Aaron (Youshen) Lim

@youshenlim.bsky.social

Tech-forward + @NUSingapore Alum + Cornell Johnson MBA Alum + Cornell AI Network + Ex-Venture Capital, Ex-Amazon Web Services (AWS), Ex-LinkedIn

Higgsfield AI leveraged GPT-6 Astra to accelerate software development, and claimed to ship new video creation features in just one day, simplify video ad creation for small businesses and rapidly deploy creative tools to market. openai.com/index/higgsf...

Higgsfield AI ships new video features in a day with GPT-6 Astra

With GPT-6 Astra, Higgsfield AI makes video ad creation easier for small businesses and brings new creative tools to market faster.

openai.com

Google DeepMind launches Gemini 3.8 Live for natural voice conversations and Extended Thinking for complex reasoning. The models combine real-time interaction with deeper problem solving capabilities. This represents a major step forward in conversational AI interfaces.

Introducing Gemini 3.8 Live and 3.8 Live Extended Thinking

Gemini 3.8 Live and Gemini 3.8 Live Extended Thinking are our most advanced live dialogue models yet, built for natural conversation.

deepmind.google

New framework unifies classical policy improvement and recursive self-improvement under one paradigm. Generalized Agent Iteration maps systems on two key axes: whether improvement is internal and whether evaluation is externally anchored. Makes AI self-improvement comparable.…

Generalized Agent Iteration: One Formal Framework for Iterative Policy Improvement and Recursive Self-Improvement

When we speak of recursive self-improvement (RSI), are we speaking of a phenomenon, a mechanism, or a prospect? Towards autonomous and evolving intelligence, RSI is being claimed at many scales, while no single framework that formally describes these emerging instances exists. Its counterpart in the classical realm, iterative policy improvement, is characterized by generalized policy iteration (GPI), a framework of broad applicability with well-understood theoretical properties, but only where the update principle and the evaluation base lie outside the agent. In this paper, we propose Generalized Agent Iteration (GAI), a formal framework that describes iterative policy improvement and RSI as two cases of a single learning paradigm. GAI defines the agent as a configuration of modifiable components within a system and models the learning process as a cycle of agent evaluation and agent improvement. Two pivotal dials then distinguish the instances: whether the improving mechanism is part of the agent and whether the standard it is measured against is grounded outside it. The former dial delineates the boundary between GPI and RSI, and the latter determines a system's polarity as anchored, goal drift, or fully self-referential. Moreover, we use these coordinates to place existing systems on the same two axes and make the defects of recursive self-improvement statable one condition at a time. We see this paper as a first step toward exploring a formal characterization of RSI that rests on the classical account, makes existing systems comparable, and provides a principled basis for analyzing and designing new ones.

arxiv.org

New research tests whether LLM judges can evaluate professional patent drafting. The good news: judge feedback helps cheaper agents match expensive ones. The catch: real patent attorneys see systematic calibration gaps. AI evaluating AI has limits.

Vibe Patenting: Evaluating LLM Judges for Professional Patent-Drafting Agents

LLM judges are increasingly used to evaluate and improve AI-generated outputs, yet their reliability for complex professional work remains unclear. We study this problem through Vibe Patenting, an end-to-end patent-drafting testbed for AI-agent evaluation. A separately-invoked LLM judge evaluates generated patent drafts and provides structured feedback for iterative revision. Across multiple inventions and drafting-agent configurations, judge-guided revision consistently improves judge-assessed quality, while unguided revision tends to saturate. Notably, iterative judge feedback enables a low-reasoning agent to approach the performance of a substantially more expensive high-reasoning agent. Stronger models and increased reasoning generally improve judge-assessed drafting quality, while domain-specific agentic workflows provide further gains. We validate the judge against independent evaluation by a professional patent attorney and find meaningful but strongly metric-dependent agreement and systematic calibration differences. These results highlight both the utility and limitations of LLM judges as evaluators and optimization signals for complex professional workflows.

arxiv.org

Researchers built a protocol to verify AI-assisted claims. PAC-2026 enforces 6 obligations before publication: evidence, artifacts, measurement, authorization, correspondence, continuity. Each must pass independently. Tested across 110,764 states and 183 cases.

Making AI-Assisted Claims Independently Challengeable: Publication Authority and a Protocol for Falsifiable Publication Records

AI-assisted claims can appear authoritative when evidence, analysis, human authorization, presentation, and correction history refer to different states. Provenance, attestation, and transparency expose history but alone do not specify the publication transition examined here. We develop Publication Authority as an exact-state, non-transferable, single-use publication capability and instantiate it in PAC-2026 (Publication-Accountability Calculus), a machine-readable AIJIM Protocol candidate. We evaluate its fourth bounded semantic freeze (SF-4), a fixed-profile specification designed for replaceable bindings. Six obligations govern evidence, runs and artifacts, measurement disclosure, authorization, surface correspondence, and lifecycle continuity. Each yields a target-bound witness, localized counterexample, or localized unverifiability; none can compensate for another. Only a fresh, complete all-pass record derives the permit consumed by one atomic publication transition. We use identity vectors, adversarial cases, finite models, and historical implementations. Ten models explored 110,764 safe reachable states; 76 unsafe configurations produced the expected violation or observer countermodel. A reader surface passing its correspondence check cannot authorize publication unless the accepted record admits that surface. SF-4 separates evidence horizon from verification time and rejects an authentic but causally invalid authorization. A historical predecessor path reproduced 17 frozen authorization-successor outcomes. A later in-house, instance-blind test of known case classes matched all 183 scored expectations; same-host package execution reproduced its 240 archived observations. Results support internal coherence, bounded safety, fault sensitivity, and limited constructibility, but not factual truth, general refinement, blind interoperability, field efficacy, or standards status.

arxiv.org

LLM trading agents typically use fixed policies that cannot adapt to market changes. EvolveTrade changes this by treating system prompts as evolvable policies. A Policy Agent rewrites the prompt after each trading period based on performance feedback.

EvolveTrade: Experience-Driven Policy Refinement for Self-Evolving LLM Trading Agents

Large language model (LLM) trading agents can combine market data, news, and executable analysis, but their behavior is often controlled by static hand-written tool-use policies that are fixed before deployment. This limits their ability to adapt how they gather evidence, invoke tools, verify signals, and manage risk under changing market regimes. We introduce EvolveTrade, a self-evolving framework that treats the system prompt of a tool-using trading agent as a text-parameterized policy. After each update interval, a Policy Agent revises this policy using accumulated decision traces and realized portfolio feedback, while keeping the backbone LLM fixed. The updated policy is then used for the next batch of trading decisions, enabling the agent to refine its information-acquisition and portfolio-construction procedure over time. Experiments across multiple market regimes and two LLM backbones show that EvolveTrade often improves Sharpe Ratio and Cumulative Return over fixed-policy LLM baselines, achieving the improved SR and CR in most evaluated settings. Behavioral analyses further show that self-evolved policies increase code-mediated analysis and activate regime-relevant computations; case-level policy-to-return attributions trace how policy-induced allocation changes contribute to realized return differences. These results suggest that adapting the reusable procedure governing tool use is a key direction for building more robust LLM trading agents.

arxiv.org

Researchers improved DSATUR graph coloring by preprocessing one optimal color class using semidefinite programming. Their SSLD algorithm matches or beats DSATUR across 1600+ benchmarks. The cost is 195x slower runtime, but it proves SDP guided preprocessing works.

One Color Preprocessing Improves DSATUR

The Graph Coloring Problem (GCP) is NP-hard and DSATUR stands as one of the fastest heuristics for it despite producing colorings that typically use more colors than state-of-the-art coloring algorithms. We propose SSLD (Semidefinite Spectral Learning with DSATUR), which improves DSATUR by preprocessing a first good color class before letting DSATUR complete coloring the rest of the given graph. We obtain this color class from a Semidefinite Programming (SDP), similar to an SDP used to compute the Lovász theta number. To the best of our knowledge, SSLD is the first approach to improve DSATUR by preprocessing through fixed color classes. We evaluate SSLD against DSATUR and against a naive 1-color-class preprocessing algorithm on DIMACS instances, random graphs (Erdős--Rényi, Watts-Strogatz, Barabási--Albert), Frequency Assignment and Job Shop Scheduling instances. SSLD matches or beats DSATUR in almost every case across over 1600 benchmark instances, and out performs the naive GISD baseline, allows us to confirm the value brought by the SDP-guided choice of the first color class. This quality comes at a runtime cost of roughly 195 times slower that DSATUR, but demonstrating that SDP-guided preprocessing of a first color class is a direction for future improvements.

arxiv.org

City pedestrian sensors drive planning and economic decisions but assume data is trustworthy. Researchers built a physics constrained digital twin using flow conservation laws to detect stealthy data injection attacks. The system achieves 54% attack impact reduction.

Physics-Constrained Digital Twins for Sensor Integrity in Urban Pedestrian Flow: Detecting Stealthy False Data Injection with Conformal Guarantees

City pedestrian counting systems now feed economic indicators, planning decisions and safety operations, yet the twins built on top of them treat the incoming stream as ground truth. We study what happens when it is not. We formalise stealthy false data injection for city-scale pedestrian sensing, where the map from latent flow to observation is far more rank deficient than in the power and water networks for which stealth has been characterised. Our twin estimates directed flows on the pedestrian street graph, assimilates counts through a learned graph-localised gain, and is trained against a flow conservation residual that couples metered and unmetered segments. Detection combines the innovation with that residual, and the alarm threshold is set by adaptive conformal calibration rather than by hand. To measure what the physics buys, we define the attack margin, the relative reduction in worst-case corruption of the estimated flow field, achieved against a white-box adversary that optimises directly through the twin. On six years of Melbourne data the margin reaches 0.54 against a single compromised device and falls to 0.19 when a third of the fleet is compromised, on a network where only 1.18 per cent of walkable segments are metered. Replacing the street graph by a distance graph collapses it to 0.09, which shows that the gain comes from the conservation law rather than from locality.

arxiv.org

Counterintuitive finding: restricting what AI modules can access improves what they learn. A rigorous preregistered study with 60 systems shows evidence masking boosts compositional generalization accuracy by over 84%. Less visible information drives better reasoning.

What You Can't See Is Still What You Learn: A Preregistered Sixty-Society Confirmation That Evidence Masking Drives Compositional Generalization

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, 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 globally visible 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.

arxiv.org

Crusoe Energy raised $3.9B to expand its data center infrastructure, focusing on building both large scale facilities and small modular AI factories. The funding round values the company at $30.9B, positioning it as a major AI infrastructure player. techcrunch.com/2026/09/17/c...

Crusoe raises $3.9B to build massive data centers and small modular 'AI factories' | TechCrunch

The round values the data center giant at $30.9 billion.

techcrunch.com

LLMs know right from wrong, but do they understand how humans actually respond to violations? New research shows models predict a harsher world than reality, overestimating punishment and missing the tolerance that defines real social regulation. Critical for AI in social…

Beyond Right and Wrong: Evaluating Second-order Social Reasoning in Large Language Models

Previous AI alignment efforts have focused primarily on first-order social norms -- teaching models what is socially acceptable or unacceptable (e.g., `do not steal'). However, social intelligence depends not only on norm recognition, but also on anticipating who will enforce it and how (e.g., public shame or even imprisonment). These second-order expectations, known as metanorms, govern how people respond when social rules are broken. We introduce a novel framework for evaluating metanorm reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs) along two dimensions: emotional appraisal and behavioral response, and propose new classification tasks, namely, predicting self-regulation in violators, and other-regulation in observers. We release a multi-perspective dataset, NormReact, of 450 norm violation scenarios, hand-annotated for emotions and behavioral responses across norm violators' gender and observers' social closeness. Current LLMs portray a harsher social world: across six models, they overpredict negative sanctions where humans would expect inaction, and alignment with human judgments deteriorates as social distance increases. These findings suggest that AI systems in norm-sensitive domains from conflict mediation to policy simulation, may risk producing a distorted picture of social regulation: one that over-represents punishment and under-represents the tolerance, restraint, and relational calibration that characterize actual norm enforcement in real world.

arxiv.org

CriticGen transforms how we evaluate LLMs by making feedback actionable. It creates sample-specific rubrics that generate scores, reasons, and executable refinement suggestions simultaneously. The results speak volumes: 73% answer improvement rate with 93% non-degradation.

CriticGen: Generation-Aware Evaluation as Actionable Feedback

Current evaluation methods for large language models are coarse-grained and decoupled from generation, producing generic explanations that fail to provide actionable feedback for model improvement. We propose CriticGen, a fine-grained, generation-aware evaluation framework that turns evaluation into actionable control for answer improvement. CriticGen first generates sample-specific evaluation dimensions and scoring criteria under high-level categories such as subjective, objective, and self-derived constraints. These criteria then serve as a dynamic rubric for jointly producing a score, a reason, an executable refinement suggestion, and a refined answer. This rubric-conditioned refinement process enables models to diagnose flaws and perform targeted answer improvement. Experimental results show that fine-grained evaluation should be both instance-specific and actionable. CriticGen induces higher-quality rubrics, improving relevance/coverage from 3.33/4.03 to 3.97/4.24. CriticGen also achieves the best score correlations, with 0.9556 Pearson and 0.9560 Spearman, and raises the F1 of criterion-grounded reasons and executable suggestions from 0.6369/0.5994 to 0.7554/0.7900. Crucially, its feedback translates into reliable answer improvement, improving 73.17% of answers with a 93.28% non-degradation rate.

arxiv.org

New dataset exposes what output only benchmarks miss: Claude Opus and GPT 5.4 achieve similar success rates on scientific tasks, yet Claude produces 30x more errors. OpenDiscoveryTrace captures how AI agents reason through 558 complete trajectories, not just what they produce.…

OpenDiscoveryTrace: Process Traces for Evaluating AI Scientist Workflows

Existing benchmarks for autonomous AI scientists evaluate only final outputs---generated code, hypotheses, or papers---yet discard the reasoning process by which those outputs were obtained. This makes it impossible to audit scientific methodology, diagnose failure modes, or distinguish systematic reasoning from fortunate guessing. We present \textbf{OpenDiscoveryTrace}, a public dataset of 558 complete AI scientific agent trajectories that captures how models reason, not just what they produce. Each trajectory records a structured 9-field-per-step trace---including thoughts, tool calls, observations, errors, revision triggers, and self-reported confidence---as models execute 124 scientific tasks spanning drug discovery, materials science, genomics, and scientific literature analysis. The dataset covers seven models: three frontier models (GPT-5.4, Claude Opus 4.6, and Gemini 3.1 Pro; 124 trajectories each, fully balanced across domains and difficulty levels) and four open-weight models (Qwen2.5-7B, Mistral-7B-v0.3, Phi-3.5-mini, and Qwen2.5-1.5B; 30 each), plus 60 live-retrieval variant trajectories. Pilot analysis on 363 LLM-judged trajectories reveals that process traces expose behavioral differences invisible to output-only evaluation: all three frontier models achieve comparable success rates (84--89%), yet Claude Opus 4.6 produces 30$\times$ more errors than GPT-5.4 (2.5 vs. 0.08 per trajectory, $p < 0.0001$, Cliff's $δ= 0.613$), with qualitatively different error profiles---66.7% tool misuse for Claude versus 83.6% reasoning errors for GPT-5.4. We define five benchmark tasks with baselines from logistic regression, random forests, LSTMs, and Transformer models. The dataset, trace schema, agent harness, and benchmark definitions are publicly available under CC BY 4.0 to support research on process-level evaluation, scientific agent auditing, and AI governance.

arxiv.org

Researchers analyzed stock trading data and found 89% of decisions follow entangled game patterns rather than independent rational behavior. This validates a brain inspired probability wave framework that could replace trillion parameter AI models with more efficient AGI…

Adaptive Entangled Game Modules in Artificial General Intelligence

We introduce a probability-wave framework for modeling the collective behavior of interacting adaptive agents, deriving testable eigenmodes through a generalized behavioral intelligence (GBI) nonlocal probability-wave equation. This framework captures a broad range of human intelligence behaviors with analytical mechanisms and offers an indirect method to examine the Liu-Chen-Ao (LCA) hypothesis of nonlocal entangled nerve fibers in the brain through collective trader behaviors. Our empirical analysis of Chinese intraday stock market data demonstrates that adaptive entangled game modes explain 82-94% (89% overall) of observed decision patterns, a sharp contrast to the predictions of neoclassical finance based on independent rational agents. Moreover, 2-12% of behaviors show adaption to intraday news, events, and environments, characterized by dual equilibrium states and abrupt reference point shifts, while purely independent modes occur in less than 5% of cases. These findings empirically support the LCA hypothesis, as observable trading behaviors reflect underlying brain mechanisms and internal intelligence decision-making in behavioral psychology. Our results highlight the necessity of incorporating adaptive entangled game modules into artificial general intelligence (AGI) architectures, addressing the limitations of conventional artificial neural network (ANN)-based AI, which relies on trillions of opaque parameters. By integrating ANN-based AI with probability-wave-based entangled-brain simulations, machine learning can enrich AGI foundation models (FMs) and facilitate the development of human-like processing units (HPUs) that leverage brain-inspired mechanisms. Such HPUs may ultimately create more compact, efficient, and robust AGI systems, particularly for embodied intelligence and robotics.

arxiv.org

New research shows subagents outperform loading skills into context for long horizon AI agent tasks. Spawning fresh context windows prevents reasoning quality degradation. The tradeoff is token overhead for coordination, but architectural clarity wins for well defined subtasks.…

Subagents vs Agent Skills: Executing Reusable Knowledge for Long-Horizon Agentic Tasks

How can language model agents effectively leverage libraries of reusable knowledge to solve long-horizon tasks? Recent work has increasingly focused on agent skills: reusable capabilities represented as skill packages, i.e., multi-file bundles containing instructions, scripts, and other resources that help agents perform specific tasks. Agent skills are typically executed by loading their skill instructions into an agent's context and relying on the agent to follow them. As task horizons grow, however, this approach becomes increasingly brittle, because reasoning quality degrades as more information accumulates in the context window. We investigate an alternative approach in which skill packages are instead invoked as subagents. Rather than loading skill instructions into the main context, subagent execution spawns fresh context windows dedicated to solving individual subtasks. We show that subagent execution outperforms agent-skill execution when skill packages expose clear input-output contracts and their instructions encode the procedural knowledge needed to fulfill those contracts. The tradeoff is additional communication overhead, as extra tokens are required to coordinate between the main agent and its subagents. Our results show that the benefit of reusable knowledge depends not only on its content, but also on how it is organized and invoked.

arxiv.org

OpenAI just paused Pro subscription sales because Astra demand overwhelmed its infrastructure. The company is adding capacity before resuming. Even the AI leaders are struggling to keep pace with adoption rates. A telling moment for the industry.

OpenAI puts Pro subscriptions on hold due to Astra demand | TechCrunch

The company said Pro subscriptions put the most strain on its systems, so it's pausing sign-ups while adding more capacity.

techcrunch.com

Arctic shipping routes are opening due to climate change, but current navigation systems ignore ecosystem damage and community impacts. Researchers built a multi-agent GeoAI system that balances vessel efficiency with protection of fish habitat, seal populations, and Indigenous…

An Autonomous GeoAI Agent for Arctic Eco-Navigation

Arctic maritime navigation is becoming increasingly important as changing sea-ice conditions expand seasonal accessibility while simultaneously introducing substantial operational, environmental, and community risks. Arctic route planning is inherently a multi-criteria problem: routes that improve vessel safety or efficiency may increase exposure to sea ice, sensitive ecosystems, or nearby communities. Existing routing methods prioritize travel time, fuel use, and navigational risk, often overlooking ecological and community impacts. We introduce a human-in-the-loop, multi-agent GeoAI system for Arctic eco-navigation that integrates operational, physical, ecological, and community-related criteria within a unified routing framework. Multiple specialized agents coordinate geospatial data acquisition and preparation, multi-objective route generation, and skyline-based decision support. The ecological criteria explicitly account for exposure to sensitive areas, including Essential Fish Habitat and seal critical habitat. By considering these ecosystem impacts and potential community burdens while keeping consequential value judgments under human control, the framework supports safer, more transparent, and socially responsible Arctic navigation. Project page and code are publicly available. https://samiraat.github.io/Arctic-Eco-Navigation-Agent/, https://github.com/samiraat/Arctic-Eco-Navigation-Agent

arxiv.org