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Weiyi Kong

Publications and source records attributed to Weiyi Kong.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

Multi-LLM Systems Exhibit Robust Semantic Collapse

Whether machines can originate novel content has been debated for nearly two centuries, from Lovelace's assertion that no engine can "originate anything" to Turing's question of whether a machine can amplify ideas brought in from outside. Systems of multiple interacting LLMs, increasingly deployed for autonomous generation, reopen this question empirically. Here we show that such systems, operating in inference-only setups, exhibit semantic collapse: systematic convergence in semantic representations despite apparent lexical variation. Across model families, extended simulations of 200 to 1,000 rounds, the pattern remains consistent. Thirteen intervention strategies, spanning decoding parameters, prompt design, agent composition, activation engineering, and reinforcement learning, fail to restore semantic diversity. Mechanistic analyses suggest that semantic collapse is not explained by alignment or conformity biases, but is consistent with intrinsic properties of autoregressive generation. Our results point to persistent constraints on the ability of multi-LLM systems to sustain open-ended exploration in closed-loop settings.

cs.MA

CARE: Context-Aware Ranking Evolution with Executable Scoring Programs for Budgeted Reaction Optimization

High-throughput experimentation can evaluate many reaction conditions, yet combinatorial condition spaces still exceed the available experiment budget. This makes experiment selection a sequential decision problem: each new condition must be chosen from limited observations before its outcome is known. LLMs can express task-specific selection logic. A direct recommendation, however, is neither a persistent executable object that can be validated and revised nor an independently auditable decision rule. We introduce CARE, a reference-conditioned controller that separates program synthesis from experiment selection. An LLM writes an executable scoring program that ranks the remaining conditions, while a non-LLM reference policy supplies a numerical candidate and support summary. CARE forms an optional alternative from the program, applies a reference-conditioned intervention gate to compare it with the reference, and records the decision before the selected outcome is revealed. Each new outcome updates controller state and can trigger retention, revision, or regeneration of the active program. This outcome-guided program evolution changes the scoring logic without updating the LLM parameters. In matched offline replay with 30 seeds on eight reaction-optimization tasks, CARE attains the lowest normalized regret, the highest normalized best-so-far AUC, and the highest Top-1% Success@15 among the evaluated methods. These results support using a scoring program written by an LLM as one component of a reference-conditioned optimizer rather than as a standalone experiment selector.

cs.LG

CDEP Agent: Connecting Meteorologically Detected Temporal Compound Events to Real-World Documentary Evidence

Compound drought-to-extreme-precipitation (CDEP) events are recognized in climate science as a growing driver of extreme impact, but whether this recognition carries over into real-world early warning and post-event documentation is unknown, so a meteorologically real CDEP event may pass with neither advance warning nor any later record. Here we present CDEP Agent, an auditable LLM-agent framework that tests this mismatch directly by linking CDEP candidates detected from meteorological reanalysis to real-world hazard and impact evidence across sources with different spatial scales, temporal resolutions, and reporting conventions. Using California as a case study, we identify 408 candidate CDEP events from ERA5 observations during 2021-2025 and evaluate each against the U.S. Drought Monitor, NOAA Storm Events, and public webpages along five dimensions: antecedent drought, extreme rainfall, local impact, hazard-impact attribution, and explicit drought-to-rainfall linkage. Only 34.3% of candidates are corroborated on both hazard components, and just 1.5% are ever explicitly linked to their antecedent drought, indicating that most meteorologically detected CDEP events go undocumented and their compound nature almost never enters the record at all. Our framework gives climate scientists a way to test physical event definitions against what actually gets documented, and gives social scientists, economists, and disaster-response agencies a provenance-linked evidence base for compound events that current warning and reporting systems largely fail to capture.

cs.AI