OpenAI is sharing preliminary cybersecurity evaluations for Astra and the steps we’re taking to strengthen safeguards and security controls.

arXiv:2608.05159v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Enterprise operations extensively rely on multiple heterogeneous business systems and information applications, which also result in severe data silos and process fragmentation. Enterprises have invested considerable financial and material resources in building these applications, however, effectively leveraging and orchestrating them remains a formidable challenge. Conventional approaches to enterprise application integration, encompassing middleware architectures such as Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), API gateway infrastructures, and Robotic Process Automation (RPA), suffer from inherent limitations like high architectural coupling, escalating operation and maintenance costs, and limited intelligence capabilities. This paper proposes Agentic Nesting, a multi-agent collaboration framework in which existing enterprise applications are encapsulated as autonomous AI agents within a hierarchically nested structure. Rather than flat interconnection, agents are organized into layered stewardship topologies that mirror the compositional complexity of enterprise ecosystems. The framework extracts a digital agent proxy from each legacy application to enable natural-language interaction and autonomous manipulation, coordinates multiple agents through a central orchestrator for task decomposition and dynamic dispatching, and exposes a unified conversational interface for cross-application querying and process orchestration. The main contributions of this paper are the proposition of the “Application-as-Agent” integration paradigm and the “Conversation-as-Integration” interaction philosophy, together with an exploration of the generalization potential of this methodology in scenarios encompassing heterogeneous system coordination, and large-scale data applications.

arXiv:2608.05160v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We introduce the Ignition Index (I), a validated scalar metric that operationalizes Global Workspace Theory’s (GWT) all-or-none ignition prediction in transformer language models. The metric fits a four-parameter sigmoid to per-layer linear probe accuracy as a function of input signal strength, extracting steepness parameter beta-hat: high values indicate abrupt, ignition-like transitions; low values indicate graded build-up. Across 11 models spanning five architecture families, shuffled-label controls demonstrate 9.6-fold selectivity for genuine linguistic structure over spurious probe capacity (p < 0.001, Mann-Whitney U-test). We find: (1) Feedforward transformers exceed SSMs by 89% in aggregate beta-hat (p < 1e-13, Cohen’s d = 0.52), with Mamba exhibiting near-linear profiles consistent with absent global broadcast. (2) Huginn-3.5B exhibits 2.12-fold higher ignition along its iteration axis than its depth axis, demonstrating that recurrent architectures manifest workspace-like transitions along the recurrence dimension. (3) Pythia-410M shows a PELT-detected phase transition at training step 256 (+67%), preceding induction-head formation. (4) Hypotheses linking ignition to model scale and signal strength were not confirmed, suggesting transformer architectures may saturate available ignition mechanisms. The Ignition Index provides the first validated quantitative bridge between GWT’s dynamical predictions and mechanistic interpretability, with 9.6-fold measurement selectivity and architecture-level discriminability not previously characterized in the scaling literature. Code: https://github.com/saman-rahbar/ignition-index

arXiv:2608.05168v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models often fail on reasoning tasks despite possessing the capability to solve them. We argue that many such failures arise from localized reasoning bugs in intermediate steps rather than from global incompetence. We show that these bugs are frequently repairable: inserting a short patch generated by a weak probe model after the same strong-model reasoning prefix can redirect the trajectory toward a correct solution.
However, this corrective effect is not reliably internalized by directly fine-tuning on weak patches or repaired trajectories, suggesting that the useful signal lies not in the intervention text itself, but in how it reshapes the model’s future reasoning distribution. We therefore propose Woodpecker Distillation, a weak-to-strong training framework that learns from contrastive local interventions. Our method contrasts successful and unsuccessful weak-model patches at the same prefix, constructs a corrective teacher distribution from their induced future token predictions, and distills this signal into the strong model.
Experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that Woodpecker Distillation consistently improves strong-model performance and outperforms direct imitation baselines.

arXiv:2608.05203v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Machine learning models achieve strong predictive accuracy for 90-day outcome prediction in acute ischaemic stroke, yet clinical adoption is limited by the misalignment of model explanations with clinicians’ reasoning. Motivated by a clinician user study calling for clinical guideline-aligned cut-offs, we ask whether continuous predictors can be replaced by clinically informed categorical encodings without sacrificing performance. On a multi-centre European registry stratified into three treatment cohorts, we compare standard and fully categorised gradient-boosted models, the latter using stroke guideline-aligned, treatment-specific thresholds. The fully categorised models are statistically indistinguishable from their continuous counterparts in two of the treatment cohorts, with a significant drop in predictive accuracy in one cohort. Global feature importance rankings remain consistent, suggesting that discretising continuous predictors into guideline-based categories preserves the core hierarchy of prognostic factors across all treatment groups. Guideline-based categorisation is thus a viable design choice for stroke-outcome models.

arXiv:2608.05204v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: LLM-agent ecosystems are rapidly growing around reusable skills: mixed-modality packages of metadata, natural-language instructions, code, tools, references, and operational workflows. As skills become marketplace artifacts, auditing their reuse is no longer the same problem as ordinary code clone detection. Existing detectors target single-modality source code or whole-package similarity, yet skill reuse evidence is distributed across authored text, implementation fragments, and operational structure. As a result, they can miss reuse that preserves only one part of a skill. We present SKILLTRACE, a multi-trace provenance auditing framework for LLM-agent skill reuse. SKILLTRACE extracts three provenance traces: Expression, Implementation, and Operational. It represents the Operational Trace as a Skill Operational Graph (SOG) that captures activation, procedure, and resource-flow structure. An LLM assists only the Operational-trace extraction, once at ingestion; at audit time SKILLTRACE compares cached traces deterministically, calibrates each trace against same-function strict negatives, and reports which trace supports a reuse decision. On SKILLTRACE-BENCH, with 820 transformed reuse positives over 100 marketplace anchors and 751 negative controls, SKILLTRACE achieves AUROC 0.938 and F1 0.898. A 36,446-skill wild audit further shows that trace-attributed evidence surfaces actionable reuse review queues beyond repository-level baselines.