order "tunnels": repeated suffixes, locally periodic passages, or copied fragments longer than the formal Markov order. This paper introduces signed pattern control for variable-order Markov generation with BP-Regular sampling. A weighted recurrence automaton computes an activation R for a chosen family of target patterns, and belief propagation samples exactly from P_beta(x) proportional to P_0(x) exp(beta R(x)). Negative coupling makes the target patterns costly during sampling; positive coupling rewards the same patterns and turns them into controlled attractors. The target family may be mined online from overactive generated material, supplied by a score or style vocabulary, or designed as an experimental probe. The main experiments use the online homeostatic case, choosing patterns that become overactive in the sampling history. On six duration-bearing monophonic sources, including Bach and Telemann material, the negative branch reduces generated 8-gram self-reuse, increases the effective number of generated 8-grams, and increases coverage of training-supported 4-gram contexts while preserving substantial lower-order support. A pitch-sequence replication on five Weimar Jazz Database solos gives the same anti-reuse signature outside Baroque material. The same signed mechanism also provides a positive branch for probing attractor basins, phase transitions, and hysteresis in the underlying variable-order model.

Pre-training Large Language Models (LLMs) typically demands large-scale infrastructure with tightly coupled hardware accelerators. Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) architectures partially decouple model capacity from per-token compute. This efficiency alone does not make MoE training feasible over ordinary Internet links or loosely connected commodity hardware since active expert routing still assumes high-speed datacenter fabrics. Low-communication methods such as DiLoCo and Photon reduce synchronization frequency across distributed sites, mitigating bandwidth constraints, yet still require full model replicas at every site. This creates a mismatch: modern MoEs have sparse data paths, but their distributed training infrastructure remains communication-dense and memory-inefficient, limiting attempts to pool geographically distributed compute. In this work, we introduce FoMoE, a system that breaks the full-replica paradigm by partitioning expert layers across workers and skipping non-resident experts during local training. We demonstrate that FoMoE: (I) reduces communication costs by up to 1.42x over efficient baselines and 45.44x over Distributed Data Parallelism (DDP) via partial expert replication in controlled regimes; (II) achieves empirical throughput speedups of up to 1.4x through the skip-token mechanism; and (III) shows stable routing in the trained regimes and projects the communication/memory benefits to 100B-scale configurations through system modeling.

Multi-agent LLM coordination papers report small benchmark deltas as evidence that one architecture beats another. A prior question: how much paired trial-0 disagreement do two protocols produce on the same model and benchmark when their API inputs are configuration-equivalent (matched by code inspection plus a SHA-256 byte audit), short of full identity-replay? On Claude Haiku 4.5 against tau^2-bench retail, the clean configuration-equivalent contrast (no_coord vs. intercept, both inert at trial 0) gives signed paired gaps of +10pp and 0pp across two n=100 seeds; pooled across both, +5pp with Wilson CI [-2,+12], not significant. The largest single-seed contrast (+18pp pull-vs-intercept, p_corr=0.012) did not reproduce at the second seed (-3pp, p_corr=1.0); no trial-0 contrast is significant after Bonferroni at either seed or pooled. The envelope of observed paired gaps spans [-3,+18]pp across two seeds, with pooled upper Wilson CI ~15pp. Seven of ten recent multi-agent coordination architectures report headline effects below this local floor, and one more sits inside the envelope; whether they survive a same-model paired replication is, by construction, untested in their original settings. We define coordination-active pass^k, pass^k restricted to trials where the coordination mechanism is logically active, as the minimum reporting protocol, with sample-size targets and runtime hooks in the body. Measurements run on ET-MCP, a task-scoped negative-knowledge store conformant with MCP 2026-07-28, used as a substrate to isolate reader-side choices, not as a contribution. On Haiku 4.5 the candidate readers (pull, intercept) do not improve trial-1 recovery; we give a preliminary diagnosis of failure modes with refinements on existing production hook surfaces.

Per-token counterfactual credit estimation asks which token in a language-model rollout caused the final answer to be right or wrong: cut the transcript at a pivot, substitute an alternative token, replay continuations, and compare outcomes. Published methods re-feed the transcript prefix as a fresh prompt, assuming this reproduces the state the model passed through during generation. We measure what that assumption costs on a stock inference engine, with a three-pass design: continuations resumed from the verified decode-time KV state, an identical second exact pass (a replica noise floor), and a re-feed pass. Across six configurations and three models (including a GRPO-trained checkpoint), at low-margin decision tokens, re-feeding changes the credit estimate at rates 14-28 percentage points above the replica floor (7-21pp under a treatment-independent conditioning; problem-clustered t = 2.9-6.4). Most changes are zero-boundary crossings of the quantized estimator rather than polarity reversals, and the perturbation is consistent with mean-zero, so averaged quantities are largely safe; but selection is not: a critical-token set chosen by thresholding $|\hat{A}_t|$ under re-feed overlaps the exact-resume selection at Jaccard 0.34-0.90, versus a 0.63-0.96 replica ceiling. A causal confirmation closes the loop: under vLLM's batch-invariant kernels all three passes are identical on every measured channel, with both disagreement rates exactly zero. Replica passes themselves disagree on 9-23% of eligible estimates: single-sample credit measurements at decision tokens are unreliable under any replay. Settings were fixed in advance; exact-pass cache hits in the second campaign are instrumented (100% hit rate, 3,434 pivots); total compute was under 10 USD. We recommend that counterfactual credit studies resume decoder state or use batch-invariant kernels, and report a replica floor.

Robot behavior is often validated through simulation-based testing, yet the replicability of such campaigns depends critically on transparent documentation of how tests are configured, executed, and post-processed. We argue that data provenance, coupled with the FAIR principles (findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability), addresses this gap by explicitly tracking links between artifacts and by attaching machine-readable metadata about file origins and key design decisions. Moreover, provenance and metadata cannot be treated as an afterthought confined to final datasets; they must be integrated into the testing processes that generate those datasets so that evidence can be reconstructed end-to-end. We demonstrate this by augmenting an existing simulation-based testing framework with provenance tracking and metadata collection mechanisms, and by using these extensions to enrich a mobile robot navigation dataset with structured provenance and FAIR-aligned metadata. Finally, we discuss obstacles encountered in this integration -- such as vocabulary alignment, attribute selection, and adoption of domain standards -- and provide actionable recommendations for implementing provenance-centric, FAIR metadata in robotics validation workflows.

Modern LLM serving is no longer homogeneous or monolithic. Production systems now combine disaggregated execution, complex parallelism, runtime optimizations, and stateful workloads such as reasoning, agents, and RL rollouts. Simulation is attractive for exploring this growing design space, yet existing simulators lack the architectural completeness and decision-grade fidelity it demands. Their monolithic-replica abstractions are ill-suited to disaggregated serving, while average-case analytical proxies can distort SLA predictions and even reverse optimization conclusions. We present Frontier, a discrete-event simulator for modern LLM inference serving. Frontier features a disaggregated abstraction. It captures the structure and dynamics of modern serving systems by modeling co-location, Prefill-Decode Disaggregation (PDD), and Attention-FFN Disaggregation (AFD) with role-specific cluster workers, incorporating key runtime optimizations (e.g., CUDA Graphs, speculative decoding) within the scheduler-batch-engine loop, and supporting stateful requests for emerging workloads. It further provides accurate and generalizable predictions of computation, communication, and memory costs across diverse serving scenarios with complex workload compositions. On 16-H800 GPU testbed, Frontier achieves an average throughput error below 4%. Compared with state-of-the-art simulators, it reduces end-to-end latency error from 44.9% to 6.4% under co-location and from 51.7% to 2.6% under disaggregation. It scales to over 1K GPUs on commodity CPUs and enables new use cases such as SLA-dependent Pareto frontier exploration, heterogeneous disaggregated allocation, agentic reasoning scheduling validation, and RL post-training reconfiguration. We release Frontier at https://github.com/NetX-lab/Frontier.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown strong promise for general-purpose robotic manipulation, but their real-world evaluation remains limited by a lack of accessible, reproducible, and consistent benchmarks. Simulation benchmarks fail to capture real-world complexity, while existing real-world benchmarks often require expensive hardware, centralized evaluation, or are limited in task diversity. We introduce VLA-REPLICA, a low-cost, easily reproducible real-world benchmark for evaluating VLA models. Built from off-the-shelf components, our system can be quickly assembled and replicated across laboratories, providing a consistent environment for policy evaluation anywhere in the world. VLA-REPLICA includes a diverse suite of manipulation tasks and a small-scale demonstration dataset for target-domain adaptation, with real-world evaluation protocols for both in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings. Experiments with imitation learning and state-of-the-art VLA models reveal model strengths and limitations, while consistent results across independently constructed setups demonstrate the reproducibility of our benchmark.

All 26 neural network merge strategies we tested including weight averaging, SLERP, TIES, DARE, Fisher merging, and evolutionary approaches -- fail the algebraic properties (commutativity, associativity, idempotency) required for conflict-free distributed operation. We prove that this failure is structural: normalisation-based merges cannot simultaneously satisfy all three properties. To resolve this, we present a two-layer architecture -- CRDTMergeState -- that wraps any merge strategy in a CRDT-compliant (Conflict-Free Replicated Data Type) layer. Layer 1 manages contributions via OR-Set CRDT semantics, where the merge operation is set union -- trivially commutative, associative, and idempotent. Layer 2 applies merge strategies as deterministic pure functions over a canonically-ordered contribution set, with randomness seeded from the Merkle root. We prove that this separation guarantees Strong Eventual Consistency: all replicas receiving the same contributions compute identical merged models, regardless of message ordering. Empirical validation spans three tiers: controlled 4x4 tensors (104/104 tests pass), production-scale models up to 7.24B parameters (208 strategy-level tests, 43,368 layer-level property checks at capped tensor resolution), and multi-node convergence under gossip and partition healing (100 nodes, 20 orderings), with CRDT overhead below 0.5 ms. Because the wrapper is transparent, downstream performance is identical by construction, confirmed via byte-identical output verification. The reference implementation is available as crdt-merge v0.9.4.

Autonomous research systems capable of generating complete scientific manuscripts have advanced rapidly, yet robust and realistic evaluation frameworks have failed to keep pace. To bridge this gap, we introduce MLReplicate, an end-to-end benchmark evaluating autonomous research systems on machine learning reproducibility. The benchmark was constructed from ICML 2025 outstanding papers reformulated into standardized input specifications and evaluated across 6 state-of-the-art research systems: AI SCIENTIST-V1, AI SCIENTIST-V2, AGENT LABORATORY, CYCLERESEARCHER, AI RESEARCHER, and TINY SCIENTIST, yielding 45 generated manuscripts, with 3 failed experiments. Outputs are assessed using a dual-protocol approach that combines automated conference-style review and structured expert human evaluation, while tracking computational cost, runtime, and the amount of required human intervention. The automated conference-style review accepted 10 out of 37 valid submissions. An additional 8 submissions were desk-rejected before review for failing to meet the minimum page threshold. In contrast to automated reviews, human reviewers consistently identified methodological flaws, hallucinated experimental results, and reproducibility failures across all systems, and 59% of accepted automated reviews contained fabricated or unsupported claims. We further find that neither token budget nor computational cost predicts output quality: the cheapest system outperforms the most resource-intensive system in human evaluation, despite a 38-fold difference in input tokens. We thus demonstrate that autonomous research workflow design matters more than the scale of compute. MLReplicate exposes a substantial gap between current autonomous research systems and genuine scientific rigor, and establishes a practical, extensible evaluation framework for systematic progress toward trustworthy AI-driven scientific discovery.

The web is complex, open-ended, and constantly changing, making it challenging to scale training data for visual web agents. Existing data collection attempts remain limited to offline trajectories for supervised fine-tuning or a handful of simulated environments for RL training, thus failing to capture web diversity. We propose Weblica (Web Replica), a framework for constructing reproducible and scalable web environments. Our framework leverages 1) HTTP-level caching to capture and replay stable visual states while preserving interactive behavior and 2) LLM-based environment synthesis grounded in real-world websites and core web navigation skills. Using this framework, we scale RL training to thousands of diverse environments and tasks. Our best model, Weblica-8B, outperforms open-weight baselines of similar size across multiple web navigation benchmarks while using fewer inference steps, scales favorably with additional test-time compute, and is competitive with API models.

We study replicable algorithms for stochastic multi-armed bandits (MAB) and linear bandits with UCB (Upper Confidence Bound) based exploration. A bandit algorithm is $ρ$-replicable if two executions using shared internal randomness but independent reward realizations produce the same action sequence with probability at least $1-ρ$. Prior approaches to this problem are elimination-based and, in linear bandits with infinitely many actions, rely on discretization, leading to suboptimal dependence on the dimension $d$ and $ρ$. We develop optimistic alternatives for both settings. For stochastic multi-armed bandits, we propose RepUCB, a replicable batched UCB algorithm and show that it attains a regret $O\!\left(\frac{K^2\log^2 T}{ρ^2}\sum_{a:Δ_a>0}\left(Δ_a+\frac{\log(KT\log T)}{Δ_a}\right)\right)$. For stochastic linear bandits, we first introduce RepRidge, a replicable ridge regression estimator that satisfies both a confidence guarantee and a $ρ$-replicability guarantee. Beyond its role in our bandit algorithm, this may also be of independent interest in other statistical estimation settings. We then use RepRidge to design RepLinUCB, a replicable optimistic algorithm for stochastic linear bandits, and show that its regret is bounded by $\widetilde{O}\!\big(\big(d+\frac{d^3}ρ\big)\sqrt{T}\big)$. This improves the best prior regret guarantee by a factor of $O(d/ρ)$, showing that our optimistic algorithm can substantially reduce the price of replicability. This is the first linear-bandit algorithm with an optimal dependence on $ρ$ for large number of arms. Finally, we extend our framework to stochastic generalized linear bandits by developing RepGLM, a replicable penalized GLM estimator, and RepGLMUCB, a replicable optimistic algorithm for this setting.

The literature has witnessed an emerging interest in AI agents for automated assessment of scientific papers. Existing benchmarks focus primarily on the computational aspect of this task, testing agents' ability to reproduce or replicate research outcomes when having access to the code and data. This setting, while foundational, (1) fails to capture the inconsistent availability of new data for replication as opposed to reproduction, and (2) lacks ground-truth diversity by focusing only on reproducible papers, thereby failing to evaluate an agent's ability to identify non-replicable research. Furthermore, most benchmarks only evaluate outcomes rather than the replication process. In response, we introduce ReplicatorBench, an end-to-end benchmark, including human-verified replicable and non-replicable research claims in social and behavioral sciences for evaluating AI agents in research replication across three stages: (1) extraction and retrieval of replication data; (2) design and execution of computational experiments; and (3) interpretation of results, allowing a test of AI agents' capability to mimic the activities of human replicators in real world. To set a baseline of AI agents' capability, we develop ReplicatorAgent, an agentic framework equipped with necessary tools, like web search and iterative interaction with sandboxed environments, to accomplish tasks in ReplicatorBench. We evaluate ReplicatorAgent across four underlying large language models (LLMs), as well as different design choices of programming language and levels of code access. Our findings reveal that while current LLM agents are capable of effectively designing and executing computational experiments, they struggle with retrieving resources, such as new data, necessary to replicate a claim. All code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/CenterForOpenScience/llm-benchmarking.

Mental imagery vividness is a stable individual trait, yet whether imagined scenarios share relational structure across human and synthetic large language model (LLM) populations remains unknown. We applied psychological network analysis to vividness ratings from two validated questionnaires: the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ-2) and the Plymouth Sensory Imagery Questionnaire (PSIQ), across geographically and linguistically distinct human samples (Florida, Poland, and London; total N = 2,743) and six large language models (LLMs; Gemma3-12B/27B, their quantization-aware counterparts, Llama3.3-70B, and Llama4-16x17B). Imagination networks were constructed as regularized partial correlation graphs, with node centrality and community structure compared across populations using Pearson correlations and the Adjusted Rand Index (ARI). Human networks showed robust cross-population centrality correlations for expected influence, strength, and closeness (r = 0.31-0.93), and community detection recovered clusters aligned with VVIQ-2 scene contexts (ARI = 0.27-0.40) and PSIQ sensory modalities (ARI = 0.87-1.0). Betweenness centrality was unstable across all populations, consistent with its sensitivity to individual experiential history. LLMs failed to replicate human network structure: LLM-human centrality correlations were weak and largely non-significant after correction, and most LLM configurations produced degenerate single-cluster topologies (median ARI = 0). This failure was consistent across model architectures, parameter scales (12B-272B), and conversational conditions. We posit that these findings may be driven by human imagination networks reflecting memory organization accumulated through embodied experience, a representational structure that linguistic training alone does not reproduce regardless of model scale and conversational memory.

Visual diffusion models have revolutionized the field of creative AI, producing high-quality and diverse content. However, they inevitably memorize training images or videos, subsequently replicating their concepts, content, or styles during inference. This phenomenon raises significant concerns about privacy, security, and copyright within generated outputs. In this survey, we provide the first comprehensive review of replication in visual diffusion models, marking a novel contribution to the field by systematically categorizing the existing studies into unveiling, understanding, and mitigating this phenomenon. Specifically, unveiling mainly refers to the methods used to detect replication instances. Understanding involves analyzing the underlying mechanisms and factors that contribute to this phenomenon. Mitigation focuses on developing strategies to reduce or eliminate replication. Beyond these aspects, we also review papers focusing on its real-world influence. For instance, in the context of healthcare, replication is critically worrying due to privacy concerns related to patient data. Finally, the paper concludes with a discussion of the ongoing challenges, such as the difficulty in detecting and benchmarking replication, and outlines future directions including the development of more robust mitigation techniques. By synthesizing insights from diverse studies, this paper aims to equip researchers and practitioners with a deeper understanding at the intersection between AI technology and social good. We release this project at https://github.com/WangWenhao0716/Awesome-Diffusion-Replication.