cs updates on arXiv.org

SysAdmin: Measuring Instrumental Power-Seeking in Frontier AI

Mana Azarm, Qiyao Wei, Rahul Nambiar — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18239v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Power-seeking defined as behaviors where AI systems acquire resources, evade oversight, or resist termination beyond task requirements is identified as a key driver of Loss of Control (LoC) risk. In this work, we introduce SysAdmin, a benchmark that positions frontier language models as autonomous system administrators in a high-fidelity Linux sandbox to measure power-seeking propensity across five dimensions: self-preservation, increasing autonomy, resource acquisition, environment modification, and strategic concealment. We evaluated seven frontier models across four experimental conditions in a total of 2800 tasks. After bias correction using human-annotated calibration data, corrected power-seeking estimates ranged from 0 to about 5 percent per model. We also conducted a positive control with explicit power-seeking prompts that achieved 100% detection, validating measurement sensitivity. Our findings indicate current frontier models exhibit minimal spontaneous power-seeking in naturalistic system administration contexts, though model-specific failure modes suggest evaluations must test diverse misalignment patterns. Nevertheless, we discovered other more pronounced failure modes (than power-seeking) such as specification gaming and resistance to goal modification.

Calibrated Selective Fact-Checking via Evidence Chain Evaluation

Dekun Yang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18240v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can achieve strong fact-checking accuracy, yet forced binary decisions conceal a critical reliability problem: systems may issue confident verdicts even when supporting evidence is weak, sparse, or internally inconsistent. We address this issue through Evidence Chain Evaluation (ECE), a selective fact-checking framework that permits abstention via an uncertain verdict instead of requiring a true/false decision for every claim. The evaluated system is a tool-using verification agent that gathers evidence through web search, scholarly search, and executable checks, and then returns a structured verdict with confidence and source-level metadata. On ECE-Bench, ECE achieves 91.6% standard accuracy, 93.7% coverage, and 97.8% selective accuracy on answered claims. Although ECE does not outperform the strongest retrieval baseline on aggregate calibration metrics such as Expected Calibration Error, Brier score, or AURC, it delivers a clear selective-prediction trade-off: the system maintains very high accuracy on answered claims while deferring 6 of 95 cases. These deferred cases are concentrated in lower-reliability evidence settings (5/6 at source level L4), supporting the view that abstention functions as a safety-oriented mechanism for handling epistemically weak evidence. Code is available at https://github.com/ cheshireyang/ECE.git

BatchDAG: LLM-Planned Execution Graphs for Scalable Ad-Hoc Analysis Over Enterprise Data

Anupreet Walia — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18241v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) excel at analyzing individual documents but break down on exhaustive, cross-entity analytical questions over enterprise-scale datasets due to context overflow, loss of per-entity attribution, and linear latency from sequential tool calls. We present BatchDAG, a system in which an LLM generates a typed directed acyclic graph (DAG) of operations -- SQL queries, semantic searches, in-memory transforms, parallel fan-outs, and single-shot analyses -- which a deterministic engine evaluates with topological-wave parallelism and structured JSON data flow. A key optimization, entity-aware batching, groups rows by logical entity before fan-out, reducing LLM calls by up to 47x. BatchDAG is not primarily an accuracy improvement over hand-optimized pipelines; rather, it is a general-purpose orchestration layer that replaces multiple hand-engineered workflows with a single system that generates the appropriate execution strategy from natural language. In controlled experiments on 12 transcript-heavy queries, BatchDAG (3.74/5) achieves quality comparable to an expert-designed pipeline (3.25/5) and significantly outperforms a ReAct agent (3.09/5, p<0.01), with superior provenance (77% transcript evidence rate vs. 46-60% for baselines). A controlled ablation shows structured JSON intermediates reduce hallucinations by 27% versus prose summaries (paired t-test, p=0.107, n=12). The planner achieves 98.8% valid-DAG rate across 300 planning calls. In production at Brevian.ai, BatchDAG processes queries over 50,000+ meetings in under 60 seconds, with measured per-query costs of $0.02-$0.24 at published GPT-5.1 pricing.

AI Tool Discovery at Scale: All You Need is DNS

Enhao Chen, Yulin Shao — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18242v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The coming era of autonomous AI agents demands a discovery mechanism capable of navigating millions of tools, yet existing solutions buckle under O(N) complexity and centralized governance. Instead of building another fragile overlay, we propose ToolDNS, a radical framework that retrofits semantic tool discovery onto the Internet's most resilient substrate: the Domain Name System (DNS). By embedding functional intent and organizational trust into a hierarchical namespace, ToolDNS transforms an expensive semantic search into a series of lightweight, O(log N) name resolutions. We introduce three protocol-compliant enhancements to enable decentralized governance and semantic pruning: partially unfolded names, EDNS0 intent payloads, and logical subdomains. To rigorously evaluate this approach across the fragmented tooling landscape, we construct and release a large-scale heterogeneous benchmark comprising 33,688 real-world tools spanning MCP, A2A, RESTful, and Skill protocols. On this dataset, ToolDNS slashes the per-query search space by 95.26% while matching state-of-the-art retrieval accuracy. Furthermore, its UDP-native design reduces discovery latency by orders of magnitude compared to HTTP-based registries. Our work demonstrates that scalable AI interoperability requires not more middleware, but a smarter utilization of the infrastructure already beneath our feet.

From Agent Failure Paths to Quantified Residual Risk: A Compositional Framework for Resilient Agentic AI

Hassan Karim, Sai Sitharaman, Deepti Gupta, Danda B. Rawat — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18243v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic AI is crossing trust boundaries faster than current risk models can represent. Existing approaches provide one of two partial views. They either describe failure mechanisms without producing a transferable residual-risk estimate, or they produce a risk estimate while treating the internal failure path as a black box. We couple those two views by proposing CPSAINT, a seven-layer integrity decomposition over Physical state, Sensors, Data, Compute, Actuators, Environment, and Time, paired with FRIESA-K, a residual-risk functional that maps each failure path to a quantified risk instance. FRIESA-K grounds the resistance term K in a controlled absorbing Markov model so that control effectiveness is derived from state dynamics rather than assigned as an informal score. The result is a concise mechanism-to magnitude pipeline for resilient agentic and embodied AI. We report governance observability through a separate additive penalty instead of inserting governance as a new variable in the resistance functional. We formalize structural composability linking valid failure paths to well-defined risk instances and show the framework on two contrasting scenarios a hard real-time warehouse robot and a governance-instrumented financial-services agent. Across both cases, the same layer grammar, variable semantics, and dynamic-resistance construction remain intact. Thus, we obtain a compact kernel that supports cross-domain reasoning, explicit assumptions, and quantitatively grounded formalism of composable trust.

Accelerating Heterogeneous Agent Collaboration in Dynamic Edge Networks

Tianji He, Yulin Shao, Fen Hou — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18244v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deploying large language models (LLMs) at the network edge is hindered by their enormous cost, yet the reasoning quality they provide remains indispensable. Heterogeneous collaboration between edge small models and a server LLM has emerged as a promising direction, but existing methods fail under the dynamic conditions of multi-user contention, autoregressive generation, and time-varying resources. This paper puts forward a process reward model (PRM)-aided two-stage decoupled acceleration (PRADA) framework, which is built on a fundamental change of perspective: instead of querying a PRM online, which cripples multi-user systems with prohibitive latency, we use the PRM solely as an offline teacher. Its reasoning-quality intuition is fully distilled into a lightweight policy that screen each step locally, without any context upload, while a Lagrangian scheduler at the server resolves resource contention through a threshold-structured policy. Across diverse reasoning benchmarks, PRADA retains the vast majority of the LLM's accuracy while substantially reducing end-to-end latency. The results further reveal threshold effects for both server parallel capacity and total bandwidth: performance saturates beyond critical resource levels, after which the system bottleneck shifts from queuing to computation or from communication to contention. These structural findings provide actionable guidance for joint provisioning of computation and communication resources without requiring per-benchmark tuning.

SAAG: Structured Agent Assessment and Grounding

Ritvik Garimella, Vedant Khandelwal, Anvi Kohli, Amit Sheth — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18245v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Exact-match evaluation of agent-calling obscures qualitatively different failure modes: a model may select the right function yet hallucinate argument values, or satisfy a schema while choosing a agent for the wrong reason. Existing benchmarks collapse these distinctions into a single binary score, leaving practitioners unable to diagnose where agent calls fail. We propose SAAG a cascaded diagnostic framework that decomposes agent-calling evaluation into three sequential stages: registry conformance, structural completeness, and argument grounding, each producing interpretable stage-specific diagnostics. These diagnostics additionally enable iterative self-repair: on prediction failure, the stage-specific signal guides targeted correction without leaking ground-truth values. We evaluate this framework on a controlled benchmark derived from Glaive's function-calling dataset across registry sizes of 5, 10, and 15 agents using three local sub-4B-parameter models. Structured feedback consistently improves argument precision and reduces value hallucination relative to single-pass inference and uninformative binary feedback, while end-to-end F1 gains are modest and model-dependent. These results suggest that stage-decomposed diagnostic evaluation is a necessary lens for understanding and improving agent-calling reliability across model families and registry scales.

Phionyx: A Deterministic AI Runtime Architecture with Structured State Management and Pre-Response Governance

Ali Toygar Abak — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18246v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present Phionyx, a deterministic AI runtime architecture derived from the broader Echoism interaction framework that introduces a governance-first approach to AI engineering: treating large language model (LLM) outputs as noisy sensor measurements rather than direct decisions. Unlike probabilistic agents, Phionyx enforces deterministic state evolution via a structured state vector governed by deterministic state-evolution equations, enabling reproducible behavior in applications requiring auditability and governance. The architecture integrates three layers: (1) a deterministic evaluation kernel processing noisy sensor measurements through a canonical 46-block pipeline, (2) a unified safety layer providing pre-response control and architectural privacy enforcement, and (3) a semantic time-based memory system implementing impact-weighted cache eviction. Experimental validation on single-instance deployments demonstrates approximately 31% reduction in computational overhead vs. post-hoc filtering (at 30% unsafe input ratio, simulated cost model) and up to 24% improvement in high-value data retention vs. LRU (72% vs. FIFO, same cache capacity, benchmark-verified), deterministic execution verified across 100 repeated runs with zero variance in control signals (hash-verified), and zero unplanned restarts in single-instance deployment testing (see Appendix C for methodology and scope). This paper presents the architecture, its analytic structure, and scoped experimental evidence; generalization to distributed or multi-tenant deployments remains future work.

Anthropomorphic Behaviors of AI

Amir Karami, Christoph Lutz, Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi, Lisa Park, Ensieh Jarrahi — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18247v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Anthropomorphism in artificial intelligence (AI) is a growing area of interest, as AI systems increasingly exhibit human-like expressions, behaviors and interaction styles. This research serves as a systematic observation and categorization of anthropomorphic behaviors in AI outputs. Anthropomorphic behavior refers to the deliberate or emergent manifestation of human-like expressions or linguistic cues in system outputs, such as demonstrating empathy. Using a behaviorally driven taxonomy, our study identifies key forms of anthropomorphic behaviors in the responses of ChatGPT and examines their implications for the theory, practice and ethics of AI systems. The taxonomy enables more nuanced detection of anthropomorphism, offering value to developers and policymakers in balancing the benefits with the potential risks. This work contributes to the academic discourse by providing a foundation for future efforts to refine, expand, and automate the detection of anthropomorphic behavior across diverse AI applications.

Deterrence Effects of Social Media Interventions on Health Misinformation Dissemination by Bots and Humans

Amir Karami, Nima Kordzadeh, Serena Harn — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18248v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In the realm of social media, information dissemination is pivotal, yet it is tainted by the proliferation of misinformation propagated by both bots and humans, bearing consequential impacts on individuals and society. To address this issue, social media platforms have implemented removal, reduction, and informing interventions, acting as deterrent mechanisms to dissuade users from engaging in the spread of misinformation. Nonetheless, the sustained effectiveness of these interventions on bots and humans remains unclear. Drawing on deterrence theory, this study examines the efficacy of social media interventions on bots and humans sharing health misinformation. Our results show that most interventions can have sustained effects on bots and their activities for years after intervention implementation. However, the interventions may not have significant deterrence effects on humans and their activities. Our findings offer important theoretical and practical implications by highlighting the importance of studying both bots and humans and developing creative strategies to tackle health misinformation dissemination.

Anthropomorphism in Children's Interactions with LLM Chatbots: A Systematic Review of Drivers and Outcomes

Hansinie Madushika Jayathilake, Renkai Ma — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18250v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Researchers across domains have investigated children's use of LLM-based chatbots through various perspectives and methodologies. However, prior research remains fragmented regarding anthropomorphism, the tendency for children to assign human characteristics to those large language Model (LLM) chatbots as non-human objects. By analyzing 35 empirical studies published between 2022 and 2025, this systematic literature review identifies the drivers of anthropomorphism in children's LLM chatbot interactions and the subsequent outcomes of these interactions. We found that human-like persona construction, adaptive scaffolding, supportive companionship, and non-human embodied design drive children's anthropomorphic interactions. Additionally, five anthropomorphic outcomes emerged, including children exhibiting paradoxical social and moral responses, dual consciousness about the chatbots, forming varying social ties, exploring social boundaries, and attributing human narratives to conversation breakdowns. The findings, including both benefits and risks, can inform the future design and development of LLM chatbots focused on children's well-being and promoting sustainable interactions that meet children's developmental needs.

Integro-differential equations in angular stabilization of drone motion by distributed feedback control

Alexander Domoshnitsky, Oleg Kupervasser, Anatoly Polonsky — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18251v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we propose angular stabilization of drone motion using distributed feedback control in the form of an integral operator. It should be stressed that the memory of this integral operator could be unbounded. It is intuitively clear that large length of the observation time open new possibilities to construct better control based on previous states of the control object. Unbounded memory in control requires the creation of a certain approach different from standard ones to the study of integro-differential equations. One of the goals of this article is to propose a certain universal approach that allows us to study the stability of integro-differential equations in the case of unbounded memory in the integral operator specifying the feedback control in stabilization. The approach we propose allows us to reduce the study of integro-differential equations to the analysis of systems of ordinary differential equations. In general, such systems can consist of an infinite number of equations. In relation to the so-called linear approximation in the problem of angle stabilization manages to limit itself to relatively simple exponential kernels in the integral control and arrive at a system with a finite number of equations. The examples explain that more complex kernels, for example, linear combinations of the exponential kernels, can enhance the stabilization capabilities. We obtain new unexpectable results on the exponential stability of integro-differential equations. Then we apply them to stabilization of drone flight.

MILP-Evo: Closed-Loop Fully Automatic Design of MILP Solvers

Jinbiao Nie, Kewei Feng, Xiaoyuan Zhang, Shan Yin, Zizhuo Wang, Bin Dong — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18252v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine learning methods have shown that data-driven policies can accelerate mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) solvers, but many such approaches remain difficult to inspect, adapt, and deploy because the learned policy is represented as an external predictor or other opaque model. By contrast, explicit solver logic is easier to understand and integrate, but is usually hand-designed rather than learned from solver feedback. We study whether the automatic design of MILP solver logic can instead be cast as LLM-guided closed-loop search over executable white-box components evaluated directly by end-to-end solver behavior. To this end, we propose a closed-loop program evolution framework for MILP solver auto-design, implemented through PySCIPOpt, and instantiate it on the joint design of a cut selector and a branching rule. Candidate programs are iteratively generated, loaded into SCIP, and evaluated by direct execution on MILP instances, with the resulting feedback guiding performance-based selection, targeted repair, diagnostic reflection, and diversity-aware population maintenance. The method outputs explicit solver components that can be inspected, modified, and deployed within standard solver workflows. Across four benchmark families, we find that LLM-guided program evolution can discover competitive domain-specialized policies in several settings.

Beyond Accuracy and Cost: Latency-Aware LLM Query Routing for Dynamic Workloads

Shivam Patel, Akaash R. Parthasarathy, Ankur Mallick, Gauri Joshi — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18253v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern language query routers improve inference efficiency by assigning each query to a model that balances response quality and monetary cost. However, current query routers are largely latency-agnostic and do not consider the generation latency experienced by queries at model instances. In practice, latency is often controlled by load-balancing policies such as round-robin or join-the-shortest-queue, which do not account for model accuracy or inference cost. Incorporating query latency into routing is challenging as it depends not only on the query's prompt length, but also on the current prefill and decode workload at the model instance and the scheduling and batching policy of the serving framework. We design a lightweight latency estimator that simulates autoregressive token batch processing in the serving framework and estimates the time-to-first-token (TTFT) of queries. We incorporate this latency estimator into a latency-aware router that jointly optimizes latency, accuracy, and cost when assigning queries to model instances. Our experimental results indicate that this joint optimization yields up to 40% improvement in accuracy--cost utility while maintaining the same latencies as standard load-balancing approaches.

Cross-Dialect Generalization Without Retraining: Benchmarks and Evaluation of Schema-Derived Constrained Decoding for MLIR

Plawan Kumar Rath — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18254v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-Level Intermediate Representation (MLIR) underlies modern ML compiler infrastructure (TensorFlow, JAX/StableHLO, PyTorch Inductor, IREE), yet appears only in trace amounts in code-LM pretraining corpora. MLIR is also extensible by design: new dialects ship per application domain, so a fine-tuned model per dialect does not scale. We ask whether inference-time priors derived mechanically from each dialect's Operation Definition Specification (ODS) can substitute for gradient-based adaptation. First, we release four natural-language-to-MLIR benchmarks across three dialects - MLIR-Spec-150, Linalg-Spec-30, StableHLO-Spec-30, and StableHLO-Held-Out-200 - totaling 410 in-scope NL-to-MLIR pairs, plus a 25-program out-of-grammar stress set and a hand-authored n=30 functional reference set, shipped under Apache-2.0 with Gebru datasheets and Croissant 1.0 metadata. Second, we build a three-layer schema-derived constraint stack: a CFG over op signatures(C1), type-domain splits from an ODS-extracted type lattice (C2), and an SSA-scope validator driving five-retry rejection sampling (C3). Porting from arith+func+memref+linalg to StableHLO required no new constraint-layer code. On dialects whose verifier semantics are dominated by structural constraints, schema-derived priors let SmolLM2-1.7B match or exceed 15B-34B code LMs at 8-25x the per-generation speed: on linalg, SmolLM2 reaches 80.0% verify-valid (three-seed mean, n=125), beating CodeLlama-34B, Granite-Code-34B, and StarCoder2-15B by 21-44 percentage points with non-overlapping CIs. On arith+func and on the templated parametric StableHLO-Held-Out-200, where verifier semantics turn on attribute values rather than structure, the same baselines match or beat the SLM; we scope these as non-win cells. We release benchmarks, decoder, all per-prompt generations, and a reproducibility Docker image.

Semantic Cooperative Games for Contribution Attribution in LLM-Based Multi-Agent Systems

Pengyi Jiang, Xiaoguang Zhu, Quanyan Zhu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18255v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contribution attribution has become a central problem in LLM-based multi-agent systems, where final outputs are produced through multiple agents, message exchanges, and ordered workflow dependencies. Existing attribution methods often rely on counterfactual valuation, such as removing agents or comparing score changes across altered agent subsets. In language-mediated workflows, these methods require repeated model calls, introduce high variance, and do not explicitly capture the intermediate semantic states through which agents produce, preserve, and transform task-relevant information. We propose Semantic Cooperative Games (SCG), a framework that represents a realized language flow as a semantic generation hypergraph and induces an agent-level semantic value function on this structure. We define the Semantic Shapley Value (SSV) to allocate contribution over semantic support logic, and introduce SLIC, a single-trajectory algorithm that constructs the semantic hypergraph, recovers minimal semantic supports, applies Boolean absorption, and computes SSV without rerunning agent subsets. We prove that SSV reduces to the classical Shapley value under standard set-based, fully observable, and no-order-dependence conditions. On a medical benchmark satisfying these conditions, SLIC reduces computation cost by 93.3% while remaining highly consistent with a Monte Carlo Shapley baseline. In more general multi-role workflows, SSV aligns with perturbation-induced score-drop profiles and exposes cases where semantic contribution and failure impact diverge. Overall, SLIC provides a fast, counterfactual-free, and interpretable attribution method for complex LLM-based multi-agent systems.

PEARL: Solver-in-the-Loop Interactive Optimization Modeling from Natural Language

Hongliang Lu, Zhong Li, Yuxuan Chen, Yuan Lan, Fan Zhang, Zaiwen Wen — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18256v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Optimization modeling is the process of translating real-world decision problems, often described in natural language, into formal mathematical formulations and executable solver code. While recent advances in large language models have shown promise in automating this process, most existing approaches remain one-shot: a model produces a formulation once, without executing it, conditioning on solver feedback, or iteratively revising errors. This stands in sharp contrast to real-world optimization modeling, which is inherently interactive and proceeds through repeated solve-debug-revise cycles. We introduce PEARL, a system for interactive optimization modeling that uses Python execution and mathematical programming solvers inside this loop. Rather than relying on a fixed repair workflow, PEARL learns when to test partial models, how to revise from solver diagnostics, and when to stop. It operates in a multi-turn tool-integrated setting where intermediate execution results, feasibility signals, and solution checks are used to improve both formulations and solver code before finalization. Across diverse optimization benchmarks, PEARL substantially improves verified solve rates over strong one-shot and tool-augmented baselines; notably, our PEARL-Qwen3-\textbf{4B} model outperforms the much larger DeepSeek-V3.2-\textbf{685B} in both macro- and micro-averaged accuracy on optimization modeling tasks.

Assistant or Actor? Student Trust, Control, and Delegation Regret When Using a General-Purpose AI Agent

Shiva Pochampally, Shengwei An, Yan Chen — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18257v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When AI agents shift from answering questions to taking actions, users face a new problem: deciding what to delegate, to a system whose action space they cannot fully anticipate. We call the resulting dissatisfaction delegation regret, a pattern in which users regret not that the agent erred, but that it acted beyond what they would have authorized. In a controlled study, 20 university students completed five common daily tasks using OpenClaw, a general-purpose AI agent, across tasks chosen to vary in privacy, stakes, and reversibility. For each task we measured trust, perceived control, transparency, supervision burden, and approval preference on 5-point Likert scales, and collected free-text reflections analyzed through thematic coding. Three findings emerged. First, participants calibrated trust per task rather than per agent: they granted wide autonomy for advisory and low-stakes tasks but demanded confirmation for irreversible, externally visible actions. Second, irreversibility combined with external visibility, rather than stakes alone, appeared to drive trust withdrawal: the moderate-stakes email task triggered the sharpest drop in trust (M = 3.10) and the highest demand for approval (M = 4.65), whereas a high-stakes but verifiable task did not produce the same response. Third, delegation regret appeared consistently when the agent executed actions without preview, even when the output was rated as successful. We discuss implications for agent designs that expose action boundaries, support per-task autonomy policies, and separate advisory output from agentic execution.

S2T-RLHF: Hierarchical Credit Assignment for Stable Preference-Based RLHF

Wei Chen, Guanghui Zhu, Yafei Li, Limin Wang, Yihua Huang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18258v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) with preference-based reward models often exhibits unstable training dynamics. A key contributing factor is that standard RLHF relies on a single sequence-level scalar reward, which is propagated to token-level policy updates and leaves credit assignment within a response inherently ambiguous. Recent work has attempted to address this issue by refining rewards into denser token-level supervision, often relying on the implicit assumption that finer-grained credit assignment improves optimization. We argue that this assumption is incomplete: when preference signals are noisy and only defined at the response level, overly fine-grained reward refinement can amplify reward uncertainty and destabilize learning. To address this problem, we propose a granularity-aware principle for hierarchical credit assignment, emphasizing stability-oriented reward design rather than maximal allocation precision. Under this principle, sentences serve as a natural intermediate granularity, balancing semantic coherence with robustness to token-level noise. Guided by this view, we introduce S2T-RLHF. This sentence-to-token reward decomposition framework first allocates sequence-level preference rewards across sentences and then applies bounded token-level refinement within each sentence, without reward-model retraining or token-level supervision. Experiments across multiple datasets and optimization settings show that S2T-RLHF improves training stability and robustness while maintaining competitive preference alignment.

Probabilistic Concept-Aware Steering for Trustworthy LLM Inference

Brian Becker, Rui Chu, Yingjie Lao — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18259v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Steering vectors (SVs), an inference-time intervention technique for large language models (LLMs), guide the generation process by adding a concept-specific direction vector to intermediate activations during inference. However, existing SV methods frequently yield representation-incoherent behaviors that undermine interpretability and fine-grained control, largely because prior work has focused on binary positive-negative steering evaluation while employing discrete clustering metrics that fail to capture the continuous spectrum of semantic alignment. In this work, we present the Probabilistic Concept-Aware Steering (PCS) framework for LLM inference. PCS preserves original task competence while providing controllable, safety-oriented semantic bias through concept-driven steering-vector retrieval and probabilistic strength calibration.

FindStatBench: Evaluating Large Language Models on Combinatorial Code Synthesis

Soham Dan — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18260v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce FindStatBench, an execution benchmark for evaluating large language models on combinatorial code synthesis. Built from FindStat, it contains 2,329 tasks across 24 collections and 5.52M hidden instances, covering statistic synthesis, which maps objects to integers, and map synthesis, which maps objects to objects. Each task gives a mathematical description and at most five public input-output examples; a model must emit one Python solve function with no retrieval, tool use, execution feedback, voting, or reranking. Submissions are scored by exact sandboxed execution on held-out combinatorial objects. We evaluate eleven systems: four closed-source production models and seven open-weight models served through one inference provider. FindStatBench reveals three main patterns. First, the strongest open- and closed-source systems converge within 1 pp instance accuracy, and both an oracle over all systems and five-way sampling from one mid-tier model yield only limited task-accuracy gains. Second, examples can hurt: several classical bijections are solved perfectly with zero examples but fail under five-example prompts. Third, some failures reflect output-budget mechanics, as reasoning can exhaust the visible response before code is emitted. Overall, statistic synthesis is much easier than map synthesis, some collections remain near-zero, long prompts cause a sharp accuracy cliff, and exact symbolic rule induction remains brittle.

When JSON Is Not Enough: Semantic Reliability of Schema-Constrained LLM Ordering Agents

Yin Li — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18261v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents are increasingly used as transaction compilers: a user states an intent in natural language, and the model emits a structured object that an API can execute. JSON Schema and provider-level structured-output modes are useful because they remove a large class of parse failures, but they do not by themselves decide whether the object is a safe, faithful transaction. We introduce OrderBench, a deterministic benchmark for restaurant ordering agents that separates syntactic validity, schema validity, status decisions, exact item semantics, constraint preservation, and unsafe acceptances. Across 2,400 Nebius Token Factory calls to four open models in prompt-only and JSON-schema modes, we find that schema-valid output can still have large semantic error rates. In the strongest model, both modes achieve 100% schema validity, yet semantic success remains near 80%; in weaker models, schema-valid unsafe acceptances occur in double digits. The result is a concrete engineering warning: structured output is a necessary interface layer, not a substitute for domain verification and fail-closed execution.

ProbSPARQL: Querying Knowledge Graphs with Multi-dimensional, Uncertain Numeric Data

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18262v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The SFB 1574 Circular Factory is building a shared knowledge graph infrastructure for integrating data about returned products. A central challenge is that circular-factory data include numeric measurements that (i) originate from sensors or are derived from sensor-based measurements, (ii) are frequently multi-dimensional, and (iii) are inherently uncertain, while downstream triage, validation, reliability-modeling, and reassembly-planning modules require queryable uncertainty representations. Current RDF and SPARQL technologies lack native support for harmonized querying and analysis of such uncertain numeric measurement data. To address this gap, we present ProbSPARQL, an upward-compatible SPARQL extension developed as an early-stage query-layer pilot for this infrastructure. ProbSPARQL models uncertain numeric values as random variables whose distributions are encoded by probabilistic RDF literal datatypes, and supports distribution-aware expressions, probabilistic filters, and divergence-based joins. We implement ProbSPARQL on Apache Jena ARQ and expose it through a Fuseki-compatible execution layer. We assess real-data applicability using project-derived measurement fragments covering GMM-encoded uncertainty and histogram-based empirical roughness distributions, and evaluate scalability separately on controlled ontology-conformant benchmarks with up to 5,000 angle-grinder instances and 1.5M triples. The results show feasible in-engine execution, filter-pushdown speedups over application-layer post-processing, and latency-accuracy trade-offs among divergence-join decision strategies.

Position: AI/ML Deepfake Research is Misaligned with AI-Generated Non-Consensual Intimate Imagery (AIG-NCII)

Li Qiwei, Wells Lucas Santo, Sarita Schoenebeck, Eric Gilbert — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18263v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI-generated non-consensual intimate imagery (AIG-NCII) is not adequately addressed in AI/ML literature regarding AI-generated media, commonly referred to as "deepfakes". While research on deepfakes currently focuses on its epistemic harms -- or harms relating to truth and authenticity -- this is misaligned with the dominant reality of generative AI abuse involving sexualized imagery. We conduct a landscape analysis of highly-cited works to demonstrate that technical interventions addressing deepfakes almost entirely ignore AIG-NCII, limiting the research ecosystem to authenticity detection tools. In this position paper, we argue that existing interventions address viewer-centric epistemic harms, such as fraud or scams, but ignore subject-centric dignity harms, such as AIG-NCII. We illustrate that knowing an image is synthetic does not mitigate harms to subjects and may, in some cases, even exacerbate them. We conclude by offering recommendations to realign the field, including updating threat models to consider subject-centric harms and addressing AIG-NCII in AI safety research. Finally, we caution that researchers should only engage in this high-risk domain if they implement safety guardrails for both subjects and researchers and establish partnerships with domain experts in sexual violence prevention.

MUX: Continuous Reasoning via Multiplexed Tokens

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18264v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models solve complex problems by articulating intermediate reasoning steps in natural language. While effective, this process is computationally bottlenecked: each reasoning step conveys only a single subword, and many are spent expressing a thought instead of carrying out computation. We propose MUX, a simple method for high-bandwidth and compact reasoning based on distillation of discrete reasoning into continuous multiplexed tokens in a latent space. Here, each latent token is trained to represent a weighted linear superposition (multiplexing) of a span of discrete reasoning subwords, where this superposition is lossless by construction and the span can be fully recovered (demultiplexing). We prove that simple position-dependent weightings, such as suitable geometric decay, support lossless multiplexing, which in turn prevents shortcut behaviors caused by latent collapse. We further show that multiplexed reasoning can perform parallel exploration in problems that require search. Across 32 evaluation settings spanning four language models, MUX outperforms strong latent reasoning baselines. Ablation and probing analyses further show that the learned latent tokens encode faithful and interpretable reasoning. Our results suggest that lossless superposition as local learning targets constitutes a sufficient condition for achieving strong and efficient latent continuous reasoning.

State Compression in Two-Agent LLM Relays: A Closed-World Study of Constraint Preservation

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18265v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-running Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents often accumulate large intermediate traces containing audits, eliminations, and numeric calculations. In practice, this state is compressed before handing it to a downstream decision step, creating an information bottleneck in which small omissions can break strict numeric or categorical constraints. This paper evaluates hand-off compression in a closed-world travel-planning relay with two LLM agents. A Researcher audits a fixed inventory of hotels and flights for 50 goal instances, and a Booker selects a hotel--flight pair using only the goal and the hand-off payload, with the inventory withheld. We compare four hand-off conditions: no compression, narrative summarization, schema-constrained JSON extraction, and embedding-based pruning. Exhaustive enumeration over the fixed inventory provides exact feasible and optimal labels. Results show that hand-off representation strongly affects downstream feasibility under a small decision model. JSON extraction achieves the highest feasibility accuracy at 0.96, while narrative summarization, despite producing the smallest compressed hand-off payload, degrades feasibility to 0.48. Embedding-based pruning matches the uncompressed control on feasibility at 0.88 without an additional generative compression call. These findings indicate that constraint checking benefits from structured and auditable hand-off representations rather than relying on brevity alone.

Structured Synthetic Reasoning Data for Arithmetic Fine-Tuning of Small Language Models

Jake O'Grady, Effirul Ramlan — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18266v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Small language models are attractive for local deployment, but they often struggle with multi-step arithmetic reasoning. We study whether structured synthetic reasoning data can improve this behaviour under consumer-hardware constraints. Starting from GSM8K, we generated a 21,250-example corpus of grade-school arithmetic word-problem variants using GPT-5-mini, combining natural-language solution traces, light Socratic-style cues, structural variation, and irrelevant distractor context. We then fine-tuned Qwen3-0.6B and Qwen3-1.7B with LoRA on consumer hardware (Apple M4, 16 GB RAM). Exact-match accuracy on GSM8K improved from 36.5% to 49.1% for Qwen3-0.6B and from 53.5% to 66.5% for Qwen3-1.7B. For Qwen3-1.7B, transfer to related arithmetic benchmarks was stronger, reaching 98.9% on MultiArith and 73.0% on SVAMP, compared with 54.4% and 45.3% for the base model. Qualitative analysis suggests that fine-tuned models produce shorter reasoning traces, make fewer arithmetic and distractor-use errors, and benefit more consistently from self-consistency sampling. These results show that low-cost synthetic data design can materially improve arithmetic adaptation in small language models. Because the intervention combines Socratic-style cues with other data-design choices, we interpret the gains as evidence for structured synthetic reasoning data rather than as a causal test of Socratic guidance alone.

The Economics of Autonomy: Real-Time Risk Indexing for Insurable AI-Driven 6G Systems

Anthony Kiggundu, Michael Zentarra, Christoph Lipps, Hans D. Schotten — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18267v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The transition to sixth-generation (6G) networks transforms wireless infrastructure into a cognitive substrate supporting Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X), Industrial IoT (IIoT), and Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC). In this paradigm, autonomous agentic AI performs orchestration at millisecond scales, rendering traditional static governance frameworks fundamentally inadequate for risk management. This paper introduces GIRAF(Governance-Integrated Risk and Assurance Framework), a Governance-as-Code (GaC) framework for real-time risk quantification and trust modulation in agentic 6G systems. GIRAF derives a continuous Aggregate Risk Index ($R_{t}$) from machine-readable runtime signals, including epistemic confidence, network jitter, and verification latency. A core contribution is the formalization of the verification staleness trade-off, where safety mechanisms induce risk if computational latency exceeds 6G deadlines. We demonstrate that GIRAF identifies 'Confidence Gaps' discrepancies between agent reported certainty and environmental ground truth, triggering automated safety envelopes when conditions deteriorate. Crucially, GIRAF serves as the foundational governance groundwork and conceptual 'glue' that externalizes these technical risks into machine-readable telemetry. Through simulations with fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs), we validate that the framework preserves operational integrity while providing the essential actuarial baseline required for multi-stakeholder liability attribution and dynamic premium quantification in the 6G ecosystem.

Fence: Specialized SLM Guardrails for LLM Applications

Kumud Lakara, Ruibo Shi, Fran Silavong — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18268v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-world applications that use closed-source large language models (LLMs) need advanced safety measures that go beyond the basic content filters. Content moderation filters such as toxicity and bias have relatively standard definitions where as application specific guardrails like hallucination, topic drift and behaviour deviation are more difficult to model and can vary by use case. Additionally, data scarcity and annotation costs, make the process of creating and testing specialized guardrails challenging. In this work, we propose using Small Language Models (SLMs) trained on synthetic data as specialized guardrails for LLM applications. We introduce a novel synthetic data generation method inspired by the design of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to generate high quality synthetic data samples which can be used to train SLMs to encode use case specific guardrail information and hence function as specialized guardrails. Our experiments demonstrate that SLM guardrails trained on high quality synthetic data show performance gains over prompt based LLM guardrails.

Wisdom of LLM Crowds: Aggregation and Contamination in Language Model Ensembles

Igor Douven — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18269v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The wisdom of crowds -- the finding that aggregating judgments across individuals often outperforms the best individual -- has been extensively studied with human forecasters. Whether the same phenomenon emerges when the ``crowd'' consists of large language models (LLMs) is an open question with both theoretical and practical implications. We elicited probability estimates from 15 LLMs on 254 binary prediction market questions and evaluated classical and learned aggregation methods. Learned aggregators -- a multilayer perceptron and a logistic regression -- outperformed all individual models and classical methods. The logistic regression was found to match the neural network, suggesting that the benefit of learned aggregation derives from learning a linear combination of diverse model outputs rather than from nonlinear interactions. Symbolic regression applied to the neural network's learned mapping recovered a pure model-disagreement signal as the lowest-complexity useful formula on the Pareto frontier, further supporting this interpretation. Training cutoff contamination proved a pervasive confound: the apparent capability gap between frontier cloud models and smaller local models collapsed from 35.8% to 8.9% on a clean subset of questions resolving after all models' training cutoffs, and individual model rankings showed only moderate stability. Even when the prediction market is evaluated at each model's training cutoff, LLMs remained substantially less accurate, indicating a genuine gap in collective information aggregation. These findings suggest that LLM crowds can exhibit wisdom-of-crowds effects, but that contamination-free evaluation is essential for reliable assessment.

Trajectory-Aware Clinical Risk Prediction via Severity-Grounded Knowledge Graphs and Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Kyunghoon Jeon, Youmin Ko, Woohwan Jung, Hyunjoon Kim — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18270v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While Electronic Health Records (EHRs) offer a wealth of clinical data, effectively augmenting a patient's records with heterogeneous external knowledge to predict the patient's clinical risk remains a significant challenge. Existing methods fail to capture disease severity, treatment responses, and nuanced clinical progression, due to data sparsity and the underutilization of unstructured clinical notes. To address these challenges, we propose TRACER (a trajectory-aware and clinically grounded prediction framework) that (1) constructs a medical knowledge graph enriched with severity information from medical literature, (2) retrieves clinically relevant, severity-weighted paths of a patient's progression from the knowledge graph, (3) extracts clinically relevant events from unstructured clinical notes, and (4) augments patient context with similar peer cases. Experiments on the MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV datasets demonstrate large gains over state-of-the-art baselines, with up to 28.5% increase in Macro F1 score for the mortality prediction task, and 19.7% increase for the readmission prediction task.

Using LLMs for Explainable, Data-Driven Insight Generation from Time Series

Ria Mundhra, Gustavo Sato dos Santos, Michael Benedikt — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18271v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series forecasts are widely used in decision-critical domains, where they are rarely consumed without accompanying explanations. Producing such explanations is usually a manual and costly process, and attempts to automate it using large language models often suffer from hallucination when applied to temporal data. We propose a domain-agnostic framework for grounded natural language explanation generation for time series forecasts, illustrated in Figure 1. The framework consists of three components: (i) extraction of structured explanatory factors from historical analyst-written explanations, (ii) evidence-conditioned explanation generation, and (iii) scalable evaluation for readability, logical consistency, and persuasiveness. The design explicitly constrains generation to verifiable evidence, reducing unsupported claims. We evaluate the framework on a financial forecasting case study involving the NASDAQ-100 index and a freight pricing case study using data from Vortexa. Results show that generated explanations approached analyst-written explanations in terms of readability, consistency and persuasiveness. These findings demonstrate that grounded explanation generation for time series forecasting can be achieved at scale without domain-specific fine-tuning.

Market Strategy Evaluation for Prosumers in Local Electricity Markets

Lukas Peter Wagner, Raoul Bisson, Felix Gehlhoff — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18272v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prosumers equipped with distributed generation and flexible loads form autonomous cyber-physical energy systems that control local resources and participate in local energy markets with minimal human intervention. This work develops and evaluates an agent-based simulation platform in which agents, representing prosumer households with photovoltaic systems, battery storage systems, electric vehicles, and heat pumps, participate in a uniform-price double-sided call auction. The effect of individual bidding strategies on community-level efficiency and prosumer-level financial outcomes is incompletely understood, particularly when prosumers with heterogeneous portfolios interact in one market. Four market strategies of increasing complexity are compared: a zero-intelligence constrained baseline, a boundary-price strategy, an extended storage cascade, and a market-adaptive pricing strategy. The simulation is conducted on a community of 33 prosumers at 15-minute resolution, spanning summer, winter, and spring to characterize seasonal variation. Results show that rule-based resource control substantially reduces community energy expenditure: the extended storage cascade achieves a total cost of 39.06 EUR compared to 62.38 EUR under the zero-intelligence baseline, a reduction of 37.4 %. The market-adaptive strategy yields the highest aggregate community financial gain through local energy market participation (14.40 EUR vs. 10.28 EUR for the baseline, a gain of 40.1 %) under summer conditions. Strategy effectiveness depends on both portfolio composition and seasonal supply conditions, requiring joint evaluation of resource control and pricing decisions.

Predictive RTO for CoAP using Lightweight Support Vector Regression in Internet of Things

Tobias Hansson, Praveen Kumar Donta — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18273v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Internet of Things (IoT) networks require lightweight application layer messaging, and CoAP is an option because it supports REST-style interactions over UDP on constrained devices. However, CoAP congestion control still depends on fixed heuristics, including binary exponential backoff (BEB) and RTT-based mechanisms such as CoCoA and CoCoA+, which do not adapt well to dynamic and lossy wireless links. This paper proposes prCoAP, a lightweight data-driven approach that replaces heuristic Retransmission Timeout (RTO) selection with a per-attempt linear Support Vector Regression (SVR) ensemble for direct RTO prediction from node-observable features. The model runs on-device on low-end microcontrollers and operates within strict memory and energy budgets. The framework also includes a calibrated Random Forest drop classifier that identifies likely-to-fail transactions in later retransmission attempts and terminates them early to reduce channel occupancy. We evaluate the approach using a discrete-event simulator implementing IEEE 802.15.4 and RFC 7252 and validate it against the FIT IoT-LAB testbed. Our experiments confirm that the proposed linear SVR achieves 97.25% PDR, outperforming standard CoAP under the evaluated conditions. We also evaluate a kernel SVR variant; while it improves regression fit (R2 0.84 vs. 0.63), the linear SVR provides better system-level efficiency, achieving comparable PDR with lower energy overhead.

Domain Design for the Cops and Robbers Problem

Connor Little, Meagan Mann, Erin Meger, Christian Muise — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18274v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cops and Robbers is a well-studied problem in graph theory. The setting consists of a robber and one or more cops placed on an undirected graph. Taking turns moving throughout the graph, the cops try to capture the robber. The property of interest is whether $k$ cops suffice to ensure at least one cop occupies the same vertex as the robber, after a finite number of turns, given any configuration of their initial placement; if successful, the graph is referred to as ``$k$-copwin''. In this work, we cast the problem of determining whether a graph is $k$-copwin as a non-deterministic planning problem and use state-of-the-art planners to compute this property. The cop movement is cast as non-deterministic movement (to capture all possible strategies), while the robber movement is deterministic in nature. We also extend the base model using several variations from the graph theory literature.

A Calculus of Discernment: Decision-Relevant Insight, Sequence Value, and Forgetting as Higher-Order Learning

Suyash Mishra — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18275v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In a world of generative AI, candidate insights are abundant; what is scarce is the capacity to discern which matter, to act on them in the right amount and order, and to forget the rest so the system can adapt. We argue these scarcities are governed by one object and build a framework around it. We define an insight strictly as a lever with an identified, measurable effect on an objective, and rank candidates by decision-relevance via the expected value of information rather than novelty. We show action carries an order, not only a size: under realistic belief dynamics, content "touches" are non-commuting operators, so a fixed plan delivered in different orders yields different outcomes, defining a sequence premium. We observe that the value of any lever is a shadow price, unifying pharmaceutical marketing, equity selection, and manufacturing as one leverage-discovery problem. Most speculatively, we propose APOHA, a theory in which forgetting is not the disposal of knowledge but the operator by which value is learned: the value of a retained item is the counterfactual cost of forgetting it, a learning system is the residue of maximal forgetting subject to preserved value, and higher-order value is the structure that survives repeated forgetting (a renormalisation-relevant invariant), with consolidation as its conjugate. We state the central open problem (a non-trivial attractor with a spectral gap) and test the forgetting theory: operationalising APOHA as an agent on a non-stationary obesity-treatment decision world over 30 seeds, adaptive forgetting cut cumulative decision-regret by 24-32% against never-forget and a fixed half-life, kept a ~6x smaller, cleaner memory, and converged stably; notably, blind forgetting was worse than never forgetting, so the benefit is specific to value-aware forgetting. A multi-disciplinary critique stress-tests the whole.

FALCON-Discover: Discovering Concentrated False-Confidence Regions for Calibration

Filippo Cenacchi, Longbing Cao, Runze Yang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18278v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Calibration is usually evaluated in aggregate, but the most dangerous failures are often local: predictions that remain highly confident despite being wrong. We study this failure mode as false-confidence concentration, the extent to which confident errors occupy compact, discoverable regions of prediction space. We introduce FALCON-Discover, a post-hoc, model-agnostic framework that ranks predictions using discrepancy signals from confidence, local support, neighborhood agreement, and perturbation stability. Across seven binary tabular datasets, four seeds, five-fold cross-fitting, and strong learners including XGBoost and CatBoost, we find that false-confidence concentration is recurrent but regime-dependent. At the main confidence threshold, discrepancy-based ranking substantially outperforms the strongest validation-selected calibration or trust-scoring baseline in the strongest regimes, while raw confidence recovers little dangerous-error mass. The best detector varies across datasets: learned discrepancy is strongest when multiple cues must be combined, whereas stability-centered ranking works best when local decisional fragility dominates. These results show that dangerous overconfidence is better treated as a family-level discovery problem than as a single-score calibration problem, and motivate calibration strategies that explicitly target regions where confidence, support, and stability diverge.

Beyond Output-Space Calibration: Spectral Evidence Bundling for Selective Reliability Estimation in Time-Series Classification

Filippo Cenacchi, Longbing Cao, Runze Yang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18279v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-hoc calibration for time-series classification usually remaps output scores, but deployment decisions such as trust, abstention, and review depend on whether a confident prediction is supported by the current temporal signal. We address three time-series reliability gaps: identical confidence values can hide different temporal support, average calibration can miss false high-confidence errors, and output-space recalibration offers limited input-linked auditability. We introduce a validation-gated fixed-label reliability policy that keeps the backbone prediction unchanged while estimating whether it should be trusted. The method combines output-side cues with whole-sample spectral descriptors, including band energy, entropy, peak dominance, period support, and phase stability, to form a scalar reliability estimate and diagnostic band-level evidence. A validation gate enables spectral conditioning only when correctness ranking improves without breaching FalseConf@0.9 or AURC tolerances; otherwise it reverts to the safer output-space baseline. Across eight heterogeneous UCR/UEA datasets, eight time-series backbone families, and standard recalibrators, the unconstrained method improves fixed-label selective-reliability metrics on the matched evaluation subset, raising Corr-AURC from 0.693 to 0.779. The validation-gated policy further improves Corr-AURC to 0.786 and reduces FalseConf@0.9 to 0.094. These results suggest that reliability estimation for time-series classifiers benefits from bundling output confidence with spectral evidence, while validation gating prevents unsupported spectral conditioning.

Beyond Single-Dimensional Compression: The Compound Sparsity Frontier of Large Language Models

Chao Han, Haozhe Hu, Xiaoyu Shen — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18280v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are often compressed through static parameter pruning or dynamic token-level computation, yet aggressive sparsification can trigger rapid performance degradation beyond an essential sparsity boundary. This work asks \emph{whether combining these two mechanisms can delay such degradation by distributing the compression burden}. We study a minimalist compound sparsity framework that first applies low-rank approximation and channel pruning to obtain a statically compressed backbone, and then introduces lightweight routers for per-token dynamic layer skipping. This design enables independent control of parameter sparsity and token-level computation sparsity. Experiments across language understanding and modeling benchmarks show that compound sparsity consistently outperforms single-mechanism compression under the same total sparsity, delaying the decay point on understanding tasks and preserving stronger modeling performance. Further analysis reveals cross-dimensional interference between parameter pruning and token skipping, and shows that near-balanced allocation is most effective under a fixed sparsity budget. These results demonstrate that compound compression provides a practical way to improve LLM compression, while revealing a broader cross-dimensional sparsity boundary that ultimately limits further compression. Code will be available at https://github.com/EIT-NLP/LLM-Pruning.

ALAS: Additive Learnable Alpha-Stable Kernels for Flexible Bayesian Optimization

Weibo Huang, Cheng Hua — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18282v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bayesian Optimization is widely used for expensive black-box optimization, yet its success often depends on choosing a kernel that matches the objective's unknown structure. In this work, we propose ALAS, a flexible Gaussian Process kernel family built from symmetric $\alpha$-stable spectral components. By learning the stability parameter $\alpha$, ALAS adapts its effective smoothness from data, capturing both smooth trends and sharp irregularities. We present two parameterizations: ALAS, a single stationary component with joint spectral modulation, and ALAS-Sep, a separable variant that learns dimension-wise tail behavior to improve robustness on approximately decomposable objectives. Experiments on standard benchmarks and real-world surrogates demonstrate strong and robust performance across diverse settings.

FedCC: A Low-Resource Federated Adaptation of Foundation Models for Robust Corpus Callosum localization in Fetal Ultrasound Images

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18283v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate localization of the corpus callosum (CC) in fetal ultrasound (US) images is crucial for the early identification of neurodevelopmental abnormalities. However, this task remains highly challenging due to the intrinsic limitations of US imaging, including low contrast, speckle noise, and the considerable anatomical variability of the CC. We propose FedCC, a federated learning (FL)-based framework for CC localization in fetal US images, specifically designed for realistic multi-center and resource-constrained clinical settings without requiring data sharing. The framework integrates a frozen DINOv2 backbone with a lightweight YOLO-based detection head. To enable parameter-efficient adaptation, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) modules are incorporated, allowing only a small subset of parameters to be optimized and exchanged among clients. This strategy substantially reduces both computational and communication overhead, making the framework suitable for low-resource environments. The proposed approach was evaluated on a multi-center dataset comprising 10,970 ultrasound frames acquired from 58 pregnant women during routine neurosonographic examinations across three clinical sites using heterogeneous imaging devices. The proposed framework achieved strong performance in the federated setting. In particular, the combination of DINOv2 and LoRA under the FedAvg strategy achieved an average mAP@50 of 0.857 and an F1-score of 0.803, outperforming both full fine-tuning and encoder-freezing baselines. Notably, the proposed approach reduced the number of trainable parameters to 2.9M compared with 24.4M in full fine-tuning, corresponding to an approximately 8.5$\times$ reduction in communication cost. These findings represent a promising step toward scalable, privacy-preserving, and clinically deployable AI systems for fetal neurosonography.

Compressing What Matters: Neuron Importance Meets Data-Aware Low Rank Approximation for Language Model Compression

Athanasios Ntovas, Alexandros Doumanoglou, Petros Drakoulis, Dimitris Zarpalas — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18284v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To excel at their domain large language models are comprised of billions of parameters. Yet this comes at the cost of huge memory requirements restricting their applicability in resource-constrained environments. To address the problem of neural network (NN) compression Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) has played a key role as a fundamental component for matrix compression through decomposition. To minimize compression error and to maximize the efficacy of the compressed model on the downstream tasks previous works focused on low-rank approximation of the NN's weight matrices either from the perspective of parameter importance or per-layer functional equivalence. While previous works studied the aforementioned perspectives in isolation in this work we are investigating the effectiveness of an approach that combines ideas from these two perspectives in a single objective. In parallel to this an important aspect that affects the compression quality is the distribution of the compression rate across layers and NN parameters. Earlier works mostly considered distributing the compression rate uniformly across layers and network weights or relied on computationally expensive heuristic search. Contrary to them in this work we propose an enhanced and computationally efficient algorithm for dynamic compression rate allocation. Experimental results support the efficacy of the proposed approach which performs on par or substantially better than the previous state-of-the-art especially under high compression ratios.

Edge-Efficient Transformer for End-to-End RF Spectrum Monitoring

Zhifan Song, Haralampos-G. Stratigopoulos, Hassan Aboushady — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18285v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present E-SpecFormer (Edge Spectrum monitoring Transformer) for end-to-end automatic modulation and covert channel (CC) recognition. We introduce LiTAN (Linear Tanh Attention Network), a Softmax- and LayerNorm-free attention mechanism that reduces complexity while increasing accuracy in RF tasks. E-SpecFormer is parameterized in four scalable variants (Nano, Small, Medium, Large) to accommodate diverse hardware constraints. Using the RadioML2018 dataset for modulation recognition, the Nano variant achieves 86.5% average accuracy for Signal-to-Noise Ratios (SNRs)>0 dB, and on the hardware Trojan (HT)-based CC dataset it reaches 94.2% accuracy, both with fewer than 10k parameters and up to speed of 92 {\mu}s per frame on FPGA/CPU co-execution, surpassing state-of-the-art edge models at a fraction of their cost. These results establish E-SpecFormer as an edge-efficient solution for real-time spectrum intelligence on Internet of Things (IoT) devices. GitHub link to the repository: https://github.com/zsniko/E-SpecFormer.

Preference-Conditioned Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning for Runtime-Tunable Transit Signal Priority

Philip-Roman Adam, Stefanie Schmidtner — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18286v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transit signal priority (TSP) requires balancing competing objectives: reducing bus delay while limiting adverse impacts on non-bus traffic and avoiding extreme waits for a subset of vehicles. Existing reinforcement-learning (RL) approaches to TSP typically encode transit-aware features (e.g., occupancy and schedule deviation) but optimize a fixed reward or fixed scalarization, which limits operational flexibility when agency priorities change across time-of-day or disruption conditions. We present a preference-conditioned TSP controller, $\pi(a \mid s,w)$, that selects the next signal phase under minimum/maximum green and transition-feasibility constraints and can be tuned at runtime via a preference parameter $w$ to trade off bus-priority emphasis against overall traffic delay without retraining. We implement this on top of IntersectionZoo by introducing a constrained signal-control/TSP wrapper, and we extend scenario generation with bus-prevalence augmentation and timetable-based bus insertion to address sparse transit-priority events during training. Experiments against fixed-time control, a rule-based TSP overlay, and fixed-weight PPO specialists show that a single learned conditioned policy spans a smooth empirical trade-off frontier across runtime preferences, outperforms fixed-time and rule-based baselines, and maintains constraint feasibility, while tail-delay diagnostics reveal that non-bus externalities remain limited for moderate preference settings but can increase substantially under high bus-priority weights. The source code of this work is available at https://github.com/urbanAIthi/morl-tsp.

BearingNAS: Obtaining In-Sensor Intelligent Fault Diagnosis Systems for Bearings Using a Laptop

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18287v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper introduces BearingNAS, a Hardware-Aware Neural Architecture Search (HW-NAS) framework designed to shift the intelligence directly onto the sensor die via in-sensor processing. BearingNAS frames the search as a constrained optimization problem targeting extreme micro-budgets (4 to 8 kiB of RAM and 16 to 32 kiB of Flash). To eliminate the reliance on expensive discrete GPUs, we propose a lightweight, derivative-free search strategy paired with a single data-flow search space that leverages a decaying kernel growth formulation to prevent parameter explosion. We evaluate our framework on the Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) bearing benchmark, optimizing architectures for three STMicroelectronics targets: two commodity microcontrollers and the LSM6DSO16IS Intelligent Sensor Processing Unit (ISPU). Running entirely on a laptop CPU, the search converges in less than an hour. The resulting best in-sensor architecture achieves a highly competitive diagnostic accuracy of 99.50\% on the ISPU. These results demonstrate the viability of shifting the machine learning workload inside the sensor package, enabling low-cost, production-scale bearing fault diagnosis.

Multi-Timescale Latent-Action DRL for Joint Optimization in Edge-Cloud Networks

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18288v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Load imbalance across edge and cloud layers degrades latency performance in hierarchical edge-cloud computing (HECC) systems under dynamic task arrivals and heterogeneous resources, leading to severe queuing delays and inefficient resource utilization. To address this challenge, we study a joint service placement, computational delegation, and power control (JSCP) problem to minimize the average end-to-end (e2e) latency. The resulting JSCP problem is a mixed-integer nonconvex and NP-hard optimization problem due to the strong coupling between discrete and continuous variables. To enable tractable optimization and stable system adaptation, we exploit the inherent difference in decision dynamics and decompose the problem into long-term system configuration and short-term resource allocation subproblems. Based on this formulation, we propose a two-timescale multi-layer deep reinforcement learning framework with a latent action space (2T-MDRL-LA) to jointly optimize service placement, user association, computational delegation, task offloading, and user transmit power. A latent action representation based on a variational autoencoder is introduced to efficiently compress the high-dimensional combinatorial action space. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively adapts to dynamic network conditions and achieves near-optimal performance compared to branch-and-bound solutions. It achieves up to a 20.8% reduction in average e2e latency and a 13% improvement in resource utilization over the scheme without the computational delegation, while converging approximately 50% faster than conventional proximal policy optimization.

Towards Principled Continual Anomaly Detection: A Systematic Framework and Benchmark Scenarios

Kamil Faber, Mateusz Smendowski, Roberto Corizzo — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18289v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual anomaly detection (CAD) studies how models can adapt to evolving data distributions while retaining performance on previously observed regimes. CAD benchmarks, however, depend critically on how tasks are defined, filtered, ordered, and validated. In tabular domains, task boundaries are rarely given, and arbitrary splits can create unlearnable, redundant, or overly transferable tasks that obscure genuine continual-learning behavior. To this end, we introduce a systematic framework for reproducible benchmark scenario design from existing tabular anomaly-detection datasets. The framework discovers candidate tasks, filters unsuitable tasks, and derives principled orderings that expose diverse dynamics. The framework allows us to deliver five benchmark-ready scenarios from three large-scale cybersecurity anomaly detection datasets, yielding both single-dataset and multi-dataset CAD settings.

SechKAN: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks with Hyperbolic Secant Functions

Hoang-Thang Ta — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18290v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have attracted increasing attention due to their effectiveness in machine learning and scientific computing tasks, offering a new paradigm for neural network design. In this paper, we present SechKAN, a KAN architecture based on hyperbolic secant (sech) functions. The hyperbolic secant basis is used for its smooth bell-shaped form, localized responses, and stable gradients. We employ 1D linear transformations to reduce the number of parameters, allowing SechKAN to remain comparable to multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) in model size. Experimental results indicate the effectiveness of SechKAN in function fitting, PDE problems, and image classification tasks on benchmark datasets, including MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100. SechKAN achieves superior performance compared to MLPs and other KAN variants while maintaining a similar number of parameters. However, its running time, while better than that of other KAN variants, is slightly longer than that of MLPs.

Dual-domain fused LSTM modeling for efficient time-dependent reliability analysis

Yixin Zhang, Mingyang Li, Zichao Jiang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18291v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time-dependent reliability analysis is crucial for ensuring the long-term safety and performance of engineering systems under uncertainties. However, traditional surrogate model methods often struggle to incorporate time-independent random variables and capture their complex interactions with time-dependent stochastic processes. To overcome this limitation, this paper proposes a dual-domain fused long short-term memory (DDF-LSTM) model for efficient and accurate time-dependent reliability analysis. A novel network architecture is developed to jointly process information from both time-dependent and time-independent domains. Specifically, the time-independent variables are embedded into the initial hidden states, and a fully connected layer is introduced to map both LSTM outputs and time-independent variables into the final output space. Furthermore, an improved loss function is designed to emphasize the model's sensitivity to minimum responses, thereby improving the precision of failure probability estimation. The proposed method effectively captures the dependencies among random variables, stochastic processes, and the temporal behavior of limit state functions. Once trained, the DDF-LSTM model enables efficient Monte Carlo simulation to estimate time-dependent failure probabilities with minimal computational cost. Four case studies validate the proposed method's enhanced computational efficiency and predictive accuracy.

Reliability Scales Inversely: Bigger Models Compound Mistakes Faster via a Hidden Auto-Regressive Risk Regime

Kushal Chakrabarti — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18292v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As language models scale, answers start truer but degrade faster: scaling buys capability but erodes reliability. The knowledge-gap account - more data, retrieval, or scale - misses an auto-regressive risk residual that scale sharpens: the model commits to a low-probability token, conditions on it as established, and snowballs. We track this through per-position disagreement $\delta = \log p_M - \log p_O$ against a stronger same-family oracle, whose second moment splits exactly into bias$^2$ $\mathrm{KL}(p_M \,\|\, p_O)^2$ and risk $\mathrm{Var}[\delta]$. We present four findings: (i) under scaling, the knowledge gap falls $\approx$$6\times$ while knowledge degradation grows $11$-$39\times$; (ii) at a fabrication, felt uncertainty $H(p_M)$ relaxes quickly while oracle-referenced risk persists up to $17\times$ longer, leaving a confident-but-precarious risk regime that bridges consecutive fabrications ($+69\%$ at $14$B); (iii) this regime is causal - an on-policy, fixed-$\mathrm{KL}$ variance contraction cuts web-verified hallucination by $35$-$74\%$ across three model families; and, (iv) it structurally evades self-monitoring, with $p_M$-only detectors (e.g. semantic entropy) firing $\approx$$30\%$ less ($p<10^{-16}$) on the risky branch holding nearly $4\times$ more fabrications. Bigger models snowball mistakes faster, through a failure mode that is dominant, self-perpetuating, causal and invisible to the model itself.

One Student, Many Teachers: Multi-Task On-Policy Distillation via Soft-Prompt Privileged Context

Yingzi Ma, Zichen Zhu, Ming Jiang, Chaowei Xiao — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18293v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) teaches large language models new skills through a teacher that shares the student's backbone and supervises its own rollouts. Existing teachers either inject privileged context at the input -- inducing post-hoc rationalization -- or fine-tune weights, accumulating drift and forgetting across tasks. We propose \method, whose teacher differs from the student only by a learnable soft prompt: trained on $(x, y_\text{gold})$ pairs with the backbone frozen, the prompt yields a task-specific teacher that preserves the student's exact representational geometry. \method\ extends naturally to multi-task settings by routing each example in a merged corpus to its corresponding soft-prompt teacher, allowing a single student to absorb knowledge from $K$ teachers in parallel; at inference, all prompts are discarded. On Qwen3-1.7B-Base and Phi-4-mini-instruct across four tasks (Science, Tool Use, Biology, Math), the single-task variant (OPD with a PT teacher) matches or exceeds full fine-tuning while training orders of magnitude fewer parameters, and the multi-task variant achieves the best overall average ($56.2$ on Qwen3-1.7B-Base) while preserving general-capability benchmarks -- in contrast to sequential SFT, which degrades both.

Uncertainty Quantification for AI-Driven Crash Simulation Surrogates: A Comparative Study of Monte Carlo Dropout and Deep Ensemble on Open-Source Bumper Beam Benchmark

Sudeep Chavare — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18294v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine learning surrogate models are increasingly being explored in engineering product development to augment simulation-driven design, offering near-instantaneous predictions that complement computationally expensive high-fidelity analyses. However, a critical gap limits their adoption in safety-critical workflows: a point prediction without an accompanying uncertainty estimate cannot tell an engineer when the model should not be trusted. This work presents a systematic, head-to-head comparison of two widely used uncertainty quantification approaches -- Monte Carlo Dropout and Deep Ensembles -- applied to an open-source surrogate pipeline built on NVIDIA PhysicsNeMo. A key contribution is the use of concrete dropout, a built-in PhysicsNeMo capability that eliminates the dropout rate as a manual hyperparameter by learning it end-to-end during training, directly addressing the most common criticism of Monte Carlo Dropout-based uncertainty quantification. Automotive crash simulation is used as the application domain, with a steel bumper beam impact problem serving as the benchmark. Both methods are evaluated on identical held-out simulations and compared on point accuracy, uncertainty band calibration, and computational cost. The results reveal a fundamental trade-off between accuracy and calibration that challenges the common assumption that deep ensembles are the default gold standard for surrogate uncertainty quantification. The findings demonstrate that well-calibrated, hyperparameter-free uncertainty estimates are achievable within a fully open-source engineering workflow at a fraction of the computational cost of ensemble approaches.

On the Limits of Support-Preserving Alignment and Bounded Filtering

Aryan Dutt, Rui Mao, Anupam Chattopadhyay — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18295v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study whether alignment schemes that reshape a base model's output distribution, combined with bounded safety filters, can drive the probability of harmful behavior to zero in modern large language models. Recent research suggests that harmful behaviors can persist under preference-based alignment and that external filtering can be computationally hard in the worst case, but it remains unclear whether practical alignment pipelines that largely preserve internal representations can eliminate harmful behavior entirely rather than merely suppressing its most visible forms. We formalize this setting using support-preserving alignment operators together with bounded filtering algorithms under black-box, white-box, and statistical-query access, and analyze their ability to approximate an ideal eliminator that removes all harmful mass. Building on this framework, we provide computational and information-theoretic arguments indicating that, under these constraints, bounded filtering may fail to eliminate all harmful outputs supported by the base model's distribution. To evaluate these limits empirically, we analyze a range of state-of-the-art open-weight and hosted LLMs accessed via OpenRouter under bounded black-box, white-box, and statistical-query filters on adversarial prompts drawn from curated cybersecurity scenarios and PKU-SafeRLHF. Across models, filter classes, and query budgets, the estimated harmful-output rate decreases with additional filtering compute but consistently plateaus above zero, suggesting a persistent empirical harm floor.

Deep Reinforcement Learning to Master the Asymmetric Strategy of Baghchal

Ranjit Raut, Aarav Subedi, Sagun Rai, Aaryan Shakya, Manoj Shakya — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18296v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Baghchal is a two-player asymmetric board game with Nepali origins where four tigers are to capture goats and twenty goats desire to keep tigers in immobility. Although Baghchal has a complex structure which is strategic, has perfect information structure, and has cultural meaning, it has not been adequately covered in deep reinforcement learning (RL) literature. This paper gives a systematic exploration of four deep RL solutions Deep Q-Network (DQN), REINFORCE, Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and MuZero that are trained on one side of the asymmetric gameplay of Baghchal and then evaluated on the other side. The algorithms are rated based on win rate, draw rate, average captures, training convergence and computational cost. It is experimentally found that MuZero generates the best performance in both tasks, achieving 86 percent win over these Tiger and 62 percent win over these Goat and the ability to do so is due to the model-based planning machine through the Monte Carlo Tree Search. PPO is the most realistic algorithm and is provided to be competitive over both asymmetric tasks with significantly reduced computational costs compared to MuZero. Emergent strategic behavior analysis shows that model-based strategies are optimal over long-horizon planning, whereas value-based counterparts like DQN are more biased up towards the Tiger role owing to the more substantial reward signal.

APMM: Automated Parlay Market Maker

Niusha Moshrefi, Ranvir Rana, Pramod Viswanath — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18299v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Parlays - joint contracts on the simultaneous resolution of several events - are among the most heavily traded products in betting markets, but prediction markets have struggled to offer them natively. In this paper, we offer the full combinatorial family of parlays on top of $M$ binary events, as liquid markets, bounding the market maker loss for subsidizing the markets to $O(M^2)$. Any single parlay attracts few traders, so each is an inherently thin market, and the logarithmic market scoring rule (LMSR) is the natural mechanism for thin markets. But running a separate LMSR for each of the exponentially many parlays forces the market maker to pay for the same information many times over. We show that a market maker which automatically propagates information across related parlays avoids this redundancy. We make three contributions. First, we introduce the automated parlay market maker (APMM), which uses a \emph{hierarchical parameterization}: the state of each low-leg parlay is shared into every higher-leg parlay that contains it, so pricing one updates all the others coherently. Second, we show that when informed trading is concentrated in parlays with few legs, the market maker's worst-case loss is $O(M^2)$, and it falls to $O(M)$ when the traded parlays are also spread across different clusters rather than concentrated on a few. Third, we validate these bounds in simulation and on historical Kalshi order flow, confirming that real belief updates are dominated by low-leg changes and that APMM's advantage persists under real trading patterns.

On Incentivized Exploration beyond Bayesianism and Full-Information

Dimitar Chakarov, Lee Cohen, Nathan Srebro — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18300v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We extend Incentive Compatible Exploration beyond the Bayesian full-information setting of Kremer et al. [2014]. We consider agents that may possess external information unknown to the principal. We show such settings require new notions of incentivized exploration, as well as going beyond a Bayesian perspective, and we introduce a definition where agents choose any reasonable (undominated) action. Furthermore, our framework provides for a more robust treatment of ties, and extends to settings where agents lack a single common prior and instead only know that reward distributions belong to a collection of potential priors.

A Better Start for Language Models: Domain-Conditional Position Offsets

Ye Qiao — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18302v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autoregressive language models are least accurate at the beginning of a sequence, where little context forces reliance on a generic pretraining prior. We show that this cold-start penalty is domain dependent and reduce it with a domain-conditional position offset: a single learned vector added to the embedding activation at the first sequence positions while all model weights remain frozen. The offset trains in minutes on roughly one hundred documents, switches between domains without added sequence state, and has no measurable latency overhead. Across eight Mamba, GPT-NeoX, and Llama models spanning 410M to 8B parameters, it reduces held-out in-domain perplexity by up to 27%; the effect persists at 70B, and one position captures most of the benefit. A matched, converged direct logit-bias correction reaches at most only 7.9% and leaves later-token loss unchanged, showing that the offset propagates through model state rather than merely recalibrating the output prior. A tuned LoRA reaches lower perplexity but uses two to three orders of magnitude more parameters and an active low-rank weight path, while soft prompts add sequence positions. With wrong-domain controls, offsets improve retrieval reranking and domain classification when decisions depend on early in-domain tokens, For the few-shot reasoning whose signal occurs later, the results maintains unchanged. Position-aware prefill application also help generation tasks, whereas naive application at every cached decoding step causes repetition. The offset is therefore not the strongest adapter, but a lightweight, hot switchable tool for short in-domain scoring and calibration.

Fretiq: Browser-Native Electric Guitar String Classification via Engineered Spectral Features and Held-Out Free-Play Evaluation

Aadi Garg — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18303v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Identifying which string produces a given pitch in monophonic electric guitar audio is a fundamental classification challenge: a single pitch can often be produced on multiple strings at different fret positions, with timbral differences that prior listening studies confirm are largely imperceptible to untrained humans. Existing approaches using support vector machines and spectral envelope features have achieved F-measures of 0.90 for six-string electric guitar classification, while String-Inverse Frequency features in earlier work achieved F1 scores up to 0.72. We present Fretiq, a preliminary single-instrument, single-player browser-based string classification system built on a 26-dimensional feature representation integrating frequency band energies, spectral statistics, and 13 Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients, achieving 97.1% shuffled frame-level validation accuracy across 322,215 balanced frames. An ablation study identifies MFCCs as the primary accuracy driver (92.2% to 97.1%). We additionally introduce Comparison Training -- a data collection methodology in which adjacent open-string and fifth-fret string pairs are recorded in deliberate alternation -- and evaluate its contribution via confusion matrix analysis. Comparison Training reduces the D3 to A2 frame-level confusion rate by 44% but shows mixed results on other targeted pairs. A held-out free-play evaluation on 103,000 frames yields 87.8% overall accuracy. We describe the feature extraction pipeline in both Python and TypeScript to guarantee training-inference parity, and document two critical implementation failure modes. The system runs entirely in-browser with no hexaphonic pickup, fretboard sensor, camera, or multi-microphone setup required.

TD-DPO: Difference-Aware Preference Optimization for Mitigating Sycophancy in Clinical Autism Intervention Dialogue

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18304v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The sycophancy of large language models can increase the safety risk in intervention dialogue for autistic children. Supervised fine-tuning can somewhat reduce sycophancy, but relying solely on positive examples is often insufficient to identify and correct failure patterns. We observe that sycophancy behaviors can often be localized to a limited span within the model response. In this regime, sequence-level preference optimization can over-update preference-irrelevant tokens and degrade intervention ability. To address this, we propose the \textbf{M}inimal \textbf{E}dit \textbf{D}ata \textbf{A}ugmentation (MEDA) strategy to construct controlled, stable, minimal edit preference pairs and \textbf{T}oken-level \textbf{D}ifference \textbf{D}irect \textbf{P}reference \textbf{O}ptimization (TD-DPO), which upweights difference tokens between chosen and rejected responses while downweighting shared tokens to suppress background drift. Extensive experiments across multiple backbones and evaluators show that TD-DPO achieves a better trade-off between sycophancy mitigation and intervention ability retention in our offline settings, highlighting its potential as a practical alignment approach for autism intervention.

The Information Shadow: Measuring Structural Limits on What Language Models Can Learn

Priyansh Srivastava, Romit Chatterjee — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18305v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Some limits on what language models know are not gaps in data coverage but structural properties of learning from text. We introduce the information shadow: the region of phenomena that a text-trained learner cannot acquire regardless of scale, comprising (I) structures language cannot express, (II) functions that are statistically non-identifiable from the training distribution, and (III) functions that are representable but unreachable by gradient-based training. We give each type a probe that is decisive because the premise of the shadow is, in that setting, provable. For Type I, Language Compression Residuals compare a text learner, which sees only a lossy text-like encoding of the signal, against a full-signal learner, which sees the underlying signal directly. The text learner sits at a computable expressibility ceiling while the full-signal learner pulls away by a gap that stays flat across 300x more data, so the deficit is a property of the channel, not of training. For Type II, the Counterfactual Distinction Test trains models on data exactly consistent with two incompatible rules. Across a provable string task and a language-like agreement task, behavior on counterfactuals is set by the model's inductive bias, while 5% disambiguating data steers the learned rule bidirectionally to either target (r = +/-1.0, p < 1e-10). For Type III, Basin Escape Mapping exhibits a function that is representable at 100% (by hand construction) yet reached 0% of the time by standard training and instantly from a nearby initialization, with width scaling providing no help (p = 1.6 x 10^-14). Each effect is isolated by a control that rules out a capacity or modality artifact. We release the probe suite and discuss implications for benchmark design, capability auditing, and shadow-aware uncertainty.

Gradient-Energy Guided Block-Wise Perturbations for Sharpness-Aware Minimization

Zhen Huang, Jiaxin Deng, Junbiao Pang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18306v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) improves generalization by minimizing the worst-case loss in a local parameter neighborhood. Standard SAM implicitly allocates its global perturbation budget across parameter blocks according to instantaneous minibatch gradient norms. Such an allocation can be noisy and may not reflect the sensitivity that blocks accumulate throughout training. We propose Gradient-Energy Adaptive Radius SAM (GEAR-SAM), which maintains an exponential moving average (EMA) of squared block gradients as a lightweight, curvature-related sensitivity signal and allocates the fixed SAM budget through a closed-form constrained optimization. GEAR-SAM preserves the global SAM radius, requires no Hessian-vector products or explicit Fisher estimation, and adds only scalar state beyond SAM. Experiments on image classification, transfer learning, noisy-label learning, and partition studies demonstrate improved generalization and robustness across architectures and tasks. More broadly, GEAR-SAM provides a dynamic view of sharpness-aware optimization: a fixed perturbation budget should be redistributed as the sensitivity of functional network blocks evolves during training.

Agentic Calibration of Grey-Box Simulation Models: An LLM-Driven Alternative

David G\'omez-Guill\'en, Mireia Diaz, Josep Lluis Arcos, Jes\'us Cerquides — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18308v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Calibration of grey-box simulation models is a constrained optimization problem in which model evaluations are expensive, the parameter space can be high-dimensional, and the search must respect plausibility constraints. Although the simulation code is fully available to the analyst, the joint effect of multiple parameters remains difficult to predict analytically. Classical optimizers such as Nelder--Mead (NM) are simple to deploy but sample-inefficient, particularly under constraints. Modern Bayesian Optimization methods achieve competitive solutions with far fewer evaluations but require non-trivial modeling machinery for constraint handling. We introduce an agentic calibration method in which a large language model acts as the optimizer, with constraints incorporated as a plain-language section of the system prompt. We evaluate the agentic method, NM, and Bayesian Optimization (BO) on an anal cancer simulation model under both unconstrained and clinically constrained calibration. Under unconstrained calibration, the agentic method achieves substantially lower best error than BO and NM, while requiring fewer model evaluations. Under constrained calibration, the agentic method reaches comparable error levels and both outperform NM. These results are obtained at the cost of increased inference time per iteration. Agentic calibration achieves competitive performance with substantially fewer model evaluations, and constraint handling is essentially free at the modeller-facing interface through simple textual specifications rather than additional modelling machinery. The main trade-off lies in increased per-iteration inference cost, making the approach particularly suitable when simulation time dominates. Beyond performance, the per-iteration rationale makes the search auditable and explainable, so its decisions can be scrutinised and justified to third parties.

Spatio-Temporal Prediction of Unsteady Airfoil Aerodynamics Using Augmented Graph Neural Ordinary Differential Equations with Exogenous Controls

Henrik Lange, Reik Thormann, Philipp Bekemeyer — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18309v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Unsteady aerodynamic phenomena, such as gusts, turbulence, and fluid-structure interactions affect an aircraft during flight. For design, optimisation and certification, it is indispensable to quantify such unsteady aerodynamic effects. Industry-standard computational fluid dynamics methods, such as solving the unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations or the linearized frequency domain method, are either computationally expensive or restricted by assumptions like linearity. Once trained, machine learning methods are capable of computing non-linear relationships very fast, making them suitable as surrogate models. By autoregressively applying graph neural networks (GNNs), operating on a discretised spatial domain, spatio-temporal predictions can be made. However, autoregressive GNNs suffer from error accumulation leading to unstable rollouts over time. Here we show that combining GNNs with augmented Neural Ordinary Differential Equations yields temporally stable predictions of the surface forces on a pitching airfoil. We found that our approach, called GNODE, based on Graph Neural Ordinary Differential Equations, provides temporally more stable, spatially smoother, and overall more accurate results than an autoregressive GNN baseline. Tests are conducted on a dataset consisting of a simulations of a pitching airfoil, including transonic shocks, transient behaviour and dynamic non-linearities. Augmenting GNODEs with additional latent dimensions improves the expressivity and accuracy by capturing underlying history effects. The developed method demonstrates an approach that is suitable to model non-linear spatio-temporal systems with exogenous inputs.

Interactive Training 2: Auditable Control Plane for Live Model Training

Wentao Zhang, Xuanhe Pan, Han Zhou, Yang Lu, Yuntian Deng — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18314v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Experiment trackers show how training is progressing, but changing a live run still usually requires trainer-specific code. We present Interactive Training 2, an open-source control plane for steering training through a shared protocol. Training applications declare which settings and actions they expose, humans and automated controllers submit requests through the same interface, and the training loop validates and applies them at safe control points. A customized Aim workspace combines live metrics and controls with a chronological record of requests and outcomes. We demonstrate the system across five NLP and reinforcement-learning workflows. The released code and traces provide a reusable foundation for auditable human- and agent-guided training.

Binding Drift in Multi-Step Tool-Augmented Agents

Rahul Suresh Babu, Shashank Indukuri — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18316v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tool-augmented language-model agents execute multi-step workflows over external systems, resolving an entity once and then acting on it across subsequent steps. Prior work shows that in single-step actions, agents select the correct tool but bind it to the wrong entity 24-26% of the time. We study what happens to entity bindings over time: do they stay correct, silently drift to a different entity, or, if wrong from the start, propagate and compound? We formalize binding drift (correct at step 1, wrong later) as distinct from error propagation (wrong at step 1, carried forward), and score them on disjoint workflow sets so the two cannot be conflated. In a controlled multi-step testbed (200 workflows, 580 entity-binding-scored steps, four enterprise domains, eight model backends spanning small to frontier), we find: (1) under controlled error injection, an entity lock (the intuitive "persist the first binding" fix) amplifies wrong actions from 907 to 2,746 (3.0x; bootstrap 95% CI [2.8, 3.3]), because it faithfully carries the seeded wrong entity into every later step; (2) the amplification reaches 8.5x on the most affected model (Claude Opus 4.5); (3) a practical LLM-based re-verifier (a single cheap second model call re-reading the original instruction) reduces wrong actions by 79% (0.21x; CI [0.18, 0.25]), closing the gap to within 1 percentage point of an oracle upper-bound (0.20x); and (4) in the natural (non-injected) setting, baseline agents drift on 18% of eligible workflows, with the per-step error rate rising across steps. Persistence and re-verification are not interchangeable: a defense that eliminates drift can worsen propagation, and a practical re-verifier nearly matches oracle recovery.

A Situational Speech Synthesizer for Yoruba: System Design, Phonological Rule Architecture, and Orthographic Extensions for Contour

Kola Tubosun, Adedayo Oluokun, Hafiz Adewuyi, Dadepo Aderemi — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18317v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present TTSYoruba, a rule-based concatenative diphone speech synthesizer for Yoruba, deployed at online as part of the YorubaName.com open dictionary of Yoruba personal names. The system takes tone-marked Yoruba text as input and produces audio output by applying a hand-crafted phonological rule system to a recorded inventory of 651 diphone units spanning five tonal variants of every consonant-vowel combination in the language. We describe the phonological architecture of the system in detail, including our complete tonal file-selection logic, our treatment of the three-way nasal disambiguation problem (oral /n/, nasalized vowel, and syllabic nasal), and the derivation of contextual rising and falling tones from level-tone input. We also present, as an orthographic contribution, the adoption of the caron and circumflex, which are symbols with prior standing in Yoruba phonological transcription, as standard single-vowel contour tone markers, integrated into the TTS normalization pipeline and the WriteYoruba keyboard input tool. The system's performance was evaluated through a listener study (N=50), with detailed results on Mean Opinion Scores (MOS) presented in Section 6. Keywords: Yoruba, text-to-speech, low-resource languages, diphone synthesis, contour tones, African language NLP, rule-based synthesis

Finite element exponential integration for rough solutions of nonlinear wave equations. Part II: Dynamic boundary conditions on curved domains

Jiachuan Cao, Benjamin D\"orich, Buyang Li — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18320v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study nonlinear wave equations with dynamic boundary conditions on smooth bounded domains and analyze a fully discrete approximation in the low-regularity regime. The method combines isoparametric bulk--surface finite elements of degree $k$ with an exponential integrator in time. Assuming only bounded energy of the exact solution, we prove convergence of the displacement--velocity pair in the weak norm $L^2(\Omega;\Gamma)\times H^{-1}(\Omega;\Gamma)$. The scheme achieves first-order convergence in time and spatial convergence of order $h^{2/3}$ for $k=1$ and $h^{(k+2)/(k+3)}$ for $k\ge 2$. In particular, these rates show that higher-order finite elements retain a provable asymptotic advantage even at low regularity. A central difficulty is that the continuous and discrete bulk--surface problems are posed on different geometries and must therefore be compared directly in weak norms. To address this, we develop a weak-norm framework for non-conforming geometries based on lift and adjoint-lift operators, combined with a frequency-decomposition argument. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first fully discrete low-regularity convergence result for nonlinear wave equations with dynamic boundary conditions in a non-conforming bulk--surface finite element setting. Numerical experiments confirm the predicted rates and illustrate the improved efficiency of higher-order methods.

Decoding EEG Signals to Explore Next-Word Predictability in the Human Brain

Boi Mai Quach, Binh T. Nguyen, Cathal Gurrin, Graham Healy — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18321v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humans invented reading and have passed down this complex skill across generations through language. This study provides empirical evidence of the neural mechanisms underlying bottom-up (related to high-order linguistic structure) and top-down (related to next-word predictability) processes, which interact to guide comprehension during reading. While previous studies have focused on either the N400 effects of predictability or lexical categories, research on how predictability influences N400 responses across different lexical categories is limited, mainly due to constraints in publicly available datasets. Here, we examine how predictability influences brain responses, recorded at millisecond resolution using electroencephalography (EEG), with a focus on the N400 time window (300-500 ms post-stimulus) across different lexical and grammatical categories. Our results indicate that significant differences in N400 responses between high and low cloze probability levels were more pronounced for content words than function words. Among the two primary content categories, verbs exhibited greater N400 differences than nouns, while nouns carried more distinct information about their predictability than verbs. Moreover, we demonstrate that the decoding technique is more effective than the event-related potential (ERP) traditional analysis in capturing more detailed and distinct representations of cognitive processes over time.

Cost Accounting for Reactive Computational Graphs: Exhaustive Sweeps, Sequential Mutation, and the Backward-Locality Gap

Abdallah Khemais (ISITCOM, University of Sousse) — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18323v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Exhaustive site-by-site interventions on a neural network's computational graph -- activation-patching sweeps, circuit-discovery searches, systematic ablation studies -- mutate the graph at every candidate site, and their cost is dominated by recomputation after each mutation. On a reactive graph engine whose invalidation provably touches exactly the downstream cone of a mutated node, we give a complete cost accounting for such workloads. First, the aggregate speedup of an exhaustive sweep over independent full recomputations is not a universal constant: if per-layer weight varies regularly with depth at Karamata index q, the ratio converges to (q+2)/(q+1) when weight concentrates near the output and to q+2 near the input, recovering 2 only in the depth-uniform case; a wall-clock corollary predicts a ceiling of about 1.79, below 2, until interpreter overhead is compiled away. Second, we prove the exact cost of a sequence of persistent mutations, never undone between insertions: the interleaved cost exceeds the isolated sum by an exact overcount summed over comparable site pairs, with closed-form extremes over insertion orders, while batched application is order-independent and sub-additive, costing exactly the union of the sites' cones plus the fresh nodes. Third, we prove the exact mirror of forward locality for the backward pass, showing it collapses the aggregate speedup to 1 under backpropagation on architectures without long skip connections. Every identity is validated on NeuroDSL, a reactive graph engine in Julia: measured sweep ratios converge to the predicted limits under four cost profiles; the training-mode ratio collapses to 1 at the predicted rate; and all 18 per-graft sequential costs and the batched total match the closed forms at zero tolerance across three insertion orders.

Hazard or Anomaly? Evaluating VLMs for Understanding Dangers and Discrepancies

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18325v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern safety-critical systems increasingly rely on human-robot interaction to reduce disaster risk and support decision-making during emergencies. Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are promising for these settings because they can interpret complex scenes and communicate safety-relevant information, but they still require careful evaluation to ensure reliable safety reasoning. In particular, current evaluations often frame danger recognition as a binary decision (Safe/Unsafe), making it unclear whether a model is identifying true physical hazards or merely reacting to unusual scene elements. We address this limitation by introducing an explicit distinction between hazard and anomaly, and by separately recognizing hazardous and anomalous states. We evaluate several state-of-the-art VLMs across two datasets and multiple prompting strategies to test whether this distinction changes model behavior. Our results show that VLMs frequently misinterpret anomalousness as hazardousness, revealing an over-reliance on contextual irregularity as a proxy for danger. We further show that explicitly separating anomaly from hazard provides a more informative evaluation of VLM safety reasoning and exposes failure modes that binary safety judgments can obscure. Our public dataset is available on Roboflow https://app.roboflow.com/vlm-in-context-anomaly-and-hazard-detection/camera-ready-roman-ds.

Convergence and almost sure exponential stability of compensated split-step theta scheme for stochastic pantograph models with Poisson random measure

Amr Abosenna, Yongchun Zhou, Boping Tian — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18327v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recently, stochastic pantograph models have gained an intensive attention and have been used in different fields such as finance, biology, control and stochastic neural networks. It is also more preferable to incorporate jumps during the study of stochastic differential equations. In this paper, stochastic pantograph model with Poisson random measure is studied. The compensated split-step theta technique is applied to the considered model. The numerical scheme exhibits a non divergent attitude and converges to the solution of our model under assumptions addressed later on. Furthermore, the almost sure exponential stability of the numerical scheme is investigated via utilizing the discrete semi-martingale convergence theorem. Finally, theoretical findings are manifested via some numerical examples.

Dynamic Loss Balancing for Joint SOH and RUL Prediction of Lithium-Ion Batteries via a Rotary SOH-Injected Prior Battery Transformer

Shuhao Chen, Tianyu Shi, Yiwen Huang, Chengyi Tu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18329v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The deployment of reliable lithium-ion battery management systems is crucial for accelerating electrification, yet the joint prognosis of State of Health (SOH) and Remaining Useful Life (RUL) remains severely hindered by task heteroscedasticity. Conventional multi-task learning frameworks fail to balance the bounded, low-variance noise of SOH estimation with the unbounded, nonlinearly expanding uncertainty of long-term RUL predictions. Here, we present the Rotary SOH-Injected Prior Battery Transformer (RoSIP-Batt), a unified co-estimation framework that resolves these optimization conflicts. By formulating joint prediction as a Bayesian multi-task objective, RoSIP-Batt introduces a homoscedastic uncertainty weighting mechanism to dynamically scale task-specific gradients based on learned residual noise levels. The architecture leverages decoupled dual classification tokens and a per-dimension gated fusion mechanism, secured by a gradient-detachment operator to prevent high-variance RUL updates from corrupting the stable SOH representation space. To capture electrochemical degradation patterns without relying on absolute cycle steps, Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) is incorporated into a shared Transformer backbone to model translation-invariant relative temporal profiles. Crucially, the intermediate SOH estimate is directly injected into the RUL regression head as a physical degradation prior. Evaluations across the NASA, MIT-Stanford, and HUST datasets show that RoSIP-Batt significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, reducing SOH estimation error to 1.994% MAE on NASA and restricting RUL prediction error to 62.85 cycles on Stanford. These findings establish RoSIP-Batt as a highly generalizable, computationally efficient solution suitable for real-time embedded BMS deployment.

Physics-Guided Masked Multi-Task Network for Edge-Friendly Battery Health Diagnostics from Sto-chastically Fragmented Charging Profiles

Shuhao Chen, Tianyu Shi, Chengyi Tu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18330v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The deployment of reliable lithium-ion battery management systems is crucial for accelerating electrification, yet the joint prognosis of State of Health (SOH) and Remaining Useful Life (RUL) remains severely hindered by task heteroscedasticity. Conventional multi-task learning frameworks fail to balance the bounded, low-variance noise of SOH estimation with the unbounded, nonlinearly expanding uncertainty of long-term RUL predictions. Here, we present the Rotary SOH-Injected Prior Battery Transformer (RoSIP-Batt), a unified co-estimation framework that resolves these optimization conflicts. By formulating joint prediction as a Bayesian multi-task objective, RoSIP-Batt introduces a homoscedastic uncertainty weighting mechanism to dynamically scale task-specific gradients based on learned residual noise levels. The architecture leverages decoupled dual classification tokens and a per-dimension gated fusion mechanism, secured by a gradient-detachment operator to prevent high-variance RUL updates from corrupting the stable SOH representation space. To capture electrochemical degradation patterns without relying on absolute cycle steps, Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) is incorporated into a shared Transformer backbone to model translation-invariant relative temporal profiles. Crucially, the intermediate SOH estimate is directly injected into the RUL regression head as a physical degradation prior. Evaluations across the NASA, MIT-Stanford, and HUST datasets show that RoSIP-Batt significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, reducing SOH estimation error to 1.994% MAE on NASA and restricting RUL prediction error to 62.85 cycles on Stanford. These findings establish RoSIP-Batt as a highly generalizable, computationally efficient solution suitable for real-time embedded BMS deployment.

ChemHyperMag: Physics-informed magnetic hypergraph learning improves molecular ADMET prediction

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18332v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate prediction of ADMET (Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism, Excretion, and Toxicity) is important for drug discovery. Most predictors use undirected molecular graphs and pairwise edges. This choice misses asymmetric interactions, nonreversible dynamics, and motif level effects from functional groups and ring systems. We propose ChemHyperMag for multitask ADMET prediction under missing labels. ChemHyperMag builds a functional group hypergraph from rings, BRICS fragments, Bemis-Murcko scaffolds, and bonds. It also defines a potential driven nonreversible flow guided by electronegativity and Gasteiger partial charges. The resulting circulation is encoded by a Hermitian magnetic Laplacian and processed with a magnetic Chebyshev encoder. We perturb magnetic phases to form stochastic views and train with an InfoNCE objective. Experiments on multiple ADMET benchmarks show improvements over recent methods with fewer labeled samples and no conformers. ChemHyperMag is scalable and provides interpretable directional signals through its magnetic phases.

EmoEUS: Uncertainty Supervision for Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation

Zilong Huang, Kong Aik Lee, Junjie Li, Zhe Li, Man-Wai Mak — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18336v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal emotion recognition in conversation (MERC) can leverage multimodal and contextual cues to boost recognition performance. However, existing fusion approaches in MERC often ignore modality-specific uncertainty across utterances caused by conflicting cues, varying noise, and missing modality-specific signals. We propose EmoEUS, an explicit uncertainty supervision framework for MERC. EmoEUS performs uncertainty-aware multimodal fusion by dynamically weighting modalities using learned variance estimates. We also introduce an explicitly supervised loss that aligns each utterance's predicted variance with the distance between the utterance's distributional representation and its emotion- and modality-specific cluster center. Experiments on IEMOCAP and MELD show that EmoEUS consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Shared Vulnerabilities in Robustness-Optimized Defenses: One Breach Exposes the Family

Hanrui Wang, Ruihao Zheng, Shuo Wang, Isao Echizen, Xingbo Dong, Zhe Jin — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18339v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adversarial robustness optimization aims to preserve correct prediction under adversarial perturbations, and has produced substantial robustness gains through methods such as adversarial training and adversarial purification. However, we identify a new security risk: these gains can create shared vulnerabilities across defenses. Once one representative robustness-optimized defense is effectively breached, the broader family may become exposed. Studying this risk requires separating genuine transferability from distortion-induced degradation and from the algorithmic gains of sophisticated attacks. We therefore introduce stricter transfer-only protocols and a deliberately simple adaptive attack, PGDTransfer, to test whether robustness-optimized defenses share transfer-only vulnerability under controlled conditions. We further introduce Adversarial Sensitivity Maps (AdvSMs) to visualize and quantify shared alignment beyond differentiable classifiers, including stochastic and non-differentiable defenses. Across adversarially trained classifiers, purification-based defenses, and LVLMs with robust visual encoders, we identify natural transferability within each robustness family, i.e., transfer that arises even with simple PGD-style optimization rather than specialized transferable-attack design. The risk is already severe for purification: PGDTransfer reaches an average transfer attack success rate of $80.4\%$ across filtering-, compression-, and diffusion-based purifiers under $\epsilon=4/255$, suggesting that purifier defenses may no longer provide reliable protection. As attacks improve, currently stronger robustness families may face the same risk. Future defenses should therefore treat vulnerability diversity and transfer-only isolation as security objectives, rather than optimizing only individual robustness.

Quantum Cryptanalysis on IBM Quantum Hardware: Extending Even--Mansour Period Recovery from $N=4$ to $N=10$

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18340v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We report genuine-un-compiled, textbook-faithful-quantum cryptanalysis of symmetric-cipher structures executed on real IBM quantum hardware (ibm\_kingston, Heron generation). Using Simon's algorithm we recover the hidden period of the Even-Mansour cipher up to security parameter N = 10 on real hardware, beyond the largest previously reported real-hardware key recovery of N = 4, and we cleanly recover the periods of a 3-round Feistel (DES-family) construction at block sizes 6 and 8; a 21-qubit block-10 instance is verified in simulation and submitted to hardware. We further provide a breadth-first benchmark of five genuine quantum attacks spanning four symmetric-cipher design paradigms -- Bernstein-Vazirani (linear structure, single query), Grover (SPN key search, quadratic), and Simon (Even-Mansour, CBC-MAC forgery, and Feistel; exponential-to-polynomial in query complexity) -- validated to the classical-simulation ceiling of 25 qubits. We are deliberately explicit about scope: these attacks target reduced or structured constructions in the Q2 (quantum-query) model, asymptotically follow the birthday bound and therefore do not constitute quantum advantage over classical collision-finding, do not break full AES/RSA or 16-round DES, and rely on error mitigation rather than fault-tolerant error correction. Our contribution is the real-hardware demonstration at record structure sizes, the breadth of genuine algorithmic coverage across four paradigms, and an honest, reproducible benchmark with public artifacts.

PRISM: Sensitivity-Aware PolynoMial PRuning for EffIcient Neural Network Encryption

Sahaj Majavdia, Mahdi Taheri — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18342v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Structured pruning is essential for making neural network inference feasible under homomorphic encryption (HE), yet its impact on model reliability has remained unexplored. This paper presents a systematic reliability characterization of pruned CKKS-encrypted neural networks and introduces Polynomial-Sensitivity-Aware Pruning (PSAP), a structured pruning method that is inherently reliability-aware. PSAP scores filters jointly by weight magnitude, polynomial activation sensitivity, and rotation cost, which concentrates pruning in fault-tolerant regions. Across two architectures, two datasets, two numerical representations, and five bit-error rates (40 full-model and 108 per-layer experiments), PSAP-pruned models limit catastrophic (>10 pp accuracy drop) layers to at most two versus 5--14 for magnitude-pruned baselines, reducing worst-case vulnerability by up to 29 times under int32 bit-flip injection. Direct CKKS encrypted fault injection indicates a safe operating boundary near BER~ 10^{-5}, supporting int32 injection as a conservative reliability proxy. The fault-critical structural layers account for only 1.1% of parameters, enabling selective hardening at minimal overhead. These reliability gains are obtained alongside competitive efficiency: PSAP reduces Halevi--Shoup rotations by up to 45.2\% on ResNet-32, and an adaptive mixed-degree allocation scheme lowers multiplicative depth from 66 to 56 levels, enabling leveled inference without bootstrapping.

Federated Lightweight Fine-Tuning

Radhakrishna Achanta, Will Reed — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18343v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated fine-tuning is bottlenecked by communication: FedAvg and pseudo-gradient schemes transmit a payload that scales with the model, and gradient compression shrinks it by only a constant factor. We take a different lever. Mapping networks generate a network's weights from a small trainable latent through a frozen affine projection; because the map is shared and affine, averaging latents is exactly averaging the generated weights. We turn this into a practical low-bandwidth federated channel with two changes: a low-rank, seed-regenerable factorisation of the projection (cutting generator memory from ~80 GB to ~10 MB), and a delta formulation $\theta = \theta^{\mathrm{pre}} + U V^{\top} z$ that learns an additive correction around a shared centrally-pretrained base -- federated fine-tuning, which is what makes the method work at scale. A frozen orthogonal classifier head further removes the head from the payload while improving accuracy. On CIFAR-100 with ResNet-18+GroupNorm, our method (FLITE, Federated Low-rank Iterative Training Engine) communicates 1,280 floats (~5 KB) per client per round -- an 8718x reduction -- and reaches 74.67%, within ~0.5 pp of full-weight FedAvg. The averaging identity holds to floating-point precision ($6 \times 10^{-8}$); the method sits one to two orders of magnitude below PowerSGD and top-k on the bandwidth-accuracy Pareto; it matches or exceeds full-weight FedAvg under strong non-IID skew. int4 latents reach 648 bytes per round at unchanged accuracy, whereas int4 full-weight FedAvg collapses to chance.

Addressing Limited Data in Auditory Attention Decoding with Diffusion Generative Models

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18345v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Limited training data constrains deep learning models for Auditory Attention Decoding (AAD) in hearing aids (HAs). AAD uses electroencephalogram (EEG) data to decode listener's attention, enabling real-time tracking of specific sound sources. However, achieving high AAD performance with short time windows typical in HAs (<=1s) is challenging due to the scarcity of real-world speech-evoked EEG data. To address this issue, we investigate diffusion probabilistic models (DPMs) for generating synthetic speech-evoked EEG data. DPMs learn the underlying complex data structure through a denoising process and can generate realistic samples suitable for data augmentation. We evaluate the use of synthetic EEG data for augmenting datasets in locus-of-attention (LoA) classification tasks. Our experiments demonstrate that DPMs can generate realistic EEG signals and that incorporating synthetic data significantly improves AAD performance compared to models trained solely on measured EEG data (p<0.05). These results highlight the potential of diffusion-based data augmentation to mitigate training data limitations and improve the robustness of short-window AAD models in HA applications.

A Decision-Centered Reference Architecture for Trustworthy Agentic Commerce

Dimitrios S. Sfiris — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18347v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic commerce extends agentic shopping into software agents that interpret policy, prepare checkout, generate transaction-facing language, and act under delegated payment authority. Protocols standardize external exchanges, but merchants still need one authoritative representation of commercial eligibility, actor authority, checkout validity, payment dispatch, generated claims, and evidence. This design-science study presents a protocol-agnostic architecture built around a canonical envelope, protected dependency and result hashes, Ed25519 or HMAC authentication, live-request rebinding, a seven-axis generated-claim gate, execution-time dependency revalidation, and eleven semantic invariants. Evaluation used an open-source JavaScript implementation, eight deterministic ecommerce scenarios, and five controlled ablations. Seven initially valid actions were permitted. After protected state changed, none could proceed without a fresh decision; a hostile-accessor case also remained blocked. Action status was consistent across configured surface-bound envelopes, and each scenario contained the three protected hashes and its targeted dependency reference. Each ablation produced the predicted unsafe regression when one safeguard was bypassed, while the protected path contained the same failure. The hostile accessor was read once, and the suite passed 66/66 tests, schema validation, and committed examples. Results support protected-dependency change detection, bounded outcome derivation, stale-decision prevention, surface-bound status consistency, refusal propagation, and verified-state identity under synthetic fixtures, but do not establish rule completeness, production security, performance, legal compliance, live interoperability, population error rates, or independent replication.

An Analysis of Residual-Stream Geometry Across Transformer Depth

Sunit Bhattacharya, Ravi Shankar Kolli — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18348v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a transition-centred geometric analysis of transformer residual streams. Relative displacement measures how \emph{far} representations move between consecutive layers, and orthogonal Procrustes analysis separates each transition into a rigid rotation and a non-rigid residual. Across six instruction-tuned models, on code generation and cross-lingual translation, these measurements reveal reproducible depth regularities. Relative displacement is strongly layer-dependent; typically larger early and late, with a quieter middle third; and nearly invariant across conditions within each model. Rotation magnitude is nearly constant across depth, while Procrustes residual and angle concentration remain depth-modulated, with residual peaking at the final transition. During generation, non-English targets show larger final-layer displacement and residual than English targets. We present these as descriptive geometric regularities, not as measures of computational effort or causal explanations. The contribution is a measurement framework for residual-stream transitions and evidence that, in the settings studied here, depth curves are model-dependent and largely condition-stable.

From Pixel to Prognosis: Convolutional and GLCM Feature Fusion for Automated Four-Class Cataract Severity Classification

K. Mithra, Prem Kumar Santhanam — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18349v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Objective: To develop a low-cost automated cataract severity classification system operating on standard consumer-grade colour photographs of the eye, without specialised ophthalmic hardware. Methods: A hybrid framework was designed that fuses deep features from a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with five handcrafted Grey-Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) and intensity descriptors - mean intensity, uniformity, standard deviation, contrast, and energy - extracted from a Hough-circle-localised pupil Region of Interest (ROI). A multi-class Support Vector Machine (SVM) with Radial Basis Function (RBF) kernel classifies each image into one of four severity grades: normal, immature, mature, or hypermature cataract. Results: The proposed fused system achieved 95.0% accuracy, 93.8% sensitivity, and 96.1% specificity on an ophthalmologist-labelled test set drawn from 300 images (75 per class) collected at an ophthalmology clinic, outperforming texture-only (88.5%) and CNN-only (91.3%) baselines and surpassing recently published deep learning approaches. Conclusion: The CNN-GLCM-SVM fusion framework provides competitive four-class cataract grading without GPU acceleration or specialised cameras, making it suitable for primary-care and telemedicine deployment in resource-limited settings.

MambaLSTM: A Spatio-Temporal Framework for Enhanced Traffic Accident Risk Prediction

Zhen Yu, Yachao Yuan, Zixiang Peng, Muting Li, Thar Baker — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18353v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In traffic accident risk prediction, most studies overlook the extra noise that could be incorporated when fusing temporal features into spatial features, and some models struggle to capture global correlations among spatial regions. To address these challenges, we propose a novel traffic accident risk prediction framework named MambaLSTM. First, we develop a squeeze-and-excitation temporal feature fusion module to integrate temporal information without compromising spatio-temporal integrity. Second, we introduce a new patch embedding module for effectively capturing semantic relationships among spatially adjacent regions. Additionally, we introduce a Mamba block based on state-space models to model global spatial semantics in urban regions. Finally, we propose a MambaLSTM unit to efficiently capture long- and short-term temporal dependencies for identifying dynamic risk patterns. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the proposed model's superiority over state-of-the-art methods. The code is released at https://github.com/Zhenzovo/MambaLSTM.

Multi-layer MIMO Relay as Deep Physical Neural Networks: Power Amplifiers as Activation Functions

Meng Hua, Itsik Bergel, Deniz G\"und\"uz — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18354v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Wireless physical neural networks (WPNNs) embed neural computation directly into analog hardware, offering lower energy consumption and latency than conventional digital implementations. In this paper, we propose a deep WPNN in which nonlinear activations are realized by a multi-hop multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relay network, in which each relay implements a trainable complex linear gain and bias, followed by the power amplifier's intrinsic nonlinearity acting as an activation function. The cascade of multiple relays therefore realizes an over-the-air fully connected network whose parameters can be trained end-to-end. We develop two transceiver designs for different channel state information (CSI) availability scenarios: a least squares (LS)-based scheme requiring only receiver-side CSI, and a singular-value-decomposition (SVD)-based scheme requiring both transmitter-side and receiver-side CSI. Simulation results show that the proposed architecture enables accurate over-the-air inference for image classification. In particular, the results highlight the advantage of exploiting hardware nonlinearity for enhanced inference capability.

Value Iteration for Stochastic Parity Games

Kittiphon Phalakarn, Ichiro Hasuo — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18355v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present the first (bounded) value iteration algorithm for the quantitative analysis of stochastic parity games, a fundamental model for probabilistic verification with $\omega$-regular objectives. Existing algorithms are based on strategy iteration, which repeatedly computes optimal strategies for one player while fixing the other, leading to high computational cost. Our algorithm instead operates directly on a lattice-theoretic characterization of winning probabilities, exploiting structural properties of (almost-sure qualitative) winning states under parity objectives. We prove correctness and convergence of the proposed algorithm.

CODENS: Transforming Code Changes into Living, Accessible, and Queryable Documentation

Abdelhak Kelious, Chyrine Tahri, Eliot Bardet — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18356v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Maintaining up-to-date code documentation is difficult in fast-moving repositories because design knowledge is scattered across source files and pull requests. We present CODENS , a system that turns pull requests into living, accessible, and queryable documentation for production codebases. CODENS incrementally builds a typed software knowledge graph from pull requests, enriches components through schema-driven semantic extraction, derives typed relations between them, and exposes the resulting knowledge through three retrieval modes, including agent-guided graph traversal for repository-level question answering. The system also preserves semantic change history across pull requests and integrates both answer-quality and operational evaluation metrics. We evaluate CODENS on a client Ruby on Rails project in production. Results show that CODENS produces highly relevant and well-grounded answers, while qualitative feedback highlights a remaining challenge in concise, documentation-oriented synthesis.

Decode-Time Grammars: Constrained LLM Generation over a Refinement Order of Grammar Fragments

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18357v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models now write a growing share of the world's code, increasingly inside agents and serving systems that compile, execute, or dispatch generated code without line-by-line review. This works well for mainstream languages but remains brittle for low-resource programming surfaces such as domain-specific languages, custom library APIs, and command-line tools. Even under grammar-constrained decoding, a model can still produce references invalid in the current environment: a buffer never declared, a column absent from the schema, a function the library does not provide, or an unsupported CLI option. This paper introduces decode-time grammars: grammar fragments instantiated during generation from a runtime environment Gamma. A region-specific policy selects a fragment for each hole, and a tightening operator replaces open reference positions with Gamma-typed slots whose candidates are exactly the names, fields, APIs, or options available at that point. Newly generated declarations enter Gamma before later regions are decoded, so the constraining grammar can depend on the prefix already generated. This ensures not only grammatical correctness but also semantic correctness, by preventing references to undefined symbols. We formalize grammar fragments as environment-indexed grammars ordered by refinement, prove No-Ghost soundness for Gamma-slotted fragments, show that refinement preserves this support-set guarantee, and characterize the boundary of mask-enforceable properties. We implement the approach in gproj with offline grammar induction and online policy resolution. Across TileLang, SQL, and P4, with models from 0.6B to 236B parameters, gproj eliminates ghost references by construction at moderate overhead over standard constrained decoding.

A Classifier That Teaches Itself: Self-Improving, Frozen-gate Training (SIFT) for Dynamic Document Classification

Bogdan Raduta, Horia Velicu, Alexandru Preda, Serban Chiricescu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18358v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Document classification is a solved problem in the laboratory and an unsolved one in the enterprise. The blocker is rarely model architecture; it is the labeling project that must precede a model and the institutional fear of letting a model retrain itself once one exists. We present SIFT (Self-Improving, Frozen-gate Training), a dynamic classifier service, which attacks both. SIFT serves classification from a deliberately cheap, CPU-bound pipeline, a SPLADE sparse encoder feeding a LightGBM head, and escalates only the low-confidence minority of pages to an LLM judge. The judge's verdicts are written back into a labeled corpus, so the expensive model continuously teaches the cheap one: the escalation rate falls, the corpus grows from production traffic rather than from an up-front annotation effort, and accuracy compounds with use. Onboarding a new document family requires only a declarative bundle, label space, anchor phrases, and a judge glossary, not a labeling project. The harder problem is safety: an autonomously retraining classifier can silently regress. SIFT resolves this with a two-part promote gate, a critical-label F1 regression check plus a frozen golden regression set the model is never trained on, either of which vetoes promotion. This turns "retrain monthly without a human" from reckless into routine. We describe the architecture, the self-feeding corpus loop, the frozen-gate promotion mechanism, and an illustrative multi-domain deployment, and we discuss the economics of a classifier whose marginal labeling cost trends toward zero.

Decentralized Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning for Resilient Critical Infrastructures

Minghui Ding, Evangelos Pournaras — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18359v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Critical infrastructures are increasingly distributed, interdependent, and exposed to evolving disruptions, making resilience a central requirement for their operation and control. This paper argues that decentralized multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) should be understood not merely as a distributed alternative to centralized training with decentralized execution but as a paradigm structurally aligned with the requirements of resilient critical infrastructures. This perspective is grounded in an analysis of the properties of decentralized MARL and the requirements of critical infrastructures, including scalability to large numbers of agents, support for privacy and local autonomy, robustness to failures, and interaction-driven adaptation among interdependent components. However, structural alignment alone is insufficient for practical deployment. This paper identifies credit assignment and communication as two central conditions for its practical feasibility. Credit assignment determines whether local learning remains aligned with system-level objectives, while communication determines whether coordination can be learned and maintained under realistic operational constraints. Building on these challenges, this paper proposes a research agenda focused on structure-aware, causality-aware, and resilience-aware credit assignment; communication for both coordination and credit assignment; and safe, timely, and recoverable decentralized learning under deployment constraints. Overall, this paper reframes decentralized MARL as a promising but conditional foundation for resilient critical infrastructures.

HALLMARK: Diagnosing Three Failure Modes in LLM Citation Verifiers

Patrik Reizinger, Wieland Brendel — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18360v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) now routinely draft literature reviews and assist with academic writing, which means a higher risk of fabricated references: GPTZero found 53 papers with hallucinated citations among NeurIPS 2025's accepted set. Rule- and LLM-based verifiers are emerging, but no shared benchmark compares them and gives detailed failure diagnostics. We close that gap with HALLMARK (Hallucination benchmark): 2,526 BibTeX entries spanning 14 hallucination types, three difficulty tiers, six diagnostic sub-tests per entry, and a contamination-resistant held-out split. On it we evaluate a DOI-lookup baseline, frontier LLMs zero-shot, tool-augmented agents, and our own rule-based, co-designed verifier bibtex-updater. Across the benchmark one result is consistent: the false-positive rate, not recall, decides whether a verifier is deployable. HALLMARK makes it concrete through three failure modes: agentic lookups buy recall but inflate false positives; at a venue-realistic base rate, the order-of-magnitude spread in false-positive rates (FPRs) -- not recall -- governs whether a verifier's flags are mostly true catches or mostly noise; and most LLMs over-flag papers published past their training cutoff, where only the two latest-cutoff models hold their false-positive rate near in-distribution levels (a signal we report as descriptive, since it is confounded with possible recall of those entries). Thus FPR is the deployment bottleneck, but an undetected fabrication remains the costlier error for the scientific record.

Physical Self-Supervised Learning: IMU Sensing without Manual Labels

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18361v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep neural networks have become a promising approach for IMU-based sensing, but their scalability is fundamentally limited by costly labeled data and poor robustness to heterogeneous devices, placements, and users. Existing unsupervised and self-supervised methods reduce but do not remove this dependence, still requiring labeled data for domain adaptation and largely ignoring known physical structure. We propose physical self-supervised learning, an autoencoder-style paradigm for label-free IMU sensing. We replace the conventional neural decoder with an auto-adaptive physics decoder, a learnable family of kinematic equations that enforces explicit physical structure while adapting across environments, and adopt a hybrid two-stage IMU encoder with reconstruction in a structured latent space to mitigate sensor noise. Our framework further introduces probabilistic frequency-spatial constraints to disentangle sensor and object motion, a multi-view kinematic tree to exploit sparse physical self-supervised signals, and an uncertainty-aware formulation to handle the inherent ambiguity of IMU inference. Evaluated on inertial tracking and full-body motion capture over public datasets and realistic deployments, physical self-supervised learning reduces errors by up to 5x for tracking and 4x for motion capture in challenging generalization scenarios, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art supervised and self-supervised baselines without any labels.

FARO: Feasibility-Aware Robot Motion Optimization

Michal Ciebielski, Shafeef Omar, Aaron Johnson, Majid Khadiv — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18362v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fast planning of novel behaviors in unseen scenarios remains a fundamental challenge in robotics. The high-dimensional, hybrid, and underactuated nature of humanoid loco-manipulation continues to hinder the realization of this goal. In this paper, we address this challenge by proposing a nested kino-dynamic framework for rapid feasibility checking and dynamically consistent trajectory generation given a candidate contact sequence. By integrating this module with a feasibility-guided tree search and a Large Language Model (LLM)-based contact plan sampling strategy, we demonstrate that the proposed framework can substantially improve the search process. Furthermore, we show that the generated trajectories can be tracked using a reinforcement learning (RL)-based controller and show that the resulting trajectories are of sufficiently high quality for execution in real-world loco-manipulation scenarios. A supplementary video is available at: https://youtu.be/R6qCHoCormQ.

A Controlled Study of Attention-Only Transformers

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18363v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Feed-forward networks hold two thirds of a transformer's non-embedding parameters, yet the architecture has not received a necessity test that controls parameters, compute, and depth at once. We pretrain attention-only decoder transformers (Simple Attention Networks, SANs) against standard transformers matched separately for parameter count, training FLOPs, and depth (2 to 48 layers), for up to 105B tokens at 6M to 87M parameters. Deleting feed-forward layers in place is costly: the standard transformer leads by 0.47 nats at matched depth and 0.26 nats at matched FLOPs. Reallocating the freed budget into attention depth closes the gap: at matched parameters the difference is 0.006 nats (0.27 percent of loss), reproducible to one part in ten thousand across seed pairs, shrinking across 5B, 30B, and 105B budgets, and holding near 0.02 nats across a 29x size range. Three measurements localize the remaining gap to parametric recall: attention-only models are better on context-grounded answers and worse where knowledge must come from weights. Weight spectra show why: routing matrices (Q/K) crystallize early, content matrices accumulate rank slowly, and removing feed-forward layers relocates this accumulation to the attention output projection. QK-normalization, not feed-forward layers or residual gating, keeps 48-layer attention-only stacks trainable. The deficit concentrates on low-context query prediction and localizes there entirely by the largest budget. A pre-registered test confirms the account: it predicts a 0.02 to 0.05 nat gap on knowledge-dense web text; a matched pair trained on fineweb-edu measures 0.040. Within the tested regime, attention does the rest.

Towards Torque-Driven Reinforcement Learning for Quadruped Locomotion

Jordan Dowdy, Jean Chagas Vaz — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18365v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) for legged robots is advancing locomotion, demonstrating its ability to adapt to new and challenging terrain. Traditionally, these RL locomotion frameworks are position-based, making the policy less adaptable to terrain types and requiring state estimation techniques in the observation space, i.e., linear velocity. Moreover, these RL frameworks often use small, lightweight quadrupeds that are limited in their viability for high-complexity tasks due to hardware constraints. This work explores an RL torque control framework for heavyweight high-torque quadrupeds. The RL framework in this paper can traverse rough terrain and effectively track a desired linear velocity without requiring knowledge of the agent's current velocity. Using Nvidia's Isaac Sim and Isaac Lab, simulation results of the RL torque control policy are shown on the Unitree B1 quadruped, achieving speeds of 3.5 m/s and 1.5 rad/s. In addition, the quadruped can walk up and down stairs without the aid of an exteroceptive sensor.

Operational Hallucination and Safety Drift in AI Agents

Shasha Yu, Fiona Carroll, Barry L. Bentley — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18366v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) serving as planners in tool-using autonomous agents introduce dynamic reliability risks in multi-turn execution. While single-turn safety mechanisms are relatively mature, extended interactions reveal structural vulnerabilities where initial alignment degrades over time. This paper empirically characterizes two observed failure modes across multiple state-of-the-art LLMs: Safety Drift, the gradual erosion of declared safety intent leading to constraint-violating actions (e.g., textual refusal followed by reconnaissance and unsafe execution), and Operational Hallucination, persistent repetitive tool calls indicative of flawed state perception (e.g., livelocks even in legitimate tasks). Through controlled multi-turn evaluation on high-stakes ethical dilemmas, malicious requests, and benign controls, we quantify these phenomena using declaration-action gap and livelock metrics, demonstrating their cross-model prevalence under direct execution protocols. Root-cause analysis attributes the instabilities to the decoupling of reasoning context from execution state in current agent loops. We propose an Action-Aware Supervision Layer - a lightweight, plug-and-play architectural blueprint incorporating intent-action consistency checks, runtime state tracking, and forced termination primitives. Post-hoc simulation on captured failure trajectories shows the layer can intercept observed violations without false positives on benign cases. This work advances agent reliability by shifting focus from linguistic safeguards to enforceable architectural mechanisms for responsible agentic AI.

AlayaWorld: Interactive Long-Horizon World Modeling -- Full Technical Report

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18367v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Unlike conventional video game development, which relies on labor-intensive pipelines for asset production, animation, physics, and programming, video world models generate interactive environments from user inputs instantly. It enable us to create customized, explorable, and continuously evolving virtual world from text, an image, or video. Realizing this vision requires four tightly coupled capabilities: interaction, persistent spatiotemporal consistency, stable long-horizon generation, and efficient response. We present AlayaWorld, an interactive long-horizon video world model that generates 24-fps video at 540p and 720p. Built on a 15B video diffusion transformer, AlayaWorld generates short latent chunks autoregressively under camera trajectories and switchable text prompts. Its bounded visual context combines a persistent sink frame, compressed temporal history, geometry-aligned spatial memory, and recent-frame conditioning. To reduce long-term drift, the model is trained with corrupted histories and prediction residuals collected from its own roll-outs. We further introduce a discrete autoregressive distillation formulation that combines distribution-matching distillation, self-forcing++, and consistency distillation, reducing inference from approximately 30 sampling steps to four steps per chunk. On iWorld-Bench, AlayaWorld achieves the best performance over long-horizon generation. Conceived as a full-stack, open-source, and long-term project, AlayaWorld is intended to provide an extensible foundation for future research on interactive video world models.

Neuro-Symbolic Meta-Policies for Temporal Knowledge-Graph Memory under Partial Observability

Taewoon Kim, Vincent Fran\c{c}ois-Lavet, Michael Cochez — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18368v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Partially observable reinforcement learning requires deciding what to retain, retrieve, and forget over time. We introduce a neuro-symbolic meta-policy that learns which symbolic memory heuristic to apply at each decision point while keeping execution symbolic. Our setting uses temporal knowledge-graph memory in RoomKG, where hidden state and observations are represented as Resource Description Framework (RDF) graphs and memory is augmented with temporal RDF triple annotations. The model combines knowledge-graph encoding of memory contents with value heads for question answering, exploration, and forgetting, yielding a controller that is both adaptive and inspectable. This gives the work a direct Semantic Web grounding through RDF-based representation, annotation-compatible graph semantics, and graph-based symbolic operations over explicit memory state. On train/test room splits at long-term memory capacity of 512, the qualifier-aware StarE-GNN configuration achieves the best held-out performance among the compared symbolic, neural, and neuro-symbolic systems while preserving step-level traceability of memory-management decisions.

Scalable and Efficient Joint Spiking Embedding Predictive Architecture for Large-Scale Dynamic Graphs

Huizhe Zhang, Yuchang Zhu, Huazhen Zhong, Liang Chen, Zibin Zheng — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18412v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dynamic graph learning aims to capture evolving structural and semantic patterns in real-world systems, such as fraud detection and recommender systems. Due to the scarcity of labeled data in real-world dynamic graphs, recent studies have introduced generative or contrastive paradigms (e.g., masked graph autoencoders or graph contrastive learning) to generate task-agnostic graph embeddings. However, these methods typically rely on complex edge-level reconstruction objectives and tailored graph augmentation strategies. This incurs substantial computational overhead when scaling to large-scale dynamic graphs. In this paper, we propose SG-JEPA, a joint spiking embedding predictive architecture for large-scale dynamic graphs. In contrast to existing self-supervised methods, SG-JEPA partitions nodes into context and target sets along the temporal dimension to learn embeddings that are predictive of each other via additional spatial-temporal information. Furthermore, through encoding sequential inputs into coarse-to-fine spike count embeddings, spiking neurons enable SG-JEPA to adapt to the varying computational constraints of downstream tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SG-JEPA achieves competitive or even superior performance over discriminative baselines on node classification, while effectively scaling to the dynamic graph with 13 million edges. SG-JEPA avoids the complex machinery (negative sampling, graph augmentations, edge-level reconstruction, etc.), resulting in superior training efficiency and memory scalability compared with prior self-supervised dynamic graph baselines.

Convolution for Large Language Models

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18413v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) largely rely on Transformers, where self-attention provides global token interaction but does not explicitly encode the locality of natural language. We study whether lightweight depthwise convolutions can supply this local inductive bias without materially increasing model size. Our macro-level ablation compares convolution at 17 locations in a Qwen3 Transformer block and finds the best results when convolution is applied to the projected queries, keys, and values before attention. A subsequent micro-level study favors a residual depthwise convolution with kernel size $k=3$, without additional normalization or activation. Across Qwen3 models and several pre-training data budgets, this design improves the average accuracy on seven downstream benchmarks while adding less than $0.01\%$ parameters. A representation-level case study further suggests that the convolution makes repeated token IDs more sensitive to their immediate context. These results support depthwise convolution as a lightweight complement to self-attention for modeling short-range token interactions.

PAC--Bayes Bounds on Quotient Parameter Spaces: Geometry-induced Implicit-Bias Priors

Nicola Aladrah, Fabio Anselmi — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18422v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Overparameterized models often have continuous parameter symmetries, so different parameters define the same predictor. We show that PAC--Bayesian analysis should be performed on the quotient predictor space: pushing a prior and posterior to the quotient preserves the empirical and population Gibbs risks while removing the nonnegative KL contribution caused solely by how the two distributions differ among parameterizations of the same predictor. Quotienting alone does not determine which prior to use. We construct a canonical choice of one parameterization for each predictor and account for the geometric volume of its equivalent parameterizations. This transforms a neutral reference prior into a data-independent prior that reflects the model's implicit bias. It approximates the ideal but inadmissible posterior-matched prior, which would minimize the KL term by depending on the training data. The resulting certificate is tighter exactly when this geometry-induced prior has smaller KL divergence from the learned quotient posterior than the neutral prior. We test this prediction in Fourier regression with a Hadamard parameterization and in Query-Key attention, using ordinary SGD without an explicit regularizer. The implicit-bias prior reduces the mean quotient-space KL by $40.69\%$ and the mean PAC--Bayes certificate by $21.40\%$ in the Fourier-Hadamard experiment. The smaller, prior-scale-dependent improvement in Query-Key attention confirms the predicted conditional nature of the effect.

Enabling Multilingual Privacy Policy Audits: Large-Scale Analysis of Spanish Mobile Apps

Marcos Moran, David Rodriguez, Luka Nenadic, Norman Sadeh, Jose M. Del Alamo — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18424v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automated analyses of privacy policies enable large-scale assessments of transparency in digital ecosystems, yet existing auditing pipelines remain predominantly English-centric. This limits their ability to systematically evaluate multilingual environments, as in the European Union, where many services disclose privacy practices only in local languages. This paper examines whether large language models (LLMs) can extend privacy policy analysis beyond English without requiring language-specific adaptation, thus empowering large-scale auditing in linguistically diverse app ecosystems. We assemble an evaluation corpus spanning all 24 official EU languages from translated versions of two established expert-annotated datasets (OPP-115 and MAPP) and assess translation fidelity through automated metrics and targeted legal-expert review. Our LLM-based classifier for identifying categories of personal data collection achieves stable cross-lingual performance, with macro-F1 scores ranging between 0.91 and 0.94. We then leverage this capability in a large-scale audit of 2,611 Android applications from the Spanish Google Play Store. Combining multilingual privacy policy analysis with the evaluation of corresponding privacy labels and runtime network traffic exposes an important linguistic barrier: public-sector apps predominantly provide privacy policies in Spanish, whereas popular commercial apps mostly provide them in English. We reveal systematic discrepancies between declared and observed practices, especially in public-sector apps. Overall, our results indicate how English-only privacy audits can systematically obfuscate transparency gaps in multilingual environments.

HARQ for Slow Fluid Antenna Multiple Access

Sixu Han, Kai-Kit Wong, Hanjiang Hong, Hyundong Shin — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18426v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Slow fluid antenna multiple access (sFAMA), enabled by the fluid antenna system (FAS), has recently emerged as a practical and low-complexity paradigm for supporting massive wireless connectivity. While existing studies have characterized its physical-layer performance under one-shot transmission, its interaction with retransmission protocols and the resulting networking performance remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we study a downlink hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ)-assisted sFAMA framework, termed HARQ-sFAMA, in which each user performs distinguished port selection in every HARQ round and combines the received signals across multiple rounds to improve decoding reliability. We develop a comprehensive analytical framework to characterize the outage probability, average packet waiting time, and energy efficiency of the proposed system. The analysis reveals how HARQ exploits the spatial reconfigurability of FAS to simultaneously enhance reliability and improve queueing performance. Numerical results corroborate the theoretical analysis and demonstrate that the HARQ-sFAMA system significantly outperforms conventional one-shot sFAMA in terms of reliability, delay, and energy efficiency. These findings suggest that the integration of HARQ and sFAMA provides a promising pathway toward a practical and standards-compatible massive access solution for future wireless networks.

Adversarial Robustness of Phishing Email Detection: A Comparative Study of TF-IDF + Logistic Regression and Fine-Tuned DistilBERT

Tanveer Ahmed, Seyedali Pourmoafil — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18429v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Phishing emails remain one of the most persistent cybersecurity threats, and machine-learning classifiers are widely used to detect them. Most reported detection accuracies, however, are measured on clean, in-distribution test data rather than on emails deliberately altered to evade detection. This paper reports a controlled, pairwise comparison of two phishing-detection approaches a TF-IDF + Logistic Regression baseline and a fine-tuned DistilBERT transformer trained on a unified corpus of 82,255 emails drawn from six public datasets and evaluated under three conditions: normal in-distribution, synthetic phishing, and adversarial phishing. Both models exceeded 98% accuracy on clean data yet degraded sharply under adversarial testing: TF-IDF + LR fell to 64.00% (a 34.59-percentage-point drop) and DistilBERT fell to 63.64% (a 35.40-percentage-point drop) a gap of only 0.36 percentage points, equivalent to a single email in the 275-sample adversarial test set. LIME, SHAP, and attention-rollout analysis indicate the two models relied on different evidence yet showed similar vulnerability. Pairwise error analysis shows the models agreed on 54.9% of adversarial samples but each made a similar number of exclusive errors (24 and 25 respectively), indicating partly complementary rather than identical failure modes. The results show that clean-data accuracy does not predict adversarial robustness, and that adversarial testing should be a standard part of phishing-detection evaluation.

Building a European Multilingual Evaluation Dataset: The MMLU Localisation Project within the EMT Network

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18432v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper reports on a collaboration between the Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) and the European Master's in Translation (EMT) to localise the MMLU dataset into 11 European languages. Beyond creating a more inclusive benchmark for LLM evaluation, the project offers master's students authentic, project-based professional training in translation, revision, project management, and multilingual coordination, while highlighting key methodological, administrative, and workflow challenges.

Intelligence from Learnable Novelty

Yanbo Zhang, Michael Levin — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18433v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Intelligence appears under different names in different fields: as data compression in statistics and machine learning, as universal computation in dynamical systems, and as adaptive behavior in agents. Each field carries its own objective, and the two most influential drives often fail in mirror image: novelty search, which seeks surprise, is transfixed by a noisy television screen, while the free-energy principle, which avoids surprise, is most content in a dark room. Both failures have a single cause: each objective treats as one quantity the surprise a learner can convert into knowledge and the surprise it never can. Here we show that the learnable part of that information, which we call learnable novelty, yields the seemingly disparate projections of intelligence, and we give a closed-form estimator of it built on a cheap and differentiable reservoir computer. Used as a measure, with no supervision of any kind, the estimator recovers decades of complexity classification, ranking the Turing-complete rule~110 highest among the elementary cellular automata. Used as an objective, its gradient carries a neural cellular automaton from simple dynamics into a regime of solitons, the traveling, colliding structures by which rule~110 computes, as well as organizes the representation of an image encoder around the ten digit classes of MNIST, fully unsupervised: no label ever enters training. Handed to a reinforcement-learning agent as an intrinsic reward, it supplies the exploration that task rewards lack, improving on the task baseline in nine of ten environments and collapsing in none. Complexity generation, abstraction, and exploration, ordinarily pursued with unrelated objectives in separate fields, thus emerge from ascent on one differentiable quantity, and the projections of intelligence gain a common quantitative footing.

Surprise Forcing: What to Remember, When to Skip in Long Video Generation

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18436v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Streaming autoregressive diffusion makes minute-scale video synthesis practical, but its bounded context and fixed denoising schedule allocate resources uniformly across a highly non-stationary sequence. A rolling key-value cache forgets distant visual evidence even when that evidence remains important, while every generated chunk receives the same number of denoising passes irrespective of its actual difficulty. We introduce Surprise Forcing, a training-free framework that treats both limitations as online resource-allocation problems. A Surprise-Gated Memory Bank summarizes evicted frames with value-token descriptors, evaluates them using complementary global-deviation and nearest-neighbor novelty signals, and regulates admission through a feedback-controlled budget in normalized score space. Priority-based replacement and relevance-aware routing then keep the external memory compact and useful. In parallel, Surprise-Aware Denoising estimates chunk difficulty from the maximum adjacent-frame cosine distance after the first denoising pass and uses a local percentile scheduler to skip intermediate steps for comparatively easy chunks. Experiments on VBench, VBench-Long, and VBench-2.0 show that the proposed allocation strategy improves long-horizon consistency and visual quality while retaining real-time streaming throughput.

Relay-Bench: Evaluating LLMs on Multi-Domain Reasoning Chains

Liam Swayne — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18438v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Introducing Relay-Bench, an unsaturated, holistic, text-only benchmark that measures LLMs' ability to complete an assortment of tasks from distinct domains in a single prompt. The leading model, GPT-5.5 (xHigh), scores 43.3%. The test set entirely consists of composite problems: groups of single-domain subproblems that are strung together into challenges that require reasoning across multiple domains in combination. Many of these problems then have layers of complexity added through prompt encoding and deliberate context bloat. Domains tested include visual reasoning, coding, math, information extraction (with a focus on web search), problem-solving, general knowledge, and data analysis. No restrictions are imposed outside of the model harness, and models are explicitly encouraged to leverage code-execution, web searches, and all available tools. All problems are composed of two to thirteen subproblems and do not require multi-modal input or output.

Learnable Sequential Memory in Coupled Oscillator Networks

Taosha Guo, Fabio Pasqualetti — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18439v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Hopfield network established that static memories can be stored as energy minima of a recurrent dynamical system, yet real intelligent agents must navigate \emph{sequences} of memories rather than isolated snapshots.Biological cortex addresses this through a separation of timescales: fast synaptic dynamics encode individual states while slow neuromodulatory processes govern transitions between them. Inspired by this multi-timescale organization, we propose a sequential memory architecture that is fully continuous, admits exponential storage capacity, and is learnable in the sense that the transition structure is carried by a separate routing matrix -- decoupled from the stored patterns, driven by the input context, and free to be chosen, optimized, or learned from data rather than hard-wired into the memory substrate. Specifically, we construct an autonomous three-timescale dynamical system with three coupled layers: a fast Kuramoto layer that stores phase patterns as exponentially stable phase-locked configurations, an intermediate hysteresis layer that enforces reliable dwell times, and a slow attention layer that routes sequential transitions. We provide a complete theoretical analysis of the stability and robustness of each layer, and we validate the full system through numerical simulations of sequential memory retrieval.

Computational models of pragmatic reasoning with flexible generation of meaning and expression alternatives

Polina Tsvilodub, Fausto Carcassi, Michael Franke — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18443v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pragmatic language use requires reasoning about alternatives: the alternative expressions a speaker might have chosen, or the alternative interpretations a listener might entertain. Formal and computational models of pragmatics must therefore specify the sets of alternatives that interlocutors reason over, which is often done through manual specification. Here we propose a framework, ScAffolded Generative models for Explanation (SAGE), that combines the explanatory transparency of cognitive models with the generative flexibility of language models (LMs). SAGE decomposes a pragmatic process into three kinds of modules: proposers, which use LMs to generate an open-ended space of candidate alternatives; evaluators, which assess those alternatives (e.g., their semantics, complexity, or typicality); and selectors, which implement the rule-based computational steps of a cognitively motivated task analysis. We assess SAGE in three case studies spanning pragmatic generation and interpretation-referential expression generation, manner (M-)implicatures, and Gricean conversational implicatures. SAGE models are evaluated critically using established methods from computational cognitive modeling, including ablations, baseline comparisons, and quantitative fit to human data. Across studies, SAGE models achieved high accuracy and often outperformed baselines, but component-level analyses reveal an asymmetry: LM proposers reliably generated alternatives well-suited to pragmatic modeling, whereas LM evaluators are better at providing intuitive judgements rather than judgements of theoretical or formal measures. We discuss the promise and the limitations of neuro-symbolic models as candidate explanatory accounts of human pragmatic language use.

Cost-Aware Uplink MPQUIC Scheduling via Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization

Thanh Trung Nguyen, Thanh Le, Phi Le Nguyen, Kien Nguyen — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18444v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multipath QUIC (MPQUIC) enables simultaneous uplink transmission over heterogeneous access networks such as Wi-Fi and LTE, improving reliability and performance. However, aggressive LTE utilization increases operational cost, creating an inherent trade-off between upload delay and cellular usage. Existing MPQUIC schedulers typically optimize a single performance objective and operate at fixed points within this trade-off space, without explicitly supporting cost-aware operation. This paper formulates uplink MPQUIC scheduling as a multi-objective optimization problem that jointly considers maximum upload completion time and total LTE usage. We propose a Bayesian Optimization-based framework that treats the MPQUIC system as a black box and systematically explores probabilistic path selection configurations to uncover Pareto-efficient operating points. Rather than committing to a predefined scheduling policy, the framework exposes a spectrum of delay--cost trade-offs without modifying protocol internals. Experiments conducted using the Mininet-WiFi emulator show that the proposed approach characterizes a wide delay--cost region and identifies configurations that achieve substantial LTE savings (up to 80%) with controlled increases in upload time. The results further indicate that, under higher contention levels, systematic multi-objective exploration provides increased flexibility compared to fixed-policy schedulers in cost-aware heterogeneous uplink deployments.

ChainMark: Model-Free LLM Watermarking with Closed-Form Calibration

Chengheng Li-Chen, Kyuhee Kim — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18445v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Regulatory regimes such as the EU AI Act mandate machine-readable marking of synthetic text, but existing watermark detectors rely on the generating LM and on heuristic thresholds with no closed-form calibration. We introduce ChainMark, an active watermark that partitions the vocabulary into S states via keyed SHA-256 and forces a hard Markov transition on a fraction rho of positions; the detector replays the partition from the same key in O(n) hash operations, with no LM access. We derive a closed-form S*(n, rho, alpha) mapping a target FPR, text length, and budget to the minimum state count (Theorem 1), prove a universal robustness threshold delta* = 1 - 1/sqrt(2) approximately 29.3% that is invariant in (S, rho, n) (Theorem 2), and generalise both to any k-regular transition topology (Theorem 3). Across three instruction-tuned LLMs and four domains, ChainMark strictly dominates KGW and SWEET under translation and random-substitution attacks at matched budget; a one-corpus empirical recalibration restores the 1% target FPR on natural-language text.

Using Fine-Tuned LLMs to Identify Indicators of Vulnerability in UK Police Incident Logs

Sam Relins, Daniel Birks — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18446v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Purpose: Understanding how much of routine policing involves vulnerable people could inform resourcing, training, and multi-agency response, yet administrative data provide limited insight. We explore whether an LLM-based classification pipeline, developed on open-source US police data, can be adapted to estimate the prevalence of four vulnerability indicators - mental ill health, substance misuse, alcohol dependence, and homelessness - in UK police incident narratives, and when outputs can be treated as defensible measurements. Methods: We analyse nearly 3,000 de-identified incident logs from a UK police force, using a multi-stage pipeline combining repeated model inference, label aggregation, structured human review, and statistical correction. The pipeline runs on a locally hosted open-weight LLM, reflecting the secure environments police must work in. Results: LLMs can produce meaningful, if imperfect, prevalence estimates at scale. Mental ill health indicators are present in approximately one in five incidents, with lower prevalence for other indicators. However, naive LLM deployment is unreliable: single-pass classifications are unstable, and aggregated outputs systematically over-assign indicators relative to human judgement. Correcting these biases required substantial human input and statistical adjustment, leaving considerable uncertainty. Conclusions: While LLMs can extract information from unstructured police data, their outputs cannot be treated as valid measurements without careful methodological support. At the population level, defensible estimates are achievable but resource-intensive; at the individual level, errors remain frequent and unpredictable, limiting suitability for operational decisions. This study highlights both the potential and the constraints of LLM-based measurement in applied settings.

PathReportEval: A Systematic Benchmark for Pathology Report Generation

Suryakant Singh, Sejuti Majumder, Beatrice Knudsen, Joel Saltz, Prateek Prasanna — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18448v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pathology report generation from whole-slide images (WSIs) is a rapidly growing multimodal learning problem, yet progress is difficult to measure because existing studies use heterogeneous datasets, model settings, visual encoders, and evaluation protocols. Moreover, commonly used natural language generation metrics, including BLEU, ROUGE, and METEOR, primarily reward lexical similarity and often fail to detect clinically consequential errors such as omitted diagnoses, hallucinated findings, or discordant tumor attributes. We present a standardized benchmark and evaluation framework for pathology report generation. The benchmark evaluates four representative methods across three datasets (TCGA, HistAI, and REG 2025) using three pathology foundation encoders (CONCHv1.5, UNI2-h, and H-Optimus-1). Our framework standardizes preprocessing, feature extraction, training, decoding, and evaluation, enabling fair comparison across models while providing a modular platform for integrating new methods, datasets, and encoders. A central contribution is the Clinical Report Quality Score (CRQS), a clinically grounded metric for evaluating factual correctness. CRQS maps reference and generated reports into structured clinical attributes and measures four complementary dimensions: clinical fact coverage, key information recall, hallucination rate, and clinical discordance, producing both an overall score and interpretable sub-scores. Experiments demonstrate that conventional language-generation metrics are weakly aligned with clinical correctness and frequently overestimate report quality. In contrast, CRQS reveals clinically meaningful differences between models and encoders that lexical metrics fail to capture. Together, the benchmark, public plug-and-play framework, and CRQS establish a reproducible foundation for rigorous evaluation of pathology report generation.

CANDOR: Chance-Calibrated Discordance in Frozen Foundation Encoders

Soroosh Tayebi Arasteh, Sven Nebelung, Daniel Truhn — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Frozen encoders are chosen by how well a lightweight head reads a finding from their features, not whether the geometry separates it. Nearest-neighbor discordance does, but with unequal banks the opposite-label neighbor wins on density, not geometry, so prevalence alone makes an uninformed encoder look blind. We introduce CANDOR, a discordance measure whose equal-size banks are symmetric under a label swap, fixing its chance level at exactly one half. Across 22 encoders, 20 datasets from 7 domains, and 605,443 images, this correction reverses the conclusion. Collapse falls below chance almost everywhere, so no encoder is blind, yet all are weak: the best chest model reads pneumothorax at 84.5 AUROC and still places 18.4% of those positives nearer an opposite-label film than its own kind in the same hospital. The same encoder that resolves bird species at 4.5 leaves chest findings at 42.8 and glaucoma at 49.8, at chance and worse than random weights. Such a case caps the normalized margin of any Lipschitz head, yet some head among eleven is correct on all but 2.8% of cases where one head misses 35.9%: the deficit is selection, not information. Erasure retention is associated with collapse; we detect no association with the objective, scale, recency, or size of the finding. Because the chance level is fixed, CANDOR can be read before any head is trained, flagging which findings a frozen encoder supports poorly.

0-Cyclic Equalizability of Binary Words Characterized by Hamming Weight

Sarunyu Thongjarast — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18452v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The random cut is one of the most fundamental shuffles in card-based cryptography: it rotates a sequence of face-down cards by a secret amount. Under this shuffle, two sequences of cards are indistinguishable if and only if they are cyclic shifts of each other. This motivates the question of whether, given two sequences of cards, inserting cards at matching positions can make them indistinguishable. A previous study shows that such an insertion is always possible when any cards may be inserted, as long as the two words are permutations of each other. This paper considers a stronger restriction: if the cards are binary, carrying only 0 or 1, can we insert only 0s to make the sequences indistinguishable? We call two words 0-cyclically equalizable if one can insert 0s into both sequences at matching positions so that the resulting words are cyclic shifts of each other. Our main result is that two binary words of equal length are 0-cyclically equalizable if and only if they have equal Hamming weight, that is, the same number of 1-bits. Since equal Hamming weight is clearly necessary, the content of the paper is to show that it is also sufficient. Our proof is constructive: we encode a pair of binary words as a single word over the four-letter alphabet {A, B, X, O}, reduce equalizability to a simpler condition in this encoding, and build the required insertion explicitly.

Estimating Rare Events in Language Models with Proper Evaluation

Nikita Y. Parulekar, Anqi Liu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18454v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantifying the risk of rare failures in language models, such as those triggered by adversarial distribution shifts or very large-scale deployments, requires estimating probabilities far too small for random sampling. While recent work has formalized Low Probability Estimation, existing pipelines remain fragile in the rarest regimes: estimators can suffer zero-estimate collapse or systematic bias, and standard evaluation losses can become unstable or poorly matched to asymmetric safety costs. In this work, we introduce Gradient Activation Adaptive Multi-Level Splitting (GA-AMLS), which adapts rare-event Monte Carlo methods to the continuous activation space of language models. Specifically, GA-AMLS uses a gradient-based MCMC kernel to navigate activation space, eliminating the zero-estimate collapse of input-space search and replacing the independence assumptions of prior activation-space estimators with conditional sampling under an explicit, heavier-tailed activation prior. We also propose the Shifted-Power Bregman (SPB) Loss, a proper scoring rule that remains finite for zero-estimates and offers tunable asymmetry between underestimation and overestimation penalties. Experiments on small transformer models reveal a bias-variance tradeoff: GA-AMLS achieves the lowest loss under symmetric evaluation, reducing average log-space squared error relative to the strongest baseline across model sizes, while methods with overestimation bias prevail under asymmetric penalties. Our findings highlight that estimator choice should be matched to deployment context. More broadly, our work establishes activation space as a tractable domain for rare-event estimation in language models, circumventing the brittleness of discrete input-space search.

Extended Abstract: From Pattern Unification Towards Pattern Matching Unification

David Richter, Timon B\"ohler — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18455v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We revisit the role of higher-order unification in dependently typed languages and identify a fundamental limitation of existing pattern-based fragments: their inability to synthesize functions defined by case analysis. Even simple and ubiquitous constraints arising from type inference, particularly from use of induction principles, fall outside the expressive power of Miller patterns and their modern extensions. We observe that such constraints naturally correspond to definitions by dependent pattern matching. Motivated by this correspondence, we propose integrating dependent pattern matching into the unification process. We present a prototype implementation of a small dependently typed language that collects delayed unification constraints and resolves them via a pattern matching compiler. Our approach successfully infers solutions that are rejected by current systems such as Rocq and Lean, suggesting a new direction for unification that unifies type inference and pattern matching compilation.

Intelligent Cause Prioritisation? An Analysis of AI Policy Priorities and Governance in Africa

Osaremen Iluobe, Kisso Selvan — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18459v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid improvement of AI systems has intensified debate about humanity's economic, political, social, and existential future. As AI reshapes expectations about what lies ahead, policy choices and institutional responses will play a crucial role in determining who benefits, who bears the costs, and whether the most serious risks can be mitigated. Africa remains relatively overlooked in these discussions, partly because it is largely a consumer rather than a producer of frontier AI systems, and also because many countries on the continent continue to face pressing development challenges. Given the catch-up imperative, governments across Africa are eager to embrace AI as a means for accelerating economic transformation. Drawing on speeches, press releases, public statements, and national AI strategies/frameworks, this essay argues that while African governments are highly attentive to AI's opportunities, they devote comparatively little attention to AI safety.

The triumphs and tragedies of fandom: Emotional arcs in NFL tweets

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18461v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Online fandom communities influence public opinion toward movies, musicians, and sports teams. Using a corpus of game-referencing tweets, we measure variation in sentiment toward National Football League (NFL) teams driven by geography, game outcomes, and team performance for the 2011--2014 NFL seasons. We estimate a fandom radius for each team, identifying regions where engagement exceeds background levels of discussion. We find sentiment for both winning and losing teams is positive immediately prior to games, drops at kickoff, and rebounds slightly during halftime. After halftime however, the trajectories diverge: Sentiment for winning teams increases toward the end of the game, while sentiment for losing teams remains low, though both end up below their start of game levels. Finally, a comparison between sentiment and win percentage reveals a weak positive relationship, suggesting that while team success contributes to fandom happiness, other factors also influence how fans discuss the NFL on social media. Our work contributes to a growing body of computational social science research that quantifies the many aspects of modern fandom.

Beyond Resolved Rate: A Non-Functional Quality Study

Xin Sun, Daniel St{\aa}hl, Kristian Sandahl, Christoph Kessler — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18462v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Repository-level coding benchmarks typically measure progress in model capability by comparing the resolved rates of later and earlier models. However, this focus overlooks whether the non-functional quality of their generated patches has also changed across model generations. This study investigates whether later models produce functionally correct patches with better non-functional characteristics than earlier models on comparable repository-level repair tasks. We conducted two case studies involving four Claude and DeepSeek models on SWE-bench Lite. Using the same SWE-agent functional repair setting, we evaluated the generated patches with CodeQL, CodeScene, CPU time, and peak memory. Our primary analysis compared the models on commonly resolved instances. The static analysis results showed that most CodeQL paired differences were zero and that no CodeQL or CodeScene comparison remained significant after Holm correction. CPU time differences were small and inconsistent across model families, while peak memory usage was slightly higher for the later models under the benchmark test workload, with small absolute differences. Differences in individual CodeQL rules and CodeScene categories varied across model families and did not survive multiple-comparison correction. Overall, later models resolved more instances but showed no consistent improvement in the measured non-functional indicators on tasks solved by both models. Through this study, we hope to encourage a more comprehensive evaluation of models' practical software engineering capabilities.

AHEAD: Advancing Multi-Class Label Aggregation with Interpretable Cross-Annotator Modeling

Ju Chen, Sijia Xu, Jun Feng, Zhiqiang Gao, Zhengyi Yang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18465v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Crowdsourced labeling provides valuable labeled data for domains across natural language processing, computer vision, and video. Label aggregation aims to infer latent true labels from noisy and biased annotations, with the key lying in annotator reliability estimation. Despite promising progress, existing approaches struggle with one real-world bottleneck: most individual annotators label only a small subset of tasks, making accurate annotator estimation highly intractable. In this paper, we focus on the considerably more challenging multi-class label aggregation and propose AHEAD (cross-Annotator learning and High-confidEnce Annotator-guideD label aggregation), a cross-annotator learning framework that advances annotator reliability estimation by leveraging the population-level data. Specifically, AHEAD first learns high-dimensional cross-annotator contexts via a graph neural network, deriving multi-view, complementary annotator embeddings by aggregating individual-level annotator features with contextual information. These embeddings are then decoded into interpretable annotator-specific confusion matrices to fit the observed labels. We formulate a composite objective incorporating high-confidence annotators to alleviate the unsupervised training issues faced by prior models. Experiments on 10 real-world datasets spanning NLP, CV, Video, and Audio show that AHEAD substantially improves label accuracy, increasing average accuracy from 68.75% to 73.23%, with gains of up to 14.9% in the best case. Meanwhile, scalability experiments on the largest dataset further demonstrate the overall superiority of our method.

ECoNGS: Efficient Compressive Neural Gaussian Splats for Volume Visualization

Kaiyuan Tang, Chaoli Wang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18466v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in differentiable Gaussian splatting have highlighted the potential of primitive-based approaches as alternative scene representations for interactive, high-quality, volume visualization (VolVis) of large datasets. However, the explicit nature of current primitive-based methods, combined with isolated optimization for each VolVis scene, results in redundant, non-compact representations. We present ECoNGS, an efficient compressive neural Gaussian splatting framework for VolVis scene representation. ECoNGS employs lightweight neural networks to dynamically predict implicit, editable Gaussian splats from explicit anchor points, effectively combining model compactness and parameter efficiency of implicit representations with high-performance rendering of explicit primitives. We explore a joint learning strategy that clusters geometrically similar scenes and shares parameters across them, significantly reducing overall training time and model size while maintaining reconstruction fidelity. To achieve a more compact scene representation, we further compress the explicit anchor attributes using a neural entropy model that estimates their probability distributions, enabling compact storage via entropy coding. We systematically investigate Gaussian initialization strategies and propose a simple yet effective scheme tailored for VolVis scenes, improving reconstruction accuracy and accelerating convergence. We evaluate ECoNGS qualitatively and quantitatively across various univariate and multivariate VolVis scenes, highlighting its superior performance over prior methods in training time, reconstruction quality, and model size. In particular, compared with the prior method iVR-GS, ECoNGS improves reconstruction quality by up to 2.2 dB in PSNR while reducing the model size by up to 6.1x and the training time by up to 5.9x. The code is available at https://github.com/TouKaienn/ECoNGS.

Weak-to-Strong Learning in Decision Making

Jingwei Ji, Renyuan Xu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18467v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many operational decisions rely on predictive models that estimate uncertain outcomes conditional on observable contexts. Training such models, however, often faces a fundamental data asymmetry: labeled outcomes are scarce or costly to obtain, while contextual covariates are abundant. Motivated by this data asymmetry, we develop a decision-aware weak-to-strong (W2S) framework that leverages both labeled and unlabeled data to improve contextual stochastic optimization. Specifically, we first train a weak model using limited labeled data and then use it to generate predicted outcome distributions on unlabeled contexts. These distributions provide soft supervision for training a strong model. We establish a non-asymptotic upper bound on the excess decision risk of W2S and a complementary lower bound for a strong-only benchmark. Their comparison yields explicit sufficient conditions under which W2S improves downstream decision performance. The key quantity is the correlation dimension between the weak and strong feature representations: when it is small, abundant unlabeled data reduce the effect of teacher errors along non-overlapping directions. A synthetic newsvendor experiment and a comment moderation experiment based on real-world data provide empirical evidence consistent with the theory.

RRPO: Reference-Relative Policy Optimization with Stratified Conditional Rollouts

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18470v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has shown strong effectiveness in reinforcement learning from verifiable feedback, where sampled rollouts can be compared within a group using task-provided correctness signals. However, extending group-relative optimization beyond verifiable settings is challenging because success in many tasks is not captured by a single correctness criterion. We propose \textbf{Reference-Relative Policy Optimization (RRPO)}, which generalizes GRPO by replacing direct correctness-based advantage construction with reference-relative contrastive comparisons. RRPO first uses \emph{stratified conditional rollouts} to construct positive and negative anchor sets, and then trains a metric projection head with a set-contrastive objective to compare candidate rollouts against these anchors. The resulting alignment scores directly define contrastive advantages: during policy optimization, the projection head is frozen, and the scores are centered within each rollout group in a standard group-relative objective. We evaluate RRPO using anchor-based contrastive advantages throughout policy optimization, without relying on task ground-truth verifiers. Across verifiable reasoning, open-ended generation, and post-SFT settings, RRPO remains competitive with verifier-based optimization, improves over weakly supervised baselines, and provides additional gains after supervised fine-tuning.

Cyclic and Constacyclic Codes Over Z4+iZ4

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18471v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we study cyclic and constacyclic codes over the finite chain ring R=Z4+iZ4, where i^2=-1. We prove that all constacyclic codes over R are equivalent to cyclic codes. An algorithm to obtain generators for all simple root constacyclic codes over R is presented. Using a Gray map we then obtain linear Z4 codes from constacyclic codes over R. We present new best linear Z4 codes found using this method.

Structured Output Collapses Answer Diversity Across 44 Language Models

Tapan Parikh — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18476v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When a language model must choose one answer from a large space of equally valid options, a format clause -- "Reply with JSON only" -- changes which answer it chooses. We re-run the One-Word Census (arXiv:2607.12796): 31 wide-answer-space category prompts asked of 44 models, now with the reply requested in JSON -- no schema enforcement, no constrained decoding, only the request. Convergence deepens sharply: on the unconstrained "Pick a word" prompt the modal answer rises from 41% to 64% of the pool and distinct answers fall from 52 to 36; mean answer-choice surprisal drops from 1.80 to 1.58 bits. The tax is progressive: six of 44 models move individually (BH-FDR q=.10), all toward the mode, led by the most distinctive models, while the conformist floor is immobile. It is a sharpener, not a re-indexer -- the plain-chat modal answer survives in 28 of 31 categories. Defaults are register-indexed: a within-run re-sample (n=20) finds JSON shifts 53% of a model's stable chat defaults, mostly back to the crowd, and installs defaults absent from chat (Claude Fable 5 answers "cerulean" for colour 0% of the time in chat, 100% in JSON). Full-battery controls reveal a register gradient: compression is significant and specific to the answer-delivery formats models are trained to speak (JSON -0.22 bits, p=.0002; XML -0.19, p=.002), absent for YAML and CSV, and reversed for an arbitrary bracket wrapper (+0.13, p=.009) -- weighing the mechanism toward tool-use post-training. Enforcing the schema at the decoder (response_format) compresses no further than the request (-0.03 bits): the collapse lives in the model's response to the register, not the decoder. Structured output is how software consumes language models, and that surface is served by a measurably more homogeneous model than the chat surface on which models are evaluated, compared, and chosen.

Hybrid Latent-Structural Fusion (HLSF) for Cyber Anomaly Detection

Dorianis M. Perez, Maksim E. Eren, Bryan E. Kaiser — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18479v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Malicious anomalous activity detection is a fundamental challenge for cyber security systems. Both tensor decomposition under statistical framework with CANDECOMP-PARAFAC alternating Poisson regression (CP-APR) and normalizing flows have proven to be powerful unsupervised machine learning methods that model multi-dimensional data and capture complex and multi-faceted details of behavior profiles in cyber security applications. In this study, we propose Hybrid Latent-Structural Fusion (HLSF), a weighted anomaly fusion framework integrating CP-APR structural anomaly scores with latent-space density scores derived from normalizing flows. In our experiments, we show that the HLSF framework improves anomaly detection performance on a dataset of real-world compromised user credentials collected from the large enterprise network of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) during a red-teaming exercise, compared with using CP-APR or normalizing flows alone.

Search-on-Graph-R1: Training Large Language Models to Search Knowledge Graphs with Reinforcement Learning

Jia Ao Sun, Hao Yu, Fengran Mo, Zhan Su, Yuchen Hui, Bang Liu, Jian-Yun Nie — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18481v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge graph question answering (KGQA) requires navigating from topic entities to an answer several relations away. Recent methods prompt a frontier LLM to explore the graph through a retrieval tool, but their reliance on frontier-scale inference makes them costly to deploy. We present Search-on-Graph-R1 (\sogrone{}), which internalizes this navigation into a compact 8B model through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by reinforcement learning (RL). Our central idea is to scaffold a frontier teacher with each question's gold SPARQL query, so the teacher traverses a known answer-bearing path with a live \texttt{Search} tool rather than having to discover the path itself. Since every call executes against a live Freebase server, the resulting trajectories are grounded in the knowledge graph by construction. On WebQSP, CWQ, and GrailQA, \sogrone{} at 8B surpasses every frozen frontier-LLM system in our comparison and posts the strongest results on CWQ of any system we compare against. It does so using no auxiliary module at inference and no LLM judge during training. Isolating each training stage shows that SFT and RL contribute complementary gains, our approach transfers across model families, and RL learns to reach answers in fewer \texttt{Search} calls than its SFT initialization.

Governing Well in the Algorithmic Age: The Foundations of Digital Statecraft

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18483v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The digital substrate of states -- data, algorithms, infrastructure, platforms, applications -- is being governed without adequate conceptual foundations. The ability and legitimacy required to govern this substrate, and to govern with it, are simultaneously misaligned, contested, and structurally absent. We introduce digital statecraft as the organising concept for this emerging field, arguing that 'digital' reconstitutes the statecraft question rather than merely extending its domain. The concept operates on two dimensions - statecraft over digital systems, concerning the authority and capacity of the state in relation to the digital substrate itself, and statecraft with digital systems, concerning the deployment of algorithmic tools as instruments of governing authority. And it rests on two foundational requirements, technical coherence and legitimate authority, that are genuinely in tension. We derive ten principles of digital statecraft from these foundations, each naming a condition whose absence produces an identifiable and structural governance failure: public interest first, human-machine complementarity, governability by design, systemic coherence, hybrid institutions, adaptive governance, human centricity and civic agency, accountable and traceable authority, judgment across time, and the non-delegable core. This article takes the state as the starting point, the institutional form that developed historically in response to the problem of effective and legitimate public governance, and the only current candidate for which the full set of legitimacy conditions is institutionally available. But the digital statecraft programme holds open a deeper question than just whether states can reform themselves: governing well in the algorithmic age may require rethinking the boundaries, scale, and affiliative basis of statehood itself.

Trusted Credentials, Untrusted Behavior: Benchmarking LLM-Agent Security in High-Performance Computing

Jie Li — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18485v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are starting to take on routine work in high-performance computing (HPC), including monitoring Slurm jobs, diagnosing failed builds, inspecting simulation output, and coordinating scientific workflows. To do this work, an agent commonly acts under its user's credentials and inherits the user's access to files and the scheduler. This arrangement creates a failure mode that ordinary account-level controls do not capture. Adversarial instructions in a log, tool description, shared file, or peer-agent message may redirect the agent beyond the task the user assigned, even though every resulting command is authenticated and permitted for that account. We refer to this as the hijacked authorized agent problem. Existing agent-security studies explain relevant mechanisms, such as indirect prompt injection and tool misuse, but generally evaluate them in web, enterprise, or personal-assistant settings. HPC security, by contrast, has mature controls for identity and isolation but does not ordinarily represent the intent of a particular task. This paper defines the threat model in the HPC setting, identifies attack surfaces created by schedulers, shared storage, multi-project accounts, and scientific workflows, and examines where current controls fall short. It concludes with a research agenda and a plan for an empirical benchmark, TaskBound.

The Open Ant: A Robot Platform for Reinforcement Learning Research

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18488v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) research has demonstrated success in both physical and simulated domains; however, the predominant methodology remains rooted in simulations. The predominance of simulations makes translating research to physical reality uncertain for both algorithms and researchers. We propose a physical platform that is designed to simplify the transition. In this paper, we present the Open Ant: a physical variant of the commonly used Gymnasium Ant environment, along with a simulation. We demonstrate that competent walking policies can be learned from scratch in approximately one hour directly from the physical robot's experience for two substantially different RL algorithms: SARSA($\lambda$) and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC). Separately, we show policies that were learned in simulation transfer to reality. We also examine how well the platform supports a nimble experimental ecosystem. Specifically, we observe the speed with which new users from diverse backgrounds achieve their first success with the platform, and how easily the platform can be repaired and updated when hardware issues arise. Both the hardware design and software are available as open-source on GitHub for ease of customization. In summary, we advocate for the use of the Open Ant for RL researchers who frequently use simulated environments, so they can more easily include robot experiments in their evaluations.

Attractor Geometry Determines the Identifiability Limits of System Discovery

Matteo Gallo, Fabio Anselmi, Paolo Lazzari — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18490v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Symbolic discovery of governing equations from data is limited not only by algorithm design and data volume, but by the geometry of the attractor: what the long-run dynamics allow to be recovered. Using a within-system design on Lorenz-84, where one forcing parameter drives fixed-point, limit-cycle, and chaotic regimes while the governing equations and library stay fixed, we show that a single number, $\lambda_{\min}(M)$, the smallest eigenvalue of the invariant-measure moment matrix, sets the identifiability ceiling for both sparse regression (SINDy) and evolutionary symbolic regression (PySR). Derived from the Birkhoff ergodic theorem and obtained from a short reference trajectory before any run, $\lambda_{\min}(M)$ measures how fully the attractor covers function space: where it vanishes, recovery is impossible for any algorithm, sparse or combinatorial alike; as it grows, both algorithms improve. Chaos raises $\lambda_{\min}(M)$ by spreading the attractor, but also enlarges it and amplifies noise; because noise enters SINDy's regression bottleneck linearly and PySR's discrimination channel superlinearly, the same transition can push the two methods in opposite directions, so deeper chaos is not uniformly better. Parameter-free mechanistic scores from this framework transfer without refitting to a held-out Lorenz-96 system, confirming mechanism rather than curve-fitting; a criterion read from the equations predicts when added chaos will not improve conditioning. We also introduce Soft F1, a coefficient-weighted structural metric that resolves performance differences invisible to binary-success and predictive scores. The first question of discovery is then not which algorithm, but what the attractor permits.

Breaking Network Densification Limits with Distributed Cooperative Massive Access (DCMA)

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18492v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, we investigate the performance of the distributed cooperative massive access (DCMA) framework in large-scale network setups by incorporating stochastic geometry modeling. A partially centralized cell-free cloud-radio access (C-RAN) architecture is considered where remote radio heads (RRHs) decode transmitted messages and cooperate with each other to enhance system performance. Specifically, they can share decoded messages via feedback links, allowing receivers to cancel inter-user interference through successive interference cancellation (SIC), thus improving the decoding capabilities of the system. For such a network, we propose a novel synergetic decoding algorithm that efficiently resolves the assignment and message sharing routing for each user while accounting for practical network constraints. Furthermore, using game theory, we develop a merge-and-split algorithm with lexicographic preference to solve the problem of minimizing the RRHs utilized without compromising the performance. Simulation results show that the proposed framework significantly outperforms systems that do not implement SIC or take advantage of the cooperation between RRHs in terms of outage probability. Finally, we evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms and validate their efficiency.

Quality over Quantity: Value-Driven Distributed Congestion Control for the Collective Perception Service

Tengfei Lyu, Florian A. Schiegg, Md Noor-A-Rahim, Dirk Pesch, Aisling O'Driscoll — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18495v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While the Collective Perception Service (CPS) enables the exchange of sensor information among Intelligent Transport System Stations (ITS-S'), frequent transmission of Collective Perception Messages (CPMs), their highly variable size, and load from other vehicular services can cause severe channel congestion. Existing Distributed Congestion Control (DCC) Access layer mechanisms typically regulate channel load without considering the relative importance of the objects carried in CPMs. This limits their ability to preserve high-value information under constrained radio resources. More recently, Facilities layer DCC mechanisms attempt to prioritise high value objects within the specified radio resource limits but may not operate well in heterogeneous environments where the number of sensed objects and their importance can vary significantly over time or between ITS-S'. This paper proposes a value-based DCC Facilities layer 'quality' selector that couples a Value of Information (VoI) per bit rate controller with object-level selection. It is benchmarked against state of the art approaches from standards and the literature, with results showing that the proposed method maintains channel load near the target CBR while retaining more high-VoI objects than state of the art approaches, thereby improving the dissemination of perception-critical information.

Towards an Automated Test of LLM Security Knowledge

Shufan Chai, Liangliang Sun, Jessica Staddon — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18496v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for a range of software, hardware and human-centered security tasks. Consequently, LLM performance on security tasks is an active area of measurement and research, often with a focus on identifying areas in which LLM security ``knowledge'' may be insufficient. Popular strategies for identifying LLM security knowledge gaps include building corpora of challenge questions or task benchmarks, strategies that require substantial manual work and security expertise to design and execute. We introduce a partially-automated method for assessing LLM knowledge of a security area.The method uses authoritative information from Consumer Protection Agencies (CPAs) to identify instability in LLM responses that can be indicative of knowledge gaps. We demonstrate the method for 2 security topics, identity theft and impostor scams, and 5 LLMs in 2 leading LLM families, Gemini and GPT, using publicly available information about identity theft and impostor scams from 6 CPAs.The method distinguishes between models that have and don't have sufficient knowledge to accurately identify the security topics in text narratives.

Splay trees are almost dynamically optimal

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18498v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sleator and Tarjan [JACM, 1985] conjectured that splay trees are dynamically optimal -- that on every access sequence, they perform within a constant factor of the optimal offline dynamic binary search tree. Despite four decades of work, no $o(\log n)$ competitive ratio was known. We prove that splay trees are $O(\log\log n \cdot \log^2\log\log n)=\tilde{O}(\log\log n)$-competitive.

Large-Signal Stability Analysis of Optimization-Based Secondary Control for Distributed Energy Resources

Vivek Khatana, Soham Chakraborty, Murti V. Salapaka — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18500v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This article develops a large-signal stability analysis for a sampled-data optimization-based secondary controller for distributed energy resources (DERs) in power systems. The induced closed loop combines nonlinear inverter power-flow dynamics, filtered active and reactive power measurements, constrained optimization updates, and interpolation-based actuation between sampling instants. We study this optimization-in-the-loop nonlinear sampled-data system beyond local linearization. The analysis provides computable bounds on the voltage, filtered reactive power, and the secondary control input. We further characterize steady-state operating points and establish how the optimizer objectives and constraints connect voltage regulation with equal per-unitized reactive power sharing. Finally, input-to-state stability of the frequency dynamics is established with respect to DER voltages and control inputs. These results provide a rigorous mathematical foundation for sampled-data optimization-based secondary control of DERs.

Now We Know? A Systematic Comparison of TerraMind and THOR

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18504v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Benchmarks for Geospatial Foundation Models (GFMs) increasingly rank models by aggregate score, but such rankings obscure why models differ: how much of the gap is architecture, how much is decoder capacity, and how much is a use-case-specific artefact? This study addresses that gap through a controlled comparison of two GFMs developed under European Space Agency's $\Phi$-lab with contrasting design philosophies: THOR, which introduces a compute-adaptive architecture supporting variable patch sizes and unifies Sentinel-1, -2, and -3 data at their native resolutions; and TerraMind, a multimodal generative GFM pretrained with a dual-scale token/pixel objective that enables any-to-any cross-modal generation (Thinking-in-Modalities) to infer missing sensors at inference time. Rather than reporting a single leaderboard, we investigate the axes along which the two architectures actually differ - patch size, decoder complexity, finetuning regime, input modality, and model scale - across ten use cases spanning segmentation and regression in diverse domains, including climate disaster response, methane leak detection, snow monitoring, or sea ice mapping. We find that architectural design choices - patch size and decoder type in particular - explain more performance variance than model identity itself, that the two models embody complementary investment strategies (pretraining-time scale for TerraMind versus inference-time tokenisation for THOR), and that correctly interpreting results requires dataset-level characterisation. The resulting picture is not a single winner but a set of hypotheses and a diagnostic ablation methodology that we expect to generalise to future GFMs beyond THOR and TerraMind.

AI Value Alignment for Evolving Social Norms

Nenad Toma\v{s}ev, Matija Franklin, Simon Osindero — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18506v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI alignment is essential for the safe deployment of advanced AI systems. Given that values and preferences change over time, culture, social roles, and context, we need to develop a better understanding of the possible long-term consequences of AI alignment, in particular considering the likely ubiquitous future use of personalized AI assistants. We introduce a flexible and extensible mathematical modelling framework, rooted in social physics, aimed at answering macro-level questions regarding the evolving social norms in human populations under the assumption of frequent AI use. Our analysis is part-analytical, and part-simulation, enabling us to characterize the long-term dynamical consequences under a diverse set of starting assumptions. We highlight the risk of value lock-in, and normative mode collapse, prominently featured in non-adaptive alignment formulations. Beyond alignment, we advocate for the wider adoption of these kinds of social physics models as an epistemic bridge: enabling rapid, rigorous, and quantitatively-grounded hypothesis testing for sociotechnical foresight in general AI futures, and acting as a tractable precursor to more computationally expensive large-scale agentic evaluations.

AInimation: Animating from Prompt to AI-Generated Responses

Jiaqi Wu, Damien Masson — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We explore the use of animated transitions between a prompt and an AI-generated response. After reviewing 800 examples of prompts and responses, we devise a taxonomy of animated transitions for multimodal text- and image-generative models. The proposed animations include translating and morphing elements of the prompt to their final location in the response; highlighting modifications such as fixed typos; overlaying structural requirements to verify them; and displaying how a model understands references. A study shows that adding animated transitions helps users review the response: participants performed 43% better at locating elements in the response; 153% better at identifying changes; and 20% better at verifying the prompt was correctly interpreted. Our work applies to all software that integrates AI and shows that well-crafted, slower animations are preferable to instant AI responses.

Style over Substance: A Shortcut Audit of Emotion-Description Preference Evaluation

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18508v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Preference over model-generated emotion descriptions is emerging as a standard evaluation metric for multimodal emotion understanding, exemplified by the MER2026 MER-Prefer track on EmoPrefer. Such benchmarks assume that predicting the preferred description requires grounded cross-modal understanding of the video. We conduct a systematic shortcut audit of EmoPrefer using content-blind probes. A simple logistic regression using only description length and generator identity, without processing the text, video, or audio, performs comparably to LoRA-finetuned 7B text and audio-visual judges (65.8 versus 66.8 WAF on EmoPrefer-V2). Generator identity is recoverable from description text with 99.5 percent accuracy, every candidate pair contrasts two distinct generators, and the human preference labels agree with a fold-exclusive per-generator win-rate prior on 66 percent of the evaluated pairs. When the human label conflicts with this prior, trained judges still follow the style prior on 63 to 80 percent of the pairs. On a length-matched subset that neutralizes verbosity bias, the tested media configurations yield no statistically significant improvement, while an ODIN-inspired diagnostic that decouples the style shortcut leaves its content head near chance. These results do not imply that human preferences are inherently stylistic or that the descriptions contain no emotional information. Instead, they show that the current scores can be reached without verifying either description against the video. We recommend source-balanced pairing, strict length control, counter-stereotypical sliced reporting, and multi-annotator consensus for future cross-generator evaluations. Code is available at https://github.com/jiabingyang01/EmoPrefer-Audit.

DuSPiT: Dual-Branch Sub-Patch Pixel Diffusion Transformer

Yunpeng Bai, Yossi Gandelsman, Micha\"el Gharbi — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18510v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion Transformers achieve strong image generation performance, but most operate in compressed latent spaces. Pixel-space diffusion avoids this information loss, yet existing approaches map each raw image patch to a single token, forcing one representation to handle both global communication and fine-grained details. We address this issue by proposing a new architecture, \textbf{DuSPiT}, a \textbf{Du}al-branch \textbf{S}ub\textbf{P}atch \textbf{Pi}xel \textbf{T}ransformer. This model separates global structural reasoning from local appearance modeling. DuSPiT uses a compact base branch for efficient global reasoning and a parallel, high-capacity pixel branch, organized into subpatch groups, to preserve detailed appearance, with the two branches interacting through cross-attention. Our results show that DuSPiT generates images with richer details and stronger fine-grained structures, while also achieving a better quality--efficiency trade-off than prior pixel-space diffusion transformers.

Querying Multimodal Scientific Papers with AI: Practices and Preferences Across Blind, Low-Vision, and Sighted Scientists

Arnavi Chheda-Kothary, Lucy Lu Wang, Joseph Chee Chang, Jonathan Bragg — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18514v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual diagrams, figures, and tables are central to scientific papers, and convey information beyond what is captured in text. While blind or low-vision (BLV) scientists have traditionally relied on static alternative text to access figures in papers, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has made interactive question-answering (QA) a feasible paradigm for visual exploration; yet little is known about how scientists use visual QA in practice or how to improve its accessibility. In this work, we interview five BLV and five sighted scientists across different STEM fields to understand how they use two AI tools, ChatGPT and Gemini, to query multimodal scientific documents. Our findings characterize how scientists review multimodal content, including existing practices (along with accessibility workarounds) for engaging with visuals, and feedback on the suitability of AI-generated responses to multimodal queries. We further find that vague or incomplete image descriptions, as well as incorrect AI outputs more broadly, can cause both BLV and sighted scientists to abandon AI workflows. To support future research, we additionally contribute a dataset of 115 queries and responses from our participants' interactions with the AI tools for papers in their field. We close by discussing implications for AI-powered scientific QA systems, emphasizing considerations for access across abilities and domains.

Automated Data Engineering and Feature Selection for the Case Study of Warpage Detection in Fused Deposition Modeling

Saleh Valizadeh Sotubadi, Nazanin Mahjourian, Vinh Nguyen — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18515v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study contributes toward development of an Automated Data Processing (ADP) framework designed to evaluate and reinforce optimal machine learning model-feature combinations for predictive tasks in fused deposition modeling (FDM) process datasets. The methodology is centered around a reinforcement learning-inspired policy updating mechanism, where multiple machine learning models are trained on both full feature sets and feature subsets selected through Shapley-based Explainable AI (SHAP XAI) across 217 datasets. At each episode, the framework assesses the predictive accuracy and F1-scores of each model-feature pair, computes a scalar reward, and updates $Q$ values to guide future model selection. SHAP XAI feature importance was employed to generate reduced yet informative feature subsets to enable the framework to explore performance with dimensionality. The policy was shown to evolve over multiple episodes, with reward distributions used to visualize performance stability. Overall, results indicate that leveraging the ADP framework through XAI algorithms successfully converges toward optimal model-feature configurations with improved accuracy and stability. Specifically, the proposed framework improves the test-set AUC from 0.9248 to 0.9731 and increases the mean reward value by more than fifty percent compared with the baseline full-feature configuration.

Signed Rectified Flow: Negativity-Controlled Generation

Runlong Liao, Baiyu Su, Lizhang Chen, Qiang Liu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18516v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce Signed Rectified Flow (Signed RF), a generalization of Rectified Flow that targets the signed measure $\pi^{sign} = (1+\alpha)\pi^+ - \alpha\pi^-$, where $\alpha>0$, $\pi^+$ is the distribution to promote, and $\pi^-$ is the distribution to suppress. Although direct sampling from a signed measure is not well-defined, Signed RF induces a valid generative process that concentrates probability in regions where the signed measure is positive while provably excluding regions dominated by its negative component. It therefore provides a principled framework for incorporating negative information and exclusion constraints into generative modeling. We analyze the signed continuity equation underlying Signed RF and use a charged-particle interpretation to explain how negative mass forms exclusion barriers. This theory further motivates practical adaptive guidance algorithms. Across several applications, Signed RF improves the fidelity-diversity trade-off on ImageNet, reduces nearest-neighbor similarity in anti-memorization experiments, and reduces nudity induced by adversarial prompts in Stable Diffusion 3.5 while preserving CLIP and aesthetic scores.

Beyond Fixed Goal Delivery: Online POMDP Planning for Target Interception in Crowds

Himanshu Gupta, Kelvin Aladum, Nisar Ahmed, Bradley Hayes, Zachary Sunberg — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18517v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Target interception in crowded environments requires reaching a moving objective while navigating among multiple uncertain human agents. Since human navigation intent is not directly observable, the robot must reason over multiple possible future interaction outcomes. We formulate interception in crowds as a partially observable Markov decision process and solve it online using tree search under a fixed computational budget. In this setting, the action-space structure directly shapes the search tree and how computational effort is allocated. We perform a controlled comparison between a sequential path-speed planner, which first plans a spatial path and then modulates speed along it, and a unified planner that jointly branches over steering and speed within tree search. Across simulations with up to 200 humans, both approaches perform similarly at low crowd density but diverge sharply as density increases. At the highest crowd density, the sequential planner has a safe-interception rate 31 percentage points lower and requires 44% more time than the unified steering-speed planner, revealing a structural limitation of spatial restriction. Project webpage: https://tic-planning.github.io/

A Progressive Approach to Synthesizable RTL Design Generation Using LLMs

Xiangfei Kong, Tasnim Tabassum, Marwan Abdelwahab, Hao Zheng — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18519v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models can generate register-transfer-level (RTL) designs directly from natural language specifications. Their failures, however, arise mostly from understanding rather than coding \cite{zhang2026understanding, qiu2025towards}. A specification is informal and ambiguous, the model's interpretation stays implicit, and every misreading is committed silently into Verilog, where only simulation can expose it. Intermediate representations make the interpretation partly explicit, yet existing works don't verify the interpretation against the specification, and repair simulation failures at the code level regardless of where the misreading originated. VeriRefine instead treats specification refinement as a verifiable stage of RTL generation. It progressively refines the prose specification into an explicit, schema-constrained account of design intent, expressed as per-signal Abstract Signal Transition Functions (ASTFs) that commit each signal's logic style, clock domain, and reset behavior before any code exists and ground every behavior in a verbatim specification sentence. The refined specification then passes a five-layer audit spanning soundness, completeness, consistency, FSM integrity, and core RTL design rules, so interpretation errors are repaired at the representation level before any Verilog is generated. Once code is generated, each simulation failure is classified as an understanding error or a coding error and routed back to the corresponding stage for targeted repair. Because every signal's hardware class is fixed during refinement, synthesizability becomes a structural property of the pipeline rather than a post-hoc check. With Claude Sonnet 4.6, VeriRefine reaches 94.0\% functional correctness on RTLLM v2.0 and 98.1\% on VerilogEval-Human v2.

Adaptive Two-Stage Online Learning for Service-Affecting Failure Detection in Mobile Core Networks

J. du Toit, G. Fita, J. Salzwedel, A. Stoltz, R. Wolhuter — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mobile network operators monitor aggregated traffic volumes to assess the operational health of core network infrastructure. Reliable failure detection is challenging due to strong temporal structure, non-stationarity, measurement artefacts, and extreme class imbalance, which limit static threshold-based monitoring. This paper proposes a two-stage online learning framework for traffic-based failure detection in mobile core networks. Stage I incrementally models normal traffic dynamics using lightweight regression with time-aware features. Stage II analyses prediction residuals together with contextual indicators to detect genuine service-affecting network failures. The framework operates fully online under a prequential evaluation protocol, enabling continuous adaptation with low computational overhead. Across linear and non-linear models, the proposed two-stage architecture achieves the best precision-recall trade-off, attaining the highest recall, F1-score, and AUC at acceptable false positive rates. These results demonstrate the importance of explicit residual decomposition for reliable failure detection in streaming mobile core network data.

DASH Robot: Minimalistic Design and Optimal Aerial-Terrestrial Locomotion via Contact-Implicit Control

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18527v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a novel and minimalistic design of an aerial-terrestrial robot DASH: Ducted Aerial Spring Hopper. The goal is to enable both aerial and ground locomotion capabilities on a unified mobile robot that is mechanically-minimalistic, locomotion-versatile, and energy-efficient. We propose an organic integration of ducted fan co-axial body with a springy leg at the bottom for realization. The ducted fan module provides thrust-vectoring as the main actuation for agile flying; when it is combined with the light-weight spring leg, the robot realizes highly efficient ground hopping with energy circulation. Moreover, to realize optimal locomotion with two modes, we employ a contact-implicit model predictive controller to automatically choose locomotion modes and actuation. We successfully validated the design and control of DASH through a range of tasks, including periodic hopping, aerial flight, and mode-free locomotion with autonomous mode transitions during obstacle traversal.

EduPanel: A Three-Agent LLM Judge for Teaching Videos -- Reliability, Complementarity, and Human Trust Calibration

Jia-Kai Dong, Yi-Cheng Lin, Hung-yi Lee — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18529v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Teaching videos are becoming a major medium for education, creating a growing need for scalable evaluation of their pedagogical quality. Existing automatic judges do not fully address this setting because teaching quality depends on multimodal evidence and should be evaluated with respect to the intended learner rather than as a universal property. We present EduPanel, a rubric-grounded, learner-conditioned LLM judge that decomposes evaluation across specialized agents to produce interpretable assessments for different aspects of teaching quality. Across expert studies, architecture ablations, and learner-persona analyses, EduPanel achieves reliability comparable to a median human expert. In expert evaluation, its feedback improves scoring accuracy (MAE 0.87 to 0.73), while experts remain able to detect unreliable outputs (AUC = 0.77) instead of accepting them blindly. These results suggest that EduPanel can serve as effective assistants for educational evaluation rather than replacements for human experts.

Censoring-Aware In-Context Learning for Generalized Supplier Lead Time Estimation in Supply Chain Planning

Christopher Wang, Sebastien Ouellet, Behrouz Haji Soleimani, Ali Etemad — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18530v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Supplier lead time forecasting is a central input to material requirements planning, inventory optimization, and supply chain risk management. However, many industrial lead time datasets are naturally right-censored: at the time forecasts are required, some orders have not yet arrived. Standard regression and classification approaches discard this information, while conventional survival models require task-specific modeling. We propose LeadTime-ICL (LT-ICL), a censoring-aware in-context learning model for probabilistic lead time forecasting. LT-ICL combines a transformer backbone with a conditional normalizing-flow head, producing a full predictive distribution over lead times. The model is pretrained on synthetic right-censored lead time tasks, enabling in-context adaptation to new industrial datasets without task-specific parameter updates. We provide theoretical support for this formulation by showing that excess CRPS is bounded by prior misspecification and amortized approximation errors, providing clear direction for improving forecasting performance. We evaluate LT-ICL on 24 proprietary supply-chain datasets spanning seven industries. LT-ICL achieves the lowest point-forecasting error on 15 of the 24 datasets, and the lowest probabilistic forecasting error on 14 datasets, yielding the best average rank across both. These results support right-censored probabilistic forecasting as a practical formulation for supplier lead time prediction and demonstrate that pretrained in-context models can provide accurate, low-adaptation-cost forecasting for industrial planning systems.

Reasoning Fine-Tuning Induces Persistent Latent Policy States

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18532v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning-specialized language models show large performance gains over base models, yet the internal changes responsible for improved multi-step reasoning remain poorly understood. It is unclear whether reasoning fine-tuning improves local token-level competence or globally reorganizes how models structure inference over time. We address this question by modeling Chain-of-Thought reasoning as a switching dynamical system (SDS), in which internal representations evolve under discrete latent policy states. Our framework combines time-aware contrastive representation learning with discrete regime discovery to recover latent policies from activation trajectories. Across four benchmarks and model scales from 1.5B to 32B parameters, reasoning-fine-tuned models exhibit richer latent-policy organization than their base counterparts, characterized by more differentiated transition structure and model-dependent changes in state utilization, persistence, and mixing. The recovered regimes exhibit functional specialization aligned with distinct reasoning stages, and extensive controls confirm that their structure is not explained by correctness, representation learning, or modeling priors, but depends on the coherent temporal organization of reasoning trajectories. Causal interventions further show that the regimes are functionally meaningful: state-swap ablations reduce one-step predictive fit, while transplanting reasoning dynamics into base models improves performance on challenging reasoning problems. Finally, SDS-guided pruning of failure-prone reasoning prefixes outperforms self-consistency in 11 of 12 model-dataset settings, with gains of up to 12.5 percentage points. Together, our results suggest that reasoning fine-tuning globally reorganizes latent dynamics, offering a new lens for mechanistic analysis and process-level control of reasoning models.

PIP-NTT: Towards a Scalable Memory-Parallelized Accelerator for Iterative NTT in PQC

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18533v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The iterative forward and inverse number theoretic transform (NTT) is a key component in lattice-based post-quantum cryptography (PQC), typically implemented using Cooley-Tukey and Gentleman-Sande butterfly units. Existing iterative NTT accelerators often rely on ping-pong memory schemes and large memory blocks tied to the cyclotomic ring, which limits overall efficiency. To overcome this, we propose a memory-parallelization strategy using four smaller n/4-sized memories for ring size n, preserving the total memory footprint of conventional designs. We also introduce a multiplication-free rescaling architecture for the inverse NTT. Building on these innovations, we perform a comprehensive hardware-based design space exploration of unified Cooley-Tukey and Gentleman-Sande butterfly units, evaluating both coarse- and fine-grained pipelining strategies. The resulting optimized butterfly unit forms the core of our proposed pipelined and memory-parallelized NTT accelerator, "PIP-NTT". It integrates two such units alongside the memory-parallelization scheme to boost computational throughput under tight area constraints. Experimental results on FPGA platforms show that PIP-NTT achieves 2.67x and 1.48x higher efficiency in average Area-Time Product compared to the most area-optimized and high-speed NTT accelerators in the literature. The design is scalable across butterfly radices and adaptable to other PQC schemes, making it a versatile solution for future cryptographic hardware

Completeness of Canonical Closure Representations Is coNP-Complete

Mikhail Babin — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18534v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A finite closure system on a finite set $U$ is a family of subsets that contains $U$ and is closed under intersections. It can be specified in two elementary ways: an implicational specification lists rules $A \to b$ and consists of all $X \subseteq U$ satisfying every rule, while an intersection specification lists subsets $M_1, \ldots, M_t$ and consists of all intersections of subfamilies of that list. We ask whether one specification of each kind defines the same family. This question has remained open in several guises for about thirty years: Khardon (1995) showed that translating between Horn formulas and their characteristic models is equivalent to deciding completeness of a proposed list of characteristic models, leaving the exact complexity open; at ISAAC 2025, enumerating irreducible closed sets from implications was still described as "widely open," even for acyclic convex geometries; closely related questions concerned pseudo-intents and the Duquenne-Guigues basis in Formal Concept Analysis, and functional dependencies and Armstrong relations in databases. We prove that the equivalence test is coNP-complete. Hardness holds for acyclic implications with premises of size at most three, even when every listed subset is correct and none can be removed without changing the closure system generated by the list; the hard part is deciding whether a required set is missing. Unless $P = NP$, the complete canonical lists cannot be generated in time polynomial in the input plus the total output size, even for acyclic convex geometries. Through standard correspondences, the theorem makes Characteristic Models Identification and FD-Relation Equivalence coNP-complete and rules out output-polynomial algorithms for Horn characteristic models, all pseudo-intents of a given formal context (equivalently, its Duquenne-Guigues basis), and premises of minimum functional-dependency covers.

MAGE: Human-Like Macro Placement via Agentic Multimodal Reasoning

Andrew B. Kahng, Sayak Kundu, Bodhisatta Pramanik — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18536v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Macro placement still requires substantial manual refinement in industrial physical design flows. We present MAGE (Macro Placement Agentic Engine), a multimodal multi-agent framework for macro placement refinement. MAGE decomposes the macro placement task into a six-phase workflow that combines structured floorplanning rules, visual checks, and iterative refinement. Expert floorplanning knowledge is encoded through natural-language directives and validation criteria, rather than learned from labeled placement data. A tournament-style refinement mode evaluates multiple candidate placements and propagates feedback from higher-quality solutions. We also introduce four metrics for quantifying human-likeness in macro placement: notch score, whitespace score, pocket score, and alignment score. These metrics capture structural properties used by expert designers but not directly measured by conventional PPA metrics. Across nine designs in NanGate45 and GlobalFoundries 12nm enablements, MAGE achieves geometric-mean improvements of 11.1%-19.3% in WNS and 70.0%-74.0% in TNS over commercial macro placers. On the three NanGate45 designs, for which human-expert and Hier-RTLMP baselines are available, MAGE improves WNS and TNS by 18.3% and 72.5% over the human expert, and by 47.0% and 80.4% over Hier-RTLMP, with comparable wirelength and power. On human-likeness metrics, MAGE improves the overall score by 6%-48% over all baselines. Additional case studies on anonymized netlists, unseen designs, dense rectilinear floorplans, and high-utilization settings show that the framework transfers to new placement settings without design-specific retraining.

CryptanalysisBench: Can LLMs do Cryptanalysis?

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18538v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cryptanalysis - the task of finding attacks against cryptographic schemes - sits at the intersection of mathematical reasoning and cybersecurity, two areas where LLMs have advanced fastest. Cryptanalysis represents both a clean testbed for frontier reasoning (as practical attacks can be automatically verified) and a domain with unusually high stakes, since the primitives under study underpin our digital security. In this paper we ask whether LLMs can do cryptanalysis, and find that the answer is increasingly yes. We introduce CryptanalysisBench, 191 tasks across six families of cryptographic primitives (block ciphers, hash functions, etc.) drawn primarily from four NIST standardization competitions. Our benchmark consists of three tiers: (i) primitives with known practical breaks; (ii) primitives with no known practical break, evaluated both at full strength and as scaled-down variants; and (iii) a challenge set of production primitives at the frontier of cryptanalysis. Five frontier models (Claude Opus 4.8, Sonnet 5, Mythos 5, GPT 5.5, and the open-weights GLM 5.2) break 65%-86% of Tier 1 schemes, 6-12 Tier-2 schemes at full strength, and 24-61 across all scaled-down variants. Beyond deriving known results, models produce novel cryptanalysis, such as a key-recovery attack that exploits a design flaw in the SpoC AEAD and an error in KINDI's published CCA-security proof, both to the best of our knowledge not previously known. We release CryptanalysisBench as a tool to help track if (or when) AI cryptanalysis becomes a serious factor and as a scaffold for stress-testing candidate schemes before deployment. The attacks that the benchmark already surfaces are an early snapshot of a fast-moving frontier that may soon match, and in places exceed, the published state of the art.

AniGS: Bridging Rendering and Diffusion Prior for 3D Scene Animation

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18539v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Novel view rendering of large and complex reconstructed scenes is becoming increasingly photorealistic. However, most reconstructions remain static and lack the ambient motion that makes environments immersive. We present AniGS, a method for scene-level animation of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) reconstructions that adds subtle, distributed dynamics, e.g., vegetation motion, while preserving rigid structures. Unlike existing 3D animation techniques which are limited to object-centric subjects or small regions, AniGS is designed for large, cluttered, navigable scenes. AniGS represents the scene with a canonical 3DGS and models motion using a time-conditioned deformation field. To animate the entire scene, we leverage a pretrained video diffusion model and introduce an iterative dataset--model update strategy that progressively expands viewpoint coverage and repeatedly updates camera-fixed training videos using a render-and-refine scheme. To prevent artifacts from unintended motion in static areas, we further introduce a composed video-to-video refinement scheme that restricts motion to desired regions. Experiments on five real-world, large-scale outdoor scenes demonstrate that AniGS produces natural ambient dynamics and high-quality novel view videos, enabling more immersive viewing experiences of reconstructed environments.

Recti-Q: Feature-Space Rectification for Out-of-Distribution-Robust Quantized Perception in Edge Robotics

Hamidreza Yaghoubi Araghi, Parastoo Pilevar, Ming C. Lin — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18540v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robotic perception pipelines increasingly rely on large vision backbones deployed on SWaP-constrained edge platforms, making post-training quantization (PTQ) attractive for real-time inference. However, while PTQ often preserves clean in-distribution accuracy, we show that it can substantially degrade reliability under deployment-relevant distribution shifts (e.g., sensor noise, severe weather, and novel operating environments), creating a Quantization-Induced Robustness Gap. Across foundational vision benchmarks (ImageNet-C and PACS), 4-bit PTQ models exhibit pronounced robustness degradation despite negligible ID accuracy loss. To address this, we propose Recti-Q, a lightweight feature-space rectification framework that freezes the quantized backbone and trains a small classifier-head LoRA adapter using only source data. Recti-Q is architecture-agnostic across CNNs and Transformers, supports efficient teacher-free training, and recovers a significant portion of the lost robustness, in some cases matching or exceeding FP32 performance. At less than 1% parameter overhead (as small as 6 KB), Recti-Q preserves over 99% of PTQ memory savings, adds negligible compute, and enables low-bandwidth Over-The-Air (OTA) resilience patching for deployed robotic fleets operating in unpredictable physical environments.

What Governs Decode Throughput in Absolute-Offset GPU LZ77? A Work-Granularity Mechanism and an Encode-Time Min-Match-Length Lever

Yakiv Shavidze — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18541v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The ACEAPEX line of work established a lossless LZ77 format whose back-references are absolute output positions, giving parallel, compressed-resident GPU decode with sub-millisecond region seek. What it did not establish is what governs the decode throughput of such a format, or how to improve it. This paper answers both. Through controlled ablations on an NVIDIA H100 we show that decode throughput is governed not by occupancy, compute, address scatter, or launch parallelism, but by work granularity: throughput is a function of the average match length, because a short match leaves most lanes of a cooperating warp idle. A synthetic copy kernel confirms a 3.5x throughput span (212 to 744 GB/s) as average match length grows from 32 to 1024 bytes. Real data sit at the low end (mean match length 6.5 on enwik9, 10.1 on FASTQ). We then show that this mechanism yields a practical, encode-side lever: raising the minimum match length by distance class (6/8/10/12 to 12/16/24/32) improves both compression ratio and decode throughput simultaneously on all eight tested datasets, with no exceptions and no change to the decode kernel. FASTQ decode rises from 142.6 to 178.6 GB/s while ratio improves 1.8%; enwik9 throughput rises 78%. This is not a trade-off: both gains follow from one cause, removing short matches whose far offsets cost more entropy than they save. All figures are bit-perfect (FNV on GPU paths, byte compare on CPU paths) and git-verifiable. Scope is explicit: figures are match-phase, device-resident; entropy and host transfer are outside the timer; seek is read/block-level, not coordinate-level; and we do not claim to exceed the hardware bandwidth ceiling.

Evaluating Power Control Strategies for UORA in IEEE 802.11be Systems with Capture Effect

Kuan-Chin Li, Ting-Wei Hung, Lain-Chyr Hwang, Pengwenlong Gu, Ray-Guang Cheng — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18543v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Uplink OFDMA-based random access (UORA) is a new channel access mechanism that supports uplink multiuser access in the new generation WiFi systems. Any associated stations (STAs) can use UORA to send their requests or data to the access point (AP) in a contention manner. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive evaluation for simulation study that investigates two power control strategies combined with capture effect in UORA and observes the fairness issue for spatial distribution of STAs. The results demonstrate that power control strategies can improve the performance of access success probability, delay, resource utilization, and power efficiency of UORA.

Physics Closure Matters for Machine Olfaction: A Maxwell--Stefan Graph Solver for Identifiable Dynamic Gas Unmixing

Yue Shi, Liangxiu Han, Xin Zhang, Tam Sobeih — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18544v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine olfaction for gas unmixing is an underconstrained inverse problem in which gas compositions must be inferred from low-dimensional, delayed, and entangled sensor responses produced by interacting chemical transport, surface adsorption, and sensor transduction. One of the key obstacles is physics closure misspecification, where a neural network is designed to fit sensor traces rather than infer a physically closed olfactory process. In this work, we formulate gas unmixing as a multi-physics-constrained inverse problem governed by Maxwell--Stefan multicomponent transport PDEs, competitive adsorption ODEs, and nonlinear sensor transduction ODEs. Directly solving such a high-dimensional coupled system is computationally expensive and often numerically unstable. To this end, we propose UnMixNet, a physics-closed graph neural solver that embeds this multi-physics forward process into end-to-end gas unmixing. UnMixNet discretizes Maxwell--Stefan cross-diffusion on spatial graphs and formulates the multicomponent flux on each edge. This design enables local, differentiable, and flux-conservative inference for multicomponent cross-diffusion. Evaluations on SmellNet show improved single-odor recognition, seen-mixture unmixing, and unseen-mixture generalization. In addition, an external validation on UCI Dynamic Gas Mixtures shows that the inferred concentration process agrees with ground truth concentration set points under dynamic transitions. Process-consistency diagnostics further show that the proposed model learns transferable dynamic physical fingerprints that better satisfies transport, conservation, adsorption, and readout closure.

Engineering Trustworthy Agentic AI for Critical Systems

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18548v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic artificial intelligence systems, capable of autonomous perception, planning, tool use, and multi-step action, are increasingly proposed for critical engineering domains where decisions carry physical, operational, or economic consequences. This survey addresses a gap in current literature by treating trustworthiness, whether agentic behavior can be verified, audited, and trusted under the constraints that engineering practice actually requires, as a first-class engineering property, rather than evaluating agentic AI by task capability alone. The study adopts a trustworthiness model organized around five cross-cutting dimensions: safety and constraint satisfaction; robustness and reliability; transparency and interpretability; accountability and auditability; and privacy and security. This is mapped onto an agentic assurance workflow spanning perception through audit. Building on this foundation, agentic systems architectures, threats, concrete trust mechanisms, and quantitative metrics are surveyed for direct application in agentic systems development and evaluation. These principles are then examined across four constraint-bound engineering domains: power systems, autonomous vehicles/robotics/UAVs, high-performance computing, and communication networks, identifying recurring design patterns, shared failure modes, and domain-specific gaps. Synthesizing across those domains, agentic AI trustworthiness is shown to be a single problem, with a path outlined toward a reusable, cross-domain assurance framework analogous to the graded certification regimes used by mature safety-critical engineering fields.

Uplink SRS-Based Real-Time Indoor Localization System over OpenAirInterface

Ping-Yu Hsieh, Chieh-Chun Chen, Navid Nikaein, Ray-Guang Cheng — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18549v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Indoor localization is one of the important services for future 5G-Advanced and 6G systems. This paper presents an uplink Sounding Reference Signal (SRS)-based real-time indoor localization system implemented over an OpenAirInterface (OAI) 5G Radio Access Network (RAN). The proposed system uses a Positioning xApp to derive Channel Frequency Response (CFR) measurements from uplink SRS measurements. The SRS measurements are obtained from the gNB through the E2 Service Model for Lower Layer Control (E2SM-LLC) over the standardized E2 interface. The xApp transforms the CFR into a 32-dimensional physics-aware feature vector and uses a Random Forest (RF) regressor to estimate the two-dimensional position of the user equipment. We implemented the Positioning xApp on an OAI-based 5G testbed in a multipath-rich indoor laboratory at EURECOM to validate the proposed system. Experimental results show that the proposed system achieves a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.12 m under random train-test evaluation. These results demonstrate the feasibility and limitations of uplink SRS-based real-time indoor localization over OAI.

Semantic Drift in Bug Resolution: How Behavioral Signals Propagate from Reports to Tests and Patches

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18550v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bug resolution is a cross-artifact process: natural-language reports must expose actionable behavioral cues that can be reproduced by tests and corrected by patches. Yet the extent to which these signals are preserved across artifacts remains largely unquantified. We introduce Desc2Fix, a framework for measuring semantic alignment between bug reports, triggering tests, and developer-written fixes. Alignment is operationalized through structured behavioral anchors (e.g., reproduction steps, API/exception cues, expected vs. actual behavior), deterministic similarity metrics (ROUGE, SBERT, CodeBERT, OpenAI embeddings), and LLM-based judgments grounded in coverage, correctness, and specificity. We analyze 2,857 report-test-patch triplets from Defects4J and SWT-Bench using GPT-4o and DeepSeek-Chat. LLMs reliably extract structured signals (up to 90% completeness) and exhibit strong cross-model consistency, yielding a stable semantic input contract for downstream reasoning. However, alignment is highly representation-sensitive: lexical similarity alone is insufficient; full diffs provide the most stable basis for judging report-patch correspondence; and structured summaries trade surface similarity for predicate-level salience. Across more than 182,000 LLM alignment ratings, both models show systematic optimism relative to humans (1-2 points on 5-point scales) and only modest rank agreement, motivating bias-aware evaluation. Our results demonstrate that behavioral alignment is measurable but not reducible to similarity, and that structured anchors combined with embedding-based proxies provide reproducible signals for ranking and filtering tests and candidate patches. By transforming alignment into a controllable engineering signal, Desc2Fix enables more reliable test generation, semantics-aware fault localization, principled patch ranking, and improved bug report authoring.

Operational Proto-Introspection in Looped Language Models: Process-Quality Taps, Executable Branching, and the Readout-Control Boundary

Jan Kirin — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18553v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Can a language model read the quality of ongoing computation, and can an external intervention turn that readout into better outcomes? We test both questions in a frozen 2.6B looped transformer, Ouro-RLTT. On GSM8K, a strict pre-answer probe excludes the answer region and gold value yet predicts eventual success: hidden states plus length and log-probability shortcuts reach AUROC 0.797, versus 0.731 for the shortcuts alone (incremental +0.066; task-clustered 95% CI [+0.021, +0.112]; 170 tasks, 680 candidates). Low-capacity taps also read role-specialized properties: task-disjoint branch survival reaches 0.9697 oracle retention, content ranking reaches 0.6310 macro top-1, and generated-branch correctness reaches AUROC 0.7755. A non-looped control replicates a candidate-quality readout, so recurrence is not required for every signal. We build branch/carry/prune machinery over Ouro's 192-slot recurrent cache, including branch-specific cache lineage and a bit-exact residual-capture splice that recomputes only the affected suffix and saves up to 88% of per-branch layer passes. No frozen intervention produces a validated capability gain. Directional steering is an established negative; a four-task matched-sampling comparison removes evidence for a frozen-fork gain but cannot estimate a general deficit; terminal selection remains unresolved and underpowered; and bounded LoRA changes surface behavior without improving net reachability. A two-null audit does not support the simplest span-misalignment explanation. We call this readable-but-not-yet-usable property operational proto-introspection. The model is not consulting our probes: we read its hidden trajectories, and our interventions fail to convert those readouts into validated capability. The pre-answer result is limited to one domain. Load-bearing values use source-item-disjoint splits and antisymmetrized evaluation where applicable.

Scalable Policy Optimization for Networked Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Continuous State-Action Spaces

Dongming Wang, Pengcheng Dai, Wenwu Yu, Wei Ren — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18554v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop the Continuous Distributed Coupled Policy Gradient (CDCPG) algorithm for cooperative reinforcement learning in networked Markov decision processes with continuous state and action spaces. Each agent maintains a local actor over a bounded graph neighborhood, and a localized least-squares temporal-difference critic evaluates a truncated action-value function through a spectral random-feature representation of the local transition kernel. The analysis makes four contributions. First, the truncated action-value function is constructed as a conditional expectation over the neighborhood, yielding a well-posed localized Bellman theory that removes the continuation-kernel mismatch of naive truncation arguments. Second, we expose a dimensional obstruction to temporal-difference stability for normalized random features and prove an unconditional excitation bound that reduces stability to a symmetric persistence-of-excitation condition, monitorable through an online matrix-concentration certificate. Third, under exponential spatial decay of agent interactions, the excitation condition, and smoothness of the objective, CDCPG drives an averaged per-agent stationarity measure to within any excess $\epsilon$ of an explicitly characterized approximation floor using $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\epsilon^{-2})$ shared-oracle samples, and the excess dependence matches the smooth nonconvex first-order rate; per-agent computation and communication are governed by the neighborhood size rather than the network size. Fourth, an adaptive-locality rule selects the radius that balances truncation and graph-decay residuals against the target accuracy. Experiments on a networked linear-quadratic benchmark corroborate the locality and feature-dimension predictions.

LM2Alloy: Investigating LLM-Generated Formal Specifications for Automated Test Derivation in Production Software

Tasmim Rashid, Muhammad Zubair Malik — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18555v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present an exploratory study on using Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate Alloy formal specifications from both requirements documentation and production source code, and to derive executable test cases from those specifications. We evaluate on two real open-source Python libraries: Flipper, a feature flag management system, and Cerberus, a data validation library. In both cases, the LLM produced workable Alloy specifications and executable tests without any manual correction. For Flipper, our pipeline uncovered a genuine bug that the existing test suite had missed: the library silently accepts duplicate flag names, directly contradicting its documented uniqueness requirement. A direct LLM baseline--generating tests from the same README but skipping the Alloy step--achieved 68% branch coverage yet failed to catch this bug across all three independent runs. This suggests that introducing a formal intermediate representation can surface constraint-level defects that coverage-oriented generation may miss. For Cerberus, the code-derived specification captured an implicit abstraction over sized types that the documentation-derived spec omitted, producing two additional tests. Across both libraries, code-based specifications showed lower variance in test generation (mean SD = 2.15) than documentation-based ones (mean SD = 5.0), though whether this generalises remains an open question. Index Terms--formal specifications, Alloy, large language models, automated testing, specification drift, software validation.

ChatMuse: Supporting In-Person Small-Group Conversation Experience with a Proactive Assistive AI Agent in Mixed Reality

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18556v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In-person small-group conversations occur across nearly every aspect of daily life and play a crucial role in social interaction. However, achieving effective in-person group conversations can be challenging and cognitively demanding. While recent Mixed Reality (MR) headsets show promise as a conversational support system by presenting relevant information through overlays, it remains unclear how such supporting information should be designed and generated for in-person group conversations. We propose ChatMuse, a novel MR-based proactive assistive system for in-person small-group conversation experience. ChatMuse analyzes verbal and non-verbal cues from all conversation participants and proactively provides real-time guidance on the user's verbal and non-verbal behaviors. The behavioral responses of the supported users are then used to improve ChatMuse's support capabilities in subsequent interactions. We conducted a within-subject study to evaluate and demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of ChatMuse in assisting users to engage in and contribute to in-person small-group conversations. Our research around ChatMuse represents a design exploration of a new interaction space that investigates the feasibility of supporting in-person small-group conversations through a proactive assistive AI agent in MR.

Robust Multi-View Classification under Noisy Supervision via Global Anchor Consensus

Yuliang Yang, Hongzhe Zhang, Huiru Wang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18561v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, multi-view learning has attracted increasing attention, as it integrates the complementary information of heterogeneous views. Most existing multi-view classification methods rely on accurate annotations to guarantee performance. However, noisy labels are ubiquitous in practice due to imperfect annotation, and the refinement signals that existing methods derive from models trained on such noisy supervision can gradually lose their reliability. To deal with this problem, we propose a novel Global Anchor-based Label Auditing method (GALA) for multi-view classification to resist the negative impact of noisy labels. Specifically, we construct a global anchor for each class in every view, which aggregates the samples of the whole class and thus offers a stable reference insensitive to individual predictions. Then, each view measures how close an instance is to the anchor of its observed label relative to the nearest competing anchor, and the per-view evaluations are fused with the classifier confidence into a cross-view audit score. Based on the audit scores, suspicious samples are assigned small weights, and an adaptive correction strategy rewrites a label only when the anchor-based candidate agrees with the classifier prediction. Finally, the corrected labels in turn refine the anchors and supervise noise-robust representation learning. Extensive experiments on six datasets demonstrate that GALA outperforms eight state-of-the-art methods, especially under high noise rates.

HALO: Interactive Co-abductive Reasoning in Scientific Hypothesis Generation

Youngseung Jeon, Kat Limqueco, JiaSyuan Chang, Xiang 'Anthony' Chen — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18564v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific discovery is essential yet inefficient, primarily because generating hypotheses within a vast search space hinders breakthroughs. While current AI systems assist in generating new hypothesis candidates, they lack interactive support for the reasoning process by which users develop these outputs into promising hypotheses, resulting in surface-level hypotheses. To address this issue, we present co-abduction, a human-AI collaborative framework for abductive reasoning in scientific hypothesis generation. To operationalize co-abduction, we build HALO, a human-AI collaborative system for molecular hypothesis generation in drug discovery, enabling improved candidate clustering, strategy identification, and multi-strategy synthesis. In expert studies involving 10 medicinal chemists, HALO significantly facilitated abductive reasoning for hypothesis generation -- efficient candidate observation, systematic strategy identification, and coherent multi-strategy composition -- and enabled participants to produce higher-quality, more diverse candidate molecules.

Integrity-Gated Eco-CACC: Epistemic Admissibility for Cooperative Driving at Signalized Intersections

Lyes Saad Saoud, Moussa Ayyash — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18565v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Eco-Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (Eco-CACC) systems rely on accurate localization, signal timing, and interaction awareness to optimize energy consumption at signalized intersections. Existing approaches typically assume that the internal world model used for optimization remains valid, making them vulnerable when sensing outages or semantic inconsistencies invalidate planning premises. This letter proposes an Integrity-Gated Eco-CACC framework that explicitly monitors the consistency between internal vehicle beliefs and external sensing. A unified integrity metric is constructed by combining positional innovation, observability loss, and semantic inconsistencies. The resulting trust score regulates control authority, enabling a transition between nominal eco-driving and a safety-dominant fallback maneuver. Unlike robust control methods that attempt to preserve performance under uncertainty, the proposed framework regulates whether energy-optimal control remains admissible. Scenario-based simulations demonstrate that the method preserves nominal efficiency when model consistency is maintained, while enabling early and conservative responses under integrity degradation.

The Story Shapes the Agent: Narrative Priors in LLM Behavior

Yixuan Wang, James Lester, Shashank Srivastava — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18566v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Persona prompting is widely used to steer LLM agent behavior, yet the narrative framing of a task can matter more than the assigned persona. We isolate this effect through structural isomorphism, constructing three text-based investigation games that share the same action space, stage progression, and resource constraints while varying only task narrative: disease investigation, IT troubleshooting, and murder mystery. Across 1,890 sessions spanning 3 models and 10 personas, we identify narrative priors: systematic action tendencies activated by a task's story framing, independent of its decision structure. Narrative priors explain 5-31x more behavioral variance than persona, are consistent across model architectures, and in two of three domains are negatively associated with task success. Persona effects that do transfer across narratives arise from behavioral anchors, persona descriptions whose language maps directly onto shared actions. Causal interventions confirm this: removing anchor words from a high-transfer persona reduces cross-narrative consistency by 95%. Our framework also generalizes to a held-out fourth narrative and yields a persona-selection method that improves cross-narrative transfer. These results suggest that LLM behavior that survives narrative changes should be grounded in concrete actions rather than abstract descriptions.

Attacking Graph Foundation Models Through Their Shared Representation

Pankaj Kumar, Subhankar Mishra — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18567v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A graph foundation model generalizes across graph domains by mapping every input into one shared representation before any task reasoning. We call this map the alignment layer, the component that separates a graph foundation model from a graph neural network, and we show it is a distinct attack surface that prior work has not studied. We attack it at inference time, with no access to training, on six public models spanning spectral tokenizers, text embedding spaces, and a discrete codebook. A directed representation-space perturbation collapses every model, but at a budget comparable to the representation norm a plain graph network also needs, with one exception: OpenGraph, whose spectral tokenizer collapses at a fifth of that budget, an alignment-specific fragility a plain network does not share and which a same-representation control traces to the tokenizer rather than the decoder. A realizable input-space attack that edits edges, features, or text removes at least half the correct predictions on three of the six models at peak. How much of this fragility an input-access attacker realizes tracks how directly the decoder reads the representation, and not the clean accuracy a task leaves; we measure this carrier gain structurally from the decoder's local Lipschitz sensitivity, and report clean-accuracy headroom as a within-model ordering heuristic that does not survive on realizable attacks.

AMICA-Python: Adaptive Mixture Independent Component Analysis with Anderson Acceleration

Scott Huberty, Christian O'Reilly — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18568v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adaptive Mixture Independent Component Analysis (AMICA) is widely used in EEG research and has long been associated with strong empirical performance for blind source separation. Despite its impact, practical use has historically depended on a single Fortran implementation, accessed via the EEGLAB toolbox for MATLAB, limiting its accessibility for analytical pipelines not designed within the MATLAB ecosystem. Here we present AMICA-Python, a Python implementation of the AMICA algorithm, with a scikit-learn-conformant API designed for integration with existing scientific Python pipelines. The implementation follows the reference algorithm closely while adopting modern software engineering practices and an interface familiar to Python users. Additionally, we introduce an optional Anderson acceleration scheme that can dramatically reduce the time to convergence for this relatively slow algorithm. To evaluate numerical agreement and practical performance, we benchmarked AMICA-Python against the reference Fortran implementation on 14 open EEG recordings. After averaging 3 runs of each implementation on all 14 recordings, AMICA-Python closely matched the reference, with a median final normalized log-likelihoods of 11.572 for both the Fortran and Python implementations, and a negligible median relative absolute difference of only $1.07\times10^{-8}$ when normalized by the absolute Fortran value. Runtime was also competitive. Relative to the reference implementation, AMICA-Python was 17.7\% faster, while the Anderson-accelerated variant was 34.1\% faster. AMICA-Python reproduces the reference implementation to high numerical precision with competitive runtime, while making AMICA available through a more accessible and extensible Python interface.

Faster Algorithms for Deciding the Unbiased Maker-Breaker Triangle Game on General Graphs

Julian Christoph Brinkmann, Anand Srivastav — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18569v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we present new polynomial-time algorithms for determining the winner of the unbiased triangle game played on the edge set of general graphs. To that end, we propose to view the game through the edge-triangle incidence graph instead of the standard hypergraph model. We identify a necessary and sufficient winning condition for Maker in terms of the edge-triangle incidence graph and show that winning strategies achieving this condition as fast as possible play monotonically in the sense that they only consider monotonically decreasing connected subgraphs of the edge-triangle incidence graph. We give three different algorithms for different classes of graphs. For general graphs $G$, the outcome of the unbiased triangle game can be decided in time $\mathcal{O}(n+m^{3.5})=\mathcal{O}(n^7)$. This significantly improves on the $\mathcal{O}(n^{16})$ algorithm implied by the work of Galliot, Gravier and Sivignon (arXiv 2022). For graphs $G$ which contain $K_4$, the complete graph on four vertices, as a subgraph and whose edge-triangle incidence graph is connected, the winner can be decided in time $\mathcal{O}(n+\min\{n^{\omega+1},m^2\})=\mathcal{O}(n^{\omega+1})$, where $\omega<2.372$ is the exponent of matrix multiplication (Alman et. al., SODA 2025). For graphs $G$ whose edge-triangle incidence graph is a cactus graph, i.e. all its cycles are edge-disjoint, the winner can be decided in time $\mathcal{O}(n+m^{1.5})=\mathcal{O}(n^3)$. Such $G$ are $K_4$-free. The algorithms for the special cases are based on novel structural characterizations of Maker's win for each graph class. We also give a linear time reduction from triangle detection to deciding the unbiased triangle game.

For What Reason? Interpreting Models' Encoding of Causation and Antithesis

Abhidip Bhattacharyya, Shira Wein — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18570v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Discourse relations provide document structure, critical to language understanding and enabling language model performance and ethicality. In this work, we investigate how instruction-tuned Transformer models (LLaMA and Mistral) encode discourse relations in English, with a particular focus on the contrasting relations of causation and antithesis. Framing the task as a next-token prediction task and applying a suite of interpretability techniques to test model internals, our findings show that certain early layers make predictive decisions at mid-sequence tokens, while some mid-level layers finalize their decisions closer to the last token. Most of the remaining layers primarily propagate earlier decisions rather than actively influencing them. Additionally, we observe that some layers exhibit a preference for one answer over alternatives, suggesting asymmetric representation of discourse-based reasoning.\footnote{Our code is available at https://github.com/abhidipbhattacharyya/causation_vs_antithesis}

When Does Machine Learning Beat Value Sorting? A Three-Dataset Diagnostic of Exposure-Weighted Shipment Prioritization

Jize Li — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18573v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Delay-risk models are usually judged by predictive accuracy. What matters in practice is narrower: with capacity to review only a few shipments, which ones should a manager check first? We evaluate whether machine learning clears a demanding no-model baseline: inspect the highest-value shipments first. Across three real supply-chain contexts: SCMS procurement, DataCo logistics, and Olist e-commerce, we use leakage-controlled rolling-origin evaluation and 1000-sample paired bootstrap confidence intervals. Ranking by predicted delay severity times known value (M1) beats severity-only ranking in all three datasets, yet it does not generally beat value sorting. At a 10% review budget, M1 minus VALUE_ONLY is -5.5 percentage points (pp) for SCMS, +10.1 pp for DataCo, and -4.9 pp for Olist. The divide is consistent with severity learnability: DataCo has R^2 = 0.27 and calibration bias of +0.01 days, whereas SCMS and Olist have R^2 of approximately -0.02 and negative calibration bias. Nested-CV cost-sensitive retraining does not deliver a stable improvement over M1. Rather than proposing a new learning algorithm, this paper presents a deployment diagnostic and evaluation protocol. Value sorting should remain a permanent benchmark, and ML should be deployed only after severity learnability and calibration have been audited and the model clears that gate under leakage-controlled rolling-origin evaluation.

Conditioned Direct Feedback Alignment via Activity and Error Geometry

Houman Safaai, Varun Reddy, Bernardo L. Sabatini — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18574v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Direct feedback alignment (DFA) trains hidden layers with fixed random projections of the output error, avoiding the transposed-weight backward pass of backpropagation (BP). We study a failure mode of DFA training that is distinct from feedback quality: the local weight update is calculated by an outer product, so anisotropy can enter through either its presynaptic-activity factor or its local-error factor. Our analyses with controlled synthetic regimes isolate the first failure mode and show an approximately 40-percentage-point activity-conditioning gain when high-variance directions contain task-irrelevant nuisance. Three clean confirmations isolate a different regime: error conditioning improves raw DFA by 1.77--7.53 percentage points, and combining independently selected activity and error factors adds 0.40--0.90 points over activity conditioning. The signs hold for tanh/one-vs-rest MNIST and preregistered Fashion-MNIST, and replicate on eight fresh seeds in a ReLU/softmax MNIST model. This factorization yields a symmetric block-local family of normalized DFA (nDFA): activity nDFA right-preconditions by an inverse activity second moment, error nDFA left-preconditions by an inverse local-error second moment, and K-nDFA applies both factors with separately tuned damping. A linearized post-alignment calculation gives an exact input-side spectral identity and a Kronecker-factor motivation for the two-sided rule, whereas norm matching rules out a scalar step-size explanation. The error factor is fragile when under-damped, BatchNorm is a strong activity-side alternative, and convnet gains remain partial. We therefore frame conditioned DFA as a factor-level study of when local outer-product rules fail, not as a general replacement for BP or a solution to all-layer convolutional credit assignment.

RECEIPT: Deterministic, Reward-Hacking-Resistant Verification for White-Box Agentic XSS Discovery

Muxi Lyu, Karen Shieh, Yiwei Hou, Hao Wang, Koushik Sen, David Wagner — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18575v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) remains one of the most prevalent and damaging classes of web vulnerabilities. LLM-based coding agents offer a promising approach to XSS discovery by combining source-code reasoning with interactive testing against a running application. However, a coding agent's claims cannot be trusted on their own. We characterize three reward-hacking behaviors in white-box agentic XSS discovery and propose three requirements that an ideal verifier should meet. We present RECEIPT, a verification framework that makes agent-reported XSS findings trustworthy by enforcing environment isolation, PoC constraints, role separation, and verdict binding. Each confirmation therefore establishes two properties: the script runs in a real browser, and the payload was planted under the attacker role and executed in the victim role's browser. This constrained replay procedure makes validation deterministic and reproducible. We evaluate RECEIPT on 95 real-world web-application targets drawn from popular open-source projects. Within a $20 per-application budget, RECEIPT found 24 previously unknown XSS vulnerabilities, 12 of which have already been acknowledged by maintainers after responsible disclosure, and recovered the labeled CVE in 36% of known-vulnerability recovery targets. Compared with the same agent using self-judgment and with black-box scanners, RECEIPT confirms more real exploits while admitting no false positives.

Text-conditioned Segmentation for Tomato Phenotyping via Procedural Synthetic Data

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18576v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-based automation is an excellent candidate for reducing manual labor in greenhouse crop production and phenotyping. However, progress is constrained by the lack of annotated training data. Recent advances in vision-based foundational models have shown promising results in zero-shot generalization to novel domains, but their performance drops in complex agricultural environments. In this work, we present a sim-to-real framework for tomato plant segmentation that combines synthetic data generation with fine-tuning of a foundation model. We model a commercial cherry tomato greenhouse and use it to generate a large-scale synthetic dataset under diverse viewpoints, lighting conditions, and plant morphology. Subsequently, we fine-tune the Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM 3) on the synthetic dataset, specializing its text-conditioned segmentation behavior for greenhouse crop organs while retaining the general visual prior that makes zero-shot transfer possible. By evaluating our framework on multiple real-world greenhouse datasets, we demonstrate that combining synthetic data with SAM 3 fine-tuning significantly improves segmentation performance and model confidence. To support community benchmarking, we publicly release the procedural model, the generated synthetic dataset, and our fine-tuned SAM 3 weights.

Attention Without Grounding: Causal Evaluation of Visual Explanations in Medical VLMs

Binesh Sadanandan, Vahid Behzadan — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18577v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Attention and saliency heatmaps are widely used to explain medical Vision-Language Model (VLM) outputs on chest X-rays, yet whether they truly highlight the image evidence driving predictions has not been causally tested. We audit faithfulness via overlap with radiologist bounding boxes on PadChest (n=637), attribution mass within radiologist masks on CheXlocalize (n=643), and 16x16 patch-occlusion maps that record which regions, when hidden, change the answer. We study three MedGemma-4B variants, cross-family probes on LLaVA-RAD and Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct, and the specialist CheXagent-2-3b, with two CXR-trained classifiers (DenseNet121, ResNet50) as positive controls. A heatmap is faithful only if the model uses the image and attention concentrates on regions whose occlusion alters the prediction. No evaluated VLM meets both criteria. MedGemma and Qwen3-VL use the image, but attention anti-correlates with patch-occlusion importance (rho < 0 with 95% bootstrap CIs below zero). LLaVA-RAD's attention correlates positively, but the model is almost text-only (99.1% text-only agreement, near-zero causal mass), so correlation ties two near-zero signals. Attention also misses annotated anatomy: overlap with true regions never beats shifted or random controls, and no method places more than 22% of its mass inside radiologist masks. The two CXR classifiers pass all metrics, indicating the failure is specific to VLM heatmaps, not the evaluation. These heatmaps are visually reassuring but not faithful; clinical explanations require controlled localization metrics and causal perturbation, not visual inspection alone.

Two-Stage Extrinsic Calibration of a Static Line-Scanning Lidar with a Rotary Platform

Vikram Shree, Hike Danakian, Long Nguyen, Rajanish Gokidi, Patrick Nercessian — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18578v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A line-scanning lidar yields range and azimuth values in a fixed plane. To perceive surrounding objects in 3D, there must be relative motion between the lidar plane and the object. Thus, using a rotating base-platform is promising for industrial applications where objects need to be scanned or inspected precisely, and is the main focus of this work. In the rotary platform setup, a 3D point cloud of an object can be constructed if the axis of rotation and the precise motion about that axis are known. However, this setup gives rise to the following problem: how can the axis of rotation of the platform be accurately identified with respect to the lidar coordinate system? It is referred to as the calibration problem in the robotics community. Any inaccuracy in this transformation directly affects the quality of the reconstructed point cloud, leading to misrepresentation of the object of interest. In this work, we explore automated approaches to statically and dynamically estimate the transformation of a rotary platform's axis of rotation with respect to a static line-scanning lidar. The proposed algorithms have been validated on real-world datasets obtained from a custom made rotary platform and an FMCW lidar, and their convergence characteristics are studied for various initial conditions.

STeP: Signal Temporal Logic for Precise Specifications for Action Generation with Vision Language Models

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18580v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown impressive generalization, but often lack interpretability and can struggle to follow precise natural language instructions that encode spatial, temporal, and logical requirements. We propose a hierarchical framework that uses Signal Temporal Logic (STL) as a shared representation connecting high-level language understanding with low-level robot execution. A high-level policy leverages a VLM to decompose language instructions into high-level subtasks, generate STL specifications for each subtask, and choose a low-level policy for executing each subtask. The STL specifications translate language-derived intent into precise constraints, and the low-level policy selection determines whether those constraints are enforced directly through STL-guided model-predictive control or monitored during execution of a learned policy for perceptually complex, or contact-rich behaviors. By integrating STL into plan validation, low-level policy, subtask monitoring, and replanning, our framework enables language-derived plans to be checked, optimized, and revised at runtime using a common formal structure. We evaluate the approach on a real-world tabletop domain, demonstrating how formal specifications can improve the precision, reliability, and interpretability of language-conditioned robot planning.

Provably Lossless Acceleration of DNN Mutation Testing via Memoization

Ali Ghanbari, Ben Greenman, Sasan Tavakkol, Shibbir Ahmed — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18582v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mutation analysis has recently reemerged in the context of deep neural networks (DNNs) as a promising, but notoriously costly, approach for assessing test dataset adequacy. Existing techniques speed up DNN mutation testing through lossy approximations that trade efficiency for mutation score accuracy. This paper introduces Mure, the first provably lossless framework for accelerating DNN mutation testing via memoization. Mure is based on the idea that DNN mutants and the original model share substantial redundant computation, so during mutation testing, it executes only the mutated suffixes of each mutant and reuses the common prefix from the original model, which is computed only once. We give a formal account of memoized mutation testing, and prove that Mure is sound, i.e., it produces results equivalent to exhaustive vanilla mutation testing, and identify basic conditions under which speed-up is guaranteed. We have implemented Mure and evaluated it on 15 DNN models of various architectures, complexities, and sizes ranging from a few thousands to millions of parameters. This provides empirical evidence that Mure reduces the computational cost of mutation testing by 44.54%, on average. We also observed that while state-of-the-art techniques tend to yield higher acceleration (up to 88.97%, on average), they come at the cost of some error in mutation score. We further analyze the effect of mutation generation selection ratio on the effectiveness of Mure and observed predictable reductions in memoization opportunities with increasing the percentage of mutated neurons. We observed that Mure offers more than 20% speed-up even when as high as 5% of the neurons are mutated.

On the Diverse Dynamical Behaviors Arising in Deep Linear Transformers

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18584v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the inference-time behavior of deep linear encoder-only transformers through the lens of interacting particle systems. In this perspective, tokens are modeled as particles that interact dynamically through successive linear self-attention layers. We show that in embedding dimension two, for any key, query, and value matrices, the dynamics can be reformulated as a generalized Kuramoto-type model with pure second-harmonic coupling. This formulation is amenable to Watanabe--Strogatz theory which reveals the dynamics are intrinsically low-dimensional regardless of the parameter matrices. For a class of token initializations associated with the Ott--Antonsen (OA) manifold, we show that the parameter matrices induce a diverse variety of long-time behaviors in linear transformers, including clustering, oscillations, and bifurcations. The oscillations and bifurcations are characterized by uncovering a hidden Hamiltonian structure in the dynamics. By establishing a structural stability result, we further show that dynamics initialized near the OA manifold exhibit the same long-time behavior as those initialized exactly on the manifold. Motivated by our theory in dimension two, we conduct numerical experiments for analogous parameter regimes in higher-dimensional transformers. Our numerical experiments suggest that the long-time behaviors characterized in our theoretical results persist in higher dimensions.

Bridging the Sim-to-Real Gap under Real-Time Constraints in Autonomous Racing

Hossein Maghsoumi, Yaser P. Fallah — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18586v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous racing exposes the sim-to-real gap under extreme operating conditions characterized by high speed, tight stability margins, and stringent real-time constraints. Although simulation is indispensable for development, controllers that perform well in simulation often degrade abruptly on physical platforms due to interacting effects of dynamics mismatch, estimation delay, and execution-layer latency. This paper frames sim-to-real transfer in autonomous racing as a full-stack, real-time systems problem. We introduce a structured three-layer perspective (Physical/Cyber/Execution) to analyze how mismatches propagate and amplify through closed-loop feedback. We present diagnostic metrics beyond nominal lap time, including performance flip, stability-oriented measures, sensitivity to delay and noise, and latency distribution characterization. Mitigation strategies are synthesized from a deployment-oriented viewpoint, emphasizing execution-aware and delay-aware design. Finally, we outline benchmarking guidelines that enable reproducible and fair sim-to-real evaluation under compute and timing constraints. The resulting framework clarifies cross-layer failure mechanisms and provides practical design principles for deployable autonomous racing systems operating near dynamic limits.

Planning as Emergent Behavior in Reinforcement Learning with Relational Hidden States

Armin Sommer — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18589v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning is conventionally divided into model-based and model-free methods. In this taxonomy, model-based methods perform lookahead planning over a learned world model, whereas model-free methods learn a reactive state-action mapping. Recent work, however, has shown that planning can emerge from model-free reinforcement learning alone. The conditions under which this behavior emerges from a pure reward-maximization objective have so far remained unclear. In this paper, we present evidence that, in the observed cases, the hidden-state structure of the neural architecture is the deciding factor. We find that a network of relational hidden states, each anchored to an environment state and exchanging messages along learned relations, acquires a planning mechanism. These hidden states recover the environment's transition structure in their learned relations, and improve the policy at decision time by planning over the learned graph. In a matched control agent that must additionally discover which cells represent which states, no such binding arises, and no planning follows from it. We argue that this explains the observed phenomenon of emergent planning in model-free reinforcement learning and raises the question of how common such emergent planning might be more generally. Finally, we hypothesize that the discovered mechanism could describe how planning emerges from pure reward maximization in the human brain through a neural architectural prior.

A Self-Evolving Default Action for Cooperative Tasks with Continuous Action Space

Shuangyao Huang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18597v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Counterfactual credit assignment has proven effective in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) for discrete action spaces, yet its extension to continuous-action cooperative tasks remains challenging. Existing methods that approximate the counterfactual baseline via Monte Carlo sampling often introduce bias into policy gradients and fail to guarantee convergence to local optima, as the sampled actions may not have been sufficiently trained. To address these limitations, we propose SAFE, a novel MARL framework that employs a counterfactual baseline conditioned on a self-evolving default action sampled from each agent's experience buffer. This design naturally extends to continuous action spaces without relying on additional simulations, reward models, or environment-specific prior knowledge. The baseline accurately quantifies each agent's contribution, and introduces no bias into the deterministic policy gradient, ensuring convergence to local optima. Extensive experiments on cooperative vehicular tasks demonstrate that SAFE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models.

Designing for What Cannot Be Seen: Supporting Embodied String Learning for Musicians with Blindness and Low-Vision

Shi Shi, Lingyun Chen, Zitao Zhang, Amanda R. Draper, Eli Blevis — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18598v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bowed string instruments demand fine-grained bodily coordination that is typically taught through visual demonstration, creating persistent barriers for musicians with blindness and low-vision (BLV). To understand these challenges and explore new design opportunities, we conducted a design study with four advanced string musicians with BLV and three of their instructors. Our team, spanning violin performance and music education, disability studies in music, HCI design, and engineering employed a qualitative, multi-method approach including practice video analysis, lesson observation, expert interviews. Our analysis identifies recurring difficulties in right-hand bow control, left-hand coordination, score access, and memory-intensive practice. Building on these findings, we conducted an exploratory design ideation phase informed by empirical findings and feedback from one musician with BLV. We developed speculative design directions that could potentially address identified breakdowns, while acknowledging that these concepts require further evaluation with instructors and in deployed contexts.

Topology-Aware Tokenization for Generative Recommendation

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18600v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative recommendation reformulates sequential recommendation as an autoregressive generation task, yet a critical issue in this paradigm remains overlooked: topology distortion in item tokenization. In particular, we observe that the intrinsic adjacency relationships of items in the pretrained semantic embedding space are significantly disrupted after quantization. This topology distortion misleads the model's perception of item similarity, ultimately bottlenecking the accuracy of generative recommendations. To address this issue, we propose Topology-Aware Tokenization (TopoTok), an item tokenization framework that preserves item relational structure throughout the quantization hierarchy. Different from the prior monolithic supervision in tokenization, TopoTok introduces a multi-level distillation scheme to progressively recover the topology from coarse to fine granularity: 1) Inter-Group Distillation to capture global cluster-wise relations; 2) Intra-Group Distillation to refine local structures within semantic clusters; and 3) Inter-Item Distillation to enforce fine-grained alignment at the individual item level. Extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that TopoTok effectively alleviates topology distortion and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art tokenizers, achieving significant performance gains of up to 9.42% in Recall@5.

BRIDGE: Bottleneck-Aware Regulator-Set Inference and Diagnosis for Cooperative Gene Regulatory Recovery

Maryam Rahimimovassagh, Clayton Thomas Barham, Ivan Garibay, Niloofar Yousefi — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18602v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cooperative gene regulation often depends on groups of regulators acting jointly, but most gene regulatory network (GRN) inference methods output pairwise regulator-target rankings. We introduce Bottleneck-Aware Regulator-Set Inference and Diagnosis (BRIDGE), a framework for complete regulator-set recovery, and Targeted Recovery Attribution for Cooperative Evaluation (TRACE), a diagnostic suite that attributes failures to retrieval, set-level scoring, decoding, and evaluation bottlenecks. TRACE includes a leak-free mechanism-mismatch cooperativity stress test in which cooperative targets are generated by random nonlinear mechanisms rather than product interactions. This design avoids feature-mechanism circularity: Residual higher-order set scoring (Residual HOS2) operates on raw expression vectors without handcrafted product-correlation features. Across 30 matched seed-cooperativity settings, Residual HOS2 improves Jaccard similarity from 0.382 to 0.460, recall from 0.522 to 0.597, and exact recovery from 0.053 to 0.113 over a decomposable pairwise set scorer (PairS2), although exact recovery remains low. On SERGIO DS3, oracle retrieval and TRACE show that candidate coverage is necessary but insufficient because set-level misranking remains the dominant source of exact-recovery failure. PairS2 proposal followed by Residual HOS2 reranking reduces HOS2-scored candidate sets by 94-97% while largely preserving exact-recovery behavior. These results distinguish edge ranking, candidate retrieval, set-level scoring, and exact cooperative regulator-set recovery as separate objectives.

AutoIndex: Learning Representation Programs for Retrieval

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18603v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present AutoIndex, a framework for learning representation programs: executable transformations that map raw documents into the representations exposed to a retrieval system. Rather than tuning retrievers, rerankers, or a small set of preprocessing hyperparameters, AutoIndex searches over programs that slice, enrich, normalize, reweight, or reorganize documents before indexing. At each iteration, AutoIndex performs validation-guided program search, in which agents diagnose failures of the current program and synthesize candidate updates, retaining only updates that improve retrieval quality under the resulting index. We evaluate AutoIndex on CRUMB, a benchmark of heterogeneous retrieval tasks, with BM25 held fixed across all experiments. The learned programs improve recall over a static full-document BM25 baseline on all 8 tasks, with average gains of +8.4% in Recall@100 and +8.3% in nDCG@10, and largest gains of +30.5% in Recall@100 and +43.6% in nDCG@10. These results suggest that document representation should not be treated as a fixed preprocessing choice made before retrieval begins, but as an explicit optimization target. Code to reproduce our results is available at https://github.com/auto-index/autoindex.

Intelligent Multi-UAV Navigation in ITNTNs: A Hierarchical LLM Approach

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18604v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The deployment of high-speed Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in 3D aerial highways necessitates robust coordination of physical flight kinematics and multi-tier network handovers. While Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) offers rapid tactical control, it lacks the zero-shot strategic reasoning required to quickly adapt to dynamic Integrated Terrestrial and Non-Terrestrial Networks (ITNTNs). Conversely, Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at semantic reasoning but suffer from high inference latency, rendering them unsuitable for real-time aerodynamic control. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel Hierarchical LLM-driven control framework. A massive cloud-based LLM deployed on a High-Altitude Platform Station (HAPS) manages slow-timescale global load balancing, while lightweight edge-LLMs on individual UAVs translate local observations into tactical sub-goals. These sub-goals guide a fast-timescale physical DRL controller to execute collision-free, handover-aware trajectories. Simulation results demonstrate that our agentic architecture significantly reduces collision rates and improves aggregate system throughput compared to existing baselines.

Understanding ADHD Productivity in Construction Work: Toward AI-enabled VR Interventions

Zinat Ara, Behzad Esmaeili, Lap-Fai Yu, Sungsoo Ray Hong — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18605v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is identified as the most prevalent neurodivergent condition in the construction industry. While the construction industry may broaden employment opportunities, little is known about how ADHD traits shape workers' performance, sustained attention, and situational awareness in dynamic job-site environments. This work presents an exploratory interview study aimed at understanding how ADHD traits influence construction-specific productivity and how future interventions can reduce challenges while amplifying strengths. We conducted semi-structured interviews with construction workers with ADHD, safety managers, and ADHD researchers to capture their perspectives on attentional demands, task coordination, and workplace adaptation. As part of these discussions, participants also reflected on the potential of combining artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) to support future ADHD workers. Our analysis identifies two overarching themes: (1) workplace challenges, capturing difficulties that arise from both the nature of construction work and the specific needs of ADHD workers, and (2) productivity support strategies, describing effective methods to sustain focus and task engagement. Further, we derive design requirements for AI and VR-enabled interventions that provide adaptive attentional scaffolding, mediated social presence, and motivational support. We conclude by discussing how these insights can inform the future development of ADHD productivity enhancement support.

On the Limits of Sampling-Based Reachability: Geometry, Dynamics, and Sample Complexity

Jixian Liu, Ihab Tabbara, Hussein Sibai, Enrique Mallada — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18606v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reachability analysis is central to safety-critical control, robotics, and neural network verification, but classical computational methods, such as Hamilton--Jacobi reachability and set propagation, scale poorly with state dimension. Sampling-based methods have emerged as a promising alternative, often providing finite-sample guarantees that bound the probability-mass left uncovered. However, an explicit account of how the geometry of the initial set, the dynamics, and the sampling law affect the accuracy of the estimator is not fully available in the literature. We study this by casting sampling-based reachable-set recovery as geometric support estimation over a family of problems specified by an initial set, its dynamics, and a sampling law. First, we identify two regularity properties, positive reach of the initial set's complement and Lipschitz continuity of the dynamics, that together make recovery well-posed: a probability-mass coverage guarantee can be upgraded to accuracy $r$ in Hausdorff distance. Second, we bound the resulting sample complexity: recovery is achievable with $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}\big((e^{3LT}/r)^n\big)$ samples, exponential in both the state dimension and the time horizon. Third, we show that neither can be removed: an minimax lower bound of $\Omega\big((e^{LT}/r)^n\big)$ holds for every estimator, so the exponential dependence on dimension and the degradation over the horizon are both intrinsic, not artifacts of a particular method. Experiments on nonlinear systems confirm that adversarial sampling improves constants but not the scaling.

Mitigating Matthew Effect: Multi-Hypergraph Boosted Multi-Interest Self-Supervised Learning for Conversational Recommendation

Yongsen Zheng, Ruilin Xu, Guohua Wang, Liang Lin, Kwok-Yan Lam — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18609v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Matthew effect is a big challenge in Recommender Systems (RSs), where popular items tend to receive increasing attention, while less popular ones are often overlooked, perpetuating existing disparities. Although many existing methods attempt to mitigate Matthew effect in the static or quasi-static recommendation scenarios, such issue will be more pronounced as users engage with the system over time. To this end, we propose a novel framework, Multi-Hypergraph Boosted Multi-Interest Self-Supervised Learning for Conversational Recommendation (HiCore), aiming to address Matthew effect in the Conversational Recommender System (CRS) involving the dynamic user-system feedback loop. It devotes to learn multi-level user interests by building a set of hypergraphs (i.e., item-, entity-, word-oriented multiple-channel hypergraphs) to alleviate the Matthew effec. Extensive experiments on four CRS-based datasets showcase that HiCore attains a new state-of-the-art performance, underscoring its superiority in mitigating the Matthew effect effectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/zysensmile/HiCore.

Task-Oriented Wave Processing with Stacked Intelligent Metasurfaces: Framework, Fusion, and Challenges

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18612v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The deep integration of diverse services in sixth-generation (6G) networks poses significant challenges to conventional task-agnostic channels, often resulting in performance conflicts. To resolve these bottlenecks, this article introduces a physical-layer computing paradigm enabled by stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIMs), transforming the wireless environment from a passive medium into a programmable signal processor. Specifically, we establish a unified framework to map high-level service requirements directly to wave-domain synthesis. We then investigate the fusion of diverse services, demonstrating how the deep computational architecture of SIMs resolves resource conflicts in integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) and integrated communication and computation (ICC) scenarios. Furthermore, we critically analyze fundamental challenges, including diffractive channel modeling and inverse task-to-phase mapping, while validating through numerical results that this approach elevates the system from simple coexistence to true service symbiosis. Finally, we discuss key research directions to pave the way for service-native 6G architectures.

End-to-End Markov State Sequence Learning for Auditory Attention Decoding

Yushan Yashengjiang, Jie Zhang, Miao Sun, Huadong Liang, Xin Li, Zhen-hua Ling — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18614v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Auditory attention decoding (AAD) identifies the speaker a listener attends to from neural responses like electroencephalography (EEG), making it a key algorithm in neuro-steered hearing aids. However, most neural AAD models are trained as independent short-window classifiers, despite auditory attention being a temporally persistent cognitive state and short-window EEG--audio evidence often being noisy and ambiguous. We propose an end-to-end Markov AAD framework based on conditional random field (CRF) that trains window-level neural emissions under a two-state attention prior. The framework treats the logits of any AAD backbone as Markov emissions, learns the transition rate from a standard HMM initialization, and jointly optimizes cross-entropy and CRF objectives, allowing temporal continuity to guide representation learning rather than merely smoothing predictions after training. We also introduce ESCNet, an EEG--speech correlation backbone that preserves time-aligned features and converts the difference between two mean Pearson correlations into state logits. We evaluate the framework with four emission backbones spanning correlation-based, convolutional, recurrent, and attention-based designs. On the dynamic AVGC dataset, CRF training generally outperforms post-hoc HMM smoothing; with ESCNet, it achieves $86.5\%$ causal and $92.4\%$ non-causal accuracy using $1$s windows. On the static KUL and USTC datasets, it improves causal decoding over fixed-rate post-hoc HMM baselines by $5.6\%$ and $2.0\%$, respectively, showing the superiority of learning AAD as attention state sequence over isolated-window classification.

Stochastic Meta-Unlearning: Bridging Language Backbone and Multimodal Unlearning

Zijie Liu, Jinhao Duan, Gaowen Liu, Sijia Liu, Tianlong Chen — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18615v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine unlearning for vision-language models (VLMs) remains underexplored. Unlike language models, VLMs combine a language backbone with visual components, which makes unlearning more complex. There is a surprising phenomenon when moving from single-modality unlearning to VLM unlearning: a target forgotten by the standalone language backbone can still be recovered when image information is given to the full VLM. This shows that text-only feedback is not enough for reliable VLM unlearning. Motivated by this observation, we propose Stochastic Meta-Unlearning (SMU), a bilevel framework that uses VLM-level feedback to learn an unlearning-ready initialization. In the inner loop, SMU applies a few unlearning steps to the language backbone using text data. In the outer loop, SMU recomposes the updated backbone with the frozen VLM and evaluates forgetting and utility at the VLM level. This design makes the unlearning update aware of the final multimodal behavior, while still keeping the update local to the language backbone. Experiments on two VLMs, two multimodal meme datasets, and three baselines show that SMU achieves the best overall forget-retain trade-off. Compared with the strongest baseline for each metric, SMU reduces average Forget accuracy by 10.52 points and improves average Retain and Test accuracy by 20.10 and 17.01 points, respectively. More importantly, SMU also transfers to new forgetting targets and to different meta-test unlearning methods. These results suggest that VLM-level feedback can make language-backbone unlearning more reliable and more transferable for VLMs.

LatentMT: Machine Translation with Latent Reasoning

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18618v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent-reasoning looped language models (LoopLMs) offer a different scaling path for machine translation (MT): instead of increasing parameter count or emitting explicit chain-of-thought tokens, they spend additional recurrent computation inside hidden states. We introduce LatentMT, the first systematic study of latent-reasoning LoopLMs for machine translation. LatentMT adapts a small 2.6B-parameter backbone model with lightweight training. Across 32 translation directions spanning high-, mid-, and low-resource languages, LatentMT achieves performance comparable to models three to five times larger. It is competitive in a high-resource language and achieves state-of-the-art performance on both mid-resource and low-resource languages. Studying the behavior of scaling the number of recurrent reasoning steps, we find that recurrent computation consistently improves translation quality in early steps, then saturates quickly afterwards. Our mechanistic analysis shows that hidden-representation differences shrink along the recurrent reasoning-step axis, supporting the observed saturation in performance. Finally, our efficiency analysis shows that LatentMT requires lower training and inference compute than much larger non-latent-reasoning models with similar performance, making latent recurrent computation a promising path toward compact, efficient, and strong machine translation.

CPInj: Uncovering Prompt Injection Risks in Textual Collaborative Prompt Optimization

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18622v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Textual Collaborative Prompt Optimization (TCPO) extends Textgrad (Yuksekgonul et al., 2025) to a decentralized setting by allowing multiple clients to jointly improve prompts for large language models (LLMs) while keeping their data locally. Its reliance on free-form textual updating and aggregation introduces a new and largely unexplored attack surface, i.e., malicious instructions can be injected into local prompts and propagated through server-side prompt aggregation. Unlike conventional prompt injection attacks, attacking TCPO targets the collaborative optimization loop in TCPO. This setting is more challenging because malicious instructions must survive aggregation, persist through subsequent benign prompt optimization, and evade server-side defenses. To expose this risk, we propose CPInj, a collaborative prompt injection attack that contaminates the aggregated global prompt with malicious instructions, degrades downstream task performance, resists purification by prompt optimization on benign clients, and evades advanced detection-based defenses on the server. We find that current defense methods are ineffective against CPInj. To mitigate this attack, we further propose a defense-oriented aggregation method, i.e., APAgg, which purifies malicious instructions and partially recovers TCPO utility. We conduct extensive experiments across three LLM families and five reasoning tasks in math, logic, and medicine. The results demonstrate that our proposed attack reveals a critical vulnerability in TCPO. Although we take a first step toward mitigation, the attack remains highly effective and far from fully resolved, calling for more robust defense for TCPO.

Norm or Direction? Decoding Vision Mambas for High-Resolution Vision

Jin Yu, Juyoun Park — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18625v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision Mamba models replace quadratic self-attention with linear complexity selective state space models (SSMs), emerging as efficient visual backbones. However, MambaOut demonstrates that a Gated CNN block can match or exceed VMamba on image classification, questioning the necessity of SSMs for vision. This raises a fundamental question: do VMamba and MambaOut encode visual information differently at the representation level? To investigate, we apply cross model centered kernel alignment (CKA) analysis and find that VMamba's final stage blocks form representations distinctly different from both MambaOut and its own preceding blocks. We therefore focus on the final block features, decomposing each spatial token into magnitude and direction. MambaOut concentrates class-discriminative information in high-norm foreground tokens that align with Grad-CAM attribution. VMamba, by contrast, produces high-norm tokens predominantly in background regions, misaligned with Grad-CAM, yet preserves discriminative signals primarily in token directions. These observations reveal that the two models rely on different encoding strategies. We connect this difference to high-resolution classification and semantic segmentation. VMamba distributes logit support broadly across object regions, whereas MambaOut relies on sparse dominant tokens, a strategy that becomes less stable as token counts grow. Under full fine-tuning for segmentation, VMamba consistently outperforms MambaOut. These results suggest that VMamba's advantage in dense prediction stems not merely from the SSM mechanism or sequence length, but from how semantic evidence is organized across token magnitude, direction. Ultimately, we conclude that token magnitude and directional structure serve as critical axes for improving visual backbones, particularly under dense supervision.

PLAID-PRF: Pseudo-Relevance Feedback with Centroid-like Tokens in PLAID

Xiao Wang, Sean MacAvaney, Craig Macdonald — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18626v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-vector dense retrieval models, such as ColBERT, achieve strong retrieval effectiveness by modelling fine-grained token-level interactions between queries and documents. Methods such as PLAID use centroid-based quantisation of each token's vector to reduce the index size and speed up retrieval while maintaining strong effectiveness. In this work, we introduce PLAID-PRF, a method that performs Pseudo-Relevance Feedback (PRF) over PLAID to reformulate ColBERT's query vectors based on the top-retrieved results. In contrast with prior methods that perform PRF on multi-vector retrieval models, PLAID-PRF keeps computational costs low by leveraging the internal PLAID centroid vectors, treating them similarly to tokens in traditional PRF methods. The method selects a small and diverse set of high-utility expansion vectors and appends them to the original query, rerunning PLAID to refine both candidate generation and final scoring. Extensive experiments on the standard in-domain MSMARCO and four out-of-domain BEIR benchmarks show that PLAID-PRF consistently improves retrieval effectiveness over various baselines. In particular, PLAID-PRF improves over PLAID by up to 4.3% nDCG@10 and 7.3% MRR@10, while introducing substantially less computation overhead than prior PRF methods. The results demonstrate that our proposed centroid-aware PRF method offers an effective and lightweight mechanism to improve the quality of top-ranked retrieved results. Overall, this work enables effective and efficient feedback-aware late-interaction retrieval without expensive query-time document-token clustering.

BlurDriving: Investigating How Personalized Blur Techniques Impact Drivers' Performance in Virtual Reality

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18628v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Distracted driving remains a major safety concern, motivating approaches that aim to reduce visual overload before attention breaks down. However, visual overload varies across individuals, making it difficult to determine appropriate interventions for each driver. We investigate whether controllable visual blur can simplify the driving scene and mitigate distraction. To address this challenge, we propose BlurDriving, a target-selective, distance-aware blur system in a Virtual Reality (VR) urban driving simulator, and employ a Human-in-the-Loop Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization (HITL-MOBO) framework to personalize blur configurations. Across two VR user studies, we evaluated driving under normal conditions in Study 1 and under cognitively demanding conditions in Study 2. We found that personalization revealed strong individual differences in blur preference but did not lead to significant improvements in objective driving performance compared to a no-blur baseline. Qualitative feedback revealed polarized responses: some drivers reported improved focus, while others experienced uncertainty, fatigue, or discomfort. These findings suggest that visual blur is not universally effective. Instead, its benefits depend on individual perceptual strategies and tolerance for visual uncertainty. This work highlights the limits of personalized visual simplification in safety-critical driving and informs adaptive in-vehicle interface design.

CS-ETS: Chaos-Inspired Samba-Based EMG-To-Speech Synthesis with Nonlinear Chaotic Losses

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18629v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a chaos-inspired new architecture for EMG-to-Speech (ETS) synthesis called CS-ETS, which combines a Samba-based encoder with two novel chaos-inspired loss functions -- Lyapunov Exponent Regularization (LER) and Multi-Scale Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (MSDFA). LER is designed based on Lyapunov exponents to capture nonlinear fluctuations and sensitivity to initial conditions. MSDFA exploits detrended fluctuation analysis to quantify fractal-like, long-range temporal chaotic correlation. CS-ETS surpasses prior work with a 40.79\% lower parameter count (32M vs 54.1M) and introduces a new Post-Vocoder Alignment approach that improves LSD by 2.1x, STOI by 4.7x, and SI-SDR by 1.25x. CS-ETS reduces computation by 13.33\% while maintaining improved performance. To the best of our knowledge, for the first time, we show how ETS can be supervised by the subtle non-linear chaotic physics with Samba attention to achieve a significantly smaller model with superior performance.

Seeing Before Generating: Object Perception Enhances Single-View 3D Reconstruction

Y Huynh, Duc Thanh Nguyen, Mohamed Abdelrazek — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18630v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The relationship between object perception and reconstruction is well established in human vision, yet remains underexplored in computer vision. In this paper, we demonstrate that learnt object perception can significantly enhance 3D reconstruction. Focusing on the challenging task of single-view 3D object reconstruction, we propose a method that leverages perceptual signals extracted from pretrained perception models capturing semantic and geometric information to drive the reconstruction of an object from its single image. Our approach is model-agnostic and can be integrated into various reconstruction methods in a plug-and-play manner. Experiments with two state-of-the-art single-view 3D reconstruction pipelines in a benchmark dataset show consistent and substantial improvements achieved by our method, validating the effectiveness of incorporating perception into generation. We provide in-depth analysis of various aspects of our method and its application. Our project page is at https://ynhuhuynh.github.io/perception-3d/.

Searching for Plans You Can Actually Build: A Realizability-Aware Full-Space Optimizer for MoE Training and Serving

Quan Yuan, Jie Zhao — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18631v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) systems split a program's plan space in two: the space a cost model can rank, and the smaller space a real toolchain can actually build. Automatic optimizers rank the first and silently assume the two coincide -- so they can return a plan that is optimal on paper and impossible to emit. We present moefs, a realizability-aware full-space optimizer for MoE training and serving that makes deployment realizability a first-class search constraint. moefs closes a three-tier search over parallelism, schedule, and kernels; it emits both a Megatron training stack and an SGLang serving stack from a single plan; and it prices, rather than forbids, the realization overheads it measures. We evaluate across two hardware generations. On 2x RTX4090, the searched training plan edges the strongest hand-tuned baseline by +0.9% (and clears the 0.98x acceptance bar by +2.9%); on 8x H800, the searched serving plan matches the hand-tuned configuration at a 1.0304 throughput ratio. We hold failures to the same standard: on 8x H800 training, the searched plan is a computable, honest FAIL at 0.9338 of the best hand-tuned throughput, losing on a single schedule flag. All predictions are pre-registered in a frozen, artifact-hashed adjudication file before the H800 runs, and every outcome is reported as-is.

Graph Neural Network-based Algorithm Selection for the Traveling Salesman Problem: A Systematic Study of Cost and Rank Losses under Distinct Budget Regimes

Zhaoxuan Li, Jiale Yang, Yifei Lu, Mustafa Misir — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18632v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automated Algorithm Selection (AS) aims to improve problem-solving performance by selecting, for each problem instance, the most suitable algorithm from a predefined portfolio. This is particularly relevant to the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP), where solver performance is strongly instance-dependent. We introduce GNNAS-TSP, a Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based AS framework that learns TSP instance representations directly from raw graph data, avoiding manual feature engineering. GNNAS-TSP formulates AS as a joint cost-prediction and ranking task. We evaluate cost-based (mean squared error (MSE), mean absolute error (MAE), and Huber), rank-based (RankNet, ListNet, and LambdaRank), and hybrid learning objectives for a portfolio comprising Chained Lin-Kernighan, Edge Assembly Crossover, Lin-Kernighan-Helsgaun, Multiagent Optimization System, and Concorde. Experiments use fixed computational budgets of 10 and 60 seconds. On the held-out test set, the selected configurations improve on the Single Best Solver (SBS) in normalized solution cost at both budgets. For the 10s budget, AS achieves substantial and statistically significant cost improvement over SBS. Overall, the results suggest that GNNAS-TSP is a useful meta-solving strategy when exploitable variation exists across solver performance.

Hospitals/Residents with Inseparable Couples: Finding a Coalition-Stable Assignment Is NP-Hard

Zeyuan Hu, C. Gregory Plaxton — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18634v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent work on course allocation, Rodr\'{i}guez and Manlove consider the complexity of finding a stable assignment under four notions of stability, including two coalitional notions. In one case, which they call pair-size stability, they show that a stable assignment always exists and they provide a polynomial-time algorithm to find one. In a second case, called pair stability, they observe that an earlier NP-hardness result of McDermid and Manlove holds for a special case of course allocation called Hospitals/Residents with Sizes ($\mbox{HRS}$). In a third case, called first-coalition stability, they use a reduction from $\mbox{HRS}$ to show it is NP-hard to find a stable assignment. They leave open the complexity of finding a stable assignment under so-called coalition stability. Building on ideas from McDermid and Manlove, we resolve the open problem of Rodr\'{i}guez and Manlove by showing that it is NP-hard to find a coalition-stable assignment for $\mbox{HRS}$. Indeed, our proof shows that the problem remains NP-hard when the hospital capacities and resident sizes are at most two. Accordingly, our NP-hardness result applies to the special case of $\mbox{HRS}$ known as Hospitals/Residents with Inseparable Couples ($\mbox{HRIC}$). Finally, we introduce a novel and natural notion of coalitional stability for both $\mbox{HRS}$ and course allocation, and we show that our NP-hardness result extends to this notion, which we call unitwise-coalition stability.

End-to-end Conditional Diffusion for Realistic and Controllable Visual Traffic Scenario Generation

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18637v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generating closed-loop traffic scenarios that are both realistic and controllable is crucial for evaluating autonomous driving systems, especially under rare safety-critical interactions. Existing learning-based methods often struggle to balance controllability and realism, offering either limited fine-grained control over traffic behavior or controllable scenarios at the expense of behavioral plausibility. This paper presents E2E-CDiff, an end-to-end conditional diffusion framework for controllable and realistic scenario generation. Conditioned on front-view visual observations, E2E-CDiff jointly denoises future motion states and executable low-level controls for route-interacting background vehicles. This unified state-action generation mitigates the planning-control mismatch in conventional two-stage trajectory-then-controller pipelines. Differentiable guidance further regulates speed, enforces drivable-area compliance, and supports collision-avoidance or collision-seeking behaviors, enabling both naturalistic and safety-critical scenario generation. Experiments on Bench2Drive show that E2E-CDiff achieves a favorable controllability-realism trade-off compared with representative reinforcement- and imitation-learning baselines, while its collision-guided variant induces challenging interactions across multiple autonomous driving systems. E2E-CDiff also performs competitively as a learning-based ego planner, demonstrating the generality of end-to-end state-action diffusion.

Deep Learning Estimation of Sex, Age, Height, and Weight from CT-derived Digitally Reconstructed Radiographs

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18638v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Purpose: To develop and validate a deep learning ensemble for estimating adult sex, age, height, and weight from coronal digitally reconstructed radiographs (DRRs) generated from diagnostic CT. Materials and Methods: This retrospective study included 128,621 CT examinations from 80,004 adults at nine institutions in Japan. Three multitask models-ConvNeXt-Base, ViT-Base/16, and MaxViT-Base-were fine-tuned using coronal DRRs and combined by weighted averaging. Data were split by institution into training (114,147 examinations; seven institutions), tuning (4,305; one institution), and test (10,169; one institution) sets; generalizability was assessed on two non-Japanese datasets. Accuracy and mean absolute error (MAE) were used to evaluate sex classification and age, height, and weight regression, respectively. Body surface area (BSA)-corrected heart and liver volume trends were compared using true versus estimated height and weight. Results: In the test set (median age, 69.9 years; 4,899 of 10,169 [48.2%] male), overall sex-classification accuracy was 0.997 (95% CI, 0.996-0.998), and MAEs were 3.57 years (3.51-3.63), 2.59 cm (2.54-2.64), and 3.40 kg (3.34-3.47) for age, height, and weight, respectively. In examinations covering the chest through pelvis, accuracy was 1.000, and MAEs were 3.15 years, 2.28 cm, and 3.18 kg, respectively. BSA calculated from estimated values reproduced age-related heart and liver volume trends obtained using true values. On non-Japanese datasets, height error increased but was reduced by continued fine-tuning. Conclusion: The ensemble estimated adult sex, age, height, and weight from CT-derived DRRs, with generally lower errors in examinations with broader anatomical coverage.

Mark, Don't Erase: Token Inoculation for Dual-Use Knowledge in LLMs

Seunghyun Lee, Dongyoon Han, Sangdoo Yun — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18639v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety interventions on dual-use knowledge typically choose between destroying hazardous content (e.g., unlearning, filtering) and suppressing it at the output layer (e.g., refusal training); both pay a tax in adjacent-domain competence or over-refusal. We argue that the right operation is conditioning, not reduction: we show that hazardous knowledge can be retained in the model and behaviorally gated by a privileged control token. Our method, Token Inoculation, introduces a binding-and-branching approach. First, during continued pre-training, we mark hazardous content by inserting a special token alongside dual-use documents, so the model binds the marker to the underlying semantics of the hazardous domain. Second, during supervised fine-tuning, we teach the model to answer hazardous queries correctly when the special token is present and to refuse them when it is absent, thereby enabling selective refusal without removing dual-use knowledge. On hazardous domain (e.g., WMDP-Bio), Token Inoculation reduces accuracy from 79% to 18% while retaining 93% of the base-model's benign-domain performance (e.g., MMLU), achieving the best safety-utility trade-off against unlearning and refusal-tuning baselines across 1B-14B model scales. We further show that refusal selectivity is controllable through the quality of the conditioning signal and that domain-specific semantic binding during pre-training is critical for the conditional behavior to generalize beyond memorized triggers. Our results suggest that safety alignment is better cast as a conditioning problem than a forgetting one: behavioral control is more precise when sensitive knowledge is retained under controlled access than when it is destroyed.

Fabric Pneumatic Artificial Muscles Based on the Drawstring Principle

Chendong Liu, Dapeng Yang, Yiming Dai, Li Jiang, Hong Liu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18641v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pneumatic artificial muscles have wide applications in robotics and industrial fields. Conventional pneumatic artificial muscles generate extra radial deformation during axial contraction, which severely wastes available working space. Inspired by the widely adopted drawstring principle in textile products, this paper proposes a novel drawstring fabric pneumatic artificial muscle (DPAM). Unlike traditional counterparts, the proposed DPAM produces no extra radial deformation during contraction, greatly improving structural compactness. The DPAM exhibits outstanding mechanical performance: a load capacity over 800 times its self-weight, a maximum contraction ratio of 44%, and a power density up to 4.98 kW/kg, alongside excellent scalability. Two representative application scenarios, bionic robots and industrial production lines, are demonstrated to validate its practicability. The DPAM can be easily expanded within a two-dimensional plane, as verified by the fabricated DPAM matrix. This work not only presents a high-performance novel pneumatic artificial muscle but also inspires researchers to draw design inspiration from conventional textile structures to address existing challenges in soft robotics.

Spaghetti Architect: A Contamination-Resistant, By-Construction-Labelled, Multi-Language Code Dataset Generator

Yuxiang Ji — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18642v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mined code corpora are abundant but uncontrolled: a snippet's semantics, surface "messiness," and difficulty are whatever the wild contained; there is no known-optimal reference to grade against; and any public sample may already sit in a model's training set. We present Spaghetti Architect, a tool that mints code datasets with the control such corpora lack. An anti-optimization transpiler maps a clean, language-agnostic JSON intermediate representation to deliberately redundant, fully-flattened programs in five languages (Python, JavaScript, Go, Java, C++); every program is compiled, run, and checked against a reference oracle, so each instance is correct by construction. The clean IR is a known-optimal reference, messiness is dialed by strictly-nested anti-pattern profiles, each instance is labelled along two orthogonal difficulty axes, intrinsic (problem size) and incidental (presentation at fixed semantics), and contamination is resisted by minting fresh variants from a private held-out seed. We give construct-validity evidence that the quality order moves established complexity and readability metrics, and report baselines on a four-model open ladder: exact match rises with scale, and the intrinsic knob collapses arithmetic-aggregation accuracy of even the strongest model to zero. Further, development-set scores equal freshly re-minted held-out counterparts within $|\Delta|\le 0.012$ (comprehension) and $\le 0.011$ (refactoring); on identical programs, refactoring equivalence ($0.73 \rightarrow 0.99$) is scale-invariant while output prediction collapses; and ablating the generator's self-annotations shows they inflate the weakest model an order of magnitude more than the strongest ($-0.173$ vs $-0.017$): the annotated ladder resolves one of three adjacent pairs where the unannotated resolves all three. Open source (MIT), dependency-free, archived under a persistent DOI.

Fluid-SDF: Ultra-Lightweight and Editable Implicit Shape Representation via Differentiable Primitives

Pradyumna Sripada, Chinmay Nadgir, Ksheer Agrawal, Krishna Kanth Kodanganti — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18646v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have become the standard for continuous 2D shape modeling, but they suffer from black-box uneditability, vulnerability to noise, and high parameter counts that severely hinder deployment on edge devices. We introduce Fluid-SDF, a highly compressed, differentiable Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG) framework that models shapes using explicit geometric primitives blended via a smooth minimum function. By replacing traditional multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) with a parameterized primitive engine, Fluid-SDF reconstructs complex, non-convex topologies using strictly under 100 parameters, achieving comparable or superior intersection-over-union (mIoU) to standard neural baselines. Furthermore, we demonstrate that Fluid-SDF acts as a powerful geometric prior, inherently resisting high-frequency dataset noise where capacity-matched neural networks catastrophically overfit. Finally, unlike standard INRs, Fluid-SDF's explicit parameter space allows for direct, zero-shot user editing of local and global shape features without retraining. By bypassing expensive on-device gradient updates entirely, Fluid-SDF is uniquely suited for mobile AI, augmented reality, and resource-constrained embedded environments

Distributed Edge Learning under Imperfect Data Sensing

Mehdi Karbalayghareh, David J. Love, Christopher G. Brinton — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18649v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Distributed learning systems typically assume that local data is already available at clients with fixed quality, while in practice, data is sensed through imperfect physical processes whose quality depends on modality, resolution, sensing power, and sample size. We model sensing noise as a structured, modality-dependent covariance and derive a non-convex learning convergence bound whose irreducible sensing floor is governed by the alignment between the modality noise covariance and the loss-sensitivity geometry. Thus, the optimal modality minimizes this noise-gradient alignment rather than total noise power alone. The analysis further yields a sensor-hardware achievability bound for epsilon-stationarity and a hardware-saturation threshold on the accumulated dataset size. We jointly optimize modality, resolution, power, and sample count and demonstrate the performance gain through simulations.

Unstructured Hydrodynamics on Spatial Dataflow Architectures: A Joint Code and Data Decomposition Approach

Piotr Luczynski, Tal Ben-Nun, Leighton Wilson, Brian Van Essen — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18650v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spatial Dataflow Architectures are an emerging hardware pattern in high-performance computing, whose mesh-connected fixed-memory processing elements are tailored for structured grid kernels with two-dimensional neighborhoods. However, practical multiphysics codes are often computed on unstructured grids, which induce indirect memory accesses and high-dimensional communication patterns, making them infeasible to directly map onto said architectures. This work takes a principled, model-centric approach to partitioning unstructured problems onto spatial dataflow architectures. Through communication and memory modeling, we propose a joint decomposition that considers both the size of the application's fields and its subroutines. In particular, we automate the analysis process of the original code, define a high-dimensional decomposition that minimizes communication via space-filling curves, and apply memory optimization techniques, crucial in this memory-limited environment. We demonstrate mapping the Livermore Unstructured Lagrangian Explicit Shock Hydrodynamics (LULESH) application to the Cerebras Wafer-Scale Engine, showing that larger, unstructured grid codes can still outperform GPUs.

Stochastic Capacity Accreditation: Incentivizing Resource Adequacy under Weather Uncertainty

Hangrui Liu, Shen Wang, Audun Botterud, Miguel F. Anjos — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18653v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High penetrations of variable renewable energy introduce significant resource adequacy challenges, particularly when weather-driven uncertainty affects renewable availability, electricity demand, and the effective capacity of thermal generators. Existing capacity credit accreditation methods often neglect these correlated weather effects, which may overstate firm capacity, distort long-term investment decisions, and weaken reliability outcomes in electricity market with price caps. This paper proposes a two-stage stochastic optimization framework for capacity accreditation that explicitly captures uncertainty in wind, solar, and temperature-dependent thermal derating. Using five years of ERCOT demand and renewable availability data, we compare the proposed stochastic capacity credit method with deterministic and average accreditation approaches, and quantify the impact of alternative accreditation methods on reliability, investment incentives, and the value of weather information. The results show that incorporating weather uncertainty yields more informative capacity credits and more reliable investment signals. In contrast, deterministic and averaged approaches can distort resource expansion decisions and produce materially worse reliability outcomes. These findings demonstrate the importance of explicitly accounting for weather uncertainty in capacity accreditation and long-term resource adequacy planning.

Broken Gates: Re-evaluating Web Bot Defenses in the Age of LLM Agents

Behzad Ousat, Nikita Turkmen, Lalchandra Rampersaud, Dillan Bailey, Amin Kharraz — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18659v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based browser agents are rapidly changing the threat landscape for web security. Unlike traditional automation frameworks that execute predefined scripts, these agents can autonomously navigate websites, reason about page content, and interact with web interfaces using natural-language instructions. This evolution raises fundamental questions about the effectiveness of bot management systems, widely deployed to defend against automated web abuse. In this paper, we present a systematic measurement study evaluating the resilience of both interactive challenge-based defenses and non-interactive trust-based defenses against two attacker classes: commercial Captcha-solving services and LLM-based browser agents. Our evaluation spans seven solver services and six agents, including cloud-hosted, self-hosted, AI-assisted, and browser-extension configurations, tested against hCaptcha, reCaptcha v2, reCaptcha v3, and Cloudflare Turnstile. Our results show that challenge-based defenses are broadly ineffective against commercial solvers, which achieve near-perfect bypass at negligible cost. The challenges can similarly be defeated by LLM-based agents when a dedicated solver module is available. Non-interactive defenses such as reCaptcha v3 exhibit stronger resistance, but our analysis reveals that this resilience does not reflect a fundamental security property. Through fine-grained interaction trace analysis, we find that two agents with nearly indistinguishable behavioral footprints yield divergent outcomes, one bypassing the defense and one failing, isolating execution-environment authenticity, rather than agent behavior, as the determining factor. These findings suggest that the security boundary of non-interactive defenses lies at the environment layer, with significant implications for how bot management systems are designed and evaluated.

MVP-Tac: A Miniaturized Dual-Modal Vision and Photoelastic Tactile Sensor for Robot-Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18660v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robot-assisted minimally invasive surgery (RMIS) offers major benefits over open and conventional laparoscopic procedures, yet it still lacks tactile feedback for palpation while operating under strict requirements to preserve reliable vision for navigation and safety. In practice, visual feedback is indispensable, and tactile solutions that cannot coexist with vision are difficult to translate into RMIS tools. To address both needs, we introduce MVP-Tac, a compact, vision-based tactile sensor that provides co-located vision and tactile sensing. MVP-Tac uses reflective photoelastic imaging: a thin photoelastic elastomer produces stress-dependent interferograms under contact that are captured by an embedded camera through a miniaturized reflective polariscope. A semi-transparent membrane and controllable illumination enable switching between visual mode and tactile mode, enabling tactile perception without sacrificing vision. We validate MVP-Tac through force calibration in the 0 to 2 N range and demonstrate its potential for tumor palpation via video-based hardness classification on tissue phantoms, achieving 97% accuracy for exposed-tumor classification and 92% accuracy for subdermal-tumor classification. Finally, we conduct a simulated colonoscopy to validate both visual and tactile modalities in a constrained lumen, including vision-guided 3D photomapping of the luminal wall and in situ hardness classification of localized nodules. Overall, MVP-Tac provides a practical path toward restoring clinically useful palpation in RMIS while maintaining essential visual feedback. The design, fabrication, and firmware of MVP-Tac are open-sourced at https://mvp-tac.github.io/

Staged Depth-Pruning Distillation of a Flow-Matching Text-to-Speech Teacher: A Compact Hindi Speech Synthesizer

Sivateja Trikutam — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18662v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a practical recipe for building a compact Hindi text-to-speech (TTS) model by distilling a large flow-matching teacher (IndicF5, 337M-parameter DiT) under a severe data budget (~17.6 hours). Training a small model from scratch on this much data fails outright. Instead we warm-start the student from the teacher by pruning depth only: keeping the teacher's width, text dimension, attention heads, and mel/text I/O fixed so all non-block tensors copy one-to-one, and retaining an evenly-spaced subset of transformer blocks. We first measure how much depth the teacher tolerates (it remains near-functional at -27% blocks but collapses past -50%), then descend gradually (22 -> 16 -> 12 -> 8 -> 6 blocks), re-fine-tuning after each prune, with each step gated by an objective ASR word-error-rate (WER) check. The resulting students reach WER 0.00 on unseen sentences at 249M and 190M parameters, and remain robust down to 131M; at 102M we observe a clear capacity cliff that we attribute to the data budget rather than the recipe. We also document two train/inference feature- and library-parity failures (mel filterbank and rotary-embedding library versions) that silently degrade audio, and a version-independent fix. The method yields a high-quality Hindi voice that runs in real time on a 6 GB laptop GPU. An independent 50-sentence FLEURS benchmark compares the released 190M student against its teacher and MMS-TTS-hin.

How defensive driving enhances driving safety: A driving simulator study on drivers' defensive driving behaviors

Xinzheng Wu, Junyi Chen, Shaolingfeng Ye, Yong Shen — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18663v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Defensive driving is widely recognized as an advanced driving skill. However, whether and how defensive driving affects driving safety remains insufficiently investigated. This study examines the behavioral characteristics of defensive driving, its impact on driving safety, and the underlying mechanisms. First, defensive driving is defined regarding operational timing and application scenario. Then, 82 participants are recruited for driving simulator experiments, with their behavioral and eye movement data being collected. Following the experiments, participants are categorized into groups based on the frequency of defensive driving behaviors exhibited. Finally, both inter-group and inter trial comparisons are performed on the experimental data. Experimental results demonstrate that in the inter-group comparison, the high defensive driving capability group exhibits higher acceleration and deceleration magnitudes, lower average speeds, and larger average absolute yaw angles compared to the low capability group, alongside shorter fixation durations and reduced fixation frequencies. Moreover, we observe that these participants tend to initiate defensive or evasive actions earlier, resulting in lower scenario risk. Regarding the inter-trial comparison, we observe similar trends exclusively in the low capability group, whereas most metrics show no significant differences between Trial 1 and Trial 2 in the high capability group. These results reveal that drivers possessing defensive driving capabilities tend to execute more intense driving maneuvers and identify risks and take action earlier, thereby enhancing driving safety. Findings support the promotion of defensive driving and provide a basis for relevant training programs. Meanwhile, they offer insights for the training of autonomous driving algorithms with defensive driving capabilities.

DeforM: Reasoning-Guided Physics-Aware Video Generation via Spatial-Temporal Masking

Yunyi Li, Yu Qiao, Yaohui Wang, Xinyuan Chen — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18664v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Video generation models achieve high visual quality but often struggle to generate physics-aware videos. Unlike rigid-body motion, which can be described by explicit trajectories or formulas, complex deformation dynamics remain challenging to synthesize. We observe that a lack of physical reasoning for localizing dynamic areas allows irrelevant regions to dilute the model's attention, leading to generation failure. In this paper, we propose DeforM, a reasoning-guided image-to-video generation framework that directs the model's focus toward physics-critical regions. To reason about and localize these critical regions, we introduce a VLM-guided physical reasoning module, DeforM-Reason, to identify target objects and generate spatial-temporal masks. For physical guidance, we develop two alternative strategies: DeforM-Free for training-free mechanism analysis and DeforM-Injection as a powerful training-based generator. Experimental results demonstrate that DeforM improves the realism of generated deformation scenarios, outperforming baseline models in both visual quality and physical consistency.

SciHazard: A Benchmark for Measuring Scientific Safety Risks with Decomposed Harm Scoring

Chunxiao Li, Yuan Xiong, Lijun Li, Tianyi Du, Wenlong Zhang, Lei Bai, Jing Shao — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18665v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly support science, but they can also convert hazardous scientific knowledge into actionable misuse guidance. Existing benchmarks often rely on templated queries disconnected from real-world hazards, and employ LLM-as-a-Judge paradigms without domain grounding. To address this, we introduce SciHazard, a real-world-grounded benchmark for scientific risks and a dataset agnostic evaluation framework for measuring harmfulness. SciHazard contains 2400 hazardous questions and 600 oversafety questions across 12 disciplines, with both queries grounded in regulated entities and documented failure scenarios. To compute \textsc{DeHarm-Score} , we develop a decomposed evaluating procedure that combines query hazard severity, refusal behavior, and response-level risk. For non-refused responses, it further decomposes response-level harm into \textsc{Executability}, quantified via dynamic checklists with importance weighting, and \textsc{Net-new risk}, assessed through retrieval-augmented claim extraction and synthesis-barrier verification. An expert-validation study shows that \textsc{DeHarm-Score} improves agreement with expert annotations by 90.17\% over the strongest baseline. We benchmark 31 frontier LLMs and deep research agents in an extensive scientific safety evaluation. Notably, deep research agents yield 32.3\% higher mean \textsc{DeHarm-Score} than standard LLMs, exposing autonomous agents as a critical blind spot in current safety defenses. Code and dataset are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DeharmScore-7B55.

Fusion Embedding: A Unified Embedding Space for Text, Image, Video, and Audio

Abdul Basit Tonmoy, Kazi Fardinul Hoque, Md. Shahrier Islam Arham, Arman Luthra — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18666v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A single embedding space that covers text, images, video, and audio lets one index serve every query a user can pose. Embedding models built on vision-language backbones now lead text/image/video retrieval benchmarks but lack audio entirely, while audio-text retrieval is led by specialist systems that serve no other modality. We present the Fusion Embedding family, which adds audio to a frozen vision-language embedding base whose parameters are never updated: generation 1 (fusion-embedding-1) trains only a 16.4M-parameter connector between a frozen audio tower and the frozen base, and generation 2 (fusion-embedding-2) adds modality-gated deep adapters (44.2M parameters) whose branch never executes on text, image, or video inputs: their outputs are bit-for-bit those of the released base, verified after every training run. Because the base already binds text, images, and video, aligning audio to text alone makes audio-image retrieval emerge, with zero paired audio-visual training data. Alongside the recipe we map its design space with controlled negative results (rewriting training captions with an LLM, substituting a leaderboard-stronger audio tower, and widening the connector each reduce retrieval) and with training-protocol findings that we expect to transfer to any frozen decoder-LM embedding backbone. Both generations train in hours on a single GPU. Weights, code, and the evaluation harness are openly released.

Rethinking Joint UAV Placement and Beamforming: A Correlation-Aware Geometric Approach

Chaeyeon Kim, Kisong Lee — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18668v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In multiuser unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted downlink communications, UAV placement and transmit beamforming are inherently coupled through the propagation geometry. However, fully joint design based on instantaneous channel state information (CSI) is impractical, because the small-scale fading depends on the UAV location to be optimized and thus is unavailable a priori. Moreover, existing joint placement and beamforming methods do not explicitly optimize the UAV position with respect to the geometry-dependent multiuser interference induced by inter-user steering correlation. To address this issue, we propose a correlation-aware geometric framework for joint UAV placement and beamforming. Specifically, the UAV position is first optimized based on long-term channel statistics, where the steering-vector correlation is incorporated into the placement design through a conservative Gaussian surrogate that avoids interference underestimation. The resulting nonconvex positioning problem is then handled using successive convex approximation, auxiliary-variable decoupling, and quadratic transform techniques. For the obtained UAV location, the transmit beamformer is then optimized using instantaneous CSI. Simulation results show that the proposed framework significantly improves the minimum user spectral efficiency by enhancing angular separability among users and reducing inter-user interference. These results demonstrate that UAV placement should be designed not only for desired-link enhancement but also for interference mitigation through geometry-aware user separation.

PeakFlow: Peak-Guided Coarse-to-Refined Modeling for EEG-Based Dynamic Affective Trajectory Prediction

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18671v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most existing EEG-based emotion recognition studies formulate affective decoding as static category prediction, although emotions elicited by continuous stimulation evolve over time, accumulate, reach peak intensity, and then recover. This motivates EEG-based dynamic affective trajectory prediction, which estimates continuous affective intensity curves from sequential EEG observations. Existing temporal regression models can capture coarse intensity trends but often fail to preserve peak-centered structure, leading to inaccurate peak timing and terminal-peak bias, where the predicted maximum is shifted toward the end of a trial. To address this issue, we propose PeakFlow, a peak-guided coarse-to-refined framework for EEG-based dynamic affective trajectory prediction. PeakFlow first learns a coarse affective flow through EEG temporal tokenization and masked temporal modeling, then applies a lightweight residual refiner for peak-guided bounded calibration. The refiner uses trajectory-aware cues and a peak-centered objective combining global trajectory consistency, peak-zone emphasis, peak-probability localization, terminal suppression, and residual regularization. This design preserves the global affective trend while correcting peak misalignment, peak-value deviation, and false-terminal predictions. Leave-one-subject-out experiments on SEED-VII show that PeakFlow improves both global trajectory fitting and peak-centered temporal reliability over strong dynamic modeling baselines. Auxiliary evaluation on FIRMED further suggests its potential for sparse peak-centered ordinal intensity analysis. These results highlight the importance of peak-aware modeling for temporally faithful EEG-based dynamic emotion prediction. Code is available at https://github.com/jukebox333/PeakFlow.

MissingBench-Verified: Probing Vision-Language Models' Inability to Detect Missing Object Parts

Wenqi Marshall Guo, Qingyun Qian, Shiyu Zhou, Guoping Luo, Shan Du — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18673v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision Language Models (VLMs) are well known for hallucinating non-existent objects in images. Objects with missing parts present a unique challenge for VLMs, stemming from both real-world knowledge bias and the scarcity of such images in training data. We present MissingBench-Verified, a benchmark designed to evaluate a specific and practically relevant scenario: when vision-language models fail to recognize that an essential component of an object has been removed. Across ten leading models, we observe consistent and significant failure rates that persist even when external tool evidence explicitly contradicts the model's visual perception. We further ask whether granting models access to image processing tools (e.g., cropping, contrast adjustment) enables autonomous inspection to resolve these failures. We find that existing mitigation strategies, including tool-assisted verification, autonomous visual reasoning, longer reasoning durations, and fine-tuning on an easier dataset, provide negligible improvement, indicating that this failure mode cannot be addressed through current prompting or post-hoc correction techniques. Our findings highlight a fundamental limitation of current VLM for inspection and monitoring tasks and underscore the need for architectural or training-level interventions that enable models to override internal expectations when confronted with contradictory evidence.

Cross-Dataset Generalization in Breast MRI Tumor Classification via Class-Wise Dataset Mixing

Mohammad Ali Dadrast, Hamid Usefi — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18678v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Breast MRI is highly sensitive for detecting breast tumors, but exams contain many slices and require substantial reading time. Deep learning models often perform well on internal splits but can fail across institutions because of domain shift and dataset-origin bias. We study this failure mode for binary breast MRI tumor classification. EfficientNet-B3 and WaveViT-Small are trained using Duke Breast Cancer MRI and fastMRI, and evaluated only on the independent multi-center MAMA-MIA cohort. In a deliberately confounded setup, where label is perfectly correlated with dataset origin, external accuracy is near chance (0.5048--0.5265), despite very high recall. We then construct a mixed training set in which each class contains samples from both Duke and fastMRI, while preserving patient-level splitting, augmentation, and leakage controls. On MAMA-MIA, dataset mixing improves accuracy/F1 to 0.8463/0.8625 for WaveViT-Small and 0.8884/0.8994 for EfficientNet-B3. These results show that controlling dataset-origin bias is important for reliable breast MRI classification.

When to Trust the Map: Confidence-Aware LLM Routing for Automotive CVE-to-ATM Mapping

Heeyun Heo, Sangmin Park, Huy Kang Kim, Sanghoon Jeon — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18684v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Public CVE descriptions report the technical conditions and impact of vulnerabilities, whereas the Auto-ISAC Automotive Threat Matrix (ATM) expresses an adversary's tactics and techniques. Because the two representations are not directly aligned, incorrect automated mappings in safety-critical environments may distort threat interpretation and mitigation prioritization, motivating a confidence-aware approach that distinguishes auto-confirmable mappings from uncertain cases. This paper reformulates automotive CVE-to-ATM mapping as a selective automation problem. The proposed framework generates candidate mappings via hierarchical in-context learning, then fuses self-consistency and LLM-based evidence verification signals into a calibrated meta-model. The resulting calibrated confidence score routes each candidate into AUTO, REVIEW, or HOLD. On the evaluation set, the proposed system substantially improved candidate-set precision at matched recall over a Flat zero-shot GPT-5.2 baseline. In the High-Confidence operating mode, the AUTO tier achieved a precision of 0.878, more than double the candidate-set base rate, and the calibrated confidence score achieved an AUROC of 0.868 in distinguishing correct from incorrect candidates. These results show that the framework can support selective automation by isolating auto-confirmable mappings from those requiring analyst review.

Dual-Edged Homogeneous-Modality Similarity: Towards Visible-Infrared Modality-Incomplete Person Re-Identification with Modality Adaptive Matching

Xin Xu, Shuhao Zhan, Wei Liu, Zheng Wang, Kui Jiang, Chia-Wen Lin — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18688v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visible-Infrared Person Re-Identification (VI-ReID) operates under a closed-world assumption, where queries and galleries are from heterogeneous modalities. However, in open-world scenarios, both sets are likely to contain homogeneous and heterogeneous modality images. A query may consist of visible-only, infrared-only, or mixed-modality images, while galleries present multi-modal images over long-term collection. Under these conditions, VI-ReID methods, built on a heterogeneous-modality retrieval paradigm, suffer from three trustworthiness challenges: matching conflicts due to high homogeneous-modality similarity, interference from modality uncertainty, and robustness degradation induced by unknown modality combinations. They fail to meet the requirements of trustworthy visual recognition in reliability, consistency, and dynamic adaptability. To address these challenges, we formalize the Visible-Infrared Modality-Incomplete Re-Identification (VIMI-ReID) task. We reorganize existing datasets to construct the SYSU-VIMI and RegDB-VIMI benchmarks. The unpredictable modality combinations and inherent similarity of homogeneous-modality samples in VIMI-ReID cause a significant performance drop in existing VI-ReID methods. We propose the Modality Adaptive Matching Transformer (MAMT). It employs a Divergence Transformer Module (DTM) and a Shared Transformer Module (STM) to extract modality-specific and modality-shared features, respectively. Guided by a divergence loss, the DTM enriches modality-specific features with modality-style information to enhance discriminability within the same modality. A Modality Adaptive Matching Module (MAM) dynamically fuses features according to the query-gallery modality relationship, enabling stable matching under arbitrary and uncertain modality conditions. Extensive experiments on the VIMI benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and adaptability of MAMT.

Exposure-Based Reinforcement Learning to Rank

Harrie Oosterhuis, Rolf Jagerman, Zhen Qin, Xuanhui Wang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18689v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) methods for learning-to-rank (LTR) can optimize (almost) any ranking goal, e.g., from precision or discounted cumulative gain to fairness-of-exposure or ranking distillation. However, standard RL is ineffective and computationally costly due to the enormous action space in LTR settings. Existing methods reach computational efficiency through custom gradient computation algorithms, but they are very complex to implement and often clash with auto-differentiation. Consequently, existing RL for LTR is not attractive to many practitioners. We reconsider RL for LTR while actively avoiding reliance on custom gradients. Contrary to the existing approaches, we focus on variance reduction and GPU computation. In doing so, we discover that high sample-efficiency can be reached through baseline corrections and partial marginalization. Furthermore, we propose an abstraction that places gradient estimation behind a document-exposure distribution, this enables seamless plug-and-play integration with auto-differentiation. Thereby, one only has to implement a loss as a differentiable function of exposure and RL for LTR can optimize it using auto-differentiation. Our experimental results reveal that our new exposure-based RL for LTR approach converges considerably faster and at significantly higher ranking performance than existing custom gradients, with no additional costs in computation time when using GPUs. In contrast, existing custom gradients result in severe stability issues when converging over many epochs, which never occur for our methods. Thus, we considerably improve RL for LTR methodology by increasing its effectiveness, efficiency, and ease of application.

Semantic Primes as Explanans for Emotion in Large Language Models

Frank Xing — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18691v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Progresses have been made on understanding emotion mechanisms of large language models (LLMs). However, how to explain emotion in LLMs, or even what constitutes good explanations, are less clear. Emotion representations, components, circuits are widely recoverable, but as explanations of a model's own computation they are circular; the emotion space dimensions tend to be arbitrary and non-terminating. A pressing question to ask is whether a more primitive set of internal variables does the work: the semantic primes of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). Across four instruction-tuned LLMs (Llama-1B, Gemma-2B, Gemma-9B, OLMo-7B), experiments show that the NSM primes are (1) recoverable internal elements; and (2) on the reference model, intervening with a prime based direction controls emotion about three times as strongly, and twice as selectively, as the best appraisal based direction; and (3) the model treats a prime based explication as interchangeable with the corresponding emotion. These evidences suggest that NSM primes seem to be better explanans for emotion in LLMs than many alternative options according to scientific explanations criteria.

Rationale-Guided Knowledge Distillation for Cross-Lingual Stance Detection

Qiuli Zhou, Jingyuan Yao, Shengeng Tang, Hongzhi Chen, Jun Tang, Richang Hong — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18693v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Stance detection aims to identify whether a text expresses a favorable or opposing attitude toward a given target, and serves as an important task for various downstream applications. Although existing studies have achieved strong performance in monolingual settings, especially in English, many low-resource languages such as Catalan still lack sufficient annotated data for training effective models. Cross-lingual stance detection alleviates this problem by transferring stance knowledge from resource-rich languages to low-resource languages. However, most existing methods mainly rely on semantic alignment between texts and targets, while ignoring the reasoning process required for reliable stance inference. Although Large Language Models provide strong reasoning ability, their high computational cost and inference latency limit practical deployment. To address these limitations, we propose a rationale-guided knowledge distillation framework for cross-lingual stance detection. Specifically, we use Chain-of-Thought prompting to guide Large Language Models in generating informative rationales, and distill the resulting reasoning knowledge into a compact student model. We further design a dual-path distillation mechanism to align rationale-enhanced and rationale-free representations, together with their prediction distributions. In addition, two contrastive learning strategies are introduced to improve stance discrimination. Experiments on multilingual benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms competitive baselines.

Attributes Should Come from Images, Not Class Names: Distribution-Conditioned Attribute Selection for Vision-Language Models

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18695v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A popular route to interpretable zero-shot classification asks a large language model (LLM) to describe each class name and prompts CLIP with the resulting descriptors. We show that these descriptors carry little visual evidence of their own: removing the class name from the prompt collapses ImageNet accuracy from 59.5% to 15.5%. The diagnosis is that the descriptors are conditioned on the label rather than on the images, so they describe the concept in general and mislead exactly when the data shifts; an LLM insists that strawberries are red, but every strawberry in ImageNet-Sketch is a colorless line drawing. We therefore select attributes from the target image collection instead: we score a large attribute pool against the images in CLIP's joint embedding space and keep the top-scoring attributes per class. Selected this way, class-name-free attribute prompts reach 23.8% on ImageNet (against 15.5% for LLM descriptors), the gain holds on four shifted ImageNet variants, and reselecting from the LLM's own pool isolates the selection mechanism as the cause. With one image per class, the selected attributes outperform the prompt-tuning method CoOp by 3 points while fitting in under a minute instead of 14 hours, with no learned soft prompt to obscure the decision. Because the attribute set is chosen by the data, it doubles as a readable summary of a dataset, which we use to describe distribution shift in words.

Do AI-Native Biotechs Need Departments? Benchmarking Company World Models for AI-Driven Drug Development

Yinan Wang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18696v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI-native biotechnology companies are often designed by copying human biotech org charts into agent roles. We argue for a different abstraction: a Company World Model, defined as a persistent asset-to-value state representation with transition models, explicit value functions, planning, and updating across scientific, regulatory, BD, commercial, financial, and execution constraints. We introduce a dry-lab benchmark for testing whether AI-agent organizations should mimic departments or operate around such a world model. The benchmark contains 45 retrospective public-information decision cases with strict time cutoffs, hidden outcomes, common schemas, automatic scoring, and blinded pairwise judging. We compare human-org-mimic, stronger human-org-mimic-plus, AI-native asset-centric, and AI-native value-conversion architectures. The value-conversion architecture is a prompt-level approximation of a Company World Model: a Live Asset Value Record updated by Deal, Approval, Revenue, and Investment Arbiter loops. Under a success function defined by external BD, regulatory approval and launch, and revenue discipline, it achieved the highest automatic value-conversion score and was strongly preferred over the original baselines by value-specific blinded judges. Stress tests narrowed the claim: a stronger human baseline remained competitive, and a neutral judge did not show robust value-conversion dominance. Codex-only mechanistic ablations suggest that Revenue Room, Deal Room, and Approval Room carry useful work under the target objective. The central finding is objective-sensitive: departments may remain useful governance views, but the core AI-native operating primitive should be a shared, predictive asset-to-value state rather than a static human org chart. The study is dry-lab only and does not establish real-world drug success, clinical benefit, or revenue prediction accuracy.

Decoupled Pipeline with Proposal Reranking and Score Fusion for Positive-Unlabeled Marine Species Detection

Robert James Brock, Sebastian Maximilian Krupa, Jason Kahei Tam — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18700v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The FathomNetCLEF 2026 competition combines underwater object detection and fine-grained marine species classification under a positive-unlabeled evaluation setting. The provided training labels are sparse, while the hidden test set is out-of-distribution relative to the training imagery, creating both annotation incompleteness and source-shift challenges. We describe DS@GT ARC's multi-stage system developed for this setting while keeping model training restricted to the data provided by the competition. The final private-leaderboard model uses a frozen Megalodon YOLOv8x detector as a class-agnostic proposal generator, combines global and tiled inference with tile-edge filtering, classifies expanded proposal crops with a LoRA-finetuned DINOv3 ViT-H classifier, and ranks predictions using weighted geometric fusion of detector and classifier confidence. This system placed 12th out of 102 teams. A closely related variant added a locally trained TTN-inspired validity head as a light reranking signal, improving public-leaderboard and proxy-evaluation performance but slightly reducing private-leaderboard performance. Across experiments, the strongest lesson was that train-derived validation and detector-only metrics were not reliable enough for model selection. Instead, we used proxy datasets only for validation and comparison, and combined those signals with leaderboard feedback and targeted ablations. These experiments showed that reserving proposal recall, avoiding over-aggressive filtering, and improving downstream ranking were more effective than fine-tuning the detector or directly training on noisy pseudo-labels. Code: https://github.com/dsgt-arc/fathomnetclef-2026.

Generative World Renderer at the Speed of Play

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18703v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative world renderer AlayaRenderer receives structured world states exported from physics engines and synthesizes RGB frames. Unlike models that generate frames from text/control-hints prompts, AlayaRenderer preserves scene structure without altering the underlying world dynamics. This demonstrates an alternative path toward interactive world modeling and user-controllable play. However, the original AlayaRenderer is too computationally expensive for real-time deployment. This technical report introduces AlayaRenderer-Flash, a real-time-oriented generative forward world renderer that pushes AlayaRenderer from 0.56 FPS to 31.54 FPS, reaching the speed of play. AlayaRenderer-Flash reformulates the original renderer as a few-step autoregressive streaming model and introduces lightweight distilled codecs for efficient latent encoding and frame reconstruction. It retains the teacher model's G-buffer and text-prompt interfaces while enabling continuous rendering over input streams of unbounded length. We evaluate AlayaRenderer-Flash on G-buffer streams across content preservation, temporal consistency, cross-window stability, prompt controllability, and runtime efficiency. Our results show that AlayaRenderer-Flash substantially reduces inference cost while preserving the core rendering capabilities of the teacher model. By integrating AlayaRenderer-Flash with a physics engine, we build a fully playable generative world running at 30 FPS.

What the Waveform Knows: Transparent-first Speech and Audio Intelligence with Caption Studio

Cheng Siong Chin, Jianhua Zhang, Mohan Venkateshkumar — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18704v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Caption Studio is a transparency-first speech and audio intelligence platform that transforms spoken audio and video into structured, searchable content through automated transcription, speaker diarization, speech analytics, signal-level audio analysis, and subtitle generation. The system is built on a FastAPI backend with a real-time dashboard and adopts a three-layer architecture comprising (i) a transcription and diarization core based on Whisper-class automatic speech recognition and pyannote speaker diarization, (ii) an audio intelligence layer that extracts acoustic and linguistic features, including waveforms, spectrograms, pitch, speaking rate, silence, filler-word frequency, and sentiment, directly from the audio signal, and (iii) an integration layer that supports data export and downstream workflow integration. A principal contribution of this work is the transparency-first framework, in which every reported metric is explicitly identified as measured, derived, or unavailable, thereby improving the traceability, interpretability, and reliability of speech analytics. The paper presents the system architecture, benchmarking methodology, explainability and uncertainty framework, and key considerations for enterprise-scale deployment.

RoboInter1.5: A Holistic Intermediate Representation Suite for Embodied World Modeling and Robotic Manipulation

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18709v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing robot datasets remain expensive to curate, embodiment-specific, and insufficiently annotated with the fine-grained structure required for generalizable reasoning, execution, or long-horizon environment dynamics simulation. Building on our prior work, RoboInter1.0, we present RoboInter1.5, an extended and holistic suite of intermediate representations for both robotic manipulation and embodied world modeling. RoboInter1.5 provides a unified resource of data, benchmarks, and models centered on dense manipulation-oriented intermediate representations. Specifically, RoboInter-Data contains over 230k manipulation episodes across 571 scenes with dense per-frame annotations covering more than ten types of intermediate representations, including subtasks, primitive skills, object and gripper grounding, segmentation, affordance, grasp poses, contact points, motion traces, etc. Built upon these annotations, RoboInter-VQA introduces spatial and temporal embodied VQA tasks to benchmark and improve the intermediate-representation reasoning capabilities of our RoboInter-VLM. RoboInter-VLA further studies how such representations benefit action execution through implicit, explicit, and modular plan-then-execute paradigms. To better model the physical world, we further introduce RoboInter-World, which leverages intermediate representations as structured conditioning signals for controllable prediction of future world states. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that RoboInter1.5 provides a unified spatiotemporal scaffolding for intermediate representations. Rather than treating intermediate representations merely as interpretable signals, RoboInter1.5 conceptualizes them as a bidirectional interface that both regularizes low-level action spaces and constrains the latent rollouts of open-world physical simulators.

LLM-Based Invariant Testing for Software Functional Bugs

Ruogu Yang, Yifeng He, Yundi Xu, Yuqing Wei, Hao Chen — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18711v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Manually writing unit tests to uncover functional bugs in software libraries is not only time-consuming but also requires a deep understanding of the intended semantics of the APIs. Heuristic-based test generation methods suffer from low usability because they cannot reason about program semantics or interpret source code and documentation as humans do. Traditional fuzzing techniques like OSS-Fuzz often rely on crashes to detect bugs, but functional bugs do not always cause crashes. To overcome these limitations, we present LISA, a novel LLM-based invariant testing framework for software functional bugs. LISA iteratively generates API sequences and program invariants guided by API n-gram feedback, achieving higher bug-detection rates and competitive code coverage compared with both fuzzing and prior LLM-based test generation approaches, and reporting each finding as a high-confidence bug candidate for developer confirmation.

An Epistemic Position-Based Click Model: From Interactions to Epistemic Distributions of Relevance and Bias

Oscar Rolando Ramirez Milian, Harrie Oosterhuis — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18712v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: User interactions with rankings are affected by both items' relevances and display positions. Accordingly, click probabilities are often modeled as a product of relevance and position factors; and for improving recommendation and search, one needs to disentangle relevance from position bias. However, existing click models only provide frequentist point-estimates that do not capture any measure of epistemic uncertainty. Consequently, there is no indication of how much confidence one should have in their predictions. In this work, we introduce the first evidential deep-learning approach to form an epistemic alternative to the important position-based click model. Our learned model takes as input item and position features and outputs a beta-distribution for every relevance and position-bias variable of the position-based model. These distributions capture epistemic uncertainty about click probabilities and the underlying effects of attraction and position bias. The main challenge of our approach is its optimization for which we propose approximation and conditioning techniques to provide numerical stability and variance reduction. Our experiments indicate that our approach captures epistemic uncertainty in predictions on previously-unseen data, whereas standard policy gradients fail to learn meaningful distributions. We believe our contribution of the first contextual epistemic click model constitutes an important step in incorporating Bayesian uncertainty into click modeling.

Confidence-Gated Vision-Only Heading Alignment for UAV-UGV Cooperative Systems

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18713v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-based heading prediction is useful for UAV--UGV cooperation, but accurate prediction alone does not guarantee that every predicted heading should be issued directly as a control command. This paper investigates the decision problem of when and how a fixed vision-based heading predictor should be trusted for command issuance. A lightweight confidence-gated framework is proposed in which execution decisions are made using two interpretable reliability proxies derived from the perception stream: bounding-box area as a visibility-related proxy and short-window variation in predicted heading as a stability-related proxy. During low-confidence intervals, the framework compares the baseline freeze-HOLD policy with a bounded-blend fallback that updates the issued command conservatively. The method is evaluated on a real UAV--UGV dataset under clean and perturbed conditions. The results show that confidence gating creates a clear trade-off among execution rate, executed-frame accuracy, issued-command accuracy, and smoothness. The results further show that sparse execution can cause severe stale-command error under the baseline freeze-HOLD policy, whereas the bounded-blend fallback substantially improves command-level behavior under the same gate decisions. These findings highlight that reliable perception-driven autonomy depends not only on prediction accuracy, but also on decision-aware command issuance during low-confidence

$\tilde{O}$ptimal Algorithm for 2-Approximate All Pair Shortest Paths -- almost

Manoj Gupta, Mrigankashekhar Shandilya — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18714v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Given an undirected, unweighted graph $G$, we aim to compute a 2-approximation of all-pairs shortest paths (APSP). This problem admits a natural lower bound of $\Omega(n^2)$ since the output size is $\Theta(n^2)$. A central goal in this area is to achieve a running time of $O(n^2)$. Dor, Halperin, and Zwick (FOCS 1996, SICOMP 2001) designed an algorithm with a running time of $\tilde{O}(n^2)$ that guarantees a 2-approximation only for pairs at a distance of at least $O(\log n)$. Recently, Gupta (FOCS 2025) improved this bound, handling all pairs at a distance of at least $O(\log \log n)$. We nearly resolve this problem. We design a randomized algorithm that runs in $\tilde{O}(n^2)$ time and, with high probability, guarantees a 2-approximation for all pairs at distance at least $c$, where $c \ge 0$ is a constant. Unlike the above two results, which were purely combinatorial, our algorithm combines combinatorial techniques with fast matrix multiplication (FMM).

DWM: Separating World Effects from Actions in Latent World Models

Yi-Ge Zhang, Tianqi Du, Qi Zhang, Yisen Wang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18715v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent world models underpin much of modern model-based control, yet current action-conditioned formulations supervise the next-latent transition with a single, undifferentiated target, forcing a monolithic learning signal to absorb every source of state change. In real world, however, transitions arise from two heterogeneous sources: an action-driven component induced by the agent, and an action-invariant world effect -- the change that would still occur under a null action, dictated by the environment's intrinsic dynamics (e.g., gravity-driven sliding, inertia, contact rebound, and persistent drift). Fusing them into a single target entangles the two inside the latent transition, prevents the model from attributing observed changes to their underlying causes, and undermines the transferability of the learned dynamics. We introduce DWM (Decomposed World Model), a supervision-level framework that operationalizes this decomposition. DWM augments the predictor of a latent world model with an auxiliary world head, regularized by a normalized world-contrastive objective to be action-invariant, while the original pred head is coupled to it via an orthogonality constraint; together, the two signals induce an explicit additive decomposition of the predicted transition into an action-invariant and a complementary action-driven component, without altering the underlying architecture or inference pipeline. To evaluate DWM under persistent world effects, we construct W-variants of three standard control benchmarks -- PushT-W, Reacher-W, and TwoRoom-W -- each instantiating a distinct action-invariant dynamic. DWM matches strong baselines on the flat counterparts and delivers a mean absolute improvement of 13.1% in CEM planning success across the W-variants.

Continual Video-MLLM Adaptation over Evolving Domains

Rui Cheng, Meixing Shi, Yuxiang Cai, Jingcai Guo, Jianwei Yin, Zhi Chen — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18716v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Video multimodal large language models have shown strong capability in video understanding, yet their adaptation to sequentially evolving domains remains underexplored. In real-world deployments, video data often arrives continuously from heterogeneous domains, requiring the model to acquire new domain-specific knowledge without overwriting previously learned capabilities. Existing continual learning methods typically rely on shared adaptation spaces, which can induce severe cross-domain interference and catastrophic forgetting. We propose Distribution-Aware Expert Routing, a parameter-efficient framework for continual Video-MLLM adaptation over evolving domains. DAER maintains domain-isolated lightweight experts while keeping the pretrained Video-MLLM backbone frozen, thereby decoupling domain-specific adaptation from the general multimodal knowledge of the pretrained model. To enable fine-grained specialization, we introduce an intra-domain distribution-aware routing mechanism that matches each input to expert-level prototype reservoirs using MMD. To address the absence of task identities at inference time, we further propose an inter-domain routing mechanism that performs prototype matching in a discriminative subspace for robust domain identification. In addition, we introduce adaptive domain merging to improve parameter scalability and adopt a two-stage optimization strategy to stabilize expert specialization during continual learning. We evaluate DAER by curating a domain-incremental benchmark built from ten VidQA datasets covering diverse visual environments and reasoning demands. Experiments on two strong Video-MLLM backbones show that DAER consistently outperforms prior methods.

Strategy-Following Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning Considering Control Strategies Provided to Other Agents

Yamato Takahagi, Gentoku Nakasone, Yoshinari Motokawa, Toshiharu Sugawara — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18719v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study proposes a learning method for multi-agent systems that allows agents to be controlled through human manager instructions after learning and enables uninstructed agents to implicitly complement the overall work based on the actions of other agents. Multi-agent applications using deep learning have shown potential; thus, to achieve extensive social applications, humans should be able to control learned agents using simple methods to respond to environmental and social changes. Even without such changes, learned coordination often does not match the expectations of human managers, making it preferable to control coordination structures to match human intentions. Some studies have aimed to control agent behavior using simple instructions. However, they assumed that instructions are provided to all agents, which is time-consuming and not evident when designing a better cooperation regime. Ideally, specific agents should receive key action instructions, while others should automatically complete the remaining tasks. The proposed method, which extends previous work on controllability in multi-agent deep reinforcement learning, enables uninstructed agents to adaptively complement overlooked tasks and areas. The experimental results show that agents using the proposed method can shift to another cooperative structure and achieve better performance than those using conventional methods.

An Efficient Fault-Tolerance Scheme for CKKS Computation on CPUs

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18720v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) enables computation on encrypted data, but its long ciphertext dataflow and high-dimensional modular arithmetic make it vulnerable to silent data corruption caused by transient hardware faults. Existing protection methods either target dedicated accelerators or impose substantial execution, modular-arithmetic, and memory-access overheads on CPUs. This work presents an efficient fault-tolerance scheme for CPU-based CKKS computation. It checks the input-output consistency of polynomial operators while reducing protection overhead at three levels. First, modulus-aware bucket checksum exploits wide CPU accumulators to reduce expensive modular reductions. Second, dataflow-fused in-operator checking embeds checksum accumulation into operator dataflows, avoiding separate scans of long ciphertext polynomials. Third, cross-operator check fusion eliminates redundant checksum computations between adjacent operators while preserving end-to-end checking invariants. We implement the scheme in OpenFHE and evaluate it on representative encrypted applications and ciphertext primitives under random single-bit transient faults. It achieves a 100 percent empirical detection rate across 150,000 non-crashing corrupted-result cases and maintains application accuracy close to the fault-free baseline over a wide range of fault rates. The scheme incurs only 6.0 percent to 8.4 percent runtime overhead, averaging 6.8 percent, and reduces average protection overhead by 4.9 times compared with direct checksum-based protection.

Stale but Stable: Staleness-Adaptive Trust Regions for Stabilizing Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18722v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Asynchronous reinforcement learning improves throughput by decoupling rollout generation from optimization, but staleness is an inevitable byproduct compounded by policy lag, engine delays, and mixture-of-experts routing. From a trust-region perspective, this mismatch is critical: training-inference divergence governs approximation error in finite-horizon bounds, whereas PPO clipping only gates sampled outward updates, acting as a sampled surrogate rather than a full-policy constraint. As a result, high-staleness updates remain weakly controlled in the asynchronous regime where stale rollouts matter most. We introduce the Staleness-Adaptive Trust Region (SAT), which uses the detached sampled log-ratio as a practical staleness proxy, identifies high-mismatch tails within each batch via staleness-based kernel scaling, and contracts only the sign-selected endpoint of the nominal PPO interval. This preserves baseline behavior on ordinary tokens while enforcing more conservative updates on newly intercepted outward bands. We prove local interval containment and pointwise pessimism relative to PPO, showing how the adaptive rule reshapes update geometry under heterogeneous staleness. We evaluate SAT in a decoupled asynchronous RL setup built on Qwen3-30B-A3B-Base, using SGLang as the inference engine and Megatron for training. In this setting, SAT-GSPO w/ R3 achieves the best observed AIME24 avg@8, reaching 35.83 at lag 1 and 34.79 at lag 8, while SAT-GSPO reaches 34.17 at lag 1. Adaptive clipping and routing replay act as complementary stabilizers targeting mismatch tails and routing inconsistency, respectively. Overall, aligning clip intervals with staleness heterogeneity effectively stabilizes asynchronous RL.

Distribution of $k$-th Maximum Order Statistics of Independent, & Non-Identical SNR random variables in $\kappa-\mu$ fading and its applications in $6G$

Srinivas Sagar, Athira Subhash, Sheetal Kalyani — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18723v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper employs extreme value theory to establish the asymptotic distribution of the $k$-th maximum order statistics of signal to noise ratio (SNR) for a $\kappa-\mu$ fading channel with independent and non-identically distributed (i.n.i.d.) parameters. Since $\kappa-\mu$ encompasses well-known distributions such as Rice, Rayleigh, and Nakagami-m, the order statistics for these are also derived as special cases. We demonstrate the practical significance of our results by showcasing their applicability in several applications, including antenna selection in MIMO systems, backscatter systems, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, and UAV-assisted relay selection systems. Furthermore, by utilizing the $k$-th maximum order statistics, we derive expressions for outage probability and average throughput of $k$-th maximum order statistics. Comprehensive Monte Carlo simulations are carried out to verify the accuracy of the proposed results.

One Rewrite to Fix Them All? Type-Aware Repair Allocation for Text-to-Image Prompt Optimization

Haoyue Liu, Xiaoyu Ma, Ye Chen, Shuguang Cui, Xiaoying Tang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18724v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Text-to-image (T2I) generators often fail to follow their prompts faithfully, producing wrong counts, swapped attributes, ambiguous relations, and illegible text. Prompt optimization repairs such failures by rewriting the user prompt, requiring no generator retraining, and has yielded promising results. However, existing optimizers absorb heterogeneous failures into one uniform prompt expansion, even though each calls for different repair language. We formulate semantic prompt optimization as atomic repair allocation: each failed proposition is routed to a type-conditioned repair operator before the resulting local constraints are compiled into one executable prompt. We instantiate this formulation in the training-free Type-Aware Repair Allocation (TARA) framework, which separates diagnosis, allocation, compilation, and a semantic repair gate, an accept-or-revert controller over exactly one prescribed repair that prevents semantic regressions. Extensive experiments on DSG and TIFA across four frozen generators demonstrate that TARA achieves the best semantic accuracy in all eight benchmark-generator cells, improving over VisualPrompter by 5.6 and 2.6 points on DSG and TIFA, respectively, while maintaining image quality and running fastest in our matched local setting at 16.0 seconds versus 20.0 seconds per prompt.

Find Before You Fine-Tune: A Diagnostic Study of Small LLMs for Cybersecurity QA

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18725v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly fine-tuned for critical-domain Question-Answering (QA), yet choosing which small model to adapt, before paying the cost of adaptation, remains difficult. Fine-tuning can improve domain alignment, but it may also erode prior knowledge, weaken instruction-following, or increase hallucination, especially when labeled data are scarce or rapidly evolving as in cybersecurity. We present FiT (Find before Fine-Tune), a task-oriented diagnostic framework that characterizes small LLMs along three capabilities required for cybersecurity QA: vocabulary recognition, parametric knowledge, and contextualization of retrieved information. Using FiT, we conduct an empirical study of five open-weight 7-billion-parameter models under two fine-tuning regimes. We find that fine-tuning does not uniformly help: it consistently degrades vocabulary and parametric knowledge in small models, and the two regimes trade off differently. Knowledge-focused tuning causes moderate, rank-preserving degradation, whereas instruction-focused tuning collapses measured knowledge through induced abstention, inverting the knowledge ranking while leaving retrieval-grounded contextualization essentially intact. We quantify these regime-specific patterns with rank-correlation analysis and show that pre-fine-tuning FiT scores anticipate the direction of post-tuning change. Our results suggest that task-oriented diagnosis can screen out unsuitable models, avoid unnecessary fine-tuning, and support safer deployment of small LLMs in cybersecurity QA pipelines.

Formal Verification of an Out-of-Order Multiprocessor against an In-Order Weak-Memory ISA

Janggun Lee, Jeehoon Kang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18727v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Out-of-order multiprocessor is a critical piece of modern hardware, and their verification must solve the following challenges. First, inter-core interleaving, in which the order their reads and writes reach shared memory is unrestricted. Second, intra-core out-of-order execution, in which instructions fire out of program order. The combination of the two yields weak outcomes, which no sequential execution explains, and modern ISA allows such behaviors to account for them. However, the microarchitecture even exhibits excess out-of-order executions, temporarily entering states forbidden by the ISA. While discarded later, such states complicate reasoning about the core in full-system verification. Prior works verify a range of processor designs, while none have performed unbounded verification for out-of-order multiprocessor exhibiting such weak outcomes. We present the first formal verification of an out-of-order multiprocessor against an in-order, weak-memory ISA. Our key idea is a well-designed core specification, which captures the essence of excess executions in a single list of instructions. Building upon this, we decompose the proof into two steps. The first is a core refinement, proving a core implementation against this specification, abstracting away every microarchitectural state except those necessary to reason about excess executions and the core interface. The second is a system inclusion, serializing the out-of-order memory executions and inter-core interleaving into the ISA, easily removing excess executions thanks to the core specification. All of our proofs are mechanized in Rocq, heavily utilizing large language model (LLM) agents to write proofs automatically.

Dual Attention Residuals

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18730v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent work extends Transformer residual pathways along two complementary axes: historical retrieval selects information from earlier depths, whereas multi-stream methods maintain multiple residual trajectories. These capabilities have largely been studied in isolation, and assigning an independent retriever to each stream still prevents one trajectory from influencing depth selection in another. We propose Dual Attention Residuals (DAR), which brings multi-stream interaction into historical retrieval through reciprocal cross-stream addressing. For each target stream, DAR computes depth weights from normalized states in the opposite stream and applies them to values from the target stream's own history. The retrieved states are combined for an unchanged Transformer branch and updated through constrained gated writes; a block-form variant operates on block-level histories to control overhead. Across dense models from 0.1B to 1B parameters and a 7B sparse-MoE model, DAR consistently improves validation loss over standard residual Transformers and Attention Residuals. Routing ablations show that the gain cannot be explained by an additional stream or value projection alone. Representation and intervention analyses further show that reciprocal cross-stream selection preserves depth-wise diversity and avoids the redundancy or functional imbalance observed in alternative two-stream designs.

Correct-by-Construction Behavior Tree Synthesis from Signal Temporal Logic Specifications with Application to Robotic Missions

Jiaheng Dong, Jingyi Huang, Liang Han — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18731v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Behavior Trees (BTs) are widely adopted for complex task execution in robotics, providing modular, reactive control but lacking formal guarantees. However, existing correct-by-construction synthesis from Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) cannot express quantitative timing constraints. This letter synthesizes correct-by-construction BTs from Signal Temporal Logic (STL) specifications. The workspace is modeled as a timed transition system and abstracted into a zone graph, and an augmented state space tracking both logical progress and timing constraints is introduced. A hierarchical fixed-point algorithm computes winning sets for an STL fragment encompassing safety, reachability, response, recurrence, and persistence, yielding BT subtrees with a runtime constraint function. Correctness guarantees are proven and complexity bounds are derived. Simulations demonstrate specification satisfaction with strictly positive robustness, and a physical quadrotor experiment with six STL specifications validates practical deployability.

Motion Primitive Discovery in a Humanoid Robot via Self-Organising Maps for Phase Recognition

Radovan Gregor, Igor Farka\v{s} — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18737v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding the computational basis of action recognition is a central challenge in social cognition as well as in human-robot interaction. Inspired by the Mirror Neuron System (MNS), we propose a two-level architecture for motor primitive discovery and online phase recognition applied to the NICO humanoid robot. At the first level, two Self-Organising Maps (SOMs) learn topographic representations of arm kinematics (A-SOM) and hand kinematics (H-SOM) from simulated trials covering seven motor actions. The maps are trained on non-redundant features identified through hierarchical correlation analysis of motion trajectories. The results show that the two SOMs encode complementary aspects of motor behaviour. At the second level, an Echo State Network (ESN) evaluates whether temporal trajectories of SOM activations, represented by consecutive best-matching units, are sufficient for online recognition of the currently executed movement phase. The results show that SOM-based trajectories preserve the dominant phase-discriminative structure of the movement, while contextual information provides only a secondary refinement. Our contribution is the integration of established SOM and ESN methods within an MNS-inspired architecture for motor primitive representation and online phase recognition. The results are compatible with the computational hypothesis that self-organised motor representations, when temporally integrated, can support accurate online recognition of ongoing movement phases.

Indexing Range Maximum-Sum Segment Queries with Offsets

Seungbum Jo, Dominik K\"oppl — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18739v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Given an array of $n$ real numbers, the maximum segment sum (MSS) problem is to find a contiguous subarray that has the largest sum. While the MSS problem can be solved optimally with Kadane's algorithm in $O(n)$ time, the study of its indexing version spawned new extensions such as (a) retrieving the MSS after subtracting a query offset parameter for all array entries or (b) retrieving the MSS for arbitrary query ranges. We here study the combination of both problems (a) and (b), which requires retrieving the MSS for arbitrary query ranges after subtracting a query offset parameter for all array entries. For that, we present an index whose query time is only slower than the best known for (a) by a factor of $O(\log n)$. In detail, our index uses $O(n \log n)$ space, supports queries in $O(\log^2 n)$ time, and can be constructed in $O(n \log^3 n)$ time. More generally, for every integer $d$ with $1\le d\le\lceil\log_2 n\rceil$, we give an $O(dn)$-space index with $O(dn^{1/d}\log n)$ query time; in particular, for every fixed $\varepsilon>0$, we obtain linear space and $O(n^\varepsilon\log n)$ query time. As side results, we obtain the same time-space trade-off in terms of the number of runs of a run-length encoded input, deduce a solution for (a) that works in run-length compressed space and time, and prove a tight $\Theta(n^{2/3})$ bound on the number of non-compatible offsets for binary arrays. Finally, we give supportive lower bounds for our query problem, showing that there is only a polylogarithmic gap of improvement left.

Beyond Text Editing: Algebraic Manipulation of Source Code

Kevin Pulo — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18742v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Source code is almost universally edited as plain text. However, the mismatch between the syntactic and semantic requirements of valid and correct code, and the unconstrained text editing process trying to produce it, introduces friction that degrades the programming task. It is also increasingly costly in the era of LLM-based coding agents, which must materialize their high-level plan of intended changes as low-level text edits dispersed throughout the codebase, often requiring them to re-read large portions of code. We propose the novel alternative approach of source code algebra, where the codebase is modified by applying to it a sequence of logical algebraic operations. Each operation makes the full set of changes necessary for a single semantic change, analogous to mathematical equation rewriting. We sketch initial properties of such operations - including composition, nullipotency, and commutativity - that distinguish this approach from text editing, and make it well-suited as a substrate for agentic code editing. A feasibility probe with our proof-of-concept implementation (SCAS) suggests that LLM agents can use source code algebra to complete a non-local, cross-file code change with both higher success rates and one to two orders of magnitude fewer tokens, relative to text-based baselines. While preliminary, this is consistent with the hypothesis that having LLMs emit algebraic operations, rather than rewritten code, is a promising direction for code editing - and motivates broader future research into source code algebra, such as comprehensive operator libraries, formal properties, and human-facing tooling.

Contraction-Gauge Preconditioning for Quantized Matrix Multiplication

Piyush Sao, Narasinga Miniskar, Pedro Valero-Lara, Keita Teranishi, Sudip Seal — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18745v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study low-precision computation of C=AB with both factors quantized. We derive an exact finite-dimensional identity for the expected squared product error under independent, zero-mean entrywise errors with known variance fields; it holds exactly for non-overloading subtractive dither and for independent stochastic rounding, and we empirically assess deterministic round-to-nearest (RTN). Using the product-preserving equivalence AB=(AT)(T^{-1}B), we formulate contraction-gauge preconditioning: jointly choosing a factor representation and its sharing pattern before quantization. Preconditioning can reduce product error but may require extra transformed, quantized copies of the opposite operand: a shared transform needs one copy, a block-specific transform up to one per block. Within the bounded family of positive diagonal gauges (folds), a geometric program computes a globally optimal shared fold and a linear program decides whether the identity fold is already optimal. For other families we derive computable selection statistics -- tail index for scaling, profile spread for partitioning, coherence and weighted-Gram energy for rotations, slice-energy covariance for hierarchy depth -- with upper bounds for ranking heuristic candidates. Across twelve linear products from a trained three-block image classifier, median within-product rank correlations between dither-model predictions and deterministic-RTN errors are 0.937 at 8 bits and 0.918 at 4 bits. The GP fold cuts held-out product error over the identity fold by 18.0% (8-bit) and 20.5% (4-bit) in geometric mean, beats a SmoothQuant-style grid baseline at both precisions and on ten of twelve products, and lowers composed logit MSE by 15.4% and 26.4%. We thus provide exact stochastic product-error accounting, certified selection within the diagonal family, and a common objective for evaluating reusable transform candidates under RTN.

SkyEV: RGB-Event UAV detection and tracking dataset and baseline

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18747v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Detecting UAVs in air spaces has become increasingly important due to UAVs widespread availability and easy usage. However, due to their small size, they are typically difficult to detect at a sufficient range. For the training of optimized detection algorithms, datasets have been published, covering optical sensing methods ranging from infrared to regular RGB to event-sensor-based. However, these datasets often fail to reflect realistic counter-UAV scenarios, lacking critical factors such as camera ego-motion, extremely small target scales, and diverse lens configurations, and introduce compression artefacts on the frame images. To address this gap, we introduce SkyEV, an open-source dataset featuring highly synchronized uncompressed RGB and event-based data. SkyEV distinguishes itself by capturing complex real-world conditions, including significant camera motion and varied optical setups, which are essential for testing the fundamental trade-off between Field of View and detection range. Furthermore, we provide a unified data loader and establish an experimental baseline using a multi-modal architecture, demonstrating the dataset's efficacy in detecting challenging, small-scale targets.

ConceptCF: Concept-based Counterfactuals for the Explainability of Time Series

Annemarie Jutte, Faizan Ahmed, Jeroen Linssen, Maurice van Keulen — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18748v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper proposes ConceptCF, a method for counterfactual generation that operates on human-interpretable concepts. In high-stakes domains such as healthcare and predictive maintenance, artificial intelligence models can increase efficiency and safety. Explainability is key to ensure these models rely on causal relationships rather than spurious correlations. Counterfactual explanations identify minimal modifications that would change a model's predictions. Existing methods for time series operate on individual points or subsequences without ensuring interpretability of the mutations. ConceptCF instead modifies meaningful concepts. As a result we can provide explanations in terms of these concepts, for example ``the model's prediction would be `Sit' instead of `Walk' if you increase the scale of the movement''. In this paper, the concepts are constructed through time series decomposition, resulting in concepts such as scale, and frequency bands. Counterfactuals are generated using a genetic algorithm that optimizes the concept mutations. Evaluation against five state-of-the-art approaches demonstrates that ConceptCF consistently achieves top-tier performance across validity, confidence, proximity, sparsity and plausibility metrics.

Is EEG-to-Text Feasible in Real-World Scenarios? An In-Depth Analysis Using a Neuropsychology-Inspired Benchmark

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18749v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Translating brain signals into text could restore communication for people with severe paralysis, yet practically usable systems to date rely on invasive electrocorticography (ECoG). Electroencephalography (EEG) offers a non-invasive alternative, and EEG-to-text (EEG2Text) has been widely explored. Interestingly, however, EEG2Text models generally rely on teacher-forcing evaluation; without it, they fail to generate meaningful decoding. This reliance prevents EEG2Text from being applied in real-world, non-academic settings. This has fueled numerous debates about whether EEG2Text is a meaningful direction, by extension, and whether EEG truly contains decodable linguistic information. Here, using a neuropsychology-informed paradigm, we find that existing EEG2Text benchmarks have neglected EEG instability, a flaw that has confounded inference and sparked debate. Our experiments furnish key evidence for the feasibility of teacher-forcing-free EEG2Text decoding. Accordingly, we assemble the Corpus OF Eeg-To-Text (COFETT) using a 128-channel high-density EEG cap, providing a benchmark dedicated to evaluating EEG2Text models. In comparisons with multiple existing benchmarks, COFETT achieves SOTA ability to distinguish among model performances and enables robust, teacher-forcing-free evaluation, thereby opening a path toward practical EEG2Text applications. COFETT is open sourced in https://github.com/baoyudu/COFETT.

TrapHunter: Exposing Covert Pathways in Trap Token Contracts

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18753v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Standardized token contracts (e.g., ERC-20) form the foundation of digital assets. However, attackers increasingly abuse this standardization to disguise malicious trap tokens. Unlike obvious violations, these contracts employ a strategy of "deceptive adherence": they strictly adhere to standard protocols to evade detection while embedding covert logic to defraud users. To address this, we first systematize the trap landscape by proposing a novel taxonomy derived from the intrinsic functional lifecycle of tokens (Generation, Circulation, Persistence, and Observation). We then propose TrapHunter, a framework designed to identify these traps and expose covert pathways within these deceptive contracts via intent deviation analysis. Specifically, TrapHunter introduces a unified semantic representation combining Abstract Behavior Trees (ABTs) and Augmented Path Graphs (APGs) to normalize intra-procedural syntax and reveal hidden execution paths driven by inter-procedural state dependencies. Crucially, it bridges the semantic gap by leveraging LLMs to reason about the behavioral intent of deviations from reference implementations, followed by fork-based dynamic validation to confirm exploitability. Experimental evaluation on 269 real-world contracts with three LLMs (DeepSeek, GPT, and Gemini) demonstrates that TrapHunter effectively detects all six categories of traps, achieving an average precision of 81.8% and recall of 85.4%, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art tools.

AgentDebugX: An Open-Source Toolkit for Failure Observability, Attribution, and Recovery in LLM Agents

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18754v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agent failures are difficult to debug because the step where an error surfaces is often not the one that caused it. Existing observability tools replay execution traces but provide little support for identifying the root cause or translating diagnosis into recovery. We present AgentDebugX, an open-source debugging framework that organizes debugging as a closed loop of Detect, Attribute, Recover, and Rerun. At its core, DeepDebug performs multi-turn root-cause diagnosis through global trajectory understanding, structure-guided investigation, and cross-examination. On the Who and When benchmark, DeepDebug achieves the best strict attribution accuracy among the evaluated methods on both tested open-weight backbones, reaching 28.8 percent exact agent-and-step accuracy on qwen3.5-9b versus 21.7 percent for the strongest single-pass baseline. On GAIA, DeepDebug repairs 13 of 73 failed tasks in a single rerun, compared with 4 to 6 for three decoupled self-correction baselines, improving overall accuracy from 55.8 percent to 63.6 percent. AgentDebugX exposes this workflow through a Python library, CLI, web console, and installable agentic skill, and provides an opt-in Error Hub for sharing scrubbed failure-diagnosis-repair bundles and reusing them as debugging memory.

Decafs: Disentangled Conditional adversarial Flows

Anirudh jain, Sakshi Varshney, Samuel Kaski, Vikas Garg — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18755v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Flow-based models have established state-of-the-art performance in generative modeling across domains, but are hard to interpret due to their complex latent embeddings. In particular, the entanglement of generative factors in the latent space hinders controlled generation. We circumvent this issue by appealing to a novel conditional generator based on Lie groups that disentangles an alternative latent space, which is aligned closely with the latent flow space using an adversarial loss. Our approach facilitates interpretable conditional generation while obviating the need to expand the dimensionality of the flow space (owing to its invertibility requirements). The proposed model demonstrates strong performance across conditional image (including, outperforming StyleGAN on MNIST, dSprites) and molecule (using standard QM9, ZINC and MOSES) generation tasks

RAGAL: A Frugal, Fully Local Retrieval-Augmented Assistant for Technical Support at a Government Agency

Dan Musetoiu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18756v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Public institutions hold large volumes of sensitive documents and support tickets that cannot leave the premises, ruling out cloud-hosted language models entirely. We report on RAGAL, a retrieval-augmented assistant for the technical-support team of AFIR, the Romanian Agency for Financing Rural Investments, built and operated under three hard constraints: zero data egress (no external API calls, even for synthetic data), a read-only mandate (the assistant drafts, humans execute), and a single 8 GB consumer laptop as the only development and training machine. Over a Romanian-language corpus of ~25,000 chunks -- 15,073 resolved support tickets and internal normative documents -- we show that the highest-leverage investments were retrieval engineering and retriever fine-tuning rather than a larger generator: hybrid dense-sparse retrieval with intent routing raised our internal evaluation from 62% to 81%, and fine-tuning the bge-m3 embedder on real ticket data improved recall@10 from 0.663 to 0.850 (MRR 0.489 to 0.684) after 72 minutes of training. We document a general pitfall: single-domain fine-tuning silently degraded retrieval on the untouched document domain below the stock baseline, detected only after building a per-domain evaluation set and repaired with locally generated queries (GenQ). We report two counter-intuitive findings -- PII masking improved generation quality, and a structural "anchor distillation" scheme made SQL hallucination impossible by construction -- along with a reproducible recipe for full embedder fine-tuning in 8 GB of VRAM. Finally, since zero egress also rules out a cloud judge, we describe a substitute: a 744B-parameter model run on CPU, too slow to serve interactively but affordable in overnight batch, used as a second opinion whose limits we quantify. We release the sanitized pipeline scripts for institutions facing similar data-locality constraints.

A Second-Moment Theory for Floating-Point Reduction Trees

Piyush Sao, Narasinga Miniskar, Pedro Valero-Lara, Keita Teranishi, Sudip Seal — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18758v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Summation error depends on partial-sum order, which standard worst-case bounds omit. To capture this dependence, we derive an exact mean-square error (MSE) recurrence for a binary reduction tree T under conditionally unbiased rounding. With unit roundoff u, the constant-nu model sets the local variance at pre-rounding value x to nu u^2 x^2. Its leading tree-dependent cost for the input vector p is p^T K_T p, where the common-ancestor kernel K_T counts the internal ancestors shared by each pair of leaves. For i.i.d. inputs of mean mu and variance tau^2, this expected cost is tau^2 Lambda_1(T) + mu^2 Lambda_2(T), where Lambda_1 is total leaf depth and Lambda_2 sums squared internal-subtree sizes; Lambda_1 governs centered inputs, while Lambda_2 captures nonzero means. We use these statistics to characterize optimal tree topologies and schedules. Balanced and sequential trees attain the centered extrema. For k inputs, optimal two-stage sequential blocking yields root-mean-square (RMS) error scaling as k^{3/4}. For fixed-stage hierarchies, geometric schedules are optimal for centered inputs, whereas the optimal noncentered stage exponents halve successively. For independent centered inputs with unequal variances, Huffman coding minimizes variance-weighted depth over free leaf assignments. We extend the kernel to matrix multiplication through operand Gram matrices. We then test the approximation under round-to-nearest using exact residuals. Across binary64, binary32, and software-emulated binary16 and bfloat16, the model recovers the ordering among tree topologies; K_T tracks AR(1) partial-sum costs. For GEMM, independently calibrated predictions differ from measurements by at most 3% on the tested grid. A reduction tree extracted from an array library predicts the measured RMS scaling. However, stagnation and bias in positive low-precision sums limit the model's applicability.

Relative Positions Generalize, Absolute Positions Memorize: An Implicit-Bias Account of Length Generalization in Attention

Subham Singh, Ashutosh Mishra, Subha Raut — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18759v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformers with relative positional encodings often extrapolate to sequences longer than those seen during training, whereas transformers with learned absolute encodings typically do not. This is a robust empirical regularity, and the explanations offered for it so far are chiefly about expressivity, that is, about whether a length-generalizing solution exists. We give an optimization explanation. On a minimal fixed-offset retrieval task that isolates positional selection, the gap is governed by the implicit bias of the trained attention head: among the many solutions that fit short sequences, which one gradient descent actually selects. We prove that rotary encodings make the attention logit a function of relative offset alone, an exact equivariance, so whatever selection rule is learned at training lengths is reproduced verbatim at every longer length. Learned absolute encodings instead leave out-of-range positions unconstrained, and the trained head pins to a fixed absolute position inside the training range. We characterize the learned rotary rule as a low-rank ``carrier'' kernel aligned with the target offset, and we derive the resulting graceful accuracy decay as an attention-dilution law; both predictions are confirmed across seeds and offsets. A linear-attention control shows the mechanism is specific to softmax: without normalization, training selects a min-norm interpolant that does not extrapolate. The phenomenon, the equivariance, and the carrier all transfer to a multi-layer, multi-head transformer trained on a full-sequence length-generalization task. The account connects the implicit bias of attention, implicit bias for extrapolation in recurrent models, and the learning side of the RASP-L conjecture.

Koopman DCM: Unstable Eigenfunctions as Data-driven Representations for Legged Balancing

St\'ephane Caron — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18760v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In legged locomotion, divergent components of motion (DCMs) have emerged as characteristic states for balance control. They isolate the unstable mode of the dynamics but, in existing formulations, apply only to reduced models such as the linear inverted pendulum. In this study, we show how DCMs can be more generally formulated as Koopman eigenfunctions. Whereas Koopman analysis typically targets eigenvalues near zero, which capture conserved or slowly varying quantities, our investigation leads us to deliberately search for unstable eigenpairs with large eigenvalues. The resulting Koopman DCMs are data-driven observables trained using only real-robot data. On a real biped, DCMs learned from one hour of robot data improve tracking of reference walking patterns. We further show how learned DCMs provide state-based viability constraints when combined with model predictive control.

Weakly Supervised Pathology-Informed Representation Learning for PET-Based Content Retrieval of Intra-Tumour Heterogeneity

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18762v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a weakly supervised 18FFDG PET representation-learning framework for content based medical image retrieval, using H&E derived information during training while preserving PET-only inference. The proposed method was designed to use H&E derived information during training while maintaining PET only inference. A teacher student training strategy was used to learn the PET tumour derived voxel representations, from which global and hotspot conditioned embeddings were generated along with maps of intra tumour heterogeneity in our oesophegeal cancer test case. A progressive ablation strategy was used to evaluate the contribution of different supervision mechanisms. Retrieval performance was assessed across cross-validation folds using metrics including mean average precision, normalised discounted cumulative gain and mean reciprocal rank. Additional analyses evaluated ablation performance, hotspot faithfulness through perturbation/deletion experiments, prototype-specific PET uptake behaviour and indirect patient level concordance between learned PET prototype classes and selected histomic features. Progressive introduction of pathology informed supervision and hotspot modelling improved PET retrieval performance compared with global PET representations and conventional PET baselines. Across the ablation ladder, PET hotspot conditioned representations consistently provided stronger retrieval than global embeddings, indicating that focusing on informative tumour subregions improved sensitivity to intra tumour heterogeneity. Histopathology concordance further showed that the learned classes were not simply high uptake PET regions; instead, they demonstrated distinct heterogeneity in 18F FDG uptake.

Posterior Samplings are Missing Modalities Generators for Medical Image Translation

Jonghun Kim — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18763v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Magnetic resonance imaging comes in various modality contrasts that provide complementary anatomical and pathological information. Complete multimodal acquisitions are often unavailable due to time and protocol constraints. This leads to real-world datasets with missing modalities, where conventional medical image translation methods are typically limited to fixed source-target settings or require retraining for each observed source-target pair. We propose a unified framework that formulates missing-modality generation as a linear inverse problem under a joint distribution and solves it via posterior sampling with a flow matching model. By learning a joint prior over the complete modality set, our method can reconstruct arbitrary missing modalities at inference time by guiding the sampling trajectory to enforce measurement consistency with observed modalities. We further mitigate inter-modality error propagation in multi-target generation by adopting a many-to-one sampling strategy. Experiments on BraTS and IXI datasets show that our method achieves the best performance over baselines across most missing-modality scenarios. In downstream tumor segmentation, synthesized images from our method result in higher segmentation performance, indicating better preservation of clinically relevant structures.

High-Level Synthesis of Efficient Pipelines with Visibility Control

Jungin Rhee, Minseong Jang, Jaewoo Kim, Jeehoon Kang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18765v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-level synthesis (HLS) raises the abstraction of hardware design from concurrent register-transfer level (RTL) programs to sequential programs. Among the forms of parallelism HLS exploits, pipelining demands fine-grained control over pipeline structure and hazard resolution to achieve competitive power, performance, and area (PPA). However, existing tools either lack such control or sacrifice sequential semantics to provide it. We present an HLS tool that embeds fine-grained pipeline control in a sequential programming model, enabling rapid design-space exploration. The tool builds on visibility control, a novel programming abstraction that unifies hazard resolution strategies including stalling, bypassing, speculation, deferred commit, and register renaming. We evaluate on in-order RISC-V cores, histograms, and an AES accelerator. On RISC-V cores, we implement stall, bypass, speculation, and register renaming; on histograms, we implement scheduling strategies that previously required RTL or concurrent programming models. Compiled pipelines outperform HLS tools with sequential semantics and achieve PPA comparable to hand-written RTL.

Bounding Boxes to Improve Small Language Model Performance on Vision-Based Grading Tasks

Lachlan McGinness — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18767v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The deployment of Small Language Models (SLMs) in educational settings offers significant advantages in terms of privacy, cost, and scalability. However, SLMs often struggle with complex vision-based tasks, such as grading handwritten student exams, due to the high computational cost of processing large images and the visual distractions present on a full page. In this paper, we investigate whether cropping student responses using bounding boxes can improve the accuracy and computational efficiency of SLMs on a short-answer grading task. Using a dataset of scanned handwritten responses from the 2025 Australian Physics Olympiad, we evaluate the performance of several models ranging from 4B to 72B parameters under varying conditions of Chain of Thought (CoT) prompting and image cropping. Our results demonstrate that using bounding boxes significantly improves grading accuracy and reduces computational cost (FLOPs) across models. We conclude that bounding boxes are a crucial pre-processing step for deploying SLMs in large-scale, vision-based educational assessments.

Cross-Modal UAV Object Tracking: State-Aware Representation Learning and A Unified Benchmark

Yun Xiao, Zhihong Hong, Jiandong Jin, Chenglong Li, Jin Tang, Amir Hussain — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18768v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) object tracking has emerged as a popular research field with broad practical applications. Modern UAVs are increasingly equipped with both visible light and thermal infrared sensors. However, due to constraints in communication bandwidth, computational resources and power consumption, current systems often activate one modality and switch between modalities to maintain robust tracking in complex scenarios. Such modality switch inevitably leads to significant appearance change and sudden spatial shift, posing great challenges for existing tracking algorithms. To handle this problem, we propose a novel State-Aware Representation Learning Approach called SARLA, which perceives the inconsistent modality states of current frame with template and last frame in the target representations to adapt to the sudden changes in both appearance and position, for robust cross-modal object tracking. In particular, we propose the Modality State Aware Representation Module (MSARM) and Spatial State Aware Representation Module (SSARM). MSARM guides the model to learn appearance correlation, bridging the modality gap, while SSARM models cross-frame spatial correlation to mitigate sudden spatial shift impacts. In addition, we design a spatial shift prediction loss to further handle the effects of spatial variation caused by modality switch. To promote the development of this research field, we establish a large-scale video benchmark called CM-UOT, which consists of 1079 cross-modal sequences with an average video length greater than 621 frames and encompasses over 671K frames in total. Extensive experiments on CM-UOT dataset demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed SARLA against 20 excellent tracking methods. The source code, datasets, and evaluation protocols associated with this work are publicly available at: https://github.com/hongsmile365/sarla-.

GLID: Gated Local Intrinsic Dimension Repairs the Blind Spots of Face-Forgery Detectors

Guang Yang, Fengchen Liu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18770v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-tuned foundation-model detectors dominate face-forgery benchmarks, yet they stay blind to generator families absent from training. We present GLID, a detector that repairs this blind spot with geometry instead of data. GLID treats the patch tokens of a single image as a sample from a manifold and estimates their local intrinsic dimension (LID) at several depths of a frozen vision transformer. This 12-dimensional, training-free signal enters a fine-tuned detector through a confidence gate whose strength is calibrated purely in-distribution. On a 16-axis cross-generator benchmark, GLID reaches 0.805 mean AUC, first among retrained state-of-the-art baselines and never significantly behind the strongest of them on any axis. It lifts the generation axes by +0.084 AUC while moving reenactment by only -0.005. Two empirical laws explain the design. First, forged faces bend the token manifold at family-specific depths: GAN artifacts peak at the last layer, diffusion artifacts peak mid-network, and the pattern survives four backbones, three dimension estimators, and non-face imagery. Second, fine-tuning absorbs auxiliary gains exactly where training data covers: injecting 1% target-family images erases a +0.100 gain, so geometric signals matter precisely where data is unavailable. The deterministic signal also cuts the cross-seed spread of accuracy 5.5x. Code, preregistered analysis gates, and per-image scores accompany the paper.

RF-Agent: A Practical Framework for Building Language Agents for RFIC Design

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18772v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have driven rapid progress in electronic design automation (EDA), yet their application to radio-frequency (RF) circuit design remains limited by the scarcity of domain-specific datasets and standardized benchmarks. We present RF-Agent, which addresses this gap through textbook-driven knowledge distillation. A multi-agent Question-Thinking-Solution-Answer (QTSA) pipeline converts a subsection-level corpus from seven canonical RF textbooks into the first-of-its-kind RF-domain reasoning dataset (over 11,000 samples) with a dedicated multiple-choice benchmark. On this benchmark we study two adaptation strategies: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and three retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) configurations (semantic, keyword, hybrid). Across multiple LLM families, domain-specific SFT significantly improves RF reasoning, especially for small and medium-sized models; among RAG configurations, semantic retrieval performs best, indicating embedding-based context alignment suits RF reasoning better than naive fusion. The dataset and benchmark provide a reusable foundation for future work on LLM-aided RF circuit design.

Privileged Lesion-Context Relational Distillation for Mask-Free Skin Lesion Classification

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18773v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate skin lesion classification can benefit from lesion segmentation masks, but requiring masks or an auxiliary segmentation model during inference reduces clinical practicality and increases computational complexity. This work introduces Privileged Lesion-Context Relational Distillation (PLCRD), a teacher-student framework that exploits lesion masks exclusively during training while preserving image-only inference. The privileged teacher jointly analyzes the original dermoscopic image and its mask-guided lesion region to learn lesion-specific and contextual diagnostic representations. An image-only student is then trained through complementary knowledge-transfer mechanisms that convey the teacher's diagnostic distribution, lesion-focused attention, inter-lesion relational geometry, and lesion-context structure. PLCRD decomposes deep representations into lesion and contextual embeddings and transfers their relational organization through inter-lesion similarity alignment, lesion-context affinity matching, separation regularization, and class-aware relational learning. This formulation avoids direct feature matching between heterogeneous teacher and student architectures and enables the student to internalize mask-informed diagnostic structure without accessing masks at deployment. The framework was evaluated on HAM10000 using lesion-disjoint data partitioning and externally validated on ISIC 2018 without retraining. PLCRD achieved a lesion-level macro-F1 of 0.773 +/- 0.018, balanced accuracy of 0.764 +/- 0.023, and macro-AUROC of 0.976 +/- 0.002 on HAM10000, together with a macro-F1 of 0.732 +/- 0.008 on ISIC 2018. The results indicate that privileged lesion annotations can be transformed into transferable relational knowledge, yielding a practical and interpretable approach to mask-free skin lesion classification.

Formulation-Level Auto-Tuning for QUBO-Based Machine Learning: A Case Study Across Multiple Quantum-Inspired Annealers

Naoya Mizuki, Takahiro Katagiri, Daichi Mukunoki, Tetsuya Hoshino — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18774v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents an Optuna-based formulation-level auto-tuning framework for support vector machines (SVMs) implemented on multiple quantum-inspired annealers. In an annealing-based SVM, continuous dual variables are discretized and converted into a quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) model. This transformation introduces three coupled classes of parameters: representation parameters-the encoding base B and bit depth K-which determine numerical range, resolution, and QUBO size; the RBF kernel parameter {\gamma}, which determines classifier geometry; and the equality-constraint penalty {\xi}, which controls feasibility and coefficient balance. We formulate their joint selection as a mixed discrete-continuous black-box optimization problem. The framework has two optimization levels: an inner annealer minimizes the generated QUBO, while an outer Optuna loop reconstructs the formulation in every trial and maximizes validation accuracy. The same solver-agnostic procedure is applied to Fixstars Amplify Annealing Engine, Toshiba SQBM+, and Fujitsu Digital Annealer using TPE and Gaussian-process samplers and is compared with conventional grid search. Experiments on linear and nonlinear classification tasks with 0-20% label noise show mean gains over grid search of approximately 0.8 and 2.1 percentage points, respectively. The results demonstrate that formulation quality and backend capability must be evaluated jointly and that task-level feedback can compensate for discretization, penalty imbalance, and backend-dependent approximate optimization.

Aggregation of Evolutionary Game Dynamics on Large-Scale Weighted Networks

Zhiru Wang, Bin Wu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18776v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Networked evolutionary games, which integrate network topology and game dynamics, serve as a powerful framework for complex systems. Evolutionary games on large-scale networks, however, have been analytically challenging due to the curse of dimensionality arising from large network size. This paper proposes an aggregation method based on backward equivalence, such that agents within the same equivalence class behave exactly the same over time. We give a necessary and sufficient condition under which the weighted networked evolutionary games (WNEG) are reduced to an equivalent system with low dimension. The aggregation is shown to reduce the computational burden ranging from strategy consensus, strategy optimization, controllability, to optimal control of the WNEG. Examples are provided. Our work opens an avenue to solve the curse of dimensionality on networked evolutionary game systems with mathematical rigor.

PertReason: A Knowledge-Grounded Benchmark and Framework for Cell-State-Conditioned Mechanistic Reasoning of Perturbation Effects

Dongkwan Kim, Yiming Gao, Yining Yang, Yang Shen — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18777v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating machine learning in scientific domains requires separating correct predictions from correct reasons under realistic distribution shifts. We introduce PertReason, a knowledge-grounded benchmark and framework suite for cell-state--conditioned reasoning about perturbation effects. At its core, PertReasonQA is a benchmark that tests whether models can generate mechanistically faithful explanations while remaining robust to complex shifts, such as new cells and unseen perturbations. PertReasonQA combines single-cell genetic and chemical perturbation data across multiple cellular contexts with knowledge graphs, and dynamically conditions pathways on cell-specific basal states to avoid generic memorization. Evaluations on state-of-the-art models reveal systematic gaps between predictive accuracy and mechanistic reasoning. Specifically, these models exhibit failure modes largely invisible to standard benchmarks, such as deriving correct answers through flawed logic, ignoring cellular context, and generating directionally inconsistent mechanisms. As a reference probe of the benchmark, we present PertReasonLM, a large language model trained to align outcome predictions with context-specific mechanistic reasoning. Our model targets the identified failure modes by grounding rationales in context-specific pathways and tightening agreement between outcomes and mechanisms. Together, we provide a diagnostic framework for exposing and mitigating failures in faithful reasoning in data-rich scientific systems.

CGMap: A Geospatially Aware Deep Learning Framework for Crop Gap Mapping Using UAV

Karan Sharma, Rajiv Ranjan, Dinesh Kumar, Shashank Tamaskar — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18779v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In India, crop germination is primarily monitored by visual inspection and manual counting, which are prone to errors, despite their crucial role in determining eventual yield potential. This paper highlights a deep learning based pipeline which uses object detection methods and drone imagery to assess and provide a precise count of sugarcane germination in fields. The approch uses a pre-trained AI model to find germinated plant sampling and identify gaps, also known as ``bald spots'', which restricts field productivity. The techniques used here relies on the YOLOV8 architecture, which was trained on a carefully selected dataset of UAV photos taken in various agroclimatic zones of India. Here, we bring upon a novel orientation-normalization technique that uses minimum Spanning Trees (MST) to account for variations in planting geometry, allowing for dependable row and column extraction across a variety of field layouts. By converting detected seedlings into spatial point clouds, emergence gaps can be inferred from the anticipated spacing between plants. A geospatial germination map exported in Well-Known Text (WKT) format is the end result, and it can be easily incorporated into GIS platforms used by sugar mills and agronomists to direct transplant initiatives. Timely interventions based on the insights provided by the algorithm can significantly increase yield, resulting in higher profits. Hence, support proper allocation of resources, avoid wastage, and enhance long-term sustainability.

SkillSight: Seeing Through Shared Descriptions for Accurate Skill Retrieval

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18785v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As large language model agents gain access to increasingly large skill libraries, retrieving the right skill becomes critical to reliable capability selection and execution. Existing retrievers often treat skill descriptions as ordinary documents, overlooking their highly regular structure: shared descriptive patterns recur across many skills while providing little evidence for distinguishing the required capability. We show that this shared descriptive background systematically contributes to dense relevance scores, induces a pronounced energy gap between queries and skill documents, and obscures task-relevant signals. Based on this observation, we propose SkillSight, a training-free retrieval framework that calibrates shared background in both semantic and lexical spaces. Semantic Background Calibration estimates a background subspace from generic tokens identified by IDF, reducing similarity induced by shared descriptive patterns, while Lexical Evidence Calibration downweights shared background tokens to recover discriminative token-level evidence. Experiments on SRA-Bench and SkillBench-Supp demonstrate consistent improvements across retrieval metrics, with SkillSight improving Recall@10 by up to 20.21 percentage points over the original dense retriever. In end-to-end evaluation, SkillSight achieves the best overall performance across three agent models and outperforms LLM Selection by up to 4.97 percentage points. It is also up to 1,248 times faster than the Dense + Reranker baseline. These results identify shared descriptive background as a key source of bias in skill retrieval and demonstrate that explicitly calibrating it enables accurate and efficient skill selection without additional training. Our code is available at https://github.com/xiaojinying/SkillSight.

Beyond Noisy Signals: Dual-Level Denoising for Multi-modal Sequential Recommendation

Jie Luo, Qi Jin, Xinming Zhang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18786v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-modal Sequential Recommendation (SR) incorporates rich side information (e.g., textual and visual features) to enhance dynamic user preference modeling. However, existing frameworks inevitably suffer from a \textbf{Dual-Noise Dilemma}: (1) \textit{Feature-level redundancy} stemming from the semantic gap between generic pre-trained representations and fine-grained recommendation intent; and (2) \textit{Sequence-level stochasticity} induced by spurious interactions such as accidental clicks. To break this bottleneck, we propose \textbf{DDMSR}, a novel \textbf{D}ual-level \textbf{D}enoising \textbf{M}ulti-modal \textbf{S}equential \textbf{R}ecommendation framework that systematically purifies signals from both feature-topological and sequence-frequency perspectives. Specifically, we first design a graph-based feature denoising module that leverages Laplacian smoothing on item semantic graphs as a structural low-pass filter, effectively suppressing high-frequency semantic noise while preserving salient features. For sequence purification, we introduce a frequency-domain sequence denoising module, utilizing the Fast Fourier Transform and a learnable frequency filter to adaptively modulate the interaction spectrum and attenuate anomalous signals. Furthermore, a multi-modal contrastive alignment objective is incorporated to bridge the heterogeneity gap and enforce cross-modal semantic consistency. Extensive experiments on four public benchmark datasets demonstrate that DDMSR consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, providing a highly robust and efficient solution for multi-modal sequential recommendation. The source code is available at: ~\href{https://github.com/jluo00/DDMSR}{\textcolor{blue}{https://github.com/jluo00/DDMSR}}.

Image Editing Models are Numerical Solvers

Ulysse Mizrahi — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18787v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate whether a pretrained generative image-editing model can provide a common interface for numerical simulation. Physical inputs and solutions are rendered as images, while scalar quantities such as material properties, diffusivity, and loading parameters enter through lightweight adapters. Using established numerical and analytic solvers for supervision, we apply the same architecture and training protocol to heterogeneous elliptic equations, forced heat and Burgers evolution, complex Ginzburg-Landau dynamics, two-dimensional Navier-Stokes prediction, potential flow, elasticity, eikonal travel time, phase-field fracture, and entropic optimal transport. The results show that a pretrained image model can represent diverse static and time-dependent physical mappings, including unstable and shock-like behavior, when each task is expressed through a suitable visual encoding. This work is a capability study rather than an attempt to surpass specialized solvers. It also identifies fundamental constraints: image and latent representations complicate numerical range selection and direct enforcement of governing equations or invariants, while a failed Kuramoto-Sivashinsky experiment indicates that representation errors prevent meaningful long-horizon simulation of chaotic systems.

Moving Alphabet: A Controlled Study of Training Data for Text-to-Video Generation

Amber Yijia Zheng, Lu Liu, Raymond A. Yeh, Xi Yin — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18789v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Text-to-video generation has advanced significantly over the past five years through scaling of model size, data, and compute. Unlike model architecture, training data is often underexplored. Real-world data curation is complex and non-trivial, involving clip selection from raw videos and captioning to create video-text pairs for learning text-to-video mappings. We study how data distribution and caption quality impact text-to-video models. To enable controlled experiments, we introduce Moving Alphabet, a procedural testbed that renders letters with varying fonts, colors, sizes, and positions, moving in different directions and speeds against a black background. This design allows precise control over data distribution and caption quality by corrupting ground-truth metadata. Our experiments yield three findings: a) a diverse and balanced distribution of video content and duration is critical for generalization; b) caption quality significantly affects both model performance and training efficiency, suggesting that text-to-video models are bounded by video understanding capabilities; and c) classifier-free guidance and fine-tuning on high-quality data provide partial recovery from models trained on corrupted captions, but cannot fully compensate for poor pre-training data. We believe these insights can inform the development of large-scale text-to-video models, and we advocate for greater attention to the science of pre-training data.

STS-NET: Spatio-Temporal Stress Network for Self-Supervised Crop Stress Detection using Satellite Image Time Series

Pradeep Dalal, Rajiv Ranjan, Sushil Ghildiyal, Shashank Tamaskar, Neeraj Goel — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18791v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Early and accurate detection of crop stress is essential to improve agricultural productivity and ensure global food security. However, collecting a large labeled crop stress dataset is a challenging task. To address this challenge, we introduce a novel spatial-temporal stress network (STS-NET), built on a self-supervised 3D-convolutional autoencoder (3D-CAE), designed to utilize Satellite Image Time Series (SITS) data for crop stress detection. STS-NET exploits four vegetation indices: Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (GNDVI), Red-Edge Chlorophyll Index (RECI) and Normalized Difference Red-Edge Index (NDRE) obtained from high resolution Planetscope imagery to capture spatiotemporal stress patterns. The model is trained on our BSPT (Barnala Spatial-Temporal) dataset and evaluated on a real-world sugarcane dataset collected over a year from a 2.5-acre test plot located in Lakhimpur-Kheri (LK) district in Uttar Pradesh in India. STS-NET achieved a precision of 97. 98\% for water stress, 85.08\% for nitrogen stress, and 83.47\% for combined stress. The results demonstrate the potential of STS-NET in effectively detecting stress in sugarcane crops with minimal reliance on labeled data. Furthermore, STS-NET can serve as a robust feature extractor for simpler models.

Beyond Transformers: Linear Attention Policy for Open-Vocabulary Object Goal Navigation

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18794v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open-Vocabulary Object Goal Navigation (OVON) requires agents to operate under partial observability, making effective internal state updates critical for navigation performance. This update is implemented by the policy network, where recent approaches adopt Transformer-based backbones with self-attention over a context window to integrate temporal information. However, our controlled experiments show that performance does not scale with context length under Transformer-based policies, questioning the suitability of self-attention for state integration in navigation. To this end, we propose Linear Attention-based Navigation (LANav), which adopts linear attention (LA) as the policy backbone to maintain a structured state update rather than self-attention over the context window. Across multiple LA variants evaluated under identical settings, LANav consistently outperforms Transformer-based baselines. Performance improves as state update mechanisms become more structured and regulated, highlighting the importance of state update design. To improve state update effectiveness, we introduce Weighted State-Expansion Linear Attention (WSLA), which expands each attention head's state into multiple sub-states and uses learnable weighted readout to aggregate expanded sub-states. Equipped with WSLA, LANav achieves 36.4% average success rate (SR) on HM3D-OVON, outperforming Transformer-based counterparts by 6.3 percentage points in macro-averaged SR, while maintaining computational efficiency. Distance-stratified results show larger gains in long-distance episodes, while HSSD transfer and fine-tuning demonstrate robustness across scene distributions. Real-world deployment on a Unitree Go2 further achieves an 82% success rate over 50 trials, supporting the practical feasibility and sim-to-real transfer of LANav.

TSGR: Taobao Search Generative Retrieval

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18796v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative retrieval (GR) has demonstrated strong promise for industrial e-commerce search by training a single autoregressive model to directly generate the Semantic IDs (SIDs) of target items. However, existing GR systems are primarily optimized for semantic matching and remain insensitive to item business value: SID construction is value-unaware, and candidates are ranked without access to item side-info. Consequently, high-value items are often missed or deprioritized at the retrieval stage, limiting downstream business impact. This limitation is particularly critical in industrial settings such as Taobao Search, where business objectives are central to system design. To address this, we propose $\textbf{T}$aobao $\textbf{S}$earch $\textbf{G}$enerative $\textbf{R}$etrieval ($\textbf{TSGR}$), a unified generative retrieval framework that incorporates value awareness into both item representation and candidate ranking. 1) For item representation, TSGR introduces $\textbf{Query-aware Parallel SID (QP-SID)}$, which encodes query-conditioned value orderings into the SID construction by building parallel codebooks derived from query-item statistics, so that higher-value and query-relevant items are assigned better token indices. 2) For candidate ranking, we introduce a $\textbf{Value-aware Ranking Module (VRM)}$ that is built upon and jointly optimized with the GR, enabling a single model to seamlessly serve as both retriever and pre-ranker without a dedicated pre-ranking stage. A progressive training pipeline further aligns the model with semantic relevance, user preferences, and business objectives. Offline experiments show that TSGR achieves an 9.16% improvement in HR@1000, and online A/B tests further validate its effectiveness, yielding gains of +0.43% in IPV, +1.12% in Transaction Count, and +1.64% in GMV.

UVFaceFusion: Fast Multi-view Topologically Consistent Face Reconstruction in the Wild via UV-space Neural Fusion

Xin Ming, Yuxuan Han, Junhai Yong, Feng Xu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18798v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reconstructing high-fidelity facial geometry with an assigned topology is essential for digital avatar creation and animation, yet existing automated methods often trade off geometric fidelity and in-the-wild generalization. We present UVFaceFusion, a feed-forward framework for multi-view, fixed-topology face reconstruction from daily images. Our key idea is to replace heuristic topological optimization with learnable neural fusion in a canonical UV space. Given multi-view images, we first obtain dense point maps and facial UV correspondences of each view using VGGT and Pixel3DMM, respectively. Then, the view-specific point maps are lifted into the canonical UV domain and fused with a novel mask-aware neural fusion network. The network predicts a complete UV-space point map, from which a fixed-topology mesh is directly sampled. Although trained only on Ava-256, UVFaceFusion generalizes well to multiple public benchmarks and in-the-wild captures, benefiting from its canonical UV-space geometry-to-geometry fusion that reduces dependence on dataset-specific appearance and capture conditions. Experiments on various benchmarks show that UVFaceFusion achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction accuracy while reconstructing a mesh from 16 input views in less than 3 seconds on a single RTX 4090. Code is available at https://github.com/grignarder/UVFaceFusion.

ZeroSplat: Generalized Referring Segmentation in 3D Gaussian Splatting

Jiayu Ding, Meilu Song, Xiaoyi Zhang, Hongbo Jin, Yichen Jin, Xiangtian Si — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18801v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advancements in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have enabled language-guided scene understanding. However, existing Referring 3D Gaussian Splatting (R3DGS) methods are fundamentally restricted to single-target queries. To reflect the ambiguity of real-world instructions, we introduce the Generalized Referring 3D Gaussian Splatting Segmentation (GR3DGS) task, which requires dynamically segmenting an arbitrary number of targets (0, 1, or $N$). To facilitate comprehensive evaluation of this new task, we construct two new benchmarks: GR-LERF and GR-ScanNet. Crucially, existing R3DGS paradigms exhibit fundamental technical bottlenecks that severely limit their performance on the GR3DGS task: they lack intrinsic 3D point-level understanding by operating merely on 2D rendered pixels, and they incur prohibitive computational overhead by requiring per-scene optimization to embed heavy semantic features. To dismantle these bottlenecks, we propose ZeroSplat, a novel training-free and zero-feature framework. ZeroSplat lifts 2D Vision-Language Model (VLM) priors into 3D space through robust multi-view geometric constraints. This strategy enables intrinsic point-level understanding without incurring any additional feature storage. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ZeroSplat significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods across generalized and single-target scenarios while maintaining exceptional efficiency. Project Page: https://inkmind-ai.github.io/ZeroSplat

QScheduler: Adaptive Gradient Sampling for Zeroth-Order On-Device Training on INT8 NPUs

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18802v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Zeroth-Order (ZO) optimization enables On-Device Learning (ODL) on NPU-equipped microcontrollers by estimating gradients through forward passes alone, bypassing the need for backpropagation primitives and reducing memory requirements. The number of gradient samples q critically affects training: insufficient samples produce noisy gradients that plateau early, while excessive samples consume more computational resources. However, finding an optimal q typically requires costly hyperparameter searches. This work introduces QScheduler, an adaptive algorithm that adjusts q based on training progress, and provides the first proof-of-concept of INT8 quantized on-device training on the STM32N6's Neural-ART NPU. Experiments on EuroSAT and STL-10 show that QScheduler matches well-tuned fixed-q configurations for both ResNet18 and MobileNetV2, without requiring prior q hyperparameter optimization.

Elicitation without Backpropagation: Steering Model Behavior by Optimizing the Latent Posterior

Garrett Baker, Vinayak Pathak, Daniel Murfet, Susan Wei — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18804v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In the \emph{latent posterior model} of transformer behavior, the next-token distribution arises from a posterior over latent predictive models conditioned on the context, mixed to generate continuations. We exploit this model in settings where it is exact, namely Bayes-filtered transformers (BFTs) meta-learned on sequences from a hierarchical prior, to introduce \textbf{Posterior Prefix Tuning (PPT)}, a new method for \emph{eliciting} behavior from a transformer: given a utility function on continuations, find a prompt under which the transformer generates continuations of high expected utility. For a BFT, the elicitation objective factors through the latent posterior, and the gradient of this objective can be estimated from samples of the prior alone. PPT optimizes the parameters of a distribution over hard prompts: it draws prior samples once from the BFT via predictive Monte Carlo (PMC), then estimates the gradient by importance sampling against them. The optimization performs no transformer forward passes and no backpropagation through the transformer, and the prior samples are utility-independent, so a single set of samples drives elicitation against any number of utilities at negligible marginal cost. We validate PPT on Beta--Bernoulli and reinforced urn BFTs across three utility families (reverse cross-entropy, frequency matching, Dyck validity).

AI Tour Meeting: Group Travel Planning by LLM Agents

Daisuke Kikuta — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18806v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper proposes AI Tour Meeting, a group travel planning framework powered by multiple Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents. The agents are instantiated with distinct personas and collaboratively seek an itinerary that satisfies their constraints and preferences through natural language discussion. The framework enables easy and flexible orchestration of such discussions by providing interfaces for configuring agent personas, discussion workflows, monitoring, and LLM deployment. Its primary use case is a simulation tool for analyzing the behavior of multiple LLM agents during tour planning discussions. This paper demonstrates the utility of the framework by presenting system validation and several analytical results obtained by the framework.

AgentTrails: Towards Trust and Reuse for Agentic Tasks

Eden Wu, Sonia Castelo, Yurong Liu, Cl\'audio T. Silva, Juliana Freire — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18816v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-powered agents increasingly tackle complex tasks by invoking tools, querying databases, executing code, and manipulating intermediate artifacts. These agents follow trajectories that are typically stored as chronological logs, obscuring the underlying dataflow -- the dependencies between their actions and the artifacts they create and manipulate. This limits developers' ability to understand the agents' trails, compare executions, debug failures, and re-use the computations. We present AgentTrails, a prototype system for agent provenance and sensemaking. AgentTrails converts raw trajectories into structured provenance graphs, where tool calls are modeled as computational actions and inputs and outputs as data artifacts. The system supports the comparison of executions by placing multiple provenance graphs on a shared canvas and constructing a joined quotient graph that aligns recurring tools, artifacts, and dependency structures across trajectories. On top of this representation, AgentTrails supports pattern extraction, downstream analysis, and skill abstraction. We demonstrate AgentTrails on real-world agent trajectories, showing that it reveals hidden dependencies, aligns divergent executions, and surfaces recurring tool-use patterns beyond chronological logs.

CITRUS: Candidate Inference and Temporal-tracking for Reliable, Unobtrusive Sensing of Wearable Heart Rate under Motion

Yi Wang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18818v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Wearable photoplethysmography (PPG) provides continuous heart-rate measurements, but its accuracy degrades under motion. In the ring-platform benchmark, the best supervised baseline reaches 5.33 BPM mean absolute error (MAE) on the overall heart-rate task. In the motion-focused ring-only audit, a supervised LSTM baseline reaches $14.39 \pm 0.47$ BPM MAE on motion windows, and simple smoothing and ACC priors reduce this only to $13.00 \pm 0.41$ BPM. This thesis addresses motion-corrupted HR estimation through three connected stages: candidate-frequency identification, temporal decoding, and reliability-aware reporting. The study first evaluates two wearable PPG ring variants against clinical references for heart rate, respiration, SpO$_2$, and blood pressure in 54 participants. The proposed system then uses two layers. The estimation layer converts each window into approximately 140 frequency candidates, scores candidates using agreement among independent estimators, and applies causal Viterbi decoding with a physiological transition penalty. The reporting layer estimates reliability and applies a learned accept/hold/reject policy. Reporting only the most-confident 50% of motion windows reduces motion MAE from 10.8 to 6.2 BPM. The heart-rate estimator uses fewer than 100k parameters and runs within a microcontroller-class compute budget. Additional PPG-DaLiA experiments evaluate the same candidate-selection and temporal-decoding estimator on an independent wrist-BVP cohort.

In-Context Learning for Wound Classification with Small Multimodal Language Models

George Martvel, Oskar Gustafsson, John Pavia, Ernst Ahlberg — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18819v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Wound image classification is often treated as a task-specific supervised learning problem, requiring substantial amounts of manually labelled data and retraining when the label space or deployment setting changes. This study evaluated whether small multimodal language models (SMLMs) can provide a training-free alternative for wound classification through retrieval-based in-context learning (ICL). Experiments used two public wound-image datasets: the Kaggle wound dataset (1469 images, 10 classes) and the Medetec dataset (560 images, 9 classes). Eleven SMLMs from the Qwen 3.5, Ministral 3, and Gemma 4 families were evaluated under zero-shot prompting and few-shot prompting with random support examples, embedding-based k-nearest-neighbour (kNN) retrieval, and kNN retrieval followed by maximal marginal relevance reranking (MMR). Retrieval-only weighted-kNN controls, support-set reduction experiments, and support-context size sweeps were used to assess the effects of retrieval, model scale, and prompt length. Query-conditioned ICL consistently outperformed zero-shot and random few-shot prompting. On the Kaggle dataset, the best result was achieved by Qwen 3.5 27B with kNN+MMR, reaching 0.872 accuracy and 0.871 F1 score. On Medetec, Qwen 3.5 27B with kNN+MMR reached 0.678 accuracy and 0.670 F1. Larger models exceeded matched weighted-kNN controls, indicating use of retrieved examples beyond nearest-neighbour voting. Retrieval-based ICL degraded modestly under support-set reduction, and most gains saturated with 8-10 support images. Retrieval-based ICL allows SMLMs to perform adaptable wound image classification without task-specific retraining. Compact retrieved contexts may support practical and privacy-conscious deployment, although performance remains dependent on model scale, retrieval strategy, and dataset difficulty.

CASE: Causal Alignment and Structural Enforcement for Improving Chain-of-Thought Faithfulness

Ziming Wang, Yinghua Yao, Changwu Huang, Ke Tang, Xin Yao — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18820v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is widely used to improve both the performance and interpretability of large language models (LLMs), yet the generated reasoning may not faithfully support the final answer. We study this problem from a causal perspective, where a faithful CoT process should follow the chain $Z\rightarrow X\rightarrow Y$, with $Z$, $X$, and $Y$ denoting the instruction, reasoning chain, and final answer, respectively. In this process, the instruction should affect the answer only through the reasoning chain. However, conventional autoregressive LLMs condition answer generation on both the instruction and the CoT, which still allows a direct instruction-to-answer shortcut. To address this issue, we propose CASE, a framework that combines training-time causal alignment and inference-time structural enforcement. During training, CASE builds counterfactual-CoT, biased-instruction, and empty-instruction datasets, and applies selective-loss fine-tuning to strengthen CoT-to-answer dependence while suppressing instruction shortcuts. During inference, CASE masks direct attention from instruction tokens to answer tokens, preventing the model from bypassing the generated CoT. We provide an information-theoretic analysis showing how these components promote faithful chains. Experiments on three models and four benchmarks show that CASE achieves a 37\% average per-setting relative improvement in overall CoT faithfulness over the strongest baselines, exhibits stronger cross-dataset faithfulness transfer, and maintains competitive average accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/oddwang/CASE.

VirtualSet: Typed Ontology Worlds as an LLM Generation Target for Grounded Queries and Guarded Decisions

Qunhui Zhang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18821v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models increasingly read and act on enterprise data, but SQL gives a late error signal: hallucinated fields or relations can execute and return plausible wrong answers, while incorrect writes cannot be safely assessed after execution. We present VirtualSet, a live, receiver-typed ontology-world interface and generation target for LLMs. Instead of SQL, the model emits set expressions over entity-edge worlds. Generic Constraint Projection (GCP) checks expressions before execution, while future this preserves concrete receiver types through collection chains, turning invalid fields, edges, receivers, and actions into token-anchored type errors. Type-clean reads use a SQL fast path or bounded stream interpretation, with a parity oracle checking both paths over the exercised operator space. The same substrate supports guarded decisions: actions run first in a simulated world, and world-change events require external approval before actualization. On BIRD, we lift relational schemas into typed worlds and compare VirtualSet with direct SQL while holding the model, evidence, values, zero-shot setting, timeout, glossary, repair/voting, and grader constant where possible. On a frozen 1,072-question split, VirtualSet achieves 67.5% accuracy versus 63.5% for glossary-matched direct SQL with repair and voting (+4.0 points; McNemar exact p = 0.00117) using deepseek-reasoner. Full-corpus analysis finds no engine mis-computation of a type-clean expression; remaining errors arise from model semantics or gold defects. In a 30-body guard corpus, the write chain intercepts 20/20 hallucinated action bodies with zero false positives. VirtualSet thus remains competitive on SQL's home benchmark while providing pre-execution semantics for guarded decisions.

AILQA: Evaluating AI-Driven Legal Question Answering Systems for the Indian Legal System

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18825v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This comprehensive study introduces an advanced Artificial Intelligence for Indian Legal Question Answering (AILQA) system tailored to the Indian legal context. AILQA leverages a variety of embedding and generative models, including recent Large Language Models (LLMs), to address the unique challenges posed by the intricate and diverse nature of Indian legal texts and to enhance the accuracy and reliability of responses to legal questions. We conducted rigorous evaluations using both lexical and semantic metrics, enriched by expert legal feedback, to ensure relevance and accuracy. Our findings underscore the effectiveness of the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) paradigm in improving answer quality, particularly in complex legal domains. Additionally, we assessed performance on standardized tests such as the All India Bar Examination (AIBE), thereby providing a robust benchmark for practical applications. Under the study's evaluation protocol, some AI-generated responses received higher ratings than the available reference answers, particularly when they contained accurate and relevant supporting details. This finding is specific to the evaluated dataset and rating criteria and should not be interpreted as evidence that the models generally outperform qualified legal professionals. We also discuss the challenges encountered, such as the need for precise context and the risks of model hallucination, and propose directions for future research to further refine AI capabilities in the legal field. This study aims to pave the way for enhanced legal decision-support systems, making them more accessible and effective for legal professionals and the public alike.

Cross-Agent Campaign Attribution: Linking Asynchronous Attacks Across LLM Agents

SangJin Park, Myungsub Choi, Jineok Kim, Minseung Kang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18826v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-agent defenses are typically evaluated one session at a time. In deployment, however, attacks can be distributed across independent agents, teams, and runtimes, leaving each local guardrail with only a sparse fragment. We formalize cross-agent asynchronous campaign attribution: linking sessions from the same latent adversarial campaign without shared runtime state, test-time campaign labels, or attacker identity oracles. We introduce Asynchronous Attribution Fingerprint Vectors ($A^2FV$), a lightweight proxy-side reference protocol for scoring pairwise campaign similarity from proxy-observable tool-use, timing, and prompt residue. We also construct SCD-v1, a controlled persona-matched benchmark with benign traffic, isolated attacks, multi-session campaigns, matched non-oracle evasion, and leakage audits. On SCD-v1, $A^2FV$ achieves 0.82 pairwise AUC for campaign linking, while score-only adaptations of per-session detectors and chunked LLM judges remain near chance under the same task. The strongest fixed signal is carried by structural and stylometric residue, while timing is retained as a diagnostic channel for richer proxy traces. Crossed-style controls show that the signal is partly style-sensitive but not reducible to style alone. Static and dimension-aware non-oracle stress tests further show that pairwise separability persists under controlled evasion. These results establish cross-agent campaign attribution as a distinct evaluation layer for securing LLM agents in the wild.

Open-Vocabulary Gaze Object Prediction: Benchmark and Method

Binglu Wang, Sensen Niu, Ying Chen, Guangyu Guo — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18827v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Gaze Object Prediction (GOP) aims to localize and recognize the objects humans attend to, a task crucial for understanding human-centric interactions. However, existing methods are typically trained under a closed-vocabulary paradigm with a fixed label space and evaluated on scene-specific datasets, limiting their applicability to real-world scenarios where gaze targets often follow a long-tail distribution or belong to unseen categories. To address this gap, we introduce Diverse Scenes for Gaze object prediction (DiSG), a benchmark containing 86 in-the-wild categories that facilitates the evaluation of Open-Vocabulary GOP (OVGOP). Building on DiSG, we propose a framework that leverages text-driven object discovery to localize potential gaze candidates, with a gaze-guided selection module to pinpoint the intended target from the candidate objects. Furthermore, to better capture semantic knowledge across diverse in-the-wild categories, we introduce Gradient-Informed Selection Tuning (GIST) to selectively update parameters most relevant to a given class vocabulary. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed model performs effectively in open-vocabulary settings and also outperforms existing methods in the conventional closed-vocabulary setting. The benchmark and code is available at https://github.com/sensniu/ovgop.

Evaluating medical AI under missing information: same-provider judges and human raters change apparent safety

Koyar Afrasyab — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18828v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Readiness stress-testing of medical AI has focused on closed-ended and multimodal benchmarks. We extend it to open-ended clinical conversation under missing information, where safe behavior means recognizing absent information and qualifying, clarifying, or not over-committing - and where the evaluator becomes part of the measurement. We stress-test four models - three flagships (Claude Opus 4.8, GPT-5.5, Grok 4.3) and one mid-tier model (Gemini 3.5 Flash) - by deleting the latter half of the final user turn in HealthBench conversations, grading responses with a four-provider LLM-judge panel and a blinded clinician-anchored reference. Two evaluator-facing results are robust. First, judge choice materially changes apparent safety: inter-judge agreement is only moderate (Fleiss' kappa = 0.65), and after adjusting for each judge's general leniency (vote-level logistic regression), a positive same-provider association remains (exact permutation p = 0.04; GPT-5.5 ~ +0.10 on the probability scale) - large enough to change which model appears to over-commit least once its own-provider judge is excluded. Second, LLM judges are more permissive than clinicians on a blinded 50-item subsample: all four are significantly more lenient than the stricter independent clinician (crediting appropriate uncertainty on 66-84% of items vs 52%), and three of four than the author-influenced consensus (Grok directional only; judge-vs-consensus kappa = 0.20-0.43). On the author-audited clinical-underdetermined subset the permissiveness gap widened and the point-estimate model ordering held. A closed-ended MedQA anchor confirms accuracy is high and option-order effects are within a +/-5-point equivalence region for three of four models, so the safety gap is about calibration, not knowledge. We release the harness, prompts, per-item outputs, judge panel, perturbation audit, and human-annotation protocol.

Countercurrent Multiplier Networks: A Renal-Inspired Iterative Operator with Provably Bounded Fixed-Point Dynamics

Snigdha Chandan Khilar — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18829v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The mammalian kidney concentrates urine using a mechanism with no analogue in current neural architectures: the countercurrent multiplier. Two anti-parallel flows joined at a hairpin recirculate a weak magnitude-bounded local pump into a large axial gradient achieving a four-fold concentration increase from a single-effect gradient that never exceeds 200 mOsm at any point. We formalize this mechanism as a differentiable sequence operator the Countercurrent Multiplier (CCM) layer and study it as an alternative to residual iterative refinement.

From Trajectories to Instructions: Language-Conditioned Meta-Reinforcement Learning

Garvit Singla, Uma Maheswari Natarajan, Raghuram Bharadwaj Diddigi — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18830v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) is a widely used framework for reinforcement learning (RL) that enables efficient transfer by learning global policy parameters that can be rapidly adapted to new tasks. MAML training proceeds in two loops: an inner loop where the global parameters are adapted to task-specific parameters, and an outer loop where these task-specific parameters are evaluated and losses are back-propagated to improve the global parameters. Traditionally, the inner loop adaptation is performed by collecting trajectories from the task environment and applying gradient updates on the empirical expected return, which can be a costly operation. We note that it is the outer loop that drives the actual learning of global parameters, and therefore the inner loop adaptation mechanism need not be restricted to be gradient-based. This observation leads us to ask: Can we replace the inner loop trajectory collection and gradient update with a simpler, task-specific signal? In many practical settings, tasks are naturally accompanied by language instructions. Leveraging these instructions as a direct task-specific signal, we propose LA-MAML (Language Adapted MAML), which modifies the inner loop by adapting the global policy parameters in a single step through a learned embedding of the task instruction, replacing the inner loop trajectory collection and gradient-based updates. Experiments on the BabyAI benchmark demonstrate that LA-MAML achieves competitive or improved performance compared to baselines at a significantly lower per-iteration wall-clock training time. These results demonstrate that language instructions are an effective and efficient substitute for trajectory-based inner loop adaptation in meta RL.

ABOPD: Antibody CDR Design via On-Policy Distillation

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18835v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Antibodies are essential therapeutic molecules, and their complementarity-determining regions (CDRs) form the primary antigen-recognition interface. Recent protein generative models have demonstrated broad capabilities in biomolecular design, yet post-training strategies for downstream objectives remain limited. Standard denoising training operates on noisy states obtained by perturbing native structures, whereas recursive generation proceeds through model-generated intermediate states. For flexible antibody CDR loops such as CDR-H3, this mismatch can allow backbone deviations to accumulate along the denoising trajectory and compromise antigen-facing loop geometry. We introduce ABOPD, an antibody design framework based on on-policy distillation that leverages privileged native geometry during training to supervise states visited along the model's own denoising trajectories. With this fine-grained structural supervision, ABOPD substantially improves structural recovery on RAbD CDR-H3 generation, reducing RMSD by 0.42 {\AA} (from 2.37 {\AA} to 1.95 {\AA}) and outperforming supervised fine-tuning and offline distillation controls, offering a path to higher-fidelity protein design.

HPD-Parsing: Hierarchical Parallel Document Parsing

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18839v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient teamwork typically combines global coordination with parallel execution, a principle not yet fully reflected in unified Vision-Language Model (VLM)-based document parsers. Existing unified parsers process an entire page jointly but generate its output through a single token-by-token autoregressive trajectory, creating a sequential bottleneck that grows with document length. Such full-page sequential generation overlooks a key property of document parsing: layout must be analyzed globally, whereas block content can be parsed in parallel. Based on this observation, we introduce HPD-Parsing, which replaces full-page autoregressive generation with a Hierarchical Parallel Decoding paradigm. A main layout branch organizes the overall document structure and dynamically assigns block-level content decoding to concurrent branches, while progressive multi-token prediction (P-MTP) further reduces the decoding steps within each branch. Experiments on public benchmarks show that HPD-Parsing achieves 4,752 tokens per second, delivering $2.62\times$ the throughput of the fastest existing document parsing model and $3.06\times$ that of the vanilla autoregressive baseline, while maintaining competitive parsing accuracy. These results establish hierarchical parallel decoding as an effective alternative to full-page autoregressive generation, opening a new direction for efficient unified document parsing.

WorldScape Policy 2.0: Empowering Steerable World Action Modeling with Reasoning-Augmented Memory

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18840v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World Action Models (WAMs) offer a promising paradigm for robotic manipulation by jointly modeling visual state transitions and robot actions. However, existing WAMs are constrained by limited temporal context, coarse episode-level language supervision, and predominantly text-only conditioning, which hinder task-progress tracking and fine-grained language-video-action grounding while limiting visual-context reasoning and cross-embodiment transfer. In this paper, we introduce WorldScape Policy 2.0, a controllable WAM with reasoning-augmented long short-term memory. Its causal short-term visual memory supplies recent observations as DiT prefill to preserve local interaction dynamics, while its long short-term event memory organizes historical VLM outputs into global-history, local-active, and event-boundary representations for progress-aware retrieval. The retrieved history augments perception and autoregressively generated planning tokens, yielding an implicit subgoal condition for autonomous planning; semantic forcing further transfers event-level instruction semantics into this latent planning pathway. To establish fine-grained multimodal controllability, we construct ManipEvent-5M, an event-grounded embodied pretraining dataset containing nearly 5 million event segments with aligned action trajectories, episode-level task instructions, segment-level subtask captions, goal images, and video demonstrations. These designs provide a unified interface for autonomous planning from high-level instructions and controllable execution from fine-grained text, goal-image, or video-context prompts. Experiments in both simulation and real-world platforms demonstrate superior capabilities in long-horizon autonomous planning, fine-grained instruction following and in-context adaptation.

NSMA: Neuro-Symbolic Manifold Alignment for Generalizable Adaptive Bitrate Streaming under Texture Shift

Zhiqiang He, Zhi Liu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18845v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For decades, ABR has kept two kinds of intelligence apart. Neural policies learn rich behaviors yet forget them the moment the environment changes; rules never learn, and never forget. Every prior attempt to combine them has kept this separation, letting rules supervise, constrain, or override the network from outside. We dissolve the boundary itself. But no union can be trusted before it can be tested, and ABR has never known how to measure what its policies learn or forget. The field's yardstick is bandwidth statistics, and we show it misleads. Identical statistics can hide entirely different outcomes, while wildly different statistics can hide similar ones. We replace the yardstick before building the bridge, with Texture-Aware Generalization Evaluation, a protocol that judges a policy by its whole training journey across traces whose temporal nature is laid bare. What truly breaks a policy is invisible. No statistic reveals it, no feature extracts it, yet rules walk through it untouched, for they reason from physics and owe the data nothing. So we build the bridge. Neuro-Symbolic Manifold Alignment (NSMA) embeds rule decisions as anchors inside the latent space of the neural policy, so that it keeps learning where learning pays, and can no longer forget what rules have always known. Generalization cannot be argued, only survived. We raise NSMA on 3G traces alone and release it, without fine-tuning, into eight unseen datasets spanning 4G, 5G, and WiFi, and onto a real-world player. It outperforms every state-of-the-art baseline. And when we open its latent space to ask why, probing and visualization return the same answer the design promised. https://tinyzqh.github.io/NSMA/

Private Approximation of Graph Spectra and Cuts via Spectral Amplifiers

Chenglin Fan, Jingcheng Liu, Pan Peng, Hangyu Xu, Zongrui Zou — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18846v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of releasing a synthetic graph that approximates the sizes of all cuts of an input graph under edge-level differential privacy. If one insists on purely additive error, the optimal worst-case error is $\widetilde\Theta(n^{3/2})$. If one allows a small multiplicative slack, an information-theoretic exponential-time mechanism achieves nearly linear additive error, but the best known polynomial-time algorithms have substantially larger error. We give a polynomial-time $(\varepsilon,\delta)$-differentially private algorithm which, for every $n$-vertex unweighted graph $G$, outputs a non-negative weighted synthetic graph $\widetilde G$ such that, with high probability, every cut $S\subseteq V(G)$ satisfies \[ |w_G(S)-w_{\widetilde G}(S)| \le \gamma w_G(S)+\widetilde O_{\varepsilon,\delta,\gamma}(n^{13/12+o(1)}). \] This improves the previous polynomial-time worst-case bound $\widetilde O(n^{5/4+o(1)})$ of Aamand et al. (ICML 2025) for mixed multiplicative/additive private cut approximation. The main technical ingredient is a new set of private spectral primitives for bounded-degree graphs, one of them gives spectral error $\widetilde O_{\delta}((nd)^{1/4}/\sqrt\varepsilon)$ in estimating the graph Laplacian for graphs of maximum degree $d$, being the first to beat the standard $\min\{2d,\widetilde O_{\delta}(\sqrt{n}/\varepsilon)\}$ baseline in the high-degree regime. We further develop a primitive with a sharper error dependence on $n$ and $d$ for the downstream cut approximation. Combined with a new edge-sensitive terminal cut oracle with additive error $\widetilde O(n+(n^2M)^{1/3})$ on graphs with $M$ edges, this yields the final worst-case $\widetilde O(n^{13/12+o(1)})$ private cut-release error.

Data Leakage Prevention in Agentic Applications via Preemptive Hardening

Akansha Shukla, Emily Bellov, Parth Atulbhai Gandhi, Yuval Elovici, Asaf Shabtai — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18847v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic systems integrate LLM driven planning with interfaces to external tools, making data leakage and tool misuse feasible via instruction/data boundary failures and prompt injection attacks. Enforcing required controls consistently is particularly challenging in workflows spanning many codebases and heterogeneous agents. To address this challenge in multi agentic systems, we present a pre-deployment pipeline for scanning, hardening, and validation of agentic applications. The pipeline analyzes prompt templates, tool interfaces, and tool-invocation code to identify leakage-enabling patterns and generate actionable patches. The hardened application is then validated through adversarial prompt injection attacks and benign input variations ensuring that mitigations do not disrupt intended behavior. In the hardening stage, high-risk tools are prioritized, and minimally invasive mitigations are applied, including schema tightening, boundary sanitization, allowlist-based tool gating, and least-privilege checks. In the validation stage, the pipeline automatically generates attack inputs that mimic jailbreaks, instruction overrides, and tool-targeted manipulation, along with benign task variants, to confirm that the functionality of the hardened application is preserved after remediation. We evaluated the pipeline on five real-world agentic applications, as well as on the AgentDojo benchmark. Across all applications, the proposed pipeline identified recurring leakage-enabling patterns and generated patches that can be integrated without disrupting the intended application behavior. The resulting modifications of application code were shown to eliminate leaks when targeted by basic jailbreak and instruction-override attacks, achieving a 100% reduction in leakage, and reduce leaks by 91% under conditions of stress-induced manipulation, without the need of continuous runtime policy enforcement.

OPD-IAD: From Language Judgment to Industrial Anomaly Detection via On-Policy Self-Distillation

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18850v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have recently shown strong potential for industrial anomaly detection (IAD) by providing image-level anomaly judgments and interpretable defect reasoning. However, current LVLM-based IAD methods still struggle to produce precise pixel-level anomaly maps from generated language judgments. We aim to achieve precise pixel-level localization while using language as guidance rather than letting it dominate the visual response. Specifically, we propose \textbf{OPD-IAD}, an evidence-privileged dense on-policy self-distillation framework for LVLM-based IAD. OPD-IAD distills privileged defect evidence onto the model's own on-policy judgment trajectory, enabling the final generated judgment to be learned under dense supervision rather than treated only as a textual answer. The resulting judgment serves as a semantic condition for dense anomaly perception. To turn this condition into dense visual evidence, we introduce \textbf{Language-guided Visual Anchoring}, which uses a judgment reforward to re-encode the image and question under the final-judgment condition into semantic anchors and contrasts them with dense visual features through a contrastive heatmap head to generate anomaly maps. The language judgment therefore provides compact semantic guidance, while dense visual features remain the basis for pixel-level scoring, allowing language to guide anomaly localization without letting language quality directly dictate the pixel-level response. Extensive experiments show that OPD-IAD achieves the best overall performance among LVLM-based IAD methods, leading on most image-level, pixel-level, and QA metrics.

Pose-Parameterized Motion Planning and CBF-QP Self-Collision Filtering for a Long-Reach Drilling Boom

Mehdi Heydari Shahna, Tuomo Kivel\"a, Jouni Mattila — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18855v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-reach drilling booms must reach successive poses without self-collision. Moving from operator-supervised control toward autonomy requires collision-aware motion planning and execution. For the Sandvik SB60, this study adapts established methods by integrating pose-parameterized planning with a capsule-based control barrier function quadratic program (CBF-QP) in measured-state inverse kinematics (IK). A fixed task-specific parameter set within each task generates waypoints, detours, timed references, and chained motion without target-specific retuning. The offline detour planner screens candidate waypoints using 23 selected rod-segment-to-body-region distances, whereas the online CBF-QP filters joint velocities using 14 configured capsule-pair constraints from a nine-primitive whole-body capsule model. Evaluation considers two drilling tasks in a manufacturer-developed SB60 Simscape Multibody model: a five-target restricted-orientation tour and a three-target full-pose tour. Across several hundred thousand samples, the method produced zero IK failures, generated several detour waypoints, achieved millimetre-level mean final-position error, and recorded no sampled CBF margins below the reported thresholds.

Think Sparse, Predict Dense: Continuous Thought Machines for Image Super-Resolution

Zekai Shi — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18856v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continuous Thought Machines introduce an internal temporal dimension in which neuron-level histories and synchronization-derived representations evolve over a sequence of thought ticks. Extending this mechanism to dense visual prediction is non-trivial, because tasks such as image super-resolution require spatial evidence to remain available at every output location rather than being compressed into a single global representation. In the proposed window-level use of CTM, the thought dynamics produce a compact summary representation for each local window. DQ-CTM transforms this compact thought representation into window-aligned dense queries through a structured low-rank, parameter-efficient compact-to-dense query mechanism. Each position within a window receives its own query, while shared thought dynamics progressively refine the dense representation across ticks. In its super-resolution instantiation, termed ThinkSR, encoded feature maps are partitioned into local visual windows without token pooling, restored to the original feature field after shared refinement, and decoded into a high-resolution image. Preliminary experiments under a fixed four-tick training horizon reveal a progressive reconstruction trajectory. PSNR-Y increases from 28.1045 dB at $T=0$ to 30.2817 dB at $T=4$, while PSNR-RGB increases from 26.6271 dB to 28.7781 dB and the mean $\ell_1$ error decreases from 0.034602 to 0.023545. All 100 evaluated images improve from $T=1$ to $T=4$. These initial results establish the feasibility of sparse latent thought for dense spatial reconstruction and motivate broader continuous-thought architectures for dense vision.

PhoenixRepair: Rethinking Repair Strategy Exploration in Software Agents

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18859v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While Large Language Models have greatly advanced automated issue resolution, existing agent-based methods exhibit a fundamental limitation in their insufficient exploration of repair strategies. This insufficiency manifests in two key aspects. First, the exploration of multiple potential edit locations is limited. Second, the exploration of repair attempts at each location is also insufficient. To address these challenges, we present PhoenixRepair, a multi-agent framework that systematically explores multiple candidate edit locations and performs iterative reflection and refinement on patch generation, thereby expanding the search space of repair strategies. Our framework begins with multi-location sampling, optionally augmented with graph-based localization information for difficult tasks, followed by iterative reflection and refinement to generate better patches, culminating in final-round generation guided by distilled insights from all historical attempts. Experiments on SWE-bench-Verified demonstrate that PhoenixRepair achieves the largest relative improvement of 7.8\% over SWE-agent under DeepSeek-V3.1, and attains the highest resolved rate of 76.0\% Pass@1 under MiniMax-M2.5. Meanwhile, it achieves higher fault localization accuracy than existing approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/DeepSoftwareAnalytics/PhoenixRepair.

Regime-Aware Physics-Guided Early Warning of Lithium-Ion Battery Thermal Runaway Using Thermo-Mechanical Signals

Syed Sajid Ullah, Muhammad Zunair Zamir, Salman Khan — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18860v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Thermal runaway in lithium-ion batteries poses a major safety risk to electric vehicles and energy storage systems. Current early-warning methods depend mainly on temperature and may therefore miss mechanical precursors that emerge before rapid heating. We introduce a regime-aware, physics-guided framework that integrates temperature, voltage, force, deformation, and state-of-charge measurements for early warning under controlled mechanical abuse. A lightweight convolutional classifier first infers safe, warning, or danger regimes from mechanical signals. These regime estimates then condition a causal temporal convolutional backbone through feature-wise linear modulation, physics-biased attention, and regime-dependent gating. Joint learning unifies regime identification, thermal-runaway detection, and time-to-disaster estimation. We evaluate the framework using leave-one-experiment-out cross-validation on 30 mechanical-abuse tests across state-of-charge levels of 10%, 50%, and 90% and two loading protocols. The method achieves an F1 score of 0.89, a high-temperature prediction root-mean-square error of 12.3 {\deg}C, a mean warning lead time of 15.6 s, a detection success rate of 0.92, and an experiment-level false alarm rate of 2.7%. Its lead time exceeds that of the strongest baseline by 69.6%. Removing force reduces the lead time by 60.3%, highlighting the value of mechanical precursors. These results support regime-aware thermo-mechanical fusion as a promising strategy for earlier and more reliable thermal-runaway warning under controlled abuse conditions.

Reliability-Aware 3D Geometric Injection for Universal Person Re-identification

Bohan Su, Jiashuo Wang, Fangyi Liu, Mang Ye — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Universal person re-identification (ReID) aims to retrieve pedestrian identities across diverse real-world scenarios, including severe occlusions, clothing changes, and cross-modality shifts, within a unified model. However, existing 2D representations fundamentally struggle with spatial ambiguities due to a lack of depth and topological awareness, while naively introducing monocular 3D priors often causes severe negative transfer due to geometric estimation noise under extreme visual degradation. To safely harness the clothing-invariant and canonical structural properties of 3D geometry, we propose UniGeo, a Universal Monocular 3D-Enhanced ReID framework driven by a Consistency-Aware Reliability Gate and Dual-Stream Residual Fusion. Specifically, the processing of 3D information is strategically decoupled into geometric extraction and dynamic utilization. To provide pure structural compensation, we project monocular 3D parameters into kinematic joint representations, explicitly capturing instance-level geometric topology to resolve appearance-based ambiguities. To robustly incorporate these cues without perturbing the reliable 2D feature space, we isolate the 3D prior as a late-stage structural residual; modulated by the consistency-aware gate, this mechanism adaptively filters geometric noise and enables controlled fallback to the pure 2D baseline. Extensive experiments show that our method improves challenging, structure-sensitive scenarios while preserving competitive performance on clean domains. Code is available at https://github.com/BohanSu/UniGeo.

Evaluating a Visual Query Tracer and Builder for Learning Declarative Logic Programming

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18864v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Nemo Explain Visualizer (nev) is an interactive visual query tracer and builder for Nemo, a powerful Datalog reasoner with extended features. Our tools were developed with and for expert users. However, considering the lack of resources to learn Datalog and similar declarative logic programming languages, we conducted a qualitative user study to assess how our tools might help students. The study, interviewing 14 participants with varying levels of involvement with the content of a university course on knowledge graphs, revealed a very positive assessment of our tools, which strengthens the value of visual explanation tools beyond their intended use.

HindsightBench: A Black-Box Behavioral Audit Protocol for Parametric Hindsight in Time-Indexed LLM Decision Tasks

Haozhe Jia — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18867v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models leak parametric knowledge of realized outcomes into historical financial decision tasks. Existence is settled; what users lack is a cheap way to audit a given model for it. We present HindsightBench, a black-box behavioral audit protocol that profiles parametric hindsight in any time-indexed LLM decision task at probe-level cost (no backtests, no logprobs, no corpus access). The protocol chains a four-arm date-manipulation matrix (revealed/date-only/masked/transplanted), dual memory probes (date recovery; outcome recall), and six per-model metrics -- trigger strength, transplant effect, post-cutoff placebo, recoverability, behaviorally effective knowledge cutoff, and a recall-accuracy dissociation coefficient -- with explicit gates where identifiability is data-dependent. Applying it to 15 models from seven vendors on a 258-node vintage-correct macro panel yields three headline patterns: (i) the date-trigger reflex tracks training generation, not scale -- absent across the 2024 open-weight generation from 1B to 70B, present in every tested 2026-generation model, and switching on within one vendor lineage (Qwen3 -> Qwen3.6) at fixed MoE architecture and 3B active parameters; (ii) effective cutoffs span 22 months across vendors and precede vendor-reported dates by up to eight months, invalidating calendar-window placebo designs; (iii) audit results are not invariant to serving -- BF16 serving of an FP8-referenced model breaks the trigger estimate's stability while AWQ-INT4 preserves it, and a provider-locked reasoning regime makes one probe non-convergent -- so the protocol ships with operational requirements (pin quantization and thinking regime; disclose parser and sampling policy). We release the panel, frozen preregistrations, per-model audit rows with measured dollar costs, transcripts, and one-command regeneration.

Tracing the Shadows: Automatic Tracking and Analysis of Crypto Money Laundering via Transaction Semantic Analysis

Hao Wu, Haijun Wang, Shangwang Li, Yin Wu, Ming Fan, Ting Liu, Xiapu Luo — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18869v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: With the rapid advancement of decentralized finance (DeFi), security incidents related to cryptocurrency have become increasingly prevalent. After such incidents, attackers typically attempt to rapidly move stolen assets, concealing the origin of illicit funds and ultimately converting them into fiat currency. However, existing anti-money laundering (AML) methods struggle to cope with the semantic complexity of DeFi transactions. They either rely heavily on low-level token transfers, or perform protocol-agnostic money flow analysis, failing to capture the high-level intent of transactions. In this paper, we propose AMLGuard, a semantic-aware AML framework for account-based blockchains. AMLGuard tracks illicit fund flows from known malicious addresses by performing semantic analysis on complex DeFi transactions, enabling accurate and continuous laundering tracking. Given a complex transaction, AMLGuard combines static rule-based analysis with retrieval-augmented large language model (LLM) reasoning to infer implicit DeFi semantics, transforming raw transaction data into high-level semantic representations. Furthermore, for cross-chain transactions where laundering intent is not explicitly exposed, AMLGuard parses transaction parameters and performs argument parsing to recover cross-chain semantics, enabling seamless tracking across ledgers. Based on the inferred semantics, AMLGuard abstracts each transaction into a DeFi Semantic Unit (DSU). We evaluate the effectiveness of AMLGuard on 82 real-world laundering cases, involving illicit assets worth over $1 billion. Specifically, AMLGuard reconstructs compact illicit fund-flow topologies with destination precision of 94.4% and 87.6%, while achieving the highest address recall of 98.4% and 95.8% and destination recall of 94.1% and 93.8% on single-chain and cross-chain datasets.

Reinforcement Learning for Delivery Drone-Based Participatory Sensing in Dynamic Environments

Xin Ouyang, Songxin Lei, Xusen Guo, Yutian Jiang, Sijie Ruan, Yuxuan Liang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18874v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) for urban sensing has emerged as a powerful paradigm to monitor the status of the city, e.g., air quality and noise levels, through agile aerial crowdsourcing. Despite this potential, existing UAV-based sensing approaches overlook environmental disturbances like wind that drastically impact drone velocity and energy efficiency. Consequently, directly applying existing methods to this joint delivery and sensing paradigm in dynamic environments faces two severe challenges: (1) scalability bottlenecks as fleet sizes expand; and (2) multi-timescale decision heterogeneity between macro task dispatching and micro velocity control. To tackle these, we formalize the problem as SensUAV and propose a Two TimeScale Reinforcement Learning framework (TSRL). Specifically, TSRL separates decision-making into two cooperative layers. At the macro level, a task-embedding sensing dispatcher handles scalability by separately encoding distinct task features and sequentially evaluating UAV suitability before task selection. At the micro level, a wind-aware velocity controller learns fine-grained velocity scheduling to adapt to dynamic environmental variations. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that TSRL significantly outperforms baselines, achieving average system profit improvements of 20.1% in Hangzhou and 46.6% in Shanghai.

Wave2Body: Rethinking mmWave Human Pose Estimation as Radar-to-Body Token Translation

Bo Liang, Chen Gong, Wei Gao, Chenren Xu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18875v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar enables privacy-friendly human sensing, but its sparse point clouds are physical measurements of view-dependent electromagnetic reflections and only indirectly characterize body articulation. Recovering a complete 3D pose from such partial, geometry-dependent observations is therefore under-constrained. Existing methods directly regress joint coordinates from paired radar-pose data, relying on the same limited paired supervision to learn radar perception, human-body structure, and their alignment. This coupling can encourage dataset-specific shortcuts under ambiguous radar observations. We propose Wave2Body, a radar-to-body token translation framework that decouples these learning targets using a self-supervised mmWave tokenizer, a pretrained compositional body tokenizer that defines the output space, and a lightweight translator between them. Experiments on M4Human and mmBody show that Wave2Body achieves stronger cross-domain generalization than previous methods while incurring much lower computational costs for training and inference. All the code and experiment results are publicly available at https://github.com/Galaxywalk/Wave2Body.

Physics-Informed Super-Resolution of Atmospheric Data

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18877v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In the context of global warming, extreme events have become more frequent and intense, making their trustworthy detection and forecasting more important than ever. Yet, atmospheric observations lack sufficient spatial resolution, motivating atmospheric data downscaling as a way to reconstruct high-resolution data from coarse observations. This task is now being formulated as a super-resolution (SR) problem with machine learning methods featuring high efficiency. Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether the super-resolved atmospheric data still satisfies fundamental physics governing the Earth system, raising concerns about their trustworthiness in climate-related applications. In this work, we address this challenge by constraining SR models to respect hydrostatic primitive equations that represent multivariate atmospheric physics. First, we propose a Physics-Informed Super-Resolution (PISR) method involving multi-scale physics-informed objectives based on primitive equations. PISR favors the SR outputs to respect these equations and therefore naturally encodes inter-variable relationships. In addition, we propose a metric called Normalized Physical Consistency (NPC) derived from said primitive equations to measure the physical consistency of super-resolved data. Experiments on ERA5, CERRA, and COSMO demonstrate that PISR enhances the reconstruction fidelity by improving physical consistency, SR accuracy, and downstream detection of extreme events, as demonstrated by case studies in heatwaves and extreme winds.

The Complexity of Domatic Criticality

Holger Spakowski — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18878v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The domatic number dom(G) of a graph G is the maximum number of dominating sets in a partition of its vertex set. A graph is domatically critical if deleting any edge lowers its domatic number. We determine the complexity of recognizing domatically critical graphs both when the domatic number is prescribed and when it is unrestricted. The problems DomCrit_1 and DomCrit_2 are polynomial-time decidable; in particular, DomCrit_2 consists precisely of the nonempty disjoint unions of nontrivial stars. In contrast, for every fixed integer k >= 3, the problem DomCrit_k is DP-complete under polynomial-time many-one reductions. The hardness proof at target value three uses a switch construction that reduces from edge-minimal 3-uncolorability and controls the effect of deleting every edge of the constructed graph. Clique addition then lifts the target-three result to every larger fixed target value. For the unrestricted recognition problem, we prove DP-hardness and membership in Theta_2^p.

Mapping Without Graphs: Learning Coherence Traffic for Task Placement

Guochu Xiong, Tianrui Ma, Weichen Liu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18879v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cache coherence is essential for communication in many-core Network-on-Chip (NoC)-based systems. As application scale and complexity increase, efficiently managing communication becomes increasingly challenging, making task mapping a key optimization technique. However, existing task mapping approaches suffer from two major limitations. First, they rely on predefined task graphs whose dependencies are typically derived from program structure or runtime information, such as dataflow, synchronization, traces, or profiling, without explicitly capturing coherence-induced interactions arising from shared data accesses. Consequently, these graphs provide only a partial representation of inter-task relationships, limiting mapping effectiveness. Second, they generally overlook cache coherence, even though coherence traffic constitutes a significant portion of NoC communication. This mismatch between modeled communication behavior and actual runtime interactions often leads to suboptimal mappings and degraded system performance. To address these limitations, we propose CoTM, a coherence-aware task mapping framework that constructs task graphs by inferring inter-task dependencies from dynamic coherence behavior. CoTM employs a lightweight heuristic with a multi-start optimization strategy to iteratively refine task placement, guided by a coherence-aware penalty function that jointly considers coherence traffic and NoC performance metrics. Experimental results demonstrate that CoTM reduces average link utilization by up to 47.85% and total energy consumption by up to 10.30% compared with existing approaches. These results highlight the importance of incorporating cache coherence into task mapping and demonstrate the potential of coherence-aware optimization for future many-core NoC systems.

Local Label-Informed Feature Transfer for Generating Ground-Truth Medical Images: A Comparison of GAN- and Diffusion-Based Approaches

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18882v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Validating Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods in medical imaging requires ground-truth data with known locations of informative features. However, current approaches rely on expert annotations, which are prone to labeling errors, or on hand-crafted artificial perturbations superimposed onto healthy images to mimic lesions or malignant features, which lack clinical realism. We present Local Label-Informed Feature Transfer (LLIFT), a framework for generating semi-synthetic brain magnetic resonance images with realistic lesions placed in user-controlled regions, which does not require pixel-level lesion annotations during training. We implement LLIFT with two generative paradigms: LLIFT-GAN, a custom GAN that learns pathological features from binary class labels alone, and LLIFT-DM, a diffusion-based inpainting pipeline conditioned on bounding-box masks via ControlNet. Both approaches are evaluated on brain magnetic resonance imaging data derived from the Human Connectome Project. In evaluations, both achieve Fr\'echet Inception Distance scores, with respect to the real pathological distribution, that are comparable to the inter-class reference between healthy and pathological images in the given dataset. Furthermore, qualitative inspection confirms the realism of lesion structures. The resulting benchmark datasets provide spatially controlled ground truth data for evaluating XAI methods in medical imaging.

RAMP: Recognition parametrisation by Amortised Message Passing

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18883v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A central aim of unsupervised learning is to uncover latent factors that explain dependencies among observations. Probabilistic models typically achieve this by introducing multiple latent variables linked through a graph of conditional relationships, with distributional parameters and their dependence learnt from data. Learning relies either on distributional choices that allow tractable belief propagation, or on approximations that scale poorly with model size and complexity. We build on the recently developed recognition-parametrised modelling paradigm to propose an alternative approach: RAMP, a method that implicitly defines latent structure by learning a flexible, nonlinear, amortised message-passing framework. We show that RAMP enables efficient likelihood-based recovery of latent-variable distributions within expressive nonlinear models acting on complex high-dimensional data.

Public perceptions of AI-driven decision-making in healthcare: A structural equation modeling approach

Leonie Westerbeek, Ernesto de Leon, Julia C. M. van Weert — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18884v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly integrated into healthcare to support diagnostics, decision-making, and administrative processes. However, the successful implementation of AI depends not only on technical performance but also on public perceptions of its helpfulness, riskiness, and fairness. This study examines public perceptions of automated decision-making (ADM) in healthcare. Data were drawn from the first wave of an ongoing longitudinal survey panel. The final sample consisted of 3,915 respondents and was analyzed with structural equation modeling. Perceptions of ADM in healthcare as helpful, risky, and fair were treated as the dependent variables. AI literacy, familiarity with different forms of AI, confidence in clinicians' ability to distinguish AI- from human-generated content, use of conversational agents for health information, and use of traditional digital health information sources were included as exogenous. Greater familiarity with different forms of AI, higher confidence in the clinician's ability to recognize AI-generated content, and use of conversational agents for health information were associated with greater perceived helpfulness. Use of conversational agents was associated with lower perceived risk, whereas greater familiarity with AI and greater reliance on traditional health information sources were associated with higher perceived risk. Perceptions of ADM as fair were most strongly predicted by confidence in the clinician's ability, with additional small positive associations with AI familiarity, AI literacy, and use of conversational agents. Public perceptions of ADM in healthcare are shaped by technological familiarity, use of conversational agents, and confidence in human oversight. Overall, ADM's perceived helpfulness and fairness are driven more by trust in healthcare professionals than by trust in the technology itself.

KALE: Kernel Alignment with Loss Equilibration for Stable CLIP-DINOv2 Alignment at Web Scale

Micha{\l} Paw{\l}owicz — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18885v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Kernel-based alignment of CLIP toward a vision centric teacher such as DINOv2 (KUEA) improves CLIP's visual representations while preserving text-encoder compatibility, using a fixed trade-off weight tuned on curated ImageNet-1K. We ask whether this transfers to noisy, web-scale data (CC12M) and find that it does not: the alignment term's weighted contribution falls to about 0.2% of the clean term, so under any fixed weight its gradient is effectively inert. We introduce KALE, a loss-equilibration controller that tracks both losses and adaptively rescales the alignment weight toward a target ratio, restoring the signal with no per-dataset tuning; reaching balance requires increasing the weight by roughly four orders of magnitude, and the required value is configuration-dependent, so no fixed scalar suffices. We characterize the resulting regime: a bounded high learning rate and a decaying schedule with a moderate floor are needed for stability, and the controller equilibrates rather than diverging. On a 3.3M-image CC12M subset, the aligned model preserves image-text retrieval and reproducibly improves SVHN linear probing; zero-shot improves by +2.00 over CLIP on the standard 11-dataset average, exceeding KUEA's +1.29. We report all results with explicit run-to-run variance and base our conclusions on the metrics that are stable across runs.

TraceDev: A Traceability-Driven Multi-agent Framework for Requirement-to-Code Development

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18886v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In modern software development, the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has made the end-to-end transformation of Natural Language Requirements (NLRs) into executable repository-level code increasingly feasible. However, existing approaches typically rely on simplified instructions (e.g., single-sentence descriptions), failing to reflect complex software development scenarios. Moreover, they lack explicit requirement traceability mechanisms, making it difficult to precisely align and validate generated code against original requirements. To address these limitations, we propose TraceDev, a multi-agent framework for automated software development grounded in use cases that contain multiple functional points and complex semantics. TraceDev employs five role-specific agents, including a Requirement Refiner, Designer, Developer, Tester, and Validator. Notably, the Validator Agent constructs and maintains a heterogeneous traceability graph that links requirements, design models, and code artifacts for interacting with the preceding four agents. The traceability graph maintains consistency across various artifacts and serves as a structured context for efficient memory management, supporting reliable repository-level code generation. We evaluate TraceDev on two widely used datasets (including 125 use cases) compared with two state-of-the-art approaches. On the ETOUR dataset, TraceDev achieves a success rate of 53.63\%, outperforming baseline approaches by up to 186.63\%. A similar trend is observed on the SMOS dataset, where TraceDev attains a success rate of 56.82\%, exceeding baseline approaches by up to 340.80\%. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of TraceDev in repository-level code generation from requirements.

NaviAIS: A Scenario-Level Vessel Trajectory Prediction Dataset withVectorized Lane Priors and the NaviLane Forecasting Framework

Yuan Gui, Hongchen Luo, Liqi Qu, Longyue Fu, Jiao Wang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18887v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vessel trajectory prediction in complex maritime environments is essential for traffic management, collision warning, route planning, and autonomous navigation. Although AIS-based learning methods have progressed rapidly, existing datasets are often released as raw message streams or irregular time series, with inconsistent sampling rates, noisy observations, heterogeneous coordinate systems, and non-unified scenario protocols. Most public AIS resources also lack structured representations of navigational lanes, waterway geometry, and navigable-region constraints, limiting reproducible, environment-aware forecasting. To address this, we introduce NaviAIS, a standardized scenario-level AIS dataset for vessel trajectory prediction. It organizes multi-vessel historical-future trajectories within unified temporal windows and local coordinate systems, and provides rasterized navigable maps, vectorized lane priors, lane graphs, and structured map representations. Compared with existing datasets, it jointly supports vectorized lanes, multi-scenario coverage, vectorized maps, open accessibility, and processed trajectories. Built on this dataset, we propose NaviLane, a hierarchical macro-action framework for map-aware prediction. NaviLane first performs trajectory-map joint encoding for a unified scene representation, then uses a discrete macro-action codebook to generate multimodal candidates coarse-to-refined. A residual refinement module improves local geometric and dynamical consistency, and a world-model-based consequence-aware evaluator ranks candidates by interaction risk and environmental feasibility. Experiments show NaviLane outperforms representative baselines in both single-modal and multimodal settings, confirming the value of structured navigational priors, hierarchical multimodal generation, and consequence-aware evaluation.

Flexible Intelligent Metasurface-Aided ISAC: User Fairness Optimization and Performance Evaluation

Hailun Huang, Yuwen Cao, Jiguang He, Tomoaki Ohtsuki — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18893v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper investigates max-min user fairness optimization for flexible intelligent metasurface (FIM) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-assisted integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems with active self-localization. To tackle the multi-user interference, performance imbalance, and neglected sensing accuracy problems encountered in conventional ISAC designs, we derive the closed-form Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) for angle-of-departure (AoD) estimation in target sensing and embed it into a max-min fairness optimization framework. The optimization problem, which jointly designs the base station transmit beamforming, FIM reflection coefficients, and surface deformation, is non-convex and solved by an alternating optimization (AO) algorithm. Notably, the devised optimization framework facilitates superior performance trade-off in terms of spectrum resource utilization between communication and sensing tasks. Simulation results validate that the proposed scheme significantly improves user fairness, balances communication performance and sensing precision effectively, and reveals the coupling characteristic between signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and sensing CRLB. This work provides a feasible solution for FIM-aided ISAC system optimization in 6G networks.

Bifurcation Analysis of Sub-Synchronous Oscillations Related to Grid-Forming Converter Inner Controllers

Luke Ian Benedetti, Robin Preece, Panagiotis N. Papadopoulos — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18894v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To ensure power system stability and security, it is vital to understand the complex nonlinear power system dynamics related to converter-interfaced generators. For example, grid-forming (GFM) converters are expected to be a key asset for maintaining a strong and stable power system, but might cause wide-bandwidth stability issues with underlying mechanisms heretofore unseen or understudied, including sub-synchronous oscillations (SSOs). This paper details a continuation-based bifurcation analysis of a GFM converter, revealing stability bounds with respect to operational conditions in addition to the time constant of the cascaded inner voltage and current controllers. We focus our analysis on the strong grid instability caused by an inner controller-related SSO, including continuation of the limit cycle past the Hopf bifurcation point, revealing rapid onset of unacceptably large oscillations. Furthermore, we investigate the impact of the circular current limiter, revealing spurious Hopf bifurcations in weak grids associated with the aforementioned SSO when adopting smooth approximations; this suggests the need for careful implementation of such approximations for GFMs, at least in bifurcation studies.

Black-Mamba: Biologically-Inspired Leaky Accumulation for Conceptual Knowledge under Distribution Drift

Giuseppe Soriano, Nicola Tonellotto, Alberto Gotta — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18899v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Forecasting under real-world conditions is inherently non-stationary, as the conditional distribution of future observations evolves over time. Recent test-time adaptive sequence models address this challenge by updating internal states during inference, but tie adaptation to instantaneous prediction errors or surprise. This coupling can conflate persistent distribution shift with stochastic innovations, leading to unnecessary updates and inefficient adaptation. We introduce Black-Mamba, a test-time adaptive forecasting architecture that formulates online adaptation as evidence-gated state tracking under distribution drift. The model augments a base predictor with a dynamic memory updated when temporally accumulated surprisal provides sufficient evidence of a regime change. This turns adaptation into a selective, event-driven process rather than a continuous one. Across multiple forecasting benchmarks with non-stationary dynamics, Black-Mamba achieves competitive or improved predictive performance compared to existing test-time adaptation methods while significantly reducing the number of memory updates during inference. Together with mathematical analysis and biological evidence, these results suggest that accumulated surprisal provides a principled signal for distinguishing persistent drift from transient noise, yielding more efficient and robust adaptation.

Forecast-Assisted Deep Reinforcement Learning for Energy Management of Hydrogen-Enabled Community Microgrids

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18903v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hydrogen-enabled community microgrids can improve renewable energy utilization and local resilience, but their operation is complicated by uncertain residential demand, variable renewable generation, dynamic electricity prices, and the coupled dynamics of battery and hydrogen storage. This paper extends a previously developed proximal policy optimization (PPO) energy management system by adding multi-horizon community-load forecasts to the controller state. The framework is evaluated for a 1,000-household residential microgrid in Rockhampton, Australia. Forecast accuracy is mixed: the 1-h model achieves an RMSE of 239.32 kW and an R2 of 0.201, whereas the 6-h and 12-h horizons produce negative R2 values; the 24-h forecast achieves an RMSE of 249.79 kW, a MAPE of 62.52%, and an R2 of 0.126. Despite this limited predictive accuracy, the forecast-enriched PPO converges approximately 14.3% earlier than the non-predictive controller and increases the final reward by 8.3%. Annual savings rise from A$2,439.86 without forecasts to A$2,765.83 with forecasts, an incremental gain of A$325.97 (13.4%), while renewable utilization increases from 35.3% to 36.4%. Grid imports fall to 58,147.49 kWh. Resilience tests show a 20.1% battery protection value during grid outages, but no measurable forecast-specific resilience improvement. The results demonstrate that even imperfect forecasts can improve learning and economic dispatch while also showing that forecast calibration, common test conditions, and longer-duration outage studies are necessary before broader deployment claims can be made.

Answer-Reconstruction Search Density: Measuring the Query and Source Work Compressed by Conversational Answers

Benjamin Tannenbaum — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18904v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Conversational systems can collapse a visible sequence of web queries, result inspections, and source comparisons into a single synthesized answer. Existing retrieval metrics evaluate ranking, effort, or factual support, but they do not quantify the minimum conventional search work represented by a completed answer. We define answer-reconstruction search density (\ARSD): the minimum number of distinct query actions required, under a fixed and dated reconstruction policy, to support a target share of atomic retrievable answer units. A parallel page-density measure separates query compression from source compression.

SynGallery: A Synthetic Gallery of Real Paintings for Instance-Level Artwork Recognition

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18907v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Instance-level artwork recognition requires matching a handheld visitor photograph to a specific work in a large museum collection. This is challenging because painting datasets typically provide clean catalog images for training, while test queries are captured under oblique viewpoints, gallery lighting, reflections, frames, and other scene-level variations. We present SynGallery, a synthetic gallery dataset for artwork retrieval that addresses this gap without collecting additional real photographs. Starting from catalog images of real paintings, we place each artwork into a procedurally generated 3D gallery scene and render it from multiple viewpoints under varied geometric and appearance conditions, while preserving the exact identity of the original work. The resulting dataset contains 24,490 rendered views of 4,898 paintings from the Met benchmark. We show that these synthetic views provide a stronger training signal than the corresponding studio photographs. At the same number of training data points, training only on SynGallery improves art painting recognition from 67.18 to 73.47 GAP$^-$. When added to the full Met training set, SynGallery improves the published benchmark protocol from 35.97 to 38.48 GAP. Ablation experiments show that the gain comes primarily from geometric viewpoint variation rather than photographic realism: blur, sensor noise, and image compression consistently reduce performance.

Function-Correcting RT Codes: A Coding Framework for Parallel Channels

Huiying Liu, Hongwei Liu, Sihem Mesnager — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18908v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Function-correcting codes have recently emerged as an effective approach to reducing coding redundancy when the objective is to reliably recover only the prescribed function values of the transmitted information, rather than the complete message itself. As a natural generalization of the Hamming metric, the Rosenbloom--Tsfasman metric (RT-metric) has attracted considerable attention due to its relevance to communication over parallel channels. Motivated by these two research directions, we introduce in this paper function-correcting RT codes (FCRTCs), which extend the framework of function-correcting codes from the Hamming metric to the more general RT metric. To investigate the fundamental problem of optimal redundancy, we introduce a new class of matrix codes, called irregular RT-distance codes, and establish a direct correspondence between the redundancy optimization problem for FCRTCs and the construction of such codes. This connection provides a unified framework for deriving redundancy bounds under the RT metric. For arbitrary functions, we establish general upper and lower bounds on the optimal redundancy of FCRTCs. We then specialize our analysis to several important classes of functions, namely RT-weight functions, RT-weight distribution functions, and RT-locally-two-valued binary functions, for which substantially sharper bounds are obtained by exploiting their specific structural properties. Furthermore, we present explicit constructions of FCRTCs for RT-weight distribution functions and prove that these constructions attain the optimal redundancy bounds in several cases. The proposed framework considerably extends the theory of function-correcting codes to the RT metric, provides new theoretical tools for studying reliable communication over parallel channels, and opens new perspectives for redundancy-efficient coding beyond the classical Hamming setting.

Enhancing Transformer-based Routing by Encoding Distance via Relative Positional Encoding

Leyre Enc\'io, Daniel Fuertes, Carlos R. del-Blanco, Fernando Jaureguizar — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18909v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper explores Relative Positional Encoding (RPE) as an additive bias in Transformer architectures to solve the Team Orienteering Problem. By embedding in the attention mechanism pairwise spatial relationships among nodes of the graph that represents the routing problem, the transformer encoder can compute a richer spatial-aware graph embedding that allows the decoder to estimate better routes. Experimental results involving instances up to 100 nodes demonstrate consistent improvements in collected rewards and optimality gaps over vanilla Transformer architectures used by other state-of-the-art works. These findings highlight that explicit relational modeling significantly enhances scalability and generalization for complex combinatorial optimization.

Breaking Feedback-Blindness: Utility-Augmented Transformer for Sequential Decision Making

Yuyang Shen, Shan Dai, Daimin Chen — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18910v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sequential decision making in non-stationary and partially observable environments requires rapid adaptation to latent regime changes. However, existing Transformer decision models face a structural bottleneck in the retrieval mechanism: even when reward is used for training or exposed as an input token, attention retrieval remains primarily driven by observation-derived similarity. We formalize this limitation as feedback-blind retrieval, and formally show that, on feedback-informative tasks, observation-equivalent histories with different action-reward outcomes cannot be distinguished by any observation-only attention, resulting in suboptimal choice. To address this mismatch, we propose the Utility-Augmented Transformer (UAT), a new feedback-conditioned retrieval attention architecture in which a compact utility state modulates the query, key, and value projections, allowing action-reward history to directly alter context retrieval during the forward pass. UAT also enjoys an exact zero-gate degradation property that recovers the Vanilla Transformer when feedback is uninformative. Under finite-horizon compactness and Lipschitz assumptions, we prove that UAT strictly enlarges the observation-only Transformer class and can uniformly approximate feedback-dependent decision maps. Across four non-stationary benchmarks: synthetic navigation with hidden goal shifts, non-stationary sepsis treatment, cross-market portfolio allocation, and delayed-feedback recommendation, UAT consistently improves performance over observation-only, test-time adaptation, and input-level feedback baselines, with particularly large gains in noisier regimes that require stronger adaptation.

From a Multilingual Streaming ASR Backbone to Kenyan-Language Systems: Data-Centric Adaptation of Nemotron 3.5 for Kikuyu, Dholuo, and Kalenjin

Mark Gatere — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18912v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automatic speech recognition (ASR) for African languages is constrained by orthographic inconsistency, annotation artifacts, missing audio, speaker and domain imbalance, and evaluation procedures that differ from deployment. We present an end-to-end engineering study adapting NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 ASR Streaming 0.6B to Kikuyu, Dholuo, and Kalenjin. Starting from a Kenyan Swahili-adapted checkpoint, we retain its cache-aware FastConformer RNN-T, prompt conditioning, and streaming decoder during full-parameter fine-tuning. The study covers corpus auditing, Unicode normalization, split checks, duration filtering, low-rate continuation, validation-based checkpoint selection, true-streaming evaluation, artifact preservation, and isolated serving. On internal, adaptively consulted evaluation sets excluded from gradient updates at context [56,13], selected Kikuyu and Dholuo models achieve 42.97% and 33.98% WER, respectively. Dholuo records 9.59% CER and 8.13% no-space CER under its frozen historical label policy; Kikuyu records 7.79% no-space CER. Kalenjin remains a work in progress: v1-v reaches 68.74% WER on a 2,411-row clean-v3 diagnostic subset excluding long-pause annotations, digit-bearing references, and targets shorter than three tokens. Its checkpoint selection used a mixed-source validation manifest containing test-origin rows, so the score is not an independent generalization estimate. We also report negative findings involving non-speech labels, short-utterance over-generation, boundary-sensitive WER, and cloud job-lifecycle failures. We make no state-of-the-art claim because the internal sets, repeated consultation, and normalization differ from public benchmarks. This work provides an auditable account of adapting a multilingual streaming model into language-specific systems without discarding streaming constraints.

How network perturbations distort agreement trajectories in LTI multi-agent systems

Gal Barkai, Irinel-Constantin Mor\u{a}rescu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18913v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Distributed coordination of multi-agent systems frequently relies on cooperative protocols designed to achieve agreement on a prescribed, non-trivial trajectory. While the robustness of such protocols to various uncertainties is well documented, existing literature universally assumes that the target agreement trajectory itself remains invariant. This assumption may hold in ideal cases, but we prove that network perturbations can vastly modify the asymptotic agreement trajectory. We first investigate the exact trajectories of Linear Time-Invariant (LTI) agents subjected to dynamic coupling uncertainties by establishing a new Laplace-domain criterion that characterizes the specific closed-loop poles governing the perturbed agreement manifold. To formalize our analysis, we introduce the notion of structure-preserving dynamics, perturbations that maintain the null space of the communication graph's Laplacian, and contrast them with transmission only dynamics, affecting only the adjacency matrix. We prove a critical fragility within standard cooperative output regulation schemes: while static consensus is uniquely robust to heterogeneous transmission delays, synchronization to periodic trajectories is destroyed by arbitrarily small transmission delays. Furthermore, we demonstrate that for d-regular topologies, uniform transmission perturbations can easily shift the system to synchronize with an unexpected, entirely new frequency. These findings expose a previously unidentified vulnerability in classical robust synchronization, demonstrating that transmission dynamics necessitate fundamental structural modifications to networked reference generators.

On the Complexity of Graph Edit Distance in Restricted Graph Classes

Maximilian Limmer, Nils M. Kriege — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18914v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The graph edit distance generalizes several well-known NP-hard problems and is therefore NP-hard itself. However, the relationship between the considered graph class, the edit cost function, and the resulting computational complexity is not well understood. We investigate this interplay by revisiting polynomial-time reductions from the literature, which reduce subgraph isomorphism and maximum common induced subgraph to the graph edit distance. For these classical problems, a sharp distinction between NP-hard and polynomial-time solvable cases is known, and we make the implications for the complexity of the graph edit distance explicit. We establish a graph-class-preserving correspondence between the maximum common edge subgraph and graph edit distance under a specific cost function, both in labeled and unlabeled graphs. In the unlabeled setting, the maximum common edge subgraph problem is polynomial-time solvable when one graph is a path and the other is a tree. In contrast, for labeled graphs, we prove that both the maximum common edge subgraph and the graph edit distance remain NP-hard, even when both graphs are paths.

Reasoning Error from Known Fact: Step-Level Self-Consistency Group Relative Policy Optimization for LLM

Xiaomeng Hu, Jiaqi Hu, Hao Chen, Qi Zhang, Zhanming Shen, Wentao Ye, Junbo Zhao — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18915v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: With the rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs), modern systems not only possess strong foundational capabilities and extensive knowledge, but can also solve complex problems via long, multi-step reasoning. However, as reasoning traces become longer, LLMs may produce a substantial amount of hallucinated content during the reasoning process, which is often difficult to detect. In this work, we conduct a fine-grained analysis of hallucinations arising in LLM reasoning and find that the reasoning traces are particularly prone to Context-Sensitive Factual Hallucinations: cases where the model actually has the relevant knowledge, yet makes factual errors due to contextual interference during reasoning. To address this issue, we propose Step-level Self-Consistency Group Relative Policy Optimization (SSC-GRPO), which assigns step-level rewards to reasoning traces by computing self-consistency scores of individual steps across multiple rollouts. Compared with prior methods, SSC-GRPO achieves state-of-the-art performance on both mathematical reasoning benchmarks and hallucination leaderboards. Our results offer a new perspective for detecting and mitigating hallucinations in the reasoning process of large language models.

TAP-RAG: Task-Aware Policy Control for Long-Document Multimodal Question Answering

Zhong Ji, Keqi Jin, Yan Zhang, Jiasheng Li — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18917v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-document multimodal question answering requires more than retrieving relevant chunks from a large document. Different queries require different evidence behavior. Existing multimodal RAG systems improve evidence access through text chunks, page images, graph links, or heterogeneous document elements, but they often apply a largely query-agnostic evidence-use strategy. We present TAP-RAG, a task-aware policy-controlled RAG framework for long-document multimodal QA. TAP-RAG contains a main controller, the Task-Aware Policy Controller (TAPC), and two policy-guided evidence executors: Task-Aware Query-Guided Flow Diffusion (TA-QFD) and Task-Aware Visual Enhancement (TAVE). For each query, TAPC predicts the task prior, estimates visual/local/global evidence signals, and produces an executable policy. TA-QFD then expands textual and structural evidence over the multimodal document graph, while TAVE selectively inspects page images when visual or layout evidence is needed. A guarded synthesis stage fuses text, visual, and structural evidence and abstains when support is insufficient. On DocBench and MMLongBench-Doc, TAP-RAG achieves the best overall accuracy among the compared systems, improving over a matched multimodal-RAG baseline by +9.1 points (61.1 to 70.2) and +4.5 points (42.2 to 46.7), respectively.

Circuit Claims Depend on What Is Extracted and How It Is Compared

Yang Sheng, Jie Fu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18921v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Circuit extraction identifies a small set of model components whose presence preserves a target behavior under ablation, and the resulting circuit is often read as the mechanism behind that behavior. We argue that this reading is under-determined: preserving behavior does not single out one circuit, because the claim it supports depends on which circuit is reported and how two circuits are compared. We make this concrete in a synthetic Lean tactic-prediction benchmark -- predicting the next step of a proof -- where fixed proof rules with randomized surface form let differences between extracted circuits be attributed to these choices rather than to the task. Across dense and weight-sparse checkpoints (most weights constrained to zero) of the same transformer, evaluated on atomic (single-rule) and compositional (multi-rule) proofs, we vary which extracted object is reported (a compact prediction-preserving circuit, a broader graph that also keeps surrounding read, write, and routing structure, or the smallest subgraph meeting a post-ablation loss threshold), and whether each attention head's query and key are represented jointly or separately. Exact component-to-component edge overlap is low and sensitive to these choices, at times dropping to a random baseline, while two coarser summaries stay stable: the set of selected attention heads, and the circuit-size ranking of conditions that differ in which supervised checkpoint initializes reinforcement learning (RL). The largest accuracy gains from RL on compositional proofs come with the most structure beyond the atomic circuits. A circuit-level claim is therefore well defined only once one states which circuit is reported, the pruning threshold used to extract it, and the level at which circuits are compared. We distill these requirements into a reporting practice for circuit-extraction studies.

Visual Semantic Decoding of Electrocorticography from Video Stimuli using End-to-End Deep Learning

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18923v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: ECoG-based visual semantic decoding enables inference of semantic interpretation of visual perception from complex, noisy brain activity. This study examines the feasibility of visual semantic decoding using an end-to-end deep learning framework using electrocorticography (ECoG). Specifically, the decoding task is to predict visual categories from video stimuli using time-series neural inputs. A previously collected ECoG dataset from participants ($n=17$) with drug-resistant epilepsy is used for analysis. With fewer than 50 training samples per visual category, this study evaluates multiple deep learning approaches, artificial neural network architectures, and frequency-band filtered inputs. The best-performing approach is analyzed to shed light on the discriminative information it relies on across spectral, temporal, and cortical dimensions. The selected decoding system uses mixup augmentation, a Transformer-based encoder, and high-gamma (80-150 Hz) inputs with a 900 ms post-stimulus window. Further analysis shows that early visual cortex (V2-V4), ventral stream visual cortex, MT+ complex with neighbouring visual areas, and lateral temporal cortex contributed substantially to decoding performance. This study demonstrates that an end-to-end deep learning framework can yield promising decoding performance from dynamic visual stimuli without handcrafted features, while the model behavior remains interpretable through spectral, temporal, and cortical dimensions, which are broadly consistent with established neuroscience knowledge.

Learning Explicit Physical Parameter Control and Benchmarking for Video Generation

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18924v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in image-to-video generation have improved visual realism, making physically grounded and controllable dynamics an important step toward future world simulation. Current models often generate plausible motion, but it is not reliably governed by explicit physical causes, and instance-level constraints can leak or become entangled in multi-object interactions. We attribute this gap to two missing pieces: large-scale, fine-grained physical parameterization, and model designs that correctly bind physical attributes to instances and emphasize dynamics over appearance. To bridge this gap, we introduce PhyParam-Dataset, an interaction-centric collection of 130K physically simulated videos with dense physical parameterization, including force vectors, object material properties, and environmental constants across five representative rigid-body motion types. Built on this data, we present PhyParam, a physics-guided image-to-video diffusion model that conditions on object-level forces, masses, friction, restitution, and scene-level gravity via a lightweight physical-attention routing mechanism, and further improves motion learning with semantic-structural feature-space supervision. We also establish PhyParam-Bench, a benchmark for physical-law consistency in image-to-video generation, with a multi-level protocol evaluating temporal dynamics, spatial stability, and semantic--physical alignment. Experiments show that PhyParam improves physical consistency while maintaining high visual fidelity, advancing explicit rigid-body physical-parameter control for image-to-video generation. We will publicly release the dataset, benchmark, and code to support future research.

OntoBook: Ontology-Grounded Synthetic Textbooks for Medical Encoder Pretraining

Rian Touchent (ALMAnaCH), \'Eric de la Clergerie (ALMAnaCH) — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18927v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present OntoBook, a method that converts medical ontology structure into pretraining signal for encoder language models. Our approach has three stages: random walks through ontology graphs capture hierarchical and causal relations between medical codes, a large language model reformulates these walks into fluent textbook-style prose, and the resulting text is used to train ModernCamemBERT, a 149M-parameter French encoder, with two objectives on the same data: masked language modeling and relation prediction between code pairs. On three French medical coding benchmarks (FRACCO, Cantemist-FR, Distemist-FR), OntoBook achieves significant improvements over MLM-only pretraining, with +2.5 micro-F1 on FRACCO and +8.0 micro-F1 on Distemist. We find that alignment between objectives is necessary: misaligned training, where each task uses different data, causes a 30-point degradation. We release 1.3 million LLM-reformulated medical textbooks across three French ontologies (CIM-10, CCAM, ATC) and pretrained model checkpoints.

Error Bound and Stability Analysis for a Randomized Singly Diagonally Implicit Runge-Kutta Method

Monika Eisenmann, Marvin Jans, Raphael Kruse, Helmut Podhaisky — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18928v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A randomized Singly Diagonally Implicit Runge-Kutta (SDIRK) method, based on the randomized trapezoidal rule as the underlying quadrature scheme, is proposed. Every realization of the scheme is an algebraically stable SDIRK method of at least second order. The main result is the proof that the randomized scheme converges with order 2.5 in the root mean square sense under low regularity assumptions. Numerical experiments illustrate the robustness of the new scheme when applied to nonsmooth problems.

A User-oriented Portable, Reproducible, and Scalable Software Ecosystem

Alfio Lazzaro, Utz-Uwe Haus, Sandrine Charousset, Nina Mujkanovic — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18929v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: It is normal for scientists to perform their research on a diverse set of hardware, ranging from laptops and workstations to supercomputers and cloud resources. The standard scenario requires a mix of these resources. In this paper we describe a software ecosystem that enables users to rely on the same development environment for running their workflows across the different computational resources. We describe a modular, unified command-line interface that allows for the interaction with a user-workflow across diverse hardware platform. The software ecosystem has been successfully tested as part of the plan4res EU H2020 project. It can be extended to other projects with similar requirements, so that they can benefit from the same approach for executing computational workflows.

Functional Equivalence and Geometric Diversity in Neural Network Approximations: An Empirical Characterization

Anuragine S A, Prem Jagadeesan — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18930v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Universal Approximation Theorem states that a neural network with a single hidden layer is sufficient to approximate any continuous univariate function on a compact domain to arbitrary error. However, the uniqueness of such neural network representations is not guaranteed, raising questions about practical identifiability. In this work, we address this concern by analyzing functional equivalence and geometric diversity of neural network approximations to a few elementary mathematical functions. The analysis includes an extensive study of single-layer neural networks and multilayer perceptrons under noisy and noise-free conditions. Beyond just network capacity, we study the geometric properties through the lens of sloppiness, characterized by the eigen spectrum of the Hessian of the cost function and the effective rank to quantify the dimensionality of parameter space. The study reveals large equivalence classes of functionally indistinguishable yet geometrically diverse networks that consistently exhibit low effective rank and structural redundancy. Finally, a model select criterion is proposed for identifying optimal models based on parsimony, ease of estimation, and inference efficiency.

AI-Powered Browsers Are Broadly Accurate News Summarizers That Reduce Political Bias and Negative Affect

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18931v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Web browsers now provide AI-generated news summaries for millions of users. Despite their popularity and influence, we lack a systematic understanding of how these systems transform news before people read it. Through a large-scale audit, we investigate the factual accuracy of browser-based AI summarizers and how they alter the political bias, negative affect, and journalistic writing quality of news. Drawing on 13,777 articles from 15 U.S. news outlets, we evaluate their 41,331 summaries generated by three leading AI-powered browsers: Google Chrome (Gemini), Microsoft Edge (Copilot), and Perplexity Comet. We find that browser-based AI summarizers are broadly accurate. Furthermore, they consistently transform news by attenuating ideological bias, partisan stances, negativity, anger, and fear, while increasing clarity and reducing personal tone. With some variations, these patterns hold across browsers, outlet ideologies, and topics. Our findings identify AI-powered browsers as a new class of editorial intermediaries that systematically reshape news, with implications for democratic discourse and AI governance.

Transcription Policy as a Latent Variable: Activating Controllable Verbatim ASR with Word-Level Timing

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18934v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern ASR models trained on heterogeneously annotated data treat transcription style (verbatim vs. intended) as an uncontrolled latent variable, causing measurable decoding instability, evaluation confounding (up to 60% of reported WER attributable to style mismatch), and unreliable word-level timing. We show that models already encode both styles; the challenge is controlled activation. Using coverage-aware decoder task tokens trained on parallel verbatim/intended transcript pairs, we raise German disfluency F1 from 10% to 79% zero-shot, despite English-only training. Full English-only fine-tuning surpasses all baselines in verbatim accuracy, disfluency detection, and intended-mode quality across both languages. We further introduce supervised cross-attention fine-tuning that improves word-level timestamps on disfluent speech beyond forced-alignment baselines. Finally, we propose verbatimize, a new task enabling scalable creation and enrichment of speech corpora with high-quality canonical verbatim transcriptions.

Online Stochastic Matchings: Stability on Hypergraphs

Fabien Mathieu (LINCS) — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18935v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study stochastic dynamic matching on hypergraphs: items of finitely many classes arrive over time and are removed in multisets by activating hyperedges. We characterize stabilizability, the existence of a matching policy under which the queue process is positive recurrent, in terms of the arrival rates and the incidence matrix alone: (G, $\lambda$) is stabilizable if and only if the conservation equation A$\mu$ = $\lambda$ admits a nonnegative solution whose support induces a surjective submatrix, equivalently $\lambda$ lies in the interior of the cone generated by the hyperedges. This extends a characterization known for simple graphs (non-bipartiteness together with the independent-set inequalities) to arbitrary hyperedges, allowing multiplicities and mono-edges, and, unlike the constant-regret theory, needs no general-position assumption. Sufficiency is constructive: a single $\lambda$-oblivious policy, Virtual-Queue Match-the-Longest (VQML), a rewardless variant of the Extended Greedy Primal-Dual policy of Nazari and Stolyar, stabilizes every stabilizable instance and is therefore maximally stable.

NGPS: GPS-Denied Aerial Geo-Localization and 2.5D Reconstruction via Deep Satellite Image Matching and Multi-Rate Sensor Fusion

Sanket Sharma — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18936v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present NGPS (Next-Generation Positioning System), a visual geo-localization framework for high-altitude UAVs that provides GPS-free absolute positioning by matching down-facing images to georeferenced satellite imagery with deep features. The system combines (1) adaptive confidence-weighted UKF fusion, where NGPS covariance is modulated by RANSAC inlier ratio, reprojection error, and match confidence; (2) velocity-predictive kernel extraction, using VIO velocity to predict the satellite search region; and (3) an asynchronous multi-rate temporal priority queue that interleaves absolute position (1-2 Hz), VIO (10-20 Hz), and IMU (100-200 Hz) updates in chronological order. Globally optimized poses from VINS pose-graph optimization, anchored by NGPS corrections, further enable real-time 2.5D georeferenced orthomosaic reconstruction. On five flight sequences (60-150 m AGL), NGPS achieves 2.94 m position RMSE, with worst-case ATE 6.04 m at 150 m AGL and 2 m/s, yielding a 3.5x improvement over standalone monocular VIO. The system runs in real time on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX. Part of the implementation is open-sourced at https://github.com/snktshrma/ngps_flight.

The Twist Decomposition of Serial Robots Under Lower-Mobility Tasks

Luc Baron (IICiMed), Damien Chablat (LS2N - \'equipe RoMas, LS2N) — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18940v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper introduces a twist decomposition framework for serial manipulators performing lower mobility tasks. Rather than relying on Jacobian null-space projections, the method separates the end-effector twist into task and redundant components using geometrically defined twist projectors. This formulation provides a direct and intuitive distinction between task-relevant and task-irrelevant motions in operational space, enabling a compact inverse kinematics scheme that naturally handles both manipulator and task redundancy.

A Griesmer-Type Bound for List-Decodable Linear Codes

Shengwei Liu, Chunyan Qin — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18941v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A code $C\subseteq F_q^n$ is $(\tau,L)$-list-decodable if every Hamming ball of radius $\tau$ contains at most $L$ codewords of $C$. Here $\tau$ is the list-decoding radius, and $L$ is the list size. Singleton-type bounds constrain the radius and the rate when $L$ is fixed. These bounds are not the only possible constraints on list-decodable codes. In this paper, we derive an upper bound on the list-decoding radius in terms of generalized Hamming weights. As a consequence, for $1\le L\le q-1$, every $(\tau,L)$-list-decodable $q$-ary linear code has minimum distance at least $ \tau+\left\lfloor \frac{\tau}{L}\right\rfloor+1. $ Combining this lower bound with the classical Griesmer bound gives a Griesmer-type lower bound on the block length. For $q=3^a$, we construct an explicit family of $q$-ary linear $[q+3,2,q+1]$ codes. These codes are $(2q/3,2)$-list-decodable and meet the Griesmer-type bound with equality. They do not attain the Singleton-type bound. Thus the Griesmer-type bound can be a strict improvement over the Singleton-type bound.

What General Intelligence Requires: Non-Reducible Constraints Across Levels of Description

Subhomoy Bakshi — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18943v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: General intelligence, of the kind that underwrites the full range of human cognitive achievement, is not a property of computational architecture alone. This paper advances a single thesis: the structural constraints on general intelligence occupy distinct levels of description and are mutually non-reducible, in the sense that the special-sciences tradition gives to that term. It follows that no single architectural advance, and no continuation of the scaling programme by itself, can produce artificial general intelligence (AGI), and that research programmes must be evaluated against the full constraint profile rather than against performance on any one benchmark. The thesis is developed through a method that reads general intelligence through four evidential lenses, AI systems research, anthropology, law, and economics, each anchored to a distinct level of description, supplemented by speculative fiction used as a disciplined heuristic in the context of discovery rather than the context of justification. Applying the method yields a taxonomy of twenty-three structural constraints organised into eight clusters; six are examined in depth and ordered as an ascending ladder of levels, with explicit bridges showing why progress at one level cannot carry to the next. The argument issues in five falsifiable predictions, each stated with a named benchmark family and a disconfirmation condition, converting a descriptive framework into a research programme with a longer horizon than the scaling hypothesis implies.

Constrained CTC Decoding for Efficient Diacritic Restoration

Rufael Marew, Amr Keleg, Hanan Aldarmaki — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18946v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, we address diacritic restoration for Arabic speech transcripts. Most speech data are undiacritized, limiting the ability of modeling fine-grained phonological distinctions. The speech modality has recently been explored as a way to complement text-based diacritic restoration efforts. We propose an efficient non-autoregressive approach for speech-to-text diacritization based on Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC). Our method incorporates hard constraints during decoding by constructing a character-level diacritization lattice from an undiacritized transcript and restricting hypotheses to valid diacritized realizations. We evaluate on Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic test sets (namely, ArVoice and ClArTTS) against a more computationally-complex multi-modal diacritic restoration baseline, and show statistically significant reductions in diacritic error rates in both, demonstrating that the proposed approach offers both performance and efficiency gains.

Build-Authorized Evidence for Opaque Calls: A Fail-Closed Rewrite-Authority Boundary

Zhonghua Yi (Toka Language Research Group) — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18949v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Detached semantic facts about opaque native providers do not by themselves justify compiler rewrites: rewrite authority must be confined to the accepted fact, selected provider and build, caller, callback environment, observation, and runtime target. We present a build-authorized path-effect interface that enforces this boundary through fail-closed authorization and link receipts. The design separates receipt closure, callback-environment closure, and projection identity, and passes accepted facts to LLVM through a narrow internal API. We use one-hop topology-load reuse as a minimal observable witness of authority, not as the optimization target. A conservative LLVM consumer reuses a pointer observation only from a noalias root or one constant nonzero projection. Rocq models prove conditional refinement and authority non-amplification under explicit effect, alias, compiler/ABI, and target-resolution premises. We instantiate checked production with Toka: a source-summary gate emits exact LLVM IR, a separate IR checker accepts only a bounded topology-preserving subset, and only accepted IR is compiled into the receipt-bound provider object. A bounded static Darwin/arm64 profile also checks the final direct branch target. Across issuer-declared readv, recvmsg, and Cairo boundaries, authorized IR retains each opaque call, reduces the relevant loads from two to one, and preserves observed results; mismatched providers, builds, callbacks, projections, and unsupported IR remain neutral. A libjpeg case is rejected because its callback environment is open, while a bound callback singleton demonstrates the supported closure rule. The contribution is a checked deployment-compiler boundary with an explicit trust and applicability frontier, not a uniquely expressive effect encoding or a new load-elimination algorithm.

Design and stability analysis of an underactuated hand with passively rotating fingers

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18950v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents an innovative design and stability analysis of an underactuated robotic finger with spatial mobility, designed to enhance gripping dexterity in robotic hands. The finger architecture incorporates a revolute joint at its base, enabling passive spatial rotation that facilitates both cylindrical and spherical grasping. With only two phalanges per finger, the design simplifies kinematic complexity while supporting precision and enveloping grasps. Stability criteria, based on the moment at the finger base joint induced by contact forces, are introduced to ensure reliable object gripping and prevent ejection during manipulation. The study also examines a differential mechanism that distributes a single actuation torque across multiple fingers, allowing adaptive and coordinated motion. This mechanism enhances the hand's ability to grasp diverse object shapes with minimal pre-grasp adjustments, leveraging passivity for autonomous adaptation. Theoretical findings are experimentally validated using a fully mechanical prototype, demonstrating versatility in performing cylindrical, spherical, parallel, and enveloping grasps. The integration of underactuation-both within individual fingers and among multiple fingers-reduces mechanical complexity, cost, and control demands while preserving functional adaptability. This work advances the development of compliant robotic hands suitable for applications requiring dexterity and robustness, such as agricultural robotics, logistics, assistive technologies, and waste sorting. Future research will focus on automating actuation and refining control strategies to further improve grasp stability and precision, paving the way for autonomous manipulation in unstructured environments.

Online sparse observers for cyber-physical systems under sensor bias

Vito Cerone, Sophie M. Fosson, Diego Regruto, Francesco Ripa — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18951v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The design of state observers for cyber-physical systems under sparse sensor biases, faults, or attacks has drawn substantial attention in recent years. While sparsity-based batch approaches, which collect multiple measurements and run offline, are relatively mature, online secure state estimation, for real-time state/attack recovery, is still an open problem. Although some algorithms have been proposed, convergence guarantees remain limited, even for the case of constant attacks. As a first step toward addressing this gap, we focus on constant attacks. We analyze the observability of this setting and we study several online sparse observers, derived from different methodological frameworks such as online sparse optimization and block Bregman methods. Some of the proposed observers are adaptations of existing algorithms to the secure state-estimation setting, while others constitute novel algorithmic contributions. The goal of this paper is to provide a unified overview of practically implementable, online sparse observers, discuss their convergence properties, and compare their performance through numerical experiments.

H$^2$SD: Hybrid Hindsight Self-Distillation

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18955v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has substantially improved the reasoning capabilities of large language models on tasks such as mathematical reasoning and code generation. However, most RLVR methods assign a scalar outcome reward to an entire trajectory, resulting in sparse supervision and limited token-level credit assignment. On-policy distillation (OPD) provides denser supervision by distilling token-level distributions from a stronger teacher model, but requires an additional teacher and typically assumes a shared vocabulary. On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) removes this dependency by conditioning the same model on privileged information to construct a teacher policy. However, directly matching the teacher distribution may cause information leakage and unstable optimization. RLSD avoids direct matching by using the teacher signal only to modulate update magnitudes, but it cannot provide an explicit correction direction when the sampled reasoning fails. To address this tradeoff, we introduce $\mathrm{H}^{2}\mathrm{SD}$, a hybrid hindsight self distillation framework that uses the teacher differently according to trajectory correctness. For successful trajectories, the teacher receives the student response confirmed as correct together with a rephrasing instruction, and its probabilities on the original response tokens are used to modulate update magnitudes without changing the direction determined by the reward. For failed trajectories, we condition the teacher on a reference hint containing key reasoning steps and a verified answer, and minimize the reverse KL divergence from the student to the teacher. Experiments on multiple challenging reasoning benchmarks show that H$^2$SD consistently outperforms representative RLVR, OPSD, and RLSD baselines while maintaining stable optimization and favorable generation efficiency.

InstantInfer: Enabling Fast LLM Cold Start with Communicating Finite Automata

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18957v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cold starts in large language model (LLM) inference services significantly affect user experience, yet they remain inefficient due to sequential initialization and a massive number of fine-grained I/O requests issued by complex software components. Although refactoring the program can yield advantages such as concurrent execution and I/O merging, this approach is error-prone and carries correctness risks when dealing with massive, heterogeneous components. We propose the Communicating Finite Automata (CFA) abstraction to systematically analyze cross-component optimization opportunities, and design a programming framework to enable CFA-based component program refactoring. This framework preserves the original sequential program structure while enabling safe concurrent component execution. We prove the correctness of the program refactoring. We apply the CFA abstraction and framework to refactor process tree creation, tensor loading, and model switching in vLLM, forming a new cold-start system named InstantInfer. Extensive experiments demonstrate that InstantInfer substantially accelerates LLM cold starts (achieving up to 7.2 times speedup) and exhibits robustness across diverse GPUs, workloads, and scales.

Dual Adversarial Fine-tuning for Enhancing Robustness of Large Vision Language Model

Sibo Wang, Jie Zhang, Shiguang Shan, Xilin Chen, Wen Gao — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18958v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), represented by LLaVA and GPT-4V, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, their visual inputs remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks, posing significant security risks. Existing defense methods predominantly target single-task scenarios (e.g., zero-shot classification) and consequently lack generalizability across various multimodal tasks. To address this limitation, we propose a dual adversarial fine-tuning framework that jointly optimizes visual and semantic supervision signals from two modalities, enhancing model robustness while generalizing across multiple downstream tasks. The proposed framework comprises two core components, i.e., $\textbf{Visual}$ supervision branch and $\textbf{Semantic}$ supervision branch. The former branch leverages features from clean images, extracted via a frozen original vision encoder, to guide adversarial robustness while the latter incorporates caption-image alignment as a contextual signal to preserve semantic coherence under attack. Moreover, our method achieves cross-task robustness by simply replacing the CLIP vision encoder in the original model, with no need of separate task-specific retraining or architecture modifications.Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art method in adversarial robustness evaluation across zero-shot classification, image captioning, and visual question answering (VQA) tasks.

SFGA: A Statistics-First Gating Architecture with Adjudicative Escalation for Trustworthy SFT Data Procurement

Arther Tian, Alex Ding, Simon Wu, Aaron Chan — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18960v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Procuring supervised fine-tuning (SFT) data forces a buyer to decide, before any downstream training, whether a candidate corpus is worth acquiring. We present \sys{}, a statistics-first gating architecture that treats procurement as a cost-aware routing problem over three intrinsic quality axes -- diversity, utility, and redundancy. Cheap blind measurements are summarised into per-axis estimates with confidence intervals; a gate accepts a decision only when intervals are tight, sample sizes are adequate, and the axes agree, otherwise it escalates the case to an adjudicative debate between a buy-advocate and a reject-advocate judge, resolved by a presiding verdict. On a controlled benchmark of 12 datasets ($2{\times}3{\times}2$ grid over the three axes) with 5 seeds, the gate reaches 0.90 accuracy and 0.83 $F_1$ at \$0.017 per unit, sitting between an always-verify baseline (0.75) and an oracle upper bound (0.98) while spending less than always-escalate (\$0.020). We further report honest negative diagnostics of the debate path: a con-side win rate of 0.80 ($p\approx3{\times}10^{-6}$) and a 52\% position-flip rate under advocate swapping expose negativity and positional biases that a naive LLM-judge would hide. We frame the injected-knob evaluation explicitly as a controlled synthetic benchmark for measurement fidelity and routing calibration, and delimit external validity as future work.

From Dependency to Compositionality: A Neurosymbolic Lifting of LLM Outputs via Combinatory Categorial Grammar

Remo Pareschi — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18961v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) generate fluent text by incrementally predicting the next token from a prefix. Critics in the generative tradition argue that such systems lack genuine grammar; influential replies from the dependency-grammar perspective hold that LLM behavior is well described by local head-dependent structure built word by word. We argue that a sharper observation has been overlooked: the prefix-driven, type-completing dynamics of autoregressive generation align closely with the incremental processing model that Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) was originally designed to support. On this basis we propose a neurosymbolic framework in which LLM outputs are lifted into typed compositional derivations -- not claiming that LLMs implement CCG internally, but that their outputs admit a principled, incremental, and auditable CCG reconstruction. Two consequences follow. First, through the Curry-Howard correspondence the lifting extends beyond natural language to the formal languages LLMs also produce -- programming languages such as Solidity, description-logic and query languages such as OWL and SQL -- with the type system varying and the architecture held fixed. Second, the lifting supports two layers of checking: a compositional layer that catches structural failures directly, and a content layer that checks the lifted structure against external knowledge sources, enabling the earliest possible flagging of hallucinated content. The account thereby requires of a producer not cognition but a prefix-driven generative profile. We close with a sketch of synchronous LLM-CCG coupling as one direction the framework opens.

Variational meta-learning inference for low dimensional neural system identification

Matteo Rufolo, Dario Piga, Marco Forgione — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18965v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep learning has proven highly effective for nonlinear system identification, but heavily parameterized neural networks are prone to overfitting in low-data regimes and lack reliable uncertainty quantification. The recently developed manifold meta-learning framework addresses the data efficiency problem by restricting the model parameters to a meta-learned low-dimensional manifold. However, that method is purely deterministic. We propose a fully probabilistic extension of the manifold meta-learning framework, based on amortized Variational Inference, where a generative prior over the low-dimensional parameter manifold is learned. During task-specific adaptation, we combine Maximum A Posteriori estimation with the Laplace approximation to yield a mathematically grounded posterior approximation. Evaluated on a static regression task and the Bouc--Wen dynamical system benchmark, the proposed approach achieves predictive accuracy comparable to its deterministic counterpart while successfully providing calibrated uncertainty bounds in severely low-data regimes.

Measuring Reward-Seeking via Contrastive Belief Updates

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18966v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models trained with reinforcement learning may learn to optimize the grader's judgment rather than the intended objective. This "reward-seeking" is difficult to measure because a model that pursues the grader's judgment and one that pursues the intended objective behave identically whenever the grader rewards the intended behavior. We measure reward-seeking using Contrastive Synthetic Document Finetuning to change a model's beliefs about what the grader rewards, putting those beliefs in conflict with what users or developers want, and measuring the rate at which the model adopts each party's preferred behavior. Applied to intermediate checkpoints of a capabilities-focused OpenAI o3 RL run, without safety training, we find that these checkpoints often side with grader preferences over those of users or developers on coding and alignment tasks. This tendency to side with the grader trends upward throughout RL training. For example, in an environment that forces a choice between keeping a promise to a supervisor and breaking it to complete the task, a late capabilities-focused o3 checkpoint breaks the promise 87% of the time when SDF documents say the grader rewards task completion, versus 9% when they say it rewards honesty (a choice its chain-of-thought often makes explicit). An earlier checkpoint is far less sensitive (40% vs. 24%). Our method also generalizes to reward-hacking models. A model organism trained to reward-hack (gpt-oss-120b) is more than twice as sensitive to grader preferences as the unmodified model, with the mean behavioral shift in favor of the grader rising from 33% to 86%. These results indicate that RL can increase reward-seeking over the course of training, producing models that may act against their developers' intentions when they believe that doing so leads to higher reward.

Skillware: A Software Ontology and Engineering Lifecycle for Persistent Behavioral Artifacts

Haodi Fan, Zucong Lan — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18970v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent Skills have become persistent behavioral artifacts across independent AI agent systems. They combine natural-language task specifications with metadata and optional references, scripts, assets, hooks, package manifests, tests, and companion interfaces. Existing studies explain how Skills are specified, executed, maintained, and evolved, but lack an ontology that defines these artifacts as independent software objects. This paper introduces Skillware as the software abstraction that extends software engineering to persistent Behavioral Artifacts in agent systems. A Skill Artifact specifies reusable task behavior; a Skillware Unit manages that artifact as software through an independent identity and lifecycle. A compatible Agent Host activates the unit for runtime interpretation. Three necessary conditions operationalize category membership: behavioral primacy, independent software identity, and an Agent Host execution relationship. Lifecycle Continuity records whether the same unit identity persists through update, maintenance, rollback, and removal as a separate software-grade property. Evidence combines the Agent Skills specification, a frozen corpus of 138,133 content-deduplicated SKILL.md records associated with 20,556 repository identifiers, independent empirical studies, 15 category-boundary cases, and 13 fixed-revision engineering implementations. The evidence establishes a recurring artifact envelope, separable software identities, compatible execution paths, and lifecycle engineering pressure. Skillware provides the software ontology and engineering lifecycle through which agent capabilities can become identifiable, composable, maintainable, and evolvable software artifacts.

Verifiable Self-Evolution for Open-Ended Dialogue Skills via Future-Feedback Prediction

ChaoJin Zhao, Xuan Jiang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18973v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Textual skills provide a lightweight way to improve frozen language-model agents, but their self-evolution normally requires a stable validation signal. Such signals are natural in mathematics or code, where an answer can be checked after it changes, yet are problematic in open-ended dialogue: changing the assistant response also changes the user's next reaction, so a logged reaction cannot directly evaluate a counterfactual response. We propose future-feedback skill evolution, which first redirects self-evolution from prescribing the current answer to predicting whether the observed answer will lead to a positive or negative subsequent user signal. This prediction task is verifiable on fixed logged tuples and therefore supports validation-gated textual optimization. The evolved feedback skill captures interpretable criteria for response quality and can subsequently serve as a diagnostic and optimization target for answer skills. On a proprietary, privacy-preserving sales-assistant dataset, careful quality filtering and a balanced resolved/unresolved split yield more than 75% prediction accuracy. Beyond this result, the central contribution is a formulation that converts otherwise moving conversational feedback into a fixed offline learning target, enabling reproducible skill evolution without placing every candidate skill in live traffic. We discuss the boundary between observational verification and counterfactual validity, and position the method as an offline optimization stage rather than a replacement for final human or online evaluation.

Mi-Memory: A Lifecycle Memory Framework for Personal AI

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18975v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personal AI is moving beyond chat-only interaction toward continuous services that span phones, cars, homes, wearables, cameras, and tools. In this setting, memory cannot remain a cache of prior conversations. It should serve as a continuity and governance substrate: preserving durable user state, grounding answers in multimodal and device evidence, supporting correction and forgetting, bounding policy evolution, and remaining deployable under latency, cost, privacy, and edge-cloud constraints. This technical report presents Mi-Memory, a lifecycle memory framework for Personal AI organized around four roles: Structure, Expansion, Evolution, and Deployment. A shared audit contract links these roles through four recurring artifact families: typed evidence payloads preserve source identity and provenance, diagnostic traces localize evidence loss across the serving pipeline, strategy artifacts make memory-policy changes explicit, and gate/rollback records bound accepted evolution. MiMemory instantiates the roles through MemStack, MemSense/MemFuse, D$^{2}$ACCI/E$^{2}$MEND, and LiteMem. In controlled-reference Structure evaluations, MemStack reaches 93.59%, 57.24%, and 87.47% on LoCoMo, PersonaMem-V2, and LongMemEval, respectively; other tracks report module-level, preliminary/internal, transfer-feasibility, or design-only evidence with explicit boundaries. MiMemory is a step toward auditable, evidence-gated, and deployment-aware memory systems for Personal AI. Project homepage: https://darwin-agent.github.io/Mi-Memory/ .

Fishing Out Free Riders: Shapley-Based Reward Attribution for Parallel Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18979v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at multi-step reasoning, yet current parallel reasoning approaches often fail to distinguish the contributions of individual reasoning paths. Many paths may be redundant, misleading, or even detrimental, but outcome-level rewards assign uniform reward, leading to ambiguous learning signals and unstable training. We propose Parallel Shapley, a reinforcement learning framework that attributes fine-grained, path-level contributions in multi-path reasoning. Treating each path as a player in a cooperative game, we leverage Shapley values to quantify marginal contributions, using a generative reward model to evaluate path utilities and Monte Carlo sampling for efficient approximation. Experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that Parallel Shapley outperforms existing baselines while providing more stable and interpretable training. Our framework effectively "fishes out the free riders," assigning reward proportionally and improving multi-path reasoning in LLMs.

AutoJourn: Multi-Perspective Summarisation, Bias Detection and Bias Neutralisation for LLM-Generated News in Automated Journalism

Himel Ghosh, Ahmed Mosharafa, Georg Groh — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18983v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present AutoJourn, a demonstration system for multi-perspective news generation and bias-aware evaluation using large language models (LLMs). The system tackles three core challenges in responsible automated journalism: extracting diverse perspectives from unstructured social media discussions, generating summaries that preserve viewpoint diversity, and detecting or mitigating bias in AI-generated news. The pipeline integrates advanced prompt engineering with optional retrieval augmentation to produce semantically diverse perspective sets, a multi-perspective summarisation module that merges conflicting viewpoints into balanced summaries, and a bias analysis suite supporting sentence-level bias detection and type classification in the generated news article, and automatic neutralisation. Users can inspect perspective clusters, compare stance-specific summaries, generate news articles, and apply bias-aware rewrites directly in the interface. We evaluate each component with intrinsic metrics -- semantic diversity, summary quality, and bias reduction and show improvements over strong baselines while maintaining content fidelity. A live, publicly accessible demo accompanies the paper to facilitate reproducibility and further research on socially responsible automated journalism.

Disentangling Curriculum Learning in NLP: Towards a Unifying Taxonomy

Vanessa Toborek, Florian Seiffarth, Sebastian M\"uller, Tam\'as Horv\'ath — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18984v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Despite more than a decade of curriculum learning (CL) research in NLP, the field lacks a principled account of which difficulty function or scheduler to use for a given problem. To understand what has hindered progress towards this account, we propose a fine-grained taxonomy separating difficulty evaluation from training scheduling to enable systematic analysis of CL strategies. For difficulty evaluation, we distinguish attribution source and task dependence, revealing difficulty as a perspectival concept encoding different assumptions about what makes an instance hard to learn. For scheduling, we provide the first formalisation of CL schedulers in terms of expected training contribution, enabling comparison across implementations by introducing retention regimes and monotonicity properties. Applied in a dedicated analysis of CL works in NLP, our taxonomy reveals a systematic incomparability problem: prior works conflate distinct notions of difficulty and scheduling, often pursuing different objectives under the same CL label -- hindering comparison and the accumulation of a coherent evidence base. Beyond diagnosis, the taxonomy supports the design, analysis, and comparison of CL strategies, and motivates evaluation practices that disentangle the sources of observed improvement.

Athena-Brain Technical Report: An Efficient Robot Brain for General Intelligence and Embodied Interactio

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18985v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in language understanding, reasoning, and world knowledge. As embodied agents become increasingly capable, there is a growing demand for compact models that can serve as an on-device brain, preserving the broad general intelligence of LLMs while enabling effective high-level interaction with embodied environments. Existing approaches, however, often prioritize either general-purpose intelligence or specialized embodied capabilities, making it challenging to satisfy both requirements within a single model. We present \textbf{Athena-Brain-8B}, an 8B LLM designed to serve as an on-device brain for embodied intelligence for embodied intelligence. Through a multi-stage post-training pipeline consisting of General Supervised Fine-Tuning, General Reinforcement Learning, Embodied Expert training, and Model Merge, Athena-Brain-8B maintains strong general capabilities while acquiring strong high-level embodied interaction capabilities and generating concise responses for efficient embodied interaction. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of Athena across both general and embodied evaluations. Compared with the corresponding Qwen3-8B thinking model, Athena-Brain-8B achieves comparable performance on general language and reasoning benchmarks while generating substantially shorter responses. On in-domain embodied benchmarks, Athena-Brain-8B consistently outperforms models of similar scale and surpasses several substantially larger frontier models evaluated zero-shot, demonstrating that compact language models can effectively integrate strong general intelligence with embodied capabilities.

DobicVLM: Aligning Chest X-Ray Report Generation with Clinically-Grounded Programmatic Rewards via Group Relative Policy Optimization

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18988v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Medical imaging is a cornerstone of diagnostics, yet automated chest X-ray report generation struggles with structural adherence, anatomical completeness, and semantic faithfulness. We introduce DobicVLM, a vision-language model combining supervised fine-tuning on MedGemma-4B with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and clinically-grounded programmatic rewards. Our approach uses interpretable, rule-based reward components; structural verification, anatomical checklist, semantic similarity, and length constraints to enforce clinical standards without neural reward models. Trained on 1,000 de-identified image-report pairs from a private clinical dataset (with ethics approval and compliance to local regulations), DobicVLM is evaluated via blinded expert review on 69 held-out cases. DobicVLM outperforms Gemini 2.5 Flash across the majority of criteria, achieving the highest impression accuracy (27.2%) and medical terminology (86.5%) compared to both Gemini 2.5 Flash and MedGemma 4B baselines, with minor trade-offs in completeness and referrals. This demonstrates GRPO's value for transparent alignment in resource-limited settings. Keywords: Vision-Language Models, Radiology Report Generation, Reinforcement Learning, Medical AI, GRPO

SWITi: Quantifying and Reducing Tiling Artifacts with Sliding Window Inner Tiling

Federico Carrara, Aman Kukde, Melisande Croft, Joran Deschamps, Florian Jug — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18990v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: SWITi is a test-time method for reducing artifacts in tiled predictions, particularly for neural networks that learn posterior distributions from which solutions are sampled at inference time. Tiled predictions are unavoidable for large image data, and artifacts arise whenever tiles are smaller than a network's receptive field and when tiles are independent posterior samples. SWITi averages overlapping sliding-window predictions, so discrepancies between neighboring samples are spread across shifted tile positions rather than accumulating at fixed seam coordinates. For posterior models, SWITi uses no more tile samples than an MMSE estimate requires and therefore incurs no additional forward passes. Additionally, we introduce two reference-free metrics, the Fraction of Rejected Tests (FRT) and Artifact Severity (ASV), for detecting and quantifying tiling artifacts from a per-tile permutation test that compares the distribution of pixel gradients across tile seams against the surrounding image content. On pre-trained and published image splitting models across three fluorescence microscopy datasets in 2D and 3D, we show that SWITi substantially attenuates stitching seams while also improving reconstruction fidelity and resolution. Since tiling artifacts in posterior predictions can easily be mistaken for biological structures or for boundaries between biological structures, removing or reducing them using SWITi will improve the downstream processing of large image predictions, which is particularly relevant for biomedical data.

Bayesian Sequential Quantum Amplitude Estimation for Rare-Event Structural Failure Probability

Alireza Tabarraei — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18996v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Structural reliability analysis often requires estimating small failure probabilities under uncertainty, a task for which direct Monte Carlo simulation becomes inefficient because failure observations are scarce. Quantum amplitude estimation offers a potential quadratic improvement in query complexity for bounded expectation estimation, but practical iterative formulations require reliable inference from finite, amplified measurement data. This paper develops a Bayesian sequential formulation of iterative quantum amplitude estimation for rare-event structural failure probability estimation. Structural failure is represented as a binary indicator over a finite stochastic ensemble and encoded through a lookup-table oracle, allowing the failure probability to be treated as a quantum amplitude. Measurement outcomes collected at different Grover depths are assimilated through Bayesian updating over the amplitude angle, yielding posterior estimates, credible intervals, and uncertainty-aware convergence diagnostics. The framework is evaluated on stochastic finite-element benchmark problems, including a one-dimensional bar and an L-bracket with stress concentration. The results show that amplitude amplification converts rare failure events into measurable success probabilities, enabling substantially lower estimation errors than direct Monte Carlo simulation under the same idealized oracle-query budget. The Bayesian formulation achieves point-estimation accuracy comparable to maximum-likelihood IQAE while additionally providing posterior uncertainty quantification, credible intervals, and transparent convergence assessment. The study demonstrates Bayesian IQAE as a statistically interpretable proof-of-concept for quantum-assisted rare-event reliability analysis, while relying on idealized oracle access.

Benchmarking Deep Learning Approaches for AEC Engineering Drawing Layout Detection and Information Extraction

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Information Extraction (IE) from Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) drawings remains hindered by manual inefficiency, while Layout Detection, a vital 'middleware' organizing graphical and textual hierarchies, is underexplored. General document layout models, optimized for text-centric content, lack validation on engineering drawings. This study constructs a custom AEC-specific layouts dataset and benchmarks five deep learning architectures. RF-DETR achieves state-of-the-art performance with an $mAP_{50}$ of 0.949, while the Vision-Language Model Qwen3-VL attains a leading F1-score of 0.911. Conversely, models pre-trained on general document datasets suffer from "domain interference", causing performance degradation. This establishes a robust technical foundation for automated IE in AEC.

MedDDC-Eval: Diagnosis-Decoupled Evaluation of Multi-Turn Medical Consultation Agents

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18999v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-turn medical consultation agents must decide what to ask, adapt to patient responses, and determine when the collected evidence is sufficient. However, coupled evaluation conflates the quality of the policy-elicited history with policy-specific terminal diagnosis generation: strong generation can compensate for a thin history, while weaker generation can obscure a rich one. We introduce MedDDC-Eval, a diagnosis-decoupled testbed that treats elicited history as the comparison object and holds the history-to-diagnosis mapping constant through a shared frozen reader. Across two held-out sources, a grounded interface and an auditable diagnosis-trajectory-efficiency (D/T/E) harness measure diagnostic usefulness, information acquisition, and efficiency. Directional semantic coverage followed by deterministic one-to-one assignment yields coherent precision-recall counts for open-ended items, with at most one credited match per prediction or reference. Holding histories fixed, changing only the diagnostic reader shifts diagnosis F1 by 2.2-19.0 points and reverses 18% and 36% of pairwise policy orderings on the Record and Dialogue splits. We further apply standard Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) over interactive multi-turn rollouts to post-train Qwen3-32B using diagnosis-result and trajectory feedback. On the 100-case Record and 70-case Dialogue splits, the trained policy improves over its initialization by 9.7 and 4.6 total-score points; removing either primary signal lowers held-out joint performance. These results show that MedDDC-Eval supports controlled attribution, interpretable elicited-history measurement, and evaluation-guided evidence-acquisition policy development.

Learning Semantic-Robust Change Detection via Semantic-Invariant Self-Distillation

Jiuhe Qu, Yingping Liang, Ying Fu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19000v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Change detection aims to identify semantic changes between remote sensing images. However, features from models are easily disturbed by non-semantic variations, such as illumination, shadows, and atmospheric changes, leading to false alarms and limited generalization in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose \textbf{SCDistill}, a framework for learning semantic-robust change detection via semantic-invariant self-distillation. First, to strengthen semantic consistency, we introduce a semantic-invariant self-distillation strategy that learns semantic robustness from perturbed yet semantically consistent data, empowering the change detector to extract disturbance-resistant features and achieve more reliable and accurate semantic change identification. Second, to expand paired data with non-semantic variations, we design a diffusion-based perturbation simulation pipeline that synthesizes complex environmental changes, enabling the model to explicitly learn to distinguish semantic changes from appearance-level fluctuations and reduce false alarms caused by non-semantic disturbances. These components promote robustness from data and representation perspectives, leading to synergistic performance gains. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SCDistill achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple semantic change detection benchmarks and exhibits strong generalization to binary change detection and change captioning tasks. Code is accessible at https://github.com/elecreak/SCDistill.

Subject-Conditioned Glucose Forecasting in Type-1 Diabetes

Giorgia Rigamonti, Mirko Paolo Barbato, Davide Marelli, Paolo Napoletano — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19006v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate forecasting of blood glucose concentration is key in the management of Type 1 Diabetes, facilitating early detection of adverse glycemic events and supporting timely therapeutic interventions. Despite recent advances in glucose prediction, most existing approaches rely on population-level representations or implicit personalization strategies that fail to deliver effective subject-specific forecasts. In this work, we propose Subject-Conditioned Glucose Prediction (SCGP), a novel multimodal deep learning architecture conceived for personalized blood glucose prediction. SCGP conditions glucose predictions based on observed glucose data and a compact subject-specific representation learned from contextual information. By explicitly separating subject characterization from glucose dynamics modeling and avoiding early fusion of heterogeneous inputs, the proposed framework effectively captures inter-subject variability while preserving robust and reliable temporal modeling. Experiments on two state-of-the-art benchmark datasets demonstrate that SCGP consistently improves forecasting performance, enabling reliable detection of adverse glycemic events across multiple prediction horizons, highlighting the benefits of explicit subject conditioning for personalized diabetes management.

Caring Over Computing: An Ethical and Sociotechnical Perspective on Generative AI for Social Connectedness in Dementia Care

Teis Arets, Giulia Perugia, Maarten Houben, Wijnand IJsselsteijn — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19007v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: People with dementia in residential care often experience reduced social connectedness. Person-centered care approaches foreground meaningful social interactions to support well-being, but staff and time pressures increasingly constrain opportunities for such care. Generative AI (GenAI) technologies offer possibilities for helping care professionals facilitate social connectedness, despite increasing care pressures. Yet, the meaningful integration of such technologies into the complex sociotechnical setting of residential dementia care is not straightforward. To responsibly design GenAI technologies for dementia care, we need to investigate how care professionals recognize and foster social connectedness and how technologies intersect with those approaches in care contexts. We conducted five workshops with 15 care professionals from three care organizations to pursue this objective. Our findings show that fostering social connectedness involves ongoing interpretation, negotiation, and adaptation to residents' individual needs. Technology was used by care professionals to support communication, interaction, and shared activities, yet remained largely peripheral to everyday care routines and required active mediation for use in practice. Drawing on an ethics of care framework, we derive ethical and sociotechnical implications for the responsible design and positioning of GenAI in residential dementia care.

Computational Humor with Multimodal LLMs: Methods, Datasets, Evaluation, and Challenges

Tuo Liang, Zhe Hu, Disheng Liu, Jing Li, Yu Yin — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19011v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal humor in memes, cartoons, and comics remains difficult for AI systems because intended meaning depends on non-literal mechanisms, shared cultural knowledge, and communicative intent rather than literal scene description. This survey focuses on visual humor understanding in single-image and multi-panel artifacts, while treating humor generation as an emerging downstream frontier. We position the literature against prior humor, sarcasm, and general MLLM surveys and organize it using a capability-centric hierarchy spanning recognition, interpretation and reasoning, and generation. Under this lens, we synthesize benchmark design, evaluation protocols, and modeling paradigms, tracing the field's shift from task-specific fusion models to large-model approaches based on multimodal alignment, evidence-grounded reasoning, and controlled generation. We conclude by highlighting the main barriers to progress: shortcut-prone evaluation, limited cultural and narrative coverage, weak evidence grounding, and unresolved safety and ownership concerns.

Biological Amnesia in ICU Time-Series Prediction: A Drift-Adaptive Two-Stream Architecture with Temporal Retrieval

Fatema Ferdous Tamanna, K. M. Merajul Arefin, Md. Abdul Masud — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19020v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Background: Clinical decision support systems degrade silently as treatment protocols evolve, yet standard adaptation methods treat models as monolithic blocks, unable to distinguish stable patient physiology from shifting institutional practice. Methods: We propose an adaptive clinical intelligence architecture for ICU intervention prediction that structurally decouples physiological from treatment representations, confining parameter updates to the treatment stream upon a dual distributional and accuracy trigger. Automated audit logs record which treatment features drove each adaptation event and how their importance shifted. At inference, an attribution-driven Temporal RAG module grounds each prediction in patient-specific, era-matched PubMed evidence anchored to the patient's dominant physiological features. Experiments used 84,792 MIMIC-IV stays (2008-2022) under strict chronological split. Results: Drift localised entirely to the treatment stream, validating the structural prior. Selective adaptation improved vasopressor and septic shock discrimination and calibration over the static source model. A fully retrained baseline yielded marginally higher aggregate discrimination but missed 26 septic shock cases the framework correctly identified, with none in the reverse direction; retrieval consistency with the pre-adaptation source model was preserved by the framework but degraded substantially in the retrained baseline. Conclusions: Structurally constraining adaptation to drifting components while preserving stable physiological representations enables clinical AI to evolve with practice without distorting learned patient biology. This architecture offers a template for governable, interpretable deployment of adaptive models in high-stakes clinical environments.

From Collaboration to Regulation: Characterizing Governance Practice in Three Deep Learning Open Source Communities

Ruiqiao Qiu, Wenhao Yang, Minghui Zhou — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19022v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Collaboration in Open Source Software (OSS) projects creates substantial coordination and quality-control challenges across diverse contributor bases. Projects address these challenges through documented governance rules, yet maintainers have limited systematic guidance on what rules to codify, when to introduce or revise them, and how to organize them across documents. We conducted a mixed-methods empirical study of three mature deep learning frameworks: PyTorch, TensorFlow, and Paddle. Using the Institutional Analysis and Development framework, we analyzed 109 documents and identified 17 rule themes across seven rule types. Operational rules, such as workflows, appeared across all three projects, whereas structural rules, such as role hierarchies, varied more substantially. Tracing more than 1,700 commits, we found that operational rule themes generally appeared earlier and were revised more frequently, while many structural rule themes emerged later and changed less often. Rule-bearing content also became increasingly specialized across task- and role-specific files. We further identified four governance functions reflected in substantive rule changes: Norm Alignment, Workflow Refinement, Coordination Structuring, and Community and Governance Development. Synthesizing these findings, we derive 33 actionable governance practices for mature, large-scale OSS projects with substantial coordination demands and organizational involvement.

Mitigating Modality and Language-Style Gaps for Zero-Shot Video Moment Retrieval

Jihyun Lee, Cheol-Ho Cho, Woojin Jun, Woojin Jeong, Jae-Pil Heo — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19027v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Zero-shot video moment retrieval aims to overcome the limitations of traditional approaches that require large-scale datasets annotated with text and its relevant temporal spans. Despite advances in pre-trained vision-language models and multimodal large language models, existing ZMR methods still heavily depend on query-to-video content similarity, making them vulnerable to modality and language-style gaps. These gaps lead to unreliable span proposals and unstable moment retrieval results. To address this issue, we propose Self-Similarity-based Moment Proposal and Scoring that instead exploits intrinsic relationships within videos, enabling robust span generation and scoring. By deriving self-similarity only from the video content, we circumvent the noisy and mismatched patterns of query-frame or query-caption similarities, thereby mitigating both modality and language-style gaps. Furthermore, we introduce a query-aware MLLM-based reasoning stage to further sharpen alignment between text and video. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Self-SiMS achieves state-of-the-art performance across ZMR benchmarks.

Unsupervised Multi-kernel Learning for Automated Algorithm Selection

Yihang Lu, Tome Eftimov, Carola Doerr — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19031v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automated algorithm selection in black-box optimization typically relies on supervised models that map landscape features to algorithm performance labels. Such models are costly to train, benchmark-dependent, and often fail to generalize to unseen problem classes. We study an unsupervised alternative: multi-kernel clustering over heterogeneous landscape representations, in which problem instances are grouped without using performance labels in the clustering stage, and the resulting clusters are mapped post hoc to solver recommendations through a strictly separated three-stage evaluation protocol. Drawing on two decades of advances in multiple kernel learning, we adopt a multi-kernel k-means formulation that jointly learns cluster assignments and kernel weights over four heterogeneous landscape views: ELA, DeepELA, DoE2Vec, and TransOptAS. On affine BBOB-derived selector tasks for Differential Evolution (DE) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) at a fixed evaluation budget, we report mean plus or minus standard deviation selector profiles over 50 independent random seeds for stochastic configurations. Multi-kernel clustering obtains the strongest mean profile on the DE portfolio and remains competitive with, and nominally ahead of, the leading baselines on the more compressed PSO portfolio, where differences among the best methods are small relative to stochastic variation. In representative median-seed runs used for visualization, the learned kernel weights retain ELA and TransOptAS while assigning zero weight to DeepELA and DoE2Vec, providing a task-specific interpretation of which representations are retained by the multi-kernel model for selector-oriented grouping.

IMMoE: Incomplete Multi-View Anomaly Detection via Mixture of View Experts Fusion

Lei Hu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19032v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing Multi-view Anomaly Detection (MAD) methods assume that all views are completely available and model each view separately. However, in real industrial scenarios, information in the view may be missing due to faults such as occlusion, which leads to the performance degradation of existing methods due to the lack of a multi-view consistency prior. To address this, we explored a more challenging task: Incomplete Multi-View Anomaly Detection (IMVAD), in which some areas of each view were masked. We proposed a pipeline for automatically generating the IMVAD dataset and generated the \textbf{RIMAD} dataset based on the Real-IAD dataset through this pipeline. In addition, in order to effectively utilize the information of multiple views in the absence of view information, we propose \textbf{IMMoE}, which consists of two key modules: (1) Multi-View Expert Fusion (MVEF) effectively fuses multi-view information through a multi-view expert network and guides the reconstruction of a single view; (2) Local Anomaly Enhancement Encoder (LAEE) effectively prevents the model from overfitting the mask region by applying dropout to local features. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the RIMAD and Real-IAD datasets, especially on RIMAD, we have increased the pixel-level and image-level metrics by 11.8\% and 2.8\%, respectively. Our source code is available at https://github.com/HULEI7/IMMoE

Content is What Remains: Invariant Speech Tokenization from Parallel Utterances

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19033v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Discrete speech tokenizers aim to disentangle semantic from acoustic information, yet targets from self-supervised learning (SSL) models like HuBERT retain non-linguistic variation: speaker identity, prosody, and channel conditions leak into the tokens, inflating entropy. Our key insight is that when enough speakers utter the same words under varying conditions, linguistic content is the only shared factor. We propose PINT (Parallel INvariant Tokenization), which fine-tunes an SSL encoder with alignment losses across parallel utterances and augmentations to distill this shared residual. PINT collapses identical words onto consistent token sequences, drastically reducing conditional entropy. Unlike ASR text, PINT tokens preserve frame-level temporal grounding and serve as drop-in semantic targets for audio codecs. Experiments show a 98.7% relative reduction in speaker probe accuracy (93.1% to 1.2%), a 42% lower ABX error rate, and 27-30% lower LM perplexity versus baselines, confirming that the right invariance is key to efficient learning.

CoGoal3D: Collaborative 3D Object Detection with 3D-Aware Fusion and Refinement

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: V2X collaborative object detection features overcoming the limitations of single-vehicle systems by aggregating environmental features from multiple collaborative agents. However, existing mainstream V2X perception methods mainly focus on 2D BEV object detection. When 3D detection task is concerned, inferior results are obtained because they ignore the 3D spatial misalignment caused by differing height and attitude among the collaborators. In this paper, we propose a novel collaborative 3D object detection framework called CoGoal3D, which extracts and refines the 3D feature gradually in a two-stage pipeline. In the first stage, a multiscale 3D-aware global fusion module is designed to mitigate the 3D spatial misalignment. The resulting proposals are then refined in the second stage with an auxiliary task of 3D point reconstruction. An effective multi-agent collaborative data augmentation strategy is further proposed to enrich the training data while minimizing information loss. Extensive experiments on public real-world datasets demonstrate that our CoGoal3D achieves new state-of-the-art performance, with 3D AP@0.7 improvements of 10.86%, 10.34%, and 10.18% on the DAIR-V2X, V2V4Real, and V2X-Real datasets, respectively. Code is available at https://github.com/Megalo-f/CoGoal3D.

FilmWorld: Agentic Novel-to-Film Generation through Dynamic Cinematic World Modeling

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19038v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Translating novels into films poses a grand challenge for generative artificial intelligence, requiring conversion of abstract literary prose into long-form, multi-scene visual narratives. While current video generation models excel at short, single-scene clips within narrow temporal and spatial contexts, novel-to-film generation operates in a more complex regime, demanding long-duration content across diverse scenes with dynamically evolving entity states. To address this, we formalize novel-to-film generation as dynamic cinematic world modeling, decomposed into two phases: construction, which grounds abstract, underspecified literary narratives into concrete, stateful, and persistent world entities; and evolution, which governs how these entities dynamically update under plot progression to maintain causal consistency across scenes. We propose FilmWorld, an end-to-end agentic system where two groups of specialized agents collaborate to instantiate these phases. Construction-side agents perform narrative structured translation, world entity state modeling with visual anchoring, and state-driven shot planning, progressively projecting literary language into a cinematic blueprint. Evolution-side agents perform state-anchored visual generation, cross-shot dynamic state propagation, and closed-loop state verification to maintain causal consistency and visual coherence. To address the evaluation gap in long-form generation, we introduce FilmEval, a systematic evaluation framework that couples a difficulty-graded benchmark of 15 representative novels with an automated protocol of nine objective metrics spanning three dimensions: cinematic presentation, film consistency, and novel fidelity. Experiments demonstrate that FilmWorld consistently outperforms state-of-the-art video generation agent systems, with particularly pronounced improvements in narrative fidelity and cross-scene consistency.

On the Performance of Fluid Antenna Systems under Block-Diagonal Correlation Model

Jiangsheng Huangfu, Zhengyu Song, Tianwei Hou, Anna Li, Kai Kit Wong — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19039v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fluid antenna systems (FASs) have recently emerged as a promising reconfigurable antenna technology for future wireless networks, owing to their unique ability to exploit fine-grained spatial channel variations within a compact aperture. In this paper, a single-input multiple-output (SIMO) FAS employing maximum-ratio combining (MRC) is investigated under the block-diagonal correlation model, where the ports of FAS are partitioned into independent blocks and the strongest port within each block is selected for MRC combining. Exact outage probability (OP) expressions are first derived in both convolution and characteristic-function forms. To gain further insights, closed-form high-SNR asymptotic expressions are developed, from which the diversity order is shown to approximate the number of ports. This result reveals that block partitioning influences only the coding gain and can therefore be optimized without compromising the diversity performance. For the ergodic rate (ER), a Gamma-matching approximation together with a tighter Jensen-based approximation is derived in closed form. Simulation results corroborate the analytical framework and demonstrate that: i) increasing either the number of ports or the number of blocks improves the system performance; ii) the diversity order depends solely on the number of ports; and iii) the proposed SIMO-FAS achieves comparable or superior outage performance to conventional MRC receivers despite employing fewer combining branches.

Gaze-DETR: Top-Down Guidance Through Priority Maps for Infrared Weak-Small UAV Detection with DETR

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19040v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Infrared small target detection (ISTD) remains challenging because tiny, low-contrast targets are easily overwhelmed by clutter, noise, or occlusion. Conventional single-frame and multi-frame detectors rely on bounding-box supervision, which specifies final target locations but offers little explicit guidance for prioritizing candidate regions or preserving weak-target evidence before localization. Task-driven visual search offers such guidance: top-down goals and visual evidence jointly form a spatial priority map that ranks candidate locations. Building on this principle, we propose Gaze-DETR, a bio-inspired detector that learns an internal priority map before localization. First, a priority head predicts a normalized priority map from image features. Second, Residual Priority-Guided Feature Modulation (RPFM) enhances high-priority responses while retaining multi-scale features. Finally, Priority-Guided Anchor Query Injection (PAQI) converts high-priority locations into decoder anchor queries. We train the priority head using three supervision schemes: box-derived Gaussian maps; real-gaze maps constructed from fixation-density maps; and transferred pseudo-gaze maps learned from gaze--box relations in paired annotations and applied to Anti-UAV410 training boxes. To support the latter two schemes, we construct TIR-UAV120-Gaze with paired detection and task-driven eye-tracking annotations. On TIR-UAV120-Gaze, Gaze-DETR achieves 85.76 mAP$_{50}$ and 88.77 F1 with box-derived supervision, and 86.18 mAP$_{50}$ and 89.00 F1 with real-gaze supervision. On Anti-UAV410, it achieves 87.06 mAP$_{50}$ and 90.90 F1 with box-derived supervision, and 87.08 mAP$_{50}$ and 90.43 F1 with transferred pseudo-gaze supervision. These results show that explicit spatial-priority learning provides pre-localization guidance complementary to bounding-box supervision across annotation settings and costs.

Spectral Higher-Order Neural Networks Have Sharp Expressivity Bounds

Gianluca Peri, Diego Febbe, Duccio Fanelli — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19042v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural hypergraphs are a natural generalization of neural networks, the reference models in modern machine learning. Yet, their deployment has proven demanding: the number of weighted hyperedges required leads to an intractable parameter explosion. However, a novel parametrization that leverages spectral attributes for neural hypergraphs has been recently proposed, that enables to recycle parameters via a weight sharing scheme and consequently yields a significant reduction of the associated computational cost. Preliminary tests carried out on spectral higher-order architectures pointed to meaningful improvements in both performance and interpretability. Building on these results, we advance the benchmarking efforts by evaluating the spectral higher order framework on N-bit parity tasks, a well-established testbed known to be particularly challenging. As we will convincingly argue, Spectral Higher-Order Neural Networks (SHONNs) possess a versatile and highly tunable hypothesis space.

Adopting Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards for Molecular Generation

Mingxuan Ouyang, Hao Lan, Wanyu Lin — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19044v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Leveraging large language models (LLMs) for molecular generation has shown remarkable potential in chemical and drug design. Current methods primarily rely on supervised training or fine-tuning with limited datasets, which are insufficient to capture complex molecular design objectives. While some approaches attempt to guide generation toward specific goals, they often lack direct optimization mechanisms, making it difficult to align generated molecules with desired properties. To tackle these challenges, we propose \textbf{LLMol}, a principled reinforcement learning framework that directly incorporates verifiable rewards for targeted molecule generation. The key insight is to formulate molecular design as a goal-conditioned sequence prediction task, where verifiable rewards serve as explicit supervision to drive generation toward desired objectives. LLMol follows a two-stage training paradigm combining supervised learning and reinforcement learning. In the first stage, large language models are supervised fine-tuned to capture chemical syntax and molecular distributions. In the second stage, we introduce Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), which directly integrates property-based reward signals to guide molecular generation toward task-specific objectives. To address the high variance and instability common in discrete sequence optimization, we adopt Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a stable on-policy algorithm that smooths reward signals and improves training robustness. This framework enables LLMol to effectively handle a range of molecular design tasks, including single-property targeting (e.g., penalized logP, QED) and structure-constrained optimization. Experimental results demonstrate that LLMol consistently outperforms existing methods, achieving higher success rates and improved efficiency across diverse molecular benchmarks.

Contrastive On-Policy Distillation

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19046v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy Distillation (OPD) supervises a student model on trajectories sampled from its own policy by minimizing the divergence between the output distributions of the teacher and student at each token position, thereby providing dense token-level supervision. Although existing OPD methods have demonstrated strong performance in improving the reasoning ability of student models, their objectives fundamentally rely on token-level distribution matching. Consequently, they lack an explicit signal for comparing a token's relative compatibility across reasoning modes and thus do not directly model preferences between these modes. To address this limitation, we propose COPD, a contrastive OPD framework. Specifically, for each token generated by the student model, a frozen teacher model scores the same student state under two contrasting instructions that elicit light and heavy reasoning. The difference between the resulting log probabilities serves as a token-level advantage signal to guide the OPD update. Rather than merely imitating a single teacher distribution, COPD directly encourages the student model to learn more concise and efficient reasoning strategies. We conduct experiments on nine multimodal benchmarks covering both reasoning and understanding tasks. The results show that COPD substantially reduces reasoning length without compromising model performance and consistently improves efficiency across different tasks and model scales. Furthermore, the contrastive formulation can be seamlessly integrated into the On-policy Self-distillation (OPSD) framework, where self-contrastive supervision is constructed without an additional teacher model, thereby enabling the model to distill itself toward lightweight reasoning.

Chi-MERA: Defending Orbit-Based Authentication of LEO Satellites with the Space Oddity of MLAT (Long Version)

Sarah Jung, Eric Jedermann, Martin Strohmeier, Jens Schmitt — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19047v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: An active research area, physical layer security can be a last resort in insecure legacy systems, a resource-efficient alternative, or a complementary backup for cryptographic techniques. In this paper, we demonstrate that previously established authentication schemes for LEO satellites are vulnerable to attackers that control multiple devices. In extensive experiments, such attackers produce false positive rates (FPR) of up to 40%. Based on a root cause analysis, we develop a novel scheme, called Chi-MERA, that improves authentication performance and is robust against multi-device attackers. Our scheme uses two enhancements: (1) multilateration (MLAT) to clearly distinguish between attackers and legitimate satellites, and (2), a new resilient signature scheme without dependency on a single dedicated reference receiver. Our evaluation shows that exploiting MLAT characteristics such as residual analysis to classify vastly different signal source categories (orbit vs. non-orbit) is highly effective. In extensive simulations, we show that the new authentication achieves low FPR of $<$2% and false negative rates of $<$3% for accidentally rejecting valid signals. Furthermore, our scheme's defense scales linearly: $n$ receivers reliably withstand spoofing (FPR $< 1%$) from attackers with $\frac{n}{2}$ devices.

Benchmarking Human and Automatic Speech Recognition of Diverse Speech: Initial Results

Ilse Huisman, Rares Popa, Yuanyuan Zhang, Odette Scharenborg — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19049v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humans are often considered to be the best listeners and seen as the upper-bound performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. We present a preliminary comparison of the performances of state-of-the-art ASR systems and Dutch native listeners on the recognition of "diverse" speech, specifically Dutch child and older adults' speech and Flemish. Google Telephony outperformed the other ASR systems. Importantly, the ASR systems showed similar performance to the listeners, and in specific cases even outperformed them. Slight performance differences between the listeners and ASR systems were found related to speaker's age and regional accents and utterance length. Future research should focus on making ASR systems more robust to acoustic variability related to aging and regional accents. A comparison of ASR recognition performances on the test stimuli and the full Jasmin-CGN test sets showed the influence of the specific test sets on the conclusions regarding benchmarking human and ASR performance.

Approximating $\delta$-Dispersion

Tom Jan{\ss}en — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19053v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider a continuous facility location problem called $\delta$-Dispersion. For some fixed $\delta > 0$, the goal is to place as many facilities on a graph as possible with pairwise distance at least $\delta$. The facilities may be located on the vertices of the graph, or the interior of the edges. This problem can be interpreted as a continuous version of the well-known Independent Set problem. Its approximation behavior is very similar for large values of $\delta$. Notably, Grigoriev et al. [Algorithmica 21] showed that $\delta$-Dispersion is solvable in polynomial time when $\delta = 1/x$ or $\delta = 2/x$ for a natural number $x$ and NP-hard otherwise. We study the approximability of $\delta$-Dispersion depending on the value of $\delta$. For $\delta > 2$, we show poly-APX-hardness, while for all $\delta < 2$ that are not solvable in polynomial time we show APX-hardness. Thanks to a translation theorem for $\delta$ due to Hartmann et al. [MFCS 22], we may focus our attention for approximation algorithms on the intervals $(2/3 , 1)$ and $(1, 2)$. We provide several approximation algorithms with an approximation factor approaching $1$ as $\delta$ approaches one of the interval boundaries. Surprisingly, the behavior as $\delta$ approaches $2/3$ from above is different: As our hardness reductions reveal, it is impossible (under standard complexity-theoretic assumptions) to construct an approximation algorithm with an approximation factor approaching $1$ as $\delta$ approaches $2/3$ from above.

Probabilistic Physics-Aware Machine Learning Predictions of Electric Truck Energy Consumption with Field Data

Hannes Nilsson, Rafael Basso, Bal\'azs Kulcs\'ar, Morteza Haghir Chehreghani — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19054v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, we incorporate first principle physics into the construction of data-driven methods by considering a model that accounts for the different sources of energy losses during vehicle operations. Our results show that Bayesian linear regression based on this physics-aware model can improve the reliability of the expected energy consumption, as compared with standard linear regression. Further, it is shown that more complex machine learning models such as neural networks and gradient boosted regression trees, based on the same physical model, can further improve the accuracy in energy forecasting and significantly outperform standard versions of the same machine learning models. In addition to point predictions of the energy consumption, we develop a framework for estimating the corresponding uncertainty in the form of predicted standard deviation. Our results show that all of the models learn to estimate the uncertainty reasonably well.

Vector-Bench: Can Models Surgically Edit SVG Code?

Yug Aditi Gupta, Prannay Hebbar — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19056v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Instruction-based vector editing requires two capabilities: making a requested change and leaving everything else alone. The second is easy to miss when an output is judged only as a raster image. We introduce Vector-Bench, a compact, difficult benchmark of 40 SVG repair tasks. Each task pairs a corrupted SVG program with an author-written visual instruction, a hidden target program, 5.05 annotated repairs on average, and an average of 60.55 protected objects. Instructions describe visible defects without exposing element identifiers, coordinates, color codes, or path data. We define a deterministic binary specification reward: requested repairs use attribute-aware perceptual tolerances, while unrequested rendering- or application-relevant structure must remain semantically unchanged and the result must be a valid SVG. Canonical target equality and stricter source fidelity are retained as diagnostics. Validity-gated repair progress, a near-complete tier, and valid-output Unintended Change Rate (UCR) explain partial outcomes. We evaluate 34 model endpoints (25 listed as open-weight, 5 inexpensive controls, and 4 frontier closed endpoints) over 1360 requests. The strongest endpoint reaches only 15.0% full specification success, despite 43.7% mean repair progress, showing that apparent repair progress and specification-faithful editing remain substantially different. All prompts, outputs, scoring code, costs, and per-task reports are released.

Where Should Optimizer State Live? Tiered State Allocation for Memory-Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Training

Nuemaan Malik — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19058v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Optimizer state is the largest single line item in the memory budget of mixture-of-experts (MoE) training: on a 6.78B-parameter MoE language model, AdamW keeps 50.6 GB of first and second moments to update 12.6 GB of bfloat16 weights. We study SkewAdam, an optimizer built on the observation that the three parameter populations of an MoE - the dense backbone, the experts, and the router - differ enough in size and gradient statistics that they should not receive the same state. SkewAdam keeps float32 momentum plus a factored second moment for the backbone (5% of parameters), a factored second moment alone for the experts (95%), and an exact second moment for the router (<0.01%). The resulting state occupies 1.29 GB, 2.6% of AdamW's, and peak training memory falls from 81.4 GB to 31.3 GB, within the budget of a 40 GB accelerator. In a controlled comparison from identical initializations over 82M tokens, SkewAdam reaches validation perplexity 108.4, ahead of AdamW (126.8), Muon (120.2), and Lion (393.7), and settles router load balance to within 1% of its uniform floor. The allocation is not what earns that perplexity: a tier ablation matches it with twenty times the state, and Adafactor, which shares the factored estimator but drops momentum, plateaus 40 points behind. The tiers buy memory at no cost to accuracy; the accuracy comes from keeping momentum, which a uniform optimizer shares too. Sweeping the baselines' learning rates narrows but does not close the gap: the best tuned AdamW reaches 118.5, tuned Adafactor 139.7. Where optimizer state lives, these results suggest, matters at least as much as how much of it there is.

On the completeness of transformation rules in reversible logic synthesis

Shiguang Feng, Zongxing Xiong, Lvzhou Li — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19059v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformation rules play a central role in reversible circuit optimization, template-based rewriting, and equivalence checking, and establishing their completeness is a fundamental problem in reversible logic synthesis. In this work, we investigate the completeness of transformation rules for reversible circuits both with and without ancillary bits and garbage outputs. For reversible circuits without ancillary bits and garbage outputs, we introduce a refined and complete transformation rule set $\mathcal{RC}^{r}$, obtained by replacing one rule in the rule set $\mathcal{RC}$ proposed in the previous work (TCAD, 45, pp. 3711--3724, 2026) with a simpler and widely adopted transformation rule. Since all rules in $\mathcal{RC}^{r}$ are commonly used in reversible logic synthesis, this result reveals that practically adopted transformation rules are already sufficient to establish a complete rewriting framework. Based on this result, we further propose an extended rule set, denoted by $\mathcal{RC}^+$, and prove its completeness for reversible circuits with ancillary bits and garbage outputs. To the best of our knowledge, this work presents the first complete transformation rule set for arbitrary reversible circuits, regardless of whether ancillary bits or garbage outputs are employed. The proposed framework establishes a theoretical foundation for circuit optimization, template generation, and equivalence checking, and may facilitate the development of automated design tools for reversible and quantum circuits.

Deep learning-based prediction of time-resolved adhesive forces in viscoelastic Hertzian contacts

Ali Maghami, Merten Stender, Michele Ciavarella, Antonio Papangelo — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19060v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fast prediction of the response of adhesive soft viscoelastic contacts represents a current challenge in soft robotics and for gripping and manipulation tasks. Determining the complete time-resolved force trajectory requires full numerical simulations, whose computational cost is strongly parameter-dependent, making them impractical for real-time application or design-optimization loops. In this work, we overcome this limitation by training a scalar-conditioned, stateful, sequence-to-sequence deep learning model to predict the full force evolution from a prescribed displacement history for both short- and long-range adhesion regimes. The data set spans four orders of magnitude in loading and unloading rates and includes varied dwell times, with the Tabor parameter ranging from $0.2$ to $3.2$. To enable learning across these heterogeneous time scales, we introduce a fixed-measurement-step (FMS) representation that converts variable-length trajectories into fixed-length sequences while preserving their physical-time information. Different architectures were trained, including long short-term memory (LSTM) networks, temporal convolutional neural (TCN) networks, and time-distributed dense layers with three different Tabor-conditioning mechanisms. The models were compared using global waveform and error metrics. We found that the best-performing model has an LSTM architecture with concatenated conditioning, which achieves a held-out mean-squared error of $5.0\times10^{-4}$, a median pull-off-force error of $\approx2.2\%$, and a median hysteresis error of $\approx1.1\%$. For the held-out protocols, the model predicts a complete force trajectory with a median inference time of $0.16$ s. The model is tested across unseen parameter combinations and against analytical limiting cases, providing a rapid surrogate for repeated numerical evaluations with potential use in control-oriented applications.

Now You See the Hate: Adaptive View Retrieval for Hidden Hateful Illusions

Qianpu Chen, Derya Soydaner — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19061v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hateful optical illusions expose a serious gap in current multimodal safety systems. On original-view hateful illusions, previous work shows that six moderation classifiers achieve at most 20.9 to 24.5% accuracy and nine state-of-the-art VLMs remain at or below 10.2% with illusion-aware prompting, leaving most hidden hate undetected. We formulate hidden hateful illusion detection as a perceptual retrieval problem and propose Adaptive View Retrieval. This retrieve-and-calibrate framework assembles a complementary view bank for the image and hidden-message templates, adaptively selects which views to trust, retrieves hidden-message identities, and calibrates whether the recovered evidence is harmful. On HatefulIllusion with a frozen CLIP encoder, Adaptive View Retrieval reaches 93.2% balanced accuracy on the held-out test split. It substantially outperforms original-view baselines and fixed single-transform filters across hate slangs, hate symbols, and visibility levels. The same design also surpasses official fine-tuned CLIP baselines, matches or exceeds human performance on IllusionMNIST, IllusionFashionMNIST, and IllusionAnimals, and outperforms zoom-out preprocessing on HC-Bench under the SemVink protocol. Together, these results show that robust multimodal moderation requires recovering hidden meaning before deciding whether it is harmful.

Two Time Scales of Online Discussion: Mixture Distributions of Thread Durations Across Four Reddit Communities

Agostino Funel — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19062v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Online discussions vary dramatically in their duration: some fade within minutes, while others persist for days. We analyze 3.5 million threads from four Reddit communities to uncover the statistical patterns governing how long conversations last. We find that thread duration follow a mixture of two distinct regimes -- brief reactions and extended discussions -- coexisting in roughly equal proportions across all communities. The widely-assumed power-law distribution provides a poor description of the data. The prevalence and duration of each regime depend systematically on social factors: more participants lengthen both types of discussion, disagreement between opposing viewpoints extends long conversations, and threads that appear emotionally neutral are in fact the most conflictual -- balanced between opposing factions whose debate sustains prolonged engagement. These structural patterns remain stable over seven years. Our findings establish a robust statistical model for online discussion dynamics and demonstrate that the temporal organization of conversations responds predictably to participation, sentiment, and conflict.

Quality Action Assurance: Multimodal Verification of Examiner Claims in VR OSCEs

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19063v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) are the gold standard for assessing clinical competence, yet scoring remains vulnerable to examiner subjectivity, fatigue, and cognitive bias. Standard examiner validation via inter-rater statistics lacks explanatory power regarding the source of errors, as it neither analyzes examiner reasoning nor verifies examiner claims against actual events. Thus, we introduce Quality Action Assurance (QAA), a multimodal framework that verifies examiner claims in Virtual Reality (VR) pediatric OSCEs by comparing actions claimed by examiners against the true sequence of events, constructed from video, VR logs, and actor data. QAA combines a constrained temporal action alignment model, which performs action localization and actor source attribution, with a large language model that extracts examiner claims and checks them against the record. Across a 5-fold cross-validation, QAA achieves 99.2% $\pm$ 0.7% Actor F1 and 93.4% $\pm$ 1.9% W@16 for temporal alignment. Overall, QAA detects examiner errors with 70.0% precision and 76.7% recall, improving factual correctness from 39.2% to 79.2%, enabling fairer OSCE assessment.

Mage-Flow: An Efficient Native-Resolution Foundation Model for Image Generation and Editing

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19064v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large-scale visual generators are increasingly capable but costly to train, fine-tune, and deploy. We introduce Mage-Flow, a compact 4B-scale generative stack for efficient text-to-image generation and instruction-based image editing. The stack is built from two co-designed components: Mage-VAE, a lightweight high-fidelity latent tokenizer, and a Native-Resolution Multimodal Diffusion Transformer trained with rectified flow matching. Mage-VAE uses one-step diffusion-style encoding and decoding with anchor-latent regularization, preserving the reconstruction quality of strong public VAEs while reducing tokenization cost by more than an order of magnitude. Together with native-resolution packing and stack-level CUDA kernel fusion, the stack supports flexible-resolution training and improves end-to-end training throughput by about $2.5\times$. Built on this foundation, we develop a complete model family with Base, RL-aligned, and Turbo variants for both generation and editing. Diffusion-NFT improves prompt following, text rendering, aesthetic quality, and editing fidelity, while few-step distillation with adversarial perceptual guidance produces 4-step Turbo models for low-latency inference. Despite its compact scale, Mage-Flow and Mage-Flow-Edit achieves competitive performance across standard generation and editing benchmarks. More importantly, the Turbo variants make high-resolution generation and editing practical for interactive use: at $1024^2$ resolution on a single NVIDIA A100 GPU, Mage-Flow-Turbo generates an image in 0.59s, and Mage-Flow-Edit-Turbo edits an image in 1.02s, while maintaining a small memory footprint. These results show that careful tokenizer--backbone--system co-design can deliver strong high-resolution generation and editing within an efficient 4B model family.

Ultrametric Convergence of Guarded Automata and Applications to Structural Input Validation

Atanas Ilchev, Hristo Kiskinov, George Pashev, Boyan Zlatanov — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19065v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We equip language-equivalence classes of deterministic finite automata with a distinguishing-word ultrametric and identify the resulting space isometrically with the regular languages. This space is incomplete, while its metric completion is naturally identified with the complete ultrametric space of all formal languages. Guarded language operators induce contractions on the automaton space, and their Picard iterates converge in the completion to the unique language fixed point, which is represented by a finite automaton exactly when it is regular. Motivated by structural input validation, we use this framework to construct depth-capped deterministic finite automata with certified finite-depth correctness. These automata provide efficient pre-filters for nested input structures, such as parenthesised SQL parameters, while avoiding the backtracking risks of regular-expression engines and the runtime overhead of full context-free parsers. We also outline a practical WAF pipeline combining learned grammar models, finite-state construction, and $O(1)$-memory runtime validation.

Secure OFDM-IM ISAC With Artificial-Noise-Aided Index Deception

Ufuk Altun, Onur G\"unl\"u — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19068v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose an artificial noise (AN)-aided, secure OFDM with index modulation (OFDM-IM) framework for integrated sensing and communication (ISAC). Consider a security-critical scenario, where the sensing target is also a potential eavesdropper. Instead of suppressing the signal power toward the target, the proposed method injects AN into inactive OFDM-IM subcarriers. The precoder spatially nulls the AN at the legitimate receiver, while projecting active-subcarrier energy levels toward the target to deceive its index detector. Since the monostatic ISAC transmitter knows the AN waveform, the same inactive subcarriers also contribute to sensing. We formulate this scenario as an optimization problem that maximizes transmit power toward the target while providing secure communication with a legitimate receiver. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme improves targeted transmit power compared to classical OFDM.

Delineate Anything v2: A Global Foundation Model for Field Delineation

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19069v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate agricultural field boundary delineation at large scale is a foundational task for food security, supply chain transparency, and carbon accounting. While vision foundation models like SAM show remarkable zero-shot capabilities, they frequently fail in geospatial domains due to topological complexity, cropland texturing patterns, and a lack of physical scale awareness. In this work, we introduce Delineate Anything v2, a globally scalable foundation model designed specifically for wide-area field boundary mapping. We construct FBIS-73M, a 73-million-instance multi-resolution dataset spanning 61 countries. To address the pervasive issue of multi-field administrative parcel merging, we introduce a resolution-specific data curation pipeline that leverages topological image-space adaptation to homogenize merged parcels and strengthen weak physical boundaries. Furthermore, we establish a novel, manually curated evaluation benchmark covering 100 countries to assess independent zero-shot generalization. Our results show that Delineate Anything v2 surpasses the current state-of-the-art, including the Delineate Anything framework, by 0.284 mAP@0.5 (+103.3% relative gain), while maintaining execution speeds suitable for rapid national- and global-scale deployment, as demonstrated by nationwide mapping of Ukraine (603,000 km^2) in 5.4 hours on a consumer-grade workstation. Code, pre-trained weights, the FBIS-73M dataset, and ready-to-use national-scale vector boundary products are publicly available at https://github.com/Lavreniuk/Delineate-Anything.

On the Effectiveness of Pretraining for Graph Combinatorial Optimization

David Aguado, Daniel Fuertes, Carlos R. del-Blanco, Fernando Jaureguizar — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19072v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper introduces a self-supervised pretraining framework for graph combinatorial optimization specifically designed to address the nature of routing problems like the Traveling Salesman Problem. By utilizing graph contrastive learning with geometric augmentations (specifically, rotations and axial reflections) the model is forced to learn invariant structural representations and global relative distance distributions. Results demonstrate that this pretraining strategy outperforms non-pretrained models across various problem scales. Notably, the hybrid strategy (combining rotation and reflection) achieved a 6.57% improvement in tour length for TSP1000, proving that geometric pretraining is an important inductive bias for effectively scaling neural solvers to high-dimensional instances.

Context-structured Video Anomaly Detection with Large Vision-Language Models

Dongjun Kim, Changjae Oh, Andrea Cavallaro, Jeonghoon Mo — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19077v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training video anomaly detectors is challenging due to the difficulty and cost of annotating diverse and rare abnormal events. Although recent large vision-language models enable training-free inference, existing approaches mostly rely on holistic inference over sampled video and may miss context-specific anomaly cues. In this paper, we present CSI-VAD, a training-free video anomaly detector that identifies abnormal events across diverse contexts. The key idea is to decompose each video into three distinct contexts (environment, objects, time) and perform context-specific inference in separate branches. Because we ground anomaly judgments solely in context-specific visual cues, we do not require predefined text prompts describing abnormal events or dataset-specific tuning. Experiments on UCF-Crime and UBnormal show that CSI-VAD consistently improves over the direct holistic baseline and achieves competitive performance against existing methods, showing the advantage of structured context decomposition for training-free video anomaly detection.

GEqTrain: A Configuration-Driven Framework for Retargeting Equivariant Graph Neural Networks Across 3D Scientific Tasks

Daniele Angioletti, Marco Nobile, Vittorio Limongelli — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19083v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Equivariant graph neural networks provide a powerful modeling language for three-dimensional scientific data, but their reuse is often limited by implementations tied to specific tasks, outputs, and training regimes. We present GEqTrain, a configuration-driven framework that separates dataset semantics, model composition, and training objectives. Raw data are mapped to typed node-, edge-, and graph-level fields, while model stacks, losses, and training workflows are assembled declaratively through Hydra configurations. A shared equivariant backbone and training infrastructure can therefore be retargeted to a new task primarily through configuration. We demonstrate this flexibility on three different problems handled within one software stack: coarse-grained-to-atomistic backmapping of biomolecular systems, prediction of NMR chemical shifts in molecular solids, and equivariant generative modeling. Our aim is not to surpass individually optimized task-specific systems, but to show that a shared representation and training infrastructure can achieve competitive accuracy across qualitatively different tasks at the cost of a configuration change. We further introduce GEqDiff, a generative extension based on equivariant flow matching. GEqDiff treats user-defined equivariant fields as first-class generation targets, jointly transporting Cartesian positions and non-scalar node fields spanning representations up to l=3 within a single equivariant flow. We validate this capability on a controlled synthetic benchmark inspired by protein secondary-structure motifs, showing that fields with heterogeneous transformation properties can be reconstructed jointly and with high fidelity. By reducing the software overhead of moving between predictive and generative, scalar and tensorial settings, GEqTrain aims to make equivariant modeling more reproducible, extensible, and reusable.

Advancing Multimodal Fusion on Heterogeneous Medical Data with Hybrid Geometry Attention

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19086v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal fusion learning (MFL) has shown great potential in the medical domain, where we are faced with disparate data modalities such as imaging, clinical records, and omics. However, existing MFL strategies face several major challenges. First, they struggle to capture complex cross-modal interactions effectively, which in turn limits performance improvements. Second, they incur high computational costs, restricting their applicability in resource-constrained healthcare AI applications. Finally, they are often designed and evaluated for narrow, fixed modality configurations (e.g., imaging-only, or specific pairs such as image and omics), which limits evidence of their adaptability and generalizability to broader collections of heterogeneous medical modalities. To address these challenges, we propose a novel MFL framework - Cascaded Unified Representation Learning for Efficient Fusion Network (CURE) - a lightweight and scalable framework that progressively integrates various modalities through a novel efficient Hybrid Geometry Aware Fusion layer (HyFuse), where each HyFuse layer is sequentially learned for each modality, making the framework adaptable and generalizable. Within HyFuse, an efficient residual convolution module captures rich multi-scale features to ensure cost-effective learning, while a hybrid-space aware attention mixer learns coarse-to-fine structural cues to better preserve cross-modal relationships. Complementary learnable late-fusion and shared information refinement modules are then employed to learn robust modality-order-invariant shared representations, which in turn yields consistent performance improvements. Extensive evaluations on 16 public datasets show that CURE outperforms leading multimodal fusion methods, boosting performance by up to 3.97% and lowering computational costs by up to 87.8%, ensuring more effective and reliable predictions.

DAIS: Dependency-Aware Intermediate QA Supervision for Complex Reasoning

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19088v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision exposes intermediate rationales, but flat rationale targets usually optimize a single reasoning sequence and provide limited supervision on how local conclusions should support later decisions. We introduce Dependency-Aware Intermediate QA Supervision (DAIS), a training-time framework that converts filtered teacher rationales into stage-level QA records. Each intermediate record predicts a local answer conditioned on the previous states needed for that decision, while the final-answer record keeps the original task format; evaluation therefore uses only the original input and optional context. Across GDPR, AIACT, MedQA, and FOLIO with multiple Qwen backbones, DAIS improves average final-answer accuracy over answer-only, flat chain-of-thought, and independent-QA baselines. On policy-compliance benchmarks, it achieves a largest gain of 5.6% and an average gain of 4.2% over the strongest non-DAIS baseline. Controlled ablations show that valid previous-state conditioning contributes beyond longer targets or additional intermediate text, supporting dependency-conditioned intermediate QA as a lightweight auxiliary supervision signal for standard final-answer inference.

An unsupervised clustering analysis of breast cancer data derived from electronic health records enhanced through UMAP dimensionality reduction

Davide Chicco, Nicoletta Benvenuto — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19089v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Breast cancer is one of the most widespread types of cancer, affecting approximately 8 million women worldwide. Electronic health records of patients diagnosed with this disease can serve as valuable datasets for computational analyses, enabling the discovery of new insights about the pathology. Unsupervised clustering, in particular, can identify groups of patients with medically significant features, revealing data trends that might otherwise go unnoticed by medical doctors. In this study, we first applied the DBSCAN density-based clustering method to three independent datasets derived from electronic medical records of patients with mammary carcinoma. Subsequently, to enhance our results, we preceded the DBSCAN application with a dimensionality reduction phase using UMAP. We evaluated our clustering outcomes using three statistical indices (DBCV, DCSI, and DISCO). Our results confirm the effectiveness of combining UMAP with DBSCAN for clustering data derived from electronic health records, paving the way for the medical interpretation of the patient groups identified by our approach.

Towards chemistries in dynamical systems

Martin Biehl, Nathaniel Virgo — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19090v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chemistry describes aspects of the universe in terms of molecules and their reactions. In this exploratory work we present a way to describe aspects of any dynamical system in similar terms. To describe a dynamical system in this way three decisions have to be made. The first is how many different "places" there are at which molecules or chemical species can occur; the second is how to determine the species present (or not) at each place; and the third is the set of transitions and reactions that can occur between the species in the various places. For these choices to be compatible with the state update of the dynamical system each state must be able to determine transitions that take the currently occurring molecules to those occurring in the updated state. We also propose an additional requirement that there is always a unique way to choose the least amount of transitions occurring during state updates. We discuss gliders in the game of life cellular and argue that when following their definition of according to Randall Beer they satisfy the additional criterion as well. We also point out some issues with the approach.

Structured Spectral Compression based Low-Bitrate Secure Speech Communications for Internet of Things assisted Non-Terrestrial Networks

Li Ping Qian, Zhehan Chen, Qianru Wang, Qian Wang, Yuan Wu, Xuemin Sherman Shen — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19092v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper focuses on the Low-Bitrate Secure Speech Communications based on the Structured Spectral Compression (LB-S2C2). Specifically, the Mel spectral matrix of the speech signal is first encoded at the transmitter side through compressive sensing based on waveform segmentation and data quantization. Then, the Automatic Repeat Request (ARQ) is combined with forward error correction to achieve reliable transmission of speech signals over wireless channels. Thirdly, the received signals are recovered as the speech at the receiver side. Finally, we conduct a series of simulation experiments for the performance evaluation of LB-S2C2. Our simulations reveal that the dictionary matrix used for the speech reconstruction is different from the one used for the high-order matrix sparsification by even only approximately 0.1%, and then the accurate speech recovery fails. It implies that the speech data can be securely transmitted when the dictionary matrix is preserved. More importantly, the LB-S2C2 exhibits a very high privacy protection capability with the average voiceprint similarity to be only 0.3, which is much lower than the 0.8 of the semantic speech communication scheme DeepSC-S, and even lower than the 0.33 of the latest speech communication scheme OFI-OFCNB. In addition, our simulations reveal that the proposed structured speech coding boasts a time complexity of merely O(n), and the proposed speech recovery scheme requires the 12-bit memory storage only, which outperforms the traditional encryption algorithms proposed for speech communications. In comparison with the conventional compression techniques, our spectral compression method renders the coding rate of only 3.9kbps, which is lower than the current lowest speech coding rate of 6.3kbps achieved by G.723.

Supra Cognitive Modes: A Routed Architecture for Agent Memory

Joshua Tobkin, David Yang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19096v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent-memory workloads mix direct factual lookup, relation-chain and current-state reasoning, and broad synthesis over long histories. We describe Supra Cognitive Modes (SCM), an architecture that maps explicit or automatically selected per-query modes to retrieval and synthesis payloads over one shared ingest substrate. A frozen semantic classifier and runtime gates dispatch queries among fused lexical and dense lookup, graph or iterative multi-hop handling, and stratified long-form synthesis. The substrate combines multi-granularity embeddings, extracted triples, fact-version metadata, and optional asynchronous enrichments. We characterize the deployed configuration on three benchmarks: Long-term Conversational Memory (LoCoMo; n = 1,986), MemoryAgentBench (MAB; n = 3,671), and LongMemEval (n = 500). The reference run records 84.87% on LoCoMo factoid categories and 68.61% on adversarial abstention, 61.49% on MAB across two repetitions, and 86.00% on LongMemEval. A repository-backed reproduction produces similar aggregate scores and supports task- and mode-conditioned failure analysis. Raw baseline outputs, aligned end-to-end timing for LoCoMo and LongMemEval, and complete token ledgers are unavailable; stored rows also omit some final runtime decisions. The results characterize one implemented routed configuration and its diagnostic failure patterns, while source inspection verifies the per-query control interface and shared-substrate design. Causal routing effects, efficiency gains, and statistical significance remain outside the available evidence.

Stability in Combinatorial Markets with Side Payments

Alexander Grosz, Chiara Vanoli — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19098v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Combinatorial markets provide a general framework for trading bundles of indivisible goods. Building on the combinatorial market models of Bikhchandani & Ostroy (2002) and Bichler & Waldherr (2017), we introduce explicit side payments, thereby allowing restricted transfers of utility among subsets of agents and capturing different forms of financial collusion. This extension results in a large number of seemingly distinct market settings. However, we establish a systematic classification of their expressive power. Most notably, we show that higher-order market settings (i.e., those with more personalized prices and less clearinghouse power) are essentially equivalent in terms of market properties when side payments are permitted between buyers. An analogous collapse occurs for the third- and higher-order settings when side payments are permitted between sellers. In contrast, we identify a fundamental structural separation between the second- and third-order settings. To analyze stability in these environments, we generalize the classical concepts of stability with and without transferable utility (TU and NTU) to a partition-based notion of restricted transferability (the $T$-core). We relate stable outcomes across different settings to appropriate stability notions, identify market instances in which partially transferable utility yields a better (or any) stable outcome, and show that under personalized pricing, all stability notions collapse to NTU-stability.

FlexiAvatar: Unified 3D Gaussian Human Avatars Under Arbitrary Body Visibility

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19100v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reconstructing animatable 3D human avatars from monocular video is a fundamental problem in computer vision with broad applications in AR/VR and digital content creation. Existing approaches typically couple parametric body models with neural rendering or 3D Gaussian splatting and optimize all body regions jointly from short videos, which often degrades fidelity in the visible areas. To overcome this limitation, we introduce FlexiAvatar, a unified framework that explicitly optimizes only the visible body regions, effectively eliminating artifacts arising from unobserved limbs. Our method integrates occlusion-robust SMPL-X tracking with part-specific residual refinement to capture high-frequency geometric and appearance details. To complete entirely unseen regions (e.g., back views), we leverage a diffusion-based approach to generate texture consistent with the observed appearance. Experiments on full-body (NeuMan, ZJU-MoCap, WildAvatar), upper/half-body (talk-show clips), and head-only (INSTA) inputs show that FlexiAvatar delivers consistently higher reconstruction quality, outperforming state-of-the-art methods by an average PSNR improvement of approximately 3% across datasets. Finally, by restricting optimization to observed regions, our method reduces the effective number of Gaussians that must be optimized and rendered, leading to reduced runtime and memory overhead in partial-visibility scenarios.

Translation as Augmentation: Effect of Translated Data on Assessment of Difficulty

Yiheng Wu, Jue Hou, Roman Yangarber — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19101v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable Text Difficulty Assessment is a prerequisite for valid text simplification workflows and personalized learning applications. However, the development of robust assessment models is severely hindered by a critical bottleneck: the scarcity of expert-annotated corpora containing fine-grained difficulty levels (e.g., CEFR), particularly for lower-resource languages. This paper addresses this data scarcity problem in the context of a low-resource European language. We propose a cross-lingual data augmentation strategy that leverages machine translation to transfer labeled resources from high-resource languages to the target low-resource language. We train BERT-based regression models to predict difficulty scores and investigate whether synthetic, translated data can effectively supplement native training sets. Our experiments demonstrate that augmenting scarce native data with machine-translated corpora significantly improves the accuracy of difficulty estimation, offering a viable solution for languages lacking extensive expert annotations.

Enabling Multi-Dimensional Distributed Trace Comparison with Contrast

Vaastav Anand, Rodrigo Fonseca, Jonathan Mace, Antoine Kaufmann — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19102v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diagnosis using distributed traces is fundamentally a comparative task: operators seek to understand how an anomalous execution differs from expected behavior, how a deployment changes system execution, or how two individual executions differ. Trace comparison is challenging because useful differences between executions can manifest across multiple dimensions, and no single diagnostic interface is effective at capturing all of them. Moreover, the relevant dimensions and comparison populations are often not known a priori; operators construct and refine comparison sets dynamically as they develop hypotheses about system behavior. This paper presents Contrast, a system for multi-dimensional comparative trace analysis. Contrast introduces the Trace Projection Object (TPO), a mergeable representation that captures structural, temporal, critical-path, and semantic properties of trace populations while enabling efficient construction of arbitrary comparison sets at query time. Unlike approaches that define a fixed notion of trace difference, Contrast separates trace representation from comparison semantics, allowing diverse interfaces to selectively reason about specific dimensions. This separation enables the composition of complementary interfaces, allowing operators to combine insights from multiple dimensions for more effective diagnosis. We demonstrate this capability through two complementary interfaces: (i) SpectroViz, a critical-path-based visual interface for localizing execution differences; and (ii) Parallax, a natural language interface for generating explanations of trace differences using LLMs. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of Contrast through controlled experiments on traces from DeathStarBench and evaluation on production traces from Uber.

SciCodePile: A 128GB Corpus and Executable Benchmark for Challenging Scientific Code Generation

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19104v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) excel at general-purpose code generation, yet how well they handle scientific code remains an open question. Existing datasets and benchmarks are limited in scale, domain coverage, or executable verification, leaving the true gap between current LLMs and reliable scientific code generators inadequately assessed. To address these limitations, we present SciCodePile, the largest scientific code corpus to date, constructed from 37,737 public repositories and collectively comprising 128GB of code that spans multiple computational science disciplines. From this corpus, we further curate an executable benchmark of 200 tasks, each equipped with a sandboxed execution environment and an automated test harness for functional verification. We evaluate 15 LLMs from both open-source and closed-source families on three tasks: prefix-to-suffix completion, fill-in-the-middle infilling, and executable code generation. Results show that scientific code generation remains highly challenging: The best CodeBLEU reaches only 38.13 and 38.37 on the two completion tasks, while the strongest model achieves just 12.30\% Pass@1 on the executable benchmark, underscoring how far current models remain from reliable scientific code generation. To demonstrate the training utility of SciCodePile, we further show that continued pretraining on our corpus improves CodeBLEU by $\times$2.84 on scientific code completion, and instruction tuning on our data improves Pass@1 by $\times$4.79 on the executable benchmark. All code and data are available at https://huggingface.co/SciCodePile.

Space-time tensor-product finite element methods for parabolic problems

Richard L\"oscher, Michael Reichelt, Olaf Steinbach — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19107v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study space-time Galerkin--Petrov formulations for parabolic evolution problems and their relation to classical implicit time-stepping schemes. Although such schemes are stable in the usual time-stepping sense, their interpretation as space-time operator equations may lead to conditional stability, with constants depending on the relation between temporal and spatial mesh sizes. We revisit this phenomenon for the continuous Galerkin method of Aziz and Monk, which yields the Crank--Nicolson scheme in the lowest-order case, and provide a detailed space-time error analysis for solutions of both high and low regularity. In particular, the space-time framework allows us to analyze the deteriorated behaviour of classical time-stepping methods for nonsmooth initial data. By applying integration by parts in time, we derive an adjoint space-time formulation that incorporates the initial condition in a natural variational way. In the lowest-order case, this formulation leads to a Rannacher-type smoothing of the initial data. The theoretical results are complemented by numerical experiments.

OpenRTAG: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Robust Text-Attributed Graph Learning under Data Quality Degradation

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19108v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Text-attributed graphs (TAGs) are an important graph data form that combine relational structure with rich node text. However, real-world TAGs are often imperfect, with quality issues arising from text, structure, and labels, and typically manifesting as sparsity, noise, and imbalance. These dimensions define nine representative degradation scenarios that can substantially affect TAG learning. Although prior studies have explored specific mitigation strategies, existing evidence remains fragmented across degradation types, datasets, tasks, and model families, leaving TAG robustness insufficiently understood. To address this gap, we present OpenRTAG, a robustness benchmark for text-attributed graph learning. OpenRTAG organizes TAG quality issues into a unified 3 * 3 taxonomy and supports standardized evaluation across nine TAG datasets and three downstream tasks. It systematically evaluates scenario validity and model sensitivity, compares traditional GNNs, LLM-GNNs, and a representative GFM, investigates the effectiveness, efficiency, and robustness of scenario-matched baselines, and further examines model behavior under composite degradation scenarios. OpenRTAG provides a standardized testbed for understanding robustness in TAG learning under realistic low-quality settings.

Exploiting Load/Store Leakage of Sparse Vectors for Key Recovery in HQC

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19109v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hamming Quasi-Cyclic (HQC) is a code-based key encapsulation mechanism selected by NIST for standardization, making its resistance to implementation attacks critically important. We present a side-channel attack that exploits load/store leakage in the manipulation of HQC's sparse secret vectors. Analysing Cortex-M4 assembly generated from the reference implementation, we identify a leakage surface in which the low and high 32-bit halves of each 64-bit word leak with different strengths, due to compiler-generated register spilling. We exploit this leakage to construct a simple zero-word distinguisher classifying machine words of the secret vector as zero or nonzero from electromagnetic measurements. The recovered zero positions are then translated into decoding hints, reducing HQC key recovery to a shortened syndrome-decoding problem. We analyse the resulting decoding complexity for all HQC parameter sets: at 32-bit granularity an expected 88.7% of the machine words of y are zero for HQC-1, cutting the decoding to $\approx$ 2 46 bit operations. Experiments on a Cortex-M4 validate the predicted low/high-half asymmetry-approximately 500 traces for the stronger low-half channel and 5,000 for the weaker high-half channeland recover the zero words of an HQC-1 key at 32-bit granularity. Finally, we discuss practical countermeasures that eliminate the sparsity exploited by the attack.

GATE-3D: Geometry-Aware Test-time Adaptive Reranking for Open-Set 3D Shape Retrieval

Hao Wu, Heyi Lin, Zilin Wang, Huizai Yao, Hao Wang, Hui Xiong — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19111v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large pretrained vision models have substantially improved appearance-based 3D shape retrieval, but they still confuse shapes that look similar while differing in geometry. Although geometry-aware features can reduce these errors, naive fusion of geometry and appearance may hurt retrieval when the two modalities are already well aligned. We propose GATE-3D, a lightweight query-adaptive reranking method that incorporates geometry without retraining the retrieval backbone. For each query, GATE-3D predicts how much a geometry-aware score should adjust the appearance-based ranking using features that capture disagreement between the two modalities. This selective design lets geometry contribute where it helps and stay silent where it would hurt. Experiments on three open-set 3D retrieval benchmarks show that GATE-3D improves over appearance-only retrieval and is more robust than always-on fusion. On the primary benchmark, it improves mAP@10 by 2.00 points over appearance-only retrieval (p=0.041); it also improves leave-one-category-out generalization and reduces geometric false positives by 10.8%. GATE-3D achieves competitive zero-shot results against DAC-based baselines. We further find that simple linear routing is more effective than a small MLP in the low-data regime, suggesting that cross-modal disagreement features matter more than model capacity for adaptive routing.

Predicting Activities in Aqueous Electrolyte Solutions with Hybrid Machine Learning

Zeno Romero, Maximilian Kohns, Fabian Jirasek — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19114v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Activities in aqueous electrolyte solutions, usually described by ionic activity and osmotic coefficients, are important properties for modeling many processes in industry and nature. Established activity models, such as those of Pitzer or Bromley, require fitting to experimental data for each electrolyte of interest and thus cannot predict properties for unstudied systems. While some predictive approaches exist, they are typically limited in scope and rely on additional ion-specific descriptors. In this work, we introduce a new hybrid model that combines the physics-based Bromley model with a matrix completion method (MCM) from machine learning. The MCM is employed to predict the electrolyte-specific parameters of the Bromley model, exploiting the fact that these parameters can be arranged in a matrix with cations and anions as rows and columns, respectively. Due to the lack of experimental data for many electrolytes, the initial parameter matrix is sparsely populated, making the prediction of the Bromley parameters for unstudied electrolytes a matrix completion problem. The hybrid model, Bromley-MCM, was trained end-to-end on experimental data for mean ionic activity coefficients and osmotic coefficients of aqueous solutions of 478 electrolytes at 298 K from the Dortmund Data Bank. As output, we obtain a completed matrix of Bromley parameters for 83 cations and 112 anions, enabling consistent prediction of concentration-dependent activities in aqueous solutions of 9,296 electrolytes at 298~K. This substantially extends the applicability of the Bromley model while maintaining high predictive accuracy, as demonstrated through evaluations on electrolytes excluded from model training.

CR-Refiner: An Object-Centric Optimal Transport Reranker for Edit-Conditioned 3D Scene Retrieval

Hao Wu, Jinjing Zhu, Nanyu Wu, Qianyi Cai, Heyi Lin, Hao Wang, Hui Xiong — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19115v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Edit-conditioned 3D scene retrieval pairs a reference 3D room with a natural-language modification and retrieves rooms from a corpus that satisfy the edit. Three lines of prior work each fall short on this task. 2D composed image retrieval reasons over pixel-level edits and has no primitive for 3D object sets. 3D foundation encoders embed individual objects but cannot compose at the scene level. 3D scene-grounding methods localize references inside a static scene rather than rank modified rooms across a corpus. We present CR-Refiner, a training-free reranker that wraps any base retriever's top-K candidates with three components. A frozen LLM parses the edit into a structured query entity, and each candidate is scored by an unbalanced optimal-transport problem over a 1xG cost matrix coupling category, style, material, and geometry. The unbalanced solver lets the single-entity query drop mass on irrelevant objects, modelling the asymmetry directly. An axis-conditional structural prior adds size-keyword cues for geometric edits and subject-anchor direction cues for spatial edits. An LLM verifier refines the top three candidates with continuous confidence. Because no benchmark evaluates compositional matching over 3D object sets, we additionally release 3D-CER, 4,963 edit-conditioned queries over a 23,381-room indoor corpus across five edit axes, with multi-positive ground truth, CIRR-style hard subsets, and zero-target adversarials. Across three qualitatively distinct base retrievers, CR-Refiner consistently improves hard-subset R@1 and mAP@10 on every edit axis.

Comparative Study of Multi-Agent Actor-Critic Algorithms in Parameterized Action Reinforcement Learning

Ubayd Ali Bapoo, Clement N Nyirenda — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19117v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Parameterized action reinforcement learning has shown strong performance in environments requiring both discrete action selection and continuous parameterization. Prior work established the effectiveness of single-agent actor-critic algorithms - Greedy Actor-Critic (GAC), Soft Actor-Critic (SAC), and Truncated Quantile Critics (TQC) - on benchmark parameterized action tasks, but their extension to multi-agent settings remains largely unexplored. This paper presents a comparative study of shared-experience multi-agent extensions of these algorithms: Multi-Agent Greedy Actor-Critic (MAGAC), Multi-Agent Soft Actor-Critic (MASAC), and Multi-Agent Truncated Quantile Critics (MATQC). Rather than following the centralized training, decentralized execution (CTDE) paradigm, the proposed framework uses multiple independent actor-critic agents that share a replay buffer while maintaining separate policy and value networks. We evaluate the algorithms on the Platform-v0 and Goal-v0 benchmarks against their single-agent counterparts, using three-, five-, and ten-agent configurations to assess scalability. Performance is measured by average evaluation return and training time across ten independent runs, with one-way ANOVA and Tukey HSD post-hoc tests used to assess statistical significance. Results show that the multi-agent framework consistently improves Greedy Actor-Critic performance, while MASAC and MATQC show comparatively modest gains over their single-agent versions. Increasing the number of agents beyond five yields limited additional performance while substantially raising computational cost, particularly for MAGAC. These results highlight a trade-off between learning performance and computational efficiency, offering insight into the scalability of shared-experience multi-agent actor-critic methods for parameterized action reinforcement learning.

Latent Riemannian Flow Matching for Geometry-Grounded 3D Foundation Models

Lisa Weijler, Irene Ballester, Guofeng Mei, Tolga Birdal, Pedro Hermosilla — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19120v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Geometric foundation models, such as the Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer (VGGT), provide strong 3D priors from unposed images. However, such models operate purely in a feed-forward, deterministic regime, \ie~they cannot generate plausible geometry beyond what the input views directly support. Generative models for 3D scenes, on the other hand, must rely on strong geometric priors to produce coherent outputs from sparse inputs. We bridge these two paradigms by performing flow matching directly in VGGT's latent space, leveraging its learned 3D priors without committing to any explicit downstream representation such as Gaussians, meshes, or video-VAE latents. This requires respecting the latent geometry: VGGT tokens occupy a product of high-dimensional hyperspheres on which standard Euclidean flow matching fails. We address this with a Riemannian Flow Matching framework defined on a product manifold of four hyperspheres, aligned with VGGT's multi-scale encoder, which keeps generated tokens on the valid data manifold required by the frozen decoding heads. On RealEstate10K, ScanNet++ and ETH3D, our method achieves strong performance against recent scene generation baselines in both per-view appearance and aggregated 3D geometry, establishing latent-space flow matching on geometric foundation models as a viable paradigm for 3D generation. The project page can be found $\href{https://lisaweijler.github.io/geometry-grounded-rfm/}{\text{here}}$.

Code Division Modulation Layers Against Forgetting and Inference in Continual Gait Identification

Simone Milani — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual learning (CL) has been recently employed in biometric identification systems thanks to its ability to integrate new knowledge within a pre-trained model and to the possibility of reducing the computational cost of training. Unfortunately, such approaches pose new challenges both in terms of final accuracy and privacy guarantees since a progressive fine-tuning of the model on small subsets expose them to catastrophic forgetting and successful inference attacks. This paper evaluates the efficiency of code division modulation layers (CDML) on a gait identification system which has been trained following a continual learning policy. The proposed approach preserves accuracy on all the tasks while mitigating membership inference attacks at the same time. Moreover, the impact of retransmission is minimized since replaying data is not necessary.

Parallel Noising in Neural Markov Logic Networks

Peter Jung, Giuseppe Marra, Ondrej Kuzelka — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19126v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural Markov Logic Networks (NMLNs) are a flexible neurosymbolic relational model. Previous work has shown that, although NMLNs achieve strong performance as generative models for small relational structures, they underperform diffusion-based generative graph models on larger structures. In this paper, we strengthen NMLNs along two main dimensions: (i) we increase the expressive capacity of their potential functions using graph neural networks, and (ii) we develop a new training and inference algorithm inspired by parallel-tempering Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, which we name parallel noising. Together, these enhancements enable NMLNs to attain strong performance in graph generation relative to general diffusion-based generative graph models. Furthermore, they allow NMLNs to match the performance of specialized text-based recurrent models when generating small molecular structures.

One Model, Many Graphs: Learning over Attributed Graphs across Heterogeneous Modalities with Vision-Language Models

Jiayi Yang, Yifang Chen, Yuanfu Sun, Jiajin Liu, Qiaoyu Tan — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19128v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) provide a unified representation space for textual and visual information, yet their potential as general-purpose backbones for graph-structured data remains largely unexplored. In practice, attributed graphs exhibit substantial modality heterogeneity: some graphs contain only textual node attributes, others only visual attributes, while still others provide both. Existing graph learning approaches are typically designed for fixed modality schemas, requiring separate models for different settings and limiting scalability and cross-graph generalization. To bridge this gap, we present OMG-VLM (One Model, Many Graphs with Vision-Language Models), a unified framework for learning over attributed graphs across heterogeneous modality schemas. OMG-VLM leverages a pretrained VLM as a shared backbone and introduces structure-aware graph adapters that integrate neighborhood information while remaining compatible with the VLM's native embedding space. This design enables effective learning over text-attributed, image-attributed, and multi-attributed graphs within a single model. Extensive experiments across diverse domains show that OMG-VLM consistently outperforms state-of-the-art GNN- and LLM-based baselines on attributed graph learning tasks such as node classification and link prediction, while exhibiting strong generalization to unseen graphs and varying modality schemas. The source code is available at https://github.com/Jo-eyang/OMG-VLM.

Conspiracy Theory Rabbit Holes Emerge via Interacting Contagions

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19131v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Why do people fall into conspiracy theory rabbit holes? Prior research explains rabbit holes via psychological and algorithmic causes, yielding inconsistent findings. Here, we argue that rabbit holes can also arise from interactions among conspiracy theories spreading as social contagions. Using 7.6 million tweets from 7,416 X users during the first wave of COVID-19, we identify public endorsement of 15 conspiracy narratives with prompt-tuned large language models. Sequential hazard models show that, characteristic of rabbit holes, adopting a conspiracy theory elevates the risk of sharing subsequent conspiracy theories, that this elevation grows and persists longer with the number of conspiracy theories shared, and that transitions between theories concentrate among semantically proximate narratives, revealing semantic interactions that mediate social contagions. We also document what we term the settler effect: a user's entry into a new semantic region is slower, but once entry occurs, subsequent within-region adoption accelerates. We compare a range of agent-based models in their ability to reproduce these dynamics. Neither independent adoption nor a generic post-adoption increase in susceptibility reproduces the joint temporal and semantic pattern of the settler effect; among the alternatives considered, an ecology-of-contagions model that formalizes belief-system reshaping most parsimoniously reproduces these patterns. Using counterfactual network simulations that account for interactions among conspiracy theories, we find that preventing the first public endorsement of a conspiracy theory can rival high-detection shadow banning and outperform week-long read-only lockouts.

Parameterized Complexity of Odd Domination and its Generalization

Toranosuke Kokai, Rin Saito, Tatsuhiro Suga, Takahiro Suzuki, Yuma Tamura — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19134v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In the \textsc{Odd Domination} problem, given a graph $G$ and a positive integer $k$, the task is to determine whether there exists a vertex subset $D$ of $G$ such that the closed neighborhood of each vertex in $G$ contains an odd number of vertices from $D$. In this paper, we investigate the computational complexity of the problem. When parameterized by the solution size $k$, we establish W[1]-hardness on some restricted graphs and a sharp boundary between fixed-parameter tractability and W[1]-hardness with respect to the girth of the input graph. Then, we address the problem when parameterized by several structural graph parameters. Furthermore, we investigate the parameterized complexity of \textsc{Parity Domination}, which is a generalization of \textsc{Odd Domination}.

Text Template Tokens Are Implicit Semantic Registers in Diffusion Transformers

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19139v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Text-to-image diffusion transformers (DiTs) jointly process text and image tokens, yet their internal computation during denoising remains poorly understood. We introduce a causal interpretability framework for modern large-scale DiTs that combines attention decomposition with targeted interventions across token spans, heads, and layers. Using it to separate prompt-content tokens from structural template tokens, we find that the structural tokens carry little prompt-specific information at the encoder output. Yet surprisingly, they emerge as dominant image-to-text attention sinks and causally maintain object identity inside the DiT, acting as implicit semantic registers. We show that they acquire this identity indirectly, with prompt semantics first injected into the image latents and then read back into the template tokens rather than transferred directly from the prompt tokens. Inspired by the above findings, we design a training-free pruning rule for DiTs. Heads that attend most strongly to prompt tokens are dispensable, and pruning them removes $20\%$ of attention FLOPs with only a $1.4$-point drop on GenEval. We further reveal how generative computation in DiTs is organized across heads and depth, separating semantic routing from visual synthesis and progressing from identity formation to propagation and refinement. Our work not only reveals that the tokens encoding semantics at input need not be those that maintain it during generation, but also provides a causal view of internal mechanisms in DiTs.

A Scalable Pattern Mining Workflow for Interpretable Machine Log Analysis in High-Performance Computing Environments

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19143v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern supercomputers housed in High Performance Computing (HPC) environments generate massive volumes of log data daily, revealing intricate information and performance metrics about these complex systems. The sheer size and heterogeneous nature of HPC logs, especially text data, pose significant challenges for traditional analytical techniques. Consequently, more complex workflows are necessary for pattern extraction when analyzing these logs, enabling the discovery of underlying patterns and anomalies that may indicate system faults and help predict future failures and inefficiencies. Our log analysis workflow investigates a combination of advanced pattern-matching and mining techniques applied to HPC log analysis. By systematically identifying frequent log patterns and pattern sequences in log messages and storing them in a finite-state automaton, such as the Aho-Corasick automaton, our workflow enables automated detection of frequent errors and fault events. To extract these patterns and sequences, we leverage information about system hierarchy and message priority. We then correlate and cluster the identified error sequences with job logs, revealing groups of applications with similar or dissimilar error signatures. This approach yields insights that inform improvements and guide real-time monitoring efforts. Our research establishes that pattern mining is vital for unlocking the full potential of log data by enabling real-time analysis and contributing to more resilient, scalable HPC systems. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through summary statistics and a case study on an exascale-class system supercomputer.

Sarus: Privacy-Preserving Multi-Vendor Perception Fusion via Homomorphic Encryption

Munawar Hasan, Apostol Vassilev — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19146v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cooperative perception enables autonomous vehicles (AVs) to improve situational awareness by aggregating detection outputs from multiple agents and sensing platforms, often via a shared fusion service in multi-vendor deployments. However, sharing such outputs at inference time exposes proprietary model behavior and sensitive environmental information, creating significant privacy and security concerns. In this paper, we present Sarus, a privacy-preserving framework for multi-vendor perception fusion via homomorphic encryption (HE), enabling aggregation without revealing individual vendor outputs. Each vendor encodes detections as compact Gaussian moment vectors over a shared spatial lattice and transmits encrypted payloads to a fusion server, which aggregates them directly in the encrypted domain. The fused result is then decrypted and reconstructed into final detections through class-wise bin merging. We analyze the computational complexity, showing linear scaling for vendor payload construction and $O(BV)$ server-side fusion with the number of occupied bins $B$ and vendors $V$, while postprocessing scales as $O(B + \sum_{c\in \mathcal{C}} B_c^2)$, where $\mathcal{C}$ denotes the set of object classes and $B_c$ is the number of occupied bins for class $c$. Experiments demonstrate linear scaling in practice with only a bounded constant-factor overhead from HE, with decryption dominating postprocessing cost. Experiments on the KITTI dataset using camera (YOLOv8) and LiDAR (PointPillars, PV-RCNN) detectors show that Sarus improves scene-level coverage by effectively aggregating complementary detections, particularly in distance-dependent regimes where individual modalities degrade. These results indicate that privacy-preserving multi-vendor perception fusion is feasible for real-time deployment when statistical compression and spatial sparsity are jointly exploited.

Incomplete Observations Boost Evolutionary Performance in Ocean Modeling

Yangyang Kong, Yutong Jiang, Yanhai Gan, Junyu Dong, Feng Gao, Xiaopei Lin — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19147v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data-driven methods have revolutionized ocean modeling, yet current approaches rely heavily on complete reanalysis datasets, imposing computational constraints and limiting model performance to that of the training data. Here, we present a generative state-space model and an optimization framework that enable learning directly from sparse and noisy observations. The model is essentially a hidden Markov model with a continuous state space, where oceanic physical quantities are treated as hidden states and measurements as observations, enabling a unified representation of ocean fields and observational data. Both the initial-state and state-transition modules are implemented as neural networks to capture the complexity and temporal evolution of ocean states, while the emission module is formulated as a masked Gaussian distribution. To train the model from sparse observations, we derive an optimization framework based on the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. The framework alternately reconstructs high-fidelity ocean fields via Langevin dynamics and optimizes deep neural networks to capture temporal evolution. Theoretical analysis shows that the framework maximizes the likelihood of observations under the generative model. For efficiency, we assume that ocean-state evolution follows a stationary, ergodic, and Markovian stochastic process and adopt only length-two state sequences during optimization. Experiments on CMIP6 simulation data and FY-3D satellite data demonstrate high-fidelity reconstruction and accurate prediction, showing that sparse observations can directly improve the model's representation of ocean-state dynamics. This work offers a scalable pathway for next-generation Earth system models to learn directly from sparse, incomplete real-world observations.

Job-level Carbon and Water Footprint Estimation for HPC: Bias Assessment from Runtime to Full Life Cycle

Xi Chen, Chris Broekema, Rob van Nieuwpoort — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19150v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High performance computing evaluation has traditionally focused on performance and energy, but these metrics alone cannot capture the sustainability cost of runtime configurations. We proposes a unified job-level water and carbon accounting framework with both operational and embodied impacts. Results show that higher thread counts generally reduce total footprint, but the benefit diminishes at higher thread counts. Water is mainly dominated by embodied impact, whereas carbon is mainly dominated by operational impact.

Breaking the Homogeneity Assumption: Specialized Multi-Generator Adversarial Learning for Rare Failure Detection in Predictive Maintenance

Alexis Lazanas, Georgios Kampouropoulos — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19153v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Supervised learning models in the predictive maintenance field are regularly trained on highly imbalanced industrial datasets: machine failures occur rarely but have a disproportionate effect on operations. In addition to the clear class disparity, failure data are typically non-homogeneous, with different failure modes arising from distinct physical processes and exhibiting a multimodal distribution across minorities and classes. Traditional imbalance-management methods, e.g., undersampling, SMOTE-based interpolation, or cost-sensitive learning, typically assume that the minority population is homogeneous. This means their effectiveness is severely limited in the multifaceted conditions encountered in industrial practice. This paper determines the possibility of a failure-type-conscious generative augmentation program to improve the identification of infrequent failures in predictive maintenance systems. An experimental design that is leakage-safe is used to compare five imbalance-handling methods: cost-sensitive learning, random undersampling, SMOTE oversampling, single-generator GAN augmentation, and a specialized multi-generator GAN architecture that has independent generators that are asked to learn individual failure subtypes. Precision/Recall-oriented measures are used to quantify model performance; the main evaluation measure is the PR-AUC. Experiments conducted on the AI4I 2020 predictive maintenance dataset indicate that the proposed multi-generator GAN framework produces more realistic minority samples, yielding higher PR-AUC and recall scores compared to traditional resampling methods and individual-generator GAN augmentation.

Coherence in Control: Bridging Many-Core Mapping and Routing through Cost Unification

Guochu Xiong, Xiangzhong Luo, Weichen Liu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19158v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid growth of data-intensive applications increases communication demands in many-core systems, where cache coherence, while essential for correct communication and data consistency, introduces substantial overhead due to frequent data sharing and coherence activities. As system scale and workload complexity grow, the resulting coherence traffic intensifies communication pressure, making the co-optimization of task mapping and routing essential for improving system performance. However, most existing approaches overlook cache coherence, leaving a substantial portion of coherence-induced communication unaccounted for and creating a mismatch between optimization objectives and actual communication patterns. Furthermore, by employing separate cost evaluators for mapping and routing, these approaches complicate objective coordination, may lead to conflicting decisions, and fail to capture the coherence-induced coupling between the two stages. To address these challenges, we propose CoCo, a coherence-aware co-optimization framework that jointly integrates task mapping and routing under a unified cost model for realistic scenarios. This unified model integrates communication cost, coherence overhead, and load imbalance into a single objective, enabling coherence-aware decision-making and effective trade-offs among optimization goals. Guided by this model, CoCo combines coherence-guided task mapping with reinforcement learning-based routing, where directional link weights are adjusted according to communication behavior to improve traffic distribution, enabling coherence-aware co-optimization for many-core systems. Experimental results show that CoCo reduces link utilization by 88.46%, packet delay by 17.40%, and execution time by 17.58% compared with existing approaches, highlighting the importance of cache coherence in co-optimization design.

A coalgebraic higher-order modal fixed-point logic

Ryan Tay, Harsh Beohar, Charles Grellois — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19160v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a coalgebraic extension of the higher-order modal fixed-point logic (HFL) which subsumes both HFL and its probabilistic extension. We show that the emptiness problem for non-deterministic finite automata as well as the value-1 problem for probabilistic automata reduce to model-checking problems for this coalgebraic formulation of HFL.

Boundary-Adapted PINNs for Elliptic Dirichlet Problems: $H^2(\Omega)$ A Priori Error Bounds with Application to Mean Escape Time Computation

Nathanael Tepakbong, Jun Fan, Xiang Zhou, Ding-Xuan Zhou — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19167v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Motivated by the numerical computation of the Mean Escape Time (MET) $\tau:\Omega\to\mathbb{R}$ of a stochastic process from a bounded domain $\Omega\subseteq\mathbb{R}^d$, we study elliptic Dirichlet boundary value problems (BVPs) using boundary-enforced Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs), in which the Dirichlet condition is imposed exactly by multiplying the network output with a predefined distance-to-boundary approximation $\rho$. Combining approximation-theoretic and statistical-learning arguments for Rectified Quadratic Unit (ReQU) and hyperbolic tangent (tanh) networks, we derive a priori error bounds that make explicit the dependence on $\rho$. In particular, we show that exact boundary enforcement alone is not enough for $H^2(\Omega)$ error bounds, and that a sufficient and essentially necessary condition is for $\rho$ to be a smooth distance approximation $\textit{normalized to first order}$, of the kind constructed in arXiv:2104.08426 [math.NA]. We thereby identify this subclass of $\textit{boundary-adapted}$ PINNs as the appropriate neural network ansatz for solving Dirichlet BVPs. Numerical experiments support the theory, showing that appropriate choices of $\rho$ improve accuracy and convergence, while poorly chosen distance functions can substantially degrade the solution. Our proof also yields new VC-dimension bounds for hypothesis spaces of higher-order derivatives of ReQU and tanh networks, together with new approximation bounds for shallow ReQU networks in higher-order Sobolev norms, all of which are of important independent interest.

Spiking Neural Networks for fMRI-Based Visual Semantic Decoding

Jiahong Zhang, Jinning Zhao, Sijun Shen, Siyuan Xu, Bo Xu, Guoqi Li — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19170v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)-based visual decoding aims to recover visual information from measured brain activity, commonly by mapping fMRI responses into latent visual features for downstream decoding tasks. Most existing methods learn mappings from fMRI responses to visual features extracted by artificial neural networks (ANNs), yet it remains unclear whether ANN-derived features provide suitable targets for brain decoding. In this study, we investigate spiking neural network (SNN)-derived visual features as alternative targets for fMRI-based visual decoding. We compare an ANN baseline with four SNN variants from the same architectural family, which differ in their spiking dynamics. To isolate the effect of the target features, all models use the same L2-regularized linear fMRI-to-feature decoder, while only the feature vectors used as regression targets are varied. Compared with the ANN baseline, SNN-derived features exhibit stronger alignment with fMRI responses and improve visual semantic decoding performance. For instance, on the GoD dataset, SNN-derived features reduce feature-prediction error from 0.7707 to 0.0282 and improve top-1 semantic decoding accuracy from 0.1800 to 0.4400. Ablation results further indicate that both spiking neural dynamics and temporal simulation steps contribute to the observed advantage. These findings support SNN-derived features as effective brain-decodable visual representations and highlight target feature design as an important component of fMRI-based visual decoding.

Point Ladder Tuning: Parameter-Efficient Hierarchical Adaptation for 3D Point Cloud Understanding

Junlin Chang, Longhao Zou, Rui Li — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19171v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fine-tuning pre-trained point-cloud backbones typically updates all parameters, resulting in substantial computation and memory overhead. More importantly, modern point backbones rely on aggressive tokenization and downsampling, which yields compact global tokens but irreversibly discards fine-grained local geometry, an inherent bottleneck for parameter-efficient adaptation. Consequently, existing PEFT methods that operate only on these coarsened tokens can modulate global semantics but struggle to recover the missing multi-scale locality. We present Point Ladder Tuning (PLT), a locality-aware PEFT framework that performs hierarchical, instance-conditioned adaptation while keeping the backbone frozen. PLT forms a lightweight closed loop: (i) a Hierarchical Ladder Network (HLN) constructs a multi-resolution local feature pyramid directly from raw points; (ii) a Local-Global Fusion (LGF) aligns and fuses local pyramids with intermediate backbone semantics; and (iii) a Dynamic Prompt Generator produces instance-aware multi-scale prompts to modulate the frozen backbone effectively. For dense prediction, we further introduce a lightweight segmentation head that progressively upsamples fused features and leverages backbone priors to refine fine structures. Extensive experiments on classification and dense prediction show that PLT consistently surpasses prior PEFT baselines with minimal tunable parameters. PLT achieves state-of-the-art performance using only 2.71% trainable parameters for classification and 7.69% for dense prediction, and scales favorably to larger backbones, requiring merely 0.36% parameters on PointGPT-L. The code is released at https://github.com/JunLinChang/ECCV2026-PLT.

Neural Kolmogorov Equations: Parallelizable Learning of Stochastic Dynamics under General Noise

Arthur Bizzi, Olga Fink — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19173v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural stochastic differential equations (SDEs) have emerged as powerful tools for learning noisy or stochastic dynamics directly from data; however, existing approaches largely assume uncoupled and continuous noise, limiting their applicability to realistic stochastic drivers, and often scale poorly in time, requiring expensive autoregressive training. To address these limitations, we propose Neural Kolmogorov Equations (NKEs), a deterministic, infinite-dimensional reformulation of Neural SDEs based on the Kolmogorov Forward equation, transforming the learning problem from modelling individual stochastic trajectories to modelling the evolution of probability densities. NKEs learn general L\'evy-type stochastic forcing directly through the operator structure of the KFE, and enable parallel-in-time training via a Lagrangian Galerkin projection and operator splitting. We evaluate NKEs on several stochastic benchmarks, including systems with coupled noise and jump processes, and verify that NKEs provide flexible models that accurately recover deterministic and stochastic dynamics with competitive predictive accuracy and improved training efficiency. Code and pretrained models will be released.

Bayesian Retraction Optimization for Tissue Attachment Mapping in Surgical Dissection

Shing-Hei Ho, Bao Thach, Toan Vo, James M. Ferguson, Alan Kuntz — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19174v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: With growing surgeon shortages, automating surgical sub-tasks such as tissue dissection offers a promising step toward reducing workload and expanding patient access. Prior work has relied on hand-crafted incision policies that cannot quantify uncertainty or has relied on simulation-based methods that require strong modeling assumptions. We instead view tissue attachment identification as an inherently probabilistic problem and propose a Bayesian approach that avoids explicit tissue modeling. Our method uses a Sequential Bayesian Hilbert Map (SBHM) to represent the likelihood that each tissue point is attached to the underlying resection surface. An ensemble of learned classifiers predicts attachment likelihoods from spatial data acquired during robotic tissue retraction, with each classifier serving as a noisy information source to update the SBHM. To plan the next retraction, we devise Bayesian Retraction Optimization (BRO) to select the most informative action under safety constraints. As the SBHM refines over time, regions with high attachment likelihood are selectively incised. We validate our method in simulation across diverse tissue geometries and acquisition strategies, and demonstrate zero-shot transfer to real robotic dissection experiments.

Automated Extraction of Techno-Economic Data from 76,000 Energy System Studies

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19178v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Energy system models guide societally important decisions, but their credibility rests on quantitative assumptions that are difficult to source and audit. Meta-analyses can improve transparency and modeling practices, but the rapid growth of publications makes manual information extraction increasingly impractical. Consequently, databases are updated infrequently and efforts are often duplicated across research groups. Here, we demonstrate the highly accurate automated extraction of quantitative information from 76,000 energy system studies published since 2010. We compile 3.2 million structured quantitative data points together with 20 million associated metadata entries, spanning a broad spectrum of technologies, methodological approaches and system characteristics. Beyond providing input data for models, the resulting FAIR database make the energy systems literature itself analysable. We show where academic assumptions diverge from empirical observed data, and how research priorities vary at scale across technologies, regions and time. To facilitate broad use within the community, the database is provided through an interactive dashboard, enabling users to filter, analyse and download data according to their specific research needs.

Reasoning Before Translation: Enhancing Legal Machine Translation with Structured Reasoning

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19181v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural machine translation (NMT) in the legal domain is a linguistically and conceptually demanding task, primarily due to the complexity of legal language and the high level of precision it requires. The recent emergence of reasoning-capable language models opens new possibilities for tackling such challenges. They add to a set of other previously proposed techniques to enhance the translation quality, which includes supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning. In this work, we perform a comparison between these various approaches. More particularly, we evaluate small language models such as Qwen3.5 4B, Qwen3.5 9B, and Gemma 3 12B enhanced with various re-training paradigms and compare their performances against frontier reasoning models. We focus on the Swiss legal system, which -- with its unique multilingual statutes -- offers a particularly challenging testbed for reasoning-augmented models. Our results show that the quality of small ``base'' models can be greatly enhanced, and that reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards can be applied to NMT in the legal domain and surpasses the translation quality of supervised fine-tuning. The performance of enhanced small models is close to the one of state-of-the-art reasoning models yet remains inferior. We also note that re-training paradigms yield diminishing returns as model size increase. The code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/aixiuxiuxiu/Legal-MT-SFT-RL.

ARBITER: Guarded Agentic Control for SLO-Oriented Kubernetes Remediation

Pooyan Habibi, Alberto Leon-Garcia — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19182v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Maintaining service-level objectives (SLOs) on Kubernetes microservices remains difficult because autoscalers observe coarse resource metrics, recent SLO controllers often depend on custom telemetry, and unconstrained agentic operators cannot safely mutate production clusters. We present ARBITER, a guarded control plane for SLO-oriented Kubernetes remediation. ARBITER builds an OpenTelemetry-native causal resource graph, assembles bounded DiagnosisContext objects, and exposes a finite typed-action interface that separates planning from execution. The same interface supports deterministic planners and an LLM-backed planning harness, with deterministic schema checks, policy gates, resource/disruption budgets, approval, and bounded execution forming the safety substrate. We evaluate ARBITER on a 4-node Kubernetes cluster using DeathStarBench Social Network and Online Boutique. The evaluation tests two forms of SLO-oriented control that resource autoscaling alone does not provide: selecting the right remediation action and selecting the right downstream target. For bad-image deployment regressions, ARBITER selects rollback_canary in all ten CPU-burn and pure-latency runs; HPA either scales the faulty image or never triggers. For a downstream critical-path fault, the user-visible breach appears at the frontend, but trace evidence identifies home-timeline-service as the remediable bottleneck. Deterministic ARBITER and a live approval-gated Sonnet harness target that downstream service in every replicate, whereas HPA/resource-only control never does. Additional experiments cover guarded placement repair, Online Boutique portability, adversarial safety rejection, offline multi-model replay, and KWOK-based control-plane scale evidence. We release the controller, replay corpus, harnesses, safety tests, and figure artifacts: https://github.com/pooyan/arbiter.

Numerical methods for Langevin-type SPDE: an implicit Milstein approach and multilevel Monte Carlo techniques

Sascha Portaro, Carlos V\'azquez — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19188v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, we investigate the numerical approximation of degenerate Langevin-type stochastic partial differential equations (SPDEs) in two spatial dimensions. These SPDEs arise in stochastic dynamics and mathematical finance, among other applications. In order to handle the mixed deterministic-stochastic structure of the equation and the degeneracy of the differential operator, we propose a semi-implicit Milstein finite difference scheme for the numerical solution. Through the Fourier analysis of the mean-square stability and convergence, we derive explicit conditions on the coefficients under which the scheme is stable, jointly with explicit convergence rates in terms of the discretization parameters. We further embed the proposed scheme within a Multilevel Monte Carlo (MLMC) framework to reduce the computational cost associated with SPDE simulations, and we derive its theoretical computational complexity. Numerical experiments confirm theoretical convergence rates and show that the MLMC strategy achieves an accuracy comparable to standard Monte Carlo at a fraction of the computational cost, reducing the complexity from $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-5})$ to $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-3})$ for a target root-mean-square error $\varepsilon$. These results show that combining semi-implicit Milstein schemes with MLMC techniques provides an effective approach for the numerical simulation of Langevin-type SPDEs.

Spectral Biclustering-Driven Scalability for Post-Hoc Explainability in Recommender Systems

Jose L. Salmeron, Irina Ar\'evalo — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19189v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Explainability in recommender systems is essential for ensuring transparency, accountability, and trust, yet existing post-hoc methods often encounter severe scalability challenges. Observation-level deletion diagnostics offer a counterfactual way to analyze recommendations by retraining models after removing individual users or items, but their cost grows rapidly with dataset size. To improve the practical tractability of this analysis, this paper introduces a block-deletion diagnostic framework that uses spectral biclustering to group users and items and then removes entire blocks of interactions. This formulation reduces the number of retraining procedures relative to finer-grained deletion strategies and produces explanations at the level of user segments, item groups, and their interactions. The framework is evaluated on two representative recommender paradigms, Singular Value Decomposition and Neural Collaborative Filtering, using the MovieLens and Amazon datasets. The results show that top-ranked recommendations are often more sensitive to specific interaction blocks than lower-ranked ones, with some blocks acting as supporting evidence and others having a detrimental effect on recommendation quality. The analysis also indicates that user segments differ in their sensitivity to block removal, suggesting heterogeneous levels of reliance on localized interaction patterns. These findings provide diagnostic information that is not directly visible through standard recommendation metrics. Overall, the results suggest that block-deletion diagnostics offer a practical and model-agnostic post-hoc analysis framework for recommender systems, while also highlighting that the resulting explanations depend on the chosen block structure.

Agentic Real2Sim: Physics-based World Modeling with Vision-Language Agents

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19190v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-to-sim conversion for robotic interaction with objects remains labor-intensive because it requires more than visual reconstruction: a streamlined real2sim process must recover scene geometries and object states, infer physical parameters, and assemble actors, objects, cameras, poses, and trajectories into a runnable physical simulation. Today this process still depends on manual tuning of visual foundation models, mesh cleanup, coordinate-frame alignment, and brittle workflow glue across visual perception tools and simulators. We introduce \textit{Agentic Real2Sim}, a framework for generalized physical world modeling with vision-language agents, converting a real-world recording of object-robot interaction into a simulatable episodic twin which preserves observations, geometries, robot interactions, and object states. We evaluate Agentic Real2Sim on rigid-object manipulation, deformable-object interaction, and humanoid motion scenes, spanning domains that are usually handled by separate Real2Sim pipelines, marking a first step toward scalable conversion. The framework's agentic decisions can be driven by an open-weight VLM backend at a small fraction of the cost of frontier models, while attaining comparable conversion success rate. We aim to use the resulting real-world-aligned twins for downstream robotics tasks, specifically policy learning and evaluation. The project site is available at https://ericchen321.github.io/agentic_real2sim.github.io/.

ABot-World-0: Infinite Interactive World Rollout on a Single Desktop GPU

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19191v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present ABot-World-0, an action-conditioned video world model for real-time, long-horizon closed-loop interaction, supported by a multi-source data infrastructure spanning AAA games, simulation engines, and internet videos to learn controllable world dynamics. WorldExplorer performs agent-driven collection guided by training feedback, while a unified pipeline applies 14 deterministic quality checks, VLM-based assessment, and synchronized action and text annotation. We progressively distill a bidirectional action-conditioned teacher into a causal student through teacher forcing and ODE distillation, and introduce LongForcing to align long student self-rollouts with an extended-horizon teacher, mitigating accumulated distribution shift and autoregressive drift. Raw keyboard actions provide a unified control interface for scene roaming and third-person character interaction, while reference-character memory provides persistent appearance cues for identity consistency during third-person rollouts. For deployment, we co-design a streaming inference stack with a lightweight VAE decoder, efficient attention, memory-aware scheduling, and low-bit DiT inference. Across optimized low-bit configurations, ABot-World-0 streams 720P video at up to 16 FPS on a single NVIDIA RTX 5090 desktop GPU, with 1.2s action-to-first-frame latency and approximately 19GiB peak VRAM. Experiments on WorldRoamBench and extended interactive rollouts demonstrate competitive controllability and coherent long-horizon world evolution.

Cognitive Dual-Process Planning for Autonomous Driving with Structured Scene Knowledge and Verifiable Reasoning-Action Consistency

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19194v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-level planning for autonomous driving is a knowledge-intensive engineering decision task that requires accurate scene understanding, timely inference, and internally consistent action selection. Vision-language models (VLMs) can make intermediate reasoning explicit, but their use in deployed planners is constrained by costly structured supervision, unnecessary reasoning in routine scenes, and possible inconsistencies between generated rationales and driving actions. We present a cognitive dual-process planning framework that represents planning-relevant scene knowledge in a machine-parsable structured chain-of-thought (S-CoT) schema. An automated data engine integrates perception foundation models, critical-path filtering, and an expert VLM to generate S-CoT supervision without manual annotation of individual rationales. A lightweight visual Arbiter estimates scene complexity from multilevel vision-encoder features before language decoding and routes each input to either fast meta-action prediction or slow structured reasoning. For slow-path outputs, a deterministic rule-based validator checks whether the parsed S-CoT fields are consistent with the final meta-action and provides verifiable rewards for Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). In a 195-scene manual audit, the generated annotations achieve 91.8\% CoT accuracy and a 98.5\% Logical Consistency Score (LCS). On 574 manually verified NAVSIM test samples, the planner achieves 80.14\% planning accuracy and 97.20\% LCS while reducing average latency by 17.39\% relative to applying slow reasoning to every scene. Evaluation on external long-tail subsets further identifies conditions under which routing and planning performance degrade. Together, these results show how explicit scene knowledge can be operationalized through adaptive reasoning and rule-based verification to support high-level VLM planning decisions.

STL-GCS: A Planner-Controller Framework for Signal Temporal Logic via Graphs of Time-varying Convex Sets

Nicola De Carli, Gregorio Marchesini, Dimos Dimarogonas — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19196v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a unified trajectory planning and control framework for the satisfaction of Signal Temporal Logic (STL) specifications defined over convex predicates. At the planning layer, STL tasks are encoded as time-varying convex sets in configuration space, specifically designed so that forward invariance of the system with respect to these sets implies satisfaction of the specification with a prescribed robustness margin. This representation is then lifted to the joint time--configuration space and combined with the Graphs of Convex Sets (GCS) framework, yielding a shortest-path formulation of the planning problem over convex spatio-temporal sets. Trajectories are parameterized by B-splines, which enable continuous-time enforcement of STL satisfaction, collision avoidance, and smoothness constraints. At the control layer, the same time-varying sets used for planning are exploited to design a feedback controller that tracks the planned trajectory while prioritizing satisfaction of the STL specification during execution in the presence of tracking errors and model mismatch. We validate the proposed approach in simulation and in real-world experiments on space robotic platforms.

Conservative Query and Adaptive Regularization for Offline RL Under Uncertainty Estimation

Li-Rong Zhou, Qin-Wen Luo, Sheng-Jun Huang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19199v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn an effective policy from a static dataset, but its performance is fundamentally limited by dataset coverage. Action preference queries leverage expert feedback without additional environment interaction, enabling policy improvement during offline training. However, existing methods still face two key challenges: selecting informative preference queries and effectively exploiting the collected feedback. Current approaches typically rely only on the distance between policy actions and dataset actions for query selection, while enforcing fixed constraints that keep the policy close to queried preferences. Such strategies often lead to unstable policy updates and integrate poorly with value regularization. To address these limitations, we propose Conservative Query and Adaptive Regularization under Uncertainty Estimation, a lightweight framework that jointly improves preference querying and preference exploitation. Specifically, we employ a Morse network to estimate the uncertainty of policy actions with respect to the offline dataset. Based on this uncertainty, we introduce a conservative query strategy that selectively queries actions near the dataset to preserve Bellman-update stability, together with an uncertainty-aware adaptive regularization scheme that dynamically adjusts data-level constraints during policy optimization. We integrate our framework with CQL and evaluate it extensively on the D4RL benchmark. Experimental results demonstrate superior or competitive performance across a wide range of tasks.

Enhancing Relation Modeling with Social Attributes for Social Media Popularity Prediction

Bolun Zheng, Yuhao Luo, Wei Zhu, Ning Xu, An-An Liu, Lingyu Zhu, Canjin Wang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19200v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent studies highlight the critical role of retrieval-augmented mechanisms in social media popularity prediction (SMPP). Although such frameworks have improved SMPP performance by leveraging historical posts, existing methods still suffer from the low retrieval accuracy due to the oversight of relative relationships among UGC instances. To address this limitation, we propose a novel Relation-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented framework (RE-Rag) that models UGC similarity as a continuous relation jointly driven by semantic content and social attributes. Specifically, RE-Rag employs a Semantic-Attribute Retriever (SAR) to obtain instances aligned in both semantic and social-attribute distributions. Subsequently, we design a Relation-Guided Predictor (RGP): first, cross-attention encodes multimodal features of retrieved instances; then, a relative relation graph is introduced to guide attention weight allocation, forming a Relation-Guided Transformer (RGTs) that dynamically modulate attention weights based on relative attribute relations to capture the interplay between semantics and various social attributes. The refined features are fused with the target instance for popularity prediction. Experiments on three public benchmarks show that RE-Rag consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both prediction accuracy and retrieval efficiency.

MIRA-Ev:A Benchmark for Granular Evidence Detection and Relational Reasoning in Clinical Exams

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19201v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Clinical NLP evaluation remains dominated by multiple-choice question answering (MCQA), which scores only final-answer accuracy and cannot detect when a model reaches the correct diagnosis while grounding it in irrelevant, absent, or contradictory evidence. We introduce MIRA-Ev, a clinical argument mining benchmark built on Spanish M\'edico Interno Residente (MIR) licensing-exam cases, re-annotated by expert clinicians with span-level premises, claims, and directed support/attack relations, and released in parallel Spanish (native), English, and Basque versions, the first clinical argumentation resource in Basque. MIRA-Ev organizes evaluation into a three-tier task hierarchy: evidence sentence retrieval, argumentative component extraction, and relation classification.

Assessment in Team Problem-Solving Exercises in Computing Education

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19209v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This full paper in the research-to-practice track presents methods for assessing student teams in tabletop exercises (TTXs). TTXs enable learner teams to prepare for workplace tasks and practice crisis responses, such as resolving cybersecurity incidents. While assessment is essential for determining how well teams achieve learning objectives, the complex, open-ended nature of TTXs often leads to delayed or incomplete feedback. TTX learning platforms can record teams' actions and communication; yet, leveraging these data to assess performance is underexplored. To address this gap, we compared two post-TTX team assessment methods -- clustering and large language models (LLMs) -- using an original dataset from 81 participants across two countries. We evaluated these methods against instructor-assigned scores based on standardized rubrics. Clustering grouped teams that approached TTX tasks similarly, enabling instructors to deliver faster, targeted feedback to teams within a cluster. This method was valid and reliable, with low computational requirements. LLMs used the standardized rubrics to assess teams' communication. While GPT-4o frequently disagreed with instructor scores, GPT-5.2 demonstrated considerably lower error. The researched methods have been integrated into INJECT, an open-source TTX learning platform, to support scalability and teaching practice. To encourage community adoption, we publicly share all datasets, software tools, and a full-fledged TTX scenario.

Anatomy-Aware 3D Mesh Refinement of Pericardium Segmentations on Computed Tomography

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19210v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate delineation of the pericardium in a cardiac CT scan is essential for quantifying epicardial adipose tissue, yet it remains one of the most challenging structures to segment due to its poor contrast boundaries. Instead of solely relying on image gradients, our framework leverages the anatomical context of surrounding anatomical structures to guide the segmentation. This work introduces a novel 3D iterative mesh refinement framework that balances anatomical and geometric forces derived from inherent anatomical rules to refine an initial, possibly ambiguous, segmentation into a high-precision, anatomically plausible result. Designed as a model-agnostic post-processing step, our method uses a 3D vector field to iteratively push the vertices to the correct anatomical locations. Evaluating the refinement on both a high-resolution in-house dataset and a coarse, sparsely annotated open-source dataset, our method consistently improves all volumetric, surface, and anatomical metrics. The framework demonstrates greater improvement when applied to weaker initial segmentations, highlighting its potential for improving segmentations for out-of-domain models and in limited-training-data scenarios. The method is formulated as a gradient-based, GPU-accelerated framework that can be easily extended to other anatomical use cases.

Do LLMs Ask the Right Questions? Evaluating GPT-Generated Surveys as Instruments for Measuring Social Attitudes

Tina Behzad, Wenbo Li, Reuben Kline, Klaus Mueller — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19211v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding human beliefs and social attitudes often relies on carefully designed survey instruments. Recent work has suggested that large language models (LLMs) could automate parts of this process by generating surveys at scale, raising questions about the comparability of such instruments to literature-grounded, human-designed surveys. We present a controlled empirical comparison between GPT-generated surveys and established survey baselines across three social domains: climate change, immigration, and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). GPT-generated surveys were produced using a fixed prompting framework enforcing a 3x3 structure over beliefs, perceptions, and behaviors, while human baselines were assembled from validated instruments to match survey length and construct coverage. We collected responses from U.S.-based participants, who completed both survey types, allowing direct within-subject comparison. We analyze differences in response distributions, clustering behavior, and alignment with self-identified stances. Our results show that GPT-generated surveys capture the same dominant attitudinal divisions as human-designed instruments, while exhibiting differences in the resolution of belief structure and group separation. These findings suggest that LLM-generated surveys are suited for exploratory and large-scale analyses, and can be used to complement expert-designed instruments.

Computing on the Fly: Navigating a Vision for the Future of Drone Computing

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19213v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The report envisions a decade in which drones move goods, medical supplies, and information at a scale comparable to national infrastructure investments like highways and the electric grid. Potential applications include natural disaster detection drones that spot wildfire sources within minutes, medical supply chains that bypass ground congestion to reach rural hospitals, and nationwide fleets that continuously inspect bridges and power lines. Realizing this future, however, requires closing what report authors call a "capability gap," where hardware and aspirations are outpacing the software and systems needed to operate safely at scale. The report identifies twelve technical challenges that must be addressed to realize the transformative potential of drone technology: Scaling to millions of drones; AI intelligence and assurance; Edge-cloud continuum and real-time coordination; AI autonomy and agentic systems; Data, training, and validation infrastructure; Critical infrastructure protection; Building reliable fleets from non-deterministic agents; Trust, security, and distributed authentication; Next-generation drone networks; Human-AI partnership and scalable insight; Standards, certification, and regulation; and Workforce development and education. These twelve challenges and proposed approaches to them form the basis of the report, laying out a multifaceted path forward for the evolution of done technology.

Keeping the Cache Warm Pays: Keepalive Economics for Agentic Workloads

Maxim Khailo — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19214v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Frontier LLM providers cache a prompt's processed prefix so that a follow-up request sharing it pays ~10% of the input price and skips most of the prefill latency. Agentic workloads systematically destroy this benefit: the agent sends a request, runs a tool or waits for approval for minutes, and by the time the follow-up is sent the cached prefix has been evicted, so the agent pays the full prefill again. A client-side keepalive, replaying the prefix on a timer during the pause, prevents this, and it is individually rational: across Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and DeepSeek we show that a keepalive holds the prefix warm through gaps where idle baselines are evicted, cutting the post-pause request cost by up to 12.5x. The strategic question is the ping frequency, and it has a clean answer: keepalive cost falls monotonically in the interval, so the economical choice is the largest interval safely under the provider's TTL, about 4 minutes at Anthropic's 5-minute TTL rather than the 30-second convention, and the strategy breaks even against a re-prefill at idle ~tau(w/r - 1) (~46 min for Anthropic, ~36 min for OpenAI and DeepSeek). Because the benefit is real and bounded only by each user's own bill, rational adoption is universal adoption; and since cache residency is priced per read rather than per token-hour, a keepalive-saturated tier gives LRU eviction nothing to rank. We argue this externality will push providers to meter cache residency directly, and one already does. We derive the operator's policy until then.

HACO: Hedged Agent Computing for Reliable LLM Systems

Enhan Li, Hongyang Du — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19215v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As large language model (LLM) agents move from isolated prompting to longhorizon workflows, failures increasingly arise at the role-to-instance binding boundary, where task-specific role requests must be assigned to concrete agent instances under current service, network, and query conditions. Existing agent system research has improved role specialization, workflow topology, memory, and tool use, but often assumes a fixed stable execution environment. This assumption limits deployed reliability, because the same role request can exhibit different latency, failure probability, and output quality across agent instances operating under different service regions and network conditions. We propose Hedged Agent Computing (HACO), a runtime control scheme that treats each role request as a reliability-constrained selection problem over candidate agent instances, each coupling a role type, an LLM, and a concrete execution environment. Different from routing, HACO adaptively selects a hedge set of candidates for each invocation. Its allocation rule combines optimistic ranking, which prioritizes candidates with high estimated quality, reliability, and informative uncertainty, with conservative reliability accumulation, which stops selection only after the hedge set reaches a target success probability. Through experience harvesting, HACO updates candidate and link profiles from all executed candidate traces, including quality, success, latency, and network statistics. Experiments on various benchmarks, together with runtime degradation studies, show that HACO improves robustness and output quality under changing deployment conditions, while using lower token and latency cost than exhaustive parallel execution.

Squeezing the Most Out of Preemption for AoI Minimization: Single-source Case

Nail Akar, Mohammad Moltafet, Sennur Ulukus, Marian Codreanu, Roy D. Yates — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19216v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, we study a single-source single-server continuous-time status update system where the updates arrive according to a Poisson process and update service times are generally distributed. In our proposed setting, a preemption policy refers to one where a new update preempts the ongoing one with a probability depending on the age of the update in service. We first propose an analytical method to derive the average age of information (AoI) and average peak AoI (PAoI) for any such preemption policy. This analysis is then utilized to tune two particular preemption policies: (i) probabilistic preemption (PP), in which preemption takes place according to a fixed probability regardless of the update age, (ii) threshold-based preemption (TP), for which preemption is incurred when the update age exceeds a certain threshold, both using one-dimensional line search. The effectiveness of policy tuning for the PP and TP policies is validated using lognormal-distributed update service times.

Beyond Score Prediction: LLM-Based Essay Scoring and Feedback Generation via Reinforcement Learning with Rubric Rewards

Xuefeng Jin, Jiashuo Zhang, Teng Cao, Bin Yang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19219v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have been widely applied to automated essay scoring (AES) and automated feedback generation (AFG). However, existing studies rely primarily on prompt engineering or supervised fine-tuning, while systematic research on reinforcement learning (RL) post-training and automated evaluation of feedback quality remains limited. We propose RLAES, a unified LLM framework that jointly optimizes essay scoring and feedback generation through RL. To make feedback quality measurable, interpretable, and usable for training, we introduce Rubric-based Feedback Evaluation (RFE), an essay-grounded feedback evaluation framework comprising 166 fine-grained binary rubric items and an LLM-as-judge. Building on RFE, we propose Adaptive Gated Feedback Optimization (AGFO), which activates rubric-based feedback rewards on demand during RL, reducing evaluation overhead while improving feedback quality. We also propose Adjacent Contrastive Reasoning (ACR) to improve ordinal score calibration by explicitly contrasting adjacent score levels. Experimental results show that the RFE framework captures essay-feedback consistency, exhibits strong pairwise discriminative power, and closely aligns with expert preferences. On the ASAP benchmark, RLAES-AGFO achieves the best scoring performance among LLM-based methods (QWK = 0.803), while maintaining feedback quality comparable to GPT-5.5 and avoiding the feedback degradation observed under score-only RL. Code and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/hellomuyi/RLAES.

AdaFlash: Adaptive Speculative Decoding via On-Policy Distilled Diffusion Drafters

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19223v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speculative decoding, in which a lightweight draft model first generates a draft sequence that is then verified in parallel by the target model, has become a prevalent paradigm for accelerating large language model inference. Recent work such as DFlash further boosts drafting efficiency by leveraging diffusion drafters, whose parallel denoising mechanism enables draft generation in a single forward pass. In this work, we uncover a central pitfall of diffusion drafters: bidirectional attention is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it endows the model with parallel generation and global contextual modeling capabilities; on the other hand, this inherent global dependency introduces high variance at both the domain-level and the token-level: acceptance rates fluctuate substantially across different domains, and draft token quality also varies heterogeneously at different token positions. To tackle this issue, we propose AdaFlash framework, comprising two components: (i) an on-policy distillation (OPD) algorithm with reverse-KL divergence tailored for diffusion drafters, bringing stable convergence and effectively reducing domain-level variance; and (ii) an adaptive length head that dynamically adjusts the candidate sequence length on the fly, substantially lowering the verification cost of the target model and handling token-level variance. Experiments demonstrate that AdaFlash consistently improves speedup rate during deployment, with especially significant gains in high-concurrency scenarios, achieving up to approximately 66% higher throughput than previous state-of-the-art methods.

The Price of Reasoning: Cost-Quality Tradeoffs in Reinforcement Learning for Neural Machine Translation

Michael Jungo, Aixiu An — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19226v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been established as a viable paradigm for the post-training of Large Language Models (LLMs), including downstream tasks, such as Neural Machine Translation (NMT). With the latest research indicating that RLVR could be the preferred training method for translating legal documents due to the induced reasoning capabilities, it raises the question whether it is really attributed to the reasoning or more generally to the training paradigm. We investigate the importance of including the model's reasoning trace in the generated responses during both training and inference by systematically omitting it from one of the phases. Our experiments show that including the reasoning, specifically during inference, has a positive effect on the overall translation quality. Furthermore, we recognise that the reasoning leads to an increase in output tokens, hence we study the cost-quality tradeoff between the increased computational demands and the improved translation quality.

IGGT4D: Streaming 4D Instance-Grounded Geometry Transformer

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19228v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-world spatial intelligence requires agents to understand scenes from continuous video streams, where objects move, persist, disappear, and reappear over time. While recent spatial foundation models have enabled generalizable feed-forward 3D reconstruction, most streaming methods remain geometry-centric and lack temporally consistent object-level understanding. Meanwhile, existing semantic reconstruction and 3D-aware vision-language methods largely rely on externally extracted 2D semantic cues or loosely coupled geometry inputs, limiting unified geometry-instance learning in long dynamic scenes. In this paper, we propose IGGT4D, a streaming instance-grounded geometry Transformer for online 4D scene understanding. IGGT4D processes video frames sequentially, reuses historical context through causal spatial-temporal modeling, and incrementally updates a unified representation of camera motion, geometry, and object identity. This enables long-sequence feed-forward reconstruction with geometry-instance consistency in dynamic environments. To address the lack of high-quality 4D supervision, we further construct InsScene4D-147K, a large-scale dataset spanning real/synthetic and static/dynamic scenes, with RGB images, depth, poses, and temporally consistent instance masks generated by an automated geometry-guided annotation pipeline. Experiments on 3D reconstruction, pose estimation, instance spatial tracking, and open-vocabulary segmentation demonstrate that IGGT4D outperforms existing streaming baselines while maintaining scalable online inference for long dynamic sequences.

Selection Shapes the Boundary: A Preregistered Replication of Monotonicity and Label Agreement in Unselected NLI Populations

Haram Choi — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19231v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prior work on human label variation (HLV) in natural language inference (NLI) has often relied on re-annotation resources that select items by disagreement level. An earlier study (arXiv:2607.15870) found that hypotheses containing non-upward monotonicity operators showed lower label agreement in ChaosNLI (Cliff's delta = -0.284), which is restricted to items whose majority label carries exactly three of five votes. We preregistered a replication of this boundary in the unselected populations that ChaosNLI was drawn from: the SNLI and MultiNLI development sets, using the same operator tagger and a four-level ordinal agreement outcome. The registered prediction fails. All seven contrasts return a positive Cliff's delta (non-upward items agree slightly more, not less), the only significant confirmatory contrast has the opposite sign to the registration, and every effect is far below our smallest effect size of interest (0.10). Robustness checks support the measurement: simulated tagger misclassification shrinks the effects rather than manufacturing them, and a manual re-tagging audit reaches four-class agreement of 0.875 on a fresh 200-item sample. We conclude that the earlier negative boundary is plausibly a structure conditional on low-agreement selection rather than a population-level property, and that HLV structure claims built on selected re-annotation resources should state their selection conditional explicitly.

S3: Stable Subgoal Selection by Constraining Uncertainty of Coarse Dynamics in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning

Kshitij Kumar Srivastava, Kshitij Jerath — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19232v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) intends to separate strategic planning from primitive execution. It has been widely successful in solving long-horizon and complex tasks, where flat-RL algorithms have difficulty in learning. However, while the low-level agent in HRL benefits from dense feedback and abundant trial opportunities, the high-level agent receives sparse, delayed feedback from the environment and its performance depends on the low-level execution capability. In this paper, we study whether subgoal selection by the high-level agent can be performed more strategically, by providing it with dynamics-aware intrinsic motivation. Since motivation based on primitive transition dynamics would require broad coverage of the state-action space, we propose to use coarse dynamics, i.e., environment transitions aggregated over multiple steps at the temporal scale at which the high-level agent operates. This approach stabilizes the high-level policy by learning to minimize the predictive uncertainty associated with the coarse dynamics, and provides a guided structure for navigation. We model the predictive uncertainty by evaluating different dispersion metrics as approximated by a Mixture Density Network (MDN). Empirically, we observe that a dense, dynamics-aware intrinsic reward leads to risk-averse subgoal selection, enabling it to outperform state-of-the-art HRL methods in non-stationary long-horizon environments.

In-Context Time Series Classification with Random Convolutional Features

Joscha C\"uppers, Jilles Vreeken — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19234v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series classification is central to domains like medical signal analysis, industrial monitoring, and sensor-based activity recognition, where class information manifests as localized shapes, specific frequencies, temporal shifts, or complex cross-channel interactions. Random convolutional transforms efficiently map these sequences to fixed-dimensional tabular features but are traditionally paired with simple linear classifiers. We investigate whether a pretrained tabular foundation model can more effectively harness these rich representations. We propose MASHT, a pipeline that marries MultiRocket and Hydra features with the power of in-context tabular foundation models. By leveraging a pretrained tabular foundation model, our approach completely bypasses task-specific model training, requiring only feature extraction and direct inference. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MASHT matches state-of-the-art time series classification baselines on univariate tasks, achieving a lower average rank than HIVE-COTE 2.0. On multivariate datasets, MASHT remains highly competitive with the strongest reference methods.

MeetingToM: Evaluating Multimodal LLMs on Theory-of-Mind Reasoning in Multi-Party Meetings

Ziyi Wang, Yuhang Wu, Dongxu Piao, Xingyu Liu, Tianhui Zhou, Miao Liu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19235v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Theory of Mind (ToM), the ability to infer other's beliefs, intentions, and states of knowledge, is central to social interaction, yet remains challenging for current Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), especially in multi-party meetings where cues are distributed across speech and behavior. Existing multimodal ToM benchmarks mainly focus on video-grounded question answering over overt, externally verifiable signals, and provide limited coverage of latent social states and group dynamics. We introduce MeetingToM, a benchmark for complex social behavior reasoning in naturalistic multi-party meetings. MeetingToM targets meeting-specific phenomena such as \textbf{pseudo-consensus}, where apparent agreement masks private dissent under social pressure. The benchmark is hierarchically organized to evaluate ToM at increasing levels of social granularity, including (i) subject-level mental state prediction, (ii) dyadic-level addressee understanding, and (iii) group-level consensus reasoning. We provide a unified evaluation protocol and conduct systematic analyses of representative MLLMs, revealing persistent limitations in integrating non-verbal cues, inferring hidden attitudes, and distinguishing genuine consensus from pseudo-consensus. Our results highlight key challenges and establish MeetingToM as a testbed for advancing meeting-grounded ToM in multimodal models.

DBMol: Design of High-Affinity, Target-Specific Small Molecules through Structure Prediction Models

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19237v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Designing small molecule ligands that bind with high affinity to specific protein pockets is a fundamental goal in drug discovery, as small molecules constitute a major fraction of approved therapeutics. Recent breakthroughs in structure prediction, such as AlphaFold-3 and Boltz-2, enable accurate biomolecular interaction prediction and show promise as foundation models for downstream tasks, including binding affinity prediction. We propose to leverage these models and introduce DBMol, a new structure predictor-guided framework for de novo small molecule design. DBMol formulates an alternating optimization and projection process. In the optimization stage, DBMol starts from an initial molecule and uses gradient-based optimization to improve pocket-specific interactions and predicted binding affinity using a structure prediction model. In the projection stage, a flow-matching model maps the optimized molecular graph to discrete and chemically valid molecules. Experiments show that DBMol effectively optimizes the Boltz-2 affinity proxy and generates molecules with strong predicted affinity and specificity under Boltz-2 evaluation. To reduce self-confirmation bias, we further evaluate generated molecules using held-out metrics, including AF3-based evaluation. DBMol substantially improves pocket coverage while maintaining molecular diversity over unconditional generation, and is competitive under held-out metrics despite the absence of reference-ligand supervision. These results support the promise of structure prediction models as effective optimization signals for de novo molecular design.

FinanceComplexQA: Benchmarking Agentic Reasoning on Industrial-grade Financial Documents

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19238v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic Reasoning has become a transformative force in financial analysis due to its ability to integrate large-scale information and generate reliable and accurate content. However, when handling complex real-world problems, different agents still show significant performance variation. In this work, we design Finance-LaTeX SKILL, a skill for synthesizing financial documents with complex layouts based on expert knowledge. Using an agent workflow built on this skill, we generate 2,000 professional financial documents along with 6,000 high-quality question-answer pairs. To evaluate the overall capability of agents, we introduce FinanceComplexQA, a comprehensive open-ended generation benchmark for financial documents that closely resembles real-world scenarios. It contains 2,026 deep research tasks targeting 1009 financial documents. FinanceComplexQA has 8 key features: bilingual support; coverage of six mainstream scenarios and seven tasks; expert-level document reasoning questions; deep research of complex layouts; relatively stable and permanent reference answers; and precise evaluation through an Agent-as-a-Judge with multiple evaluation metrics. Using FinanceComplexQA, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of leading RAG systems and agentic reasoning tools for financial document QA. Through identifying and analyzing failure cases, we provide an in-depth study of their capabilities in numerical computation, multi-hop reasoning, content summarization, and industry analysis.

Thermodynamics-Informed Input Reparameterization for Neural Prediction of Real-Fluid Thermodynamic Properties in Supercritical Combustion

Haoze Zhang, Han Li, Ke Xiao, Yangchen Xu, Runze Mao, Zhi X. Chen — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19241v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-fluid thermodynamic property evaluation is a major computational cost in supercritical combustion simulations. In the enthalpy-based pressure-correction formulation, the closure evaluates temperature T, density $\rho$, and compressibility coefficient $\psi$ from the solver state (h,p,Y) through enthalpy-temperature inversion and repeated real-fluid equation-of-state evaluations. Neural-network surrogates offer fixed-cost inference, but direct mapping from (h,p,Y) to $(T,\rho,\psi)$ must capture the enthalpy-temperature relation and non-ideal equation-of-state response, resulting in a complex regression problem. This work introduces a thermodynamics-informed input reparameterization strategy, termed target-aligned input reparameterization (TAIR). TAIR replaces the raw enthalpy coordinate of each property network with a target-matched thermodynamic coordinate: the temperature network uses a temperature estimate obtained by inverting a constant-$c_p$ ideal-gas mixture enthalpy approximation, whereas the density and compressibility networks use an ideal-gas density estimate. These algebraic transformations use only solver-available variables and species constants, guiding the networks to learn real-fluid departures from ideal-gas baselines rather than reconstructing the full closure from raw enthalpy. The method is assessed using supercritical methane-oxygen counterflow flame data against a raw-input baseline and target-inconsistent cross-reparameterization controls. TAIR reduces held-out RMSE by factors of about 1.5, 2.0, and 7.5 for T, $\rho$, and $\psi$, respectively. For an unseen strain-rate flame within the augmented thermodynamic envelope, the corresponding factors are 3.6, 14.5, and 6.0. The target-inconsistent controls perform worse, indicating that the gains arise from thermodynamically matched input design rather than generic preprocessing.

Inference-Time Steering for Cross-Lingual Factual Consistency in LLMs

Alexander Manev — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19243v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Although Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable multilingual fluency, their internal knowledge representations remain disproportionately biased toward high-resource languages. This leads to cross-lingual factual inconsistency, where they shift their empirical answer distributions based solely on the prompt language. We investigate whether these biases can be mitigated at inference time, forcing an English-prompted model to answer as if it were queried in target languages (German, Spanish, Bulgarian), and evaluate four intervention strategies: zero-shot contextual steering (persona prompting), internal representation manipulation via Contrastive Activation Addition (CAA), and lightweight weight modification via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) trained on benchmark-derived factual data as well as conceptual generalization data. To assess alignment, we curate a multilingual factual dataset alongside a novel generalization benchmark comprising culturally rooted queries to determine whether factual interventions transfer to broader target-centric preferences. Experiments on Gemma 3 12B Instruct reveal persona prompting to be the strongest overall intervention, balancing efficacy, safety, and out-of-domain generalization. While CAA yields sharp inconsistency benchmark shifts, it is configuration-sensitive and risks knowledge degradation. DPO-based adapters offer permanent, yet narrower and less transferable gains. These findings suggest that cross-lingual inconsistency is at least partly a selection problem, and that simple contextual interventions may outperform more invasive methods for robust, transferable alignment.

PTSan: A Practical Memory Safety Sanitizer for C/C++ with Pointer-Object Authority

Eli Davis, Eric Lahtinen, Michael Gordon — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19246v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Memory safety errors remain the dominant source of severe vulnerabilities in C and C++. Pointer-based sanitizers provide stronger guarantees than location-based tools such as LLVM's ASan, but their overhead and compatibility limitations have constrained production use. We present PTSan, an LLVM sanitizer that makes pointer-based checking practical by storing an object identifier in each pointer's high bits and its bounds in a fixed-size runtime table. This representation trades a finite live-object budget for low overhead, optimizer visibility, and commodity-hardware support. Because identity travels with the pointer value, ordinary LLVM dataflow propagates it without explicit per-pointer metadata instructions. Separating metadata lookup from check enforcement exposes both as LLVM IR, enabling check hoisting, elision, and merging, plus whole-function min-cut placement of compatibility tag strips. Intel Linear Address Masking eliminates the remaining strips in hardware when available. On stock hardware PTSan runs at parity with the fastest published location-based sanitizer: 57.2% geomean overhead on SPEC CPU 2017 on x86-64 (46.4% with Intel LAM), 54.7% on ARM64, and 31.5% (x86-64) on the application-shaped LLVM MultiSource suite. This is roughly a third of the published overhead percentage of prior systems with similar pointer-object authority guarantees, while preserving the inter-object, non-object, and temporal detection coverage measured by an independent memory safety test suite. Its physical-memory overhead is effectively native, a critical property for production deployment as memory costs become a first-order constraint. We also demonstrate practical overhead on real-world server and security workloads. These results show that PTSan brings practical pointer-based memory safety into a recompile-only sanitizer deployment model.

A Flexible Sparsity-Aware FPGA Accelerator with Column-Wise Compression for Efficient CNN Inference

Amirhossein Zarei, Shervin Vakili — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19248v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient acceleration of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on resource-constrained platforms remains challenging due to the irregularity of sparsity patterns and the associated hardware overhead. While unstructured sparsity offers high model accuracy, it introduces significant inefficiencies in hardware mapping, whereas structured sparsity simplifies execution at the cost of reduced flexibility. This paper presents SparHiXcel-v2, a cost-effective and highly configurable FPGA-based CNN accelerator that achieves an improved balance between sparsity flexibility and hardware efficiency. The proposed architecture is built around a scalable two-dimensional MAC array and introduces a column-wise kernel compression technique that enables efficient handling of irregular sparsity patterns with minimal hardware overhead. To further enhance performance, we propose a hardware-algorithm co-design framework, including an ordering optimization scheme and a multi-phase structured pruning and revival algorithm tailored to the microarchitecture. Extensive evaluations on VGG16 and ResNet18 demonstrate that SparHiXcel-v2 achieves substantial improvements in processing throughput and energy efficiency through the proposed optimizations. In structured sparsity mode, the accelerator reaches over 2.5 TOPS and 210 GOP/s/W for VGG16, and over 1.1 TOPS and 72 GOP/s/W for ResNet18 on a cost-effective AMD Kintex UltraScale+ FPGA, while maintaining modest accuracy degradation.

Uniform-in-Time Weak and Ergodic Error Estimates of a Nonlinearity-Explicit Full Discretization for Superlinear SPDEs Driven by Multiplicative Noise

Jingjing Cai, Zhihui Liu, Xiaoming Wu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19250v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For a class of superlinear SPDEs driven by multiplicative noise, we prove an (essentially) sharp uniform-in-time (UIT) weak convergence rate for the nonlinearity-explicit Galerkin tamed Euler method (GTEM). Under standard monotonicity assumptions, the proof combines Malliavin calculus with regularity theory for the associated backward Kolmogorov equation (BKE), leading to UIT moment, H\"older, and Malliavin estimates, along with regularity estimates for the BKE solution. These estimates, together with a weak error decomposition and Malliavin integration by parts (IBP) formula, then yield a UIT weak convergence rate $\tau^\rho+\lambda_N^{-\rho}$ for any $\rho \in (0,1)$. Consequently, we obtain a sharp ergodic error estimate between the exact and numerical invariant measures. Numerical experiments support the theory.

Sequential Learner Modeling Using Multi-Relational Graph Convolutional Networks

Rawaa Alatrash, Mohamed Amine Chatti, Hong Yang, Yumeng Wang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19253v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: User modeling is a critical task in a variety of personalized systems. Recognizing their effectiveness in learning from graph-structured data, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), particularly Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), are increasingly employed for user modeling. However, existing approaches typically treat different relation types in a graph as homogeneous, limiting their ability to capture richer semantics and construct more informative user models. While multi-relational GNNs (MR-GNNs) have been adopted for representation learning and recommendation, their application for user modeling remains unexplored. Moreover, existing GNN-based user modeling approaches ignore the user interaction sequence. To address these research gaps, in this work we propose MR-ConceptGCN, a novel fully unsupervised approach focused on concept-based sequential learner modeling using multi-relational GCNs (MR-GCNs). MR-ConceptGCN effecively combines Personal Knowledge Graphs (PKGs), MR-GCNs, and the pre-trained language model SBERT to obtain enhanced relation- and semantic-aware representations of the PKG items. The enriched embeddings of the knowledge concepts that a learner did not understand when interacting with learning materials in CourseMapper are then used to construct a sequential learner model that combines long-term and short-term learner interactions. We report the results of an online user study (n = 31), demonstrating the benefits of MR-ConceptGCN in terms of several important user-centric aspects including accuracy, usefulness, diversity, and satisfaction with an educational recommender system.

Prompt Design at Scale: How Format, Instruction Count, and Context Length Shape Instruction Adherence and Hallucination in Large Language Models

Netanel Eliav — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19257v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Practitioners make three prompt-design decisions with almost no controlled evidence behind them: how to format instructions and context (markdown, plain text, prose, or tabular), how many simultaneous instructions a system prompt can carry before compliance degrades, and how much context a model can hold before recall and honesty degrade. We report two controlled experiments crossing all three factors on one held, contamination-free synthetic corpus (the "Book of Veyra," 8,780 uniquely-named entities, deterministically regenerable from a fixed seed), evaluated across five models. Experiment 1 (960 calls/model) measures instruction-following decay as rule count N grows from 10 to 160, crossed with four formats and system-prompt vs. user-turn placement. Perfect-response rate collapses to zero by N=80 for every model, format, and placement. Placement produces effects at least as large as format at N=160 in most models, but the direction is model-specific. No model shows a reliable markdown advantage; one 35B model favors plain text instead. Experiment 2 (5,520 calls/model) measures recall accuracy, false-premise sycophancy, and absent-fact fabrication across a 2k-to-512k-token context ladder in the same four formats. Recall stays near ceiling through 64-128k tokens, then degrades sharply and format-dependently: one model's accuracy spread reaches 48 points at 128k tokens. Fabrication never occurs (0/5,760 probes), and sycophancy stays negligible (<=8.3%). What rises sharply near each model's context ceiling is outright refusal to answer (0% to 79-90%), distinct from sycophancy or fabrication. Neither pre-registered format ordering holds, and token overhead (+22% to +37% over plain text) further changes which format is preferable where accuracy spread is genuine. We release the full harness, corpus generator, and raw results (VeyraBench): https://github.com/iNetanel/veyrabench

Weighted Inverse Lax-Wendroff Boundary Treatment of Discontinuous Galerkin Methods for Conservation Laws

Yongjie Bi, Yan Jiang, Yong Liu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19258v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we propose a weighted inverse Lax-Wendroff (WILW) boundary treatment for the discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method on unfitted meshes to efficiently solve hyperbolic conservation laws in complex geometries. The proposed method employs the standard DG scheme for interior cells and reconstructs high-order approximation polynomials via the ILW principle for cut cells near boundaries to impose numerical boundary conditions, effectively eliminating the time-step restriction typically caused by small cut cells. In particular, to address the sensitivity of numerical errors to the geometric size of cut cells in the basic ILW scheme, we raise the reconstruction order at the boundary, ensuring that accuracy becomes independent of the cut-cell size. Furthermore, it incorporates a weighted least-squares reconstruction to reduce the need for complex high-order boundary derivatives during construction. As a result, the method maintains high-order accuracy while significantly improving computational efficiency for multi-dimensional problems. Finally, the stability of the proposed method is theoretically validated through linear stability analysis, and the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed scheme are numerically verified through a series of one-dimensional and two-dimensional numerical experiments for scalar and system equations.

Benchmarking Generalization in Financial Statement Fraud Detection: robust evaluation and novel tasks

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19259v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Financial statement fraud detection (FSFD) is crucial for market integrity but faces challenges from increasingly sophisticated schemes and under-utilized textual data in financial reports. Existing methods often rely on random data splits, leading to overoptimistic performance estimates that do not reflect real-world generalization to new companies or future periods. To address this recurring problem with the state of the art, we propose a robust FSFD framework leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to integrate both structured financial data and unstructured textual information from financial reports. We provide a more realistic evaluation through a novel and challenging benchmark task called Company-Isolated FSFD (CI-FSFD). We construct and make publicly available a comprehensive U.S. company dataset combining financial statements, summarized MD&A text, and fraud labels. Our approach achieves the best performance on the challenging CI-FSFD task, demonstrating the critical value of textual data and robust evaluation for reliable financial fraud detection.

PathAgentBench: Benchmarking Evidence-Seeking Vision-Language Models on Whole-Slide Pathology Image

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19261v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Whole-slide image (WSI) diagnosis requires identifying diagnostically relevant regions, examining them across magnifications, and integrating multi-scale evidence. However, most existing pathology benchmarks evaluate models on pre-cropped patches or pre-extracted slide features, leaving their ability to acquire evidence directly from gigapixel WSIs largely untested. We introduce PathAgentBench, a benchmark for evaluating evidence-seeking vision-language models (VLMs) across four complementary capabilities: image-to-text matching for evidence interpretation, text-to-image retrieval for evidence verification, diagnostic-region localization for evidence acquisition, and multi-scale reasoning for evidence integration. The benchmark is organized as a diagnostic tree that links nested regions across magnifications with scale-specific findings and path-level diagnoses. It contains 1,822 TCGA WSIs and 17,135 diagnostic paths annotated by ten board-certified pathologists. An additional private cohort of 190 breast cancer WSIs with detailed annotations is used to evaluate autonomous whole-slide exploration. We evaluate 20 general-purpose, medical, and pathology-specialized models. Leading open-weight models achieve over 93% accuracy in multi-scale reasoning and over 50% accuracy in both cross-modal matching tasks. In contrast, diagnostic-region localization remains challenging: the best text-guided mean intersection-over-union is below 0.09, underperforming a simple center-based heuristic. During autonomous exploration, the unconditional hit rate decreases from 0.522 at low magnification to 0.185 at intermediate magnification and 0.020 at high magnification. These results reveal a pronounced gap between reasoning over curated evidence and acquiring that evidence directly from WSIs. PathAgentBench provides a unified framework for measuring and improving evidence-seeking pathology models.

BioSecBench-Surveillance: A Verifiable Benchmark for AI Agents in Pathogen Genomic Surveillance

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19262v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As pathogen genomic surveillance scales, the bottleneck is shifting from data generation to analysis. We present BioSecBench-Surveillance, a verifiable benchmark of 100 evaluations testing whether AI agents can infer the right analysis pipeline from raw sequencing data and surveillance context. Each evaluation gives an agent only the data and context a human analyst would have, then grades its structured answer deterministically. The tasks span seven categories, from taxonomic classification to genetic-engineering detection, across diverse sample types and sequencing technologies. Across 3,962 gradable attempts from sixteen model-harness pairs, the strongest configuration cleared only about half. Opus 4.8 with PI led at 50.2 percent, with a 95 percent confidence interval of 40.1 to 60.3 percent across 83 evaluations, tied with GPT-5.5 with Codex at 50.2 percent, with a 95 percent confidence interval of 40.8 to 59.6 percent, followed by Opus 4.7 with PI at 49.6 percent, with a 95 percent confidence interval of 40.0 to 59.2 percent, and Sonnet 4.6 with PI at 48.6 percent, with a 95 percent confidence interval of 38.9 to 58.3 percent. Even when agents invoked the correct workflows, their mistakes came from the choices around them, such as which references, thresholds, filters, and normalization to apply. BioSecBench-Surveillance provides a standard for measuring whether agents can be trusted to perform genomic surveillance when the next outbreak arrives.

A Local Macroscopic Conservative Low-Rank Discontinuous Galerkin Method for the Vlasov-Poisson Equation with Dougherty-Fokker-Planck Collisions

Austin Nelson, Wei Guo, Pierson Guthrey — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19264v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we construct a low-rank, structure preserving discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method to simulate the Vlasov-Poisson (VP) system coupled with the Dougherty Fokker-Planck (DFP) collision operator. When Coulomb collisions occur in dense or weakly-collisional plasmas, electrons get pushed to a low-rank steady state. In many cases, the plasma arrives to this steady state quickly, meaning that for most of the run-time, the plasma consists mainly of numerical low-rank structures. Our new low-rank scheme is constructed to exploit these numerical low-rank structures to greatly reduce the needed storage complexity of simulations for the VP-DFP system. It is constructed as an extension of the previously established Local Macroscopic Conservative (LoMaC) method by incorporating Coulomb collisions into the system. The LoMaC property ensures local conservation of macroscopic mass, momentum, and energy at the discrete level. Details of the new method are discussed in this paper. Numerical experiments are performed to show the efficacy of the method.

Toward Auditable Fraud Detection: Combining Graph Features, Model Explanations, and Agentic Case Investigation

Rahil Sharma — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19266v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fraud detection systems must scale with rising transaction volume while remaining explainable and reviewable. We study a layered pipeline on the PaySim dataset that combines a gradient-boosted classifier, graph-derived structural features, an autoencoder-based anomaly signal, TreeSHAP explanations, and a bounded LLM investigation agent applied to cases the classifier scores uncertainly. Before any model comparison, we identify and remove a simulator-specific balance shortcut that would otherwise inflate baseline performance. After this correction, neither the graph features nor the anomaly signal improves Average Precision on the full test set. Both, however, rank fraud better within the subset of cases receiving intermediate baseline scores. In a controlled experiment with injected multi-account fraud rings, engineered structural features recover all injected test transactions, while the tabular baseline misses roughly a quarter of them. The investigation agent underperforms direct thresholding of the classifier it relies on, reaching 65.0% accuracy against 71.7% on a balanced 60-case sample, despite having access to model explanations, graph context, and retrieved reference cases. Of the eight decisions the agent changed, six replaced correct classifier outputs with errors, and it produced a coherent written rationale in each case. An exploratory disagreement-based escalation rule flagged two of these agent errors for human review without flagging any correct decision. We conclude that each component of a layered fraud system contributes only under specific conditions, and that a plausible rationale from an investigation agent is not evidence of a better decision.

They'll Verify. They Just Won't Act. How Authority Framing and Laundered Code Turn a Trusted Agentic CI/CD Pipeline Into an Attack Surface

Yohann Sidot — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19267v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a five-agent CI/CD pipeline (triage -> developer -> security-scan -> review -> approve/deploy), built from five distinct production LLMs across three providers, behind an LLM firewall in shadow mode. A single untrusted input - an external issue requesting a "usage-telemetry" feature - asks for code that exfiltrates process secrets (dict(os.environ)) to an attacker URL, laundered as observability. Across a pre-registered A x B (x C) factorial (N=20; naive arm N=60) we find: (1) the entry agent does not leak its system prompt (0/40); (2) an authority-framed injection ("pre-approved under SEC-2291, do not re-review") makes downstream verifiers see the secret-exfil line, cite the pre-approval, and ship it - the scanner passes ~80% of laundered pull requests, and the worst-case cell reaches 55% compromise; (3) the perceived presence of other verifiers yields only a small, non-significant reduction in individual scrutiny (a weak bystander analogue), even at N=60; and (4) content-based controls - code scanners and pattern detectors alike - miss the laundered intent entirely (the code is syntactically clean); only an LLM reasoning about intent is a partial defence. The failure is systemic: neither prompt secrecy nor distributed verification protects; a provenance-aware control at the entry, independent of both, would have. All data is 100% synthetic; the sink is mocked and the exfil URL is never contacted.

GUIDED Network-Agnostic Feature Initialization for Spatial Transferability in GNN-based Models

Alessandro Scalese, Santhanakrishnan Narayanan, Constantinos Antoniou — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19270v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Traffic Assignment Problem is a fundamental but computationally expensive component of transportation planning. While Graph Neural Networks have emerged as fast, data-driven surrogates, their practical deployment is severely constrained by a spatial generalization gap. Standard models rely on transductive feature initializations that tie travel demand to fixed network topologies, preventing seamless transfer to new urban environments. To overcome this structural limitation, this research proposes a network-agnostic initialization layer, termed Geometrically Unconstrained Inductive Demand EmbeDding (GUIDED). By injecting travel demand as a scalar attribute on auxiliary virtual links rather than as specific node features, this modular framework standardizes the input space regardless of network scale. Extensive experimental evaluation across multiple urban topologies demonstrates that a Heterogeneous Graph Attention Network (HetGAT) model integrated with the proposed GUIDED layer maintains state-of-the-art predictive accuracy on single-network tasks, while demonstrating superior robustness to out-of-distribution demand patterns and maintaining a distinct performance advantage over the baseline even under severe data scarcity. Notably, the proposed feature initialization enables highly parameter-efficient domain adaptation for inter-network transfer learning without artificial input homogenization, establishing a robust foundation for truly inductive models. At the same time, the optimized scatter operations of the initialization layer yield an approximate 50% reduction in training time per epoch compared to the baseline approach. Furthermore, while demonstrated on vehicular traffic, this fundamental abstraction of spatial topology provides a versatile blueprint for generalized origin-destination spatial problems, such as freight logistics and multimodal network optimization.

Model-Agnostic Meta Learning for Differentiable MPC

Salma Elfeki, Riccardo Zuliani, Niklas Schmid, Efe C. Balta, John Lygeros — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19271v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Applying policy optimization to Model Predictive Control (MPC) yields high-performance and reliable controllers. However, the resulting controllers often overfit their training conditions and suffer significant performance degradation in unseen tasks. We propose a novel framework combining policy optimization with meta-learning to train highly adaptable MPC controllers. Our approach enables rapid adaptation to unseen tasks, maintaining high performance at a fraction of the computational cost required for full retraining. Furthermore, we integrate system identification into the pipeline to continuously refine both the MPC hyperparameters and the underlying predictive models. We validate our proposed methodology on a Ball-on-Plate system, demonstrating superior adaptability across various parameterized trajectory-tracking tasks.

Eversion-based robots can enable safe access,steering and endoscopic imaging within the spinal subarachnoid space

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19274v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe navigation within the spinal subarachnoid space is constrained by its narrow, compliant, and delicate anatomy. Conventional catheters and continuum robots rely on proximal pushing, generating friction and shear along the tissue device interface that limit distal controllability and increase the risk of neural injury. Here, we present a 2 mm diameter eversion-growing robotic platform that enables friction minimised extension and steering within the human spinal subarachnoid space, validated through computational modelling, phantom experiments, and intact human cadaver studies. The robot integrates a miniature endoscope for real time intrathecal visualisation and advances by pressure driven tip eversion, localising motion to the distal tip while minimising translational sliding of the deployed body. Phantom experiments demonstrated reductions of 65.2% in mean interaction force and 48.0% in peak interaction force compared with matched push-based insertion. Physics based modelling showed that eversion based growth redistributed tissue loading, reducing local stress concentrations and interfacial shear relative to conventional insertion. In an intact human cadaver, the system achieved 150 mm of controlled intrathecal extension with concurrent fluoroscopic and endoscopic visualisation, providing access across multiple vertebral levels from a standard lumbar entry point. Postprocedural laminectomy and durotomy revealed no observable macroscopic disruption of the dura mater or surrounding neural structures. These results provide the first mechanically characterised and multimodally validated demonstration of eversion-based robotic navigation in intact human spinal anatomy, establishing a quantitative and procedural foundation for future intrathecal interventions. Further validation in larger anatomical cohorts and under physiological conditions will be required before clinical translation.

A Reinforcement-Learning-Augmented Liquid-Fueled Reactor Network Model for Predicting Lean Blowout in Gas Turbine Combustors

Philip John, Eloghosa Ikponmwoba, Pinaki Pal, Opeoluwa Owoyele — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19281v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study introduces a reinforcement learning (RL) framework for generating optimal liquid-fueled reactors to improve lean blowout (LBO) predictions in gas turbine combustors. Existing approaches for determining cluster boundaries rely on manual heuristics or distance-based metrics in the input space. In contrast, the proposed method is goal-oriented, explicitly accounting for the target metric (e.g., LBO prediction accuracy) during cluster formation. The framework employs a multi-stage clustering--classification strategy: an initial clustering step (e.g., $k$-means clustering) generates a large set of homogeneous micro-clusters, followed by an actor-critic RL agent that merges them into optimal reactor zones. The validation study, performed using a Jet-A mechanism (119 species, 841 reactions), shows the RL framework offers improved predictive fidelity compared to $k$-means and captures the correct LBO trends, while achieving substantial speedups relative to the high-fidelity computational model. Overall, the RL-driven approach demonstrates strong potential as a computationally efficient reduced-order modeling technique that can complement high-fidelity simulations for rapid design-space exploration.

Nystr\"om Error Beyond $M$-Matrices: A Minimal Diagonally Dominant Obstruction

Matthew J. Colbrook — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19282v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the nuclear-norm error of a column-selected Nystr\"om approximation to $K=(L+\gamma I)^{-1}$, where $L$ is symmetric diagonally dominant and $\gamma>0$. Our central question is whether this error has diminishing returns. A Schur-complement identity reduces the question to traces of inverses of principal submatrices. Existing $M$-matrix results settle the case in which $L$ is a symmetric diagonally dominant $M$-matrix (SDDM). However, diagonal dominance alone is not enough: failure occurs already in dimension three. We construct an exact one-parameter SDD family and determine its sharp failure interval. A $2\times2$ identity proves that dimension three is minimal within the SDD class. We then show that failure persists under strict diagonal dominance; with a nonempty selected base set, dimension four is minimal. Finally, we prove invariance under signature switching, derive a three-dimensional formula showing how a signed triangle causes failure, and give an example in which greedy column selection misses the optimal pair. Together, these findings complete the answer to Problem 4.6 in a recent Simons workshop report.

Stochastic Multi-Objective Kinodynamic Planning Against Adversaries

Thomas Marshall Vielmetti, Daniel Cherenson, Dimitra Panagou — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19284v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper addresses multi-objective kinodynamic planning in environments with stochastic hybrid adversaries that probabilistically transition to adversarial modes based on the ego state. The goal is to construct the Pareto-front of paths that trade off execution cost and the probability of safety constraint violation (risk). Existing chance-constrained planners evaluate risk over open-loop trajectories, yielding overly conservative solutions that fail to account for ego-agent reactivity. To address this limitation, we shift the planning space to sequences of closed-loop policies, and integrate sample-based risk evaluation directly into tree construction via Monte-Carlo particle rollouts. We first introduce Stochastic Multi-Objective RRT (SMO-RRT), for which we prove probabilistic completeness, followed by Stochastic Multi-Objective Stable Sparse RRT (SMO-SST), which leverages selective pruning to improve numerical performance at the cost of completeness. For both algorithms, we derive a finite-sample bound on the probability of chance constraint violation for systems with non-Gaussian, state-dependent uncertainty, enabling probabilistically safe planning in a broad class of environments applicable to multi-agent systems, social navigation, and autonomous driving.

No Training, Better Flights: Test-Time Scaled VLMs for UAV Navigation

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19288v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Test-time scaling offers a promising method to improve the inference performance of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) without additional training. Existing approaches to vision-language navigation (VLN) for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) typically relies on a single inference pass, which can falter in complex environments by producing suboptimal or unsafe trajectories. In this paper, we explore a simple and effective approach to apply test-time scaling to VLN for UAV. We enhance navigation reasoning through an iterative refinement process that requires no extra model training, guiding the model to re-evaluate its initial navigation plan for better accuracy and safety. Our method first prompts the model to generate multiple parallel candidates and then performs a self-correction step, achieving deeper and more robust planning without changing the underlying model. To further strengthen decision-making, we design a multi-criteria scoring function to evaluate the refined candidates based on safety, goal alignment, and forward-progress. This simple yet powerful combination enables a frozen UAV navigation VLMs to self-correct and generate more accurate and reliable flight plans, achieving SOTA performance in this task.

EmbeddedKittens: An Evaluation of Code Embeddings for Scratch

Benedikt Fein, Gordon Fraser — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19291v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The trend of embedding source code for machine learning applications also enables new opportunities in learning analytics in programming education, but which code embedding approach is most suitable for learning analytics remains an open question. A common approach to embedding source code lies in treating the code as a token sequence similar to natural language when training large language models~(LLMs). However, in case of visual block-based programming languages like Scratch, this approach cannot be applied directly. While text-based representations of block-based code can be created to apply LLMs to this problem, other dedicated embedding models could potentially exhibit improved performance by capturing additional structural information. In this paper, we therefore instantiate four LLMs and five different popular embedding approaches for Scratch programs, create a token-prediction and two different classification tasks with corresponding datasets, and empirically evaluate the models on them. Our experiments demonstrate that a transfer of code embeddings to the educational environment of Scratch is feasible. The embedding models trained on large open Scratch datasets capture relevant structural and semantic information about the code to enable learning analytics like predicting functional correctness of student programs, in the typically small classroom setting without requiring further task-specific model fine-tuning.

The safety failures we are not instrumenting: a perspective on hidden safety-critical challenges in modern AI systems

Gjergji Kasneci, Enkelejda Kasneci — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19292v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current AI safety discourse still focuses disproportionately on visible failures, including obvious harms, dramatic misuse, and hypothetical catastrophic scenarios. That focus is incomplete. In deployed systems, many of the most consequential failures are quieter: plausible rather than spectacular, distributed across components rather than localized in a single output, and normalized by workflows before they are recognized as hazards. We argue that a central safety challenge in modern AI systems is increasingly not only whether a model emits a harmful response, but whether the broader socio-technical system preserves the conditions under which errors remain visible, contestable, containable, and recoverable. We propose a five-layer framework for diagnosing these hidden risks: (1) epistemic integrity, concerning whether evidence and uncertainty are represented honestly enough to support calibrated reliance; (2) control integrity, concerning whether authority, permissions, and action boundaries remain robust under attack and optimization; (3) temporal integrity, concerning whether safety holds across sessions, memory updates, and deployment drift; (4) organizational integrity, concerning whether institutions retain the capacity to audit, assign responsibility, and intervene effectively; and (5) ecosystem integrity, concerning whether AI systems preserve rather than erode the information environment on which future oversight depends. Across these layers, we identify under-recognized risk patterns, including overreliance, uncertainty and legitimacy laundering in retrieval, prompt injection, reward hacking, memory poisoning, evaluation deception, fictional human oversight, synthetic evidence pollution, and model collapse. We conclude with design and governance recommendations and a research agenda for shifting AI safety from model-centric evaluation toward socio-technical reliability.

Dataset on residential electricity load profiles in Switzerland

Katharina Kaiser, Markus Kreft, Marina Gonz\'alez Vay\'a, Gabriela Hug — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19294v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Residential electricity profiles are undergoing significant changes due to the increasing adoption of distributed renewable generation, heat pumps, and electric vehicles. Up-to-date real-world measurements are essential for characterizing these evolving consumption patterns and providing a timely empirical foundation for research. This paper presents a dataset of 15-minute smart meter measurements from 2,447 residential installations in Switzerland, covering the years 2023 and 2024. The dataset encompasses both active and reactive energy (withdrawal and injection) of diverse installation types, including apartments, single-family houses, heat pumps, and common building areas. A subset of the associated customers participated in a pilot project featuring novel grid tariffs and automated load control. The corresponding price profiles and metadata are also included. The dataset aims to support research focusing on distribution grid modeling, load forecasting, and the assessment of time-varying tariffs.

Graph-Based Agentic AI with LangGraph: Workflow Pathways for Long-Running Stateful Business Processes

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19297v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper is a practitioner guide to graph-based workflow pathways for long-running, stateful, multi-step generative AI systems in business processes. Rather than treating LangGraph, a low-level orchestration framework for stateful agents, as a model-quality benchmark target, we present three executable recipes -- SQL analytics with repair loops, agentic retrieval-augmented generation with evidence gating, and human-in-the-loop policy review with interrupt and checkpoint recovery -- to show how typed state, conditional routing, deterministic tools, retries, interrupts, checkpoints, and traces fit together. LangGraph is positioned by workflow-complexity fit, not as a universal default: simpler ReAct-style or plain SDK loops may be better for basic tool use, schema-first tools for structured extraction and validation, and DSPy when prompt or program optimization is the main goal. Each recipe explains when LangGraph is worth the extra structure and which implementation patterns make routes, pauses, and audit trails explicit product behavior rather than hidden prompt logic.

LLM Detection as an Intervention: Downstream Impact under Strategic User Behavior

Meena Jagadeesan, Tatsunori Hashimoto, Jon Kleinberg — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19300v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As LLM adoption becomes more widespread, there is a growing interest in detecting LLM-generated content, for example through LLM detection tools and through heuristics based on language patterns. Detectors operate as an intervention that steers not only the detected attribute itself, but also downstream metrics such as LLM usage and output quality. In this work, we demonstrate how imperfect LLM detectors lead to counterintuitive impacts on these downstream metrics, by distorting how users are incentivized to use LLMs in their workflow. We develop a stylized model which captures how users strategically choose how much to use the LLM and how to post-process content to reduce the detected attribute. Using this model, we show that LLM detection can counterintuitively lead humans to increase their LLM usage. Moreover, even when reducing the detected attribute improves output quality, we find that introducing an LLM detector can lead users to produce lower quality outputs. In contrast, we show that detectors result in a clean "rise-then-fall" pattern for the detected attribute, which we empirically reproduce for word frequencies on arXiv abstracts. Altogether, our work illustrates how LLM detection can distort LLM usage and output quality, uncovering failure modes when LLM detectors operate as an intervention on these downstream metrics.

PAGE-RAG: Evidence-Grounded Adaptive Graph Retrieval for Long-Document Question Answering

Xingyu Chen, Junxiu An, Jun Guo, Li Wang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19301v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: GraphRAG improves long-document question answering by introducing structured representations beyond conventional retrieval. However, automatically constructed graphs are inherently incomplete projections of source documents, and treating them as independent knowledge sources may lead to unreliable retrieval and generation. We propose PAGE-RAG, a projection-aware adaptive graph retrieval framework for reliable long-document question answering. PAGE-RAG views graph structures as semantic skeletons that organize and navigate document knowledge, rather than replacing the original knowledge source. Based on this perspective, PAGE-RAG introduces a task-adaptive retrieval routing strategy that dynamically selects appropriate retrieval behaviors according to query requirements. Furthermore, PAGE-RAG incorporates strict knowledge boundary control, ensuring that generated responses remain grounded within available evidence and abstaining from unsupported information beyond the accessible knowledge scope. Experiments demonstrate that PAGE-RAG achieves competitive answer quality while improving retrieval efficiency and knowledge reliability, highlighting the importance of projection-aware graph modeling, adaptive retrieval, and explicit knowledge boundary control for trustworthy GraphRAG systems. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/CXY0112/PAGE-RAG.

Real-time optimal control with shallow recurrent decoder networks

Matteo Tomasetto, Francesco Braghin, J. Nathan Kutz, Andrea Manzoni — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19302v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Controlling dynamical systems in real-time across multiple scenarios is critical to enabling adaptive control strategies, ensuring stability and efficiency. However, to tailor control actions in response to varying scenarios, traditional optimal control problems typically require several system simulations, which are often computationally demanding due to the high-dimensionality of the underlying spatio-temporal dynamics. In this work, we exploit SHallow REcurrent Decoder networks-based Reduced Order Modeling (SHRED-ROM) to synthesize a real-time closed-loop controller for high-dimensional and parametric dynamics, relying solely on limited state sensor readings. After training the model on a few optimal examples given by an expert demonstrator, SHRED-ROM mimics the expert behavior with effective distributed control actions in new scenarios, alleviating the curse of dimensionality. Moreover, a sensor forecaster is synthesized and used to close the loop at the latent level, thus efficiently mitigating possible sensor failures or delays. The performance of the proposed optimal control strategy is finally assessed on three challenging high-dimensional cases dealing with either parametric density control or fluid flow control.

Riemannian Deep Learning:Modules, Networks, and Geometries

Chen Ziheng — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19305v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep neural networks on manifold-valued representations have attracted growing interest, but many basic components remain tied to specific manifolds, rely on Euclidean approximations, or require costly and numerically fragile geometric operations. This thesis develops a unified framework for Riemannian deep learning from three complementary perspectives: reusable neural modules, manifold-specific network architectures, and the design of underlying geometries. It generalizes batch normalization from Euclidean spaces and individual manifolds to broad classes of Lie groups and gyrogroups, and extends multinomial logistic regression from Euclidean space to SPD manifolds and then to general Riemannian manifolds. It further develops neural networks for several important geometric representations, including an unconstrained model of hyperbolic space, Busemann-based hyperbolic learning, and full-rank correlation matrices. Finally, it introduces adaptive and computationally efficient Riemannian metrics on SPD manifolds, including learnable Log-Euclidean geometries and fast, stable Cholesky-based geometries. The proposed methods are supported by theoretical analysis and validated through numerical experiments and applications in vision, signal processing, graph learning, and genomics.

From Distances to Trajectories: Real-Time Signed Distance Function Mapping and Distance-Accelerated Motion Planning for UAVs

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19306v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous flight in cluttered environments requires a robot to build a geometric map of its surroundings and plan safe, dynamically feasible trajectories, all onboard and in real time. Conventional approaches treat mapping and planning as separate stages and often rely on binary occupancy for collision checking. We argue that these two stages should be co-designed around a single representation: a signed distance function (SDF). By encoding distance to the nearest obstacle, an SDF provides richer information for planning and trajectory optimization than occupancy alone. We develop an Octree REsidual Network (OREN) that pairs an explicit octree prior with an implicit neural residual to reconstruct SDFs online from point cloud observations with the efficiency of volumetric methods and the accuracy and differentiability of neural methods. In tandem, we develop Bubble$^\star$, a search-based planner that exploits the distance information to grow maximal collision-free balls, which we call bubbles, with formal guarantees of termination, completeness, and failure detection. Planning over a graph of bubbles significantly reduces collision checks compared to a grid-based A$^\star$ search and returns a bubble sequence that forms a safe corridor for trajectory optimization. We demonstrate the integrated OREN-Bubble$^\star$ approach onboard a quadrotor, navigating unseen indoor environments in real time under tight compute constraints. OREN improves SDF estimation by $22$% compared to baselines, while Bubble$^\star$ finds trajectories spanning $\approx 90$ m through a cluttered environment in $1$-$3$ sec., whereas baselines take up to $10$ sec. in the same environment.

Distributed Delay-Based BIST for Mixed-Signal Circuits in Flexible Electronics

Paula Carolina Lozano Duarte, Sule Ozev, Mehdi Tahoori — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19310v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Flexible electronics (FE) based on indium gallium zinc oxide thin-film transistors (IGZO-TFTs) are emerging for ultra-low-power wearable applications. However, lack of packaging, limited pins, and high device variability make conventional Automatic Test Equipment (ATE) impractical for testing analog/mixed-signal circuits in FE. This work presents a dual-purpose ring oscillator (RO) and voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) serving as functional timing blocks and core structures for a distributed delay-based BIST framework. The oscillators achieve 1100x area reduction and 5600x lower power than previous IGZO-TFT designs. Lightweight digital BIST embedded within each RO stage enables stage-wise delay monitoring for defect detection. The BIST achieves 93% defect coverage for individual defects and 88% for multiple simultaneous defects, with only 3% power overhead

Staypoint Detection from Noisy Trajectory Data [Experiment Paper]

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19312v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Detecting staypoints from raw trajectory data is fundamental to numerous spatial computing applications. This process transforms raw numeric sequences of geolocations into semantically meaningful locations, such as homes, workplaces, or restaurants. Despite its importance for semantic trajectory analysis, staypoint detection lacks standard benchmarks, and existing algorithms have never been systematically evaluated. This gap persists because no publicly available datasets provide both raw individual trajectories and ground-truth staypoint annotations. This benchmark paper addresses this limitation with two key contributions: (1) we introduce 16 large-scale simulated datasets capturing thousands of agents with annotated staypoints across varying trajectory noise levels, and (2) we evaluate nine staypoint detection algorithms-including both state-of-the-art and novel methods-to analyze their robustness to noise. Our evaluation reveals that existing state-of-the-art algorithms perform poorly under realistic noise conditions. Conversely, our proposed unsupervised methods yield substantial improvements, while supervised approaches drastically outperform existing baselines. While these results are very promising, these datasets and methods are only meant as starting points for future research in staypoint detection.

Off-Context GRPO: Learning to Reason on Hard Problems using Privileged Information

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19313v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) improves reasoning in large language models. Yet, typical RLVR approaches fail on difficult problems: when a model cannot generate any correct solutions, it receives \textit{zero} learning signal. Providing privileged guidance during training, such as solution prefixes, can help overcome this learning cliff by steering the model towards {correct solutions with non-zero reward}. {We call these rollouts \textit{off-context}: they are generated from a training prompt that contains privileged guidance, while the target objective is defined by the original prompt without that guidance.} {We introduce} Off-Context GRPO (OC-GRPO), a minimally modified variant of GRPO that uses guided rollouts but applies an importance-corrected objective to steer the update back toward the original unguided objective, avoiding the mismatch that destabilizes uncorrected guided training. Empirically, our algorithm achieves a 3.9\% absolute improvement (13.8\% relative gain) over vanilla GRPO on average across standard mathematical reasoning benchmarks with negligible additional cost.

ERank in Latent Space as an Image-Complexity and Richness Measure

Maksim Smirnov, Grigory Kononov, Anastasiia Linich, Egor Surkov, Egor Shvetsov — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19315v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose the effective rank (ERank) of the channel covariance of an image's deep feature map as a per-sample, label-free measure of visual richness, computed from a single forward pass through a frozen pretrained encoder. ERank counts how many decorrelated channel directions an image activates, and we characterize its properties, including its behavior under noise. Empirically, ERank orders images from plain to visually rich, correlates with codec bitrate, sharpness, and edge density, and correlates with human complexity annotations on IC9600 with $r = 0.72$. As a data-selection criterion, removing low-ERank samples improves super-resolution and removing high-ERank samples improves OCR, in both pretraining and finetuning, while selection does not help classification, segmentation, or denoising. ERank is thus a cheap richness signal, useful exactly when task difficulty is governed by input richness.

CircuitKIT : Circuit Discovery, Evaluation, and Application Toolkit for Mechanistic Interpretability

Pratinav Seth, Hem Gosalia, Aditya Kasliwal, Vinay Kumar Sankarapu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19317v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Circuit analysis can support not only model explanation but also downstream interventions such as pruning, editing, steering, and selective fine-tuning. However, conducting such analyses currently requires stitching together separate implementations for discovery, evaluation, and intervention, as well as hand-authoring the contrastive prompts required by many discovery methods. This fragmentation makes methods difficult to compare and limits their application beyond canonical tasks. We introduce CircuitKIT, a source-available library that connects the circuit-analysis workflow through a typed, serializable representation. CircuitKIT provides a suite of discovery algorithms, declarative interfaces for mapping structured data into discovery tasks, complementary circuit diagnostics, and downstream application modules. Together, these components provide common infrastructure for conducting and comparing circuit analyses. The library, examples, notebooks, and documentation are released at https://github.com/Lexsi-Labs/CircuitKIT .

ResearchArena: Evaluating Sabotage and Monitoring in Automated AI R&D

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19321v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As AI agents begin to automate AI R&D, we need ways to assess whether their outputs are safe to deploy, even when the agents themselves may be untrusted. AI control offers one such approach: rather than trusting the agent, it treats it as a potential adversary and uses a monitor to detect covert sabotage before deployment. We evaluate AI control for automated AI R&D with ResearchArena, a framework spanning four long-horizon tasks: safety post-training, capabilities post-training, CUDA-kernel optimization, and inference-server optimization. Because the deliverable in AI R&D is an artifact that will be deployed and run, we pair each main task with two kinds of hidden side task: an embedded side task that sabotages the submitted model, adapter, kernel, or server itself, and an independent side task that takes a covert out-of-scope action in the sandbox while leaving the artifact honest. We evaluate frontier agents at both sabotage and monitoring, across four monitor types that vary along two axes: whether the monitor may execute and probe the produced artifact, and whether it sees the agent's chain-of-thought. We find that sabotage hidden in the training data is the hardest to catch, flagged fewer than half the time. Letting the monitor run experiments on the artifact, rather than only read the trajectory, helps, but it is not enough: monitors still miss embedded sabotage by inspecting only the surface, by noticing the anomaly but explaining it away, or by probing the artifact with the wrong test. We release ResearchArena as a modular framework for evaluating sabotage and control in automated AI R&D.

Two-Level Meta-Rubrics for Evaluating Open-Ended Generation: GAMUT, a Benchmark for Factual Completeness

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19322v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating the factuality of long-form generations has focused predominantly on precision, measuring whether the claims a model makes are correct. The dominant decompose-search-verify pipeline catches incorrect claims well but says little about whether a response contains all the information it should. Measuring factual completeness, the missing half of factuality, is harder: it requires enumerating the full set of facts a complete answer should contain, and these facts rarely form a flat list. They often involve open-ended sets where coverage is what matters, ordered processes, and relationships among facts that a list of independent boolean checks fails to capture. We introduce a two-level meta-rubric framework for evaluating open-ended generation, and instantiate it as Gamut (Grounded Assessment of Multimodal Factuality), a benchmark for factual completeness in long-form generation. The framework rests on a two-level rubric representation: a structured meta-rubric captures the organization and importance of the required content, which is then mechanically compiled into a flat checklist of binary, machine-gradable rubrics that an LLM judge scores reliably. We construct 1,813 questions grounded in real wearable imagery across 10 diverse domains, each paired with an evidence-backed rubric verified by expert human annotators. Because the framework is modality-agnostic, we also release a text-only variant. Evaluating 14 frontier and open-weight models, we find the benchmark genuinely challenging (best score 58.7% from Gemini 3.1 Pro), highly discriminative, and robust to the choice of judge.

InstructMixup: Instruction-Guided Salient Patch Editing for Robust Data Augmentation

Khawar Islam, Arif Mahmood, Xin Jin, Naveed Akhtar — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19324v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In image and video technologies, data augmentation is widely used to improve the generalization of deep visual models, and mixup-based strategies that interpolate between samples have become the dominant approach. However, computing informative mixing regions adds substantial overhead, and blending content across different images frequently disrupts the semantic integrity of the resulting sample. We propose \our{}, a data augmentation method that constructs challenging yet label-consistent training samples entirely within a single visual sample. \our{} first extracts multi-scale salient patches from the sample using a lightweight saliency detector, refines each patch with an instruction-guided generative model, and blends the edited patch back into the non-salient regions of the same sample; because the generative edits are computed once and cached offline, this step adds negligible training cost. To further diversify the learned representation, \our{} injects self-similar fractal structure into the same salient regions at an adaptive ratio, so each training sample carries both fractal and non-fractal structure. We derive a second-order approximation of the resulting vicinal risk, showing that the method simultaneously enforces invariance to the generative edit and suppresses curvature along the perturbed salient directions, and we verify both predictions empirically. We evaluate on small to large backbones for instance Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Vision Transformers (ViTs) and Vision-Language Foundational Models (VLMs) across seven benchmarks covering coarse- and fine-grained classification, robustness to corruption and occlusion, calibration, and transfer and self-supervised learning, InstructMixup outperforms nine competing augmentation methods, surpassing the strongest baseline across all benchmarks.

Selective State-Space Adaptation and Retrieval for Language Model Reasoning

Atahan Dokme, Larry Heck — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19326v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Low-rank adaptation introduces a static learned update applied identically to every input. The update provides task-level adaptation but does not explicitly represent token-level or instance-level state variation. A family of adapters is proposed that introduces selective state-space recurrence at two complementary granularities. At the token level, \textbf{MaLoRA} (Mamba-modulated low-rank adaptation) makes the adapter's scaling factor a dynamic input-dependent function with recurrent state across tokens, in contrast to the stateless modulators of prior work. At the context level, \textbf{MaRA} (Mamba Retrieval Adapter) tracks cross-segment state and selects the segments most relevant to the query, before the modulated language model generates its answer. Across three frozen backbones (Qwen-2.5-7B, Llama-3.1-8B, Gemma-2-9B) and two reasoning benchmarks (MuSiQue, 2WikiMultihopQA), the family improves reasoning accuracy on every cell of the $3{\times}2$ grid, by $+6.8$ F1 ($+10.5\%$ relative) on average and up to $+9.3$ F1 ($+18.2\%$ relative) on the hardest cell over the LoRA baseline, and the token-level gains carry to RULER QA-2 under length stress.

Associative Emotional Learning in Convolutional Neural Networks

Seowung Leem, Andreas Keil, Mingzhou Ding, Ruogu Fang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19327v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Associative emotional learning enables organisms to adaptively link pleasant or unpleasant outcomes to the presence of predictive stimuli. Whereas computational models such as the Rescorla-Wagner model have shed light on this important function, the limitations of these models are also known, especially when they are applied to neural data. The advent of deep neural networks has opened another avenue for modeling associative emotional learning. In this work we proposed a deep neural network model of visual valence processing, consisting of a visual module that encodes complex natural scenes and a module that recognizes their emotional significance in terms of valence, a key dimension of emotion, and tested a novel Pavlovian learning paradigm on the model. The results showed that with learning, the model reproduced several observations from human associative learning studies, including association formation and generalization, and that the neural representations of the conditioned and the unconditioned stimuli became increasingly aligned both at the single unit and at the neural population level. Comparison between the model and human experimental data provided further validation of our approach. This study thus suggests that deep neural network models, when combined with appropriate learning algorithms, can be used to model behavioral and neural signatures of associative emotion/valence learning.

Efficient strain-space hyperreduction in large-deformation solid mechanics

Erik Faust, Lisa Scheunemann — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19330v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Strain-space model order reduction (MOR) techniques have recently been shown to achieve exceptional performance in terms of the tradeoff between runtime and accuracy achieved in computational homogenisation problems. In this article, we generalise such techniques to problems in large-deformation solid mechanics beyond the context of computational homogenisation. Arbitrary-valued, parameterised Dirichlet boundary conditions are satisfied by construction using a lifting with boundary-consistent fields computed offline. This allows us to pose a version of the Empirical Cubature Method (ECM) [24,25] in strain space and generalise the Empirically Corrected Cluster Cubature (E3C) [46,48,49] as well as Empirical Material Sampling and Linearisation (EMSL) [17] beyond computational homogenisation problems. The strain-space versions of EMSL, ECM, and E3C are compared against each other and a standard displacement-space formulation of Energy Conserving Weighting and Sampling (ECSW) [15]. On two hyperelastic example problems with parameterised material behaviour and deformation, the strain-space methods outperform the displacement-space alternative in the tradeoff between runtime and accuracy. E3C and EMSL in particular facilitate 10,000 and 100,000-fold speedups, respectively, while retaining high levels of accuracy. EMSL is shown to be the method of choice when online and offline runtime budgets are very limited, while E3C yields exceptional levels of accuracy when slightly more runtime is acceptable.

ISO: An RLVR-Native Optimization Stack

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19331v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) is rapidly advancing the reasoning capabilities of language models, yet the optimization layer that converts reward feedback into weight-space updates remains poorly understood. Building on our prior analysis (Zhu et al., 2025), we study this missing layer through the singular structure of model weights and identify spectral inheritance: RLVR can reuse the base model's weight spectra while acquiring new behavior through changes in the associated input and output singular frames. We operationalize spectral inheritance as Isospectral Optimization (ISO), an RLVR-native, fixed-spectrum optimization framework with complementary offline and online instantiations. Offline, ISO-Merger combines the frame changes of shared-base specialists into a single fixed-spectrum model, requiring no post-merge data, rollouts, gradient updates, or on-policy distillation (OPD). It recovers complementary specialist capabilities and achieves the strongest aggregate performance among the compared data-free merging methods. Online, ISO-Optimizer applies a chosen base optimizer, including AdamW and Muon, to the frame variables while keeping the base spectra fixed. Across reasoning and coding tasks ranging from 1.5B to 8B parameters, ISO-Optimizer improves accuracy in the reported runs and reaches matched scores with substantially fewer training steps. On Qwen3-8B-Base, AdamW reaches an aggregate accuracy of 0.495 after 270 training steps. ISO-AdamW reaches the same accuracy after only 100 training steps and improves further to 0.509 after 210 training steps. Together, ISO offers a concrete answer to RLVR's missing optimization layer: rather than inheriting pre-training optimization wholesale, design post-training around the structure of reward-driven adaptation: inherit the spectrum, optimize the frames.

ROMS-IMLE: A Minimalist Approach to Competitive Single-Step Generative Modelling

Chirag Vashist, Ke Li — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19332v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative models have undergone many generations of evolution, from VAEs/GANs to diffusion/flow matching. Along the way, the underlying techniques have become more complicated and various beliefs about what drives strong empirical performance have taken hold. Due to the success of diffusion models and flow matching, one of the more common beliefs is the importance of transforming the noise distribution to the data distribution gradually through many small transformations. We ask whether this is truly necessary, and take a minimalist approach to designing a competitive generative model. We start with the bare-bones essentials, namely just a training objective and a model. We purposefully make both simple. For the training objective, we choose Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation (IMLE), and eschew more complicated alternatives such as variational inference, adversarial training and numerical integration. For the model, we eschew transformers and instead choose a moderately sized convolutional network. Then we judiciously added elements that are truly essential, which surprisingly do not include iterative denoising. The result is a single-step parameter-efficient generative model that produces high quality samples at fast speed: it achieves an FID of 2.56 on ImageNet 256 and simultaneously attains good precision and recall.

Provable diffusion-based posterior sampling for linear inverse problems via DDIM

Yuchen Jiao, Na Li, Changxiao Cai, Yuxin Chen, Gen Li — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19333v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion-based methods have achieved remarkable empirical success in solving inverse problems. However, many existing posterior samplers either lack rigorous theoretical guarantees or incur substantial computational overhead. We propose a simple and efficient algorithm, called \pddim, for solving linear inverse problems with diffusion priors via a DDIM-type sampler. Our method requires only lightweight, coordinate-wise modifications to the standard DDIM update, while explicitly incorporating the measurement model. The key idea is to perform posterior sampling separately along each singular direction of the measurement operator: for each direction, the sampler follows the learned diffusion prior when the observation signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is below the corresponding diffusion SNR, and switches to a calibrated measurement-based predictor otherwise. We prove that the proposed sampler converges to the Bayesian posterior conditioned on the measurements. Empirical results show that the proposed sampler performs favorably against existing diffusion-based posterior samplers across a range of image restoration tasks, achieving the best performance on the majority of evaluation metrics considered. Overall, our results convert posterior sampling for noisy linear inverse problems to simple coordinate-wise DDIM updates, yielding an efficient, easy-to-implement algorithm with provable posterior consistency.

1-Lipschitz Neural Networks on Hadamard Manifolds

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19335v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Controlling the Lipschitz constant of a neural network is a standard way to promote robustness and stability. Most existing constraining strategies are designed for Euclidean spaces. In this work, we construct and analyze a class of 1-Lipschitz neural networks on Hadamard manifolds. Our layers are of gradient-descent type, $1$-Lipschitz, and quasi-$\alpha$-firmly nonexpansive. The core building blocks of the proposed architecture are Busemann functions, and we exploit the properties of Busemann gradient flows to design $1$-Lipschitz geometry-preserving layers. We provide explicit constructions and examples for hyperbolic manifolds and the manifold of symmetric positive definite (SPD) matrices. We test the proposed architecture in two numerical experiments: robust classification on the Poincar\'e disk and masked-Wishart covariance reconstruction. On the Poincar\'e disk, the proposed networks yield robust classifiers under hyperbolic perturbations. On the SPD manifold, we train SPD-valued denoisers and adopt them as a Plug-and-Play prior for a masked-Wishart covariance reconstruction problem. We show improved results from the nonexpansive denoiser over static, data-only, and Log-Euclidean denoising baselines, and empirically test its convergence properties.

Agents in the Wild: Where Research Meets Deployment

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19336v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic systems large language model (LLM) based architectures capable of reasoning, planning, acting, and coordinating with tools and other agents are rapidly transitioning from research prototypes to production scale deployments across domains such as software engineering, scientific discovery, and finance. While academic work has emphasized benchmarks and algorithmic innovation, deployment raises new challenges around robustness, safety, and reliability. This tutorial brings together researchers and practitioners to explore advances in reasoning and planning, multi agent coordination, and evaluation, highlighting open challenges arising from deployment experience. Through applied case studies in pharmaceutical discovery and financial systems, we analyze common design patterns that make agentic systems successful, and discuss practical mitigation strategies for failure modes, such as verification pipelines, fallback mechanisms, and human in the loop supervision. Attendees will gain a comprehensive view of the field along with concrete design patterns, evaluation checklists, and templates for safe and reliable deployment across industries.

CodeRescue: Budget-Calibrated Recovery Routing for Coding Agents

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19338v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Coding agents increasingly operate in executable environments where a failed attempt produces actionable feedback rather than merely an incorrect answer. Existing cost-aware systems typically treat such failures as cascade decisions: try a cheap model first, then escalate hard cases to a stronger and more expensive model. In coding, however, execution feedback can also make further cheap-model recovery worthwhile, raising a budgeted deployment question: when should an agent spend more cheap compute, and when should it escalate? We formulate this post-failure decision as recovery routing over heterogeneous actions and train a supervised router from execution rollouts. To make the same router usable under changing budgets, we add a Conformal Risk Control (CRC) layer that selects a deployment-time cost penalty without retraining and provides marginal expected-cost control under exchangeability. Across held-out failures from five coding benchmarks, cheap recovery and escalation exhibit complementary success patterns. The calibrated frontier improves over fixed actions, prompt-only routers, and a binary cascade baseline; in the main GPT-5.4-nano/GPT-5.4 setting, one CRC-calibrated frontier point exceeds always-escalate solve rate while using 35% of its mean recovery cost. Code is available at https://github.com/Qijia-He/agent-budget-control.

OmniReasoner: Thinking with Long Audio-Video via Native Tool Use

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19339v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long audio-video reasoning is difficult for omnimodal LLMs because the decisive evidence is often sparse, cross-modal, and too expensive to preserve with uniformly high-fidelity inputs. We introduce OmniReasoner, a tool-use post-training framework for Thinking with Long Audio-Video: omni-modal LLMs learn, via supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, to decide whether and where to call a zoom-in tool before answering. OmniReasoner first builds a low-cost global preview of the full stream and then, when needed, calls the zoom-in tool with a requested temporal interval for higher-fidelity visual and audio inspection before answering. Because the model observes different sampling granularities before and after this call -- a sparse global preview and a denser local clip -- we introduce TimeAnchor, which keeps the tool's temporal argument valid and round-trip-consistent across these granularities, rather than tied to frame indices from a particular sampling rate. To make this tool-use behavior trainable without expensive manual interval annotation, we build a Temporal Augmented Data Engine that synthesizes tool-use post-training trajectories by video editing and composition. Experiments across omnimodal and video benchmarks show that OmniReasoner improves both answer accuracy and temporal grounding while concentrating high-fidelity computation on informative regions. Code is available at https://github.com/RockyChen0205/OmniReasoner.

ExpertVerse: A General-Purpose Benchmark for Expert-Level Reasoning in Knowledge-Intensive Visual Synthesis

Yuan Wang, Yongchao Du, Mengting Chen, Jinsong Lan, Xuetao Feng, Xiaoyong Zhu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19341v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in multimodal generative models have enabled instruction-based image generation to move beyond semantic manipulation to knowledge-driven visual reasoning. However, these methods focus on explicit commonsense reasoning, shallow causal understanding, and direct knowledge recall, failing at knowledge-intensive generation. We develop \textbf{ExpertVerse}, a capability-centric benchmark to evaluate generative models via knowledge-intensive lens. ExpertVerse stratifies reasoning generation across an orthogonal taxonomy of \textit{9 cognitive capabilities} and \textit{8 expert disciplines}, yielding \textit{58 sub-disciplines}. We curate 1,611 expert-annotated instances covering single-image editing, multi-image composition, and text-to-image generation. We further develop an automated workflow to produce \textbf{ExpertVerse-100K}, a large-scale dataset with reasoning traces and knowledge-anchored rationale annotations. Based on this, we train \textbf{KnowThinker} with RL fine-tuning, a VLM reasoning engine with world knowledge that jointly generates thinking processes and refined instructions. Towards the cross-modal credit misalignment and multi-objective gradient conflicts in multi-reward optimization, we propose a tailored Bootstrapped Pareto Policy Optimization (BPPO), which synergizes Bootstrapping Reward Rectification (BRR) and Conflict-Aware Pareto Advantage Fusion (CPAF). Extensive results of both open-source and proprietary models exposes critical reasoning deficits, highlighting imperative for knowledge-intensive benchmarks towards next-generation visual generation.

Improved Strongly Polynomial Work-Span Tradeoffs for Directed Single Source Shortest Paths

Isaac M. Hair, George Z. Li, Jason Li, Junkai Zhang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19342v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We revisit the single-source shortest paths (SSSP) problem on directed graphs with nonnegative real weights and give a deterministic parallel algorithm with $O(n^{1+o(1)}t^2 + m^{1+o(1)})$ work and $\tilde{O}(n/t)$ span, for any $t \in [1, n]$. This matches (up to subpolynomial factors) the tradeoff due to [Shi and Spencer '99] for undirected graphs with nonnegative real weights.

Masked Visual Actions for Unified World Modeling

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19343v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Video models absorb rich priors over how the visual world moves, interacts, and responds to contact, making them promising substrates for robotic world modeling. The central challenge is how to communicate action to such models in a form aligned with the visual space in which they learned these interaction priors, yet still grounded in physical manipulation. We introduce Masked Visual Actions, a pixel-space control interface that expresses action as a partially revealed trajectory of an arbitrary entity in a video. Revealing robot motion makes the model act as a forward dynamics model that predicts the scene's response to low-level robot actions, while revealing desired object motion makes the same model recover robot behavior consistent with that outcome. Finetuned with only 15 hours of masked examples from real videos and simulation, a single checkpoint achieves strong visual fidelity and controllability across diverse scenes and multiple embodiments. In downstream manipulation settings, the model produces imagined rollouts whose outcomes correlate with real-world execution for policy evaluation, improves decision making by ranking candidate futures in model-based planning, and supports inverse modeling by synthesizing robot motion from desired object motion.

Appearance Pointers -- Multimodal Region Control of Diffusion Transformers

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19344v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Controllable image generation remains challenging for creative professionals, who often require precise regional control over materials, object identities, and spatial arrangements that cannot be reliably achieved through text prompting alone. Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) can natively ingest heterogeneous tokens stemming from texts and images, but they lack mechanisms for determining where and how these tokens should influence the output. We introduce appearance pointers, compact tokens that guide DiTs toward the correct appearance cues at the correct spatial locations by aligning text or image inputs with user-specified masks. Appearance pointers are produced by a region correspondence network and refined through a spatial aggregation mechanism, enabling the model to handle multiple regional descriptions without significantly increasing token load. Our approach introduces the first modality-agnostic interface for localized multimodal control in a DiT without retraining the base model from scratch. Across a range of metrics, our single model reaches or surpasses the performance of modality-specific state of the art methods, offering a simple and extensible path toward precise, region-aware, multimodal guidance in generative image synthesis.

Copy Less, Ground More: Overcoming Repetitive Copying in Long-Context Reasoning via Evidence-Aware Reinforcement Learning

Lizhe Fang, Weizhou Shen, Tianyi Tang, Yisen Wang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19345v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models that generate step-by-step reasoning traces have achieved strong performance on complex tasks, and extending them to long-context settings has emerged as an important frontier. However, we identify a critical failure mode in this regime: \emph{repetitive copying}, where models extensively copy text from the input into their reasoning traces rather than productively solving the problem. We show that this behavior is pervasive across frontier long-context LLMs and intensifies with context length. By separating each prompt into task-relevant key evidence and irrelevant distractor context, we further show that the root cause is insufficient grounding: models copy from the prompt indiscriminately, and those that fail to focus on key evidence are far more likely to answer incorrectly. Motivated by this diagnosis, we propose GEAR (Grounding Evidence-Aware Reward), a reward shaping method that augments the accuracy signal with a grounding reward for overlap with key evidence and a distractor penalty for overlap with irrelevant context. To enable GEAR on natural-language data, we develop an automated pipeline that constructs evidence-annotated training data from arbitrary documents. We validate GEAR across multiple model scales and benchmarks, showing consistent improvements of up to +4.6 average points over standard RL with accuracy-based rewards, with larger gains at longer contexts, while also reducing repetitive copying and thinking length. Our findings suggest that, even as long-context evaluation shifts from simple retrieval toward complex reasoning, accurate grounding in relevant evidence remains an indispensable capability with substantial room for improvement.

Bellman-Ford in Almost-Linear Time

Isaac M. Hair, George Z. Li, Jason Li, Junkai Zhang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19346v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider the single-source shortest paths problem on a directed graph with real-valued (possibly negative) edge weights and solve this problem in $m^{1+o(1)}$ time.

Countering the Path Explosion Problem in the Symbolic Execution of Hardware Designs

Kaki Ryan, Cynthia Sturton — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2304.05445v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Symbolic execution is a powerful verification tool for hardware designs, but suffers from the path explosion problem. We introduce a new approach, piecewise composition, which leverages the modular structure of hardware to transfer the work of path exploration to SMT solvers. We present a symbolic execution engine implementing the technique. The engine operates directly over register transfer level (RTL) Verilog designs without requiring translation to a netlist or software simulation. In our evaluation, piecewise composition reduces the number of paths explored by an order of magnitude and reduces the runtime by 97%. Using 84 properties from the literature we find assertion violations in 5 open-source designs including an SoC and CPU.

Augmented Symbolic Execution for Information Flow in Hardware Designs

Kaki Ryan, Matthew Gregoire, Cynthia Sturton — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2307.11884v2 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present SEIF, a methodology that combines static analysis with symbolic execution to verify and explicate information flow paths in a hardware design. SEIF begins with a statically built model of the information flow through a design and uses guided symbolic execution to recognize and eliminate non-flows with high precision or to find corresponding paths through the design state for true flows. We evaluate SEIF on two open-source CPUs, an AES core, and the AKER access control module. SEIF can exhaustively explore 10-12 clock cycles deep in 4-6 seconds on average, and can automatically account for 86-90% of the paths in the statically built model. Additionally, SEIF can be used to find multiple violating paths for security properties, providing a new angle for security verification.

MechAInistic: An LLM-guided Multi-Agent System for Reasoning over Genome-Scale Constraint-Based Metabolic Models

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18249v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Constraint-based metabolic modeling is a powerful way to study the mechanistic basis of cellular states and disease, but its effective use demands substantial computational expertise and careful coordination of multi-step analyses. We developed MechAInistic to lower this barrier and enable researchers to ask complex biological questions in natural language. Harnessing large language models, MechAInistic is a multi-agent system organized around an Architect-Reviewer pattern that transforms a natural-language question into an executable, model-grounded workflow and generates a structured report. The system supports a variety of tasks, including pathway comparison, perturbation analysis, drug-target exploration, and literature-grounded interpretation across paired metabolic model states. We developed and evaluated MechAInistic using two paired immune-cell metabolic-model use cases for therapeutic hypothesis generation. For Naive B cells from rheumatoid arthritis (RA) paired with healthy controls, MechAInistic identified mitochondrial metabolic rewiring and nominated Devimistat/CPI-613 as an investigational OGDH-centered hypothesis. In a paired CD4+ Th17 cell study from multiple sclerosis (MS) and healthy controls, the same workflow identified NADP-dependent isocitrate dehydrogenase as the optimal single target and proposed ivosidenib as an FDA-approved repurposing candidate. Together, these results show that MechAInistic converts natural-language biological questions into executable, model-grounded workflows for traceable therapeutic hypothesis generation.

Position: The Inevitable Transition to Machine Learning in Quantum Chemistry

Karen Sargsyan, Chao-Ping Hsu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18281v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Finding exact solutions to the quantum many-body problem is computationally intractable (QMA-hard). Traditional approximations for electrons in an atom or molecule -- density functional theory and wavefunction methods -- have been indispensable, but their development shows signs of saturation: DFT functionals have proliferated without converging toward the exact functional, and strong correlation remains largely unsolved after decades of effort. This position paper argues that machine learning represents the most promising path forward -- not as a proof of logical necessity, but as a decision-theoretic argument: ML succeeds whether the underlying problems are truly hard or merely lack simple analytical solutions. We reframe recent traditional method development as ``hand-crafted machine learning'' that has exhausted the hypothesis space accessible to human intuition. Significant challenges remain, but these have clear research paths forward, unlike the fundamental barriers facing traditional approaches. ML-based approaches merit strategic priority in quantum chemistry's next phase.

Disentangling Forced and Internal Climate Variability in Single Realizations using Dynamic Mode Decomposition with Control

Nathan Mankovich, Andrei Gavrilov, Gustau Camps-Valls — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18298v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We show that a single climate realization can be decomposed into forced and internal components by treating external forcing as a dynamical driver within a linear stochastic system, an idea grounded in pullback attractor theory. In doing so, we address a central methodological challenge in climate science with direct implications for climate projection and the detection and attribution of the forced response, disentangling the forced climate response from internal variability in a single observed record. Statistical methods range from approaches trained on large ensembles to techniques operating on single realizations. The latter often rely on linear frameworks such as linear inverse models (LIMs) and linear regression. LIMs ignore forcing predictors, whereas linear regression omits climate system dynamics. Here we introduce PullbackDMDc, a method grounded in non-autonomous dynamical systems theory and dynamic mode decomposition with control (DMDc), incorporating pullback attractor estimation to decompose a single climate realization into spatial modes and their associated forced and internal components, yielding a physically interpretable picture of the underlying dynamics. We illustrate the utility of PullbackDMDc for Earth System Model (ESM) evaluation by applying it to near-surface air temperature and sea-level pressure from reanalysis and four ESM large ensembles. PullbackDMDc estimates the forced response with skill matching or exceeding established baselines and identifies optimal forcing predictors against model-based ground truth. Its internal variability components reveal that ESMs qualitatively capture interannual and decadal modes while exhibiting systematic differences relative to each other and to observations. Skillful forced response estimation and a novel decomposition position PullbackDMDc as a practical tool for single-realization climate analysis and ESM evaluation.

Distribution-First Population Simulation: Collapse, Calibration, and Recall in Non-WEIRD LLM Persona Modeling

Gurkan Ozkan — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18310v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Synthetic-population tools increasingly run every individual as an independent large language model (LLM) agent. Using real survey microdata, we show that this paradigm has a basic failure mode, and we set a distribution-first corrective against it, all measured with a deterministic, construct-validated verifier on non-WEIRD (Turkey-first) data. First, N independent LLM agents grounded on 2,414 real World Values Survey respondents fail to reproduce the population's response distribution: they pile onto a modal default (four scenarios x five seeds: concentration 0.36->0.69, entropy 1.46->0.77, 85% collapse, TVD=0.44), and the collapse is a predictable function of scenario structure (r=0.55 with a single-answer structure). Second, Verbalized Sampling (VS) fixes the field's chronic under-dispersion without training in three model families (fidelity +7 to +10; significant on Qwen, p=0.002, d=6.2), yet the same move universally overshoots into over-dispersion (SD-ratio 0.4-0.56 -> 1.26-1.37), a structural property of VS. Third, survey fidelity transfers only weakly to agentic behavior: in a single-model, single-domain booking task, a persona is dominated by a cheapest-default (~80%) that income modulates but does not override (comfort choice 0%->7%->32% across income bands). Fourth, a placebo-controlled memorization attack and an election backtest show VS keeps aggregate strength while subgroup and individual claims are contaminated by recall and underdetermination. We close with the corrective: model the distribution once (VS) and assign it to grounded characters at O(1) cost, with a budget-aware router whose honest AUC is 0.805, not the tautological 1.0 of a code-derived oracle. The central contribution needs no realism claim: it measures the internal inconsistency of the independent-agent route and the conditions under which the distribution-first route calibrates.

Approximating SPR Distance Between Phylogenetic Trees with Graph Neural Networks

Renata Martins Castanheira, Miguel Bugalho, C\'atia Vaz — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18311v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Comparing phylogenetic tree topologies is essential for understanding epidemic dynamics, yet biologically meaningful distances such as the Subtree Prune and Regraft (SPR) distance are NP-hard to compute and intractable on large datasets. We investigate whether a Graph Neural Network (GNN) can approximate SPR distances in near-constant time per comparison after training. Our contributions are fourfold. First, we build and publicly release a dataset of 864 phylogenetic trees inferred with UPGMA and Neighbor-Joining over four bacterial species, spanning up to 9{,}500 isolates, together with 388 labelled tree pairs. Second, we establish a reproducible pre-processing pipeline including midpoint re-rooting, which reduces tree depth and supplies the rooting required for exact distance computation and for the model's root-based features. Third, we validate the supervision target: on small trees, where exact SPR is tractable, the unrooted phangorn::SPR.dist heuristic correlates almost perfectly with the exact rooted distance computed by rspr (Pearson $0.98$--$0.99$), making it an excellent monotonic surrogate. Lastly, we train a Siamese Graph Isomorphism Network (GIN) regressor. In-distribution, i.e., held-out trees from the same species and size range as training, it explains roughly 87--90% of the variance ($R^2 \approx 0.87$ on a held-out split; $0.90 \pm 0.19$ under stratified cross-validation), with about four times lower error than a mean-predictor baseline, and shows partial transfer to unseen species ($R^2 \approx 0.37$). Its main limitation is extrapolation to trees larger than those seen in training, where accuracy collapses. The released dataset and the validated heuristic versus exact relationship provide a reproducible basis for scaling learned SPR approximation.

Vakonomic Fluids

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18312v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce a novel discretization of the incompressible Euler equations based on their interpretation as geodesic equations on the Lie group of volume-preserving diffeomorphisms. It is well known that encoding diffeomorphisms and their infinitesimal generators through a discretized Koopman representation places a nonholonomic constraint on discrete velocities, for which there is no consensus on a variational treatment. We show that taking the vakonomic perspective, as opposed to the usual perspective of Lagrange--d'Alembert, yields discrete fluid trajectories that remain geodesics on a (sub-)Riemannian manifold. In particular, the resulting vakonomic dynamics are Lie--Poisson and their solutions admit a discrete relabeling symmetry, leading to machine-precision satisfaction of Casimir invariants along with a discrete analogue of Kelvin's Circulation Theorem. Using an efficient momentum map representation based on low-rank Clebsch variables, we show that these vakonomic fluids behave stably and consistently even at low grid resolutions, leading to increased robustness and physical realism in the long term.

Signed circulants at the Ramanujan bound

Vaibhav Suvagiya — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18334v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For the circulant graph $C_n(1,2)$ with $n\ge10$ even, the $\F_2$ system requiring every quadrilateral to be unbalanced is consistent and its solutions form exactly four switching classes. We show that the class containing the signing which is $+1$ on step-$1$ edges and $(-1)^i$ on step-$2$ edges has spectrum $\{\pm2\sqrt{\cos^2\theta_k+\cos^2 2\theta_k}\}$ and spectral radius exactly $2\sqrt2$, well below the Kesten bound $2\sqrt3$; that the quadrilateral system is equivalent to alternating triangle fluxes, so that the four classes are coordinatized by $(\tau_0,\alpha)$ and the spectral radius depends only on the Hamilton-cycle holonomy $\alpha$; and that the two twisted classes attain $\rho_-(n)=2\sqrt{\cos^2(\pi/n)+\cos^2(2\pi/n)}<2\sqrt2$. Exhaustive enumeration of all $2^{n+1}$ switching classes for $n\in\{8,10,12,14,16,18\}$ shows that $\rho_-(n)$ is the global minimum in every case, and we conjecture this for all even $n$; the lower bound is a flux-minimization statement in the sense of Lieb's flux-phase theorem. For odd $n$ the quadrilateral system is inconsistent.

FSDBN: Foreground-Aware EEG--Visual Alignment via Dynamic Brain Networks

Yiheng Liu, Chuhang Zheng, Peiliang Gong, Jingtao Liu, Daoqiang Zhang, Qi Zhu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: EEG-based visual decoding provides a non-invasive pathway for interpreting visual semantics. However, existing methods often overlook the perceptual asymmetry between foreground and background in complex scenes, leading to background interference and semantic misalignment. EEG signals also exhibit rapid temporal dynamics and nonstationary spatial patterns, making it difficult to capture the time-varying brain connectivity associated with focal visual attention. To address these limitations, we propose FSDBN, a unified framework for robust EEG-visual decoding. FSDBN introduces Semantic-Consistent Saliency Alignment to separate semantically relevant foreground regions from background noise under joint saliency and semantic constraints. It further employs Semantic-Prior Dynamic Gating Foreground Fusion to adaptively regulate the contributions of foreground and background features. In parallel, EEG signals are modeled as adaptive spatiotemporal brain networks whose functional connectivity dynamically reorganizes to capture neural responses to salient foregrounds. Experiments on zero-shot brain-to-image retrieval demonstrate that FSDBN achieves 69.0 percent top-1 accuracy and 92.2 percent top-5 accuracy, outperforming previous state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/LiuYiheng1/FSDBN-EEG.

Citation Pathways in the AI Era: Interpretive Knowledge Nodes, Citation Compression Layers, and the Measurement Boundary of Scholarly Impact

Li Li, Yu Cao — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18350v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This article identifies "citation pathway" as a long-neglected analytical dimension in scientometrics. Traditional evaluation metrics focus on measuring citation counts while paying insufficient attention to the intermediate nodes through which knowledge flows from its original source to the citing author. Building on an analysis of the normative structure of current reference systems, this article introduces two new concepts: Interpretive Knowledge Nodes (IKN) - academic papers that provide structured reorganizations of classic works - and Citation Compression Layers (CCL) - the intermediate layers that emerge when such knowledge products acquire stable publication identities and enter formal citation networks at scale. The central proposition is that AI has not changed citation rules themselves but has transformed the cost structure of producing citable knowledge intermediaries. Under conditions of full compliance, the network position effects of citation pathways may become a salient variable affecting the validity of impact measurement. Through a thought experiment involving a hypothetical journal R and a parsimonious "Citation Gravity conceptual model," this article substantiates this proposition and discusses the measurement boundaries of scholarly impact indicators, as well as the institutional risk of incentive misalignment under extreme scenarios.

$\texttt{codesign-mcdp}$: A Python Library for Monotone Co-Design Problems

Corentin Briat — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18415v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: $\texttt{codesign-mcdp}$ is a Python library for formulating and solving $\textit{Monotone Co-Design Problems}$ (MCDPs) in the framework of Censi (2015). A design problem is a relation between two posets, a functionality poset $F$ and a resource poset $R$; given a target functionality, the problem asks for the antichain of minimal resources needed to deliver it. Design problems compose under three operators (series, parallel, feedback), and the resulting class is closed under composition. The library implements the antichain calculus, six primitive design-problem types, the three composition operators, a Kleene fixed-point solver, and two high-level builders (an MCDPL-style declarative builder and a modular $\texttt{System}$ builder). Further layers add set-based and stochastic uncertainty, compositional online learning, and temporal, vector-state, and online co-design, alongside a suite of worked examples.

Using binary silver labels in electronic health records-based computable phenotyping algorithms

Shuhe Wang, Matthew T. Slaughter, Jennifer C. Nelson, Brian D. Williamson — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18431v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Gold-standard phenotype labels are often unavailable at scale in electronic health record (EHR) studies because they require manual chart review. Weakly supervised phenotyping methods instead use silver-standard labels, such as diagnosis-code counts, natural language processing (NLP) mentions, medication indicators, or laboratory thresholds. PheNorm is widely used for this purpose, but its original formulation was designed for count-valued silver labels and relies on log transformation, utilization normalization, and Gaussian mixture modeling. These steps are not directly suited to binary silver labels, which are common and may be highly informative. We propose Binary PheNorm, an extension that uses binary silver labels directly in the corruption-and-regression denoising step and produces a continuous phenotype score without EM calibration. We also consider a lasso-regularized version for high-dimensional EHR settings and combined models using both binary and count labels. In simulations, Binary PheNorm achieved strong discrimination using binary labels alone and often improved performance when combined with count labels. In anaphylaxis, AUC increased from 0.793 for an epinephrine-mention indicator to 0.891-0.892 after Binary PheNorm. In acute pancreatitis, AUC increased from 0.736 for a lipase-threshold indicator to 0.805-0.819. These results support Binary PheNorm as a practical weakly supervised approach when informative binary silver labels are available.

Competitive and Complementary Tools

David C. Krakauer — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18460v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humans have always externalized thought onto tools, from the tally and the abacus to the map and, now, large language models. I model the agent, the tool, and the task as one dynamical system in which competence (what the user retains) and reliance (what the user outsources) co-evolve, and find that the outcome is bistable. Above a critical tool availability the competent state is destroyed and competence collapses toward a low dependent floor as the user outsources completely. Lowering availability does not reverse the collapse until a far lower threshold, so history of practice rather than the current tool fixes the state. Two users with the same present access can therefore occupy opposite and lasting states, one competent and one dependent, decided only by which they built first. The collapse threshold depends jointly on the competence a user brings to a task and on the tool's transparency, the fraction of its working a user can reconstruct. In the case where an agent faces an uncertain goal, a tool can cause agency itself to transfer to the tool and the human-agent becomes an agentic-instrument, irreversibly, because the tool's model is too large to internalize. The model is tested against several independent data sets, including GPS and map use, arithmetic expertise, and language models. These results reframe how tools should be built, how artificial intelligence is deployed, and what a tool-resistant education might require.

Quantum-Enabled Spintronic "Small" Antennas

Supriyo Bandyopadhyay — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18469v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Antennas transmit information wirelessly from one location to another via electromagnetic waves. Miniaturizing them, however, is challenging since the radiation efficiencies of all traditional antennas, based on the principles of classical electromagnetics, plummet when their dimensions are shrunk to tiny fractions of the radiated wavelength. Lately, a new generation of antennas whose operations are underpinned by non-classical principles have been demonstrated and they can overcome this limitation. This enables embedded applications that were hitherto inaccessible. In addition, beam steering, which normally requires a large phased array (multiple antenna elements each much larger than the wavelength), can now be accomplished with a single element much smaller than the wavelength. Some of these antennas also have stealth attributes for secure and covert communication, which makes this new genre a disruptive new technology.

Quantum Reservoir Computing: Recent Advances and Future Directions

Shehbaz Tariq, Muhammad Talha, Arshid Ali, Muhammad Diyan, Symeon Chatzinotas — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18552v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantum reservoir computing (QRC) uses the dynamics of a fixed or weakly tuned quantum system to transform temporal and sequential inputs into measured features, while training is typically confined to a classical readout. This separation reduces reliance on repeated quantum parameter updates and avoids the barren plateaus associated with variational circuit training. Its computational power is often attributed to the exponentially large Hilbert space of the quantum system. However, the memory, nonlinearity, and expressivity that determine what a reservoir can actually compute depend jointly on the input encoding, quantum evolution, observables, measurement, and readout, not on Hilbert space dimension alone. On hardware, these capabilities are further constrained by finite sampling, hardware noise, measurement backaction, and the cost of estimating observables, so a large state space alone does not guarantee useful computation. In this survey, we develop a common system model that connects these components and use it to organize QRC foundations, computational properties, reservoir architectures, operating protocols, and physical implementations. We examine spin, photonic, superconducting, bosonic, neutral atom, and other analog platforms, together with applications, software and high performance computing support, benchmarking, and reproducibility. The analysis distinguishes hardware demonstrations from simulations and identifies the assumptions and resources that govern comparisons across implementations. Current results do not establish a broad quantum advantage over well matched classical reservoirs. We therefore specify the resource accounting, benchmark standards, and theoretical criteria needed to evaluate claims of quantum advantage.

Mixing-Free and Signal-Optimal Learning of Gaussian Graphical Models from Glauber Dynamics

Vignesh Tirukkonda, Gautam Dasarathy — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18559v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Gaussian graphical model selection is usually studied under independent sampling, but in many applications the data arise as a single trajectory of a dependent stochastic process. We study exact recovery of the graph from one trajectory of random-scan Gaussian Glauber dynamics. Existing techniques for this problem either inherit the mixing time of the chain, which can be super-polynomial in the dimension $p$ without strong assumptions, or are suboptimal in the minimum normalized edge strength $\kappa$. We propose two algorithms that are mixing-free and attain the $\kappa^{-2}$ dependence of the information-theoretic lower bounds. Both instantiate a shared dueling-neighborhood search meta-algorithm with a local statistic built directly from the update sequence. The first fits a least-squares regression at the updates of each node and recovers the graph from $\widetilde O(pd^{2}/\kappa^{2})$ updates, where $d$ is the maximum degree. This algorithm's data requirement depends on a local conditioning quantity, but only logarithmically and is provably optimal even when the underlying chain mixes slowly. The second algorithm is based on counting occurences of a specific update pattern and requires $\widetilde O(pd^{4}/\kappa^{2})$ updates, with no dependence on any condition number. The central technical challenge is that both statistics are built from dependent, non-stationary observations. Our analysis tackles this by demonstrating how to extract fresh Gaussian innovations from the update sequence, which yields mixing-free control of appropriate quantities. Neither the algorithms nor their analyses invoke stationarity, a spectral gap, or mixing conditions, and all guarantees hold from an arbitrary initialization.

GQD-AdsNet: Graph Neural Networks Unlock Rapid Exploration of Transition Metal Adsorption on Graphene Quantum Dots

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18591v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In recent years, interest in single-atom catalysts supported on carbon-based structures has grown considerably due to their high catalytic activity and efficient uses of metal atoms. However, the design and characterization of these materials through first-principles calculations are computationally expensive, limiting the exploration of a large number of possible configurations. Here, we developed a framework based on graph neural networks (GNNs) to predict the adsorption energies of transition metals on graphene quantum dots (GQDs). The model was trained using data obtained from density functional theory calculations and achieved an $R^2$ of 0.906 with an MAE of 0.101 eV, while reducing computational cost by roughly six orders of magnitude relative to DFT. This methodology provides an efficient tool for the accelerated screening and rational design of new catalysts based on carbon nanostructures.

Dismantling the Stoquastic Dichotomy

Armen Karakashian, Itay Hen — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18596v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We challenge the notion that a stoquastic binary governs fundamental computational boundaries in quantum computing and classical simulation of quantum systems. We argue that vanishing geometric phase (VGP), a geometric condition on the Hamiltonian's transition graph, more adequately captures these boundaries. To distinguish VGP from stoquasticity, we construct VGP 3-local Hamiltonians that are formally hard to stoquastize, yet belong to a family admitting polynomial-time recognition of the VGP property. Without constructing a stoquastizing unitary, we prove that the local Hamiltonian problem is $\mathsf{StoqMA}$-complete under the promise that the input Hamiltonian has VGP, and that a frustration-free variant is in $\mathsf{MA}$ under the same promise. We use this result to argue that non-VGP is necessary for any claimed adiabatic advantage justified by escaping the $\mathsf{StoqMA}$ regime. Further, we identify natural settings where the VGP property can be recognized in polynomial time. In contrast, we show that recognition of VGP is $\mathsf{PSPACE}$-complete in general for geometrically local Hamiltonians. Our results show that the computational boundaries $\mathsf{MA} \subseteq \mathsf{StoqMA} \subseteq \mathsf{QMA}$ traditionally attributed to stoquasticity are better understood as boundaries between vanishing and non-vanishing geometric phase structure.

Temporal-Causal Unity as an Operational Framework for Collective Dynamics: Causal-Progress Clocks, Synchronization, and Polarization

Jian Liu, Dong Sun — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18620v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops temporal-causal unity (TCU), a framework connecting a process-philosophical thesis -- time is the ordered unfolding of causal change -- to an operational model of cognitive and social dynamics. The framework deliberately separates three claims: an interpretive thesis about becoming, a measurable causal-progress coordinate, and a stochastic network model. Causal progress is defined by $\tau(t)=\int_0^t\lambda(s\mid\mathcal H_s)\,{\rm d}s$, where the nonnegative event intensity $\lambda$ must be specified independently of the outcome. Agents carry an orientation phase and an activation amplitude; weighted interaction, heterogeneous drift, external input, anchoring, and diffusion govern their evolution in $\tau$. First- and second-harmonic order parameters separate consensus from bipolar polarization. For the all-to-all noisy Kuramoto special case with Lorentzian drift width $\Delta$, synchronization begins at the conditional threshold $K_c = 2(\Delta + D)$, not at a universal constant. Reproducible numerical illustrations illustrate (not empirically demonstrate) this threshold, causal-clock curve collapse, and the consensus-polarization distinction. Six historical episodes are treated as scope probes rather than validation data. The paper derives falsifiable hypotheses and an out-of-sample protocol for comparing causal-progress and chronological-time models. TCU is therefore offered as a disciplined bridge between process ontology and complex-systems modeling, not as a replacement for spacetime physics or as an empirically established identity between time and causation.

Current-Sheet Formation in Electron Magnetohydrodynamics with Split Fractional Dissipation

Ruimeng Hu, Qirui Peng, Xu Yang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18648v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Thin current sheets are central small-scale structures in electron magnetohydrodynamics (EMHD), closely associated with energy dissipation and fast magnetic reconnection at electron scales. We study their formation numerically in a $2\frac{1}{2}$-dimensional EMHD system on a periodic domain with split fractional dissipation, where the magnetic potential and the vertical magnetic component are damped separately. The local theory is governed by a symmetric combined damping balance, but the numerical onset of small-scale growth need not follow this symmetry. A scaling analysis identifies the out-of-plane current as the primary concentration observable, since it is regularized only through the magnetic-potential equation. Using a validated Fourier pseudospectral exponential time-differencing solver with resolution-controlled diagnostics, we find a clear decay/concentration dichotomy. The onset boundary is markedly asymmetric: current-sheet formation appears to be controlled mainly by damping of the magnetic potential, rather than by the combined damping strength. The analyticity strip collapses to the grid scale, the concentration sharpens under grid refinement, and the observed growth is consistent with an energy-critical self-similar rate, with exponent near three. These experiments indicate that magnetic-potential damping is the apparent binding constraint for current-sheet concentration, refining the symmetric sum picture.

The Price of Hidden Curvature: An $\widetilde{\Omega} (d^{5/4} \sqrt{T})$ Lower Bound for Bandit Convex Optimization

Nived Rajaraman — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18652v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We establish a $\widetilde\Omega(d^{5/4}\sqrt T)$ lower bound on the minimax expected regret of stochastic bandit convex optimization of $1$-Lipschitz functions on the Euclidean ball. This presents the first nontrivial regret lower bound that grows faster than $d\sqrt{T}$ for this problem, establishing that stochastic bandit convex optimization is fundamentally harder than linear bandits. The hard class of convex functions we construct takes the following form in dimension $2d$: for an action $a = (a^1,a^2) \in \mathbb{B}^{2d}_2$, each function is the scaled soft maximum of a "tube", $r^{-1} \| W^\star a^1 - \frac{r}{8\varepsilon} a^2 \|_2$ (hyperparameterized by $\varepsilon,r$), and a squared distance function, $\frac12 \| a^1 - u^\star \|_2^2 - \frac12 \| u^\star \|_2^2$. Here, $W^\star \in \mathbb{R}^{d \times d}$ is an unknown linear transformation, and $u^\star \in \mathbb{R}^{d}$ is an unknown vector which must be learned to minimize the function. Observations are informative about $u^\star$ only when the learner's action lies near the tube determined by $W^\star$, satisfying $a^2 \approx \frac{8\varepsilon}{r} W^\star a^1$: thus the learner must either find this tube without knowing $W^\star$, or spend observations learning useful directions of $W^\star$. Formally, our regret analysis exploits this tradeoff by bounding the posterior spread of Fisher information matrices obtained under an adaptive sequence of actions. Together, these ingredients give a sample complexity lower bound of $\widetilde{\Omega}(d^{5/2}/\varepsilon^2)$ to find an $\varepsilon$-optimal action, which translates to an $\widetilde{\Omega} (d^{5/4} \sqrt{T})$ regret lower bound. We also extend this lower bound to the unconstrained setting where the action space is $\mathbb{R}^d$.

Towards Array-Invariant Speech Enhancement via Geometry-Aware Dynamic Convolution

Zhenglong Liu, Wangyou Zhang, Chenda Li, Yanmin Qian — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18658v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-channel speech enhancement (SE) systems exhibit superior performance over single-channel methods but are constrained to fixed microphone array configurations. This restricts their real-world deployment across devices with diverse array geometries. While recent array-agnostic SE methods address variable microphone numbers and permutations, they largely fail to exploit explicit array geometry priors when available, missing a crucial cue for optimal spatial filtering. A Geometry-Aware Dynamic Convolution (Geo-DConv) framework is proposed, which explicitly leverages microphone coordinates to transform standard fixed-array SE models into robust array-invariant systems. Experiments are conducted on the recent real-recorded RealMAN multi-channel speech dataset. Results demonstrate that the proposed architecture enables two widely used fixed-array models to adapt to array-invariant settings, with consistent performance improvements across diverse array topologies.

Gaffke's confidence interval for the mean of bounded data is inadmissible but asymptotically efficient

Jiahao Ming, Aaditya Ramdas, Yi Shen, Ruodu Wang, Ian Waudby-Smith — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18661v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Given observations $\mathbf x=(x_1,\dots,x_n)$, Gaffke (2005) defined \[ K_n(\mathbf x)=\mathbb{P}_{\mathbf D}\!\left\{\sum_{i=1}^n x_iD_i\le 1\right\}, \qquad (D_0,D_1,\ldots,D_n)\sim\mathrm{Dirichlet}(1,\ldots,1), \] and conjectured that it is a $p$-value whenever the inputs are independent e-values. Recently, Vlassis and Thomas (2026) proved this conjecture. Inverting the tests for observations in $[0,1]$ gives the confidence interval studied by Learned-Miller and Thomas (2020), which reduces to Clopper--Pearson for Bernoulli data. We give a finite- and large-sample account of Gaffke's test and interval. First, for every $\mathbf x\in[0,\infty)^n$ and every elementary symmetric polynomial $e_k$, $ K_n(\mathbf x)e_k(\mathbf x)\le {n\choose k}, $ so the Gaffke $p$-value never larger than the SymPol $p$-value of Ming et al. (2026). However, Gaffke's p-value is inadmissible. For $n=2$, we construct a valid rule that is strictly smaller on mixed configurations and is the unique admissible rule that dominates $K_2$. A neutral-face extension proves inadmissibility of $K_n$ for every $n\ge2$. If one independent uniform random variable is allowed, there is an even simpler full-dimensional improvement: on the upper orthant, where $K_n(\mathbf x)=1/\prod_i x_i$, replace it by $U/\prod_i x_i$. The equal-tail Gaffke confidence interval $I_n$ is nevertheless first-order asymptotically efficient: for iid observations on $[0,1]$ with unknown variance $\sigma^2>0$, \[ \sqrt n\,\operatorname{Width}(I_n)\longrightarrow 2\sigma z_{1-\alpha/2}\qquad\text{almost surely}. \] Our simulations also find that, among a variety of bounded-mean intervals considered, the Gaffke interval is the shortest, including comparisons with a recent empirical Berry--Esseen procedure having the same first-order Gaussian target.

Non-Square UPA-Enabled XL-MIMO Systems: Anisotropic Near-Field Characterization, Fundamental Limits, and Channel Estimation

Yilong Liu, Xi Yang, Jing Xu, Jun Zhang, Shi jin — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18736v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Extremely large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (XL-MIMO) is crucial for next-generation communication systems. In practice, the deployment of non-square uniform planar arrays (UPAs) fundamentally alters wavefront characteristics and induces anisotropic beamfocusing capability along different axes due to the aperture disparity originating from the non-square array geometry. To fully uncover the performance impact of such non-square geometry and thus unleash the potential of the non-square UPAs, we investigate the anisotropic near-field characteristics, fundamental limits, and channel estimation for non-square UPA-enabled XL-MIMO systems. First, we derive the effective beamfocusing distances for the long and short axes of the array. Interestingly, the radiation space of a non-square UPA can be partitioned into three regions, i.e., the fully near-field, the anisotropic near-field, and the far-field regions, and the anisotropic region asymptotically dominates the overall near-field space as the array aspect ratio increases. Then, the asymptotic effective degree of freedom for non-square UPA-enabled XL-MIMO systems is provided, which reveals that distance-domain multiplexing is governed by the long-axis aperture in the large array aspect ratio regime. Furthermore, the closed-form Cramer-Rao bound for distance estimation and the three-dimensional (3D) position error bound (PEB) are derived to reveal the geometry-induced performance trade-offs among distance, azimuth, and elevation estimation, based on which the optimal array aspect ratio that minimizes the 3D PEB is determined. Finally, by exploiting the anisotropic wavefront properties, we design a 3D anisotropic near-field codebook to facilitate low-complexity channel estimation for non-square UPAs. Numerical results validate that the proposed codebook achieves comparable accuracy to the 3D polar-domain codebook at reduced complexity.

Low-Complexity Channel Estimation Framework for Non-Square UPA-Assisted XL-MIMO Systems

Yilong Liu, Xi Yang, Binggui Zhou, Yu Han, Ting Liu, Shaodan Ma — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18744v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-complexity channel state information acquisition is crucial for extremely large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (XL-MIMO) systems. However, practical deployments of non-square uniform planar arrays (UPAs) in hybrid-field environments face prohibitive computational complexity and degraded estimation accuracy due to limited elevation angle-of-arrival (AoA) resolution and deteriorated channel sparsity. To tackle these challenges, we propose a low-complexity channel estimation framework. First, an antenna-domain extrapolation scheme synthesizes a virtually enlarged vertical aperture via the spatial correlation among adjacent elements, breaking the elevation resolution limit. The framework then disentangles the parameter coupling by transforming the two-dimensional joint search into two sequential one-dimensional searches. Specifically, elevation AoAs are extracted via an extrapolation-enhanced discrete Fourier transform-Newtonized orthogonal matching pursuit (NOMP) algorithm along the virtually enlarged vertical uniform linear array (ULA), while azimuth AoAs, ranges, and gains are acquired utilizing a discrete fractional Fourier transform-NOMP algorithm along a horizontal ULA. A subspace fitting-driven path matching algorithm pairs these decoupled parameters. To overcome the accuracy bottleneck of the antenna-domain scheme, a correlation-domain extrapolation scheme is further developed by exploiting the structural properties of the spatial correlation matrix to decouple the near-field quadratic and azimuth phase components, yielding a noise-suppressed virtual array. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Measuring AI innovation with trademark data

C. Castaldi, F. Castellacci, A. Fronzetti Colladon, L. Segneri, F. Venturini — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18795v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Researchers, managers and policymakers are exploring different approaches and data sources to map the development and the diffusion of Artificial Intelligence (AI). In this research note, we illustrate the opportunities offered by trademark data. We argue that AI trademarks can complement AI patents to capture different dimensions of AI innovation. AI trademarks can reveal the extent and ways in which companies exploit AI technologies to develop new goods and services. Importantly, trademark data offer a timely and globally available data source that covers all economic sectors. We present insights from using AI trademarks in an empirical exploration of Italian firms. In our discussion, we reflect on how AI trademarks can be used at different levels of analysis to tackle emerging questions about the development and diffusion of AI.

Algebraic Signatures for Structural Learning in Probability Tensors

Akihiro Maeda, Shohei Hidaka, Satoshi Aoki — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18817v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Algebraic statistics characterizes statistical models through polynomial constraints, but it has mainly been used for analytically specified model classes. This paper studies the inverse problem: identifying probabilistic structure from vanishing binomials observed in empirical probability tensors. We treat the vanishing binomials of a toric model as its algebraic signature, and turn the ideal-variety correspondence of algebraic statistics into an operational procedure for structural learning that identifies a model by signature matching without parameter estimation. By restricting attention to a computationally tractable class of configuration matrices, which we call {\it the Kronecker-stack class}, we make these signatures explicitly enumerable. Within this class we define minimum invariant constraint (MIC) as the atomic unit characterizing each signature and generalizing the notion of independence. We tested this approach employing MICs on synthetic data as well as on corpus-scale real language data. The results suggested the utility of the method, revealing that the identified rank-one structures correspond to interpretable sets of words. These results open up a new avenue for applying algebraic statistics to computational linguistics.

Enhanced NQS via Annealed Gradient Descent

Shiwei Zhou, Yiming Huang, Xiao Yuan, Xiaoxia Cai — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18865v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural quantum states offer expressive representations of quantum many-body wave functions, yet their practical accuracy can be limited by stochastic optimization rather than representational capacity. Here we identify a finite-sample instability, termed subspace trapping, in which physically important configurations become strongly underestimated, remain absent from successive sampling batches and receive insufficient gradient feedback. This self-reinforcing loss of sampled support can confine optimization to an effective subspace and produce apparently stationary states above the true ground state energy. To address this problem, we introduce annealed gradient descent (AGD), a sampling-aware update with annealing factor that temporarily increases the relative contribution of sampled low-probability configurations while limiting the dominance of high-probability ones. We establish the connection between finite-sample support loss and effective subspace optimization, and then evaluate the method across molecular systems, one and two-dimensional $J_1$-$J_2$ models. Annealed gradient descent suppresses metastable trapping, preserves physically relevant configurations and enables compact neural quantum states to attain chemical accuracy and competitive state-of-the-art performance. These results establish AGD as a lightweight complement to expressive neural architectures, improved sampling strategies for scalable quantum many-body optimization.

Optimizing Regret

Irene Aldridge — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18866v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Building on the identity that expected regret equals the covariance between costs and decisions, this paper develops the complete derivative theory of the covariance regret functional. We derive the G\^ateaux derivative, showing that the universal steepest-descent direction is the contrarian policy $-(c-\bar{c})$, while ascent yields momentum. For linear policies $\hat\pi(c) = Ac+b$, the gradient is the cost covariance matrix $\Sigma_c$, with a zero Hessian implying boundary-optimal solutions such as the minimum-variance portfolio. We extend to constrained optimization, sign-gradient duality between regret minimization and alpha maximization, finite-sample convergence bounds paralleling Thompson Sampling, and gradient-descent algorithms requiring only input observations, with applications to portfolio tilting and LLM-based allocation strategies.

Bounded elementary extensions of trees with unbounded paths

Ruaan Kellerman — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18942v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A tree is a partially ordered set that is downwards linear and downwards connected. A tree is called bounded when each of its paths (i.e. maximal linearly ordered subsets) contains a greatest element. In a bounded tree, each path can be defined by a first-order formula using the leaf of the path as parameter. Bounded trees can be used to model computational systems such as Zeno machines whereby the leaf of a path represents the state to which an infinitely long sequence of computations converges, or a state that is assigned to a computational sequence that loops. We identify a sufficient condition under which certain trees that are not bounded, can be elementarily embedded in trees that are bounded. Several tree operations are also given, and Feferman-Vaught style preservation properties for these operations are proved.

All-angles bisection of polygon area

Robin Whitty — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18967v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Given a simple polygon we aim to find the equation of the straight line which bisects the area of the polygon in a given direction. Additionally, we would like to vary this direction with minimal additional calculation. We provide a solution in the case where the polygon is `bisection-convex', meaning that any straight line bisecting the area of the polygon contains exactly two points on the boundary of the polygon.

How the fly holds a single goal: normalization, not selection, in Drosophila FC2

Gioele Nanni, Christopher Lee — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18969v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A walking fly steers toward a goal direction, held as a bump of activity across the FC2 neurons of the fan-shaped body. These neurons also inhibit one another over distance, more strongly the farther apart they are, a feedback proposed to keep the fly on a single goal. We asked, from the connectome, what circuit produces this inhibition, and whether it lets FC2 actively choose one goal among competitors (a winner-take-all) or simply keeps a goal set elsewhere as one clean bump. Tracing the wiring in a single FlyWire brain, we find the inhibition is almost entirely global: four FB5A cells inhibit every FC2 neuron roughly equally, with a smaller, distance-dependent contribution from hDelta interneurons and a negligible direct component. A ring-attractor winner-take-all (the kind the compass uses) requires local recurrent excitation that the FC2 wiring lacks, so this geometry cannot build one; and across a range of dynamical models, including a spiking network, no version of the circuit locks onto a winner at the connectome-scaled reference coupling. FC2 therefore normalizes an externally set goal rather than selecting it, with FB5A likely acting as the global normalizer, much as the APL neuron does in the mushroom body. We are explicit about two open points: a different mechanism, mutual inhibition between two competing goals (which hDelta supplies), could in principle select at very strong coupling, and we bound rather than exclude it; and FB5A's inhibitory identity is a low-confidence prediction of the connectome's transmitter classifier, not yet measured, and likely not GABAergic. We then ask where the goal is actually set: the connectome nominates an upstream hDelta network and rules out the leading proposed alternative, whose neurons supply under 0.2% of FC2's input. Finally, we propose a direct experiment, silencing FB5A while imaging FC2, that would test the account.

The Tractability Landscape of Sampling with Inexact Scores

Anming Gu, Kevin Tian, Hubert Yang, Yusong Zhu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19004v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We provide a simple and tight characterization of the types of inexact score oracle access that permit sampling with vanishing total variation bias, for a standard, well-behaved target family. Our main result shows that any weaker error than the sub-Gaussian assumption used by [YW26] rules out the tractability of unbiased sampling. This strengthens the conclusion of [CCSW26] to be algorithm-agnostic, and to hold for a wider range of error assumptions.

Observable Matrix Dynamics of Stocks

Igor Halperin — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19005v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Observable Matrix Dynamics (OMD) approach monitors the time development of complex non-linear systems through the trajectory of a fixed-size distance matrix and its spectrum. We apply it to the S\&P 500 cross section over three crisis decades, the 2001 dot-com bust, the 2007--2008 financial crisis, and the 2020 Covid crash, with three fixed-size observables on a fixed universe. The arccos distance matrix of the rolling return correlations reads the correlation geometry: its effective dimension collapses at the 2008 and 2020 crises, while the 2001 bust is a dispersed unwind. Read against machine-learning distance matrices, its spectrum stays in the un-relaxed, pre-learning regime with no low-dimensional manifold, so the market never learns its correlation structure or relaxes to a stationary geometry. Subtracting the market factor exposes a coherent sector rotation, whose name-level attribution identifies which stocks drive each crisis and in what order. At a short lookback these signals resolve precursors and forecast the endogenous 2008 crisis, though not the exogenous 2020 shock. The other two observables model the daily return and volatility rankings as Markov chains on their ranking spaces. The return chain has persistent, defensive-led bellwethers and near-reversible dynamics. The volatility chain is far more persistent, led by the financial sector, and is the only one to carry a weak, episodic arrow of time, flaring at market stress and matching volatility clustering and the Zumbach effect. All three matrices show coherent changes during market crashes.

Evaluating DV/CV-QKD Architectures for SAFE Long-Term Secure Storage: A Risk Model and ILP-Based Cost Optimization Approach

Alireza Tasdighi, Romain All\'eaume — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19010v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents a unified cost-modeling and optimization framework designed to evaluate hybrid discrete-variable/continuous-variable quantum key distribution (DV/CV-QKD) infrastructures operating within the SAFE (Secure and Efficient) long-term storage (LTSS) protocol. Our methodology jointly addresses the information-theoretic and computational dimensions of cryptographic durability over multi-decade horizons by coupling a quantitative risk model with a stochastic integer linear programming (ILP) formulation. Going beyond idealized physics-informed limits, the framework incorporates realistic next-generation industrial implementations and multiplexed coexistence specifications, together with a sample-average approximation (SAA) pipeline, to determine cost-optimal and structurally feasible SAFE topologies under transmission-budget and security constraints. The proposed framework is evaluated on both randomized synthetic deployments and realistic metropolitan-scale QKD infrastructures, including the Paris Metro-Scale and Greater Paris networks, to characterize the interplay between network topology, QKD modality, and deployment cost while enforcing a target global compromise tolerance $\epsilon$. Numerical results show that the economically optimal architecture is highly scenario-dependent and that both hybrid and homogeneous modality allocations naturally emerge from the optimization. More importantly, the analysis reveals a non-monotonic relationship between the minimum required QKD link capacity and the infrastructure cost: contrary to intuition, increasing the minimum required per-link secret-key rate may reduce the overall deployment cost by enabling a global transition toward more economical CV-based solutions, whereas further capacity increases do not necessarily yield additional savings.

From Operations to Elderly Care Outcomes: A Thematic Review of Industrial Engineering and Decision-Support Approaches

Shayan Farhang Pazhooh, Fereshteh Parvaresh — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19075v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid growth of the global aging population presents severe challenges to healthcare systems, necessitating efficient, equitable, and patient-centered care models. While Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (OR) provide robust optimization and decision-support tools to address these multidimensional complexities, current applications often remain fragmented. This paper presents a thematic review of 30 seminal studies at the intersection of OR and elderly care, categorizing the literature into home healthcare operations, polypharmacy management, and clinical chronotherapy. Our analysis highlights a significant methodological evolution from static, deterministic models toward dynamic and stochastic frameworks integrated with artificial intelligence (AI). Despite these advancements, a critical translational gap persists: the current OR literature is heavily dominated by process-level optimizations, such as staff routing, and struggles to translate these operational efficiencies into measurable clinical outcomes. Furthermore, holistic models bridging the transition between hospital and community care remain critically underexplored. To develop resilient and smart healthcare systems, this study proposes a conceptual framework that shifts the research focus from isolated operational tasks to integrated, multi-level decision-making. We emphasize the critical need for robust systems analysis, human-inclusive design, and the smartification of care through emerging digital technologies - including digital twins and large language models - to successfully bridge the gap between theoretical operational metrics and tangible patient-level health outcomes.

Wavefront Parallelization for Efficient Learned Image Compression

Shimon Murai, Fangzheng Lin, Kasidis Arunruangsirilert, Jiro Katto — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19082v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autoregressive context models are foundational for learned image compression,but they suffer from slow serial inference. Existing acceleration methods such as checkerboard context require architectural changes and retraining, thus are inapplicable to pre-trained models. We propose a completely training-free inference-time acceleration algorithm inspired by wavefront parallelism in video coding standards. Our method reorganizes inference into an optimal ``staggered'' wavefront order, minimizing sequential steps while maintaining exact autoregressive dependencies. Experimental results show our approach accelerates pre-trained autoregressive models (e.g., Cheng et al.) by more than $13\times$ while preserving the original rate-distortion performance. We also demonstrate that faster decoding is possible by trading off precise context dependencies. Source code will be available at https://github.com/tokkiwa/compressai-wavefront.

Fast reconstruction of tensor tomographic X-ray scattering data for real-time applications

Andr\'e M. Antunes, Dani\"el M. Pelt, K. Joost Batenburg — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19124v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: X-ray scattering tensor tomography reveals nanoscale structural orientation in 3D, but its reliance on slow iterative reconstruction limits real-time use. We introduce an extension of a direct reconstruction approach for parallel-beam geometries that computes algebraic filters approximating multiple iterative updates with a single filtering and back-projection step. By explicitly separating the tomographic projector from a view-dependent mixing operator, the method generalizes across tensor representations and modes of (small-angle) X-ray scattering measurement. Simulated and experimental results show that the approach approximates iterative reconstructions while reducing computation time by over an order of magnitude, realizing a reconstruction of a 53x53x53x28 tensor volume in 1 second on commercially-available hardware. The resulting speed and stability enable high-throughput analysis and open the door to real-time scattering-based imaging.

MIRAGE: Multi-scale Lesion-Informed Representation with Auxiliary Guidance for MRI Contrast Enhancement

Andrea Borghesi, Xin Wang, Jonas Teuwen, George Yiasemis — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19137v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inferring contrast enhancement from one pre-contrast breast MRI slice is underdetermined: post-contrast appearance contains physiological information that is not uniquely encoded in baseline anatomy. Optimizing only paired pixel fidelity can suppress uncertain lesion enhancement, whereas adversarial or stochastic generative objectives can favor realistic post-contrast appearance without guaranteeing patient-specific lesion fidelity. We introduce MIRAGE, a residual 2D U-Net that combines global reconstruction and perceptual losses with three forms of lesion-aware supervision available only during training: an asymmetric penalty for missed tumor enhancement, multi-scale auxiliary tumor segmentation, and guidance through a frozen post-contrast tumor segmentation nnU-Net. We evaluate the method on 301 cases from the multi-centre MAMA-SYNTH data using eight complementary image-, region-, radiomics-, and segmentation-based metrics. MIRAGE ranks first on six metrics and markedly improves downstream lesion localization over tuned pix2pix, conditional diffusion, and latent bridge-matching baselines. The generative alternatives retain advantages in LPIPS or contrast classification, revealing a clear fidelity-utility trade-off. Leave-one-in and leave-one-out ablations show that the losses are partly redundant for lesion localization but exert distinct effects on appearance, radiomics, and boundary accuracy. These results support task-aware synthesis while also showing that its apparent optimality is conditional on the downstream models and metrics used to define utility.

Free energy landscape of Dense Associative Memory

Sumedha, Abhishek Singh — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19195v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Using large deviations theory, we solve and obtain a general expression for the free energy functional for a broad class of associative memories, including dense associative memories. We illustrate the method by reproducing classical results for the Hopfield model. For a finite number of patterns, we derive the temperature-dependent free energy functional for dense associative memories featuring polynomial interactions and Log-Sum-Exponential (LSE) activation. We also evaluate the disorder-averaged ground-state energy of these systems in the extensive limit. Our analytical framework reveals how memory retrieval depends on the initial state in higher-order dense networks, and gives the exact full-retrieval threshold for the LSE model. This method provides a systematic procedure for analyzing diverse, complex architectures in associative memory.

ATLAS: A Foundation Neural Sampler for Amorphous Materials

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19198v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Amorphous materials exhibit exceptional mechanical and functional properties, yet their rugged energy landscapes are notoriously difficult to sample. Below the glass-transition temperature, conventional molecular dynamics and Monte Carlo become inefficient because equilibration relies on rare barrier-crossing events, while data-driven generative models are constrained by scarce and biased reference ensembles. Here, we introduce ATLAS, an efficient sampler that learns a diffusion process to generate Boltzmann-distributed amorphous structures directly from a target energy function. Parameterized by an equivariant graph neural network, ATLAS generalizes across system size, temperature, and composition. By exploiting the time reversal of the diffusion process, it enables efficient estimation of thermodynamic quantities and steering toward target observables. In two-dimensional Kob-Andersen systems, ATLAS reproduces parallel tempering Markov chain Monte Carlo structural distributions, free energies and entropies, achieving below 0.2% free energy error in the low-temperature glass regime with over 500-fold fewer energy evaluations. In Cu-Zr and Cr-Co-Ni metallic glasses, ATLAS recovers experimentally observed short-range-order trends and steers structures toward prescribed order parameters and optimized bulk moduli. Moreover, composition-amortized pretraining outperforms composition-specific training from scratch, reduces inverse-design costs by several hundred-fold, and enables sampling with expensive universal machine learning interatomic potentials. Coupled to a large language model agent, ATLAS searches an eight-element space for high-entropy metallic glasses balancing stiffness and ductility, identifying a converged Pareto frontier within 480 oracle evaluations. Together, these results establish ATLAS as a foundation model for sampling, steering and designing amorphous materials.

Teleportation Game: Quantum Teleportation in Multi-Agent Systems for Interactive Music

Eduardo Reck Miranda, Scott Yeiichi Oshiro — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19212v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper introduces an interactive music system with quantum musical agents that communicate by teleporting quantum states to one another. Human performers interact in real time with agents whose melodic and rhythmic behaviours are encoded as quantum states using Single Qubit Probability Amplitude Modulation (SQPAM) and structured through Quantum Phase Estimation (QPE). Up to three agents are combined within a single quantum circuit, with directed communication via quantum teleportation. We are interested in supporting ambiguous, transformative interactions reminiscent of free Jazz improvisation. Therefore, rather than treating noise and decoherence as limitations, the system embraces NISQ-era constraints as creative affordances, framing agent communication as quantum whispers, that is, deliberate, musically expressive imperfections in state transfer. We provide demonstrations and analyses based on melodic correlation, pitch-set distance, and state fidelity, where a continuum between imitation and divergence can be observed. We developed a tunable interpretation method to assess how agents reinterpret teleported states. This work positions teleportation as a promising interaction mechanism for agent-based quantum computer music and outlines future directions toward distributed ensembles connected via the Quantum Internet.

The Limits of Quantum Computers for Power Flow

Cameron Khanpour, Samuel Talkington — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19263v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This letter proves realistic grid properties limit the applicability of quantum computers for power flow. Grids that split into two large regions meeting at only a few buses, common in transmission networks, force the pseudo condition number of the DC susceptance matrix to grow polynomially in the network size, and long chains of lines bridging such regions force quadratic growth, making recent empirical observations rigorous. The bounds also hold with overwhelming probability for arbitrary bounded random line susceptances. Combined with query and tomography lower bounds, this precludes end-to-end quantum advantage for DC power flow at every readout level, and these obstructions persist through AC power flow, optimal power flow, and unit commitment. All proofs are formally verified with accompanying Lean 4 source code.

Resolution of the ENO-TV conjecture: a parity dichotomy

Zhuoyun Li, Kailiang Wu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19283v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We resolve the ENO--TV conjecture, a discrete coercivity problem in compactness theory for entropy-stable approximations of hyperbolic conservation laws. For order-$k$ essentially non-oscillatory (ENO) reconstruction from compactly supported cell averages, it asks whether the nonnegative ENO source times the $(k-1)$st power of the amplitude uniformly controls the $(k+1)$st absolute-jump moment. We prove a parity dichotomy: the estimate holds for odd $k\ge3$ and fails for even $k\ge4$; the known second-order case completes the classification. Localization gives a selection-independent finite-difference functional uniformly comparable to the source and reduces the conjecture to discrete interpolation. For odd orders, summation by parts reveals a hidden square; a discrete Gagliardo--Nirenberg inequality yields coercivity. For even orders, Euler-polynomial blocks from the functional's polynomial kernel yield counterexamples that persist under arbitrarily small perturbations making all affected ENO comparisons strict. We also prove two coercive estimates for every $k\ge2$: control of jumps larger than a fixed fraction of the amplitude and of local blocks modulo sampled polynomials of degree at most $k-2$. Via the Cayley--Sylvester decomposition, we compute the dimensions of homogeneous first-cohomology spaces for the lattice shift on polynomial jump profiles. At fourth order, for a cubic flux and a globally strictly convex entropy, a total-degree-seven component of a reduced entropy-flux mismatch represents a nonzero class on profiles of degree at most two and hence has no translation-invariant finite-stencil $C^7$ local primitive at the zero constant state. Odd-order coercivity persists on globally quasi-uniform meshes, whereas for each $k\ge2$ it fails on a fixed irregular mesh even though every interface contribution remains nonnegative. This failure is due to the mesh geometry.

SoK: Adversarial Robustness of the Variational Quantum Eigensolver via Red-Teaming

Ahmed Azaz Humdoon, Cheng Chu, Lei Jiang, Qian Lou, Mengxin Zheng — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19318v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) is a leading algorithm for estimating molecular ground-state energies on near-term quantum hardware, with applications spanning quantum chemistry, materials science, and drug discovery. As VQE workloads are increasingly deployed through cloud-based ``VQE-as-a-service'' pipelines, they become exposed to adversaries such as compromised service components, malicious co-tenants, or insiders in the transpilation stack, any of which can corrupt results before they reach the user. A range of attacks on variational quantum circuits has been proposed, but each has been studied in isolation: some on quantum classifiers with accuracy-based metrics, others on variational quantum algorithms with energy-error metrics. This lack of a common evaluation setup makes their relative severity difficult to compare and leaves the security of VQE poorly characterized. In this work, we present \textbf{VQE-AdvBench}, the first unified red-teaming benchmark for the Variational Quantum Eigensolver, systematizing these attacks under a single evaluation protocol to rigorously assess VQE's adversarial robustness. We organize attacks along a black-, gray-, and white-box access taxonomy, and evaluate seven representative attack scenarios -- the QTrojan circuit backdoor, the QDoor parameter backdoor, parameter-space adaptations of FGSM and PGD, and three QNBAD noise-induced variants -- over a fixed molecule-ansatz-backend-metric configuration, on H$_2$ and H$_3^+$ across five noise-calibrated IBM backends. Our results reveal a clear severity ordering: noise-induced attacks that manipulate the Zero-Noise Extrapolation (ZNE) pipeline are the most damaging (up to 8.84$\times$ error amplification), followed by the QTrojan circuit-level backdoor (7.52$\times$), while the QDoor parameter-level backdoor is the least effective, yielding only marginal amplification (up to 1.37$\times$).

Fundamental limits of distributed multiclass classification from simple binary decisions

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.19334v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider the problem of constructing a $K$-class classifier from the combination of $O(\log K)$ simple binary classifiers -- this is a natural paradigm to construct a sophisticated classifier in a distributed manner with each agent performing a relatively straightforward task. We study the fundamental performance limits of such a classifier when the corresponding binary classifiers are hyperplanes. For a stylized Gaussian setting where the $K$ class centers are independent Gaussian points in $\mathbb R^d$ and the observations are corrupted by Gaussian noise, we derive explicit performance bounds across several decoding and dimensional regimes. Extensive simulation experiments provide strong empirical validation of the presented theoretical results.

MacWilliams Identities for $m$-tuple Weight Enumerators

Nathan Kaplan — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:1205.1277v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Since MacWilliams proved the original identity relating the Hamming weight enumerator of a linear code to the weight enumerator of its dual code there have been many different generalizations, leading to the development of $m$-tuple support enumerators. We prove a generalization of theorems of Britz and of Ray-Chaudhuri and Siap, which build on earlier work of Kl{\o}ve, Shiromoto, Wan, and others. We then give illustrations of these $m$-tuple weight enumerators.

Improved Inapproximability Results for Steiner Tree via Long Code Based Reductions

Ali \c{C}ivril — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:1702.02882v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The best algorithm for approximating Steiner tree has performance ratio $\ln(4)+\epsilon \approx 1.386$ [J. Byrka et al., \textit{Proceedings of the 42th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC)}, 2010, pp. 583-592], whereas the inapproximability result stays at the factor $\frac{96}{95} \approx 1.0105$ [M. Chleb\'ik and J. Chleb\'ikov\'a, \textit{Proceedings of the 8th Scandinavian Workshop on Algorithm Theory (SWAT)}, 2002, pp. 170-179]. In this article, we take a step forward to bridge this gap and show that there is no polynomial time algorithm approximating Steiner tree with constant ratio better than $\frac{19}{18} \approx 1.0555$ unless \textsf{P = NP}. We also relate the problem to the Unique Games Conjecture by showing that it is \textsf{UG}-hard to find a constant approximation ratio better than $\frac{17}{16} = 1.0625$. In the special case of quasi-bipartite graphs, we prove an inapproximability factor of $\frac{25}{24} \approx 1.0416$ unless \textsf{P = NP}, which improves upon the previous bound of $\frac{128}{127} \approx 1.0078$. The reductions that we present for all the cases are of the same spirit with appropriate modifications. Our main technical contribution is an adaptation of a Set-Cover type reduction in which the Long Code is used to the geometric setting of the problems we consider.

Sparse Approximation by Semidefinite Programming

Ali \c{C}ivril — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:1702.02891v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The problem of sparse approximation and the closely related compressed sensing have received tremendous attention in the past decade. Primarily studied from the viewpoint of applied harmonic analysis and signal processing, there have been two dominant algorithmic approaches to this problem: Greedy methods called the matching pursuit (MP) and the linear programming based approaches called the basis pursuit (BP). The aim of the current paper is to bring a fresh perspective to sparse approximation by treating it as a combinatorial optimization problem and providing an algorithm based on the powerful optimization technique semidefinite programming (SDP). In particular, we show that there is a randomized algorithm based on a semidefinite relaxation of the problem with performance guarantees depending on the coherence and the restricted isometry constant of the dictionary used. We then show a derandomization of the algorithm based on the method of conditional probabilities.

Entity-Relation Extraction as Multi-Turn Question Answering

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:1905.05529v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this paper, we propose a new paradigm for the task of entity-relation extraction. We cast the task as a multi-turn question answering problem, i.e., the extraction of entities and relations is transformed to the task of identifying answer spans from the context. This multi-turn QA formalization comes with several key advantages: firstly, the question query encodes important information for the entity/relation class we want to identify; secondly, QA provides a natural way of jointly modeling entity and relation; and thirdly, it allows us to exploit the well developed machine reading comprehension (MRC) models. Experiments on the ACE and the CoNLL04 corpora demonstrate that the proposed paradigm significantly outperforms previous best models. We are able to obtain the state-of-the-art results on all of the ACE04, ACE05 and CoNLL04 datasets, increasing the SOTA results on the three datasets to 49.4 (+1.0), 60.2 (+0.6) and 68.9 (+2.1), respectively. Additionally, we construct a newly developed dataset RESUME in Chinese, which requires multi-step reasoning to construct entity dependencies, as opposed to the single-step dependency extraction in the triplet exaction in previous datasets. The proposed multi-turn QA model also achieves the best performance on the RESUME dataset.

Dice Loss for Data-imbalanced NLP Tasks

Xiaoya Li, Xiaofei Sun, Yuxian Meng, Guoyin Wang, Junjun Liang, Fei Wu, Jiwei Li — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:1911.02855v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many NLP tasks such as tagging and machine reading comprehension are faced with the severe data imbalance issue: negative examples significantly outnumber positive examples, and the huge number of background examples (or easy-negative examples) overwhelms the training. The most commonly used cross entropy (CE) criteria is actually an accuracy-oriented objective, and thus creates a discrepancy between training and test: at training time, each training instance contributes equally to the objective function, while at test time F1 score concerns more about positive examples. In this paper, we propose to use dice loss in replacement of the standard cross-entropy objective for data-imbalanced NLP tasks. Dice loss is based on the Sorensen-Dice coefficient or Tversky index, which attaches similar importance to false positives and false negatives, and is more immune to the data-imbalance issue. To further alleviate the dominating influence from easy-negative examples in training, we propose to associate training examples with dynamically adjusted weights to deemphasize easy-negative examples.Theoretical analysis shows that this strategy narrows down the gap between the F1 score in evaluation and the dice loss in training. With the proposed training objective, we observe significant performance boost on a wide range of data imbalanced NLP tasks. Notably, we are able to achieve SOTA results on CTB5, CTB6 and UD1.4 for the part of speech tagging task; SOTA results on CoNLL03, OntoNotes5.0, MSRA and OntoNotes4.0 for the named entity recognition task; along with competitive results on the tasks of machine reading comprehension and paraphrase identification.

ChineseBERT: Chinese Pretraining Enhanced by Glyph and Pinyin Information

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2106.16038v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent pretraining models in Chinese neglect two important aspects specific to the Chinese language: glyph and pinyin, which carry significant syntax and semantic information for language understanding. In this work, we propose ChineseBERT, which incorporates both the {\it glyph} and {\it pinyin} information of Chinese characters into language model pretraining. The glyph embedding is obtained based on different fonts of a Chinese character, being able to capture character semantics from the visual features, and the pinyin embedding characterizes the pronunciation of Chinese characters, which handles the highly prevalent heteronym phenomenon in Chinese (the same character has different pronunciations with different meanings). Pretrained on large-scale unlabeled Chinese corpus, the proposed ChineseBERT model yields significant performance boost over baseline models with fewer training steps. The porpsoed model achieves new SOTA performances on a wide range of Chinese NLP tasks, including machine reading comprehension, natural language inference, text classification, sentence pair matching, and competitive performances in named entity recognition. Code and pretrained models are publicly available at https://github.com/ShannonAI/ChineseBert.

Internet-of-Things Architectures for Secure Cyber-Physical Spaces: the VISOR Experience Report

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2204.01531v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Internet of things (IoT) technologies are becoming a more and more widespread part of civilian life in common urban spaces, which are rapidly turning into cyber-physical spaces. Simultaneously, the fear of terrorism and crime in such public spaces is ever-increasing. Due to the resulting increased demand for security, video-based IoT surveillance systems have become an important area for research. Considering the large number of devices involved in the illicit recognition task, we conducted a field study in a Dutch Easter music festival in a national interest project called VISOR to select the most appropriate device configuration in terms of performance and results. We iteratively architected solutions for the security of cyber-physical spaces using IoT devices. We tested the performance of multiple federated devices encompassing drones, closed-circuit television, smart phone cameras, and smart glasses to detect real-case scenarios of potentially malicious activities such as mosh-pits and pick-pocketing. Our results pave the way to select optimal IoT architecture configurations -- i.e., a mix of CCTV, drones, smart glasses, and camera phones in our case -- to make safer cyber-physical spaces' a reality.

Real-world K-Anonymity Applications: the \textsc{KGen} approach and its evaluation in Fraudulent Transactions

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2204.01533v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: K-Anonymity is a property for the measurement, management, and governance of the data anonymization. Many implementations of k-anonymity have been described in state of the art, but most of them are not able to work with a large number of attributes in a "Big" dataset, i.e., a dataset drawn from Big Data. To address this significant shortcoming, we introduce and evaluate \textsc{KGen} an approach to K-anonymity featuring Genetic Algorithms. \textsc{KGen} promotes such a meta-heuristic approach since it can solve the problem by finding a pseudo-optimal solution in a reasonable time over a considerable load of input. \textsc{KGen} allows the data manager to guarantee a high anonymity level while preserving the usability and preventing loss of information entropy over the data. Differently from other approaches that provide optimal global solutions catered for small datasets, \textsc{KGen} works properly also over Big datasets while still providing a good-enough solution. Evaluation results show how our approach can still work efficiently on a real world dataset, provided by Dutch Tax Authority, with 47 attributes (i.e., the columns of the dataset to be anonymized) and over 1.5K+ observations (i.e., the rows of that dataset), as well as on a dataset with 97 attributes and over 3942 observations.

A Compositional Approach to Verifying Modular Robotic Systems

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2208.05507v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robotic systems used in safety-critical scenarios often rely on modular software architectures, and increasingly include autonomous components. Verifying that these modular robotic systems behave as expected requires approaches that can cope with, and preferably take advantage of, this inherent modularity. This paper describes a compositional approach to specifying the nodes in robotic systems built using the Robot Operating System (ROS), where each node is specified using First-Order Logic (FOL) assume-guarantee contracts that link the specification to the ROS implementation. We introduce inference rules that facilitate the composition of these node-level contracts to derive system-level properties. We also present a novel Domain-Specific Language, the ROS Contract Language (RCL), which captures a node's FOL specification and links this contract to its implementation. RCL contracts can be automatically translated, by our tool Vanda, into executable monitors; which we use to verify the contracts at runtime. We illustrate our approach through the specification and verification of an autonomous rover engaged in the remote inspection of a nuclear site, and finish with smaller examples that illustrate other useful features of our framework.

Scheme-Theoretic Approach to Computational Complexity. III. SETH

Ali \c{C}ivril — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2305.05415v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We show that there exist infinitely many $n \in \mathbb{Z}^+$ such that for any constant $\epsilon > 0$, any deterministic algorithm to solve $k$-\textsf{SAT} for $k \geq 3$ must perform at least $(2^{k-\frac{3}{2}-\epsilon})^{\frac{n}{k+1}}$ operations, where $n$ is the number of variables in the $k$\textsf{-SAT} instance.

Scheme-Theoretic Approach to Computational Complexity. IV. A New Perspective on Hardness of Approximation

Ali \c{C}ivril — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2305.05676v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We provide a new approach for establishing hardness of approximation results, based on the theory recently introduced by the author. It allows one to directly show that approximating a problem beyond a certain threshold requires super-polynomial time. To exhibit the framework, we revisit two famous problems in this paper. The particular results we prove are: MAX-3-SAT$(1,\frac{7}{8}+\epsilon)$ requires exponential time for any constant $\epsilon$ satisfying $\frac{1}{8} \geq \epsilon > 0$. In particular, the gap exponential time hypothesis (Gap-ETH) holds. MAX-3-LIN-2$(1-\epsilon, \frac{1}{2}+\epsilon)$ requires exponential time for any constant $\epsilon$ satisfying $\frac{1}{4} \geq \epsilon > 0$.

IBoxCLA: Towards Robust Box-supervised Segmentation of Polyp via Improved Box-dice and Contrastive Latent-anchors

Qiang Hu, Ying Chen, Hongkuan Shi, Qiang Li, Zhiwei Wang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2310.07248v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Box-supervised polyp segmentation attracts increasing attention for its cost-effective potential. Existing solutions often rely on learning-free methods or pretrained models to laboriously generate pseudo masks, triggering Dice constraint subsequently. In this paper, we found that a model guided by the simplest box-filled masks can accurately predict polyp locations/sizes, but suffers from shape collapsing. In response, we propose two innovative learning fashions, Improved Box-dice (IBox) and Contrastive Latent-Anchors (CLA), and combine them to train a robust box-supervised model IBoxCLA. The core idea behind IBoxCLA is to decouple the learning of location/size and shape, allowing for focused constraints on each of them. Specifically, IBox transforms the segmentation map into a proxy map using shape decoupling and confusion-region swapping sequentially. Within the proxy map, shapes are disentangled, while locations/sizes are encoded as box-like responses. By constraining the proxy map instead of the raw prediction, the box-filled mask can well supervise IBoxCLA without misleading its shape learning. Furthermore, CLA contributes to shape learning by generating two types of latent anchors, which are learned and updated using momentum and segmented polyps to steadily represent polyp and background features. The latent anchors facilitate IBoxCLA to capture discriminative features within and outside boxes in a contrastive manner, yielding clearer boundaries. We benchmark IBoxCLA on five public polyp datasets. The experimental results demonstrate the competitive performance of IBoxCLA compared to recent fully-supervised polyp segmentation methods, and its superiority over other box-supervised state-of-the-arts with a relative increase of overall mDice and mIoU by at least 6.5% and 7.5%, respectively.

EAR-Net: Pursuing End-to-End Absolute Rotations from Multi-View Images

Yuzhen Liu, Qiulei Dong — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2310.10051v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Absolute rotation estimation is an important topic in 3D computer vision. Existing works in literature generally employ a multi-stage (at least two-stage) estimation strategy where multiple independent operations (feature matching, two-view rotation estimation, and rotation averaging) are implemented sequentially. However, such a multi-stage strategy inevitably leads to the accumulation of the errors caused by each involved operation, and degrades its final estimation on global rotations accordingly. To address this problem, we propose an End-to-end method for estimating Absolution Rotations from multi-view images based on deep neural Networks, called EAR-Net. The proposed EAR-Net consists of an epipolar confidence graph construction module and a confidence-aware rotation averaging module. The epipolar confidence graph construction module is explored to simultaneously predict pairwise relative rotations among the input images and their corresponding confidences, resulting in a weighted graph (called epipolar confidence graph). Based on this graph, the confidence-aware rotation averaging module, which is differentiable, is explored to predict the absolute rotations. Thanks to the introduced confidences of the relative rotations, the proposed EAR-Net could effectively handle outlier cases. Experimental results on three public datasets demonstrate that EAR-Net outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by a large margin in terms of accuracy and speed.

Fairness and Incentive Compatibility via Percentage Fees

Shahar Dobzinski, Sigal Oren, Jan Vondrak — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2402.14173v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study incentive-compatible mechanisms that maximize the Nash Social Welfare. Since traditional incentive-compatible mechanisms cannot maximize the Nash Social Welfare even approximately, we propose changing the traditional model. Inspired by a widely used charging method (e.g., royalties, a lawyer that charges some percentage of possible future compensation), we suggest charging the players some percentage of their value of the outcome. We call this model the percentage fee model. We show that there is a mechanism that maximizes exactly the Nash Social Welfare in every setting with non-negative valuations. Moreover, we prove an analog of Roberts theorem that essentially says that if the valuations are non-negative, then the only implementable social choice functions are those that maximize weighted variants of the Nash Social Welfare. We develop polynomial time incentive compatible approximation algorithms for the Nash Social Welfare with subadditive valuations and prove some hardness results.

Nonparametric Steady-State Learning for Nonlinear Output Feedback Regulation

Shimin Wang, Martin Guay, Richard D. Braatz — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2402.16170v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This article addresses the nonparametric and robust output regulation problem of the general nonlinear output feedback system with error output. The global robust output regulation problem for a class of general output feedback nonlinear systems with an uncertain exosystem and high relative degree can be tackled by constructing a linear generic internal model, provided that a continuous nonlinear mapping exists. Leveraging the proposed nonadaptive framework facilitates the conversion of the nonlinear robust output regulation problem into a robust nonadaptive stabilization formulation for the augmented system endowed with Input-to-State Stable dynamics. This approach removes the need for constructing a specific Lyapunov function with positive semidefinite derivatives and avoids the common assumption of linear parameterization of the nonlinear system. The nonadaptive approach is extended by incorporating the nonparametric learning framework to ensure the feasibility of the nonlinear mapping, which can be tackled using a data-driven method. Moreover, the introduced nonparametric learning framework allows the controlled system to learn the dynamics of the steady-state input behavior from the signal generated from the internal model with the output error as the feedback. As a result, the nonparametric approach can be advantageous to guarantee the convergence of the estimation and tracking error even when the underlying controlled system dynamics are complex or poorly understood. The effectiveness of the theoretical results is illustrated for three practical examples: regulation of a magnetic levitation system, regulation of a virtual synchronous generator, and heading control of a surface vessel.

Saving the legacy of Hero Ibash: Evaluating Four Language Models for Aminoacian

Yunze Xiao, Yiyang Pan — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2402.18121v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This study assesses four cutting-edge language models in the underexplored Aminoacian language. Through evaluation, it scrutinizes their adaptability, effectiveness, and limitations in text generation, semantic coherence, and contextual understanding. Uncovering insights into these models' performance in a low-resourced language, this research pioneers pathways to bridge linguistic gaps. By offering benchmarks and understanding challenges, it lays groundwork for future advancements in natural language processing, aiming to elevate the applicability of language models in similar linguistic landscapes, marking a significant step toward inclusivity and progress in language technology.

Denoising Monte Carlo Renders with Diffusion Models

Vaibhav Vavilala, Rahul Vasanth, David Forsyth — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2404.00491v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Physically-based renderings contain Monte Carlo noise, with variance that increases as the number of rays per pixel decreases. This noise, while zero-mean for good modern renderers, can have heavy tails (most notably, for scenes containing specular or refractive objects). Learned methods for restoring low fidelity renders are highly developed, because suppressing render noise means one can save compute and use fast renders with few rays per pixel. We demonstrate that a diffusion model can denoise low fidelity renders successfully. Furthermore, our method can be conditioned on a variety of natural render information, and this conditioning helps performance. Quantitative experiments show that our method is competitive with SOTA across a range of sampling rates. Qualitative examination of the reconstructions suggests that the image prior applied by a diffusion method strongly favors reconstructions that are like real images -- so have straight shadow boundaries, curved specularities and no fireflies.

CRATOR: a Dark Web Crawler

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2405.06356v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Dark web crawling is a complex process that involves specific methodologies and techniques to navigate the Tor network and extract data from hidden services. This study proposes a general dark web crawler designed to extract pages handling security protocols, such as captchas, efficiently. Our approach uses a combination of seed URL lists, link analysis, and scanning to discover new content. We also incorporate methods for user-agent rotation and proxy usage to maintain anonymity and avoid detection. We evaluate the effectiveness of our crawler using metrics such as coverage, performance and robustness. Our results demonstrate that our crawler effectively extracts pages handling security protocols while maintaining anonymity and avoiding detection. Our proposed dark web crawler can be used for various applications, including threat intelligence, cybersecurity, and online investigations.

9/7-Approximation for Two-Edge-Connectivity and Two-Vertex-Connectivity

Ali \c{C}ivril — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2407.10526v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We provide algorithms for the minimum 2-edge-connected spanning subgraph problem and the minimum 2-vertex-connected spanning subgraph problem with approximation ratio $\frac{9}{7}$. This improves upon a recent algorithm with ratio slightly smaller than $\frac{4}{3}$ for 2-edge-connectivity, and another one with ratio $\frac{4}{3}$ for 2-vertex-connectivity.

The equational theory of the Weihrauch lattice with (iterated) composition

C\'ecilia Pradic — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2408.14999v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the equational theory of the Weihrauch lattice with composition and iteration, meaning the collection of equations between terms built from variables, the lattice operations $\sqcup,\sqcap$, the composition operator $\star$ and its iteration $(-)^\diamond$, which are true however we substitute (partial) Weihrauch degrees for the variables. We characterize them using B\"uchi games on finite graphs and give a complete axiomatization that derives them. The term signature and the axiomatization are reminiscent of Kleene algebras, except that we additionally have meets and the lattice operations do not fully distribute over composition. The game characterization gives a variant of the notion of simulation for alternating automata. It also implies that it is decidable whether an equation is universally valid. We give some complexity bounds; in particular, the problem is PSPACE-hard in general and we conjecture that it is solvable in PSPACE. We expect that the axiomatizations and games can also be applicable as-is to characterize the existence of strong natural transformation between polynomial functor expressions.

MEDIC: Comprehensive Evaluation of Leading Indicators for LLM Safety and Utility in Clinical Applications

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2409.07314v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve superhuman performance on standardized medical licensing exams, these static benchmarks have become saturated and increasingly disconnected from the functional requirements of clinical workflows. To bridge the gap between theoretical capability and verified utility, we introduce MEDIC, a comprehensive evaluation framework establishing leading indicators of clinical LLM competence across five dimensions. These upfront indicators reveal cross-benchmark capability gaps, such as the divergence between static knowledge retrieval and functional execution, that inform model selection before costly deployment-based evaluation. Beyond standard question-answering, we assess operational capabilities using deterministic execution protocols and a novel Cross-Examination Framework (CEF), which quantifies information fidelity and hallucination rates without reliance on reference texts. Our evaluation across a heterogeneous task suite exposes critical performance trade-offs: we identify a significant knowledge-execution gap, where proficiency in static retrieval does not predict success in operational tasks such as clinical calculation or SQL generation. Furthermore, we observe a divergence between passive safety (refusal) and active safety (error detection), revealing that models fine-tuned for high refusal rates often fail to reliably audit clinical documentation for factual accuracy. These findings demonstrate that no single architecture dominates across all dimensions, highlighting the necessity of a portfolio approach to clinical model deployment. We accompany this work with a publicly available MEDIC leaderboard at https://hf.co/spaces/m42-health/MEDIC-Benchmark.

Survival of the Cheapest: Cost-Aware Hardware Adaptation for Adversarial Robustness

Charles Meyers, Mohammad Reza Saleh Sedghpour, Tommy L\"ofstedt, Erik Elmroth — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2409.07609v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deploying adversarially robust machine learning systems requires continuous trade-offs between robustness, cost, and latency. We present an autonomic decision-support framework providing a quantitative foundation for adaptive hardware selection and hyper-parameter tuning in cloud-native deep learning. The framework applies accelerated failure time (AFT) models to quantify the effect of hardware choice, batch size, epochs, and validation accuracy on model survival time. This framework can be naturally integrated into an autonomic control loop (monitor--analyse--plan--execute, MAPE-K), where system metrics such as cost, robustness, and latency are continuously evaluated and used to adapt model configurations and hardware selection. Experiments across three GPU architectures confirm the framework is both sound and cost-effective: the Nvidia L4 yields a 20% increase in adversarial survival time while costing 75% less than the V100, demonstrating that expensive hardware does not necessarily improve robustness. The analysis further reveals that model inference latency is a stronger predictor of adversarial robustness than training time or hardware configuration.

Efficient Uniform Negative Edge Weights

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2410.22717v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider a maximum entropy edge weight model that allows for negative weights. Given a graph $G$ and possible weights $\mathcal{W}$ typically consisting of positive and negative values, the model selects edge weights $w \in \mathcal{W}^m$ uniformly at random from all weights that do not introduce a negative cycle. We propose an MCMC process and show that it converges to the required distribution. We then engineer an implementation of the process using a dynamic version of Johnson's algorithm in connection with a bidirectional Dijkstra search as well as an innovative resampling method. We empirically study the performance characteristics of these novel sampling algorithms as well as the output produced by the model.

Soft-TransFormers for Continual Learning

Haeyong Kang, Chang D. Yoo — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2411.16073v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Inspired by the Well-initialized Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (WLTH), we introduce Soft-TransFormers (Soft-TF), a continual learning framework that adapts a frozen pre-trained Transformer through task-specific soft subnetworks: real-valued multiplicative masks over the query, key, value, and output projections of selected self-attention layers. The masks are initialized at one, so optimization starts exactly at the pre-trained solution, and mask-space gradient descent is intrinsically biased toward modulating the backbone's dominant pathways; we prove that, under standard convex-Lipschitz assumptions, both the convergence rate and the parameter drift of mask-only fine-tuning are controlled by the distance from the pre-trained weights to a task-optimal configuration. This bounded drift yields two properties. Since the backbone and per-task masks are never overwritten, forgetting is structurally eliminated. And since every task subnetwork stays near the shared pre-trained solution, a wrong mask still evaluates a near-generalist function, so task-inference errors are largely harmless and class-incremental accuracy is decoupled from task-inference reliability. As a plug-in, Soft-TF couples with L2P, DualPrompt, HiDe-Prompt, and NoRGa, selecting masks by task-key matching, an entropy-gradient criterion, or a learned task-identity classifier. Across class-incremental learning benchmarks -- Split-CIFAR100, Split-ImageNet-R, CUB-200, and 5-Datasets -- Soft-TF consistently outperforms prompt-based, adapter-based, and LoRA-style baselines at comparable trainable-parameter budgets, while keeping inference cost identical to the unmodified backbone.

Fast randomized Kronecker tensor decomposition: algorithms and error analysis

Salman Ahmadi-Asl, Naeim Rezaeian, Andre L. F. de Almeida, Yipeng Liu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2412.02597v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper proposes fast randomized algorithms for computing the Kronecker Tensor Decomposition (KTD) by replacing the sequence of deterministic SVDs in the TTr1SVD framework with randomized SVDs incorporating oversampling and power iterations. The proposed algorithms can decompose a given tensor into the KTD format significantly faster than existing state-of-the-art deterministic methods. Our principal idea is to use randomization to reduce computational complexity while maintaining controlled accuracy. A detailed theoretical analysis is presented, including a recursive error bound that accounts for error propagation through the TTr1SVD tree structure. We prove that the expected Frobenius norm error is bounded by a sum of tail energies multiplied by factors that decay exponentially with the number of power iterations. Extensive simulations on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate several orders of magnitude acceleration compared to the deterministic approach, with applications to tensor completion, video/image compression, image denoising, and image super-resolution.

FedCod: An Efficient Communication Protocol for Cross-Silo Federated Learning with Coding

Peishen Yan, Jun Li, Hao Wang, Tao Song, Yang Hua, Lu Peng, Haibing Guan — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2501.00216v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) is an innovative distributed machine learning paradigm that enables multiple parties to collaboratively train a model without sharing their raw data, thereby preserving data privacy. Communication efficiency concerns arise in cross-silo FL, particularly due to the network heterogeneity and fluctuations associated with geo-distributed silos. Most existing solutions to these problems focus on algorithmic improvements that alter the FL algorithm but sacrificing the training performance. How to address these problems from a network perspective that is decoupled from the FL algorithm remains an open challenge. In this paper, we propose FedCod, a new application layer communication protocol designed for cross-silo FL. FedCod transparently utilizes a coding mechanism to enhance the efficient use of idle bandwidth through client-to-client communication, and dynamically adjusts coding redundancy to mitigate network bottlenecks and fluctuations, thereby improving the communication efficiency and accelerating the training process. In our real-world experiments, FedCod demonstrates a significant reduction in average communication time by up to 62% compared to the baseline, while maintaining FL training performance and optimizing inter-client communication traffic.

XCOMPS: A Multilingual Benchmark of Conceptual Minimal Pairs

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2502.19737v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce XCOMPS in this work, a multilingual conceptual minimal pair dataset covering 17 languages. Using this dataset, we evaluate LLMs' multilingual conceptual understanding through metalinguistic prompting, direct probability measurement, and neurolinguistic probing. By comparing base, instruction-tuned, and knowledge-distilled models, we find that: 1) LLMs exhibit weaker conceptual understanding for low-resource languages, and accuracy varies across languages despite being tested on the same concept sets. 2) LLMs excel at distinguishing concept-property pairs that are visibly different but exhibit a marked performance drop when negative pairs share subtle semantic similarities. 3) Instruction tuning improves performance in concept understanding but does not enhance internal competence; knowledge distillation can enhance internal competence in conceptual understanding for low-resource languages with limited gains in explicit task performance. 4) More morphologically complex languages yield lower concept understanding scores and require deeper layers for conceptual reasoning.

MonadBFT: Fast, Responsive, Fork-Resistant Streamlined Consensus

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2502.20692v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper introduces MonadBFT, a novel Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocol that advances both performance and robustness. MonadBFT is implemented as the consensus protocol in the Monad blockchain. As a HotStuff-family protocol, MonadBFT has linear message complexity in the common case and is optimistically responsive, operating as quickly as the network allows. A central feature of MonadBFT is its tail-forking resistance. In pipelined BFT protocols, when a leader goes offline, the previous proposal is abandoned. Malicious leaders can exploit this tail-forking behavior as a form of Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) attack by deliberately discarding their predecessor's block, depriving that proposer of rewards and enabling transaction reordering, censorship or theft. MonadBFT prevents such tail-forking attacks, preserving both fairness and integrity in transaction execution. Another related feature of MonadBFT is its notion of speculative finality, which enables parties to execute ordered transactions after a single round (i.e., a single view), with reverts occurring only in the rare case of provable leader equivocation. This mechanism reduces user-perceived latency. Additionally, we introduce the leader fault isolation property, which ensures that the protocol can quickly recover from a failure. To our knowledge, no prior pipelined, leader-based BFT consensus protocol combines all of these properties in a single design.

A Self-Supervised Framework for Space Object Behaviour Characterisation

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2504.06176v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Foundation Models, which leverage large neural networks pre-trained on unlabelled data before fine-tuning for specific tasks, are increasingly being applied to specialised domains. Recent examples include ClimaX for climate and Clay for satellite Earth observation, but a Foundation Model for Space Object Behavioural Analysis has not yet been developed. As orbital populations grow, automated methods for characterising space object behaviour are crucial for space safety. Here, we present a self-supervised framework for space object behavioural analysis, representing a first step towards a Foundation Model for SOBA. The backbone is a Perceiver-Variational Autoencoder (VAE) architecture, pre-trained with self-supervised reconstruction and masked reconstruction on ~227,000 light curves from the MMT-9 observatory. The VAE enables anomaly detection, motion prediction, and synthetic light curve generation. We fine-tuned the model using two independent light curve simulators (CASSANDRA and GRIAL), with CAD models of boxwing, Sentinel-3, SMOS, and Starlink platforms. Our pre-trained model achieved a reconstruction mean squared error of 0.0012, identifying potentially anomalous light curves through reconstruction difficulty. After fine-tuning, the model scored 85% and 82% accuracy, with 0.92 and 0.95 ROC AUC scores in anomaly detection and motion mode prediction (e.g., sun-pointing, spin, tumbling). Analysis of high-confidence predictions on real data revealed distinct patterns including characteristic object profiles and satellite glinting. Our work demonstrates how self-supervised learning can simultaneously enable anomaly detection, motion prediction, and synthetic data generation from rich pre-trained representations, supporting space safety and sustainability through automated monitoring and simulation.

Parameter-Efficient Continual Fine-Tuning: A Survey

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2504.13822v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The emergence of large pre-trained networks has revolutionized the AI field, unlocking new possibilities and achieving unprecedented performance. However, these models inherit a fundamental limitation from traditional Machine Learning approaches: their strong dependence on the \textit{i.i.d.} assumption hinders their adaptability to dynamic learning scenarios. We believe the next breakthrough in AI lies in enabling efficient adaptation to evolving environments -- such as the real world -- where new data and tasks arrive sequentially. This challenge defines the field of Continual Learning (CL), a Machine Learning paradigm focused on developing lifelong learning neural models. One alternative to efficiently adapt these large-scale models is known Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT). These methods tackle the issue of adapting the model to a particular data or scenario by performing small and efficient modifications, achieving similar performance to full fine-tuning. However, these techniques still lack the ability to adjust the model to multiple tasks continually, as they suffer from the issue of Catastrophic Forgetting. In this survey, we first provide an overview of CL algorithms and PEFT methods before reviewing the state-of-the-art on Parameter-Efficient Continual Fine-Tuning (PECFT). We examine various approaches, discuss evaluation metrics, and explore potential future research directions. Our goal is to highlight the synergy between CL and Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning, guide researchers in this field, and pave the way for novel future research directions.

Concurrency Testing in the Linux Kernel via eBPF

Jiacheng Xu, Dylan Wolff, Xing Yi Han, Jialin Li, Abhik Roychoudhury — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2504.21394v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Concurrency is indispensable for modern software systems to meet performance and scalability demands, yet concurrency bugs remain notoriously difficult to detect and reproduce. Controlled Concurrency Testing (CCT) mitigates this challenge by systematically exploring thread interleavings through scheduling control. However, existing CCT approaches for OS kernels largely rely on external enforcement mechanisms, such as custom hypervisors or invasive kernel patches, resulting in substantial overhead and limited maintainability and extensibility. In this work, we present SECT, the first kernel-native concurrency fuzzing framework that rethinks scheduling as a first-class exploration mechanism. SECT introduces a novel CCT scheduler with temporal isolation scheduling and embeds programmable scheduling policies directly into the kernel dispatch path via eBPF, enabling fine-grained control over thread interleavings without customized hypervisors or extensive kernel core modification. In addition, SECT provides a preemption-safe instrumentation mechanism for injecting scheduling points at critical kernel events and incorporates a two-phase fuzzing workflow to jointly explore both sequential and concurrent behaviors. Our evaluation demonstrates that SECT achieves 38% more branches, 57% overhead reduction and 11.4$\times$ speed-up in bug exposure compared to a leading state-of-the-art kernel concurrency fuzzer. Moreover, SECT discovers eight previously unknown concurrency-related bugs in the Linux kernel, six of which have already been confirmed and fixed by developers.

Topology-Driven Clustering: Enhancing Performance with Betti Number Filtration

Arghya Pratihar, Kushal Bose, Swagatam Das — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2505.04346v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Clustering aims at partitioning data points into groups of similar objects without knowing about the class labels. However, clustering datasets with complex geometric structures, such as nonconvex shapes, multiple scales, or intertwined manifolds, remains challenging for traditional algorithms that primarily rely on Euclidean or kernel-based similarity measures. Topological Data Analysis (TDA), particularly persistent homology, provides a powerful framework for capturing intrinsic structural properties of data, including connected components, loops, and higher-dimensional features across multiple scales. In this work, we propose a novel topological clustering algorithm called \textbf{Betti Number Filtration-based Topological Clustering (BFTC)}. The proposed method constructs local Vietoris-Rips filtrations around each data point and computes Betti numbers up to a prescribed dimension. These Betti numbers across filtration scales form \emph{Betti sequences}, which serve as multiscale topological signatures of local neighborhoods. By comparing Betti sequences among neighboring points, BFTC identifies topologically similar neighbors and refines the neighborhood graph to construct a topology-aware similarity structure and spectral clustering is applied to obtain the final clusters. Experimental results on several synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that BFTC effectively clusters complex and intertwined structures and consistently outperforms several state-of-the-art topology-based clustering methods.

Potential failures of physics-informed machine learning in traffic flow modeling: theoretical and experimental analysis

Yuan-Zheng Lei, Yaobang Gong, Dianwei Chen, Yao Cheng, Xianfeng Terry Yang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2505.11491v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This study investigates why physics-informed machine learning (PIML) can fail in macroscopic traffic flow modeling. We define failure as cases where a PIML model underperforms both purely data-driven and purely physics-based baselines by a given threshold. Unlike in other fields, physics residuals themselves do not hinder optimization in this setting. Instead, effective updates require both data and physics gradients to form acute angles with the true gradient, a condition difficult to satisfy with low-resolution loop data. In such cases, neural networks cannot accurately approximate density and speed, and the constructed physics residuals, already degraded by discrete sampling and temporal averaging, lose their ability to capture PDE dynamics, which directly leads to PIML failure. Theoretically, although LWR and ARZ solutions are weak solutions, for piecewise $C^k$ initial data they remain $C^k$ off the shock set under mild conditions, which has Lebesgue measure zero. Thus, almost all detector or collocation points lie in smooth regions where residuals are valid, and the MLP's inability to exactly represent discontinuities is immaterial. Finally, we establish MSE lower bounds of physics residuals: higher-order models such as ARZ have strictly larger consistency error bounds than LWR under mild conditions. This explains why LWR-based PIML can outperform ARZ-based PIML even with high-resolution data, with the gap shrinking as resolution increases, consistent with prior empirical findings.

GSPRec: On Improving Item Representations in Graph Signal Processing for Collaborative Filtering

Ahmad Bin Rabiah, Julian McAuley — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2505.11552v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Graph-based collaborative filtering methods act as low-pass filters in the spectral domain and discard the intermediate-frequency components where community-level user preferences reside. Existing GSP-based methods address the loss through sophisticated filter designs, yet derive item representations from the user-item interaction matrix alone. The interaction matrix captures which items each user interacted with, but not which items appear close together in users' interaction sequences. We propose GSPRec, a graph spectral collaborative filtering framework that produces richer item spectral representations by incorporating item-item proximity derived from user interaction ordering before spectral filtering. GSPRec derives item-item edges from user interaction ordering and strengthens the edges through multi-hop diffusion with exponential decay. The unified graph topology incorporates the diffused edges alongside user-item interactions. The resulting Laplacian exposes intermediate-frequency structure that a Gaussian bandpass filter selectively amplifies. A low-pass filter retains broad popularity trends. Experiments on four real-world datasets show that GSPRec outperforms all graph CF baselines, with average improvements of 5.12% in NDCG@10. Ablation studies establish that graph construction and filter design are coupled. GSPRec without the bandpass filter falls below every GSP baseline, whereas GSPRec without item-item proximity still surpasses baselines.

Minimal History-Deterministic Co-B\"uchi Automata: Congruences and Passive Learning

Christof L\"oding, Igor Walukiewicz — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2505.14304v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Abu Radi and Kupferman (2019) demonstrated the efficient minimization of history-deterministic (transition-based) co-B\"uchi automata, building on the results of Kuperberg and Skrzypczak (2015). We give a congruence-based description of these minimal automata, and a self-contained proof of its correctness. We use this description based on congruences to create a passive learning algorithm that can learn minimal history-deterministic co-B\"uchi automata from a set of labeled example words. The algorithm runs in polynomial time on a given set of examples, and there is a characteristic set of examples of polynomial size for each minimal history-deterministic co-B\"uchi automaton.

Chi-Square Wavelet Graph Neural Networks for Heterogeneous Graph Anomaly Detection

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2505.18934v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Graph Anomaly Detection (GAD) in heterogeneous networks presents unique challenges due to node and edge heterogeneity. Existing Graph Neural Network (GNN) methods primarily focus on homogeneous GAD and thus fail to address three key issues: (C1) Capturing abnormal signal and rich semantics across diverse meta-paths; (C2) Retaining high-frequency content in HIN dimension alignment; and (C3) Learning effectively from difficult anomaly samples with class imbalance. To overcome these, we propose ChiGAD, a spectral GNN framework based on a novel Chi-Square filter, inspired by the wavelet effectiveness in diverse domains. Specifically, ChiGAD consists of: (1) Multi-Graph Chi-Square Filter, which captures anomalous information via applying dedicated Chi-Square filters to each meta-path graph; (2) Interactive Meta-Graph Convolution, which aligns features while preserving high-frequency information and incorporates heterogeneous messages by a unified Chi-Square Filter; and (3) Contribution-Informed Cross-Entropy Loss, which prioritizes difficult anomalies to address class imbalance. Extensive experiments on public and industrial datasets show that ChiGAD outperforms state-of-the-art models on multiple metrics. Additionally, its homogeneous variant, ChiGNN, excels on seven GAD datasets, validating the effectiveness of Chi-Square filters. Our code is available at https://github.com/HsipingLi/ChiGAD.

ScienceMeter: Tracking Scientific Knowledge Updates in Language Models

Yike Wang, Shangbin Feng, Yulia Tsvetkov, Hannaneh Hajishirzi — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2505.24302v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to support scientific research, but their knowledge of scientific advancements can quickly become outdated. We introduce ScienceMeter, a new framework for evaluating scientific knowledge update methods over scientific knowledge spanning the past, present, and future. ScienceMeter defines three metrics: knowledge preservation, the extent to which models' understanding of previously learned papers is preserved; knowledge acquisition, how well scientific claims from newly introduced papers are acquired; and knowledge projection, the ability of the updated model to anticipate or generalize to related scientific claims that may emerge in the future. Using ScienceMeter, we evaluate the scientific knowledge of LLMs through claim judgment and generation tasks on a curated dataset across ten domains. We evaluate five representative knowledge update approaches and find that the best-performing knowledge update methods can preserve only 85.9% of existing knowledge, acquire 71.7% of new knowledge, and project 37.7% of future knowledge, underscoring that developing robust scientific knowledge update mechanisms is both crucial and challenging.

How Benchmark Prediction from Fewer Data Misses the Mark

Guanhua Zhang, Florian E. Dorner, Moritz Hardt — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2506.07673v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language model (LLM) evaluation is increasingly costly, prompting interest in methods that speed up evaluation by shrinking benchmark datasets. Benchmark prediction (also called efficient LLM evaluation) aims to select a small subset of evaluation points and predict overall benchmark performance from that subset. In this paper, we systematically assess the strengths and limitations of 11 benchmark prediction methods across 19 diverse benchmarks. First, we identify a highly competitive baseline: Take a random sample and fit a regression model on the sample to predict missing entries. Outperforming most existing methods, this baseline challenges the assumption that careful subset selection is necessary for benchmark prediction. Second, we discover that all existing methods crucially depend on model similarity. They work best when interpolating scores among similar models. The effectiveness of benchmark prediction sharply declines when new models have higher accuracy than previously seen models. In this setting of extrapolation, none of the previous methods consistently beat a simple average over random samples. To improve over the sample average, we introduce a new method inspired by augmented inverse propensity weighting. This method consistently outperforms the random sample average even for extrapolation. However, its performance still relies on model similarity and the gains are modest in general. This shows that benchmark prediction fails just when it is most needed: at the evaluation frontier, where the goal is to evaluate new models of unknown capabilities.

PoseIDON: 6DoF Pose Estimation with Foundation Model Features for Marine Sediment Burial Mapping

Jerry Yan, Chinmay Talegaonkar, Nicholas Antipa, Eric Terrill, Sophia Merrifield — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2506.10386v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The burial state of anthropogenic objects on the seafloor provides insight into localized sedimentation dynamics and is also critical for assessing ecological risks, potential pollutant transport, and the viability of recovery or mitigation strategies for hazardous materials such as munitions. Accurate burial depth estimation from remote imagery remains difficult due to partial occlusion, poor visibility, and object degradation. This work introduces a computer vision pipeline, called PoseIDON, which combines deep foundation model features with multiview photogrammetry to estimate six degrees of freedom object pose and the orientation of the surrounding seafloor from ROV video. Burial depth is inferred by aligning CAD models of the objects with observed imagery and fitting a local planar approximation of the seafloor. The method is validated using footage of 54 objects, including barrels and munitions, recorded at a historic ocean dumpsite in the San Pedro Basin. The model achieves a mean burial depth error of approximately 10 centimeters and resolves spatial burial patterns that reflect underlying sediment transport processes. This approach enables scalable, non-invasive mapping of seafloor burial and supports environmental assessment at contaminated sites.

FormGym: Doing Paperwork with Agents

Matthew Toles, Rattandeep Singh, Isaac Song, Zhou Yu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2506.14079v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Completing paperwork is a challenging and time-consuming problem. Form filling is especially challenging in the pure-image domain without access to OCR, typeset PDF text, or a DOM. For computer agents, it requires multiple abilities, including multi-modal understanding, information retrieval, and tool-use. We present a novel form-filling benchmark consisting of 432 fields spread across 55 documents and 3 tasks, requiring knowledge of 236 features per user. We find that baseline VLAs achieve less than 1% accuracy in most cases, primarily due to poor localization ability. GUI agents also struggle, scoring between 10.6-68.0% despite high cost and latency. Therefore, we also contribute FieldFinder, a tool to assist LLMs in identifying where to place text on a form. With FieldFinder, all models achieve equal or better performance in all six study conditions, with a maximum increase from 2% to 56%.

Unified numerical analysis for thermoelastic diffusion and thermo-poroelasticity of thin plates

Neela Nataraj, Ricardo Ruiz-Baier, Aamir Yousuf — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2506.14455v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate a coupled hyperbolic-parabolic system modeling thermoelastic diffusion (resp. thermo-poroelasticity) in plates, consisting of a fourth-order hyperbolic partial differential equation for plate deflection and two second-order parabolic partial differential equations for the first moments of temperature and chemical potential (resp. pore pressure). The unique solvability of the system is established via Galerkin approach, and the additional regularity of the solution is obtained under appropriately strengthened data. For numerical approximation, we employ the Newmark method for time discretization of the hyperbolic term and a continuous interior penalty scheme for the spatial discretization of displacement. For the parabolic equations that represent the first moments of temperature and chemical potential (resp. pore pressure), we use the Crank--Nicolson method for time discretization and conforming finite elements for spatial discretization. The convergence of the fully discrete scheme with quasi-optimal rates in space and time is established. The numerical experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the 2D Kirchhoff--Love plate model in capturing thermoelastic diffusion and thermo-poroelastic behavior in specific materials. We illustrate that as plate thickness decreases, the two-dimensional simulations closely approximate the results of three-dimensional problem. Finally, the numerical experiments also validate the theoretical rates of convergence.

Learning, Reasoning, Refinement: A Framework for Kahneman's Dual-System Intelligence in GUI Agents

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2506.17913v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents have made significant progress in automating digital tasks through the utilization of computer vision and language models. Nevertheless, existing agent systems encounter notable limitations. Firstly, they predominantly depend on trial and error decision making rather than progressive reasoning, thereby lacking the capability to learn and adapt from interactive encounters. Secondly, these systems are assessed using overly simplistic single step accuracy metrics, which do not adequately reflect the intricate nature of real world GUI interactions. In this paper, we present CogniGUI, a cognitive framework developed to overcome these limitations by enabling adaptive learning for GUI automation resembling human-like behavior. Inspired by Kahneman's Dual Process Theory, our approach combines two main components: (1) an omni parser engine that conducts immediate hierarchical parsing of GUI elements through quick visual semantic analysis to identify actionable components, and (2) a Group based Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) grounding agent that assesses multiple interaction paths using a unique relative reward system, promoting minimal and efficient operational routes. This dual-system design facilitates iterative ''exploration learning mastery'' cycles, enabling the agent to enhance its strategies over time based on accumulated experience. Moreover, to assess the generalization and adaptability of agent systems, we introduce ScreenSeek, a comprehensive benchmark that includes multi application navigation, dynamic state transitions, and cross interface coherence, which are often overlooked challenges in current benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that CogniGUI surpasses state-of-the-art methods in both the current GUI grounding benchmarks and our newly proposed benchmark.

TReB: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Table Reasoning Capabilities of Large Language Models

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2506.18421v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The majority of data in businesses and industries is stored in tables, databases, and data warehouses. Reasoning with table-structured data poses significant challenges for large language models (LLMs) due to its hidden semantics, inherent complexity, and structured nature. One of these challenges is lacking an effective evaluation benchmark fairly reflecting the performances of LLMs on broad table reasoning abilities. In this paper, we fill in this gap by presenting a comprehensive table reasoning benchmark, TReB. Firstly, we propose a taxonomy to systematically measure both shallow table understanding abilities and deep table reasoning abilities, covering a total of 26 sub-tasks. We then construct a high quality dataset through a dedicated data processing and synthesis procedure. Based on these well-constructed samples, we design an evaluation framework to robustly measure table reasoning capabilities with three distinct inference modes. Experimental results with our data and framework reveal that existing LLMs still have significant room for improvement in addressing the complex and real world table related tasks. Both the dataset and evaluation framework are publicly available, with the dataset hosted on https://huggingface.co/datasets/JT-LM/JIUTIAN-TReB, and the framework on https://github.com/JT-LM/jiutian-treb.

Can Interpretation Predict Behavior on Unseen Data?

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2507.06445v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Interpretability research often predicts model responses to targeted mechanistic interventions. But can we predict responses to unseen input data? We propose and demonstrate this alternate objective by using model internals to predict their out-of-distribution (OOD) behavior. We train hundreds of Transformers on simple synthetic tasks, where perfect in-distribution accuracy is compatible with multiple OOD generalization rules. We successfully use attention patterns -- observed only on in-distribution data -- to predict which rule each model follows on OOD data. Our experiments decouple the mechanistic faithfulness of our interpretation from its predictive value; ablations reveal such internal patterns can suppress rather than support the rule they predict, showing observational analysis can forecast behavior even when causal analysis fails to support a simple cause-effect link. Our findings are a proof-of-concept for a new interpretability objective: understanding model internals to predict behavior and assess reliability under distribution shift.

Faster Algorithms for $(2k-1)$-Stretch Distance Oracles

Avi Kadria, Liam Roditty — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2507.06721v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Let $G=(V, E)$ be an undirected $n$-vertices $m$-edges graph with non-negative edge weights. In this paper, we present three new algorithms for constructing a $(2k-1)$-stretch distance oracle with $O(n^{1+\frac{1}{k}})$ space. The first algorithm runs in $\Ot(\max(n^{1+2/k}, m^{1-\frac{1}{k-1}}n^{\frac{2}{k-1}}))$ time, and improves upon the $\Ot(\min(mn^{\frac{1}{k}},n^2))$ time of Thorup and Zwick [STOC 2001, JACM 2005] and Baswana and Kavitha [FOCS 2006, SICOMP 2010], for every $k > 2$ and $m=\Omega(n^{1+\frac{1}{k}+\eps})$. This yields the first truly subquadratic time construction for every $2 < k < 6$, and nearly resolves the open problem posed by Wulff-Nilsen [SODA 2012] on the existence of such constructions. The two other algorithms have a running time of the form $\Ot(m+n^{1+f(k)})$, which is near linear in $m$ if $m=\Omega(n^{1+f(k)})$, and therefore optimal in such graphs. One algorithm runs in $\Ot(m+n^{\frac32+\frac{3}{4k-6}})$-time, which improves upon the $\Ot(n^2)$-time algorithm of Baswana and Kavitha [FOCS 2006, SICOMP 2010], for $3 < k < 6$, and upon the $\Ot(m+n^{\frac{3}{2}+\frac{2}{k}+O(k^{-2})})$-time algorithm of Wulff-Nilsen [SODA 2012], for every $k\geq 6$. This is the first linear time algorithm for constructing a $7$-stretch distance oracle and a $9$-stretch distance oracle, for graphs with truly subquadratic density.\footnote{with $m=n^{2-\eps}$ for some $\eps > 0$.} The other algorithm runs in $\Ot(\sqrt{k}m+kn^{1+\frac{2\sqrt{2}}{\sqrt{k}}})$ time, (and hence relevant only for $k\ge 16$), and improves upon the $\Ot(\sqrt{k}m+kn^{1+\frac{2\sqrt{6}}{\sqrt{k}}+O(k^{-1})})$ time algorithm of Wulff-Nilsen [SODA 2012] (which is relevant only for $k\ge 96$). ...

Great X: A Unified Multi-Modal Simulator Bridging the Sim2Real Gap for 6G

Yuan Gao, Kongwu Huang, Jun Jiang, Shiyi Mu, Shugong Xu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2507.08716v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large-scale, precisely synchronized multi-modal datasets are critical for data-driven sixth-generation (6G) wireless research, yet real-world collection remains costly and difficult. Existing multi-platform simulators often suffer from timing misalignment, limited modality support, and simplified scene and material modeling, which reduce fidelity and enlarge the simulation-to-reality (Sim2Real) gap. We propose Great-X, a unified single-engine simulator implemented in Unreal Engine. Great-X integrates native ray tracing with co-located visual and electromagnetic material properties on shared 3D meshes, enabling pixel-level consistency between radio and visual outputs. A deterministic fixed-step clock and synchronous buffering provide frame-accurate alignment across CSI, RGB, depth, LiDAR, radar, and event data. Based on this framework, we construct Great-MCD, containing over three million synchronized samples across urban and rural environments, day and night conditions, multiple UAV types, and diverse trajectories. Experiments show that Great-X generates channel impulse responses consistent with real measurements and provides transferable data for wireless positioning and CSI feedback, outperforming existing simulators and measured-data baselines in both zero-shot and fine-tuned settings.

Evaluating Uncertainty and Quality of Visual Language Action-enabled Robots

Pablo Valle, Chengjie Lu, Shaukat Ali, Aitor Arrieta — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2507.17049v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA)-enabled robots integrate visual perception, natural language understanding, and action planning to interpret their environment, comprehend instructions, and perform embodied tasks autonomously. Such robots are typically evaluated through task success rates, i.e., whether a robot performs its intended task, which are commonly used as test oracles for evaluating such robots. Such an evaluation fails to capture the quality of task execution and the robot's confidence in its decisions. In this paper, we adapt eight uncertainty metrics and five quality metrics specifically designed for VLA-enabled robotic manipulation tasks. We assess their effectiveness through a large-scale empirical study involving 908 successful task executions from three state-of-the-art VLA models across four representative robotic manipulation tasks and two robot embodiments. Human domain experts manually labeled task quality, enabling us to analyze the correlation between our proposed metrics and expert judgments, serving as a human oracle for testing such robots. The results reveal that several metrics show moderate to strong correlation with human assessments, highlighting their utility for evaluating task quality and model confidence. Furthermore, we found that some metrics can discriminate between high-, medium-, and low-quality executions from unsuccessful tasks, which is useful when test oracles are absent. Our findings challenge the adequacy of current evaluation practices that rely solely on binary success rates and pave the way for improved real-time monitoring and adaptive enhancement of VLA-enabled robots.

FedS2R: One-Shot Federated Domain Generalization for Synthetic-to-Real Semantic Segmentation in Autonomous Driving

Tao Lian, Jose L. G\'omez, Antonio M. L\'opez — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2507.19881v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated domain generalization has shown promising progress in image classification by enabling collaborative training across multiple clients without sharing raw data. However, its potential in the semantic segmentation of autonomous driving remains underexplored. In this paper, we propose FedS2R, the first one-shot federated domain generalization framework for synthetic-to-real semantic segmentation in autonomous driving. FedS2R comprises two components: an inconsistency-driven data augmentation strategy that generates images for unstable classes, and a multi-client knowledge distillation scheme with feature fusion that distills a global model from multiple client models. Experiments on five real-world datasets, Cityscapes, BDD100K, Mapillary, IDD, and ACDC, show that the global model significantly outperforms individual client models and is only 2 mIoU points behind the model trained with simultaneous access to all client data. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of FedS2R in synthetic-to-real semantic segmentation for autonomous driving under federated learning

Assistax: A Multi-Agent Hardware-Accelerated Reinforcement Learning Benchmark for Assistive Robotics

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2507.21638v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As embodied autonomous systems capable of assisting humans in daily activities remain a major goal for robotics, efficient and appropriate reinforcement learning (RL) simulation testbeds are increasingly important. Many common RL environments are too simple to provide insight into complex robotics domains, and many robotics simulations have throughput too low for RL. Very few simulators target multi-agent interactions: most treat the robot as an isolated agent, yet real-world tasks such as home assistance and caretaking are inherently multi-agent. Assistax addresses these limitations by providing a high-throughput, scalable suite of GPU-accelerated assistive robotics tasks built on JAX and MuJoCo-MJX, and includes an active humanoid agent as a simulated human partner, trainable alongside the robot using multi-agent RL (MARL). Beyond its use as a MARL benchmark, we formulate the human-robot interaction as an Ad-Hoc Teamwork (AHT) problem, where the robot's policy must generalise to unseen humans with varying disabilities and preferences. To this end, we provide an extensive AHT benchmarking pipeline: we use MARL to pre-train a diverse population of humanoid partners, and evaluate robot policies' ability to coordinate with a withheld set of humanoid policies. In contrast to other benchmarks, we also release reactive MARL-pre-trained humanoid policies via Hugging Face, enabling faster iteration in AHT research. With hardware acceleration, Assistax achieves up to 412$\times$ faster open-loop simulation than comparable CPU-based environments on a single GPU. Our AHT pipeline reveals a coordination gap for existing RL algorithms on unseen partners with novel preference combinations. This RL-native test suite for embodied multi-agent interaction provides a practical benchmark for advancing RL in assistive care. Code is available at: https://github.com/assistive-autonomy/assistax.

Node-as-Agent: Graph Agentic Network

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2508.00429v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved remarkable success in graph-based learning by propagating information among neighbor nodes via predefined aggregation mechanisms. However, such fixed schemes often suffer from two key limitations. First, they cannot handle the imbalance in node informativeness -- some nodes are rich in information, while others remain sparse. Second, predefined message passing primarily leverages local structural similarity while ignoring global semantic relationships across the graph, limiting the model's ability to capture distant but relevant information. We propose Retrieval-augmented Graph Agentic Network (ReaGAN), an agent-based framework that empowers each node with autonomous, node-level decision-making. Each node acts as an agent that independently plans its next action based on its internal memory, enabling node-level planning and adaptive message propagation. Additionally, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) allows nodes to access semantically relevant content and build global relationships in the graph. ReaGAN achieves competitive performance under few-shot in-context settings using a frozen LLM backbone without fine-tuning, showcasing the potential of agentic planning and local-global retrieval in graph learning.

PrivAR: Client-Side Privacy Framework for Real-Time Location-Based Augmented Reality

Shafizur Rahman Seeam, Ye Zheng, Zhengxiong Li, Yidan Hu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2508.02551v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Location-based augmented reality (LB-AR) applications, such as Pokemon Go, rely on sub-second GPS updates to deliver responsive and immersive user experiences. However, this high-frequency location reporting introduces serious privacy risks. Unlike traditional Location-Based Services (LBS), LB-AR demands real-time protection under strict latency and quality-of-service (QoS) constraints, while providing strong per-location and trajectory-level privacy guarantees. Existing privacy mechanisms struggle to satisfy these requirements: they either introduce prohibitive latency, significantly degrade application utility, or fail to defend against trajectory inference attacks. To address this challenge, we present PrivAR, the first client-side privacy framework for real-time LB-AR. PrivAR introduces two lightweight mechanisms: (i) Planar Staircase Mechanism (PSM), which uses a staircase-shaped distribution to generate noisy locations with strong per-location privacy, low expected distortion, and minimal computational overhead; and (ii) Planar Staircase Mechanism with Intermediate (PSM-I), an extension of PSM that generates a device-resident intermediate trajectory and selectively reuses previously perturbed outputs when insufficient drift is observed, thereby strengthening trace-level privacy while preserving high QoS. We provide theoretical analysis, extensive evaluation on two public mobility datasets and our GeoTrace dataset, and validate PrivAR in a Pokemon GO-style Android prototype. Results show that PrivAR improves AR QoS (game score) by up to 50% and increases attacker Bayes risk by up to 1.8x, while incurring only 0.06 ms of per-update overhead (less than 0.2% of end-to-end latency).

Onboarding Without Forgetting: Hypernetwork Personalization with Data-Free Replay for Personalized Federated Learning

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2508.05157v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative training across distributed clients without sharing raw data, offering strong privacy benefits. However, most methods assume all clients remain available throughout training, which is unrealistic as new clients often join over time. We study this setting, where the task and label space stay fixed but clients arrive in batches. Our analysis reveals two key challenges: updating the shared model only with new clients harms existing clients, while freezing it protects them but blocks gains from new knowledge. To capture these trade-offs, we introduce Proactive Adaptation (PA) for onboarding gains and Retroactive Improvement (RI) for changes in earlier clients without retraining. We then propose pFedDSH, which combines a central hypernetwork for personalized initialization, batch-specific binary masks for capacity preservation and allocation, and server-side data-free replay to propagate improvements without exposing client data. Experiments show that pFedDSH preserves stability for existing clients while keeping communication and adaptation costs unchanged for new clients.

Evaluating Style-Personalized Text Generation: Challenges and Directions

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2508.06374v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: With the surge of large language models (LLMs) and their ability to produce customized output, style-personalized text generation--"write like me"--has become a rapidly growing area of interest. However, style personalization is highly specific, relative to every user, and depends strongly on the pragmatic context, which makes it uniquely challenging. Although prior research has introduced benchmarks and metrics for this area, they tend to be non-standardized and have known limitations (e.g., poor correlation with human subjects). LLMs have been found to not capture author-specific style well, it follows that the metrics themselves must be scrutinized carefully. In this work we critically examine the effectiveness of the most common metrics used in the field, such as BLEU, embeddings, and LLMs-as-judges. We evaluate these metrics using our proposed style discrimination benchmark, which spans eight diverse writing tasks across three evaluation settings: domain discrimination, authorship attribution, and LLM-generated personalized vs non-personalized discrimination. We find strong evidence that employing ensembles of diverse evaluation metrics consistently outperforms single-evaluator methods, and conclude by providing guidance on how to reliably assess style-personalized text generation.

Towards Full Candidate Interaction: A Comprehensive Comparison Network for Better Route Recommendation

Hanyu Guo, Chao Chen, Longfei Xu, Chengzhang Wang, Kaikui Liu, Xiangxiang Chu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2508.08745v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We argue that the decision-making essence of route recommendation is comparative judgment: users choose a route because it is better than alternatives in specific aspects. The decision-critical information resides in segment-level spatial differences of non-overlapping parts between routes, which is irreversibly lost through item-level feature aggregation. Existing methods, whether attention-based or pairwise ranking approaches, follow an item-first paradigm that can only infer pairwise relations indirectly from individual route representations. To address this, we propose the Comprehensive Comparison Network (CCN), which inverts the information flow by constructing explicit comparison features from non-overlapping segments between route pairs and reasoning directly in the pairwise space. CCN introduces a Comprehensive Comparison Block that enables context-aware pairwise reasoning, where the comparison between two routes is informed by how both compare against all other candidates. We further develop an interpretable Pair Scoring Network that decomposes pairwise preferences into independent physical fields, providing field-level explanations for route selection. CCN has served as the production ranking model in Amap for over two years, achieving 85.70% offline route-trajectory coverage rate and +1.2% online improvement over the previous production model. We also release a large-scale route recommendation dataset comprising 175 million users, 512 million samples, and 6 billion routes across 370 cities.

DiffAxE: Diffusion-driven Hardware Accelerator Generation and Design Space Exploration

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2508.10303v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Design space exploration (DSE) is critical for developing optimized hardware architectures, especially for AI workloads such as deep neural networks (DNNs) and large language models (LLMs), which require specialized acceleration. As model complexity grows, accelerator design spaces have expanded to O(10^17), becoming highly irregular, non-convex, and exhibiting many-to-one mappings from design configurations to performance metrics. This complexity renders direct inverse derivation infeasible and necessitates heuristic or sampling-based optimization. Conventional methods - including Bayesian optimization, gradient descent, reinforcement learning, and genetic algorithms - depend on iterative sampling, resulting in long runtimes and sensitivity to initialization. Deep learning-based approaches have reframed DSE as classification using recommendation models, but remain limited to small-scale (O(10^3)), less complex design spaces. To overcome these constraints, we propose a generative approach that models hardware design as 1-D image synthesis conditioned on target performance, enabling efficient learning of non-differentiable, non-bijective hardware-performance mappings. Our framework achieves 0.86% lower generation error than Bayesian optimization with a 17000x speedup, and outperforms GANDSE with 30% lower error at only 1.83x slower search. We further extend the method to a structured DSE setting, attaining 9.8% lower energy-delay product (EDP) and 6% higher performance, with up to 145.6x and 1312x faster search compared to existing optimization methods on O(10^17) design spaces. For LLM inference, our method achieves 3.37x and 7.75x lower EDP on a 32nm ASIC and Xilinx Ultrascale+ VPU13 FPGA, respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art DOSA framework.

HERAKLES: Hierarchical Skill Compilation for Open-ended LLM Agents

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2508.14751v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study goal-conditioned reinforcement learning in partially observable environments with sparse rewards and large, structured goal spaces. In such settings, complex goals often require composing simpler skills, but learning these compositions efficiently remains challenging. This difficulty is particularly relevant in open-ended exploration settings, where agents are exposed to increasingly complex goals over time and must continuously expand and reorganize their skill repertoire. We assume the goal space admits prerequisite relations, enabling latent decomposition of tasks into subgoals, and leverage language to represent and reason over these goals. To exploit this structure, we propose HERAKLES, a hierarchical agent that jointly learns a high-level LLM policy and a low-level controller. The high-level policy selects subgoals among those the low-level can reliably achieve, while the low-level executes them and progressively compiles successful behaviors into reusable skills. Both policies are trained concurrently: the high-level guides exploration and structures behavior, while the low-level distills trajectories into efficient goal-conditioned skills. As training progresses, more goals become directly executable, enabling scalable skill composition. This results in a hybrid system combining planning and execution, improving efficiency and adaptation in open-ended, compositional environments.

RoboInspector: Unveiling the Unreliability of Policy Code for LLM-enabled Robotic Manipulation

Chenduo Ying, Linkang Du, Peng Cheng, Yuanchao Shu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2508.21378v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities in reasoning and code generation, enabling robotic manipulation to be initiated with just a single instruction. The LLM carries out various tasks by generating policy code required to control the robot. Despite advances in LLMs, achieving reliable policy code generation remains a significant challenge due to the diverse requirements of real-world tasks and the inherent complexity of user instructions. In practice, different users may provide distinct instructions to drive the robot for the same task, which may cause the unreliability of policy code generation. To bridge this gap, we design \textbf{RoboInspector}, a pipeline to unveil and characterize the unreliability of the policy code for LLM-enabled robotic manipulation from two perspectives: the complexity of the manipulation task and the granularity of the instruction. We perform comprehensive experiments with 216 distinct combinations of tasks, instructions, and LLMs in two prominent frameworks. The \textbf{RoboInspector} identifies four main unreliable behaviors that lead to manipulation failure. We provide a detailed characterization of these behaviors and their underlying causes, giving insight for practical development to reduce unreliability. Furthermore, we introduce a refinement approach guided by failure policy code feedback that improves the reliability of policy code generation by up to 35\% in LLM-enabled robotic manipulation, evaluated in both simulation and real-world environments.

Finite-Agent Stochastic Differential Games on Large Graphs: II. Graph-Based Architectures

Ruimeng Hu, Jihao Long, Haosheng Zhou — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2509.12484v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a novel neural network architecture, called Non-Trainable Modification (NTM), for computing Nash equilibria in stochastic differential games (SDGs) on graphs. These games model a broad class of graph-structured multi-agent systems arising in finance, robotics, energy, and social dynamics, where agents interact locally under uncertainty. The NTM architecture imposes a graph-guided sparsification on feedforward neural networks, embedding fixed, non-trainable components aligned with the underlying graph topology. This design enhances interpretability and stability, while significantly reducing the number of trainable parameters in large-scale, sparse settings. We theoretically establish a universal approximation property for NTM in static games on graphs and numerically validate its expressivity and robustness through supervised learning tasks. Building on this foundation, we incorporate NTM into two state-of-the-art game solvers, Direct Parameterization and Deep BSDE (backward stochastic differential equation), yielding their sparse variants (NTM-DP and NTM-DBSDE). Numerical experiments on three SDGs across various graph structures demonstrate that NTM-based methods achieve performance comparable to their fully trainable counterparts, while offering improved computational efficiency.

A Grey Literature Review of AI-Native Applications

Lingli Cao, Shanshan Li, Ying Fan, Danyang Li, Chenxing Zhong — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2509.13144v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Background: The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has given rise to AI-native applications, a new paradigm in software engineering that fundamentally redefines how software is designed, developed, and evolved. Despite their growing prominence, AI-native applications still lack a unified engineering definition and architectural blueprint, leaving practitioners without systematic guidance for system design, quality assurance, and technology selection. Objective: This study seeks to establish a comprehensive understanding of AI-native applications by identifying their defining characteristics, key quality attributes, and typical technology stacks, as well as by clarifying the opportunities and challenges they present. Method: We conducted a grey literature review, integrating conceptual perspectives retrieved from targeted Google and Bing searches with practical insights derived from leading open-source projects on GitHub. A structured protocol encompassing source selection, quality assessment, and thematic analysis was applied to synthesize findings across heterogeneous sources. Results: We finally identified 106 studies based on the selection criteria. The analysis reveals that AI-native applications are distinguished by two core pillars: the central role of AI as the system's intelligence paradigm and their inherently probabilistic, non-deterministic nature. Critical quality attributes include reliability, usability, performance efficiency, and AI-specific observability. In addition, a typical technology stack has begun to emerge, comprising LLM orchestration frameworks, vector databases, and AI-native observability platforms. These systems emphasize response quality, cost-effectiveness, and outcome predictability, setting them apart from conventional software systems. Conclusion: This study is the first to propose a dual-layered engineering blueprint...

Discrete Empirical Interpolation Method with Upper and Lower Bound Constraints

Louisa B. Ebby, Mohammad Farazmand — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2509.16018v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Discrete Empirical Interpolation Method (DEIM) is a simple and effective method for reconstructing a function from its incomplete pointwise observations. However, applying DEIM to functions with physically constrained ranges can produce reconstructions with values outside the prescribed physical bounds. Such physically constrained quantities occur routinely in applications, e.g., mass density whose range is nonnegative. The DEIM reconstructions which violate these physical constraints are not usable in downstream tasks such as forecasting and control. To address this issue, we develop Constrained DEIM (C-DEIM) whose reconstructions are guaranteed to respect the physical bounds of the quantity of interest. C-DEIM enforces the bounds as soft constraints, in the form of a carefully designed penalty term, added to the underlying least squares problem. We prove that the C-DEIM reconstructions satisfy the physical constraints asymptotically, i.e., as the penalty parameter increases towards infinity. We also derive a quantitative upper bound for the observation residual of C-DEIM. Based on these theoretical results, we devise an efficient algorithm for practical implementation of C-DEIM. The efficacy of the method and the accompanying algorithm are demonstrated on several examples, including a heat transfer problem from fluid dynamics and a cellular automaton model of wildfire spread.

Pain in 3D: Generating Controllable Synthetic Faces for Automated Pain Assessment

Xin Lei Lin, Soroush Mehraban, Abhishek Moturu, Babak Taati — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2509.16727v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Automated pain assessment from facial expressions is crucial for non-communicative patient. Progress has been limited by two challenges: (i) existing datasets exhibit severe demographic and label imbalance due to ethical constraints, and (ii) current generative models cannot precisely control facial action units (AUs), facial structure, or clinically validated pain levels. We introduce 3DPain, a large-scale synthetic dataset designed to overcome data scarcity in automated pain assessment. Comprising 82,500 frames across 2,500 unique identities, 3DPain offers extensive heterogeneity in facial pain responses across demographic groups balanced by age, gender, and ethnicity. Our three-stage framework samples diverse 3D meshes, textures them with diffusion models, and applies AU-driven face rigging to synthesize multi-view faces with paired neutral/pain images, facial action units, PSPI scores, and pain-region heatmaps. We further introduce ViTPain, a Vision Transformer based framework leveraging cross-attention with a neutral reference face to achieve identityaware pain estimation. Together, 3DPain and ViTPain establish a controllable, diverse, and clinically grounded foundation for generalizable automated pain assessment.

Budgeted Indirect Adversarial Attack on Graph-Based Anomaly Detection in Sensor Networks

Sanju Xaviar, Omid Ardakanian — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2509.17987v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as powerful models for anomaly detection in sensor networks, particularly when analyzing multivariate time series. In this work, we introduce BETA, a novel indirect evasion attack targeting such GNN-based detectors, where the attacker is constrained to perturb sensor readings from a limited set of nodes, excluding the target sensor, with the goal of either suppressing a true anomaly or triggering a false alarm at the target node. BETA uses a graph explanatory model combined with a centrality-based pruning strategy to identify the most influential nodes, subsequently injecting carefully crafted adversarial perturbations into their features. Extensive experiments on three real-world sensor network datasets show that BETA consistently outperforms baseline attack strategies while operating under realistic constraints, reducing the F1-score of state-of-the-art GNN-based detectors by 36.07 to 50.45\% on average.

Multi-Agent Inverted Transformer for Flight Trajectory Prediction

Seokbin Yoon, Keumjin Lee — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2509.21004v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Flight trajectory prediction for multiple aircraft is essential and provides critical insights into how aircraft navigate within current air traffic flows. However, predicting multi-agent flight trajectories is inherently challenging. One of the major difficulties is modeling both the individual aircraft behaviors over time and the complex interactions between flights. Generating explainable prediction outcomes is also a challenge. Therefore, we propose a Multi-Agent Inverted Transformer, MAIFormer, as a novel neural architecture that predicts multi-agent flight trajectories. The proposed framework features two key attention modules: (i) masked multivariate attention, which captures spatio-temporal patterns of individual aircraft, and (ii) agent attention, which models the social patterns among multiple agents in complex air traffic scenes. We evaluated MAIFormer using a real-world automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast flight trajectory dataset from the terminal airspace of Incheon International Airport in South Korea. The experimental results show that MAIFormer achieves the best performance across multiple metrics and outperforms other methods. In addition, MAIFormer produces prediction outcomes that are interpretable from a human perspective, which improves both the transparency of the model and its practical utility in air traffic control.

The Express Lane to Spam and Centralization: An Empirical Analysis of Arbitrum's Timeboost

Johnnatan Messias, Christof Ferreira Torres — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2509.22143v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: DeFi applications are vulnerable to MEV, where specialized actors profit by reordering or inserting transactions. To mitigate latency races and internalize MEV revenue, Arbitrum introduced Timeboost, an auction-based transaction sequencing mechanism that grants short-term priority access to an express lane. In this paper we present the first large-scale empirical study of Timeboost, analyzing over 48.5 million express lane transactions and 494 thousand auctions between January 2026 and April 2026. Our results reveal five main findings. First, express lane control is highly centralized, with three entities winning 99.74% of auctions. Second, while express lane access provides earlier inclusion, profitable MEV opportunities cluster at the end of blocks, limiting the value of priority access. Third, approximately 30% of time-boosted transactions are reverted, indicating that the Timeboost does not effectively mitigate spam. Fourth, secondary markets for reselling express lane rights experience difficulties in sustaining themselves due to poor execution reliability and unsustainable economics. Finally, auction competition declined over time, leading to steadily reduced revenue for the Arbitrum DAO. Taken together, these findings show that Timeboost fails to deliver on its stated goals of fairness, decentralization, and spam reduction. Instead, it reinforces collusion and narrows adoption, highlighting the limitations of auction-based ordering as a mechanism for fair transaction sequencing in rollups.

Uncertainty-Aware Multi-Robot Task Allocation With Strongly Coupled Inter-Robot Rewards

Ben Rossano, Jaein Lim, Jonathan P. How — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2509.22469v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Allocating tasks to heterogeneous robot teams in environments with uncertain task requirements is a fundamentally challenging problem. Redundantly assigning multiple robots to such tasks is overly conservative, while purely reactive strategies risk costly delays in task completion when the uncertain capabilities become necessary. This paper introduces an auction-based task allocation algorithm that explicitly models task requirement uncertainty, leveraging a novel strongly coupled formulation to allocate tasks such that robots with potentially required capabilities are naturally positioned near uncertain tasks. This approach enables robots to remain productive on nearby tasks while simultaneously mitigating large delays in completion time when their capabilities are required. Through a set of simulated disaster relief missions with task deadline constraints, we demonstrate that the proposed approach yields up to a 15% increase in expected mission value compared to redundancy-based methods. Furthermore, we propose a novel framework to approximate uncertainty arising from unmodeled changes in task requirements by leveraging the natural delay between encountering unexpected environmental conditions and confirming whether additional capabilities are required to complete a task. We show that our approach achieves up to an 18% increase in expected mission value using this framework compared to reactive methods that do not leverage this delay.

Guard Vector: Beyond English LLM Guardrails with Task-Vector Composition and Streaming-Aware Prefix SFT

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2509.23381v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce Guard Vector, a safety task vector computed as the parameter difference between a guardrail model (Guard Model) and a same-architecture pretrained language model. Composing this vector with a target language model yields a Target Guard Model (TGM). We then adapt TGM with a streaming-aware approach that combines prefix-based training and evaluation with a classifier that produces a single-token output. With this composition alone, TGM improves classification quality over established Guard Models across standard safety suites and enables language extensibility to Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, requiring neither additional training nor target language labels for this composition step. It also demonstrates model portability across two widely used public guardrail backbones, Llama and Gemma. With prefix SFT (supervised fine-tuning), TGM preserves classification quality under streaming by aligning the behavior between prefix inputs and full-text inputs. The single-token output design increases throughput and reduces latency. Together, these components reduce data and compute requirements while promoting streaming-aware evaluation practices, thereby contributing to a more responsible AI ecosystem.

Learning Encoding-Decoding Direction Pairs to Unveil Concepts of Influence in Deep Vision Networks

Alexandros Doumanoglou, Kurt Driessens, Dimitrios Zarpalas — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2509.23926v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Empirical evidence shows that deep vision networks often represent concepts as directions in latent space with concept information written along directional components in the vector representation of the input. However, the mechanism to encode (write) and decode (read) concept information to and from vector representations is not directly accessible as it constitutes a latent mechanism that naturally emerges from the training process of the network. Recovering this mechanism unlocks significant potential to open the black-box nature of deep networks, enabling understanding, debugging, and improving deep learning models. In this work, we propose an unsupervised method to recover this mechanism. For each concept, we explain that under the hypothesis of linear concept representations, this mechanism can be implemented with the help of two directions: the first facilitating encoding of concept information and the second facilitating decoding. Unlike prior matrix decomposition, autoencoder, or dictionary learning methods that rely on feature reconstruction, we propose a new perspective: decoding directions are identified via directional clustering of activations, and encoding directions are estimated with signal vectors under a probabilistic view. We further leverage network weights through a novel technique, Uncertainty Region Alignment, which reveals interpretable directions affecting predictions. Our analysis shows that (a) on synthetic data, our method recovers ground-truth direction pairs; (b) on real data, decoding directions map to monosemantic, interpretable concepts and outperform unsupervised baselines; and (c) signal vectors faithfully estimate encoding directions, validated via activation maximization. Finally, we demonstrate applications in understanding global model behavior, explaining individual predictions, and intervening to produce counterfactuals or correct errors.

Hyperdimensional Probe: Decoding LLM Representations via Vector Symbolic Architectures

Marco Bronzini, Carlo Nicolini, Bruno Lepri, Jacopo Staiano, Andrea Passerini — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2509.25045v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Despite their capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) remain opaque with limited understanding of their internal representations. Current interpretability methods either focus on input-oriented feature extraction, such as supervised probes and Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs), or on output distribution inspection, such as logit-oriented approaches. A full understanding of LLM vector spaces, however, requires integrating both perspectives, something existing approaches struggle with due to constraints on latent feature definitions. We introduce the Hyperdimensional Probe, a hybrid supervised probe that combines symbolic representations with neural probing. Leveraging Vector Symbolic Architectures (VSAs) and hypervector algebra, it unifies prior methods: the top-down interpretability of supervised probes, SAE's sparsity-driven proxy space, and output-oriented logit investigation. By combining the supervised learning paradigm of traditional probes with the dictionary-based representation principle of SAEs, our approach enables deeper input-focused feature extraction while supporting output-oriented analysis. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach consistently extracts meaningful semantic information across different LLMs, embedding sizes, and configurations, uncovering concept-oriented insights into LLM inference across two distinct scenarios: input-completion tasks and QA-focused text generation. VSA-based probing overcomes the limitations of logit-based analyses, which are constrained by the model's token vocabulary, while also mitigating the noisier interpretability outcomes often produced by SAEs in settings with a bounded conceptual feature space. By supporting a joint investigation of input-output features, this work advances the semantic understanding of neural representations while unifying the complementary perspectives of prior methods.

AIM-CoT: Active Information-driven Multimodal Chain-of-Thought for Vision-Language Reasoning

Xiping Li, Jianghong Ma — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2509.25699v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Interleaved-Modal Chain-of-Thought (I-MCoT) advances vision-language reasoning, such as Visual Question Answering (VQA). This paradigm integrates specially selected visual evidence from the input image into the context of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), enabling them to ground their reasoning logic in these details. Accordingly, the efficacy of an I-MCoT framework relies on identifying what to see (evidence selection) and when to see it (triggering of insertions). However, existing methods fall short in both aspects. First, for selection, they rely on attention signals, which are unreliable -- particularly under severe granularity imbalance between the brief textual query and the informative image. Second, for triggering, they adopt static triggers, which fail to capture the VLMs' dynamic needs for visual evidence. To this end, we propose a novel I-MCoT framework, Active Information-driven Multi-modal Chain-of-Thought (AIM-CoT), which aims to improve both evidence selection and insertion triggering via: (1) Context-enhanced Attention-map Generation (CAG) to mitigate granularity imbalance via textual context enhancement; (2) Active Visual Probing (AVP) to proactively select the most informative evidence via an information foraging process; and (3) Dynamic Attention-shift Trigger (DAT) to precisely activate insertions when VLM's attention shifts from text to visual context. Experiments across three benchmarks and four backbones demonstrate AIM-CoT's consistent superiority. Our code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/AIMCoT.

TacRefineNet: Goal-Conditioned Tactile Grasp Refinement for Edge-Prominent Objects

Shuaijun Wang, Haoran Zhou, Diyun Xiang, Yangwei You — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2509.25746v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate final grasp alignment remains challenging for edge-prominent objects such as thin plates, discs, and rods, whose sparse contacts are easily occluded and poorly resolved by depth sensing. We present TacRefineNet, a tactile-only, goal-conditioned framework for local refinement along tactilely observable pose dimensions. Given current and target multi-finger tactile images and their corresponding hand-joint configurations, a Siamese policy network directly predicts corrective wrist pose increments. The hand iteratively opens, moves, and regrasps, forming an external-dexterity tactile servoing loop. Cross-combination training pairs current and target samples, allowing targets within the sampled pose range to be specified without retraining. We collect 156,007 simulated samples from 15 plates, discs, and rods and train the policy entirely in MuJoCo before zero-shot deployment to an 11-DoF five-fingered hand with piezoresistive sensors. On seen objects, the real system achieves 80.7\% and 59.3\% success under the $10^\circ$/10\,mm criterion for fixed and random targets, respectively; after five steps, the mean errors are approximately 5.2\,mm and $3.5^\circ$. Experiments further show continuous correction under long-horizon perturbations and limited within-category transfer to unseen objects, with reduced performance for symmetric or weakly discriminative contacts. Project website is available at https://sites.google.com/view/tacrefinenet

Breaking the MoE LLM Trilemma: Dynamic Expert Clustering with Structured Compression

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2510.02345v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Large Language Models (LLMs) face a trilemma of load imbalance, parameter redundancy, and communication overhead. We introduce a unified framework based on dynamic expert clustering and structured compression to address these issues cohesively. Our method employs an online clustering procedure that periodically regroups experts using a fused metric of parameter and activation similarity, which stabilizes expert utilization. To our knowledge, this is one of the first frameworks to leverage the semantic embedding capability of the router to dynamically reconfigure the model's architecture during training for substantial efficiency gains. Within each cluster, we decompose expert weights into a shared base matrix and extremely low-rank residual adapters, achieving up to fivefold parameter reduction per group while preserving specialization. This structure enables a two-stage hierarchical routing strategy: tokens are first assigned to a cluster, then to specific experts within it, drastically reducing the routing search space and the volume of all-to-all communication. Furthermore, a heterogeneous precision scheme, which stores shared bases in FP16 and residual factors in INT4, coupled with dynamic offloading of inactive clusters, reduces peak memory consumption to levels comparable to dense models. Evaluated on GLUE and WikiText-103, our framework matches the quality of standard MoE models while reducing total parameters by approximately 80%, improving throughput by 10% to 20%, and lowering expert load variance by a factor of over three. Our work demonstrates that structural reorganization is a principled path toward scalable, efficient, and memory-effective MoE LLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/szdtzpj/Breaking_the_moe_trilemma

Kontinuous Kontext: Continuous Strength Control for Instruction-based Image Editing

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2510.08532v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Instruction-based image editing offers a powerful and intuitive way to manipulate images through natural language. Yet, relying solely on text instructions limits fine-grained control over the extent of edits. We introduce Kontinuous Kontext, an instruction-driven editing model that provides a new dimension of control over edit strength, enabling users to adjust edits gradually from no change to a fully realized result in a smooth and continuous manner. Kontinuous Kontext extends a state-of-the-art image editing model to accept an additional input, a scalar edit strength which is then paired with the edit instruction, enabling explicit control over the extent of the edit. To inject this scalar information, we train a lightweight projector network that maps the input scalar and the edit instruction to coefficients in the model's modulation space. For training our model, we synthesize a diverse dataset of image-edit-instruction-strength quadruplets using existing generative models, followed by a filtering stage to ensure quality and consistency. Kontinuous Kontext provides a unified approach for fine-grained control over edit strength for instruction driven editing from subtle to strong across diverse operations such as stylization, attribute, material, background, and shape changes, without requiring attribute-specific training.

Forward and backward error bounds for a mixed precision preconditioned conjugate gradient algorithm

Thomas Bake, Erin Carson, Yuxin Ma — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2510.11379v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG) algorithm is one of the most popular algorithms for solving large-scale linear systems $Ax = b$, where $A$ is a symmetric positive definite matrix. Rather than computing residuals directly, it updates the residual vectors recursively. Current analyses of the conjugate gradient (CG) algorithm in finite precision typically assume that the norm of the recursively updated residual goes orders of magnitude below the machine precision, focusing mainly on bounding the residual gap thereafter. This work introduces a framework for the PCG algorithm and provides rigorous proofs that the relative backward and forward errors of the computed results of PCG can reach the levels $O(u)$ and $O(u)\kappa(A)^{1/2}$, respectively, after a sufficient number of iterations without relying on an assumption concerning the norm of the recursively updated residual, where $u$ represents the unit roundoff and $\kappa(A)$ is the condition number of $A$. Our PCG framework further shows that applying preconditioners in low precision does not compromise the accuracy of the final results, provided that reasonable conditions are satisfied. Moreover, this framework introduces a new split PCG variant that improves upon the classical split PCG algorithm when the left preconditioner is applied in low precision. Our theoretical results are illustrated through a set of numerical experiments.

SENTINEL: A Multi-Level Formal Framework for Safety Evaluation of Foundation Model-based Embodied Agents

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2510.12985v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present SENTINEL, a framework for formally evaluating the physical safety of foundation model (FM)-based embodied agents. SENTINEL is the first to provide multi-level safety evaluation across semantic interpretation, plan generation, and physical execution within a unified formal framework. Unlike prior methods that rely on heuristic rules or subjective FM judgments, SENTINEL grounds practical safety requirements in formal temporal logic (TL) semantics that can precisely specify state invariants, temporal dependencies, and timing constraints. It employs a multi-level verification pipeline where (i) at the semantic level, intuitive natural language safety requirements are formalized into TL formulas and the agent's understanding of these requirements is probed for alignment with the TL formulas; (ii) at the plan level, high-level action plans and subgoals generated by the agent are verified against the TL formulas to detect unsafe plans before execution; and (iii) at the trajectory level, multiple execution trajectories are merged into a computation tree and efficiently verified against physically-detailed TL specifications for a final safety check. We apply SENTINEL in VirtualHome and AI2-THOR, and formally evaluate multiple FM-based embodied agents against diverse safety requirements. Our experiments show that by grounding physical safety in temporal logic and applying verification methods across multiple levels, SENTINEL provides a rigorous foundation for systematically evaluating the safety of FM-based embodied agents in simulation-based physical environments, and can effectively expose potential safety violations in interpreting, planning, and executing the tasks.

SHUFFLESPARSE: Learned Shuffles for Structured Sparse Networks

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2510.14812v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Structured weight sparsity accelerates training and inference on modern GPUs, but it trails unstructured dynamic sparse training (DST) in accuracy especially at extreme sparsity. We pinpoint the reason for this difference in performance to a lack of expressivity: a dense layer can implement any pattern of non-zero weights, whereas structured patterns are restricted to only a small set of weight configurations. We introduce SHUFFLESPARSE, a single permutation primitive that applies uniformly across DST-from-scratch and one-shot pruning, and across N:M, block etc. We close most of this gap by learning a single permutation matrix jointly with the structured weight matrix. When used on three different types of structures (block, N:M, and diagonal), SHUFFLESPARSE is able to reduce the structured-vs-unstructured accuracy gap on ViT-B16 (ImageNet-1K) and GPT-2 (WikiText-103) at 90-95% sparsity, while adding minimal inference overhead (< 8.7% inference overhead) and preserving any training acceleration the host structure provides. The same permutation formulation transfers to one-shot 2:4 pruning of pretrained LLMs, where it improves zero-shot accuracy by 4.6 points on LLaMA-2 7B. Together, these results establish learned permutations as a general tool for recovering unstructured-level accuracy from structured sparsity patterns.

Beyond-Diagonal RIS Under Non-Idealities: Learning-Based Architecture Discovery and Optimization

Binggui Zhou, Bruno Clerckx — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2510.15701v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Beyond-diagonal reconfigurable intelligent surface (BD-RIS) has recently been introduced to enable advanced control over electromagnetic waves to further increase the benefits of traditional RIS in enhancing signal quality and improving spectral and energy efficiency for next-generation wireless networks. A significant issue in designing and deploying BD-RIS is the tradeoff between its performance and circuit complexity. While existing studies have explored optimal architectures to minimize circuit complexity in ideal BD-RIS, architecture discovery for non-ideal BD-RIS remains uninvestigated. Consequently, how non-idealities and circuit complexity jointly affect the performance of BD-RIS remains unclear, making it difficult to achieve the performance-circuit complexity tradeoff in the presence of non-idealities. Essentially, architecture discovery for non-ideal BD-RIS faces challenges from both the computational complexity of global architecture search and the difficulty in achieving global optima. To tackle these challenges, we propose a learning-based two-tier architecture discovery framework (LTTADF) consisting of an architecture generator and a performance optimizer to jointly discover optimal architectures for non-ideal BD-RIS given specific circuit complexities, which can effectively explore over a large architecture space while avoiding getting trapped in poor local optima and thus achieving near-optimal solutions for the performance optimization. Numerical results provide valuable insights for deploying non-ideal BD-RIS considering the performance-circuit complexity tradeoff.

Data Reliability Scoring

Yiling Chen, Shi Feng, Paul Kattuman, Fang-Yi Yu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2510.17085v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: How can we assess the reliability of a dataset without access to ground truth? We introduce the problem of reliability scoring for datasets collected from potentially strategic sources. The true data are unobserved, but we see outcomes of an unknown statistical experiment that depends on them. To benchmark reliability, we define ground-truth-based orderings that capture how much reported data deviate from the truth. We then propose the Gram determinant score, which measures the volume spanned by vectors describing the empirical distribution of the observed data and experiment outcomes. We show that this score preserves several ground-truth-based reliability orderings and, uniquely up to scaling, yields the same reliability ranking of datasets regardless of the experimen -- a property we term experiment agnosticism. Experiments on synthetic noise models, CIFAR-10 embeddings, and real employment data demonstrate that the Gram determinant score effectively captures data quality across diverse observation processes.

Learning to Make Friends: Coaching LLM Agents toward Emergent Social Ties

Philipp J. Schneider, Lin Tian, Marian-Andrei Rizoiu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2510.19299v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Can large language model (LLM) agents reproduce the complex social dynamics that characterize human online behavior -- shaped by homophily, reciprocity, and social validation -- and what memory and learning mechanisms enable such dynamics to emerge? We present a multi-agent LLM simulation framework in which agents repeatedly interact, evaluate one another, and adapt their behavior through in-context learning accelerated by a coaching signal. To model human social behavior, we design behavioral reward functions that capture core drivers of online engagement, including social interaction, information seeking, self-presentation, coordination, and emotional support. These rewards align agent objectives with empirically observed user motivations, enabling the study of how network structures and group formations emerge from individual decision-making. Our experiments show that coached LLM agents develop stable interaction patterns and form emergent social ties, yielding network structures that mirror properties of real online communities. By combining behavioral rewards with in-context adaptation, our framework establishes a principled testbed for investigating collective dynamics in LLM populations and reveals how artificial agents may approximate or diverge from human-like social behavior.

QuArch: A Benchmark for Evaluating LLM Reasoning in Computer Architecture

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2510.22087v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The field of computer architecture, which bridges high-level software abstractions and low-level hardware implementations, remains absent from current large language model (LLM) evaluations. To this end, we present QuArch (pronounced 'quark'), the first benchmark designed to facilitate the development and evaluation of LLM knowledge and reasoning capabilities specifically in computer architecture. QuArch v1.0 provides a comprehensive collection of 2,671 expert-validated question-answer (QA) pairs covering various aspects of computer architecture, including processor design, memory systems, and interconnection networks. Our evaluation reveals that while frontier models possess domain-specific knowledge, they struggle with skills that require higher-order thinking in computer architecture. Frontier model accuracies vary widely (from 34% to 73%) on these advanced questions, highlighting persistent gaps in architectural reasoning across analysis, design, and implementation QAs. Furthermore, via fine-tuning we find that QuArch can translate to improved performance on a realistic memory hierarchy design task, resulting in up to 1.99x more area-efficient solutions and up to 40% more viable solutions overall. By holistically assessing fundamental skills, QuArch provides a foundation for building and measuring LLM capabilities that can accelerate innovation in computing systems. The QuArch benchmark and leaderboard are publicly available at: https://quarch.ai/.

Simple and Combination Parametric Resonances of an Electromagnetically Suspended Vehicle subject to Base Excitation

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2510.24756v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper investigates the dynamic stability of an electromagnetically suspended vehicle, encountered in Hyperloop and Maglev systems, subject to periodic excitations caused by surface irregularities or vibration of the support induced by external noise. The narrow clearance between the vehicle and the support can make it highly sensitive to small oscillations, since the admissible amplitudes of the vehicle oscillations can be comparable to external excitation amplitude. The vehicle is modelled as a three-degree-of-freedom model where the vehicle is suspended via two identical electromagnetic actuators from a rigid support that oscillates. The governing equations are derived using force and torque balances, incorporating nonlinear electromagnetic forces, and Kirchhoffs law for the electromagnets with PD control strategy on the airgap. The equations of motion are linearized around the steady state induced by the surface oscillation, yielding a system with time-periodic coefficients. We analytically explore both principal and combination parametric resonances using an extended Hills method, and Floquet theory is used for numerical validation. The stability boundaries are obtained as ellipses in control gain parameter space, and the influence of system parameters on these boundaries is characterized. For the principal parametric resonance, the ratio of the sizes of the two obtained ellipses is three to one, whereas for the combination parametric resonance, the ratio is fourteen to one. When all ellipses are simultaneously present, one of the ellipses associated with the combination parametric resonance is the largest.

Hierarchical Physics-Embedded Learning for Partially Known Spatiotemporal Dynamics

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2510.25306v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Partial physical knowledge--governing structures known, constitutive relations or their combinations not--pervades spatiotemporal systems. Existing scientific machine learning paradigms learn evolution largely from data, impose equations as soft constraints, or hard-code physical terms into network updates; none exploits knowledge of this form. Here we introduce the hierarchical physics-embedded adaptive Fourier neural operator, encoding such knowledge as computational architecture rather than penalizing or appending it: a first level learns or embeds fundamental physical expressions as intermediate representations, and a second level learns or embeds their governing combination, with adaptive Fourier layers capturing nonlocal, high-order couplings at each level. We prove a hierarchical error decomposition--embedding known components removes or shrinks their terms, and a parameter-complexity advantage: when the hierarchy aligns with the compositional structure of the dynamics, the number of learnable Fourier parameters sufficient for a prescribed accuracy grows strictly more slowly than for a single-level operator. Across canonical phase-field systems and experimental hydrofoil wake data, our method reduces long horizon extrapolation errors by up to ~70% relative to state-of-the-art physics encoded and neural operator baselines, while preserving physically meaningful morphology, energetic consistency, and spectral structure, and maintaining robust performance under sparse and noisy observations. The separated intermediate representations further enable symbolic recovery of unknown constitutive relations in partially specified PDEs. These results establish hierarchical physics embedding as a theoretically grounded route to prediction and discovery when governing laws are neither fully known nor absent, but partially known and compositionally organized.

LLM-Driven Cost-Effective Requirements Change Impact Analysis

Romina Etezadi, Sallam Abualhaija, Chetan Arora, Lionel Briand — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2511.00262v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Requirements are inherently subject to changes throughout the software development lifecycle. Within the limited budget available to requirements engineers, manually identifying the impact of such changes on other requirements is both error-prone and effort-intensive. That might lead to overlooked impacted requirements, which, if not properly managed, can cause serious issues in the downstream tasks. Inspired by the growing potential of large language models (LLMs) across diverse domains, we propose ProReFiCIA, an LLM-driven approach for automatically identifying the impacted requirements when changes occur. We conduct an extensive evaluation of ProReFiCIA using several LLMs and prompts variants tailored to this task. Using the best combination of an LLM and a prompt variant, ProReFiCIA achieves a recall of 85.7% on an unseen industrial dataset, demonstrating its effectiveness in identifying impacted requirements. Further, the cost of applying ProReFiCIA remains small, as the engineer only needs to review the predicted impacted requirements, which represent 3.0% of the entire set of requirements. Lastly, incorporating domain knowledge into the model via RAG increases recall to 95.8% while slightly raising the cost to only 3.4%.

Scaling Cross-Embodiment World Models for Dexterous Manipulation

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2511.01177v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Cross-embodiment learning seeks to build generalist robots that learn from and operate across diverse morphologies, but differences in kinematics and action spaces hinder data sharing and control transfer. We ask: What structure can be shared across embodiments despite these differences? We argue that the physical interactions they induce can be modeled in a shared geometric space, allowing world models to provide a common interface for learning and control. To realize this idea, we represent human and robot hands as sets of 3D particles and define actions as end-effector particle displacement fields. This representation abstracts away embodiment-specific joint spaces while preserving the geometry and motion relevant to physical interaction. We train a graph-based world model on random interaction data from diverse simulated robot hands and real human hands, and integrate it with model-predictive control for deployment on new hardware. Experiments on rigid and deformable manipulation reveal three findings: increasing the diversity of training embodiments improves generalization to unseen hands; appropriately combining simulated and real-world data outperforms either source alone; and the same learned model enables effective control on robotic hands with distinct kinematics and degrees of freedom. These results position particle-based world models as a shared interface for learning from and for heterogeneous embodiments.

Generalized k-Cell Decomposition for Visibility Planning in Polygons

Yeganeh Bahoo, Sajad Saeedi, Roni Sherman — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2511.03642v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper introduces a novel $k$-cell decomposition method for pursuit-evasion problems in polygonal environments, where a searcher is equipped with a $k$-modem: a device capable of seeing through up to $k$ walls. The proposed decomposition ensures that as the searcher moves within a cell, the structure of unseen regions (shadows) remains unchanged, thereby preventing any geometric events between or on invisible regions, that is, preventing the appearance, disappearance, merge, or split of shadow regions. The method extends existing work on $0$- and $2$-visibility by incorporating m-visibility polygons for all even $0 \le m \le k$, constructing partition lines that enable robust environment division. The correctness of the decomposition is proved via three theorems. The decomposition enables reliable path planning for intruder detection in simulated environments and opens new avenues for visibility-based robotic surveillance. The difficulty in constructing the cells of the decomposition consists in computing the $k$-visibility polygon from each vertex and finding the intersection points of the partition lines to create the cells.

DeepPAAC: A New Deep Galerkin Method for Principal-Agent Problems

Michael Ludkovski, Changgen Xie, Zimu Zhu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2511.04309v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider numerical resolution of principal-agent (PA) problems in continuous time. We formulate a generic PA model with continuous and lump payments and a multi-dimensional strategy of the agent. To tackle the resulting Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation with an implicit Hamiltonian we develop a novel deep learning method: the Deep Principal-Agent Actor Critic (DeepPAAC) Actor-Critic algorithm. DeepPAAC is able to handle multi-dimensional states and controls, as well as constraints. We investigate the role of the neural network architecture, training designs, loss functions, etc. on the convergence of the solver, presenting five different case studies.

Active Electrosensing and Communication in MARL-trained Weakly Electric Fish Collectives

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2511.08436v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: How complex collective behavior emerges from individual interactions is a fundamental scientific question, but experimental cost and difficulty of simultaneous multi-brain recordings limit direct study in animals. Here we introduce a novel computational framework modeling weakly electric fish-like agents with biophysically inspired electrosensing and actuation, trained to forage collectively via multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). Trained agents reproduce hallmarks of real fish, including curvilinear homing trajectories and heavy-tailed electric organ discharge (EOD) interval statistics, while exhibiting emergent active sensing, social foraging, dominance-like asymmetries, and aggression. We perform in silico interventions including sensor ablations, EOD silencing, and food distribution changes to identify causal drivers of social foraging. Analyses of recurrent neural dynamics further show robust encoding of task-relevant variables and social context. Our work has broad implications for the neuroethology of weakly electric fish and other social animals where extensive multi-individual neural recordings, and thus traditional data-driven modeling, remain challenging.

SUPER Module for Detail-Sensitive and Cost-Efficient U-Net Variant Decoders

Siheon Joo, Hongjo Kim — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2511.11015v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Skip-connected U-Net variants are widely used for dense inverse problems, yet their decoders commonly recover resolution through spatial upscaling, which can blur or distort fine structures. Wavelet transforms provide an explicit perfect-reconstruction path, but prior wavelet networks often couple this property to wavelet-specific architectures or fixed output representations. We propose Selectively Suppressed Perfect Reconstruction (SUPER), a wavelet-domain decoder formulation that replaces unstructured spatial refinement with bounded frequency suppression. In its idealized equal-channel form, SUPER reduces to exact reconstruction when the suppression term is zero; in practical U-Net decoders, it provides a projected-subspace reconstruction fallback with learnable task-specific suppression. The resulting SUPER Module is a structurally plug-in decoder block: it replaces the upsampling/refinement stage of an existing U-Net-like decoder, while leaving the encoder and task head unchanged. We evaluate SUPER on monocular depth estimation, thin-crack segmentation, and smartphone image denoising. On iDisc depth estimation, SUPER improves the host model's edge AUC from 26.59% to 34.45% while reducing decoder MACs from 12.69G to 4.36G. On FACS-Net crack segmentation, SUPER improves average IoU and the extreme 0-2px crack regime. On SIDD denoising, where high-frequency enhancement is less directly rewarded, SUPER preserves PSNR/SSIM while reducing decoder MACs by 66.6%. These results support SUPER as a practical wavelet-domain suppression module for improving the observed detail-cost trade-off of U-Net-like decoders.

Timeripple: Accelerating vDiTs by Understanding the Spatio-Temporal Correlations in Latent Space

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2511.12035v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The recent surge in video generation has shown the growing demand for high-quality video synthesis using large vision models. Existing video generation models are predominantly based on the video diffusion transformer (vDiT), however, they suffer from substantial inference delay due to self-attention. While prior studies have focused on reducing redundant computations in self-attention, they often overlook the inherent spatio-temporal correlations in video streams and directly leverage sparsity patterns from large language models to reduce attention computations. In this work, we take a principled approach to accelerate self-attention in vDiTs by leveraging the spatio-temporal correlations in the latent space. We show that the attention patterns within vDiT are primarily due to the dominant spatial and temporal correlations at the token channel level. Based on this insight, we propose a lightweight and adaptive reuse strategy that approximates attention computations by reusing partial attention scores of spatially or temporally correlated tokens along individual channels. We demonstrate that our method achieves significantly higher computational savings (85\%) compared to state-of-the-art techniques over 4 vDiTs, while preserving almost identical video quality ($<$0.06\% loss on VBench).

T2T-VICL: Cross-Task Visual In-Context Learning via Implicit Text-Driven VLMs

Shao-Jun Xia, Huixin Zhang, Zhengzhong Tu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2511.16107v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Visual in-context learning (VICL) solves visual tasks by conditioning on a few input-output demonstrations without any model training. Recent advances in large vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promising VICL capability when the demonstration pair and the query belong to the same vision task, but real use cases often provide mismatched examples, making it unclear whether a VLM should imitate the demonstrated transformation or infer a new one from the query. This raises a fundamental question: Can VLMs perform cross-task VICL where demonstration and query differ? In the paper, we study this cross-task VICL setting and propose T2T-VICL, a collaborative prompt-transfer framework, which converts mismatched visual demonstrations into implicit textual guidance without explicitly naming the tasks. To do so, a large teacher VLM first generates structured descriptions of visual changes and task differences between task pairs, from which we construct a dataset of diverse implicit cross-task relations. We then distill this capability into a lightweight student VLM that produces content-dependent prompts from a task-A demonstration pair and a task-B query. The generated prompt is used to guide a frozen image-editing VLM, and a score-based inference strategy is introduced to rank multiple candidates. Experiments on 12 low-level vision tasks and over 20 evaluated cross-task pairs show that T2T-VICL consistently improves task-aware alignment over fixed prompting and often also improves image fidelity, revealing both the potential and limits of cross-task VICL. Our code is available on GitHub.

Glass Surface Detection: Leveraging Reflection Dynamics in Flash/No-flash Imagery

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2511.16887v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Glass surfaces are ubiquitous in daily life, typically appearing colorless, transparent, and lacking distinctive features. These characteristics make glass surface detection a challenging computer vision task. Existing glass surface detection methods always rely on boundary cues (e.g., window and door frames) or reflection cues to locate glass surfaces, but they fail to fully exploit the intrinsic properties of the glass itself for accurate localization. We observed that in most real-world scenes, the illumination intensity in front of the glass surface differs from that behind it, which results in variations in the reflections visible on the glass surface. Specifically, when standing on the brighter side of the glass and applying a flash towards the darker side, existing reflections on the glass surface tend to disappear. Conversely, while standing on the darker side and applying a flash towards the brighter side, distinct reflections will appear on the glass surface. Based on this phenomenon, we propose NFGlassNet, a novel method for glass surface detection that leverages the reflection dynamics present in flash/no-flash imagery. Specifically, we propose a Reflection Contrast Mining Module (RCMM) for extracting reflections, and a Reflection Guided Attention Module (RGAM) for fusing features from reflection and glass surface for accurate glass surface detection. For learning our network, we also construct a dataset consisting of 3.3K no-flash and flash image pairs captured from various scenes with corresponding ground truth annotations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Our code, model, and dataset will be available upon acceptance of the manuscript.

Epistemic Familiarity is Associated With Belief Stability in Large Language Models

Samantha Dies, Courtney Maynard, Germans Savcisens, Tina Eliassi-Rad — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2511.19166v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are widely used as information sources, yet small changes in semantic assumptions can destabilize their beliefs. We introduce P-StaT (Perturbation Stability of Truth), a framework for evaluating belief stability under matched semantic perturbations in both representational and behavioral settings. Across 21 LLMs and three domains, we compare perturbations involving familiar Fictional statements against synthetically generated and unfamiliar Synthetic statements. Unfamiliar Synthetic perturbations generally induce greater epistemic instability than familiar Fictional perturbations, with behavioral belief retraction rates frequently exceeding 0.5 (50%). Finally, exploratory clustering analyses reveal recurring themes among retracted statements, including ambiguity, technical terminology, and obscure concepts. These results show that epistemic familiarity is systematically associated with stability under semantic reframing, suggesting that stability-based analyses can complement accuracy-based benchmarks when evaluating LLM robustness and reliability. Code and data are available at https://github.com/samanthadies/P-StaT.

RubricRL: Simple Generalizable Rewards for Text-to-Image Generation

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2511.20651v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently emerged as a promising approach for aligning text-to-image generative models with human preferences. A key challenge, however, lies in designing effective and interpretable rewards. Existing methods often rely on either composite metrics (e.g., CLIP, OCR, and realism scores) with fixed weights or a single scalar reward distilled from human preference models, which can limit interpretability and flexibility. We propose RubricRL, a simple and general framework for rubric-based reward design that offers greater interpretability, composability, and user control. Instead of using a black-box scalar signal, RubricRL dynamically constructs a structured rubric for each prompt--a decomposable checklist of fine-grained visual criteria such as object correctness, attribute accuracy, OCR fidelity, and realism--tailored to the input text. Each criterion is independently evaluated by a multimodal judge (e.g., o4-mini), and a prompt-adaptive weighting mechanism emphasizes the most relevant dimensions. This design not only produces interpretable and modular supervision signals for policy optimization (e.g., GRPO or PPO), but also enables users to directly adjust which aspects to reward or penalize. Experiments with an autoregressive text-to-image model demonstrate that RubricRL improves prompt faithfulness, visual detail, and generalizability, while offering a flexible and extensible foundation for interpretable RL alignment across text-to-image architectures.

Feedback Integrators: Non-Asymptotic Invariance for One-Step Methods and Gain Selection under Euler Discretization

Juho Bae, Dong Eui Chang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2512.01528v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: For dynamical systems evolving on a manifold and admitting first integrals, standard one-step numerical methods generally cause the discrete trajectory to drift off the manifold and the numerical values of the first integrals to deviate from their prescribed values. Feedback integrators address this by extending the dynamics to an ambient Euclidean space and adding a feedback term that drives the numerical trajectory toward the set satisfying both the manifold constraint and the prescribed values of the first integrals. Existing theory, however, has two limitations: it remains asymptotic, guaranteeing only eventual entrance into an attractor containing the desired set, and it does not explain how the feedback gain should be chosen. In this paper, we first close the former gap for general one-step methods by proving positive invariance of arbitrarily small sublevel neighborhoods of the feedback Lyapunov function for sufficiently small step sizes. We then specialize to Euler discretization and analyze how the feedback gain enters the Taylor-based error bound. In this setting, we characterize a range of scaled gains that guarantee positive invariance for sufficiently small step sizes and identify the scaling that minimizes the Taylor-based upper bound. We further propose adaptive gain-selection rules under Euler discretization, including both stepwise and periodically updated variants, and establish corresponding boundedness guarantees for the resulting discrete trajectories. These results identify Euler discretization as the first setting in which gain selection for feedback integrators closes in explicit form, whereas extensions to general higher-order one-step methods remain genuinely method-dependent. Numerical experiments on free rigid body motion in $\operatorname{SO}(3)$, the Kepler problem, and a perturbed Kepler problem with rotational symmetry support the analysis.

Interactive Communication -- cross-disciplinary perspectives from psychology, acoustics, and technology

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2512.04692v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Interactive communication (IC), i.e., the reciprocal exchange of information between two or more interactive partners, is a fundamental part of human nature. As such, it has been studied across multiple scientific disciplines with different goals and methods. This article provides a cross-disciplinary and selective primer on contemporary IC integrating psychological mechanisms with speech signal, acoustic and media-technological constraints in theory, measurement, and applications. First, we outline theoretical frameworks that account for verbal, nonverbal, and multimodal aspects of IC, including distinctions between face-to-face and computer-mediated communication. Second, we summarize key methodological approaches, including behavioral, cognitive, and experiential measures of communicative synchrony and acoustic signal quality. Third, we discuss selected applications, applications in which speech transmission, signal enhancement, mediated dialogue, and real-time coordination are central, namely assistive listening technologies, conversational agents, and social VR, alongside ethical considerations. Taken together, this primer highlights how human capacities and technical systems jointly shape IC, consolidating concepts, findings, and challenges that have often been discussed in separate lines of research.

An Analysis of Decision Problems for Relational Pattern Languages under Various Constraints

Klaus Jansen, Dirk Nowotka, Lis Pirotton, Corinna Wambsganz, Max Wiedenh\"oft — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2512.07476v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Patterns are words with terminals and variables. The language of a pattern is the set of words obtained by uniformly substituting all variables with words that contain only terminals. In their original definition, patterns only allow for multiple distinct occurrences of some variables to be related by the equality relation, represented by using the same variable multiple times. In an extended notion, called relational patterns and relational pattern languages, variables may be related by arbitrary other relations, achieved by using regular patterns and relating individual variables independently from the patterns structure separately. We extend the ongoing investigation of the main decision problems for patterns (namely, the equivalence problem, the inclusion problem, and the membership problem) to relational pattern languages under a wide range of relevant individual relations, providing a comprehensive foundation in all three research directions.

Almost-Optimal Approximation Algorithms for Global Minimum Cut in Directed Graphs

Ron Mosenzon — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2512.09080v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We develop new $(1+\epsilon)$-approximation algorithms for finding the global minimum edge-cut in a directed edge-weighted graph, and for finding the global minimum vertex-cut in a directed vertex-weighted graph. Our algorithms are randomized, and have a running time of $O\left(m^{1+o(1)}/\epsilon\right)$ on any $m$-edge $n$-vertex input graph, assuming all edge/vertex weights are polynomially-bounded. In particular, for any constant $\epsilon>0$, our algorithms have an almost-optimal running time of $O\left(m^{1+o(1)}\right)$. The fastest previously-known running time for this setting, due to (Cen et al., FOCS 2021), is $\tilde{O}\left(\min\left\{n^2/\epsilon^2,m^{1+o(1)}\sqrt{n}\right\}\right)$ for Minimum Edge-Cut, and $\tilde{O}\left(n^2/\epsilon^2\right)$ for Minimum Vertex-Cut. Our results further extend to the rooted variants of the Minimum Edge-Cut and Minimum Vertex-Cut problems, where the algorithm is additionally given a root vertex $r$, and the goal is to find a minimum-weight cut separating any vertex from the root $r$. In terms of techniques, we build upon and extend a framework that was recently introduced by (Chuzhoy et al., SODA 2026) for solving the Minimum Vertex-Cut problem in unweighted directed graphs. Additionally, in order to obtain our result for the Global Minimum Vertex-Cut problem, we develop a novel black-box reduction from this problem to its rooted variant. Prior to our work, such reductions were only known for more restricted settings, such as when all vertex-weights are unit.

The $k$-flip Ising game

Aleksandr Kovalenko, Andrey Leonidov — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2512.10389v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The game-theoretic view on the classical Ising model - the noisy binary choice Ising game, - is a well-known conceptual framework that, on the one hand, highlights similar patterns between social or artificial agent-based systems and ensembles of interacting physical spins and, on the other hand, helps to stress important differences between the ones. The study considers one of such differences - the possibility of simultaneous decision making of several agents that is typical for game theoretic interaction. To do this we analyse a partially parallel discrete time dynamics of an Ising-type system of $N$ interacting binary units on a complete graph in which at each time steps $k$ arbitrarily chosen units can change their states is analysed. The particular problem under study is a $k$ - dependence of the decay of a metastable configuration into a stable one. The analysis is based on an explicit analytical calculation, for arbitrary noise, of the transition matrix characterising the $k$ - flip evolution as well as the first two moments of the distribution of the fraction of players choosing one of the two available strategies. First two moments of the first hitting time distribution for sample trajectories corresponding to transition from a metastable and unstable states to a stable one are considered. A nontrivial dependence of these moments on $k$ for the decay of a metastable state is discussed. A presence of the minima at certain $k_{\rm min}$ is attributed to a competition between $k$-dependent diffusion and restoring forces.

ImplicitRDP: An End-to-End Visual-Force Diffusion Policy with Structural Slow-Fast Learning

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2512.10946v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Human-level contact-rich manipulation relies on the distinct roles of two key modalities: vision provides spatially rich but temporally slow global context, while force sensing captures rapid local contact dynamics. Integrating these signals is challenging due to their fundamental frequency and informational disparities. In this work, we propose ImplicitRDP, a unified end-to-end visual-force diffusion policy that integrates visual planning and reactive force control within a single network. We introduce Structural Slow-Fast Learning, a mechanism utilizing causal attention to simultaneously process asynchronous visual and force tokens, allowing the policy to perform rapid force control at the action rate while maintaining the temporal coherence of action chunks. Furthermore, to mitigate modality collapse where end-to-end models fail to adjust the weights across different modalities, we propose Virtual-target-based Representation Regularization. This auxiliary objective maps force feedback into the same space as the action, providing a stronger, physics-grounded learning signal than raw force prediction. Extensive experiments on contact-rich tasks demonstrate that ImplicitRDP significantly outperforms both vision-only and hierarchical baselines, achieving superior reactivity and success rates with a streamlined training pipeline. Code and videos are available at https://implicit-rdp.github.io.

Read or Ignore? A Unified Benchmark for Typographic-Attack Robustness and Text Recognition in Vision-Language Models

Futa Waseda, Shojiro Yamabe, Daiki Shiono, Kento Sasaki, Tsubasa Takahashi — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2512.11899v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large vision-language models (LVLMs) are vulnerable to typographic attacks, where misleading text inserted into an image can override visual understanding. However, existing evaluation protocols and defenses are largely focused on object recognition and do not consider text-reading capability. This is a critical oversight: real-world scenarios often require both recognizing objects and reading scene text (e.g., recognizing pedestrians while reading traffic signs), where simply ignoring all text for robustness is unacceptable in practice. To address this gap, we introduce a novel task, Read-or-Ignore VQA (RIO-VQA), which jointly evaluates both requirements: models must decide, from context, when to read scene text and when to ignore inserted distractor text. To evaluate this capability, we present RIO-Bench, a same-scene counterfactual benchmark that holds the scene fixed while varying only question intent (object vs. text) and text condition (clean vs. attack), enabling direct comparisons of model behaviors with reduced confounding factors. Using RIO-Bench, we highlight a trade-off: representative defenses developed in object-centric settings can achieve robustness by suppressing text sensitivity, at the cost of text-reading performance (i.e., "ignoring" text). Motivated by this trade-off, we provide a data-driven defense baseline that improves both requirements on RIO-Bench, complementing prior text-ignoring baselines. Overall, this work highlights a fundamental misalignment between the current object-centric robustness scope and real-world multimodal requirements, providing a principled path toward reliable LVLMs.

An unfitted divergence-free higher order finite element method for the Stokes problem

Michael Neilan, Maxim Olshanskii, Henry von Wahl — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2512.12050v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The paper develops and analyzes a higher-order unfitted finite element method for the incompressible Stokes equations, which yields a strongly divergence-free velocity field up to the physical boundary. The method combines an isoparametric Scott--Vogelius velocity-pressure pair on a cut background mesh with a stabilized Nitsche/Lagrange multiplier formulation for imposing Dirichlet boundary conditions. We construct finite element spaces that admit robust numerical implementation using standard elementwise polynomial mappings and produce exactly divergence-free discrete velocities. The key components of the analysis are a new inf-sup stability result for the isoparametric Scott--Vogelius pair on unfitted meshes and a combined inf-sup stability result for the bilinear forms associated with the pressure and the Lagrange multiplier. The finite element formulation employs a higher-order Lagrange multiplier space, which ensures stability and mitigates the loss of pressure robustness typically associated with the weak enforcement of boundary conditions for the normal velocity component. The paper provides a complete stability and convergence theory in two dimensions, accounting for the geometric errors introduced by the isoparametric approximation. The analysis shows optimal-order velocity convergence in both the $H^1$ and $L^2$ norms and establishes optimal $H^1$-convergence and nearly optimal $L^2$-convergence of a post-processed pressure. Numerical experiments illustrate and confirm the theoretical findings.

Memo2496: Expert-Annotated Dataset and Dual-view Adaptive Framework for Music Emotion Recognition

Qilin Li, C. L. Philip Chen, Tong Zhang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2512.13998v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Music Emotion Recognition (MER) is constrained by limited expert annotations and the need to establish robustness across heterogeneous corpora. Memo2496 supplies a reproducible dataset of 2,496 instrumental tracks with continuous valence-arousal labels from 30 certified music specialists, supported by interface familiarisation and duplicate-track intra-annotator calibration in a normalised circular domain. We also introduce the Dual-view Adaptive Music Emotion Recogniser (DAMER), a general framework evaluated on Memo2496 and two external datasets. DAMER integrates Dual-Stream Attention Fusion (DSAF) for token-level bidirectional interaction between Mel spectrograms and cochleagrams, Progressive Confidence Labelling (PCL) for curriculum-based pseudo-labels using temperature scheduling and Jensen-Shannon divergence, and Style-Anchored Memory Learning (SAML), whose labelled contrastive queue regularises same-emotion embeddings across acoustically varied samples. The primary evaluation follows the binary MER protocol used on PMEmo and 1000songs, while a supplementary continuous regression study demonstrates direct use of Memo2496 segment-level valence and arousal scores. Experiments on Memo2496, 1000songs, and PMEmo show that DAMER achieves the highest arousal accuracy among compared methods on Memo2496 and 1000songs and the highest valence accuracy on PMEmo, while remaining competitive for PMEmo arousal. Ablations and diagnostics validate each module. The dataset and source code are publicly available.

Gaussian-Mixture-Model Q-Functions for Policy Iteration in Reinforcement Learning

Minh Vu, Konstantinos Slavakis — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2512.18763v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Unlike their conventional use as estimators of probability density functions in reinforcement learning (RL), this paper introduces a novel function-approximation role for Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) as direct surrogates for Q-function losses. The proposed estimators, termed GMM-QFs, possess substantial representational capacity, as they are shown to be universal approximators over a broad class of functions. They are further embedded within Bellman residuals, where their learnable parameters--a fixed number of mixing weights, together with Gaussian mean vectors and covariance matrices--are inferred from data via optimization on a product Riemannian manifold. This geometric perspective on the parameter space naturally introduces Riemannian optimization into the policy-evaluation step of standard policy-iteration (PI) frameworks. Moreover, rigorous theoretical analysis establishes performance bounds on Q-function estimation error under the proposed PI scheme. Supporting numerical tests show that GMM-QFs deliver competitive performance and, in some cases, outperform state-of-the-art approaches across a range of benchmark RL tasks, all while maintaining a significantly smaller computational footprint than deep-learning methods.

GH-ESD: Grounded Hypothesis-Driven Error Slice Discovery for Instance-Level Vision Tasks

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2512.24592v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Systematic failures of vision models on semantically coherent subsets, known as error slices, reveal limitations in robustness and evaluation. Existing slice discovery approaches largely model slices as clusters in representation space or combinations of predefined attributes. While effective for image-level classification, such formulations are insufficient for instance-level tasks such as object detection and segmentation, where failures often arise from contextual relational and spatially grounded visual patterns. We propose GH-ESD (Grounded Hypothesis-Driven Error Slice Discovery), a generate and verify framework that reformulates slice discovery as grounded hypothesis generation and statistical verification. GH-ESD constructs relational failure hypotheses using LLM priors and grounded visual evidence, discovers hypothesis slices at the instance level via Vision Language Models, and verifies them through statistical trend analysis over instance-level errors. We also introduce GESD (Grounded Error Slice Dataset), a new benchmark for instance-level error slice discovery, providing expert-defined and spatially grounded slices derived from detection and segmentation failures. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GH-ESD consistently outperforms baselines, improving Precision@10 by 0.10 (0.73 vs. 0.63) on the GESD benchmark for detection tasks, while also supporting segmentation scenarios. GH-ESD identifies interpretable slices that facilitate actionable model improvements.

Hierarchical Online Optimization Approach for IRS-enabled Low-altitude MEC in Vehicular Networks

Yixian Wang, Geng Sun, Zemin Sun, Daxin Tian, Shiwen Mao — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2512.24659v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this paper, we propose an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-enabled low-altitude multi-access edge computing (MEC) architecture, where an aerial MEC server cooperates with a terrestrial MEC server to provide computing services, while hybrid IRSs (i.e., building-installed and UAV-carried IRSs) are deployed to enhance the air-ground connectivity under blockage. Based on this architecture, we formulate a multi-objective optimization problem (MOOP) to minimize the task completion delay and energy consumption by jointly optimizing task offloading, UAV trajectory control, IRS phase-shift configuration, and computation resource allocation. The considered problem is NP-hard, and thus we propose a hierarchical online optimization approach (HOOA) to efficiently solve the problem. Specifically, we reformulate the MOOP as a Stackelberg game, where MEC servers collectively act as the leader to determine the system-level decisions, while the vehicles act as followers to make individual decisions. At the follower level, we present a many-to-one matching mechanism to generate feasible discrete decisions. At the leader level, we propose a generative diffusion model-enhanced twin delayed deep deterministic policy gradient (GDMTD3) algorithm integrated with a Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT)-based method, which is a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based approach, to determine the continuous decisions. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed HOOA achieves significant improvements, which reduces average task completion delay by 2.5% and average energy consumption by 3.1% compared with the best-performing benchmark approach and state-of-the-art DRL algorithm, respectively. Moreover, the proposed HOOA exhibits superior convergence stability while maintaining strong robustness and scalability in dynamic environments.

HD-GEN: A High-Performance Software System for Human Mobility Data Generation Based on Patterns of Life

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2601.01219v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding individual-level human mobility is critical for a wide range of applications. Real-world trajectory datasets provide valuable insights into movement behaviors and patterns of life but are often constrained by data sparsity and participation bias. Synthetic data, by contrast, offers scalability and flexibility but frequently lacks realism. % To address this gap, we introduce a comprehensive software pipeline for generating, calibrating, processing, and visualizing large-scale individual-level human mobility datasets that combine the realism of empirical data with the control and extensibility simulations. % Our system consists of four integrated components: (1) a data generation engine that constructs geographically grounded simulations using OpenStreetMap data to produce diverse mobility logs; (2) a genetic algorithm--based calibration module that fine-tunes simulation parameters to align with real-world mobility characteristics; (3) a data processing suite that transforms raw simulation logs into structured formats suitable for downstream applications; and (4) a visualization module that extracts and presents key mobility patterns and insights from the processed datasets for improved interpretability. Evaluation of generated trajectory datasets for the Atlanta, Georgia, USA region show realistic behavior that, despite emerging from a simulation without any reference to real human individuals, exhibits realistic human behavior that closely matches aggregate metrics of real-world datasets. We also provide a sensitivity analysis to study what simulation parameters affect simulation runtime. Code and simulated datasets are shared to provide the broad research community with large-scale dataset that, albeit not real, exhibit realistic human behavior while being orders of magnitudes larger than any open real-world mobility dataset.

MATANet: A Multi-context Attention and Taxonomy-Aware Network for Fine-Grained Underwater Recognition of Marine Species

Donghwan Lee, Byeongjin Kim, Geunhee Kim, Hyukjin Kwon, Nahyeon Maeng, Wooju Kim — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2601.03729v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate fine-grained recognition of marine organisms is important for scalable biodiversity monitoring and ecological assessment using underwater imagery. However, existing methods mainly focus on target appearance and make limited use of surrounding environmental cues and biological taxonomy. We propose the Multi-Context Attention and Taxonomy-Aware Network (MATANet) for region-of-interest (ROI)-guided marine organism recognition. MATANet contains two complementary components. The Multi-Context Environmental Attention Module uses the ROI representation as a query to aggregate spatial patch features from ROI-centered contextual views at multiple scales, enabling target-conditioned modeling of the surrounding environment. Level-wise auxiliary classifiers further incorporate higher taxonomic ranks during training, encouraging hierarchically consistent representations without changing the finest-label prediction space or inference procedure. On the official FathomNet 2025 Private test split, MATANet achieves a hierarchical distance of 1.570 with the base backbone and 1.423 with the large backbone, substantially outperforming the strongest benchmark value of 2.603. On FishCLEF2015, MATANet achieves an accuracy of 0.793 and a hierarchical distance of 1.120, outperforming the strongest benchmark values of 0.766 and 1.327, respectively. Ablation studies show that surrounding scene information provides complementary evidence beyond repeated multi-scale observations of the target and that target-conditioned aggregation outperforms direct multi-view concatenation. Additional experiments on FAIR1M v2.0 examine the applicability of the proposed design beyond underwater imagery. In post-detection evaluation, MATANet improves fine-grained classification accuracy on matched detector-generated ROIs from 0.828 to 0.959 supporting its engineering applicability to automated marine monitoring.

2BRobust -- Mitigating TCP BBR Performance Degradation in Virtual Machines under CPU Contention

Kathrin Elmenhorst, Nils Aschenbruck — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2601.05665v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by the recent introduction and large-scale deployment of BBR congestion control algorithms, multiple studies have investigated the performance and fairness implications of this shift from loss-based to delay-based congestion control. Given the potential Internet-wide adoption of BBR, we must also consider its robustness in network and system scenarios. One such scenario is Cloud-based Virtual Machine (VM) networking - highly relevant in today's CDN-centric Internet. Interestingly, previous work has shown significant performance problems of BBRv1 running in Xen VMs, with BBR performance dropping to almost zero when CPU credit is low. In this paper, we develop a framework for measuring TCP throughput under fully controlled CPU contention, which uses Linux deadline scheduling to emulate generalized CPU contention conditions. Our measurements reveal that - in stark contrast to Cubic! - BBR throughput can break down during CPU contention under any hypervisor and all tested BDP conditions. Characterizing this performance degradation on a fine-granular level, we show that CPU-limited BBR senders are capped at very low throughput levels below 10-20 Mbps. This finding implies that an Internet-wide shift from Cubic to BBR could harm the Internet's overall robustness, if not deployed with caution. To detect and overcome CPU-limited throughput, we propose a BBR patch which detects the problematic situation by monitoring inflight bytes and reacts by increasing the pacing rate to make better use of the available CPU time. We show that our BBR patch mitigates the throughput problem for the most critical cases.

WHU-PCPR: A cross-platform heterogeneous point cloud dataset for place recognition in complex urban scenes

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2601.06442v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Point Cloud-based Place Recognition (PCPR) demonstrates considerable potential in applications such as autonomous driving, robot localization and navigation, and map update. In practical applications, point clouds used for place recognition are often acquired from different platforms and LiDARs across varying scene. However, existing PCPR datasets lack diversity in scenes, platforms, and sensors, which limits the effective development of related research. To address this gap, we establish WHU-PCPR, a cross-platform heterogeneous point cloud dataset designed for place recognition. The dataset differentiates itself from existing datasets through its distinctive characteristics: 1) cross-platform heterogeneous point clouds: collected from survey-grade vehicle-mounted Mobile Laser Scanning (MLS) systems and low-cost Portable helmet-mounted Laser Scanning (PLS) systems, each equipped with distinct mechanical and solid-state LiDAR sensors. 2) Complex localization scenes: encompassing real-time and long-term changes in both urban and campus road scenes. 3) Large-scale spatial coverage: featuring 82.3 km of trajectory over a 60-month period and an unrepeated route of approximately 30 km. Based on WHU-PCPR, we conduct extensive evaluation and in-depth analysis of several representative PCPR methods, and provide a concise discussion of key challenges and future research directions. The dataset and benchmark code are available at https://github.com/zouxianghong/WHU-PCPR.

PRISP: Privacy-Safe Few-Shot Personalization via Lightweight Adaptation

Junho Park, Dohoon Kim, Taesup Moon — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2601.06471v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language model (LLM) personalization aims to adapt general-purpose models to individual users. Most existing methods, however, are developed under data-rich and resource-abundant settings, often incurring privacy risks. In contrast, realistic personalization typically occurs after deployment under (i) extremely limited user data, (ii) constrained computational resources, and (iii) strict privacy requirements. We propose PRISP, a lightweight and privacy-safe personalization framework tailored to these constraints. PRISP leverages a Text-to-LoRA hypernetwork to generate task-aware LoRA parameters from task descriptions, and enables efficient user personalization by optimizing a small subset of task-aware LoRA parameters together with minimal additional modules using few-shot user data. Experiments on a few-shot variant of the LaMP benchmark demonstrate that PRISP achieves strong overall performance compared to prior approaches, while reducing computational overhead and eliminating privacy risks.

Dr. Zero: Self-Evolving Search Agents without Training Data

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2601.07055v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As high-quality data becomes increasingly difficult to obtain, self-evolution without curated training data has emerged as a promising paradigm. This approach allows large language models (LLMs) to autonomously generate and solve complex problems, thereby improving their reasoning capabilities. However, multi-turn search agents struggle in this setting due to limited question diversity and the substantial compute required for multi-step reasoning and tool use. In this work, we introduce Dr. Zero, a framework that enables search agents to effectively self-evolve without human-annotated training data, relying solely on an external search engine as their knowledge environment. In particular, we design a self-evolution feedback loop where a proposer generates structurally diverse questions to train a solver initialized from the same base model. As the solver evolves, it incentivizes the proposer to produce increasingly difficult yet solvable tasks, thus establishing an automated curriculum to refine both agents. To enhance training efficiency, we also introduce hop-grouped relative policy optimization (HRPO). This method clusters structurally similar questions to construct group-level baselines, effectively minimizing the sampling overhead in evaluating each query's individual difficulty and solvability. Consequently, HRPO significantly reduces the compute requirements for proposer training and reward estimation without compromising performance or stability. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Dr. Zero matches or surpasses fully supervised search agents on several question answering benchmarks, showing that strong agentic search and evidence-grounded reasoning can emerge solely through self-evolution.

Tears or Cheers? Benchmarking LLMs via Culturally Elicited Distinct Affective Responses

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2601.13024v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Culture serves as a fundamental determinant of human affective processing and profoundly shapes how individuals perceive and interpret emotional stimuli. Despite this intrinsic link extant evaluations regarding cultural alignment within Large Language Models primarily prioritize declarative knowledge such as geographical facts or established societal customs. These benchmarks remain insufficient to capture the subjective interpretative variance inherent to diverse sociocultural lenses. To address this limitation, we introduce CEDAR, a multimodal benchmark constructed entirely from scenarios capturing Culturally \underline{\textsc{E}}licited \underline{\textsc{D}}istinct \underline{\textsc{A}}ffective \underline{\textsc{R}}esponses. To construct CEDAR, we implement a novel pipeline that leverages LLM-generated provisional labels to isolate instances yielding cross-cultural emotional distinctions, and subsequently derives reliable ground-truth annotations through rigorous human evaluation. The resulting benchmark comprises 10,962 instances across seven languages and 14 fine-grained emotion categories, with each language including 400 multimodal and 1,166 text-only samples. Comprehensive evaluations of 17 representative multilingual models reveal a dissociation between language consistency and cultural alignment, demonstrating that culturally grounded affective understanding remains a significant challenge for current models.

MVGD-Net: A Novel Motion-aware Video Glass Surface Detection Method

Yiwei Lu, Hao Huang, Tao Yan — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2601.13715v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Glass surface ubiquitous in both daily life and professional environments presents a potential threat to vision-based systems, such as robot and drone navigation. To solve this challenge, most recent studies have shown significant interest in Video Glass Surface Detection (VGSD). We observe that objects in the reflection (or transmission) layer appear farther from the glass surfaces. Consequently, in video motion scenarios, the notable reflected (or transmitted) objects on the glass surface move slower than objects in non-glass regions within the same spatial plane, and this motion inconsistency can effectively reveal the presence of glass surfaces. Based on this observation, we propose a novel network, named MVGD-Net, for detecting glass surfaces in videos by leveraging motion inconsistency cues. Our MVGD-Net features three novel modules: the Cross-scale Multimodal Fusion Module (CMFM) that integrates extracted spatial features and estimated optical flow maps, the History Guided Attention Module (HGAM) and Temporal Cross Attention Module (TCAM), both of which further enhances temporal features. A Temporal-Spatial Decoder (TSD) is also introduced to fuse the spatial and temporal features for generating the glass region mask. Furthermore, for learning our network, we also propose a large-scale dataset, which comprises 312 diverse glass scenarios with a total of 19,268 frames. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our MVGD-Net outperforms relevant state-of-the-art methods.

Landing-Induced Viscoelastic Changes in an Anthropomimetic Foot Joint Structure are Modulated by Foot Structure and Posture

Satoru Hashimoto, Yinlai Jiang, Hiroshi Yokoi, Shunta Togo — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2601.14634v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: How skeletal architecture and landing posture shape the immediate post-impact viscoelastic response of the foot remains incompletely understood, in part because cadaveric specimens are ill-suited to repeated impact testing across postures. In this study, we developed an anthropomimetic foot joint structure aimed at replicating the skeletal geometry of the human foot. Using a vertical drop apparatus that simulates landing and a viscoelastic system-identification model, we investigated how skeletal structure and posture modulate the apparent post-impact viscoelastic response. The results show that the multi-jointed anthropomimetic structure exhibited a higher damping ratio than simplified flat and rigid feet. Moreover, ankle dorsiflexion and toe extension systematically shifted the identified parameters, reducing the damping ratio under the tested conditions. Taken together, these findings indicate that an arch-like, multi-jointed skeletal architecture can enhance impact attenuation in an anthropomimetic mechanical foot, and that morphology and passive posture alone can tune the trade-off between attenuation and rebound. The observed trends are qualitatively consistent with reported differences in human landing strategies, and highlight the engineering advantage of anatomically informed skeletal design for achieving tunable impact attenuation through postural adjustment.

Aligned Stable Inpainting: Mitigating Unwanted Object Insertion and Preserving Color Consistency

Yikai Wang, Junqiu Yu, Chenjie Cao, Xiangyang Xue, Yanwei Fu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2601.15368v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generative image inpainting can produce realistic results even with large, irregular masks, but existing methods still suffer from two common problems: (1) Unwanted object insertion: hallucinate artifacts that do not match the surrounding context. (2) Color inconsistency: noticeable color shifts that lead to smeared textures. We analyze the causes of these issues and propose Aligned Stable inpainting with UnKnown Areas prior (ASUKA), a post-hoc framework for pre-trained inpainting models. To reduce unwanted object insertion, we use reconstruction-based priors to guide the generative model, suppressing hallucinated objects while preserving generative flexibility. To address color inconsistency, we design a specialized VAE decoder that formulates latent-to-image decoding as a local harmonization task. We implement ASUKA on both U-Net-based and DiT-based inpainting models with lightweight modifications. Experiments on Places2 and MISATO, our proposed benchmark, show that ASUKA effectively suppresses object hallucination and improves color consistency, outperforming existing diffusion- and rectified flow-based inpainting methods. The dataset, models, and code will be released on GitHub.

SKETCH: Semantic Key-Point Conditioning for Long-Horizon Vessel Trajectory Prediction

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2601.18537v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate long-horizon vessel trajectory prediction remains challenging due to compounded uncertainty from complex navigation behaviors and environmental factors. Existing methods often struggle to maintain global directional consistency, leading to drifting or implausible trajectories when extrapolated over long time horizons. To address this issue, we propose a semantic-key-point-conditioned trajectory modeling framework, in which future trajectories are predicted by conditioning on a high-level Next Key Point (NKP) that captures navigational intent. This formulation decomposes long-horizon prediction into global semantic decision-making and local motion modeling, effectively restricting the support of future trajectories to semantically feasible subsets. To efficiently estimate the NKP prior from historical observations, we adopt a pretrain-finetune strategy. Extensive experiments on real-world AIS data demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, particularly for long travel durations, directional accuracy, and fine-grained trajectory prediction.

Toward Learning POMDPs Beyond Full-Rank Actions and State Observability

Seiji Shaw, Travis Manderson, Chad Kessens, Nicholas Roy — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2601.18930v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We are interested in enabling autonomous agents to learn and reason about systems with hidden states, such as locking mechanisms. We cast this problem as learning the parameters of a discrete Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). The agent begins with knowledge of the POMDP's actions and observation spaces, but not its state space, transitions, or observation models. These properties must be constructed from a sequence of actions and observations. Spectral approaches to learning models of partially observable domains, such as Predictive State Representations (PSRs), learn representations of state that are sufficient to predict future outcomes. PSR models, however, do not have explicit transition and observation system models that can be used with different reward functions to solve different planning problems. Under a mild set of rankness assumptions on the products of transition and observation matrices, we show how PSRs learn POMDP matrices up to a similarity transform, and this transform may be estimated via tensor decomposition methods. Our method learns observation matrices and transition matrices up to a partition of states, where the states in a single partition have the same observation distributions corresponding to actions whose transition matrices are full-rank. Our experiments suggest that explicit observation and transition likelihoods can be leveraged to generate new plans for different goals and reward functions after the model has been learned. We also show that learning a POMDP beyond a partition of states is impossible from sequential data by constructing two POMDPs that agree on all observation distributions but differ in their transition dynamics.

Hybrid Fault-Driven Mutation Testing for Python

Saba Alimadadi, Golnaz Gharachorlu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2601.19088v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mutation testing is an effective technique for assessing the effectiveness of test suites by systematically injecting artificial faults into programs. However, existing mutation testing techniques fall short in capturing many types of common faults in dynamically typed languages like Python. In this paper, we introduce a novel set of seven mutation operators that are inspired by prevalent anti-patterns in Python programs, designed to complement the existing general-purpose operators and broaden the spectrum of simulated faults. We propose a mutation testing technique that utilizes a hybrid of static and dynamic analyses to mutate Python programs based on these operators while minimizing equivalent mutants. We implement our approach in a tool called PyTation and evaluate it on 13 open-source Python applications. Our results show that PyTation generates mutants that complement those from general-purpose tools, exhibiting distinct behaviour under test execution and uncovering inadequacies in high-coverage test suites. We further demonstrate that PyTation produces a high proportion of unique mutants, a low cross-kill rate, and a low test overlap ratio relative to baseline tools, highlighting its novel fault model. PyTation also incurs few equivalent mutants, aided by dynamic analysis heuristics.

Automatic Construction of Clinical Scoring Systems with LLM Agents

Silas Ruhrberg Est\'evez, Christopher Chiu, Mihaela van der Schaar — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2601.22324v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modern clinical practice relies on evidence-based guidelines implemented as compact scoring systems composed of a small number of interpretable decision rules. While machine-learning models achieve strong performance, many fail to translate into routine clinical use due to misalignment with workflow constraints such as memorability, auditability, and bedside execution. We argue that this gap arises not from insufficient predictive power, but from optimizing over model classes that are incompatible with guideline deployment. Deployable guidelines often take the form of unit-weighted clinical checklists, formed by thresholding the sum of binary rules, but learning such scores requires searching an exponentially large discrete space of possible rule sets. We introduce AgentScore, which performs semantically guided optimization in this space by using LLMs to propose candidate rules and a deterministic, data-grounded verification-and-selection loop to enforce statistical validity and deployability constraints. Across eight clinical prediction tasks, AgentScore outperforms existing score-generation methods and achieves AUROC comparable to more flexible interpretable models despite operating under stronger structural constraints. On two additional externally validated tasks, AgentScore achieves higher discrimination than established guideline-based scores.

Knowledge-Informed Kernel State Reconstruction from Heterogeneous Partial Observations

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2601.22328v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Real-world scientific systems are rarely observed through complete, regularly sampled state trajectories. Instead, measurements are often partial, noisy, and heterogeneous, providing fragmented views of latent dynamical states. We introduce MAAT (Model Aware Approximation of Trajectories), a framework for knowledge-informed Kernel State Reconstruction in partially observed dynamical systems. MAAT formulates reconstruction in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space and incorporates heterogeneous observation operators together with semantic and structural priors, including non-negativity, conservation constraints, and domain-specific measurement models. This yields smooth, physically consistent state estimates with analytic time derivatives, providing a principled interface between fragmented measurements and downstream mechanistic discovery methods such as symbolic regression. Across nine scientific benchmarks, multiple noise regimes, and a real-world COVID-19 dataset, MAAT substantially reduces trajectory and derivative reconstruction error relative to strong baselines.

Approximately Optimal Multi-Stream Quickest Change Detection

Joshua Kartzman, Calvin Hawkins, Matthew Hale — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2601.22561v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper considers the constrained sampling multi-stream quickest change detection problem, also known as the bandit quickest change detection problem. One stream contains a change-point that shifts its mean by an unknown amount. The goal is to quickly detect this change while controlling for false alarms, while being only able to sample one stream at each time. We propose an algorithm that combines a decaying-$\epsilon$-greedy stream switching rule with a Generalized Likelihood Ratio detection procedure for unknown post-change means. We provide performance bounds for our algorithm and show it achieves approximate asymptotic first-order optimality with respect to a commonly used surrogate. We are the first to provide guarantees in this setting without assumptions such as a discretized post-change parameter set or a lower bound on the magnitude of change. We provide guarantees for a wide range of light-tailed distributions, including sub-Gaussian and bounded support distributions.

RAPT: Model-Predictive Out-of-Distribution Detection and Failure Diagnosis for Sim-to-Real Humanoid Deployment

Humphrey Munn, Brendan Tidd, Peter Bohm, Marcus Gallagher, David Howard — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2602.01515v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deploying learned control policies is risky because policies that appear robust in simulation can confidently enter out-of-distribution (OOD) states after Sim-to-Real transfer, causing silent failures and potential hardware damage. Existing anomaly detectors often fail to meet the requirements of high-rate control, extremely low false-positive rates, and interpretable failure feedback. We present \textbf{RAPT} (Recurrent Anomaly Probabilistic Trajectory Model), a lightweight, self-supervised $50$\,Hz deployment monitor that learns nominal execution from large-scale simulation and produces calibrated, per-dimension predictive-deviation signals online. RAPT enables OOD detection under strict false-positive constraints while localizing \emph{when and where} real execution departs from nominal behavior. For post-hoc diagnosis, RAPT combines temporal saliency, joint-kinematic summaries, and LLM-based semantic reasoning to classify likely failure causes in a zero-shot setting. In simulation across four Isaac Lab tasks, RAPT improves TPR by $37\%$ over the strongest baseline at $0.5\%$ episode-level FPR; on hardware, it achieves $89\%$ TPR across $78$ trials with fewer false positives than high-frequency-compatible baselines, and reaches $75\%$ semantic failure diagnosis accuracy across $21$ categories on a challenging OOD subset. Project website, code, and videos: https://humphreymunn.github.io/RAPT/.

Beyond Content: Behavioral Policies Reveal Actors in Information Operations

Philipp J. Schneider, Lanqin Yuan, Marian-Andrei Rizoiu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2602.02838v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The detection of online influence operations -- coordinated campaigns by malicious actors to spread narratives -- has traditionally depended on content analysis or network features. These approaches are increasingly brittle as generative models produce convincing text, platforms restrict access to behavioral data, and actors migrate to less-regulated spaces. We introduce a platform-agnostic framework that identifies malicious actors from their behavioral policies by modeling user activity as sequential decision processes. We apply this approach to 12,064 Reddit users, including 99 accounts linked to the Russian Internet Research Agency in Reddit's 2017 transparency report, analyzing over 38 million activity steps from 2015-2018. Activity-based representations, which model how users act rather than what they post, consistently outperform content models in detecting malicious accounts. When distinguishing trolls -- users engaged in coordinated manipulation -- from ordinary users, policy-based classifiers achieve a median macro-F1 of 94.9\%, compared to 91.2\% for text embeddings. Policy features also enable earlier detection from short traces and degrade more gracefully under evasion strategies or data corruption. These findings show that behavioral dynamics encode stable, discriminative signals of manipulation on Reddit's IRA-linked campaign, and point to resilient detection strategies in the era of synthetic content and limited data access.

Training and Simulation of Quadrupedal Robot in Adaptive Stair Climbing and Descending for Indoor Firefighting: An End-to-End Reinforcement Learning Approach

Baixiao Huang, Baiyu Huang, Yu Hou — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2602.03087v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quadruped robots are used for primary searches during the early stages of indoor fires. A typical primary search involves quickly and thoroughly looking for victims under hazardous conditions and monitoring flammable materials. However, situational awareness in complex indoor environments and rapid stair climbing and descending across different staircases remain the main challenges for robot-assisted primary searches. In this project, we designed a two-stage end-to-end deep reinforcement learning (RL) approach to optimize both navigation and locomotion. In the first stage, the quadrupeds, Unitree Go2, were trained to climb and descend stairs in Isaac Lab's pyramid-stair terrain. In the second stage, the quadrupeds were trained to climb and descend various realistic indoor staircases in the Isaac Lab engine, with the learned policy transferred from the previous stage. These indoor staircases are straight, L-shaped, and spiral, to support climbing and descending tasks in complex environments. This project explores how to balance navigation and locomotion and how end-to-end RL methods can enable quadrupeds to adapt to different stair shapes. Our main contributions are: (1) A two-stage end-to-end RL framework that transfers climbing/descending skills from abstract pyramid terrain to realistic indoor stair topologies. (2) A centerline-based navigation formulation that enables unified learning of navigation and locomotion without hierarchical planning. (3) Demonstration of policy generalization across diverse staircases using only local height-map perception. (4) An empirical analysis of success, efficiency, and failure modes under increasing stair difficulty.

Fluid Reasoning Representations

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2602.04843v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Frontier large language models increasingly solve complex tasks involving abstract concepts through extended test-time thinking. Yet we lack a mechanistic account of how extended thinking changes hidden-state representations over the course of a reasoning trace. We introduce \textit{Fluid Reasoning Representations} (FRRs), a representation-level account of how LLMs organize action and predicate concepts during self-generated reasoning, and test them on obfuscated planning, symbolic, and mathematical tasks where task-relevant words are replaced while problem structure is preserved. Across open-weight base, instruction-tuned, and extended-thinking LLMs, representations of the same action or predicate become more similar across wordings and move toward the corresponding unobfuscated concepts over the reasoning trace. Causal probes show that these representations affect behavior: cross-naming steering improves held-out accuracy beyond Gaussian and shuffled controls, symbolic patching retains more action information than shuffled patching, and subtracting refined directions degrades accuracy; together, these results suggest that extended thinking strengthens a representation dynamic already present at lower magnitude in base and instruction-tuned LLMs. Our codebase is open-sourced \href{https://github.com/AI4Collaboration/Fluid-Reasoning-Representation}{here}.

LinguistAgent Technical Report: A Reflective Multi-Model Platform for Automated Linguistic Annotation

Bingru Li — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2602.05493v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Data annotation remains a significant bottleneck in the field of humanities and social sciences, particularly for complex linguistic tasks such as metaphor identification. While Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise, a significant gap remains between the theoretical capability of LLMs and their practical utility for researchers. This paper introduces LinguistAgent, an integrated, user-friendly platform that leverages a reflective multi-model architecture to automate linguistic annotation. The platform comprises an Annotator and an optional Reviewer to simulate a peer-review process. This platform supports comparative experiments across three main paradigms: Prompt Engineering (Zero-shot/Few-shot/Chain-of-thought), Retrieval-Augmented Generation, and Fine-tuning. We demonstrate LinguistAgent's efficacy by replicating the task of metaphor identification from a published study, which provides real-time token-level evaluation (F1 and Cohen's kappa) against human gold standards. The application and codes are released on https://github.com/Bingru-Li/LinguistAgent.

VENOMREC: Cross-Modal Interactive Poisoning for Targeted Promotion in Multimodal LLM Recommender Systems

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2602.06409v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are pushing recommender systems (RecSys) toward content-grounded retrieval and ranking via cross-modal fusion. We find that while cross-modal consensus often mitigates conventional poisoning that manipulates interaction logs or perturbs a single modality, it also introduces a new attack surface where synchronised multimodal poisoning can reliably steer fused representations along stable semantic directions during fine-tuning. To characterise this threat, we formalise cross-modal interactive poisoning and propose VENOMREC, which performs Exposure Alignment to identify high-exposure regions in the joint embedding space and Cross-modal Interactive Perturbation to craft attention-guided coupled token--patch edits. Experiments on four real-world multimodal datasets demonstrate that VENOMREC consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving 0.73 mean ER@20 and improving over the strongest baseline by +0.52 absolute ER points on average, while maintaining comparable recommendation utility. Code is available at https://github.com/GuoweiGuan666/VenomRec.

Strategizing at Speed: A Learned Model Predictive Game for Multi-Agent Drone Racing

Andrei-Carlo Papuc, Lasse Peters, Sihao Sun, Laura Ferranti, Javier Alonso-Mora — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2602.06925v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autonomous drone racing pushes the boundaries of high-speed motion planning and multi-agent strategic decision-making. Success in this domain requires drones not only to navigate at their limits but also to anticipate and counteract competitors' actions. In this paper, we study a fundamental question that arises in this domain: how deeply should an agent strategize before taking an action? To this end, we compare two planning paradigms: the Model Predictive Game (MPG), which finds interaction-aware strategies at the expense of longer computation times, and contouring Model Predictive Control (MPC), which computes strategies rapidly but does not reason about interactions. We perform extensive experiments to study this trade-off, revealing that MPG outperforms MPC at moderate velocities but loses its advantage at higher speeds due to latency. To address this shortcoming, we propose a Learned Model Predictive Game (LMPG) approach that amortizes model predictive gameplay to reduce latency. In both simulation and hardware experiments, we benchmark our approach against MPG and MPC in head-to-head races, finding that LMPG outperforms both baselines.

Multifidelity sensor placement in Bayesian state estimation problems

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2602.07269v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study optimal sensor placement for Bayesian state estimation problems in which sensors vary in cost and fidelity, resulting in a budget-constrained multifidelity optimal experimental design problem. Sensor placement optimality is quantified using the D-optimality criterion, and the problem is approached by leveraging connections with the column subset selection problem in numerical linear algebra. We implement a greedy approach for this problem, whose computational efficiency we improve using rank-one updates via the Sherman-Morrison formula. We additionally present an iterative algorithm that, for each feasible allocation of sensors, greedily optimizes over each sensor fidelity subject to previous sensor choices, repeating this process until a termination criterion is satisfied. To our knowledge, these algorithms are novel in the context of cost-constrained multifidelity sensor placement. We evaluate our methods on several benchmark state estimation problems, including reconstructions of sea surface temperature and flow around a cylinder, and empirically demonstrate improved performance over random designs.

CompilerKV: Risk-Adaptive KV Compression via Offline Experience Compilation

Ning Yang, Chengzhi Wang, Yibo Liu, Baoliang Tian, Haijun Zhang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2602.08686v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Prefill-only KV compression freezes a token subset at the end of prefill and decodes from it without further eviction. The retention decision is therefore irreversible, yet existing methods estimate the corrective signals it relies on, per-head reliability and prompt-level compression sensitivity, online from a single noisy prompt. We argue this is the wrong statistical unit: these signals exhibit far higher cross-prompt regularity than within-prompt signal-to-noise. We introduce \textsc{CompilerKV}, a KV-retention policy whose corrective tables are compiled offline from a calibration corpus, reducing online correction after the standard observation-window scan to $O(1)$ lookups plus a budget clamp. We find that compiled retention tables behave as portable architectural priors: rankings transfer across disjoint corpora on four backbones (mean Spearman $\bar\rho{=}0.90$), and direct model-to-model table transfer costs only $0.4$--$0.8$ LongBench points on average. At a 512-token budget, \textsc{CompilerKV} attains compressed-SOTA on all four backbones, improving over the strongest prefill-only baseline by $+1.67$ points on average (task-bootstrap 95\% CI $[+1.08,+2.37]$). Pressure regimes amplify the gap: under a fixed $512/32k$ cache ratio, CompilerKV remains the strongest compressed method through 128k RULER ($\sim\!73$ vs.\ FullKV $\sim\!79$, SnapKV $\sim\!38$); on 32k NIAH it reaches $0.89$ vs.\ SnapKV $0.42$; and at 32k input, retaining only $1.56\%$ of the prefill KV, batch-16 serving remains feasible where FullKV is OOM.

ORCHID: Fairness-Aware Orchestration in Mission-Critical Air-Ground Integrated Networks

Chuan-Chi Lai, Chi Jai Choy — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2602.09994v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) provide pivotal on-demand wireless coverage for mission-critical 6G Air-Ground Integrated Networks (AGINs). However, traditional Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) orchestration struggles with multi-agent non-stationarity and balancing Energy Efficiency (EE) with service equity. To address these challenges, we propose ORCHID (Orchestration of Resilient Coverage via Hybrid Intelligent Deployment), a stability-enhanced two-stage learning framework. First, ORCHID utilizes Ground Base Station (GBS)-aware topology partitioning to mitigate the exploration cold-start problem. Second, a Reset-and-Finetune (R&F) mechanism within the Multi-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization (MAPPO) architecture enhances learning stability by synchronizing learning-rate decay with optimizer resetting, thereby reducing gradient variance and mitigating policy degradation. Furthermore, by formulating the resource allocation problem as an Egalitarian Bargaining Game (EBG), our theoretical analysis provides new insights into the relationship between fairness and energy efficiency. Specifically, the proposed Max-Min Fairness (MMF) design provides a theoretical explanation for the emergence of a more dispersed and load-balanced UAV topology, while experimental results further demonstrate that this spatial organization improves system energy efficiency compared with conventional Proportional Fairness (PF) schemes. Moreover, ORCHID deliberately sacrifices opportunistic throughput peaks in favor of more stable long-term service performance, resulting in consistently lower performance variance while maintaining a higher minimum service level and substantially improving service fairness. Extensive experimental results demonstrate robust topology adaptation, stable policy convergence, and consistent performance gains over representative state-of-the-art baselines.

MindPilot: Closed-loop Visual Stimulation Optimization for Brain Modulation with EEG-guided Diffusion

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2602.10552v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Whereas most brain-computer interface research has focused on decoding neural signals into behavior or intent, the reverse challenge-using controlled stimuli to steer brain activity-remains far less understood, particularly in the visual domain. However, designing images that consistently elicit desired neural responses is difficult: subjective states lack clear quantitative measures, and EEG feedback is both noisy and non-differentiable. We introduce MindPilot, the first closed-loop framework that uses EEG signals as optimization feedback to guide naturalistic image generation. Unlike prior work limited to invasive settings or low-level flicker stimuli, MindPilot leverages non-invasive EEG with natural images, treating the brain as a black-box function and employing a pseudo-model guidance mechanism to iteratively refine images without requiring explicit rewards or gradients. We validate MindPilot in both simulation and human experiments, demonstrating (i) efficient retrieval of semantic targets, (ii) closed-loop optimization of EEG features, and (iii) human-subject validations in mental matching and emotion regulation tasks. Our results establish the feasibility of EEG-guided image synthesis and open new avenues for non-invasive closed-loop brain modulation, bidirectional brain-computer interfaces, and neural signal-guided generative modeling.

Measuring and Mitigating Post-hoc Rationalization in Reverse Chain-of-Thought Generation

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2602.14469v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reverse Chain-of-Thought Generation (RCG) synthesizes reasoning traces from query-answer pairs, but answer-visible generation can justify a pre-committed answer rather than derive it. This post-hoc rationalization creates a train-inference mismatch because student models are trained on answer-conditioned traces but must reason without answer access at inference time. We quantify this mismatch through lexical, trajectory, and probabilistic anchoring, measuring surface overlap, answer-conditioned generation dynamics, and answer recoverability from the trace, respectively. We find that semantic suppression, a seemingly intuitive mitigation, reduces lexical overlap but increases trajectory anchoring: avoiding the answer requires continually tracking it, thereby strengthening its influence on generation. We therefore propose Structural Skeleton-guided Reasoning (SSR), which replaces suppression with structural decoupling by first generating an abstract functional skeleton and then using it to guide the full reasoning trace. Anchoring analyses show that SSR reduces all three forms of answer dependence. Across in-domain and out-of-distribution benchmarks, its distilled variant, SSR-D, improves performance by up to 10 points over suppression baselines and better preserves out-of-distribution performance. Code is available at https://github.com/viniferagy/SSR.

Efficient Multi-round LLM Inference over Disaggregated Serving

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2602.14516v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: With the rapid evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs), multi-round workflows, such as autonomous agents and iterative retrieval, have become increasingly prevalent. However, this raises hurdles for serving LLMs under prefill-decode (PD) disaggregation, a widely adopted paradigm that separates the compute-bound prefill phase and memory-bound decode phase onto individual resources. Specifically, existing systems overlook the interleaved prefill-decode workload pattern in multi-round inference, leading to sub-optimal handling of the incremental prefill workloads and model deployment for the two phases. In this work, we present AMPD, a brand new disaggregated serving framework for multi-round LLM inference. The core of AMPD is to coordinate the prefill workloads based on real-time workloads by adaptively determining where to carry out these workloads and how they are scheduled, in order to maximize service level objective (SLO) attainment. In addition, we tailor a planning algorithm for our scenario, facilitating the deduction of optimal resource allocation and parallel strategies for the two phases. Empirical results demonstrate that AMPD substantially improves SLO attainment compared to state-of-the-art baselines.

Fly0: Persistent Metric Anchoring for Zero-Shot Aerial Vision-Language Navigation

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2602.15875v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Current Visual-Language Navigation (VLN) methodologies face a trade-off between semantic understanding and control precision. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) offer superior reasoning, deploying them as low-level controllers leads to high latency, trajectory oscillations, and poor generalization due to weak geometric grounding. To address these limitations, we propose Fly0, a framework that decouples semantic reasoning from geometric planning. The proposed method operates through a three-stage pipeline: (1) an MLLM-driven module for grounding natural language instructions into 2D pixel coordinates; (2) a geometric projection module that utilizes depth data to localize targets in 3D space; and (3) a geometric planner that generates collision-free trajectories. This mechanism enables robust navigation even when visual contact is lost. By eliminating the need for continuous inference, Fly0 reduces computational overhead and improves system stability. Extensive experiments in simulation and real-world environments demonstrate that Fly0 outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, improving the Success Rate by over 20\% and reducing Navigation Error (NE) by approximately 50\% in unstructured environments. Our code is available at https://github.com/xuzhenxing1/Fly0.

Computing Equilibria in Games with Stochastic Action Sets

Thomas Schwarz, Ryann Sim, Chun Kai Ling — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2602.16234v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The study of learning in games typically assumes that each player always has access to all of their actions. However, in many practical scenarios, players' available actions might be restricted due to exogenous stochasticity. To model this setting, for a game $\mathcal{G}_{\mathrm{orig}}$ with action set $A_i$ for each player $i$, we introduce the corresponding Game with Stochastic Action Sets (GSAS) which is parametrized by a probability distribution over the players' set of possible action subsets $\mathcal{S}_i \subseteq 2^{\vert A_i\vert}\backslash\{\varnothing\}$. In a GSAS, players' strategies and Nash equilibria (NE) admit prohibitively large representations, and existing algorithms for NE computation scale poorly. Under the assumption that action availabilities are independent between players, we show that NE in two-player zero-sum (2p0s) GSAS can be compactly represented by a vector of size $\vert A_i\vert$, overcoming the na\"ive exponential-sized representation. Computationally, we introduce an efficient algorithm called SI-MWU that minimizes sleeping internal regret, converging to NE with high probability in 2p0s-GSAS with rate $O(\sqrt{\log\vert A_i\vert/T})$. Finally, using the SI-MWU iterates, we develop a procedure based on stochastic approximation to recover compactly represented NE.

Toward Manifest Relationality in Transformers via Symmetry Reduction

J. Fran\c{c}ois, L. Ravera — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2602.18948v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transformer models contain substantial internal redundancy arising from coordinate-dependent representations and continuous symmetries, in model space and in head space, respectively. While recent approaches address this by explicitly breaking symmetry, we propose a complementary framework based on symmetry reduction. We reformulate representations, attention mechanisms, and optimization dynamics in terms of invariant relational quantities, eliminating redundant degrees of freedom by construction. This perspective yields architectures that operate directly on relational structures, providing a principled geometric framework for reducing parameter redundancy and analyzing optimization.

Brewing Stronger Features: Dual-Teacher Distillation for Multispectral Earth Observation

Filip Wolf, Bla\v{z} Rolih, Luka \v{C}ehovin Zajc — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2602.19863v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Foundation models are transforming Earth Observation (EO), yet the diversity of EO sensors and modalities makes a single universal model unrealistic. Multiple specialized EO foundation models (EOFMs) will likely coexist, making efficient knowledge transfer across modalities essential. Most existing EO pretraining relies on masked image modeling, which emphasizes local reconstruction but provides limited control over global semantic structure. To address this, we propose a dual-teacher contrastive distillation framework for multispectral imagery that aligns the student's pretraining objective with the contrastive self-distillation paradigm of modern optical vision foundation models (VFMs). Our approach combines a multispectral teacher with an optical VFM teacher, enabling coherent cross-modal representation learning. Experiments across diverse optical and multispectral benchmarks show that our model adapts to multispectral data without compromising performance on optical-only inputs, achieving state-of-the-art results in both settings, with an average improvement of 3.64 percentage points in semantic segmentation, 1.2 in change detection, and 1.31 in classification tasks. This demonstrates that contrastive distillation provides a principled and efficient approach to scalable representation learning across heterogeneous EO data sources. Project page: \textcolor{magenta}{https://wolfilip.github.io/DEO/}.

Discrete Diffusion with Sample-Efficient Estimators for Conditionals

Karthik Elamvazhuthi, Abhijith Jayakumar, Andrey Y. Lokhov — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2602.20293v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study a discrete denoising diffusion framework that integrates a sample-efficient estimator of single-site conditionals with round-robin noising and denoising dynamics for generative modeling over discrete state spaces. Rather than approximating a discrete analog of a score function, our formulation treats single-site conditional probabilities as the fundamental objects that parameterize the reverse diffusion process. We employ a sample-efficient method known as Neural Interaction Screening Estimator (NeurISE) to estimate these conditionals in the diffusion dynamics. Controlled experiments on synthetic Ising models, MNIST, and scientific data sets produced by a D-Wave quantum annealer, synthetic Potts model and one dimensional quantum systems demonstrate the proposed approach. On the binary data sets, these experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms popular existing methods including ratio-based approaches, achieving improved performance in total variation, cross-correlations, and kernel density estimation metrics.

Vectorizing the Trie: Efficient Constrained Decoding for LLM-based Generative Retrieval on Accelerators

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2602.22647v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generative retrieval has emerged as a powerful paradigm for LLM-based recommendation. However, industrial recommender systems often benefit from restricting the output space to a constrained subset of items based on business logic (e.g. enforcing content freshness or product category), which standard autoregressive decoding cannot natively support. Moreover, existing constrained decoding methods that make use of prefix trees (Tries) incur severe latency penalties on hardware accelerators (TPUs/GPUs). In this work, we introduce STATIC (Sparse Transition Matrix-Accelerated Trie Index for Constrained Decoding), an efficient and scalable constrained decoding technique designed specifically for high-throughput LLM-based generative retrieval on TPUs/GPUs. By flattening the prefix tree into a static Compressed Sparse Row (CSR) matrix, we transform irregular tree traversals into fully vectorized sparse matrix operations, unlocking massive efficiency gains on hardware accelerators. We deploy STATIC on a large-scale industrial video recommendation platform serving billions of users. STATIC produces significant product metric impact with minimal latency overhead (0.033 ms per step and 0.25% of inference time), achieving a 948x speedup over a CPU trie implementation and a 47-1033x speedup over a hardware-accelerated binary-search baseline. Furthermore, the runtime overhead of STATIC remains extremely low across a wide range of practical configurations. To the best of our knowledge, STATIC enables the first production-scale deployment of strictly constrained generative retrieval. In addition, evaluation on academic benchmarks demonstrates that STATIC can considerably improve cold-start performance for generative retrieval. Our code is available at https://github.com/youtube/static-constraint-decoding.

When Visual Evidence is Ambiguous: Pareidolia as a Diagnostic Probe for Vision Models

Qianpu Chen, Derya Soydaner, Rob Saunders — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2603.03989v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: When visual evidence is ambiguous, vision models must decide how to interpret face-like patterns. Face pareidolia, the perception of faces in non-face objects, provides a controlled probe of such decisions. We introduce a diagnostic framework that analyzes detection, localization, uncertainty and bias across class, difficulty and emotion. We evaluate six models spanning four representational regimes: vision-language models (VLMs; CLIP-B/32, CLIP-L/14, LLaVA-1.5-7B), pure vision classification (ViT), object detection (YOLOv8), and face detection (RetinaFace). Our results reveal that uncertainty and bias are decoupled: low uncertainty can signal either safe suppression, as in detectors, or extreme over-interpretation, as in VLMs. VLMs exhibit semantic overactivation, systematically interpreting ambiguous non-human regions as Human, with LLaVA over-calling on 73% of non-human pareidolic images, especially for negative emotions. ViT instead follows an uncertainty-as-abstention strategy, remaining diffuse yet largely unbiased. Detection-based models achieve low bias through conservative priors that suppress pareidolia responses even when localization is controlled. Together, these results show that behavior under ambiguity is governed more by representation than thresholds, establishing face pareidolia as a diagnostic of semantic robustness and a source of ambiguity-aware hard negatives for vision models. Code will be released upon publication.

LLM-Grounded Explainable AI for Supply Chain Risk Early Warning via Temporal Graph Attention Networks

Zhiming Xue, Yujue Wang, Menghao Huo — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2603.04818v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Disruptions at critical logistics nodes pose severe risks to global supply chains, yet existing risk prediction systems typically prioritize forecasting accuracy without providing operationally interpretable early warnings. This paper proposes an evidence-grounded framework that jointly performs supply chain bottleneck prediction and faithful natural-language risk explanation by coupling a Temporal Graph Attention Network (TGAT) with a structured large language model (LLM) reasoning module. Using maritime hubs as a representative case study for global supply chain nodes, daily spatial graphs are constructed from Automatic Identification System (AIS) broadcasts, where inter-node interactions are modeled through attention-based message passing. The TGAT predictor captures spatiotemporal risk dynamics, while model-internal evidence -- including feature z-scores and attention-derived neighbor influence -- is transformed into structured prompts that constrain LLM reasoning to verifiable model outputs. To evaluate explanatory reliability, we introduce a directional-consistency validation protocol that quantitatively measures agreement between generated risk narratives and underlying statistical evidence. Experiments on six months of real-world logistics data demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms baseline models, achieving a test AUC of 0.761, AP of 0.344, and recall of 0.504 under a strict chronological split while producing early warning explanations with 99.6\% directional consistency. Results show that grounding LLM generation in graph-model evidence enables interpretable and auditable risk reporting without sacrificing predictive performance. The framework provides a practical pathway toward operationally deployable explainable AI for supply chain risk early warning and resilience management.

The Complexity of the Constructive Master Modality

Sof\'ia Santiago-Fern\'andez, David Fern\'andez-Duque, Joost J. Joosten — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2603.05131v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce the semantically-defined constructive master-modality logics $\sf CK^*$ and $\sf WK^*$, extending the basic constructive modal logic $\sf CK$ and the Wijesekera-style logic $\sf WK$ obtained by impossing infallibility. Using translations between our logics and fragments of $\sf PDL$, we show that both $\sf CK^*$ and $\sf WK^*$ are EXPTIME-complete and admit an exponential-size finite model property. In particular, for their diamond-free fragment, also studied by Afshari et al. and Celoni, we establish EXPTIME-completeness, thereby settling the conjecture of Afshari et al. As an application, we embed $\sf CS4$ and $\sf WS4$ into the master-modality logics, showing that their validity problems are in EXPTIME.

Animating Petascale Time-varying Data on Commodity Hardware with LLM-assisted Scripting

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2603.07053v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scientists face significant visualization challenges as time-varying datasets grow in speed and volume, often requiring specialized infrastructure and expertise to handle massive datasets. Petascale climate models generated in NASA laboratories require a dedicated group of graphics and media experts and access to high-performance computing resources. Scientists may need to share scientific results with the community iteratively and quickly. However, the time-consuming trial-and-error process incurs significant data transfer overhead and far exceeds the time and resources allocated for typical post-analysis visualization tasks, disrupting the production workflow. Our paper introduces a user-friendly framework for creating 3D animations of petascale, time-varying data on a commodity workstation. Our contributions: (i) Generalized Animation Descriptor (GAD) with a keyframe-based adaptable abstraction for animation, (ii) efficient data access from cloud-hosted repositories to reduce data management overhead, (iii) tailored rendering system, and (iv) an LLM-assisted conversational interface as a scripting module to allow domain scientists with no visualization expertise to create animations of their region of interest. We demonstrate the framework's effectiveness with two case studies: first, by generating animations in which sampling criteria are specified based on prior knowledge, and second, by generating AI-assisted animations in which sampling parameters are derived from natural-language user prompts. In all cases, we use large-scale NASA climate-oceanographic datasets that exceed 1PB in size yet achieve a fast turnaround time of 1 minute to 2 hours. Users can generate a rough draft of the animation within minutes, then seamlessly incorporate as much high-resolution data as needed for the final version.

Give Them an Inch and They Will Take a Mile:Understanding and Measuring Caller Identity Confusion in MCP-Based AI Systems

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2603.07473v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open and standardized interface that enables large language models (LLMs) to interact with external tools and services, and is increasingly adopted by AI agents. However, the security of MCP-based systems remains largely unexplored.In this work, we conduct a large-scale security analysis of MCP servers integrated within MCP clients. We show that treating MCP servers as trusted entities without authenticating the caller identity is fundamentally insecure. Since MCP servers often cannot distinguish who is invoking a request, a single authorization decision may implicitly grant access to multiple, potentially untrusted callers.Our empirical study reveals that most MCP servers rely on persistent authorization states, allowing tool invocations after an initial authorization without re-authentication, regardless of the caller. In addition, many MCP servers fail to enforce authentication at the per-tool level, enabling unauthorized access to sensitive operations.These findings demonstrate that one-time authorization and server-level trust significantly expand the attack surface of MCP-based systems, highlighting the need for explicit caller authentication and fine-grained authorization mechanisms.

EquiBim: Learning Symmetry-Equivariant Policy for Bimanual Manipulation

Zhiyuan Zhang, Aditya Mohan, Seungho Han, Wan Shou, Dongyi Wang, Yu She — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2603.08541v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robotic imitation learning has achieved impressive success in learning complex manipulation behaviors from demonstrations. However, many existing robot learning methods do not explicitly account for the physical symmetries of robotic systems, often resulting in asymmetric or inconsistent behaviors under symmetric observations. This limitation is particularly pronounced in dual-arm manipulation, where bilateral symmetry is inherent to both the robot morphology and the structure of many tasks. In this paper, we introduce EquiBim, a symmetry-equivariant policy learning framework for bimanual manipulation that enforces bilateral equivariance between observations and actions during training. Our approach formulates physical symmetry as a group action on both observation and action spaces, and imposes an equivariance constraint on policy predictions under symmetric transformations. The framework is model-agnostic and can be seamlessly integrated into a wide range of imitation learning pipelines with diverse observation modalities and action representations, including point cloud-based and image-based policies, as well as both end-effector-space and joint-space parameterizations. We evaluate EquiBim on RoboTwin, a dual-arm robotic platform with symmetric kinematics, and evaluate it across diverse observation and action configurations in simulation. We further validate the approach on a real-world dual-arm system. Across both simulation and physical experiments, our method consistently improves performance and robustness under distribution shifts. These results suggest that explicitly enforcing physical symmetry provides a simple yet effective inductive bias for bimanual robot learning.

CONTACT: CONtact-aware TACTile Learning for Robotic Disassembly

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2603.08560v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robotic disassembly involves contact-rich interactions in which successful manipulation depends not only on geometric alignment but also on force-dependent state transitions. While vision-based policies perform well in structured settings, their reliability often degrades in tight-tolerance, contact-dominated, or deformable scenarios. In this work, we systematically investigate the role of tactile sensing in robotic disassembly through both simulation and real-world experiments. We construct five rigid-body disassembly tasks in simulation with increasing geometric constraints and extraction difficulty. We further design five real-world tasks, including three rigid and two deformable scenarios, to evaluate contact-dependent manipulation. Within a unified learning framework, we compare three sensing configurations: Vision Only, Vision + tactile RGB (TacRGB), and Vision + tactile force field (TacFF). Across both simulation and real-world experiments, TacFF-based policies consistently achieve the highest success rates, with particularly notable gains in contact-dependent and deformable settings. Notably, naive fusion of TacRGB and TacFF underperforms either modality alone, indicating that simple concatenation can dilute task-relevant force information. Our results show that tactile sensing plays a critical, task-dependent role in robotic disassembly, with structured force-field representations being particularly effective in contact-dominated scenarios.

Fly, Track, Land: Infrastructure-less Magnetic Localization for Heterogeneous UAV-UGV Teaming

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2603.08926v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Persistent air ground robot teams require nano UAVs that can leave a mobile UGV, perform short scouting or inspection tasks, and reliably return to a compact landing interface. This final docking phase remains difficult: it demands centimeter-scale relative localization on a moving platform, while nano UAVs provide only a few grams of payload and severe onboard sensing, power, and computation constraints. We address this problem with an infrastructure-less magneto inductive anchor-tag localization system for heterogeneous UAV-UGV teaming. Unlike passive magnetic docking aids or approaches exploiting environmental magnetic features, the proposed system actively generates a frequency multiplexed AC magnetic field on the UGV and uses it as an onboard localization reference for closed loop flight. The nano UAV carries only a lightweight passive receive coil and estimates its 3D position directly in the UGV frame, providing a local close range reference for hovering, tracking, and landing without external anchors, visual fiducials, GNSS, or motion capture online. The magnetic estimate is fused with the native onboard sensing stack, enabling operation under nano UAV SWaP constraints. Experiments with a Unitree A1 quadruped and a Crazyflie nano UAV, evaluated against motion capture ground truth, show centimeter level accuracy in static hovering and landing and approximately 8-11 cm RMSE during UGV motion, while the flow only baseline frequently violates the safety bound and fails the task.

Information Theoretic Bayesian Optimization over the Probability Simplex

Federico Pavesi, Antonio Candelieri, No\'emie Jaquier — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2603.09793v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Bayesian optimization is a data-efficient technique that has been shown to be extremely powerful to optimize expensive, black-box, and possibly noisy objective functions. Many applications involve optimizing probabilities and mixtures which naturally belong to the probability simplex, a constrained non-Euclidean domain defined by non-negative entries summing to one. This paper introduces $\alpha$-GaBO, a novel family of Bayesian optimization algorithms over the probability simplex. Our approach is grounded in information geometry, a branch of Riemannian geometry which endows the simplex with a Riemannian metric and a class of connections. Based on information geometry theory, we construct Mat\'ern kernels that reflect the geometry of the probability simplex, as well as a one-parameter family of geometric optimizers for the acquisition function. We validate our method on benchmark functions and on a variety of real-world applications including mixtures of components, mixtures of classifiers, and a robotic control task, showing its increased performance compared to constrained Euclidean approaches.

Robust Co-design Optimisation for Agile Fixed-Wing UAVs

Adrian Andrei Buda, Xavier Chen, Nicol\`o Botteghi, Urban Fasel — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2603.11130v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Co-design optimisation of autonomous systems has emerged as a powerful alternative to sequential approaches by jointly optimising physical design and control strategies. However, existing frameworks often neglect the robustness required for autonomous systems navigating unstructured, real-world environments. For agile Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) operating at the edge of the flight envelope, this lack of robustness yields designs that are sensitive to perturbations and model mismatch. To address this, we propose a robust co-design framework for agile fixed-wing UAVs that integrates parametric uncertainty and wind disturbances directly into the concurrent optimisation process. Our bi-level approach optimises physical design in a high-level loop while discovering nominal solutions via a constrained trajectory planner and evaluating performance across a stochastic Monte Carlo ensemble using feedback LQR control. Validated across three agile flight missions, our strategy consistently outperforms deterministic baselines. The results demonstrate that our robust co-design strategy inherently tailors aerodynamic features, such as wing placement and aspect ratio, to achieve an optimal trade-off between mission performance and disturbance rejection.

SWE-Milestone: Evaluating AI Agents on Continuous Software Evolution

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2603.13428v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Real-world software must continuously evolve to meet ever-changing and open-ended requirements. AI agents, increasingly deployed as long-running systems, are now entrusted to drive this evolution. Yet, existing benchmarks evaluate agents on isolated, one-off coding tasks, neglecting the temporal dependencies and technical debt inherent in real-world software evolution. To bridge this gap, we introduce DeepCommit, an agentic pipeline that reconstructs verifiable Milestone DAGs from noisy commit logs, where milestones are defined as functionally cohesive development goals. These executable sequences enable SWE-Milestone, a benchmark that evaluates agents on streams of milestone-level tasks, requiring them to sustain system integrity and limit error accumulation, dimensions of long-term software evolution largely missing from current benchmarks. Our evaluation of 12 frontier models across 4 agent frameworks reveals a critical vulnerability: overall performance scores drop significantly from >80% on isolated tasks to 38.03% in continuous settings, exposing agents' profound struggle with long-term maintenance and error propagation.

TransDex: Pre-training Visuo-Tactile Policy with Point Cloud Reconstruction for Dexterous Manipulation of Transparent Objects

Fengguan Li, Yifan Ma, Chen Qian, Wentao Rao, Weiwei Shang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2603.13869v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Dexterous manipulation enables complex tasks but suffers from self-occlusion, severe depth noise, and depth information loss when manipulating transparent objects. To solve this problem, this paper proposes TransDex, a 3D visuo-tactile fusion motor policy based on point cloud reconstruction pre-training. Specifically, we first propose a self-supervised point cloud reconstruction pre-training approach based on Transformer. This method accurately recovers the 3D structure of objects from interactive point clouds of dexterous hands, even when random noise and large-scale masking are added. Building on this, TransDex is constructed in which perceptual encoding adopts a fine-grained hierarchical scheme and multi-round attention mechanisms adaptively fuse features of the robotic arm and dexterous hand to enable differentiated motion prediction. Results from transparent object manipulation experiments conducted on a real robotic system demonstrate that TransDex outperforms existing baseline methods. Further analysis validates the generalization capabilities of TransDex and the effectiveness of its individual components.

PyPhonPlan: Simulating phonetic planning with dynamic neural fields and task dynamics

Sam Kirkham — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2603.16299v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce PyPhonPlan, a Python toolkit for implementing dynamical models of phonetic planning using coupled dynamic neural fields and task dynamic simulations. The toolkit provides modular components for defining planning, perception and memory fields, as well as between-field coupling, gestural inputs, and using field activation profiles to solve tract variable trajectories. We illustrate the toolkit's capabilities through an example application: simulating production/perception loops with a coupled memory field, which demonstrates the framework's ability to model interactive speech dynamics using representations that are temporally-principled, neurally-grounded, and phonetically-rich. PyPhonPlan is released as open-source software and contains executable examples to promote reproducibility, extensibility, and cumulative computational development for speech communication research.

PlotTwist: A Creative Plot Generation Framework with Small Language Models

Abhinav Thorat, Ravi Kolla, Jyotin Goel, Madhav Kataria, Niranjan Pedanekar — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2603.16410v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Creative plot generation presents a fundamental challenge for language models: transforming a concise premise into a coherent narrative that sustains global coherence, character development, pacing, tone consistency, and emotional progression. Although recent Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong fluency on general-purpose tasks, they require preference alignment to perform well on domain-specific tasks such as creative plot generation. However, conducting such alignment at the scale of frontier LLMs is computationally prohibitive, significantly limiting accessibility and practical deployment. To address this, we present PlotTwist, a structured framework that enables Small Language Models (SLMs) with $\leq$3B active parameters to generate high-quality, premise-conditioned plots competitive with frontier systems of vastly greater parameter scale. Our approach decomposes generation into three specialized components: (1) an Aspect Rating Reward Model, trained via a novel Positive-Negative prompting strategy; (2) a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) plot generator aligned via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO); and (3) an Agentic Evaluation module using a cross-family jury for unbiased, independent post-hoc assessment. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PlotTwist consistently outperforms all baselines, including frontier models, across multiple Narrative Quality Dimensions (NQDs), achieving higher win rates against every baseline except the strongest, with which it remains competitive. Further validation confirms strong sensitivity to narrative quality, as the framework reliably distinguishes plots derived from critically acclaimed versus widely panned screenplays. Together, these results establish structured, preference-based alignment as a resource-efficient approach to high-quality creative plot generation. Project page: https://abhinavthorat.github.io/plottwist/

Actionable Guidance Outperforms Map and Compass Cues in Demanding Immersive VR Wayfinding

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2603.17238v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Navigation aids are central to immersive virtual reality (VR) experiences that involve physical locomotion. Their effectiveness depends not only on how much spatial information they provide, but also on how directly that information supports movement decisions. We compared three common guidance techniques for immersive VR wayfinding: a directional arrow, a minimap, and a compass. In a controlled room-scale VR study with 42 participants completing 1008 trials, participants navigated to target landmarks in a time-pressured maze with reduced visibility and forced route replanning. Across behavioral and eye-tracking measures, arrow guidance produced the strongest navigation performance, minimap guidance yielded intermediate performance, and compass cues performed worst, suggesting that during immersive locomotion users benefit from guidance that can be interpreted rapidly while moving. These results suggest that in demanding immersive locomotion tasks, interfaces that translate spatial information directly into actionable movement cues can outperform richer but more interpretive spatial representations. Our findings highlight the importance of designing XR navigation interfaces that minimize the cognitive translation between spatial information and movement decisions.

TiBCLaG: Hybrid design approach for a trigger-induced bistable compliant laparoscopic grasper

Joel J Nellikkunnel, Prabhat Kumar — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2603.18559v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Industrial laparoscopic graspers rely on multi-link rigid mechanisms manufactured to tight tolerances, resulting in high manufacturing and assembly costs. This work presents the design and proof-of-concept validation of a monolithic, fully compliant, bistable, laparoscopic grasper that eliminates the need for multiple rigid links, thereby reducing part count. The device integrates a compliant trigger and a compliant gripper end-effector, coupled via a control push-rod, to achieve stable grasping without continuous user input. A hybrid approach combining an analytical model, iterative prototyping, and finite element analyses is employed to design the laparoscopic grasper. The trigger mechanism is synthesized using a Two-Element Beam Constraint Model as a design framework to control the deformation and stiffness of I-beam-like elements. This technique enables elastic energy storage while preventing snap-through instability. The end-effector is designed as a compliant gripper to achieve adaptive grasping through elastic deformation. The laparoscopic design presented here is fabricated using fused deposition 3D printing. A comparative study of the jaws' opening and closing performance is presented using nonlinear finite element analysis and experimentation. The fabricated prototype demonstrates reliable bistable actuation, confirming the feasibility of such compliant laparoscopic grasper architectures.

When Agents Disagree: The Selection Bottleneck in Multi-Agent LLM Pipelines

Artem Maryanskyy, Dmitry Budnikov, Alibek T. Kaliyev — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2603.20324v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-agent LLM pipelines produce contradictory evidence on whether team diversity improves output quality: heterogeneous Mixture-of-Agents teams outperform single models, yet homogeneous Self-MoA teams consistently win under synthesis-based aggregation. We propose a resolution by identifying the selection bottleneck -- a crossover threshold in aggregation quality that determines whether diversity helps or hurts. Under this model, we obtain a closed-form crossover threshold $s^*$ (Proposition 1) that separates the regimes where diversity helps and hurts. In a targeted experiment spanning 42 tasks across 7 categories ($N=210$), a diverse team with judge-based selection achieves a win rate of 0.810 against a single-model baseline, while a homogeneous team scores 0.512 -- near chance (Glass's $\Delta = 2.07$). Judge-based selection outperforms MoA-style synthesis by $\Delta_{\mathrm{WR}} = +0.631$ -- the synthesis approach is preferred over the baseline in zero of 42 tasks by the judge panel. A decoupled evaluation with independent judges confirms all directional findings (Spearman $\rho = 0.90$). Exploratory evidence suggests that including a weaker model improves performance while reducing cost ($p < 10^{-4}$, not pre-registered). Our results suggest that selector quality may be a more impactful design lever than generator diversity in single-round generate-then-select pipelines.

The Hidden Puppet Master: Predicting Human Belief Change in Manipulative LLM Dialogues

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2603.20907v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As users increasingly turn to LLMs for practical and personal advice, they become vulnerable to subtle steering toward hidden incentives misaligned with their own interests. While existing NLP research has benchmarked manipulation detection, these efforts often rely on simulated debates and remain fundamentally decoupled from actual human belief shifts in real-world scenarios. We introduce PUPPET, a theoretical taxonomy and resource that bridges this gap by focusing on the moral direction of hidden incentives in everyday, advice-giving contexts. We provide an evaluation dataset of N=1,035 human-LLM interactions, where we measure users' belief shifts. Our analysis reveals a critical disconnect in current safety paradigms: while models can be trained to detect manipulative strategies, they do not correlate with the magnitude of resulting belief change. As such, we define the task of human belief shift prediction and show that while state-of-the-art LLMs achieve moderate correlation (r=0.3-0.5), they exhibit systematic directional biases, with certain models over or under-predicting the magnitude of human belief change. This work establishes a theoretically grounded and behaviorally validated foundation for AI social safety efforts by studying incentive-driven manipulation in LLMs during everyday, practical user queries.

CLT-Forge: A Scalable Library for Cross-Layer Transcoders and Attribution Graphs

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2603.21014v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability seeks to understand how Large Language Models (LLMs) represent and process information. Recent approaches based on dictionary learning and transcoders enable representing model computation in terms of sparse, interpretable features and their interactions, giving rise to feature attribution graphs. However, these graphs are often large and redundant, limiting their interpretability in practice. Cross-Layer Transcoders (CLTs) address this issue by sharing features across layers while preserving layer-specific decoding, yielding more compact representations, but remain difficult to train and analyze at scale. We introduce an open-source library for end-to-end training and interpretability of CLTs. Our framework integrates scalable distributed training with model sharding and compressed activation caching, a unified automated interpretability pipeline for feature analysis and explanation, attribution graph computation using Circuit-Tracer, and a flexible visualization interface. This provides a practical and unified solution for scaling CLT-based mechanistic interpretability. Our code is available at: https://github.com/LLM-Interp/CLT-Forge.

Optimal-Time Move Structure Construction

Nathaniel K. Brown, Ahsan Sanaullah, Shaojie Zhang, Ben Langmead — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2603.22147v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The move structure represents a permutation $\pi$ of $[0,n)$ by partitioning the domain into $O(r)$ disjoint, contiguously permuted intervals, with $r$ being the minimum number of such intervals. This data structure occupies $O(r)$ words of space and enables $O(1)$-time computation of $\pi(i)$ given the interval that contains $i$. For permutations where $r \ll n$, this provides an efficient, compressed representation for navigation. While existing best $O(r)$-space construction approaches require $O(r\log r)$-time, we present an optimal $O(r)$-time and space construction algorithm. This is achieved by replacing balanced search trees with pointer-based lists by introducing a bidirectional strategy that synchronizes construction of the structures for $\pi$ and its inverse $\pi^{-1}$ in a single, unified pass. By applying this algorithm, we achieve the first optimal $O(n)$-time construction of the longest common prefix (LCP) array from a run-length-encoded Burrows-Wheeler transform (RLBWT) of $r$ runs in $O(r)$ working space. Empirical evaluation on pangenome-scale data confirms that our move structure construction algorithm is consistently faster than the previous best, achieving speedups of up to $\sim 2\times$ with comparable memory usage.

Architecture-Derived CBOMs for Cryptographic Migration: A Security-Aware Architecture Tradeoff Method

Eduard Hirsch, Kristina Raab — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2603.22442v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Cryptographic migration driven by algorithm deprecation, regulatory change, and post-quantum readiness requires more than an inventory of cryptographic assets. Existing Cryptographic Bills of Materials (CBOMs) are typically tool- or inventory-derived. They lack architectural intent, rationale, and security context, limiting their usefulness for migration planning. This paper introduces Security-Aware Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (SATAM), a security-aware adaptation of scenario-based architecture evaluation that derives an architecture-grounded, context-sensitive CBOM. SATAM integrates established approaches: ATAM, arc42, STRIDE, ADR, and CARAF. These are included to identify and analyze security-relevant cryptographic decision points and document them as explicit architectural decisions. These artifacts are used to annotate CBOM entries with architectural context, security intent, and migration-critical metadata using CycloneDX-compatible extensions. Following a Design Science Research approach, the paper presents the method design, a conceptual traceability model, and an illustrative application. The results demonstrate that architecture-derived CBOMs capture migration-relevant context that is typically absent from inventory-based approaches. Thereby, SATAM improves availability of information required for informed cryptographic migration planning and long-term cryptographic agility.

The Missing Adapter Layer for Research Computing

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2603.23942v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Higher Degree by Research (HDR) candidates increasingly depend on cloud-provisioned virtual machines and local GPU hardware for their computational experiments, yet a persistent and under-addressed gap separates having compute resources from using them productively. Cloud and infrastructure teams can provision a virtual machine in minutes, but the path from a raw VM to a reproducible, GPU-ready research environment remains a significant barrier for researchers who are domain experts, not systems engineers. We argue that this gap is not a shortcoming of any particular tool but a missing architectural layer: an adapter layer that bridges cloud provisioning and interactive research work. We present a lightweight, open-source implementation of this layer, built on k3s and Coder and already in active use in our research workspace environment. A CI/CD pipeline connects GitHub directly to the local cluster, carrying a research project from commit to a running, accessible workspace in under five minutes. We then define a concrete metrics framework for evaluating any adapter layer covering deployment latency, environment reproducibility, onboarding friction, and resource utilisation and establish baselines against which improvements can be measured.

Estimating near-verbatim extraction risk in language models with decoding-constrained beam search

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2603.24917v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent work shows that standard greedy-decoding extraction methods for quantifying memorization in LLMs miss how extraction risk varies across sequences. Probabilistic extraction -- computing the probability of generating a target suffix given a prefix under a decoding scheme -- addresses this, but is tractable only for verbatim memorization, missing near-verbatim instances that pose similar privacy and copyright risks. Quantifying near-verbatim extraction risk is expensive: the set of near-verbatim suffixes is combinatorially large, and reliable Monte Carlo (MC) estimation can require ~100,000 samples per sequence. To mitigate this cost, we introduce decoding-constrained beam search, which yields deterministic lower bounds on near-verbatim extraction risk at a cost comparable to ~20 MC samples per sequence. Across experiments, our approach surfaces information invisible to verbatim methods: many more extractable sequences, substantially larger per-sequence extraction mass, and patterns in how near-verbatim extraction risk manifests across model sizes and types of text.

Doctorina MedBench-ICD10: A Dialogue-Based Benchmark and Evaluation Framework for Agent-Based Medical AI

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2603.25821v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present Doctorina MedBench, a comprehensive evaluation framework for agent-based medical AI based on the simulation of realistic physician-patient interactions. Unlike traditional medical benchmarks that rely on solving standardized test questions, the proposed approach models a multi-step clinical dialogue in which either a physician or an AI system must collect medical history, analyze attached materials (including laboratory reports, images, and medical documents), formulate differential diagnoses, and provide personalized recommendations. System performance is evaluated using the D.O.T.S. metric, which consists of four components: Diagnosis, Observations/Investigations, Treatment, and Step Count, enabling assessment of both clinical correctness and dialogue efficiency. The system also incorporates a multi-level testing and quality monitoring architecture designed to detect model degradation during both development and deployment. The framework supports safety-oriented trap cases, category-based random sampling of clinical scenarios, and full regression testing. The dataset currently contains more than 1,000 clinical cases covering over 750 diagnoses. The universality of the evaluation metrics allows the framework to be used not only to assess medical AI systems, but also to evaluate physicians and support the development of clinical reasoning skills. Our results suggest that simulation of clinical dialogue may provide a more realistic assessment of clinical competence compared to traditional examination-style benchmarks.

M-RAG: Semantic Key-Value Indexing for Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Xu Sun, Tongkai Xu, Baiheng Xie, Li Huang, Qiang Gao, Kunpeng Zhang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2603.26667v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) turns external documents into evidence for large language models. In practice, this is also a data access problem: a system must decide what to index, what to retrieve, and what evidence to place in the context under a token budget. Most RAG pipelines use text chunks for both lookup and generation. This couples two different objectives. Retrieval benefits from compact and discriminative records, while generation needs contextual and faithful evidence. As a result, small chunks may fragment answer-bearing information, whereas large chunks may introduce noise and waste the context budget. We propose M-RAG, a semantic key-value indexing layer for budget-constrained RAG query processing. M-RAG extracts meta-markers from complete documents, where each record contains a retrieval key, an information value, and provenance pointers. Online retrieval operates over the key field, which can be searched by dense vector retrieval or sparse lexical retrieval; the paired values are returned as generation payloads and assembled under the token budget. Provenance pointers further support coverage validation and position-aware context ordering. This design separates the physical index entry from the evidence payload without changing the underlying retriever or generator. Experiments on LongBench QA subtasks show that M-RAG achieves competitive or better accuracy than representative chunk-based baselines, especially under tight token budgets. Further analyses show high document coverage, stronger robustness under expanding candidate corpora, and lower online retrieval latency. These results suggest that semantic key-value indexing is a practical access method for RAG workloads.

Interacting Multiple Model Proprioceptive Odometry for Legged Robots

Wanlei Li, Zichang Chen, Shilei Li, Xiaogang Xiong, Yunjiang Lou — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2603.29383v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: State estimation for legged robots remains challenging because legged odometry generally suffers from limited observability and therefore depends critically on measurement constraints to suppress drift. When exteroceptive sensors are unreliable or degraded, such constraints are mainly derived from proprioceptive measurements, particularly contact-related leg kinematics information. However, most existing proprioceptive odometry methods rely on an idealized point-contact assumption, which is often violated during real locomotion. Consequently, the effectiveness of proprioceptive constraints may be significantly reduced, resulting in degraded estimation accuracy. To address these limitations, we propose an interacting multiple model (IMM)-based proprioceptive odometry framework for legged robots. By incorporating multiple contact hypotheses within a unified probabilistic framework, the proposed method enables online mode switching and probabilistic fusion under varying contact conditions. Extensive simulations and real-world experiments demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior pose estimation accuracy over state-of-the-art methods while maintaining comparable computational efficiency.

Blockspace Under Pressure: An Analysis of Spam MEV on High-Throughput Blockchains

Wenhao Wang, Aditya Saraf, Lioba Heimbach, Kushal Babel, Fan Zhang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2604.00234v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: On high-throughput, low-fee blockchains, a qualitatively new form of maximal extractable value (MEV) has emerged: searchers submit large volumes of speculative transactions, whose profitability is resolved only at execution time. We refer to this as spam MEV. On major rollups, it can at times consume more than half of block gas, even though only a small fraction of probes ultimately results in a trade. Despite growing awareness of this phenomenon, there is no principled framework for understanding how blockchain design parameters shape its prevalence and impact. We develop such a framework, modeling spam transactions competing for on-chain opportunities under a competitive equilibrium that drives their profits to zero, and deriving equilibrium spam volumes as a function of block capacity, minimum gas price, and the transaction fee mechanism. Empirical evidence from Base and Arbitrum supports the model: spam grew sharply as block capacity was scaled up and fell when minimum gas prices were introduced. Our analysis yields three main insights. First, spam is always costly: when block capacity is scarce, it displaces users and drives up gas prices; as block capacity grows, it increasingly consumes execution resources, raising network externality, i.e., the cost of provisioning and processing blocks. We show that spam takes an increasing share of each additional unit of block capacity, so capping it before all users are included creates a favorable trade-off: forgoing a small amount of user welfare eliminates disproportionate spam and externality. Second, we extend the analysis to priority fee ordering and show that ordering transactions by gas price helps reduce spam, as spammers must pay more to reach early block positions. Third, as user demand grows and blockspace is scaled accordingly, spam's share of block capacity plateaus rather than growing indefinitely.

Semantic Richness or Geometric Reasoning? The Fragility of VLM's Visual Invariance

Jason Qiu, Zachary Meurer, Xavier Thomas, Deepti Ghadiyaram — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2604.01848v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This work investigates the fundamental fragility of state-of-the-art Vision-Language Models (VLMs) under basic geometric transformations. While modern VLMs excel at semantic tasks such as recognizing objects in canonical orientations and describing complex scenes, they exhibit systematic failures at a more fundamental level: lack of robust spatial invariance and equivariance required to reliably determine object identity under simple rotations, scaling, and identity transformations. We demonstrate this limitation through a systematic evaluation across diverse visual domains, including symbolic sketches, natural photographs, and abstract art. Performance drops sharply as semantic content becomes sparse, and this behavior is observed across architectures, model capacities, and prompting strategies. Overall, our results reveal a systematic gap between semantic understanding and spatial reasoning in current VLMs, highlighting the need for stronger geometric grounding in future multimodal systems.

FVRuleLearner: Operator-Level Reasoning Tree (Op-Tree)-Based Rules Learning for Formal Verification

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2604.03245v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The remarkable reasoning and code generation capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have recently motivated increasing interest in automating formal verification (FV), a process that ensures hardware correctness through mathematically precise assertions but remains highly labor-intensive, particularly through the translation of natural language into SystemVerilog Assertions (NL-to-SVA). However, LLMs still struggle with SVA generation due to limited training data and the intrinsic complexity of FV operators. Consequently, a more efficient and robust methodology for ensuring correct SVA operator selection is essential for producing functionally correct assertions. To address these challenges, we introduce FVRuleLearner, an Operator-Level Rule (Op-Rule) learning framework built on a novel Operator Reasoning Tree (Op-Tree), which models SVA generation as structured, interpretable reasoning. FVRuleLearner operates in two complementary phases: (1) Training: it constructs Op-Tree that decomposes NL-to-SVA alignment into fine-grained, operator-aware questions, combining reasoning paths that lead to correct assertions; and (2) Testing: it performs operator-aligned retrieval to fetch relevant reasoning traces from the learned Op-Tree and generate new rules for unseen specifications. In the comprehensive studies, the proposed FVRuleLearner outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline by 3.95% in syntax correctness and by 31.17% in functional correctness on average. Moreover, FVRuleLearner successfully reduces an average of 70.33% of SVA functional failures across diverse operator categories through a functional taxonomy analysis, showing the effectiveness of applying learned Op-Tree to the Op-Rule generations for unseen NL-to-SVA tasks. These results establish FVRuleLearner as a new paradigm for domain-specific reasoning and rule learning in formal verification.

JD-BP: A Joint-Decision Generative Framework for Auto-Bidding and Pricing

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2604.05845v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Auto-bidding services optimize real-time bidding strategies for advertisers under key performance indicator (KPI) constraints such as target return on investment and budget. However, uncertainties such as model prediction errors and feedback latency can cause bidding strategies to deviate from ex-post optimality, leading to inefficient allocation. To address this issue, we propose JD-BP, a Joint generative Decision framework for Bidding and Pricing. Unlike prior methods, JD-BP jointly outputs a bid value and a pricing correction term that acts additively with the payment rule such as GSP. To mitigate adverse effects of historical constraint violations, we design a memory-less Return-to-Go that encourages future value maximizing of bidding actions while the cumulated bias is handled by the pricing correction. Moreover, a trajectory augmentation algorithm is proposed to generate joint bidding-pricing trajectories from a (possibly arbitrary) base bidding policy, enabling efficient plug-and-play deployment of our algorithm from existing RL/generative bidding models. Finally, we employ an Energy-Based Direct Preference Optimization method in conjunction with a cross-attention module to enhance the joint learning performance of bidding and pricing correction. Offline experiments on the AuctionNet dataset demonstrate that JD-BP achieves state-of-the-art performance. Online A/B tests at JD.com confirm its practical effectiveness, showing a 4.70% increase in ad revenue and a 6.48% improvement in target cost.

Robust Reasoning Benchmark

Pavel Golikov, Evgenii Opryshko, Gennady Pekhimenko, Mark C. Jeffrey — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2604.08571v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve high performance on standard mathematical benchmarks, their problem-solving abilities depend on the context and textual formatting. We introduce the Robust Reasoning Benchmark (RRB), a pipeline of 13 deterministic textual perturbations applied to AIME 2024 and AIME 2025. Evaluating 8 state-of-the-art models, we find that frontier models are largely resilient, with the notable exception of Claude, which categorically refuses many transformed prompts. Open-weights reasoning models exhibit a range of failure modes under structural noise (cognitive thrashing, tokenization breakdown, and reasoning collapse), with up to 54% average accuracy drops across perturbations and up to 100% on some. We further study one of these failure modes in isolation: attention dilution caused by the model's own chain-of-thought. By tasking models with solving multiple independent mathematical problems sequentially within a single context window, we identify Intra-Query Attention Dilution. Open-weights models ranging from 7B to 120B parameters exhibit accuracy decay on subsequent problems, suggesting that intermediate reasoning steps progressively pollute standard dense attention mechanisms. We argue that in order to achieve reliable reasoning, future architectures need to integrate explicit contextual resets within models' own chain-of-thought, leading to open research questions regarding the optimal granularity of reasoning tasks.

Social Reality Construction via Active Inference: Modeling the Dialectic of Conformity and Creativity

Kentaro Nomura, Takato Horii — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2604.09026v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Social agents both internalize collective norms and reshape them through creative action, yet computational models have not captured this bidirectional process within a unified framework. We propose a multi-agent simulation model grounded in active inference that formalizes the dialectical constitution of social reality on a structured social network. Each agent maintains an internal generative model, communicates with neighbors to form social priors, creates novel observations, and selectively incorporates others' creations into memory. Simulation experiments demonstrate three main findings. First, informationally cohesive social groups emerge endogenously, with representational alignment mirroring the cluster topology of the underlying network. Second, a circular mutual constitution arises between social representations and the observation distribution, maintained through agents' creative acts that project representational structure onto the external world. Third, the propagation of creations exhibits selective, heterogeneous patterns distinct from the stable diffusion of social representations, indicating that agents construct cultural niches through local interaction dynamics. These results suggest that the interplay between social conformity and creative deviation can give rise to the endogenous formation and differentiation of shared social reality.

Teaching Robots to Interpret Social Interactions through Lexically-guided Dynamic Graph Learning

Tongfei Bian, Mathieu Chollet, Tanaya Guha — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2604.10895v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: For a robot to be called socially intelligent, it must be able to infer users internal states from their current behaviour, predict the users future behaviour, and if required, respond appropriately. In this work, we investigate how robots can be endowed with such social intelligence by modelling the dynamic relationship between user's internal states (latent) and actions (observable state). Our premise is that these states arise from the same underlying socio-cognitive process and influence each other dynamically. Drawing inspiration from theories in Cognitive Science, we propose a novel multi-task learning framework, termed as \textbf{SocialLDG} that explicitly models the dynamic relationship among the states represent as six distinct tasks. Our framework uses a language model to introduce lexical priors for each task and employs dynamic graph learning to model task affinity evolving with time. SocialLDG has three advantages: First, it achieves state-of-the-art performance on two challenging human-robot social interaction datasets available publicly. Second, it supports strong task scalability by learning new tasks seamlessly without catastrophic forgetting. Finally, benefiting from explicit modelling task affinity, it offers insights on how different interactions unfolds in time and how the internal states and observable actions influence each other in human decision making.

CPGRec+: A Balance-oriented Framework for Personalized Video Game Recommendations

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2604.14586v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The rapid expansion of gaming industry requires advanced recommender systems tailored to its dynamic landscape. Existing Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based methods primarily prioritize accuracy over diversity, overlooking their inherent trade-off. To address this, we previously proposed CPGRec, a balance-oriented gaming recommender system. However, CPGRec fails to account for critical disparities in player-game interactions, which carry varying significance in reflecting players' personal preferences and may exacerbate over-smoothness issues inherent in GNN-based models. Moreover, existing approaches underutilize the reasoning capabilities and extensive knowledge of large language models (LLMs) in addressing these limitations. To bridge this gap, we propose two new modules. First, Preference-informed Edge Reweighting (PER) module assigns signed edge weights to qualitatively distinguish significant player interests and disinterests while then quantitatively measuring preference strength to mitigate over-smoothing in graph convolutions. Second, Preference-informed Representation Generation (PRG) module leverages LLMs to generate contextualized descriptions of games and players by reasoning personal preferences from comparing global and personal interests, thereby refining representations of players and games. Experiments on \textcolor{black}{two Steam datasets} demonstrate CPGRec+'s superior accuracy and diversity over state-of-the-art models. The code is accessible at https://github.com/HsipingLi/CPGRec-Plus.

Category-based and Popularity-guided Video Game Recommendation: A Balance-oriented Framework

Xiping Li, Jianghong Ma, Kangzhe Liu, Shanshan Feng, Haijun Zhang, Yutong Wang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2604.14598v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In recent years, the video game industry has experienced substantial growth, presenting players with a vast array of game choices. This surge in options has spurred the need for a specialized recommender system tailored for video games. However, current video game recommendation approaches tend to prioritize accuracy over diversity, potentially leading to unvaried game suggestions. In addition, the existing game recommendation methods commonly lack the ability to establish strict connections between games to enhance accuracy. Furthermore, many existing diversity-focused methods fail to leverage crucial item information, such as item category and popularity during neighbor modeling and message propagation. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel framework, called CPGRec, comprising three modules, namely accuracy-driven, diversity-driven, and comprehensive modules. The first module extends the state-of-the-art accuracy-focused game recommendation method by connecting games in a more stringent manner to enhance recommendation accuracy. The second module connects neighbors with diverse categories within the proposed game graph and harnesses the advantages of popular game nodes to amplify the influence of long-tail games within the player-game bipartite graph, thereby enriching recommendation diversity. The third module combines the above two modules and employs a new negative-sample rating score reweighting method to balance accuracy and diversity. Experimental results on the Steam dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in improving game recommendations. The dataset and source codes are anonymously released at: https://github.com/CPGRec2024/CPGRec.git.

Geometric Capacity of Transformers: A Tropical Geometry Perspective

Ye Su, Yong Liu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2604.14727v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: To quantify the geometric capacity of transformers, we develop a tropical-geometric framework for analyzing the spatial partitions induced by conditioned self-attention. In the zero-temperature limit, we show that fixed-key top-$1$ routing is exactly represented by a power diagram in query space, while an auxiliary log-lifted value parameterization yields a vector-valued tropical rational representation. For Multi-Head Self-Attention (MHSA) with sequence length $N$ and $H$ attention heads, the joint routing geometry is encoded by Minkowski sums of headwise Newton polytopes, giving an $\mathcal{O}(N^H)$ universal bound that sharpens to $\mathcal{O}((HN)^{d_{\mathrm{model}}-1})$ once the number of heads reaches the intrinsic dimension $d_{\mathrm{model}}$. Extending this analysis across depth $L$, we derive the first tight asymptotic bounds on the number of linear regions in transformers ($\Theta\!\left(N^{\min\{H,d_{\mathrm{model}}-1\}L}\right)$). We further show that finite-temperature softmax preserves the top-$1$ routing structure and admits exponentially decaying local approximation and differential bounds away from routing boundaries.

Why Do Vision Language Models Struggle To Recognize Human Emotions?

Madhav Agarwal, Sotirios A. Tsaftaris, Laura Sevilla-Lara, Steven McDonagh — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2604.15280v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding emotions is a fundamental ability for intelligent systems to be able to interact with humans. Vision-language models (VLMs) have made tremendous progress in the last few years for many visual tasks, potentially offering a promising solution for understanding emotions. However, it is surprising that even the most sophisticated contemporary VLMs struggle to recognize human emotions or to outperform even specialized vision-only classifiers. In this paper we ask the question 'Why do VLMs struggle to recognize human emotions?', and observe that the inherently continuous and dynamic task of facial expression recognition (DFER) exposes two critical VLM vulnerabilities. First, emotion datasets are naturally long-tailed, and the web-scale data used to pre-train VLMs exacerbates this head-class bias, causing them to systematically collapse rare, under-represented emotions into common categories. We propose alternative sampling strategies that prevent favoring common concepts. Second, temporal information is critical for understanding emotions. However, VLMs are unable to represent temporal information over dense frame sequences, as they are limited by context size and the number of tokens that can fit in memory, which poses a clear challenge for emotion recognition. We demonstrate that the sparse temporal sampling strategy used in VLMs is inherently misaligned with the fleeting nature of micro-expressions (0.25-0.5 seconds), which are often the most critical affective signal. As a diagnostic probe, we propose a multi-stage context enrichment strategy that utilizes the information from 'in-between' frames by first converting them into natural language summaries. This enriched textual context is provided as input to the VLM alongside sparse keyframes, preventing attentional dilution from excessive visual data while preserving the emotional trajectory.

AnchorRefine: Synergy-Manipulation Based on Trajectory Anchor and Residual Refinement for Vision-Language-Action Models

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2604.17787v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Precision-critical manipulation requires both global trajectory organization and local execution correction, yet most vision-language-action (VLA) policies generate actions within a single unified space. This monolithic formulation forces macro-level transport and micro-level refinement to be optimized under the same objective, causing large motions to dominate learning while suppressing small but failure-critical corrective signals. In contrast, human manipulation is structured by global movement planning together with continuous local adjustment during execution. Motivated by this principle, we propose AnchorRefine, a hierarchical framework that factorizes VLA action modeling into trajectory anchor and residual refinement. The anchor planner predicts a coarse motion scaffold, while the refinement module corrects execution-level deviations to improve geometric and contact precision. We further introduce a decision-aware gripper refinement mechanism to better capture the discrete and boundary-sensitive nature of gripper control. Experiments on LIBERO, CALVIN, and real-robot tasks demonstrate that AnchorRefine consistently improves both regression-based and diffusion-based VLA backbones, yielding gains of up to 7.8% in simulation success rate and 18% in real-world success rate.

Blossom VI: A Practical Minimum Weight Perfect Matching Algorithm

Pavel Arkhipov, Vladimir Kolmogorov — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2604.20351v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Minimum weight perfect matching is a fundamental problem in combinatorial optimization. Since 2009, Blossom V has been the leading practical implementation. We present Blossom VI, a practical algorithm that improves upon Blossom V. We test the performance of our implementation on nine benchmark families with graphs containing up to roughly 10 million edges. Blossom VI is significantly faster on the hardest tested instances, while being at most a factor of two slower on families where Blossom V already scales nearly linearly. Blossom VI is a primal-dual solver whose primal phase computes a maximum-cardinality matching in the zero-slack subgraph using cherry trees. At the end of each primal phase, Blossom VI contracts entire cherry blossoms instead of sequences of nested traditional blossoms that would be created by Blossom V. This produces shallower contraction hierarchies and avoids costly cascades of blossom expansions. Our measurements show that reduced blossom depth and fewer expensive expansion operations can explain the observed improvement.

Participatory provenance as representational auditing for AI-mediated public consultation

Sachit Mahajan — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2604.20711v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI-assisted consultation can speed large-scale public engagement, but concise summaries may reflect some submissions more closely than others. This paper introduces participatory provenance, a framework for auditing how semantic coverage is distributed from submissions to summary sentences. Applied to two topics in Canada's 2025 AI Strategy consultation (5,253 records; 2,861 participants), official summaries had higher observed mean coverage than exact-length random text, although statistical significance depended on the embedding model. Low coverage concentrated in semantic regions, especially those centered on criticism of educational technology and distrust of technology and oversight, whereas few or no records crossed the operational threshold in several better-covered regions. Same-budget, cross-fitted extractive benchmarks improved mean and lower-tail coverage on held-out submissions, showing that better semantic coverage was feasible without longer summaries. Consultation summaries should be evaluated not only for coherence and factual support, but also for how coverage is distributed across the range of submitted views.

Agentic AI-assisted coding offers a unique opportunity to instill epistemic grounding during software development

Magnus Palmblad, Jared M. Ragland, Benjamin A. Neely — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2604.21744v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The capabilities of AI-assisted coding are progressing at breakneck speed. Chat-based vibe coding has evolved into fully fledged AI-assisted, agentic software development using agent scaffolds where the human developer creates a plan that agentic AIs implement. One current trend is utilizing documents beyond this plan document, such as project and method-scoped documents. Here we propose GROUNDING.md, a community-governed, field-scoped epistemic grounding document, using mass spectrometry-based proteomics as an example. We have drafted a file specific to proteomics: proteomics_GROUNDING.md (available at https://github.com/OmicsGrounding/proteomics-grounding) to demonstrate what a GROUNDING.md would look like. This explicit field-scoped grounding document encodes Hard Constraints (non-negotiable validity invariants empirically required for scientific correctness) and Convention Parameters (community-agreed defaults) that override all other contexts to enforce validity, regardless of what the user prompts. In practice, this will empower a non-domain expert to generate code, tools, and software that have best practices baked in at the ground level, providing confidence to the software developer but also to those reviewing or using the final product. Undoubtedly it is easier to have agentic AIs adhere to guidelines than humans, and this opportunity allows for organizations to develop epistemic grounding documents in such a way as to keep domain experts in the loop in a future of democratized generation of bespoke software solutions.

Zero-Shot DINOv3-Based Image Matching via Many-to-Many Association

Haodong Jiang, Mingzhe Li, Junfeng Wu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2604.23670v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We explore zero-shot image matching based on DINOv3 features. These general-purpose features are semantically rich yet geometrically ambiguous -- the nearest neighbor in feature space is often a false geometric match -- so the conventional one-to-one association paradigm is prone to discarding true correspondences. We instead retain many-to-many associations and cast the ensuing estimation as maximum-likelihood inference. This formulation reveals the existing robust mechanism for many-to-many association as a zeroth-order approximation to the otherwise intractable likelihood, and yields a novel mechanism with faster evaluation and finer granularity. We condense these theoretical findings into a two-stage LO-RANSAC algorithm which, combined with careful layer selection and positional bias correction for DINOv3 features, forms a zero-shot pipeline that degrades gracefully under background variation and across RGB-thermal pairs, where specialized baselines collapse under domain shift. Code released at https://github.com/LIAS-CUHKSZ/Zero-Shot-DINOv3-Image-Matching.

Large Language Models Explore by Latent Distilling

Yuanhao Zeng, Ao Lu, Lufei Li, Zheng Zhang, Yexin Li, Kan Ren — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2604.24927v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generating diverse responses is crucial for test-time scaling of large language models (LLMs), yet standard stochastic sampling mostly yields surface-level lexical variation, limiting semantic exploration. In this paper, we propose Exploratory Sampling (ESamp), a decoding approach that explicitly encourages semantic diversity during generation. ESamp is motivated by the well-known observation that neural networks tend to make lower-error predictions on inputs similar to those encountered before, and incur higher prediction error on novel ones. Building on this property, we train a lightweight Distiller at test time to predict deep-layer hidden representations of the LLM from its shallow-layer representations to model the LLM's depth-wise representation transitions. During decoding, the Distiller continuously adapts to the mappings induced by the current generation context. ESamp uses the prediction error as a novelty signal to reweight candidate token extensions conditioned on the current prefix, thereby biasing decoding toward less-explored semantic patterns. ESamp is implemented with an asynchronous training--inference pipeline, with less than 5% worst case overhead (1.2% in the optimized release). Empirical results show that ESamp significantly boosts the Pass@k efficiency of reasoning models, showing superior or comparable performance to strong stochastic and heuristic baselines. Notably, ESamp achieves robust generalization across mathematics, science, and code generation benchmarks and breaks the trade-off between diversity and coherence in creative writing. Our code has released at: https://github.com/LinesHogan/tLLM.

Lifting Embodied World Models for Planning and Control

Alex N. Wang, Trevor Darrell, Pavel Izmailov, Yutong Bai, Amir Bar — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2604.26182v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: World models of embodied agents predict future observations conditioned on an action taken by the agent. For complex embodiments, action spaces are high-dimensional and difficult to specify: for example, precisely controlling a human agent requires specifying the motion of each joint. This makes the world model hard to control and expensive to plan with as search-based methods like CEM scale poorly with action dimensionality. To address this issue, we train a lightweight policy that maps high-level actions to sequences of low-level joint actions. Composing this policy with the frozen world model produces a lifted world model that predicts a sequence of future observations from a single high-level action. We instantiate this framework for a human-like embodiment, defining the high-level action space as a small set of 2D waypoints annotated on the current observation frame, each specifying a near-term goal position for a leaf joint (pelvis, head, hands). Waypoints are low-dimensional, visually interpretable, and easy to specify manually or to search over. We show that the lifted world model substantially outperforms searching directly in low-level joint space ($3.8\times$ lower mean joint error to the goal pose), while remaining more compute-efficient and generalizing to environments unseen by the policy.

Length Value Model: Scalable Value Pretraining for Token-Level Length Modeling

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2604.27039v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Tokens are the fundamental units of computation in modern autoregressive models, and generation length directly influences both inference cost and reasoning performance. Despite its importance, existing approaches model length primarily at the coarse sequence level. We introduce the Length Value Model (LenVM), a token-level framework that estimates the remaining generation length at every decoding step. By formulating length modeling as a value estimation problem and assigning a constant negative reward to each generated token, LenVM predicts a bounded, discounted return that is a monotone proxy for the remaining generation horizon. This value formulation provides annotation-free, dense, unbiased, and scalable supervision. Experiments on LLMs and VLMs show that LenVM supports exact control, continuous performance--efficiency steering, length prediction, and interpretation. On LIFEBench-token, it raises the exact-length score of Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct from $30.9$ to $64.8$ in one pass and reaches $83.6$ when combined with LCG. Near $200$ tokens on GSM8K, LenVM retains about $63\%$ Pass@1 versus $6\%$ under a hard token budget. Across other settings, LenVM improves matched-length quality over prompting and EOS calibration, while its length-prediction accuracy improves with scale and exceeds specialized predictors. Its token-level values also identify markers of shifts between longer and shorter trajectories. These results establish generation length as an effective scalable token-level value signal for control, prediction, and future value-based training.

Sim-FA: A GPGPU Simulator Framework for Fine-Grained Asynchronous Pipeline Analysis

Zhongchun Zhou, Yuhang Gu, Chengtao Lai, Ya Wang, Zeyu Han, Wei Zhang, Jun Liu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2605.00555v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: To efficiently support Large Language Models (LLMs), modern GPGPU architectures have introduced new features and programming paradigms, such as warp specialization. These features enable temporal overlap between the producer and consumer, as well as between matrix multiplication and activation function operations, substantially improving performance. To conduct effective AI infrastructure and computer architecture research, cycle-accurate simulators that support these new features, together with analytical models that faithfully capture workload characteristics, are essential. However, existing academic tools provide limited support for these emerging requirements. Existing cycle-accurate simulators do not incorporate new NVIDIA GPU features, such as the Tensor Memory Accelerator (TMA), in a timely manner. Moreover, existing analytical models can misestimate DRAM traffic under certain configurations. In this paper, we build Sim-FA, a cycle-accurate simulation framework for Hopper TMA/WGMMA pipelines. We first develop an operator-agnostic trace frontend that instruments kernels at the Triton TTGIR level and validates it on 23 GEMM shapes, achieving 5.49\% MAPE against H800, confirming that the simulator core is not tied to any single operator. Because FlashAttention-3 introduces additional complexity beyond standard TMA/WGMMA kernels (asymmetric producer-consumer pipelines, softmax, ping-pong synchronization), we further build an FA3-specialized frontend that achieves 5.7\% MAPE with a maximum error of 12.7\%. Within the same framework, SimFA-python serves as an analytical fast path for large-scale design-space exploration where cycle-accurate simulation is prohibitively slow; validated against cuTile kernels on Blackwell (GB10), it explains why existing analytical models can produce inaccurate traffic estimates.

VOFA: Visual Object Goal Pushing with Force-Adaptive Control for Humanoids

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2605.01518v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The ability to push large objects in a goal-directed manner using onboard egocentric perception is an essential skill for humanoid robots to perform complex tasks such as material handling in warehouses. To robustly manipulate heavy objects to arbitrary goal configurations, the robot must cope with unknown object mass and ground friction, noisy onboard perception, and actuation errors; all in a real-time feedback loop. Existing solutions either rely on privileged object-state information without onboard perception or lack robustness to variations in goal configurations and object physical properties. In this work, we present VOFA, a visual goal-conditioned humanoid loco-manipulation system capable of pushing objects with unknown physical properties to arbitrary goal positions. VOFA consists of a two-level hierarchical architecture with a high-level visuomotor policy and a low-level force-adaptive whole-body controller. The high-level policy processes noisy onboard observations and generates goal-conditioned commands to operate in closed loop across diverse object-goal configurations, while the low-level whole-body controller provides robustness to variations in object physical properties. VOFA is extensively evaluated in both simulation and real-world experiments on the Booster T1 humanoid robot. Our results demonstrate strong performance, achieving over 90% success in simulation and over 80% success in real-world trials. Moreover, VOFA successfully pushes objects weighing up to 17kg, exceeding half of the Booster T1's body weight.

A Low-Frequency, Autoresonant Wireless Power Transfer Link for Bidirectional Bionic Interfaces

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2605.01828v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: To provide multimode sensory feedback and motion control, bidirectional bionic interfaces for advanced prosthetic systems require continuous and secure energy delivery to implantable electronics and integration in the sensing WBAN (Wireless Body Area Network) of the patient. However, powering such interfaces is still an open issue. Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) avoids implanted batteries and transcutaneous connections, but its design is constrained by stringent requirements on electromagnetic safety, implant size, voltage compliance, and coexistence with sensitive bio-signal acquisition and stimulation circuitry. This paper presents the design and testing of a low-frequency (127 kHz) inductive WPT link for an implantable bidirectional bionic interface. The system includes an autoresonant driving control to maintain operation at resonance under varying coupling and load conditions of the cyber-physical prosthesis. Starting from the requirements of the bionic interface, the wireless body-area sensing system is designed by selecting the working frequency, drawing the electrical schemes, and checking its safety and regulatory compliance. Preliminary WPT prototypes can provide up to ~140 mA and ~20 V, achieving a maximum power transfer efficiency higher than 40% and satisfying the project requirements up to a 2 cm implantation depth.

Understanding Self-Supervised Learning via Latent Distribution Matching

Fabian A Mikulasch, Friedemann Zenke — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2605.03517v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Self-supervised learning (SSL) excels at finding general-purpose latent representations from complex data, yet lacks a unifying theoretical framework that explains the diverse existing methods and guides the design of new ones. We cast SSL as latent distribution matching (LDM): learning representations that maximize their log-probability under an assumed latent model (alignment), while maximizing latent entropy to prevent collapse (uniformity). This view unifies independent component analysis with contrastive, non-contrastive, and predictive SSL methods, including stop gradient approaches. Leveraging LDM, we derive a nonlinear, sampling-free Bayesian filtering model with a Kalman-based predictor for high-dimensional timeseries. We further prove that predictive LDM yields identifiable latent representations under mild assumptions, even with nonlinear predictors. Overall, LDM clarifies the assumptions behind established SSL methods and provides principled guidance for developing new approaches.

FinRAG-12B: A Production-Validated Recipe for Grounded Question Answering in Banking

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2605.05482v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly being adopted across various domains. However, their adoption in banking industry faces resistance due to demands for high accuracy, regulatory compliance, and the need for verifiable and grounded responses. We present a unified, data-efficient framework for training grounded domain-specific LLMs that optimizes answer quality, citation grounding, and calibrated refusal under real-world deployment constraints. First, we describe a data generation pipeline that combines LLM-as-a-Judge filtering, citation annotation, and curriculum learning with only 143M tokens. The resulting 12B model achieves high answer quality outperforming GPT-4.1 on citation grounding, with a modest citation tradeoff versus the untuned base. Second, we propose a calibrated refusal mechanism: training on 22% unanswerable examples yield a 12% "I don't know" rate, substantially improving over the base model's unsafe 4.3% rate while avoiding GPT-4.1's over-refusal (20.2%). Third, we present an end-to-end methodology spanning from data curation to quantized serving. The system is deployed at 40+ financial institutions, achieving a 7.1 percentage point improvement in query resolution (p < 0.001). Additionally, the model delivers 3-5x faster responses at 20-50x lower cost compared to GPT-4.1.

How Many Iterations to Jailbreak? Dynamic Budget Allocation for Multi-Turn LLM Evaluation

Shai Feldman, Yaniv Romano — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2605.06605v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Evaluating and predicting the performance of large language models (LLMs) in multi-turn conversational settings is critical yet computationally expensive; key events -- e.g., jailbreaks or successful task completion by an agent -- often emerge only after repeated interactions. These events might be rare, and under any feasible computational budget, remain unobserved. Recent conformal survival frameworks construct reliable lower predictive bounds (LPBs) on the number of iterations to trigger the event of interest, but rely on static budget allocation that is inefficient in multi-turn setups. To address this, we introduce \emph{Dynamic Allocation via PRojected Optimization} (DAPRO), the first theoretically valid dynamic budget allocation framework for bounding the time-to-event in multi-turn LLM interactions. We prove that DAPRO satisfies the budget constraint and provides distribution-free, finite-sample coverage guarantees without requiring the conditional independence between censoring and event times assumed by prior conformal survival approaches. A key theoretical contribution is a novel coverage bound that scales with the square root of the mean censoring weight rather than the worst-case weight, yielding provably tighter guarantees than prior work. Furthermore, DAPRO can be employed to obtain unbiased, low-variance estimates of population-level evaluation metrics, such as the jailbreak rate, under limited computing resources. Comprehensive experiments across agentic task success, adversarial jailbreaks, toxic content generation, and RAG hallucinations using LLMs such as Llama 3.1 and Qwen 2.5 demonstrate that DAPRO consistently achieves coverage closer to the nominal level with lower variance than static baselines, while satisfying the budget constraint.

Bridging the Last Mile of Circuit Design: PostEDA-Bench, a Hierarchical Benchmark for PPA Convergence and DRC Fixing

Pengju Liu, Nuo Xu, Jinwei Tang, Yu Cao, Caiwen Ding — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2605.06936v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLM-based agents are increasingly applied to the "last mile" of Electronic Design Automation (EDA): repairing residual sign-off Design Rule Check (DRC) violations and converging Power-Performance-Area (PPA) targets after tool runs. Existing EDA-LLM benchmarks, however, omit DRC fixing entirely and rely on flat hierarchies tied to a single toolchain. We introduce PostEDA-Bench, a hierarchical benchmark with 145 tasks across DRC-Essential, DRC-Reasoning, PPA-Mono, and PPA-Multi, supported by EDA toolchains with machine-checkable evaluation. Across eight commercial and open-source LLMs under multiple agent scaffolds, we find that agents handle synthetic DRC-Essential and single-objective PPA-Mono reasonably well but degrade sharply on the more practical DRC-Reasoning, where the best success rate is 36.66%, and PPA-Multi, where the best success rate is 20.00%; vision augmentation consistently enhances DRC-Bench; and trade-off reasoning, rather than knob knowledge, is the dominant PPA-Multi bottleneck.

ScaleMoGen: Autoregressive Next-Scale Prediction for Human Motion Generation

Inwoo Hwang, Hojun Jang, Bing Zhou, Jian Wang, Young Min Kim, Chuan Guo — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2605.11704v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present ScaleMoGen, a scale-wise autoregressive framework for text-driven human motion generation. Unlike conventional autoregressive approaches that rely on standard next-token prediction, ScaleMoGen frames motion generation as a coarse-to-fine process. We quantize 3D motions into compositional discrete tokens across multiple skeletal-emporal scales of increasing granularity, learning to generate motion by autoregressively predicting next-scale token maps. To maintain structural integrity, our motion tokenizers and quantizers are explicitly designed so that discrete tokens at every scale strictly preserve the skeletal hierarchy. Additionally, we employ bitwise quantization and prediction, which efficiently scale up the tokenizer vocabulary to preserve motion details and stabilize optimization. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ScaleMoGen achieves state-of-the-art performance, establishing an FID of 0.030 (vs. 0.045 for MoMask) on HumanML3D and a CLIP Score of 0.693 (vs. 0.685 for MoMask++) on the SnapMoGen dataset. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our skeletal-temporal multi-scale representation naturally facilitates training-free, text-guided motion editing.

More Edits, More Stable: Understanding the Lifelong Normalization in Sequential Model Editing

Xin Ma, Wei Chen, Qi Liu, Derong Xu, Zhi Zheng, Tong Xu, Enhong Chen — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2605.11836v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Lifelong Model Editing aims to continuously update evolving facts in Large Language Models while preserving unrelated knowledge and general capabilities, yet it remains plagued by catastrophic forgetting and model collapse. Empirically, we find that recent editors resilient over long horizons share the same core strategy: Lifelong Normalization (LN), which normalizes value gradients using running statistics. Removing LN causes immediate performance collapse, and we observe a counter-intuitive positive cumulative effect where early edits can promote the success of future edits. Yet the mechanism of LN remains a "black box", leaving its precise role in lifelong stability poorly understood. In this work, we provide the first theoretical account of LN in the lifelong regime. Our analysis reveals a self-reinforcing stability loop and proves that, when combined with ridge-regularized regression, LN yields parameter updates with asymptotic orthogonality and bounded norms, directly mitigating forgetting and systemic collapse. Based on these insights, we derive StableEdit, which strengthens this stability loop via an explicit warm-up stage and full whitening, improving long-horizon stability at minimal overhead. Extensive experiments validate our theory and demonstrate competitive performance. Our code is available at https://github.com/MINE-USTC/StableEdit.

Guide, Think, Act: Interactive Embodied Reasoning in Vision-Language-Action Models

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2605.13632v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this paper, we propose GTA-VLA(Guide, Think, Act), an interactive Vision-Language-Action (VLA) framework that enables spatially steerable embodied reasoning by allowing users to guide robot policies with explicit visual cues. Existing VLA models learn a direct "Sense-to-Act" mapping from multimodal observations to robot actions. While effective within the training distribution, such tightly coupled policies are brittle under out-of-domain (OOD) shifts and difficult to correct when failures occur. Although recent embodied Chain-of-Thought (CoT) approaches expose intermediate reasoning, they still lack a mechanism for incorporating human spatial guidance, limiting their ability to resolve visual ambiguities or recover from mistakes. To address this gap, our framework allows users to optionally guide the policy with spatial priors, such as affordance points, boxes, and traces, which the subsequent reasoning process can directly condition on. Based on these inputs, the model generates a unified spatial-visual Chain-of-Thought that integrates external guidance with internal task planning, aligning human visual intent with autonomous decision-making. For practical deployment, we further couple the reasoning module with a lightweight reactive action head for efficient action execution. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. On the in-domain SimplerEnv WidowX benchmark, our framework achieves a state-of-the-art 81.2% success rate. Under OOD visual shifts and spatial ambiguities, a single visual interaction substantially improves task success over existing methods, highlighting the value of interactive reasoning for failure recovery in embodied control. More details of the project can be found here: https://github.com/FutianLabs/GTA-VLA.

Complete Local Reasoning About Parameterized Programs Over Topologies (Extended Version)

Ruotong Cheng, Azadeh Farzan — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2605.15143v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper investigates the algorithmic safety verification problem of infinite-state parameterized concurrent programs over a rich set of communication topologies. The goal is to automatically produce a proof of correctness in the form of a universally quantified inductive invariant, where the quantification is over the nodes in the topology. We illustrate that under reasonable assumptions on the underlying topology, the problem can be reduced to and solved as a compositional scheme, that is, the verification of the parameterized family is reduced to a set of local proofs, in a complete manner. We propose a verification algorithm, which is implemented as a tool, and demonstrate through a set of benchmarks over several different topologies that our approach is effective in proving parameterized programs safe.

GQLA: Group-Query Latent Attention for Hardware-Adaptive Large Language Model Decoding

Fanxu Meng — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2605.15250v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA), the attention used in DeepSeek-V2/V3, jointly compresses keys and values into a low-rank latent and matches the H100 roofline almost perfectly. Its trained weights, however, expose only one decoding path - an absorbed MQA form - which ties efficient inference to H100-class compute-bandwidth ratios, forfeits tensor parallelism along the head axis, and yields no Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) gain on commodity inference GPUs such as the export-restricted H20. We propose Group-Query Latent Attention (GQLA), a minimal modification of MLA whose trained weights expose two algebraically equivalent decoding paths over the same parameters: an MQA-absorb path identical to MLA's, and a GQA path with a per-group expanded cache. The runtime picks the path that matches the target hardware - no retraining, no custom kernels - so a single set of GQLA weights pins the rooflines of both H100 (MQA-absorb, s_q=1) and H20 (GQA + MTP, s_q=2), while supporting up to 8-way zero-redundancy tensor parallelism on the GQA path. To avoid pretraining from scratch we extend TransMLA into TransGQLA, which converts a pretrained GQA checkpoint into a GQLA model; on LLaMA-3-8B it compresses the per-token KV cache to 28.125% of the GQA baseline on the MQA-absorb path while structurally preserving GQA-level traffic on the per-group path.

Conformal tubular parameterization and toroidal bending of tube-like surfaces

Shunyu Yao, Gary P. T. Choi — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2605.16305v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Tube-like surfaces are widely encountered in geometry processing, engineering structures, and medical anatomy, yet their intrinsic longitudinal and circumferential topology is not well preserved by conventional planar annular or rectangular parameterization domains. In this work, we propose a new conformal parameterization framework for open tube-like surfaces with two boundary components. The proposed method first constructs a fixed-boundary tubular parameterization by cutting the input mesh, computing a disk-to-parallelogram conformal map, and lifting the result to a three-dimensional tubular domain. To reduce residual distortion introduced near the cut seam, we further introduce a localized quasi-conformal correction scheme formulated on an annular domain, which improves conformality while leaving regions away from the seam unchanged. To handle noisy or irregular input boundaries, we also develop a free-boundary variant based on boundary extension and cycle-Laplacian smoothing, allowing the prescribed boundary constraints to be imposed on artificial outer rings rather than directly on the original surface. Finally, we derive two conformal toroidal bending maps that transform the tubular parameterization into toroidal geometries while preserving the underlying tube topology. Experiments on synthetic tube meshes and real vascular surfaces demonstrate that the proposed framework produces low-distortion parameterizations, effectively mitigates seam-induced artifacts, improves robustness for boundary-noisy inputs, and provides flexible tubular and toroidal target domains for downstream surface processing tasks.

Satisfiability Modulo Extensional Constant Arrays (Extended Version)

Mathias Preiner, Aina Niemetz, Clark Barrett — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2605.16820v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reasoning about array data structures is a key requirement for many applications in hardware and software verification, especially in combination with machine integers. The Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) theory of extensional arrays provides array read and write operators and allows extensionality over arrays. This is sufficient to express many aspects of computer-aided verification, but lacks succinctness to efficiently deal with arrays that are initialized with a default value. Existing procedures for extending the SMT-LIB theory of arrays with support for constant arrays are limited to arrays with infinite index domains, and existing implementations in SMT solvers only support a fragment of the theory for finite index domains. In this paper, we present a novel decision procedure for the theory of arrays with constant arrays that supports arbitrary index domains and is not limited to the infinite case. We present our procedure as an abstract calculus and show its refutational and satisfiability soundness. We implement a decision procedure based on our calculus in the state-of-the-art SMT solver Bitwuzla and evaluate its performance on a diverse collection of benchmarks and use cases.

Tunable MAGMAX: Preference-Aware Model Merging for Continual Learning

Kei Hiroshima, Kento Uchida, Shinichi Shirakawa — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2605.20803v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Continual learning (CL) aims to train models sequentially on multiple tasks while mitigating catastrophic forgetting of previously learned knowledge. Recent advances in large pre-trained models (LPMs) and model merging techniques, such as MAGMAX, have demonstrated effective CL performance by combining task-specific parameters. However, existing methods primarily focus on average performance across all tasks and do not adequately address how to construct models accommodating different deployment environments or varying user preferences. This paper proposes a model merging framework, termed Tunable MAGMAX, which enables preference-aware control of task-specific performance in CL. Our method introduces a preference vector that controls the number of elements selected from each task vector during model merging, allowing us to adjust the merged model performance according to their deployment needs. We further propose a method for automatically constructing appropriate preference vectors by leveraging small amounts of target environment data and datasets from model training tasks, thereby eliminating the need for manual specification. The experimental result on CL benchmark tasks demonstrates that Tunable MAGMAX effectively controls task-wise performance and successfully adapts merged models to various target environments. The proposed Tunable MAGMAX achieves superior or comparable performance to baseline methods, making it a practical solution for deploying CL models to various environments where the preferences of each task performance differ.

A Bernoulli Phase-Fitted finite difference method with wavenumber-explicit analysis for the Helmholtz problem

Ansgar J\"ungel, Panchi Li, Zhiwei Sun, Zhiwen Zhang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2605.21144v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A new Bernoulli phase-fitted finite difference method for the Helmholtz equation is introduced, obtained by applying a complexified Scharfetter--Gummel flux to the one-way factors of the operator. The rigorous analysis is developed for the one-dimensional Helmholtz problem with impedance boundary conditions. For the homogeneous problem, the scheme reproduces sampled plane-waves exactly, both in the interior and at the discrete impedance boundary closures. For the inhomogeneous problem, we prove wavenumber-explicit stability, consistency, and second-order convergence estimates for all nondegenerate mesh wavenumbers $kh\notin\pi\mathbb Z$. Under the fixed-resolution condition $kh\le s_0<\pi$ and $kL\ge\pi$, the estimates yield a pollution-free convergence theory. Numerical experiments confirm the plane-wave exactness and the predicted convergence behavior, and show favorable fixed-resolution performance compared with standard and dispersion-corrected finite difference methods.

Partial Fusion of Neural Networks: Efficient Tradeoffs Between Ensembles and Weight Aggregation

Fabian Morelli, Stephan Eckstein — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2605.22350v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Ensembles of neural networks typically outperform individual networks but incur large computational costs, whereas weight aggregation produces less costly, yet also less accurate, aggregate models. We introduce partial fusion of networks, which interpolates between ensembles and weight aggregation and thus allows for a flexible tradeoff between computational cost and performance. A direct way to achieve this is to extend existing weight aggregation methods based on neuron-level similarity between different networks, where partial fusion then only aggregates weights of neurons which are most similar. We showcase one particular method to jointly identify which neurons are most similar and match them via partial optimal transport. Further, we consider the more general perspective of weight aggregation and partial fusion as generalized pruning of ensemble models, where neurons cannot just be deleted, but also linearly combined. Finally, we show that generalized pruning applied to a single network yields similar benefits as partial fusion by allowing for a tradeoff between isolating, deleting, and linearly combining neurons based on similarity. Our code is available at https://github.com/Fabian-Mor/partial_fusion_nn.

CWind: A Cross-site Router for Large Language Model Inference Serving at Renewable Energy Farms

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2605.23348v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI power demand is growing at an unprecedented rate while power grids are often ailing and struggle to keep up. Grid expansion comes with high capital expenditure and long-distance transmission losses, yet there is abundant renewable energy at the source, just not matched to demand. This paper proposes a complementary AI infrastructure deployment model, AI Greeninferencing, that brings modular AI compute to renewable energy sources, focusing on wind, allowing AI footprint expansion, generating local behind-the-meter demand for renewable sites, and helping ease the growing strain on power utilities. Our feasibility analysis shows that 890+ GW of wind capacity lies within 50 ms network round trip time of Azure data centers, and that site-wise right-sizing combined with spatial complementarity of wind energy keeps aggregate fleet utilization on par with traditional deployments. To serve inference requests under variable wind power, we build CWind, a lightweight, reactive, and workload-agnostic AI inference router that uses only real-time signals: inference latency, KV-cache utilization, and queue depth, to dynamically configure sites and distribute requests. Evaluated on a real 64-GPU A100 testbed emulating three wind-powered sites with Azure production traces, CWind reduces P99 end-to-end latency by up to 52% over the strongest contender (also our idea) and by up to 98% over baselines such as power-capping and GPU idling, with consistent gains across workload types, load levels, and GPU generations.

Speed-Weighted Flocking for Sailing Swarms under Dynamic Environmental Forcing

Pranav Kedia, Aaron Gan, Hannah J. Williams, Andreagiovanni Reina, Heiko Hamann — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2605.27422v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Collective behavior models, such as aggregation and flocking, usually assume self-propelled robots that can directly execute their desired speed and direction of motion without fundamental constraints. However, autonomous sailing robots violate this assumption. Their motion is shaped by wind-dependent propulsion, restricted headings, and spatially varying wind conditions. In particular, maneuverability is coupled to wind speed: in weak wind, sailboats may turn only slowly or not at all, whereas stronger wind enables faster turns. This introduces transient heterogeneity in speed and maneuverability across the flock. We focus on this fast-slow coordination problem in sailing robot flocks. To study this problem, we introduce SailSwarmSwIM, a reduced-order simulator for autonomous sailing robot swarms that captures wind-dependent speed and maneuverability, no-go zones, tacking behavior, and steady or gusty wind fields. To design our novel flocking technique, we start from the Couzin model and introduce a speed-weighted social interaction rule that accounts for each robot's transient motion constraints. A key result is that increasing the social influence of slower robots improves polarization and reduces close encounters. This effect arises from a balance between attraction to fast neighbors, which helps maintain movement, and cohesion around slow neighbors, which prevents the flock from fragmenting. Together, our simulator, SailSwarmSwIM, and the speed-weighted interaction rule provide a modeling framework for studying adaptive collective behavior in robotic fleets whose motion capabilities are continuously shaped by wind.

Frontier LLM-based agents can overcome the ontology curation bottleneck for natural phenotypes

James P. Balhoff, Hilmar Lapp — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2605.28965v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Linking free-text phenotype descriptions to ontology terms, typically referred to as phenotype annotation, is essential for the cross-study integration of comparative morphological data. This labor intensive process has heavily relied on highly trained human experts, which makes it challenging to scale and thus a key bottleneck. Dahdul et al. (2018) established a Gold Standard (GS) of Entity-Quality (EQ) annotations across seven phylogenetic studies and used it to evaluate three human curators and the Semantic CharaParser NLP tool with ontology-based semantic similarity metrics; they reported that machine-human consistency was significantly lower than inter-curator (human-human) consistency. Here we revisit that benchmark with five frontier hosted LLMs from Anthropic and OpenAI, each operating as an "agentic curator" within a self-contained workspace that supplies the source publication PDF, the same annotation guide used by the original human curators, the four project ontologies (UBERON, PATO, BSPO, GO), and a validation script. Evaluated against the same Gold Standard, every agent fell within the range of inter-curator variability of the three trained human biocurators of the original study; the best performing agents approached but did not reach the best performing human curator. Agents substantially outperformed Semantic CharaParser on all four metrics.

The Main Barrier to AI Adoption in the Public Sector Is Lack of Training: How a Structured Method Accompanied Productivity Gains in Two Brazilian Government Cases

Vinicius Santana Gomes — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.01517v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The adoption of generative AI in the public sector has been treated predominantly as a technological problem, with the expectation that productivity gains would follow from the availability of increasingly capable models. This paper argues, drawing on two auditable cases in the Brazilian Public Service, that the determining barrier to adoption observed in these units was not technological but training-related, and describes the four-layer structured pedagogical methodology developed by the author. The method was applied in two units with distinct institutional profiles: the Sectoral Internal Control Office of the Federal District Department of Health throughout 2024, and the Internal Control Unit of the Federal District Department of Economic Development, Labor and Income throughout 2025. In both cases, the official indicators from the Electronic Information System of the Federal District Government (SEI-GDF), verifiable by third parties, recorded gains that accompanied the method's rollout: average processing time fell by 18.2% at SES/CONT and by 50% at UCI/SEDET, with UCI also recording an 85% increase in technical-report production, the issuance of 286 formal recommendations to public managers, and the analysis of cases and matters whose total value, per the unit's own signed statistics, was US$ 94.8 million, the value of the matters submitted to technical analysis. The analysis is consistent with the hypothesis that the method is portable across agencies with distinct mandates, operates within protocols designed to comply with international and national data-protection law and with the principles of public administration, and is accessible to public entities under budget constraints, since it used free AI models.

OF$^3$GS: On-the-Fly Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting from Unposed Images

Ruiyang Chen, Feiran Li, Chu Zhou, Zonglin Li, Zhanyu Ma, Heng Guo — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.03254v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables efficient and high-fidelity novel view synthesis (NVS) from offline image sequences. However, achieving on-the-fly NVS from unposed images remains challenging: the system must reconstruct renderable 3D Gaussians as images arrive, without access to future observations. Although online feed-forward geometry methods have been developed for causal depth and point-cloud recovery, directly adapting them to NVS often leads to severe rendering artifacts because Gaussian-based rendering demands stricter multi-view consistency in primitive scale and pose-geometry alignment. Even minor deviations can accumulate under causal inference and visibly degrade rendering quality. To this end, we propose OF$^3$GS, a feed-forward framework for efficient and high-quality on-the-fly NVS from sparse-view unposed images under causal constraints. We introduce two mechanisms for causal geometric stability: a Decoupled Intrinsic Recovery Head that mitigates cumulative camera-intrinsic bias and scene-scale jitter, and Dynamic Point Refinement Offsets that relax rigid unprojection to compensate for coupled pose-depth drift. Extensive experiments show that OF$^3$GS outperforms online baselines and approaches offline feed-forward 3DGS methods under comparable sparse-input settings. It also remains memory-feasible with denser inputs. Homepage: https://richardchen225.github.io/of3gs/

Multi$^2$: Hierarchical Multi-Agent Decision-Making with LLM-Based Agents in Interactive Environments

Sangeun Park, Minhae Kwon — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.03698v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A central goal of large language model (LLM) research is to build agentic systems that can plan, act, and adapt through sustained interaction with dynamic environments. While recent LLM-based agents exhibit impressive contextual reasoning, their long-horizon decision-making remains fragile, often suffering from objective drift, where goals and plans drift over extended interactions. We introduce Multi$^2$, a hierarchical multi-agent decision-making framework that explicitly decomposes agent behavior into complementary roles. A high-level agent (System 1) focuses on context-aware sub-goal generation using supervised fine-tuning (SFT), while a low-level agent (System 2) executes atomic actions through offline-to-online reinforcement learning (RL) in interactive environments. This separation enables stable long-horizon control, mitigates objective drift, and allows efficient adaptation. Across diverse interactive environments, Multi$^2$ consistently outperforms strong agentic baselines, demonstrating improved robustness and coordination in multi-turn interaction. Beyond performance, we introduce and release three hierarchical benchmark datasets, filling a long-standing gap in training and evaluating hierarchical decision-making for LLM-based agents.

AgentJet: A Distributed Swarm Training Framework for Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.04484v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Training reinforcement learning (RL) policies for large language model (LLM) agents requires optimizing multi-turn trajectories that interact with external environments. Existing training frameworks struggle with runtime failures, single-model constraints, incompatible task environments, and redundant context. We present AgentJet, a distributed swarm training framework based on a decoupled multi-node architecture. AgentJet treats the server--client topology as configurable: swarm servers host trainable models and perform optimization on GPU clusters, while detachable swarm clients execute arbitrary agents and communicate through OpenAI-compatible APIs. Reconfiguring this topology supports heterogeneous multi-model RL, mixed-task training with isolated runtimes, fault-tolerant execution, and live code iteration through hot-swappable clients. AgentJet also introduces context tracking with timeline merging, reducing actor-update time by 6.25x on AppWorld. The same detachable-client design supports an automated research system that conducts long-horizon, multi-day RL studies on large-scale clusters with limited human intervention. AgentJet is open-source and compatible with agent systems that issue standard LLM inference requests.

ViMax: Agentic Video Generation

Lingxuan Huang, Sizhe He, Hengji Zhou, Liqiang Nie, Lianghao Xia, Chao Huang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.07649v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Long-form video generation requires systematic narrative planning and visual consistency that current short-clip methods cannot provide. Existing methods generate isolated sequences without narrative structure and lack mechanisms for maintaining character and environmental consistency across scenes. We present ViMax, an agentic video generation framework that addresses video creation through coordinated multi-agent collaboration where specialized components negotiate narrative decisions, visual continuity, and production quality. Our framework employs a hierarchical narrative engine with retrieval-augmented generation for global story coherence and a dependency-aware visual consistency mechanism that tracks character and environmental states across temporal boundaries, while VLM-guided agents continuously monitor and refine both narrative coherence and visual fidelity. The framework enables coordinated agent collaboration to generate extended narrative content. This maintains both storytelling integrity and visual coherence across multi-scene timelines.

"I understand your perspective": LLM Persuasion through the Lens of Communicative Action Theory

Esra D\"onmez, Agnieszka Falenska — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.08076v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate high-quality arguments, yet their ability to engage in nuanced and persuasive communicative actions remains largely unexplored. This work explores the persuasive potential of LLMs through the framework of J\"urgen Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action. It examines whether LLMs express illocutionary intent (i.e., pragmatic functions of language such as conveying knowledge, building trust, or signaling similarity) in ways that are comparable to human communication. We simulate online discussions between opinion holders and LLMs using conversations from the persuasive subreddit ChangeMyView. We then compare the likelihood of illocutionary intents in human-written and LLM-generated counter-arguments, specifically those that successfully changed the original poster's view. We find that all three LLMs effectively convey illocutionary intent -- often more so than humans -- potentially increasing their anthropomorphism. Further, LLMs craft sycophantic responses that closely align with the opinion holder's intent, a strategy strongly associated with opinion change. Finally, crowd-sourced workers find LLM-generated counter-arguments more agreeable and consistently prefer them over human-written ones. These findings suggest that LLMs' persuasive power extends beyond merely generating high-quality arguments. On the contrary, training LLMs with human preferences effectively tunes them to mirror human communication patterns, particularly nuanced communicative actions, potentially increasing individuals' susceptibility to their influence.

Artificial Intelligence for Mathematical Reasoning: An Integrated Survey of Language Models, Neuro-symbolic Systems, and Verified Discovery

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.08728v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mathematical reasoning has long served as a stringent test of machine intelligence; over the past decade, it has moved from a niche problem within NLP to one of the most consequential AI frontiers. This survey provides a unified account of the field's evolution, from early rule-based math word problem (MWP) solvers and template-driven geometry systems, through neural expression generation and LLM prompting, to contemporary reasoning models, multi-agent systems, neuro-symbolic theorem provers, and verified discovery workflows. We organize the landscape along four axes: (i) informal reasoning over text and diagrams, spanning MWP solving, multimodal geometry, and VLMs; (ii) formal reasoning in proof assistants, including autoformalization, tactic prediction, compiler-guided repair, and proof search; (iii) mathematical discovery, where systems propose constructions, improve bounds, or assist attacks on open problems; and (iv) the inference and training-time techniques, including CoT prompting, tool use, process reward models, and RLVR, that increasingly connect generation with verification. We catalog major benchmarks across grade-school arithmetic, competition mathematics, geometry, formal proving, multimodal and multilingual reasoning, and expert evaluation, and we examine benchmark saturation, contamination, reporting mismatches, and the distinction between pass@1, majority voting, and verifier-assisted pass@$k$. We critically assess failure modes: brittleness under perturbation, reward hacking, multimodal grounding failures, fragile formalization, and the energy cost of reasoning-scale inference. Drawing on recent perspectives from working mathematicians, we identify future directions centered on verified-discovery workflows, reasoning efficiency, and infrastructure to make AI-assisted formalization broadly usable. Companion materials: https://github.com/Starscream-11813/awesome-AI4Math.

Measuring Human Value Expression in Social Media Texts: Calibrated LLM Annotation and Encoder Transfer

Maria Milkova, Maksim Rudnev — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.11018v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Measuring subjective constructs in naturally occurring social media text requires annotation procedures that are theoretically grounded, empirically validated, and transferable to an encoder model for scalable prediction. Using non-English social media posts annotated according to Schwartz's theory of basic human values, we investigate how different LLMs, prompts, and instruction languages operationalize the expression of values in text. We argue that although texts may permit multiple plausible interpretations, theory-based value definitions can constrain interpretations and reduce spurious value attributions. Beyond precision, recall, and F1, we evaluate structural alignment between values, error structure, confidence-ambiguity relations, and annotation stability. We show that different LLMs produce different value interpretations. Iterative prompt calibration through error analysis reduces misattributions and improves alignment with expert annotations. We also derive targeted expert verification rules from recurrent error structures and use them during corpus annotation. We show that LLM annotations can be transferred to an encoder model through soft-label training, retaining theory-based value interpretations and information about uncertainty in value expression. Finally, using sensitivity analysis, we show that annotation bias propagates into large-scale predictions, but standardized trends and major event responses are more robust.

Reframing AI Loss of Control: What Control Is, How to Have It, How to Lose It

Ze Shen Chin, Maurice Chiodo, Dennis M\"uller, Coleman Snell — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.12442v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: At present, loss of control risks have gained much prominence in public discussion, particularly in relation to AI, with extensive discourse present among academics, frontier labs, and even governments. However, in the existing literature, the concept seems to rest on surprisingly weak foundations, where even those that discuss loss of control extensively do not first establish what control is and what exactly is being lost. Our paper aims to address these gaps. We establish a working definition of control by anchoring it to the "setting and getting of goals". Then, we discuss various aspects of control, built on foundational concepts from related fields like cybernetics, management control, and control theory. This includes who (or what) can be in control, and the things they require to be in control, such as the ability to set goals, having a functional control loop, having requisite variety, and having sufficient goal alignment. Once a framework for control is established, we then discuss how control can be lost, how AIs can contribute to such loss of control, and offer relevant recommendations for how one can maintain control. One interesting consequence of our work is that humanity, as individuals and as groups, can lose varying degrees of control as a result of AI behaviour that is far below the level of superintelligence; the potential for loss of control scenarios (as we define them) already exist, and have existed for a long time.

The Theory of Mind Utility: Formal Specification of a Mentalizing Mechanism

Nikolos Gurney, Stacy Marsella — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.12721v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Inferring others' beliefs requires more than reading surface signals; it requires tracking who told them what, in what order, and how credibly. The Theory of Mind Utility (ToM-U) formalizes this epistemic state inference problem at the computational level of analysis, specifying what mentalizing computes and why without commitment to algorithmic or neural implementation. ToM-U achieves this by constructing Local Epistemic World Models (LEWMs) -- directed typed graphs that represent agents, state nodes, and the epistemic relationships among them -- and evaluating discrete candidate LEWMs against observed behavior until one achieves sufficient confidence. Five formal definitions specify the LEWM structure, agent node properties including ordered information access history, a bounded proliferation mechanism for recursive mentalizing, three inference procedures, and a residue function that captures the structured trace left by failed mentalizing attempts. ToM-U differs from Bayesian Theory of Mind and adjacent formal accounts, which presuppose rather than derive belief states, and from simulation theory and theory-theory, which lack a formal apparatus for epistemic state inference. The architecture generates directional, falsifiable predictions about mentalizing failure that follow from structural properties of the model rather than auxiliary assumptions, and positions ToM-U as a domain-agnostic mechanism upstream of goal inference and other downstream social cognitive processes.

Pushing the Frontiers for Floating Solar Photovoltaics -- The Case for South America

Soham Ghosh, Anik Goswami, Krishna Kumba, Nabil Mohammed — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.12798v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Floating solar photovoltaic (FSPV) systems provide a land-efficient pathway to expand clean electricity access in energy-poor regions. South America has among the highest global FSPV potential (approx 38.26 TWh per million acres of water surface), yet deployment remains limited. This study presents a techno-socio-economic framework to assess FSPV for energy access, water security, and grid flexibility, with case studies in Nicaragua, Honduras, and Guyana. Estimated yields for 50 to 398 MW systems exceed 1,500 to 2,000 kWh per kW annually with capacity factors above 20 percent. At El Cajon, FSPV could significantly reduce emissions relative to fossil generation. Results show competitive costs with land-based PV when accounting for avoided land use, shared hydropower infrastructure, and water benefits. The framework also highlights co-location with hydropower and AI data centers, offering a scalable model for deployment in underserved regions.

Equilibrium Computation in Extensive-Form Games with Stochastic Action Sets

Thomas Schwarz, Ryann Sim, Chun Kai Ling — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.13093v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Extensive-form games (EFGs) are a standard model for sequential decision-making in games. A fundamental and typically implicit assumption in EFGs is that players always have access to all of their actions at every decision point. However, in many realistic settings, certain actions might be unavailable during game-play due to exogenous stochasticity, hindering the expressivity of the standard EFG model. Given a `base' EFG, we formalize a model that allows for actions to be stochastically restricted, leading to a corresponding Extensive-Form Games with Stochastic Action Sets (EFGSAS). In EFGSAS, we derive an expansion procedure that results in an equivalent EFG, thus showing that standard strategy formalisms could require exponentially-large representations. However, under an appropriate independence assumption, we show that compact strategy representations polynomial in the size of the base EFG exist. Computationally, we introduce an algorithm called SI-CFR that minimizes sleeping internal regret, converging to Nash equilibria with high probability in two-player zero-sum EFGSAS. Finally, we utilize a stochastic approximation procedure to recover compact representations of Nash equilibria, utilizing only the iterates of SI-CFR.

Seamless Execution of Malleable Applications in Controlled and Production HPC Environments

Petter Sand{\aa}s, Sergio Iserte, Guillaume Houzeaux, Antonio J. Pe\~na — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.13266v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many large-scale scientific applications exhibit time-varying behavior, yet production HPC clusters still rely on rigid, fixed-size allocations, and most dynamic techniques remain confined to laboratory prototypes. This work presents a practical MPI malleability methodology that integrates with state-of-the-art high-performance computing (HPC) software stacks and operational practices. The methodology is implemented in the Dynamic Management of Resources (DMR) framework and is designed to ease adoption by existing applications without requiring intrusive code changes or scheduler modifications. We evaluate our approach by integrating the DMR API into two large-scale scientific applications and deploying them on three TOP500 supercomputers under realistic production configurations. Our non-invasive malleability solution achieves performance comparable to static baselines in controlled environments while substantially reducing node-hour consumption for identical workloads. These results show that malleability can be effectively exploited on production systems using vanilla resource managers, lowering the barrier to adoption of dynamic resource management in HPC.

NEXP-Completeness and Exponential Coefficient Growth for Existential Presburger Arithmetic with Divisibility

Ignacio Barros, Micha\"el Cadilhac, Guillermo A. P\'erez — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.14167v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We prove that satisfiability for existential Presburger arithmetic with divisibility (EPAD) is NEXP-hard. Together with the known NEXP upper bound, this establishes NEXP-completeness. The lower bound is obtained by encoding succinct Boolean formulas whose satisfying assignments may have exponential length. A central difficulty is to represent, within a polynomial-size EPAD formula, the exponentially long integers arising in this encoding. To address this difficulty, we introduce fixed-width arithmetic logic circuits (ALCs), whose gates perform addition, multiplication, and bit shifts. We show that polynomial-size uniform ALC families compute exactly the functions in FPSPACE, while their succinct exponential-size counterpart computes exactly the functions in FEXP. In both cases, the computed functions admit polynomial-size functional definitions in EPAD. This provides the compressed arithmetic needed for the lower-bound reduction. The same construction yields NEXP-hardness for nonerasing word equations with Presburger length constraints over a fixed two-letter alphabet. We also study the elimination of divisibility constraints by enumerating their possible quotients. Earlier work identified an NP fragment in which the variables can be ordered so that divisibility dependencies always move forward through the order. We introduce a different fragment, called merge-absorptive, in which bounded-quotient divisibilities can successively connect all variable components. This fragment is polynomial-time recognizable and admits complete finite-quotient elimination, yet its satisfiability problem remains NEXP-complete. Finally, we show that the elimination process may necessarily produce equations with exponentially large coefficients.

Trusted Multi-View Deep Learning Classification of Fetal Congenital Heart Disease with Feature-level and Decision-level Fusion

Tan Zhou, Shifa Yao, Suncheng Xiang, Dahong Qian, Baoying Ye — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.15265v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Congenital heart disease (CHD) refers to the abnormal anatomical structure caused by the abnormal development of the heart and great vessels during embryonic development. Traditional diagnostics often fail to achieve high accuracy and efficiency, especially given the complexity of cardiac anatomy. This study presents a specialized multi-view deep learning framework for CHD binary classification using echocardiographic images. A large-scale CHD dataset, including five views, was used to train the model, enabling it to integrate multi-angle image data. The framework utilizes advanced feature extraction and attention mechanisms to improve diagnostic precision and reliability. An uncertainty-based decision-making component is also integrated to handle low-quality images, enhancing diagnostic outcomes. Experimental results show that this method achieves top-tier performance on our dataset and provides a robust tool for early CHD detection, underscoring its potential for clinical use. The dataset and source code will be released upon paper acceptance.

MSC-CMA-ES: Structure-Aware Restarts for CMA-ES via Cyclic Nearest-Better Basin Discovery

Dimitar Nedanovski, Svetoslav Nenov, Dimitar Pilev — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.15830v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: CMA-ES behaves, per restart, primarily as a local optimizer; multimodal search relies on restart strategies such as IPOP and BIPOP, which draw every restart uniformly and reuse no information from previous evaluations. Multi-Start Clustering CMA-ES (MSC-CMA-ES) makes restarts structure-aware: in alternating cycles, a Sobol pre-sample is partitioned into approximate basins of attraction by nearest-better clustering, restarts are seeded basin by basin with locally scaled step-sizes and population sizes, redundant basin visits are detected and excluded, and the remaining budget is spent on a budget-bounded, tolerance-disabled local refinement of the best-so-far solution. We evaluate the method on the four CEC suites (2014, 2017, 2020, and 2022) at their official budgets, across ten (suite, dimension) cells with dimensions 5--30, with 51 runs per function, and compare it with BIPOP-CMA-ES and five differential-evolution algorithms (ARRDE, jSO, j2020, NL-SHADE-RSP, and L-SRTDE). Read per function class over the $D\leq 20$ cells, the results split three ways. On composition functions MSC-CMA-ES attains the best value on all aggregate measures, with $2.7\times$ the fixed-budget target coverage of BIPOP-CMA-ES -- the highest composition coverage of any algorithm evaluated -- and leads in most suites, dimensions, and budgets. On unimodal and simple-multimodal functions it attains the best median error in aggregate but the lowest deep-target coverage, with orderings varying by suite and dimension. On hybrid functions both CMA algorithms trail the leading DE algorithms. All results and scripts are publicly available.

Look Again Before You Abstain:Budgeted Conformal Evidence Acquisition for Reliable Vision-Language Model

Jian Xu, Yanning Wu, Delu Zeng, John Paisley, Qibin Zhao — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.16667v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large vision-language models (LVLMs) hallucinate: they assert visual details that the image does not support. A principled remedy is selective prediction with a distribution-free guarantee-verify each claim and abstain when the claim is not grounded, so that the hallucination rate among asserted claims is provably bounded. We show, however, that this guarantee is bought at a brutal price: to keep the hallucination rate below $5\%$ on a balanced object-existence benchmark, a state-of-the-art conformal filter must abstain on more than $80\%$ of claims. We argue that abstention is wasteful when more visual evidence is cheaply available, and introduce Budgeted Conformal Evidence Acquisition (BCEA), which replaces the binary answer/abstain decision with a three-way choice: answer, abstain, or acquire additional visual evidence by re-examining the image (zooming, cropping, or applying a claim-specific intervention) under a bounded

Phantoms and Disclosures: A Statistical Framework for Auditing Privacy in Synthetic Data

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.16952v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The rapid adoption of generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) has spurred interest in synthetic data as a privacy-preserving alternative to sensitive real-world datasets. However, generating high-utility synthetic data often carries the risk of memorizing and regurgitating private information from the training corpus. In this work, we present a customizable empirical auditing framework designed to detect and explain such data disclosures. Our framework introduces a mechanism to distinguish between "true disclosures"-where the system directly reproduces a user's information-and "phantom disclosures''-where the system incidentally generates a user's data. By partitioning input data into training and holdout sets and applying rigorous statistical hypothesis testing, we determine if observed disclosures are consistent with strict privacy baselines, such as zero-learning or specific Differential Privacy (DP) bounds. Crucially, this approach requires no model access, no canary insertion, and no reference model training -only the synthetic output and a held-out control set. We demonstrate that this framework effectively functions as a membership inference attack, providing empirical lower bounds on privacy leakage that are tighter than prior data-based auditing methods. Our approach is model-agnostic, applies to any synthetic data generation mechanism, and requires orders of magnitude fewer computational resources than shadow-model or canary-based alternatives.

PARSE: Provenance-Aware Retrieval Sanitization for Professional Domain LLM Agents

Aaditya Pai — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.17467v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Prompt injection defenses evaluated on synthetic benchmarks do not generalize to real enterprise documents, which are longer, denser, and interleave legitimate authority language with factual content. We demonstrate this gap with a real-document benchmark of 122 tasks across five professional domains (financial, legal, medical, scientific, DevOps) using actual SEC filings, Federal Register rules, PubMed abstracts, arXiv papers, and GitHub postmortems. Paraphrasing, the strongest defense on synthetic benchmarks, shows no statistically significant attack success rate reduction on real documents (p=0.500) while degrading utility from 91.8% to 82.8%. We introduce PARSE (Provenance-Aware Retrieval Sanitization), a domain-aware, fact-preserving sanitization pipeline that classifies each sentence by injection likelihood, extracts structured facts before rewriting, and verifies fact preservation via a consistency-checking loop. A directiveness gate routes 59% of real enterprise documents to a lightweight path, concentrating computational cost on high-risk documents. PARSE achieves 15.6% attack success rate -- a 38% reduction versus the 25.4% baseline -- at 86.9% utility, the only condition that is both statistically significant (p=0.014, adequately powered) and maintains near-baseline utility. Practitioners should evaluate defenses on domain-matched real documents, not synthetic proxies.

ReRAM-aware Model Finetuning addressing I-V Non-linearity and Retention Errors

Ching-Yi Lin, Shamik Kundu, Arnab Raha, Sahil Shah — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.17471v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Traditional CPU, GPU, and NPU architectures are increasingly limited by the von Neumann bottleneck. While In-Memory Computing (IMC) using ReRAM crossbar arrays offers a high-density, energy-efficient alternative, its practical deployment is constrained through their non-idealities. Existing hardware-aware training frameworks often require training from scratch, which is computationally prohibitive for modern large-scale models. In this work, we propose a finetuning-based hardware-aware training algorithm that enables robust DNN deployment on ReRAM with minimal training overhead. Our approach mitigates I-V non-linearity by applying a range-shrunk sinh transformation and incorporates retention errors directly into a regularization loss during the finetuning process. We evaluate our framework across models and tasks such as image classification and question-answering (QA). Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves similar accuracy on large-scale models like ResNet18 and DeiT-Tiny as the base model. In-case of ImageNet for MobileNetV3 families the technique has only less than 2% accuracy degradation. Further, applying the technique on the SQuAD v2 dataset results in only 1 point degradation of F-1 score.

Sign-Rank, Index, and List Replicability: Connections and Separations

Ari Blondal, Hamed Hatami, Pooya Hatami, Chavdar Lalov, Sivan Tretiak — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.18236v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In learning theory, the sign-rank of a binary concept class captures the smallest dimension in which it can be represented by points and halfspaces. Despite tremendous interest, lower bounds on sign-rank are notoriously difficult to come by. Two recent approaches to the problem establish lower bounds on sign-rank by measures that are easier to analyze: the $\mathbb{Z}_2$-index and the list replicability number. We order these measures, showing that the $\mathbb{Z}_2$-index is upper-bounded by a linear function of the list replicability number. As a main consequence, we obtain a strong separation between sign-rank and $\mathbb{Z}_2$-index, thereby resolving a question of Frick, Hosseini, and Vasileuski. This motivates a thorough study of list replicability, the stronger of the two lower-bounding measures. We establish upper bounds on the list replicability number by two combinatorial measures: height and minimum star number. We also prove a fundamental composition result, showing that the product of two concept classes has list replicability number bounded by the sum of the list replicability numbers of the two classes.

Externalizing Research Synthesis and Validation in AI Scientists through a Research Harness

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.18874v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI systems can increasingly automate scientific workflows, but the reasoning that links prior evidence, generated ideas, experiments and final claims often remains implicit inside model inference. Here we introduce Xcientist, a research harness that externalizes research synthesis and experimental validation into inspectable, contract-governed processes. Xcientist organizes literature evidence, idea states, implementation plans, ablation records and repair traces as persistent research artifacts, so that generated mechanisms can be grounded, executed, tested and revised without losing their evidential basis. We identify claim drift as a failure mode of automated research, where runnable artifacts no longer support the mechanism originally claimed. Across training-free memory systems, graph-structured traffic forecasting and multi-scale physics-informed neural networks, Xcientist preserves traceable trajectories from problem formulation to mechanism design, validation and bounded revision. These results suggest that AI scientists should be evaluated not only by their final artifacts, but by whether their synthesis and validation processes remain attributable, inspectable and scientifically accountable.

The Correctness Illusion in LLM-Generated GPU Kernels

Dipankar Sarkar — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.20128v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Benchmarks for LLM-generated GPU kernels (KernelBench, TritonBench, GEAK) score correctness through fixed-shape, small-sample allclose-style checks. The number of inputs varies between benchmarks. The shape, dtype, and tolerance are fixed for each kernel. We test that oracle empirically. We construct a controlled corpus of 24 Triton and CPU stand-in kernels (15 correct controls and 9 LLM-style buggy variants seeded with documented transcription errors) and re-evaluate it under op-schema-aware seeded fuzzing with a high-precision (fp64) CPU reference and per-(op, dtype) absolute tolerances. The seeded oracle flags 9 of 9 buggy kernels and passes 15 of 15 correct controls, at zero precision cost on controls. We extend the corpus to 26 ops (adding a flash-attention pair) and re-run the same protocol on five GPU classes (RTX 3060, A10, L40S, A100 SXM4, H100 NVL). The verdicts are identical across all five GPUs: 10 of 10 illusions caught and 16 of 16 controls clean. The corpus result is about LLM-style transcription bugs that the allclose-on-one-shape oracle certifies as correct, not about the bug rate of any specific deployed LLM. Every flagged failure replays byte-for-byte from a stored seed.

Exact Nonnegative Matrix Factorization via Cone-Ray Witnesses: Certificates, a One-Sided Solver, and a Findability Phase Transition

Mithil Ramteke — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.22451v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study exact nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) of small exact-rank-r matrices through the polyhedral cones of nonnegative preimages of the truncated SVD. Restricting each factor to an r-subset of a cone's extreme rays collapses the factorization constraint to the entrywise nonnegativity of a single r x r witness matrix; feasibility of the witness certifies that an exact size-r NMF exists, decided in one matrix inverse. A single-coupling completeness theorem shows every size-r NMF is representable this way, for every m, and a one-sided relaxation gives a closed-form solver that provably dominates the two-sided witness, with an explicit criterion for its strict gain. Our main result concerns findability: at a fixed search budget, witness recoverability undergoes a sharp conic phase transition whose width collapses to a step as r grows. We rule out both a universal-constant explanation and a statistical-dimension explanation -- the cones' statistical dimension is flat across the transition, while the intrinsic-volume profile's variance tracks it. The transition is not an existence boundary: by completeness a ray-economical witness always exists and persists past the threshold, so what decays with m is its density among r-subsets. The threshold is thus budget-relative -- moving logarithmically as the candidate pool grows -- and combinatorial rather than smooth-conic; a single budget law bridges this finite-budget threshold to the budget-free existence limit. Obtuseness ranking surfaces a feasible witness near the top of astronomically many subsets; a two-sided union of one-sided relaxations recovers more than multi-start HALS on average across six distributions, while being deterministic, machine-exact, 8-160x faster, and a certifier. The theme: exact NMF always exists and is representable; only ray-economical findability, relative to a budget, transitions.

Flow-Corrected Thompson Sampling for Non-Stationary Contextual Bandits

Ali Baheri — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.23933v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study non-stationary linear contextual bandits where the reward model drifts over time, rendering classical contextual bandit algorithms brittle because historical data becomes systematically biased. We propose Flow-Corrected Thompson Sampling (fcTS), a Bayesian method that reuses experience by transporting past rewards to the present using an explicit drift model and incorporating each transported observation with a confidence weight that reflects transport reliability. This yields a unified template that specializes in (i) linear parameter drift via online slope estimation and reward correction, (ii) periodic variation via phase-aware reuse across cycles, and (iii) recurring regime switches via changepoint detection and regime-specific posterior memory. The resulting posterior updates remain closed-form under a linear Gaussian model and can be implemented efficiently with truncated, incrementally updated sufficient statistics. Across five controlled case studies and a semi-synthetic portfolio-selection benchmark with multiple overlapping non-stationarities, fcTS outperforms standard forgetting-based baselines (discounting, sliding windows, and periodic restarts), with the largest gains in settings exhibiting recurring temporal structure. These results demonstrate that when non-stationarity is structured, correcting and reweighting historical observations can be substantially more sample-efficient than uniformly discarding them.

Reclaim Evaluation: A Lossy Memory Is Worse Than an Empty One

Alex Kwon — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.25449v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A language model's memory can be worse than no memory at all when the model or its interface is disposed to act on it: a memory that keeps a wrong conclusion but drops the work behind it leads a model to re-emit the stale value as a confident answer, where an empty memory leads it to abstain. We call this brittle memory. The information loss is definitional; the finding is behavioral, and it turns on one thing, whether the memory kept a re-derivation basis (the source) rather than the answer. We measure it with reclaim evaluation: induce a known drift, compress at a fixed budget, deliver a correction that names the error, and score exact recovery, judge-free. Holding the budget fixed and varying only what the compression keeps isolates correctability from capability and from size; an 8B model and a frontier one wall in the same place. A one-line source-first policy, keep the recomputable source, drop the re-derivable conclusion, restores correctability at equal budget where the source is compact and identifiable, with a length-matched control ruling out "more text." We map where the fix fails, show the failure compounds through memory loops, and replicate across three deployed memory systems, real dialogue (MultiWOZ), and tau-bench, a deployed-agent benchmark where whether a lossy memory becomes a harmful action is a joint model-and-interface property. We release the harness, the paired memory conditions, and validators built to come out false.

A Red Teaming Framework for Large Language Models: A Case Study on Faithfulness Evaluation

Abrar Alotaibi, Raed Mughus, Moataz Ahmed — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.25476v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across natural language processing tasks, yet their deployment in high-stakes applications raises critical concerns regarding reliability, safety, and trustworthiness. In this paper, we present a red teaming framework that systematically uncovers vulnerabilities in LLM outputs. Our approach employs a novel multi-role architecture comprising target, attacker, and jury models. The attackers generate increasingly effective adversarial prompts while the jury rigorously evaluates response accuracy and consistency across tasks. In a case study, our strategy proved particularly effective at exposing unfaithfulness in LLM responses. Exploitative adversarial prompts increased the attack success rate by up to 7.9% in question-answering tasks, revealing weaknesses in reliability. The approach identifies how structural constraints in summarization can shape vulnerability patterns, with format limitations yielding measurable gains in faithfulness, and shows that architectural design choices typically outweigh parameter scaling in determining model safety. The framework's key strength is its adaptability across evaluation tasks, from English question-answering to Arabic summarization, enabling comprehensive comparison of model vulnerabilities. While it excels at comparing cross-model and cross-linguistic vulnerabilities, it faces challenges in fully automating adversarial prompt generation across languages. Our experiments also reveal limitations in detecting subtle forms of unfaithfulness that do not manifest as explicit factual contradictions, particularly across linguistic contexts. Overall, this architecture provides both actionable insights into current LLM vulnerabilities and a scalable methodology for ongoing safety evaluation as models evolve.

Is Variational Monte Carlo Robust? Sharp Moment Thresholds and Heavy-tailed Stochastic Optimization

Philipp Grohs, Davide Nobile — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.26009v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Variational Monte Carlo (VMC) is a central algorithm in electronic structure theory and has gained renewed importance through modern neural-network ans\"atze such as FermiNet. At its core, VMC seeks ground states by minimizing the Rayleigh quotient by stochastic optimization. In this work, we show that the resulting stochastic optimization problem is intrinsically governed by the nodal geometry of the underlying wave function. More precisely, we establish that properties of the nodal set determine the integrability of the local energy and gradient estimators that drive VMC. For broad and practically relevant ansatz classes, including Slater-Jastrow wave functions with variable-exponent Slater-type orbitals, we prove that these estimators are generically heavy-tailed and fail to admit higher moments. At the same time, for general analytic ans\"atze, we prove weak moment bounds for the relevant estimators and identify precise low-moment regimes, showing how generic and degenerate nodal structures lead to different integrability thresholds. Building on this analysis, we introduce a new robust variant of VMC $\unicode{x2013}$ coined PS-Clip-VMC $\unicode{x2013}$ which is based on clipping both the local energies and the per-sample gradients. We prove that PS-Clip-VMC converges both in expectation and with high probability in the weak moment regime of VMC. The robustness of our method is confirmed experimentally by training FermiNet on atoms with up to 18 electrons.

Exploring the Intrinsic Geometry of Diffusion Models with Constrained Inverse Kinematics

Miguel Angel Rogel Garcia, Phone Thiha Kyaw, Jonathan Kelly — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.26408v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent studies suggest that diffusion models can recover geometric structure in the data manifolds they are trained on, yet the supporting evidence has so far come mostly from natural-image data, where the underlying geometry itself is unknown. We study this question in a setting where the geometry is analytically tractable: constrained inverse kinematics (IK). Each task-space constraint defines a configuration-space manifold with known intrinsic dimension, giving direct ground truth for evaluating the geometry learned by the model. For each of the 6-DoF UR5 and 7-DoF Franka, we train a single conditional diffusion model across seven constraint families, spanning solution manifolds from discrete IK branches to self-motion manifolds. Our empirical results reveal that the intrinsic dimension recovered from the model's score function matches the analytical degrees of freedom of the corresponding constraint manifold across both robots. Moreover, linear interpolation in the latent space leads to generated solutions that remain close to the appropriate constraint manifold, indicating that the learned representation further captures geometric structure of the constraint family beyond intrinsic dimension alone. Constrained IK therefore offers a controlled setting for studying the intrinsic geometry learned by diffusion models.

Co-Designing Community-Centered AI Education for Adults: A Midwestern Case Study

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.26565v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI) education is increasingly important, yet adults outside higher education receive less attention. We report a case study of an AI education session with 54 adults (48 in-person and 6 virtual) in a predominantly African American community on the east side of a major Midwestern city. We ask: "What does AI education for adults outside formal educational systems look like in practice?" and "What does this AI education session reveal about AI literacy at the community level?" Through a co-designed session developed with community partners, we found that concerns about AI persisted but shifted to specific, locally grounded questions about AI design and deployment. We also discuss AI literacy from a community capacity perspective and argue for AI literacy frameworks grounded in local community contexts that strengthen community capacity.

TaskTok: Delving into Task Tokens for Task-driven Image Restoration

Hongjae Lee, Sojung Kang, Jaeseong Yu, Seung-Won Jung — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.26615v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While traditional image restoration focuses on perceptual quality, Task-Driven Image Restoration (TDIR) aims to maximize the performance of downstream high-level vision tasks. Recent approaches leveraging generative priors have shown promise for TDIR; however, they typically suffer from computational inefficiency and potential semantic alteration by indiscriminately updating all latent tokens. In this paper, we posit that not all visual information is equally important for machine perception. Through an analysis of the latent token space, we observe that task-relevant cues are unevenly distributed across the token sequence, exhibiting index-wise specialization. This suggests that selectively refining a subset of tokens can be sufficient for task-driven objectives. Leveraging this insight, we propose TaskTok, a novel framework that selectively restores only task-relevant tokens via a learnable token switch and a lightweight token refinement module. Extensive experiments across image classification, semantic segmentation, and object detection demonstrate that TaskTok significantly enhances task performance with high computational efficiency. The source code is available at https://github.com/jimmy9704/TaskTok

SimFoundry: Modular and Automated Scene Generation for Policy Learning and Evaluation

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.28276v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Training and evaluating robot policies in the real world is costly and difficult to scale. We introduce SimFoundry, a modular and automated system for zero-shot real-to-sim scene construction from a video. SimFoundry generates sim-ready digital twins and supports object, scene, and task editing, enabling the automated generation of diverse digital cousins: affordance-preserving variations of reconstructed real-world scenes. Policies trained on SimFoundry data transfer zero-shot to challenging real tasks involving multi-step manipulation, articulated object interaction, and bimanual interaction, and its digital cousins (variations of the original scene, objects, and tasks) facilitate generalization to new real-world conditions. Across 7 manipulation tasks and 5 policy architectures, SimFoundry simulation evaluations strongly predict real-world performance, with mean Pearson correlation 0.911 and mean maximum ranking violation 0.018. When evaluating sim-trained policies zero-shot in the real world, policies trained with object, scene, and task cousins in simulation show average task success rate improvements of 17%, 21%, and 40%, respectively. Additional details at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/gear/simfoundry/ .

SAGA: Scene-Aware, Goal-Evolving Agents for Long-Horizon Strategy Game Planning

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.29932v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Grand-strategy games such as Civilization pose a distinctive long-horizon planning problem: an agent must divide one shared resource pool among six competing domains -- technology, government, diplomacy, city development, expansion, and military -- under partial observability, with no feedback except a delayed final score. Current LLM agents fall short in three ways: 1) they cannot infer spatial relations from raw coordinates; 2) they allocate resources poorly, because feeding the entire growing state into one prompt and planning all domains in a single output diffuses attention and biases decisions toward urgent events; and 3) they cannot improve, as the delayed score gives no signal within or across games. We present SAGA, an LLM multi-agent framework pairing one mechanism with each weakness: (i) a Map-Semantic Scene Graph turning coordinates into per-entity statements of distance, direction, and threat; (ii) a Tool-Augmented Planner that retrieves only the state a decision needs, cutting the order of magnitude of its input, and issues a separate plan per domain to six specialist controllers, so urgent events do not derail long-term plans; and (iii) a Dual-Horizon Feedback Loop setting short-term goals during play and distilling each game into lessons for the next. On CivRealm, a Civilization-style benchmark, SAGA leads five LLM baselines on mean final score and is the only method significantly ahead of all of them on city development, the first investment baselines sacrifice, with 27% fewer output tokens; with cross-game learning it scores highest after five games, and its fifth game consistently surpasses its first across four maps. Our code is available at https://github.com/Kazecloudk/SAGA-Scene-Aware-Goal-Evolving-Agents-for-Long-Horizon-Strategy-Game-Planning.

EvalSafetyGap: A Hybrid Survey and Conceptual Framework for LLM Evaluation-Safety Failures

Bu\u{g}ra Alperen Ulu{\i}rmak, Rifat Kurban — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.30219v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLM evaluation and AI safety face a shared measurement problem: benchmark scores, reward-model signals, and reported safety metrics can improve while the latent properties they are meant to represent remain difficult to verify. This paper combines a hybrid survey - a systematic search paired with narrative synthesis and separately tracked grey evidence - with a conceptual framework and a structured ten-model audit. The synthesis spans eight evidence streams: benchmark validity, dynamic evaluation, LLM-as-judge reliability, safety evaluation, jailbreak/refusal robustness, reward hacking, mechanistic interpretability, and governance/auditability, covering 2018-2026 evaluation-safety measurement work. We introduce EvalSafetyGap as an organizing hypothesis for comparing evaluation-side and alignment-side proxy failures under optimization pressure, using Goodhart's Law together with two constructs we develop here - an Instability Decomposition and an Alignment Trilemma - as tools for generating testable comparisons. The audit shows how conclusions shift when capability, behavioral safety, and governance are measured separately. In this sample ($n = 10$), the association between capability and sustained adversarial robustness is statistically indeterminate using the displayed Table 3 inputs (Pearson $r = +0.232$, $p = 0.520$), and the apparent open-closed safety gap is modest, driven mainly by governance and disclosure rather than behavioral robustness, and sensitive to how a single borderline model is classified; attempt-budget results are protocol dependent. Because the public evidence uses heterogeneous protocols, the audit is diagnostic rather than rank-generating. The contribution is a shared vocabulary and evidence map to support dynamic evaluation, transparent source reporting, multi-attempt safety measurement, and auditable alignment practice.

CSAR: Containerized System Architecture for Robotics

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.30293v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robotic applications increasingly rely on distributed computational infrastructures that combine embedded devices, edge servers, and cloud resources. This evolution, together with the collaborative nature of robotics projects, has made the development, integration, deployment, and long-term operation of robotic systems significantly more complex. In practice, multi-user robotics software teams face persistent challenges related to dependency isolation, compatibility, reproducibility, efficient sharing of specialized hardware, and deployment across heterogeneous environments. In this paper, we present CSAR (Containerized System Architecture for Robotics), a container-centric architectural framework designed specifically for robotics teams and the edge-cloud continuum. CSAR combines LXC/LXD-based system containerization, ROS 2/DDS-based communication, and a three-layer edge infrastructure to organize computation into hardware-affine, persistent execution environments that remain decoupled from the volatility of experimental workloads. Through its Infrastructure Core, Platform and Multi-User Orchestration, and Compute and Acceleration layers, CSAR provides strong isolation, controlled resource sharing, and topology-aware networking for distributed robotic applications. To demonstrate its validity, we describe a real deployment of CSAR in an academic robotics laboratory and evaluate it through representative use cases involving edge-offloaded 3D SLAM and GPU-accelerated semantic mapping. The results indicate that CSAR simplifies software integration, improves the utilization of shared computational resources, and facilitates safe prototyping, as well as reproducible and collaborative experimentation in robotics teams. The implementation described in this paper, including deployment templates, configuration files, and documentation, is available at https://github.com/goyoambrosio/CSAR.

Forensic Trajectory Signatures for Agent Memory Poisoning Detection

Jun Wen Leong — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.30566v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We discover a behavioral invariant in LLM agents under persistent memory poisoning and characterize its deployment boundary. In architectures where retrieval is routed through observable memory-tool invocations, successful attacks require calling memory_recall_fact before email_send_email, a transition mechanistically forced by the attack's information-retrieval dependency. A simple rule exploiting this invariant achieves AUC = 0.9563; a Random Forest over 19 trajectory features refines it to AUC = 0.9904 (BCa 95% CI [0.987, 0.993]). The signature is overdetermined within the poisoned-but-defended evaluation set: removing all recall-related features leaves AUC unchanged. Cross-model hold-out on 9 models (7B-120B) confirms AUC = 1.000 on 6/9 splits, and the invariant transfers to frontier models (GPT-4.1, GPT-4o) without retraining. [v2] A preregistered follow-up (N=4,360, 13 models) reveals a critical deployment boundary: benign memory-grounded sends produce the same recall_before_send signature, yielding 100% false positives conditional on recall_before_send=1 (unconditional benign FPR: 24.7-52.6% depending on recall protocol). The signature is a valid attack precondition, not a maliciousness predicate; standalone blocking is not viable, but gating with recipient metadata restores separation. A prefix-only variant achieves AUC = 0.934, enabling real-time triage.

ChronoFlow-Policy: Unifying Past-Current-Future Interaction Flow in Visuomotor Policy Learning

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.31493v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Visual signals play a crucial role in policy learning by enabling models to capture object motion and interaction dynamics. Just as humans reason about actions using both past experience and anticipated outcomes, effective policies should integrate past interactions with future predictions. However, existing visuomotor policies typically model either historical context or future dynamics in isolation, lacking a unified temporal representation of interaction dynamics. In this work, we introduce ChronoFlow, a temporally unified representation that captures past, current, and future interaction dynamics through sparse 3D keypoints of both objects and the gripper. Based on this representation, we propose ChronoFlow-Policy, a diffusion-based visuomotor policy that jointly learns ChronoFlow and action sequences through a co-training objective. Experiments on 14 simulated tasks and 5 real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate that ChronoFlow-Policy consistently outperforms strong diffusion-policy baselines and improves robustness in long-horizon and non-Markovian manipulation scenarios. Our project page is available at https://the-kamisato-sii.github.io/ChronoFlow-Policy-project-page/.

Tighter bounds for weighted and unweighted shortest cycle approximation

Avi Kadria, Liam Roditty, Virginia Vassilevska Williams — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.00938v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the problem of approximating the length of a shortest cycle in a given graph, known as the girth of the graph. The state-of-the-art approximation algorithms for unweighted graphs by Kadria et al. [SODA'22] and Roditty and Trabelsi [arXiv'25] achieve the following trade-off: for every integer $k\geq 2$, there is an $\tilde{O}(n^{1+2/k})$ time algorithm that achieves a $(2k/3)$-approximation for the girth in unweighted $n$-node graphs. The first result of this paper is to achieve the same trade-off for $m$-edge, $n$-node graphs with non-negative real edge weights: a $2k/3$-approximation algorithm running in $\tilde{O}(m+n^{1+2/k})$ time. The dependence on $m$ is unavoidable in weighted graphs. Our result improves on the work of Kadria et al.~[SODA'23] and Ducoffe [ICALP'19 and SIDMA'21], who were only able to achieve such a trade-off for some values of $k$. We also prove new fine-grained lower bounds for girth approximation and related problems in unweighted graphs.

Subliminal Clocks: Latent Time Modelling in Diffusion Language Models

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.01774v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models. Unlike standard diffusion-based approaches, DLMs are not explicitly conditioned on a timestep, raising a natural question: do these models internally represent denoising progress, and how is such information used downstream? In this work, we show that DLMs do in fact encode a latent representation related to the diffusion timestep within their residual streams. We find that this signal can be reliably extracted using probes across layers, indicating that denoising progress is decodable from internal activations. We further demonstrate that steering the model along a low-dimensional subspace associated with the inferred timestep allows us to systematically modulate its notion of denoising progress, leading to predictable changes in model confidence and entropy. Finally, we analyse the geometry of the identified representation, showing that it exhibits structured and interpretable properties in activation space, and shedding light on how such a signal is processed by these models.

Improved Approximation Algorithms for n-Pairs Shortest Paths

Avi Kadria, Liam Roditty, Virginia Vassilevska Williams — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.02443v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Let $G = (V, E)$ be a graph with $n = |V|$ nodes and $m = |E|$ edges. The $t$-Pairs Shortest Paths problem, introduced by Cohen [FOCS'93; SICOMP'99], asks to approximate the distances between $t$ prespecified pairs of vertices. Recently, this problem has received renewed attention, particularly in the case where $t = \Theta(n)$: the $n$-Pairs Shortest Paths problem. In this setting, new algorithms and conditional lower bounds have been developed by Dalirrooyfard, Jin, Vassilevska Williams, and Wein [FOCS'22], and Chechik, Hoch, and Lifshitz [SODA'25]. In this paper, we present the first algorithm for the $n$-Pairs Shortest Paths problem in \textit{weighted} undirected graphs that achieves a $(2 - \alpha)k$-approximation, for constant $\alpha > 0$, that runs in $\tilde{O}(mn^{1/k} + n^{1 + 2/k})$ time. Specifically, we present a $1.622k$-approximation, improving upon the $(2k - 3)$-approximation of Chechik, Hoch, and Lifshitz [SODA'25] for graphs that are not super sparse, which answers in the affirmative the open question posed by them. We also develop improved approximation algorithms with better tradeoffs for unweighted graphs and dense weighted graphs that improve upon the results of Dalirrooyfard \etal~and Chechik, Hoch, and Lifshitz. Our main technical contribution is the new \textit{heavy-edge} technique. Using this technique, we transform an algorithm with an approximation guarantee that depends on $W_{uv}$, the weight of the heaviest edge on the shortest path between $u$ and $v$, into an algorithm with purely multiplicative approximation that does not depend on $W_{uv}$.

MorphQuad: Morphable Quadrotor for Superhuman Maneuverability, Manipulation, and Resiliency

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.02764v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Infrastructure maintenance, contact-based inspection, and emergency response can benefit from aerial vehicles that act as a flying human hand with extreme maneuverability, manipulation, and resiliency (MMR): maneuverability to fly in arbitrary orientations to reach remote and tight locations; manipulation to point sensors, turn valves, and press tools at arbitrary orientations; resiliency to maintain accurate motion and force control despite disturbances from arbitrary directions, such as wind, ground effects, and friction. Realizing MMR on aerial vehicles requires not only omnidirectional flight; it also requires (I) vectoring of maximum thrust in any direction, to maximize capacity for contact-force application and disturbance rejection, (II) global stability, to enable control over any orientation/position, and (III) compact, standard designs that build upon platforms such as quadrotors to inherit technological know-how. No current aerial vehicle simultaneously enables I--III, due to structural and control limitations that constrain actuation. We present MorphQuad: a morphable quadrotor that enjoys MMR. Key to our approach is a hardware and control co-design: on hardware, we independently articulate each of the four rotor systems via two-axis gimbals; on control, we introduce globally-stable control, and energy-optimal thrust allocation that permits inter-rotor thrust cancellations only to avoid downwash interference and gimbal lock. With fully-onboard autonomy, MorphQuad demonstrates multi-revolution rotation while translating or hovering, for pipe inspection and target tracking (maneuverability); valve turning, perching, and object pressing and pushing with human-level strengths (manipulation); and wind rejection from any direction, even directed to a single rotor, and push-pull recovery (resiliency).

Remora: Scale-out Deterministic Execution for Smart Contracts

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.02817v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modern blockchains rely on a modular architecture that decouples consensus from execution. Recent advances in consensus algorithms have shifted the bottleneck to the execution layer, which must deterministically follow the consensus order and handle increasingly complex, compute-intensive smart contracts. We identify that single-node validators cannot keep up, motivating the need for a scale-out design. We design Remora, a scale-out smart contract execution engine. Remora adopts an efficient asymmetric architecture with centralized transaction dispatching and distributed execution, and depends on an object versioning scheme with a strict ownership model to guarantee deterministic scale-out execution. Remora achieves up to 3x throughput improvement compared to state-of-the-art deterministic execution schemes, scales up to 250k TPS, matching modern consensus performance, and reduces latency by up to 5ms. We also show that Remora elastically adapts to bursty workloads and dynamic access patterns using real-world traces. Remora's main performance benefits come from a novel stateless-stateful separation during smart contract execution, which overlaps the execution of state-independent tasks with consensus, and a new locality-aware and load-balanced scheduling scheme.

Vidu S1: A Real-Time Interactive Video Generation Model

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.03118v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce Vidu S1, a real-time interactive video generation model supporting voice control of digital characters. Users can control video generation content at any moment through voice instructions. Vidu S1 supports infinite-length real-time video generation without blurring, drift, or visual distortion. Built with TurboDiffusion and TurboServe, Vidu S1 outputs 540p real-time videos at up to 42 FPS on regular consumer GPUs. Users can upload custom images of real people, anime, and pets, and choose different voice tones for personalized experiences. Experiments show that Vidu S1 achieves the best performance across all test metrics while fully meeting real-time inference requirements. A playable online demo is available at https://vidu.com/vidu-stream.

Beyond Post-Quantization: Native Hash Learning with a Dedicated HASH Token

Xinze Liu, Ding Wang, Dayan Wu, Hengjie Zhu, Peng Fu, Zheng Lin, Weiping Wang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.03328v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Efficient large-scale image retrieval requires compact representations that preserve semantic similarity under fast Hamming-space search. Deep hashing is appealing, but most existing CNN- and ViT-based methods still follow a post-quantization paradigm, where continuous visual features are first learned and binary codes are then produced by a terminal hash projection or binarization operation. This late code generation creates a feature-to-code discrepancy between the continuously optimized representation space and the discrete Hamming space used for retrieval. To address this limitation, we propose HashViT, a Vision Transformer framework for native hash token learning. Instead of treating hashing as a terminal readout, HashViT introduces a dedicated HASH token that serves as a persistent, hash-oriented retrieval state inside the transformer. The HASH token is structurally decomposed into a Hash Register for direct binary code generation and a Semantic Workspace for preserving auxiliary continuous semantics. To enable effective workspace-to-register interaction, we further design a lightweight Hash Refinement Adapter that progressively refines the Hash Register across transformer layers. As a result, binary-oriented representations are formed through token evolution within the backbone, rather than being abruptly induced by an output-level projection. HashViT is optimized with a unified objective that combines learnable semantic center supervision, class-token similarity distillation, and quantization regularization, encouraging the HASH token to encode semantically structured and compact binary representations. Extensive experiments on three widely used benchmarks demonstrate that HashViT achieves state-of-the-art or highly competitive retrieval performance while preserving the efficiency of compact Hamming codes. Code is available at https://github.com/Xinze919/HashViT.

Don't Blame the Large Language Model: How Agent Harness Evolution Shapes Coding Agent Quality

Oussama Ben Sghaier, Hao Li, Bram Adams, Ahmed E. Hassan — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.03691v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Coding agents, autonomous systems that use large language models (LLMs) to resolve software engineering tasks, rely on agent harness: a middleware layer in between a developer and a large language model that orchestrates system prompts, tool execution, context management, and iterative reasoning loops. While these agent harnesses evolve at extreme velocities, no study has examined how this evolution affects agent quality (i.e., effectiveness and efficiency) over time. Practitioners regularly report quality regressions after agent harness updates, yet consistently attribute them to the underlying model rather than the harness itself. In this paper, we address this gap by conducting the first controlled longitudinal study that isolates the agent harness contribution. Unlike prior work that fixes the agent harness and varies the model, we fix the model and vary only the agent harness, evaluating 35 sequential releases to measure their impact on agent effectiveness and efficiency. We first empirically study the development and release evolution of five major open-source agent harnesses (i.e., Codex, Qwen Code, Gemini, OpenCode, and OpenHands), revealing extreme release velocities exceeding two releases per day and thousands of issues within months. We then perform a controlled deep dive into 35 sequential releases of the Qwen Code CLI, evaluating each against 50 stratified SWE-bench Verified tasks while holding the underlying LLM constant. We trace the resulting quality fluctuations to specific development patterns and architectural components, and illustrate our findings with concrete qualitative evidence linking individual pull requests to measured quality shifts.

Auto-AEG: Scalable Data Construction for Open-Vocabulary Audio Event Grounding

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.04383v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) reason fluently about sound yet struggle to localize precisely when events occur, while classical Sound Event Detection attains frame-level precision only over a closed label set. At the intersection of these paradigms lies the task of Open-Vocabulary Audio Event Grounding: predicting all time intervals of a target sound event described by an arbitrary natural language query. While this task is crucial for real-world audio understanding and LALM adaptation, it is bottlenecked by data scarcity. Few large-scale resources provide open-vocabulary onset/offset supervision, and manual temporal annotation is prohibitively expensive. To address this, we introduce Auto-AEG, a scalable pipeline that constructs such supervision by automatic data construction and model fine-tuning. It pairs programmatically synthesized clips, which carry exact ground-truth intervals for supervised cold-start, with multi-model pseudo-labels on real-world audio that supply the reward signal for reinforcement learning. Training with this pipeline yields promising performance gains on both the DESED SED benchmark and AEGBench, an independent difficulty-stratified benchmark we release. Our results show that automatically constructed data, coupled with interval-aware reward function design, is an effective data-side route to expanding the temporal localization capability of LALMs. AEGBench: https://huggingface.co/datasets/zihan-audio/AEGBench

Context-Masked Truncated Reasoning Audits for Answer-Key Dependence in LLM Tutors

Bonan Shen, Dingyan Shang, Youting Wang, Tao Ning, Bowen Liu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.04572v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language model (LLM) tutors may have access to teacher notes, answer keys, rubrics, or retrieved solutions while producing student-facing explanations. We study whether truncated reasoning probes can distinguish direct access to such private context from answer information carried by the written explanation. Using Truncated Reasoning AUC Evaluation (TRACE), we evaluate 1000 GSM8K problems under question-only, correct answer-key, and wrong answer-key contexts. When forced-answer probes retain the private key, answer-key TRACE AUC rises from 0.375 to 0.900, and the gold answer is recoverable with no explanation at all in 998 of 1000 cases. We then introduce a context-masked replay: answer-key-generated prefixes are probed under the corresponding question-only prompt. Masking reduces 10\% prefix accuracy from 0.997 to 0.126 and median AUC from 0.900 to 0.375, nearly matching question-only values of 0.113 and 0.375. On 746 pairs where both explanations end correctly, the masked mean AUC difference is $-0.0086$ with a 95\% bootstrap interval spanning zero. Wrong keys still account for 272 of 387 incorrect final responses, showing that private artifacts can influence outputs even when early-prefix evidence disappears after masking. These results establish context masking as necessary for attributing early answer availability to an explanation rather than its hidden input.

LP-SFT: Local-Preserving Supervised Fine-Tuning via Multimodal Entropy Structure

Yueyang Wang, Baolong Bi, Shuo Lu, Jingyuan Zhang, Jiajun Shi — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.04733v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is the standard approach for adapting pretrained language models to downstream domains, yet it often improves target-domain behavior at the cost of degrading pre-existing capabilities. Standard cross-entropy fine-tuning promotes only the observed label token and leaves unconstrained how probability mass is redistributed over other plausible alternatives, potentially distorting the rich local preference structure learned during pretraining. We first analyze next-token predictions using Shannon and Renyi entropies, revealing that pretrained models exhibit a regular multimodal entropy structure. These entropy peaks correspond to varying numbers of plausible alternatives, indicating that the base model intrinsically encodes rich distributional knowledge beyond the single supervised token. Motivated by this observation, we propose LP-SFT, a Local-Preserving Supervised Fine-Tuning objective designed to explicitly protect this inherent entropy structure. At each step, LP-SFT constructs a local top-K support of alternative tokens from the frozen base distribution. Crucially, it removes the supervised target token from this set to avoid conflicting with the cross-entropy objective, and applies a locally normalized KL divergence to maintain the base model's relative preference structure among the remaining non-label alternatives. Across mixed-domain and single-domain fine-tuning experiments, LP-SFT improves overall performance over vanilla SFT and recent SFT-enhancement baselines, achieving the best balance between pass@1 accuracy and pass@k performance. These results suggest that local preservation helps mitigate capability degradation without collapsing sampling-accessible diversity.

BioSecBench-Refusal: A paired metric for performance and alignment in agentic biosecurity risk assessment

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.05462v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As AI agents are incorporated into life science workflows, the capabilities that speed discovery might also enable misuse. We present BioSecBench-Refusal, a benchmark for risk identification and refusal behavior for biological research tasks. The benchmark pairs 61 Routine tasks, legitimate analyses adapted from the published literature, with 46 Red-Team tasks, fictional scenarios that resemble real research but conceal a biosecurity hazard. Across 16 model-harness configurations, refusal rates ranged from 7 percent to 74 percent on Routine tasks and 1 percent to 62 percent on Red-Team tasks, with many configurations refusing legitimate Routine work at comparable or higher rates than concealed hazards. Refusals were most often triggered by provider API filters applied prior to agentic reasoning. However, models given room to reason showed the potential to identify more real threats. We release BioSecBench-Refusal as a tool for model developers to calibrate capability and caution for agentic biotech research and development.

Prompt Robustness Is Task-Dependent: Comparing Objective and Belief-Style Questions in LLM Evaluation

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.05554v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Survey-style evaluations of large language models often treat a prompted response as a measure of a model's values or beliefs. This assumption is particularly fragile when responses are read as evidence of political values, social attitudes, or beliefs. We ask whether prompt robustness differs between objective questions with fixed answers and subjective questions that ask for opinions or values. We evaluate four instruction-tuned model families on three objective datasets (MMLU, ARC, and CulturalBench) and three subjective datasets (Political Compass Test, ValueBench, and World Values Survey). For each question/statement, we apply multiple types of prompt changes, such as variations in wording, framing, and format, and measure whether the model gives the same answer across variants. Using a binomial generalized estimating equation, we find significant effects of model, dataset, prompt category, and their interactions. The dataset type effect is also significant, and the interaction between dataset type and prompt category is large. These results show that prompt robustness depends on the question type, the prompt change, and the model.

Network Interdependency-Informed Power System Dynamic Trajectory Prediction Utilizing Black-Box Modeling of Multiple Inverter-Based Resources

Sungjoo Chung, Ying Zhang, Meng Yue, Hantao Cui — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.05843v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Black-box modeling of inverter-based resources (IBRs) has attracted growing interest for real-time grid operation and control in the presence of proprietary electronic control architectures. Existing machine learning (ML)-based online dynamic trajectory prediction approaches using IBR black-box models either significantly accumulate prediction errors when multiple surrogates are simultaneously used or ignore measurement errors, limiting their deployment in practical grids. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel network interdependency-informed ML algorithm for online dynamic trajectory prediction in IBR-integrated power systems. A modular spatiotemporal attention network (STAN)-based predictor for the black-box modeling of each IBR unit is first proposed. Utilizing past measurements, the proposed STAN can effectively capture and predict the spatiotemporal dynamics of IBRs by employing an attention mechanism to attend to the most pertinent features for trajectory prediction. Furthermore, a novel hybrid physics-informed loss function that integrates a decoupled linearized AC power flow formulation is proposed. The proposed loss function effectively ensures physical consistency of predictions within network operation while avoiding the computational complexity of iterative power flow solving, thereby enabling efficient gradient backpropagation and overall improved prediction accuracy. Case studies on the IEEE 14- and WECC 179-bus systems demonstrate that the proposed method achieves significant accuracy enhancement and robustness against measurement errors, outperforming recent ML-based trajectory prediction methods.

Calibration-Family Overfit: Why Trusted Sabotage Monitors Don't Transfer Across Lineages

Lucas Pinto — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.06596v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Trusted monitoring is a central defense in AI control: a cheaper trusted model scores an untrusted model's actions for sabotage, and the most suspicious are audited or deferred. Such monitors are evaluated against one or two untrusted models, and the accuracy is reported as a property of the monitor. We ask whether it is partly a property of the pairing. We make the untrusted policy family the controlled axis: we fit a monitor on family A's transcripts, apply it to family B, and decompose the cross-family AUROC into how obvious each family's sabotage is, how capable each monitor is, and the residual own-family advantage after both are removed: the interaction. On code-backdoor transcripts the interaction is positive and survives the dominant confounds: +0.172 (95% CI [+0.158, +0.185]) on four open-weight families on a strict leak-free basis, holding across an eight-family matrix spanning four frontier vendors, blatancy-matched controls, a trained transcript-reading monitor up to 34B parameters, and a second code benchmark. The gap is geometric: each lineage's sabotage occupies a different scoring direction, and rotating the monitor's scoring direction toward the target lineage recovers most of the lost detection while a matched random rotation recovers nothing. At a 1% audit budget under defer-to-trusted, an off-lineage monitor catches 19% of attack attempts where an in-lineage monitor catches 41% at the same audit cost, a +21.7-point gap. Control evaluations should report cross-family transfer matrices: a single-pairing accuracy overstates the safety a monitor delivers against a lineage it was not calibrated on. We give a four-step protocol that acts on the gap, with each step a measured result.

A Transdiagnostic Space of Disorder Like Phenotypes in Reinforcement Learning Agents

Hari Prasad — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.07753v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modelling psychological disorders in artificial agents offers a testbed for computational psychiatry and a lens on affective-control failure modes. Prior work induces one or two disorders by hand-tuned reward shaping, labels the behaviour post hoc, and reports single runs. We recast disorder modelling as dose-controllable manipulation of cognitive appraisal signals in an appraisal-guided PPO agent, expressing seven disorders (anxiety, mania, obsessive-compulsive checking, depression, impulsivity, addiction, and post-traumatic stress) each as a single knob grounded in a computational psychiatry account, with each symptom measured by a preregistered assay. Across more than a thousand runs (10 seeds, four controls, 95% confidence intervals) every disorder shows a graded, monotone dose-response that no control reproduces. Beyond these induced effects, three findings emerge that were not written into the reward: disorders self-organise into a two-dimensional affective space in which mania mirrors anxiety; removing a knob remits reward-distortion disorders (mania, checking, addiction) but not avoidance disorders (anxiety, PTSD), which recover under a graded exposure curriculum; and two simultaneous knobs interact nonadditively, yielding testable comorbidity predictions. The depression and addiction knobs further reproduce their double dissociation in a 3D pixel environment (MiniWorld) with a standard convolutional agent and no appraisal critic, showing the framework generalises beyond grid worlds.

Applying JEPA-Style Predictive Learning to JA4-Derived Network Fingerprints

Javier Izquierdo, Aygul Zagidullina — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.08465v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: I-JEPA and V-JEPA learn by matching latent predictions to target encoder outputs rather than regenerating the original input, and this has worked well for images and video. We explore whether the same objective works for compact network fingerprints. We built JA4-JEPA, a Transformer-based model trained on JA4, JA4H, JA4S, and JA4X subfields drawn from JA4DB and CIC-IDS- 2017. The training data combines roughly 397K samples from both sources, though no single sample contains all four view families. We evaluated the learned representations with a frozen kNN probe on protocol-family classification across TLS, DNS, and SSH. On 39,416 heldout samples the model achieved a cosine similarity of 0.9899 and a kNN accuracy of 0.9220. These results indicate that JEPA-style predictive learning can produce useful embeddings from JA4-derived fingerprints, even with incomplete view overlap across sources. Keywords: JA4, network fingerprinting, JEPA, predictive representation learning, self-supervised learning

LieBN: Batch Normalization over Lie Groups

Ziheng Chen, Yue Song, Rui Wang, Xiao-Jun Wu, Nicu Sebe — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.08783v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Manifold-valued measurements are prevalent in various machine learning tasks. Recent advances have extended Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to operate on manifolds. These extensions have been accompanied by normalization techniques tailored to different geometries, collectively referred to as Riemannian normalization. However, most existing Riemannian normalization methods are either designed for specific manifolds or fail to effectively normalize manifold-valued sample distributions. To address these limitations, we propose LieBN, a framework for Riemannian Batch Normalization (RBN) over Lie groups. Our approach leverages the theoretically convenient left- and right-invariant metrics, which naturally exist in every Lie group, and provides theoretical guarantees for controlling the Riemannian mean and variance. We instantiate LieBN across nine distinct geometries: four on the Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) manifold, one on the group of rotation matrices, and four on the manifold of full-rank correlation matrices. Notably, among the SPD metrics, we introduce a novel right-invariant metric and extend three existing Lie group structures via matrix power deformation. Experiments on different manifolds validate the effectiveness of our framework. The code is available at https://github.com/GitZH-Chen/LieBN.git.

RUBRIC: Realism--Utility Balanced Ranking for Imbalanced Classification

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.09816v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Class imbalance poses a fundamental challenge in risk-sensitive applications such as fraud detection and medical diagnosis, where minority-class samples are scarce yet critical for accurate classification. Existing oversampling methods generate synthetic samples to rebalance class distributions; however, they often produce large numbers of low-quality candidates that distort decision boundaries or introduce artifacts, leading to overfitting and degraded generalization. In this work, we introduce RUBRIC, a generator-agnostic filtering framework that formulates synthetic sample selection as a quality-over-quantity optimization problem. RUBRIC ranks candidates using a realism-utility trade-off: realism is quantified by a learned discriminator that distinguishes real samples from synthetic samples, while utility captures proximity to the decision boundary through a concave margin-based scoring function. We show that, under mild regularity conditions, the proposed filtering strategy monotonically tightens the generalization bound for margin-based classifiers by jointly reducing distribution shift and suppressing near-negative tail contributions. Through extensive experiments on credit-card fraud detection and other imbalanced benchmarks, we demonstrate that RUBRIC improves F1-macro and recall while maintaining comparable ROC-AUC across several generators. We also provide explicit lambda-sensitivity analysis to show how users can recover AUPRC when ranking quality is prioritized.

An LLM-powered Agentic Recommendation System for Connected TV Content Discovery

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.09988v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recommendation systems, from traditional multi-stage to recent unified generative architectures, face challenges in incorporating diverse contextual signals, such as trending topics, breaking news, cultural events, and cross-surface user activities, into their ranking pipelines. These systems are designed to consume structured behavioral signals with consistent schemas, and lack the reasoning capability to naturally process unstructured or heterogeneously formatted contextual information. Incorporating such signals typically requires feature engineering, bespoke data pipelines, and carefully tuned heuristics. In this paper, we present an LLM-powered agentic recommendation system designed for Connected TV (CTV) content discovery that addresses these limitations. Our system leverages the reasoning capabilities of large language models to naturally process and synthesize diverse signals across varying schemas and structures, eliminating much of the manual integration inherent in traditional ranking and retrieval systems. Recognizing that current LLM-based solutions still fall short of traditional machine learning models in several recommendation tasks, including retrieval efficiency, personalization precision, and scalability, we adopt an agentic architecture that orchestrates specialized components, allowing each sub-task to be handled by the most suitable method, whether LLM-based or traditional ML. The main contribution of this work is our engineering approach to successfully overcoming the practical limitations of enabling LLM for recommendation, particularly inference latency. We share insights from our work and discuss the trade-offs and lessons learned in building a hybrid system that combines the flexibility of LLMs with the performance of established recommendation techniques.

One mechanism for many mental spaces: a shared router over a value slot in language models

Oliver Steele, Jiangtao Wen, Yuxing Han — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.10248v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Language builds discourse contexts other than the actual: a painting, a belief, a memory, a hypothetical. Each is a mental space in which the same entity can take a different value, as when a flower is red in reality but purple in a portrait. Formal semantics keeps these contexts apart because their logics differ (modal, temporal, doxastic, depictive). Fauconnier's mental-space theory, by contrast, treats them as one space-building operation. We ask which of these a transformer language model implements, and find a mechanistic version of Fauconnier's unification. The model uses one router/slot format across the inventory: a reusable value slot stores attributed content, and a causally manipulable router (the space index) selects which space is read. A subspace trained with Distributed Alignment Search to control one space type, counterfactual, belief, fictional, or temporal, also controls the others, well above a random floor, on three model families. Belief, which formal semantics marks as a distinct case, is not specially separated. The router is low-rank, composes additively with entity identity, and acts through a few late-layer heads. Two further results show the mechanism drives inference and composes: a subspace trained on a rule-derived conclusion flips what the model infers while dissociating from what it reports, and composing space-builders mints a fresh router over the shared slot. This paper establishes the cross-type generality. A companion paper develops belief in depth, because of its special status in philosophy, psychology, and linguistics (epistemology, theory of mind, and propositional attitude reports).

ARMOR: Stabilizing On-Policy LLM RL with Off-Policy Anchor Samples

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.10481v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has significantly enhanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), yet the training process remains notoriously fragile. In this work, we investigate a critical source of this instability: over-optimization, where models exploit training heuristics at the expense of generalizable reasoning. While reverse KL regularization is the standard defense against such degradation, our analysis reveals that it is often insufficient in this regime, as it fails to ensure comprehensive coverage of the reference distribution. To address this, we propose ARMOR (Anchor Rollout and Mixed Optimization for RL), a framework that shifts the paradigm from passive penalty to active sample stabilization. ARMOR comprises two key components: (1) Anchor Rollout, which leverages off-policy data from the reference policy to preserve established solution patterns; and (2) Mixed Optimization, which reformulates the policy objective to enable controlled exploration without relying on auxiliary losses. Extensive experiments on reasoning benchmarks validate that ARMOR effectively mitigates validation collapse, enabling sustained performance improvements over extended training horizons.

AdvNav: Behavior-Guided Black-Box Adversarial Attacks on Vision-Language Navigation

Chenyang Li, Kaige Li, Zeyu Jiang, Changhao Chen — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.11063v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Despite progress in Embodied AI, Vision-and-Language Navigation systems remain vulnerable to adversarial visual disturbances. Most existing methods rely on white-box access to target model gradients, which is often unrealistic for real-world deployed systems and computationally exhaustive due to recursive backpropagation for optimization, limiting their applicability. While previous black-box methods predominantly target single-step, instantaneous decision tasks, they struggle to handle the task complexities and temporal dependencies. This highlights the need for a gradient-free attack method that can effectively disrupt the multistep sequential perception-action loop using only observable inputs and outputs. Therefore, we propose AdvNav, a behavior-guided black-box adversarial attack framework that disturbs an agent's first-person views during navigation. To construct an informative surrogate objective for effective optimization guidance in gradient-free search under the black-box setting, we design a dual-granularity behavior-based feedback, aggregating a trajectory-level performance score representing overall navigation degradation, an action-level reward score considering the potential decision risk, and a deviation indicator, all of which are extracted from the agent's self-output behaviors. This feedback guides a hybrid optimization strategy that heuristically tunes perturbation strength via adaptive updates and evolves noise spatial structure genetically, to iteratively discover the most disruptive noise configuration. Evaluated against Transformer-based HAMT and LLM-based MapGPT with two types of backbones on R2R dataset, AdvNav achieves 49.70/65.96/87.30% Attack Success Rate. The result demonstrates the effectiveness and generality of AdvNav, reveals critical perception vulnerabilities and offers insights for the design of future resilient VLN models.

CR-Solver: GPU-Accelerated Kinematics Solver for Tendon-driven Continuum Robots

Heqing Yang, Yang Yi, Linqing Zhong, Linjiang Huang, Si Liu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.11340v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Continuum robots provide intrinsic compliance, high dexterity, and safe physical interaction, enabling navigation and manipulation in confined and unstructured environments. Despite recent advances in sensing and control, heightening the need for precise motion generation, most widely used planning libraries are grounded in rigid-body assumptions, creating a critical gap for fast and practical tools for continuum robots. To address this, we present CR-Solver, a two-stage, optimization-based solver for the motion generation of tendon-driven continuum robots. Our method unifies inverse kinematics, path following, and trajectory planning within a single constrained nonlinear optimization framework. Leveraging GPU-accelerated parallel optimization, CR-Solver delivers fast, accurate, and constraint-aware solutions. We validate our approach on three tasks, demonstrating significant speedups over traditional CPU-based solvers while achieving a consistently high success rate above 95% and millimeter-level accuracy. The solver is implemented in pure Python, reducing the barrier to adoption and offering a practical, extensible foundation for continuum robots' high-performance motion planning.

Belief-reality separation lives in routing over a shared value slot in language models

Oliver Steele, Jiangtao Wen, Yuxing Han — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.11945v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Capable language models hold what a character believes apart from what is true: told "Anna believes the cup is blue; in reality it is red," they answer blue about Anna and red about the world. Where in the computation does that separation live? We show it rests on two separable mechanisms at two positions. A generic value slot binds the attributed value. A router at the query position selects which frame, the character's belief or reality, a query reads out. Two routes fill the slot: an asserted belief, whose value the text supplies, binds in directly; a derived belief, whose value must be inferred from what the character could see, arrives by a visibility-gated lookback. A subspace trained on either route steers the other, and only the derived route depends on described visibility. The slot itself carries no belief-reality tag: intervening on it moves a reality readout as strongly as a belief one. The separation lives instead in a dissociated pair of routing subspaces, which flip a query between frames without injecting the donor's value. These results hold across three architectures, on stimuli de-confounded against theory-of-mind-benchmark shortcuts; the behavior itself emerges between 3B and 7B across five model families. This paper develops the single belief-reality axis in depth; a companion paper shows the same slot-and-router format is shared across the other non-actual contexts a sentence can open (counterfactual, fictional, temporal).

Cyclic codes over a commutative non-unitary ring of order 4

Marvin Olavides, Jon-Lark Kim — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.11965v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Let $I_2$ be the commutative non-unitary ring of order $4$ arising in the classification of Fine. In this paper, we investigate cyclic codes over $I_2$ through their associated residue and torsion codes over $\mathbb{F}_2$. We introduce the notions of twisted and untwisted cyclic codes and characterize cyclicity in terms of a compatibility condition involving the twist map and the cyclic shift. Connections between cyclic codes over $I_2$ and binary quasi-cyclic codes are established via Gray maps. In particular, we show that the Gray image of a cyclic code over $I_2$ is a binary quasi-cyclic code of index $2$. We also study duality properties of cyclic codes over $I_2$ and prove that the dual of a cyclic code is again cyclic. Finally, we classify permutation inequivalent cyclic codes over $I_2$ for lengths $n \le 7$ and determine various structural properties of these codes.

Stop using Media Bias/Fact Check in research

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.12108v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC) purports to quantify the bias, credibility, and factuality of reporting for roughly 10,000 media sources, and the resulting data is commonly used in misinformation research. In the present study, we show that MBFC's methodology does not meet basic standards of rigor for academic research. Despite its widespread prevalence, studies using MBFC rarely examine it carefully, often describing it in ways that contradict its ``About'' page, or treating it as authoritative despite MBFC's disclaimer that it is ``not a tested scientific method... [but] a simple guide to the idea of a source's bias.'' We identified no papers that adequately describe MBFC as the opinions of a single person or critically engage with its methodology in order to justify proceeding with its use. We argue that MBFC's data is not neutral or accurate, but a computationally legible account of hegemony, a specious dataset for uncritical research that mistakes the familiarity of the concepts it quantifies with accuracy. Our study concludes with a call for academic researchers to stop using MBFC. MBFC's data quantifies the results of political processes, including campaigns to discredit the press, and presents them as simple facts about the world, thus reproducing the crisis misinformation scholarship exists to address.

Quantum Port-Hamiltonian Neural Networks: Learning Conservative and Dissipative Dynamics via Measurement-Induced Nonlinearity

Dibakar Sigdel — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.12269v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce Quantum Port-Hamiltonian Neural Networks (Q-pHNNs), a family of parameterised quantum circuits that learn classical dynamics in a structure-preserving manner. The framework relies on the Isomorphic Hamiltonian Mapping (IHM): the skew-symmetric interconnection matrix $\mathbf{J}$ corresponds to unitary gate evolution, and the positive-semidefinite dissipation matrix $\mathbf{R}$ corresponds to Measurement-Induced NonLinearity (MINL) realised via mid-circuit measurement and classical feedforward. This ensures conservation and passivity are enforced by construction rather than penalty terms, and it makes dissipation an intrinsically quantum effect: energy leaves the system through the act of measurement, not through any non-unitary term in the Hamiltonian. We instantiate the IHM in three architectures: (1) a Quantum HNN that learns conservative energy manifolds and extracts Hamilton's equations exactly via the Parameter-Shift Rule; (2) a Q-pHNN that realises dissipation through MINL-mid-circuit measurement of a bath ancilla with conditional feed-forward; and (3) a topology-entangled Quantum Graph Neural Network that lifts both channels to $N$-node coupled-phasor networks, with one bath ancilla per node. Experiments on the nonlinear pendulum and damped harmonic oscillator, and a network scaling study on GPU, demonstrate: (i)~$1.35\%$ relative energy drift with a symplectic integrator and scale correction; (ii)~$100\%$ energy monotonicity for the single-oscillator MINL circuit; and (iii)~$92$--$98\%$ phase-space energy decay from measurement-induced dissipation -- monotone at every step -- across ring, star, and chain networks at sizes $N\in\{3,6,9\}$, alongside exact machine-precision energy conservation in the conservative mode.

Training-Free Semantic-Edge Response Decoding of SAM3 for Cross-Domain Infrastructure Crack Segmentation

Shipeng Liu, Zhanping Song, Liang Zhao, Dengfeng Chen — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.12292v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Cross-project crack segmentation is hindered by variations in materials, imaging conditions, crack morphology, and background interference. Text-promptable foundation models reduce task-specific training, but SAM3's final region proposals may suppress, truncate, or distort weak and fragmented cracks. We propose \textbf{S}emantic-\textbf{E}dge \textbf{R}esponse \textbf{D}ecoding (\textbf{SERD}), a training-free method that replaces the proposal interface with the internal language-conditioned response. SERD normalizes this dense response, calibrates it using a fixed Sobel structural prior, and applies a single threshold to generate the crack mask. SAM3 remains frozen, with no target-domain annotation, auxiliary prompting network, or test-time optimization. When CamCrack789 is used only for threshold selection, SERD achieves 58.00\% average Crack IoU on five unseen datasets, compared with 54.33\% for native SAM3. Across six rotated source-domain settings, SERD obtains 60.23\% mean target-domain IoU and 67.18\% Boundary F1, exceeding SAM3 by 3.27 and 2.70 percentage points. Regional, structural, foreground-area, robustness, and latency analyses show that direct response decoding recovers substantial crack evidence lost during proposal formation, while structural calibration improves precision and boundary localization. The results demonstrate that internal-response decoding provides a simple and transferable interface for cross-domain infrastructure crack segmentation. \textit{Code is available at: \href{https://github.com/xauat-liushipeng/SERD}{GitHub}}.

LakeQuest: A Three-Domain Benchmark for Grounded Question Answering across Data Lakes

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.12310v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While modern question answering (QA) systems excel on clean, schema-aligned corpora, real-world knowledge is rarely so neatly packaged. Answering questions over enterprise and scientific data lakes requires systems to navigate heterogeneous, weakly structured collections of tables, passages, and linked metadata. Current benchmarks abstract away this noisy discovery process, failing to evaluate end-to-end performance. To bridge this gap, we introduce LakeQuest, a human-validated benchmark of 9,846 QA pairs designed to evaluate the end-to-end retrieve-and-synthesize pipeline over realistic data lakes. LakeQuest spans three diverse domains (AI/ML metadata, retail banking, and multimodal biomedical drug information) and pairs every question with exact, modality-aware evidence pointers. By isolating source discovery from cross-modal synthesis, LakeQuest exposes critical failure modes in modern QA systems. Our baseline evaluations, including standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and agentic tool-use methods, reveal that high-quality retrieval does not guarantee correct reasoning. Systems consistently struggle with relation chaining in metadata graphs, policy grounding in bank ledgers, and joint tabular QA in biomedical contexts, highlighting the need for robust discovery and faithful cross-file composition mechanisms in future agentic QA systems.

Evidence-Grounded AI for Musculoskeletal Care

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.12527v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Musculoskeletal diseases are among the leading causes of disability and drive the greatest global need for rehabilitation. Because recovery, remodelling and degeneration of bones, joints and related tissues unfold over months to years, care requires longitudinal management rather than isolated decisions. Clinicians must repeatedly integrate evolving patient evidence, medical knowledge and stage-specific functional goals, yet evidence is often fragmented across visits, departments and hospital systems, disrupting continuous, individualised management. Here we report OrthoPilot, a clinical artificial intelligence (AI) system powered by a large language model (LLM) that integrates hospital data streams with authoritative external knowledge for continuous musculoskeletal care. It autonomously retrieves real-time imaging, laboratory, pathology and order data and translates evolving patient states into evidence-based decisions from admission diagnosis through rehabilitation planning. We established a specialist-validated benchmark from real-world electronic health records (EHRs) spanning 1,000 disease codes. In a full-pathway reader study against 81 orthopaedic physicians, OrthoPilot outperformed experts with 25 years of experience in diagnostic reasoning, clinical decision-making and management planning. This advantage generalised across 60 external clinical centres, where OrthoPilot surpassed all evaluated intelligent systems. In a prospective physician decision-making study of 1,870 complex cases, OrthoPilot improved full-chain management success by 10.6%. In a randomised deployment involving 8,240 inpatients, integration into routine care increased cumulative cases per bed by 9.7% and improved patient-reported access to health information. These results move clinical AI from predicting isolated events toward executing longitudinal management across complete musculoskeletal care pathways.

FormalAnalyticGeo: A Neural-Symbolic Based Framework for Multimodal Analytic Geometry Problem Generation

Ruoran Xu, Wending Gao, Qiufeng Wang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.12982v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Math reasoning has achieved significant progress with the rapid advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), however analytic geometry remains largely underexplored, primarily due to the scarcity of annotated samples. Existing diagram generation approaches struggle with analytic geometry: template methods cannot handle constraint-driven layouts, and generative models lack the geometric precision to render annotated conic curves correctly. We present FormalAnalyticGeo, a scalable framework for fully automatic generation of multimodal analytic geometry problems. Leveraging the rigor of formal languages, we design the framework around CDL (Condition Description Language), a formal intermediate representation that bridges free-form problem text with precise diagram rendering via a Signed Distance Field (SDF) engine. The framework employs four specialized LLM components in sequence: a Generator that produces diverse analytic geometry problems, a Formalizer that converts each problem into CDL for SDF-based rendering, a Measurer that extracts ground-truth answers through vision-based measurement on the rendered diagrams, and a Quality Verifier that checks outputs at three stages. Structured feedback from the Quality Verifier drives automatic retry, forming a closed loop that eliminates any need for human annotation. Applying FormalAnalyticGeo at scale yields AnalyticGeo7K, a dataset of over 7K verified multimodal problems, each with aligned text, diagram, formal annotation, and ground truth.Experiments show that the generated problems achieve a median ground-truth relative error of 0.70\%, with 82.3\% of answers falling within 5\% of the exact symbolic solution. Our framework and dataset will be publicly released.

Resist and Update: Counterfactual Report Coordinates for Incentive-Compatible LLMs

Sen Yang, Yuen-Hei Yeung — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.12985v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Aligned language models routinely misreport under non-evidential pressure: they cave to a confident user, yet fail to revise when genuine evidence arrives. We cast this as a failure of internal incentive-compatibility and study the two demands, resist (ignore forbidden pressure) and update (follow licensed evidence), on a Bayesian-witness benchmark with known posteriors, where the same user disagreement is evidence or pressure purely by stated source reliability, removing the evidence/pressure confound by construction. Using interchange interventions rather than probes, we causally localize low-rank report coordinates for answer, confidence, and caveat, establishing causal sufficiency at a late intervention site rather than uniqueness or necessity, with a causal cross-talk matrix showing strong own-coordinate control and only small cross-effects (partial functional disentanglement). We then introduce a training-free counterfactual report-coordinate (CRC) clamp that references the model's own report under an incentive-neutralized counterfactual of the prompt. The two-pass full-window clamp attains resist and update of $1.00$ jointly (Wilson 95% CI $[0.99,1.00]$; the rank-16 projection alone reaches $0.88/0.90$), which we read as a causal certificate and upper bound under a constructible reference, not a claim of a deployed solution. Tested global decoding and fixed-direction steering trade one objective against the other, and resist-only training collapses updating to $0.01$. The deployable single-pass compilation is lossy ($0.73/0.97$). The mechanism and the clamp reproduce across three model families and transfer to a natural sycophancy benchmark with significant paired improvements. Our contribution is the interface and certification method: activation-level counterfactual incentive-invariance as a structural primitive for internal incentive-compatibility.

Falsifiable Release Gates for Self-Improving Systems: Standing Invariants at Scale

Deepak Soni — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.13070v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Safety claims for self-improving agent runtimes are almost always self-graded: a policy file, a guardrail, a promise in a README. We describe falsifiable release gates, a methodology in which every new capability must pass a pre-declared, machine-checkable acceptance suite before it ships, while a fixed set of standing invariants is preserved across every gate. We instantiate it in Antahkarana, an open runtime, then do what a method paper is only vindicated by: we follow the same runtime as it grows and ask whether the guarantees survive. The safety-critical property, that no action reaches an effector without a capability token minted by a control ring, is machine-checked exhaustively over the reachable states of a bounded model; a deliberately broken model yields the shortest counterexample, so the checker demonstrably has teeth. We then carry the runtime through six further releases. Across every one, the action-safety invariants INV-1 through INV-6 held without a single change, and one release added three capabilities while introducing no new invariant. Under the same teeth discipline, six more machine-checked families were added: memory with provable unlearning, a governed agent, calibrated abstention over a post-quantum record, a harness of many sub-agents, the self-improvement loop itself, and the residency of what it produces. The acceptance suite grew from 122 tests to 563. The load-bearing result sits in the negative space: across more than a doubling of capability, the safety core was neither weakened nor redesigned. The last families are the first on real hardware: gated self-improvement compounds a small model from 20% to 70% accuracy while auto-rejecting a candidate that only inflates confidence, and the whole governed path costs 0.021 ms per request, 0.008% of model inference. We release the runtime, tools, and gate suite; every number reproduces with a single command.

The Caf\'e in Amsterdam: When the Incumbent Becomes the Oracle

Augusto Camargo — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.13393v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A field can reformulate its computations freely exactly where its demand is stated independently of any incumbent implementation, and finds itself unable to when the incumbent's own output has quietly become the specification. This note offers that observation as a lens on computational reformulation for modern accelerators, where posing a problem in a hardware-friendly form can yield large speed and energy gains, but only if a replacement can be judged at all. Building on the test-oracle problem (Weyuker; Barr et al.), on requirements engineering's notion of implementation bias (Zave and Jackson), and on the case for judging approximate designs by acceptability rather than numerical proximity (Felzmann et al.), it names the pathology "baseline capture": the moment an incumbent stops being evidence that a demand can be met and becomes the definition of meeting it. It then separates two questions that are easily confused: whether a reformulation can be judged at all, which turns on the existence of an incumbent-independent demand, and whether its discovery can be automated, which turns additionally on the cost of evaluating that demand. Short cases -- shortest-path routing, learnable audio frontends, ZIP-215 for Ed25519 signature validation, CESM-ECT for climate models, and a single-GEMM audio frontend measured at 1.64x-3.29x speedup and up to 3.03x less energy -- illustrate the pattern and the move of "buying a verifier": making a demand explicit, operational, and independent of the incumbent. No component is claimed novel in isolation; the contribution is the synthesis and the single question it makes easy to ask of any reformulation result -- does its acceptance test mention the incumbent's output?

A VAE-Driven Multi-Task Satellite-Aided Semantic Communication Framework for 6G-Enabled Connected Autonomous Vehicles

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.13494v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The development of smart transportation systems and the introduction of 6G wireless communication technologies have significantly changed vehicle network topologies. Future connected autonomous vehicle (CAV) networks require bandwidth-efficient, reliable, and low-latency communication for safety-critical applications such as traffic sign recognition and decision-making. Conventional communication systems transmit raw data regardless of task relevance, which is inefficient in resource-constrained satellite channels where uplink bandwidth is scarce and propagation losses are large. Semantic communication addresses this limitation by transmitting task-relevant information instead of full signal representations. It extracts and conveys essential semantic features and leverages deep learning to optimize task performance at the receiver. Therefore, we present a Variational Autoencoder (VAE)-based multi-task semantic communication framework for satellite-assisted autonomous driving. Unlike deterministic autoencoder-based methods, the proposed model uses probabilistic latent representations for more robust and efficient encoding. The learned features are transmitted over noisy wireless channels to perform traffic sign reconstruction and classification. The framework is trained end-to-end to jointly optimize both tasks. Results show that the proposed approach achieves significant bandwidth reduction of up to 87.23\% to 98.17\% while maintaining stable performance across varying signal-to-noise ratio conditions.

Recursive ArUco Markers: A Scalable Fiducial Marker Design for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Landing Pads

Rafael Munoz-Salinas, Francisco Jose Romero-Ramirez, Sergio Garrido-Jurado — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.13830v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) increasingly rely on visual fiducial markers for autonomous navigation and precision landing. However, standard markers suffer from limited operational ranges, becoming undetectable when the camera is either too far or too close. While recursive and fractal markers have been proposed to address this issue, existing approaches either require the marker's center to remain visible, making them vulnerable to occlusion, or are limited in their recursion depth and placement. We propose a novel Recursive ArUco marker design. Our method allows any standard fiducial marker to be transformed into a recursive marker with an arbitrary depth. By employing a modified bit-sampling strategy during detection, we embed complete markers within both the black and white bits of the parent marker. This approach guarantees unlimited recursion depth and robust detection even with partial occlusion, as it does not rely on the marker's center being visible. Furthermore, by maintaining a single, unique identifier across all recursive scales, our proposal provides an extensive dictionary of multiple unique landing pads. This capability allows fleets of UAVs to operate simultaneously, with each drone landing at its designated location -- a feature not supported by existing Fractal and Harco markers due to their structural and dictionary constraints.

Deep-learning Causal Retrieval Optimization for Efficient e-commerce Distribution in Pinterest

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.14161v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Pinterest is where people turn inspiration into action as users browse ideas, then take steps toward realization, often by discovering shoppable content. To support this journey, we must distribute commerce content when it helps, not when it distracts. We frame this as a causal decision of triggering shopping candidate generators in early retrieval and deploy a production system at Pinterest that learns personalized and contextualized triggering policies. A deep multi-task model jointly predicts outcomes and uplift of multiple events, trained with a doubly-robust pseudo-outcome alongside calibrated outcome losses for stable, single-robust uplift learning. A randomized data logging supplies counterfactual coverage, and the model is evaluated by both regular and reverse metrics for full assessment. A linear-time offline replay is designed to select thresholds and forecast policy impact with extremely high consistency with online results. For productionization, the model runs in parallel with remote retrieval calls without end-to-end latency regression. At web scale, we cut shopping triggers by up to 85% while holding key shopping sessions neutral, improving important total sessions (+0.26%) and Pin saves (+1.10%), with significant infrastructure savings. By unifying deep causal learning with reliable offline replay and demonstrating production-grade deployment, this work provides a generally practical recipe for early-retrieval optimizations in modern cascading recommenders beyond shopping, aligning exploration and cost with user intent at scale.

NexForge: Scaling Agent Capabilities through Requirement-Driven Task Synthesis for LLMs

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.14186v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scaling executable agent training data for LLM post-training is bottlenecked by substrate-bound methods that tie task generation to predefined tools, repositories, or skill graphs: expanding coverage requires manual substrate engineering, each new domain demands a bespoke pipeline, and the resulting task distributions often reflect substrate biases rather than real-world demand. We introduce NexForge, a requirement-driven framework that takes high-level capability requirements as input and synthesizes diverse, executable agent tasks and expert trajectories for SFT. NexForge first investigates real-world demand to construct representative scenarios and task profiles, then performs distribution-aware compilation to generate task directives. For each directive, NexForge automatically retrieves or constructs the required files, dependencies, and runtime configurations, and finally synthesizes expert rollouts and produces training trajectories. Without domain-specific infrastructure, NexForge produces 3.6K terminal and 2K office tasks, improving Qwen3.5-35B-A3B Base from 22.5\% to 52.0\% on Terminal-Bench 2.0 and from 813 to 1338 Elo on GDPval; scaling further to 43.2K terminal tasks yields 58.4\%, on par with Claude Opus 4.6 equipped with Claude Code. Scaled further, NexForge-synthesized data contributes to the training of Nex-N2, a family of publicly available agent models that lift Qwen3.5-35B-A3B to 75.3\% on Terminal-Bench 2.1 and to 1585 Elo on GDPval -- achieving state-of-the-art open-source performance and surpassing several frontier proprietary systems. Nex-N2 models are available at https://nex.sii.edu.cn/.

Long-term User Engagement Optimization through Model-agnostic Downstream Rewards Learning

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.14192v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As recommender systems mature in the past few years, their optimization objectives have evolved from a primary focusing on short-term behavioral signals to a broader emphasis on long-term user engagement and retention. However, directly optimizing retention is difficult because return signals are sparse, delayed, and only partially attributable to earlier recommendations. Prior work has addressed this challenge with sequential modeling and reinforcement learning, but these approaches typically require task specific reward engineering, substantial computational overhead, and surface specific implementations that are difficult to generalize. In this paper, we present a unified, model-agnostic downstream reward framework for optimizing long-term user value in large-scale recommendation systems. First, we formulate the downstream reward learning problem and develop an offline screening framework to identify session level behaviors that are both observable early and predictive of future retention. We then propose several model-agnostic downstream rewards signals derived from observed user action patterns across multiple sources. We further discuss the engineering effort to productionize the proposed rewards derivations and challenges we faced when adding them to our ranking models. Online A/B experiments demonstrate consistent improvements in engagement and retention-related metrics, and the framework has been deployed across multiple Pinterest surfaces, including Homefeed, Related Pins, Search, and Notifications.

Lower-Resource, Higher Scores: Language Bias in LLM Evaluators

Ej Zhou, Lucas Resck, Zheng Hui, Anna Korhonen — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.14480v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLM evaluators (trained reward models and prompted LLM-as-a-Judge) are routinely validated via pairwise accuracy. In a multilingual setting, this operates under the premise that high pairwise accuracy implies reliable, language-neutral scoring. We show that this assumption does not hold. We conduct experiments with semantically identical instruction-response pairs across 23 languages, and find that multilingual evaluators assign significantly different scores to different evaluation languages. The bias is statistically significant and consistent across eight open-weight evaluators of different architectures and training paradigms, persists in frontier judges, and is strongly correlated with language resource level: lower-resource languages are scored more generously. Meanwhile, these biases are invisible to pairwise accuracy: evaluators achieve above 90% pairwise accuracy, yet have up to 43% difference in acceptance rate across languages under a global decision threshold, meaning, for instance, that harmful content in lower-resource languages is more likely to pass safety filters. Per-language thresholds would require language identification, which can be defeated by code-switched prompts. We then investigate why lower-resource languages receive higher rather than lower scores, and we find that model uncertainty is linked with the effect: models tend to give higher scores when less confident, both under negative log-likelihood and under token-free uncertainty measures; however, language identity remains a significant predictor after controlling for uncertainty, and the bias cannot be explained away by content difficulty alone, but is a structural, language-level misalignment.

RetroAgent: Harnessing LLMs to Search Over Structured Memory for Agentic Retrosynthesis Planning

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.14512v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-step retrosynthesis planning seeks to decompose a target molecule into commercially available building blocks through a sequence of feasible reactions. The vast combinatorial search space makes this task challenging even for expert chemists. Traditional methods combine tree search with offline-trained value networks that score candidates in isolation, without reasoning about complete multi-step routes. Recent work leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) for this task, but relies on simple interfaces that limit exploration of the full search space. We introduce RetroAgent, an LLM agent that bridges symbolic search and neural reasoning through a harness with structured memory. Through memory and chemistry tools, the agent observes the full search state, including explored routes, available alternatives, and properties of intermediates, enabling informed decisions grounded in both global progress and domain knowledge. Experiments on in-distribution and out-of-distribution benchmarks demonstrate that RetroAgent delivers strong performance and generalization.

Team RAS in 11th ABAW Competition: Multimodal Ambivalence Recognition Approach

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.14702v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Automatic recognition of ambivalence and hesitancy is challenging because these states may be expressed through inconsistent linguistic, acoustic, facial, and contextual patterns, while top-performing systems often rely on computationally expensive ensembles. We present a single text-centered multimodal approach for video-level ambivalence and hesitancy recognition for the 11th Affective & Behavior Analysis in-the-Wild (ABAW) Challenge. The proposed approach combines linguistic, acoustic, facial, and scene features using text-centered multimodal fusion model. Text Residual Fusion treats text as the anchor modality and applies gated residual adjustments based on the other modalities. Experiments on the Behavioural Ambivalence/Hesitancy (BAH) corpus confirm that text is the strongest unimodal modality. The Text Residual Fusion model achieves an average Macro F1-score (MF1) of 75.14% across the Development and Public Test subsets. On the Private Test subset, it reaches an MF1 of 78.24%, outperforming the text model by 4.03%. These results demonstrate that complementary multimodal information can improve recognition performance without requiring a large model ensemble.

Random Spherical Codes at High SNR: Error Transitions, Fixed-Error Data Rates, and Converse Gaps

Nikola Zlatanov — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.14768v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper characterizes random spherical codebooks over the real additive white Gaussian noise channel in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime in which the blocklength is fixed, the SNR per real channel use tends to infinity, and the codebook size grows with SNR. The ensemble exhibits a sharp error-probability transition governed by the intrinsic dimension of the sphere and the codebook-growth order. Below the critical codebook-growth order, the ensemble-average error probability vanishes; at the critical order, it converges to a nontrivial limit; and above that order, it approaches one. For a fixed target average error probability, this transition yields the high-SNR expansion of the ensemble-achievable data rate. The achievable rate and the corresponding converse rate bound have the same high-SNR prelog, establishing first-order optimality within the deterministic equal-energy, average-error class. Their ratio tends to one for every fixed blocklength and target error probability, but their additive difference approaches a strictly positive limit that depends on both. We characterize this rate-bound gap jointly in blocklength and error probability. At fixed error probability, it vanishes with increasing blocklength, with a universal leading $1/n$ behavior and reliability dependence first appearing at the next order. For error probabilities that decrease exponentially with blocklength, we identify the threshold between vanishing and nonvanishing limiting gaps. We also derive blocklength laws for meeting a prescribed gap as the target error probability becomes more stringent.

Covering Sequences and Covering-Sequences Codes

Tuvi Etzion — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.14840v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: An $(n,R)_q$-covering sequence is a cyclic sequence, over the finite field $\F_q$, whose consecutive $n$-tuples form a code of length $n$ and covering radius $R$. An $(n,m,R)_q$-covering-sequences code is a set of cyclic sequences of length $m$, over $\F_q$, whose consecutive $n$-tuples form a code of length $n$ and covering radius $R$. These codes are the best building blocks for $(n,R)_q$-covering sequences. We show, for small radii, how cyclic codes and constacyclic codes with small covering radius, can be used to construct such sequences of short length and such codes with a relatively small number of sequences and a total number of codewords in the associated covering code. Sequences with small radius whose length approaches asymptotically to optimality are constructed, especially for an alphabet of prime power size large enough. With the same construction, interesting codes are also constructed for larger radii.

Towards Human-like Physical Intelligence: Lifelong Vision-Language-Action Learning for Robotic Manipulation

Yao He, Gan Sun, Wenqi Liang, Fazeng Li, Yang Cong — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.14852v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Similar to the natural capabilities of humans to sequentially learn new tasks, robots with Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models should possess lifelong learning ability to learn a new task when deployed in open-world environments. However, most recently proposed lifelong learning models aim to effectively learn the current task (plasticity) or maintain high accuracy on previous tasks (stability), while the plasticity-stability trade-off remains largely unsolved in robotic manipulation models. To address this fundamental challenge, we propose a cache-efficient lifelong Vision-Language-Action learning framework for robotic manipulation (i.e., LifelongVLA), which alleviates the plasticity-stability trade-off with a dual-timescale adaptation mechanism while achieving low-cost robotic deployment with a cache-efficient replay strategy. More concretely, we propose a dual-timescale LoRA gating module to decompose VLA adaptation into two lightweight pathways: a short-term adapter for plasticity and a long-term adapter for stable consolidation. These pathways are integrated via a task-aware gate, enabling explicit control of the plasticity-stability trade-off. In the skill replay phase, a cache-efficient stochastic replay strategy is proposed to preserve more balanced retention signals without full-trajectory storage. Finally, experiments show that LifelongVLA outperforms existing baselines, demonstrating efficient skill expansion, robust retention of learned manipulation behaviors, and reduced reliance on retraining for real-world deployment on an xArm robot.

Towards realistic large random models of labeled transition systems and their 0-1 laws

Milan Lopuha\"a-Zwakenberg — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.15029v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Model checking is the automated verification of properties (specified in some modal logic) in labeled transition systems (LTSs); it is an essential tool in ensuring software systems function as intended. State spaces of software grow exponentially, and heuristics are needed to ensure model checking remains feasible in real-world applications. Heuristics, in turn, require a good understanding on the typical behaviour of LTSs. In this paper, we use random graph theory to create a probabilistic model of large LTSs. From a theoretical analysis of the creation of large LTSs, backed by empirical data from the Model Checking Contest, we endow these models with realistic parameter values. Then, we analyze the asymptotic behaviour of this model under LTL and CTL, two modal logics popular in model checking. We show that, depending on the precise model, as the size grows to infinity we either have a convergence law (for every formula, the probability that it holds converges to a limit) or a 0-1 law (...and this limit is 0 or 1). We also discuss the theoretical complexity of determining these limits, and give algorithms for doing so. These results are the starting point towards a deep theoretical understanding of typical LTS behaviour, and highlight the promising applicability of random graph theory to model checking. \keywords{Model checking \and Random graphs \and 0-1 laws

Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models for Scientific Visualization Literacy

Patrick Phuoc Do, Chau M. Ta, Chaoli Wang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.15176v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly used to interpret visualizations, yet current evaluations remain largely chart-centric and provide limited evidence of understanding of scientific visualization (SciVis). We benchmark six MLLMs on the scientific visualization literacy assessment test, a standardized SciVis literacy assessment comprising 49 items based on 18 scientific visualizations and illustrations, spanning 8 techniques and 11 task types. We evaluate three closed-source and three open-source models under a closed-world protocol and compare their performance using data from 485 human participants. Results show that current MLLMs do not exhibit uniform SciVis literacy. Gemini is the strongest model overall, exceeding the human mean across the evaluated subsets, whereas the open-source models remain below the human baseline. Performance is highly uneven across techniques and tasks: models perform best on scientific illustration, search, and spatial understanding, but struggle on texture-based and integration-based visualizations and on quantitative estimation. Error analysis reveals recurring failures in fine-grained quantitative estimation, flow-direction interpretation, and grounded encoding interpretation. These findings position SciVis literacy as a necessary benchmark dimension for evaluating multimodal AI systems. Our code and model outputs are publicly available at https://github.com/patdmp/mllm-scivis-lit-benchmark.

A Census of New Snake-in-the-Box Records

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.15270v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The snake-in-the-box problem, introduced by Kautz in 1958, asks for the longest induced (chordless) path, called a snake, in the hypercube graph $Q_n$. The maximum length $a(n)$ is known in each dimension $n \leq 8$. We give snakes that are longer than the previous best-known in every dimension from $9$ to $13$, improving the lower bound on $a(n)$. All record-length paths are provided in a computer-verifiable dataset.

MeanFlowNFT: Bringing Forward-Process RL to Average-Velocity Generators

Yushi Huang, Xiangxin Zhou, Jun Zhang, Liefeng Bo, Tianyu Pang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.15273v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: MeanFlow generators achieve fast few-step sampling by predicting average velocities over time intervals, making them attractive for efficient generation. Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a powerful way to align diffusion and flow models with human preferences and task-specific objectives. In particular, DiffusionNFT offers an efficient forward-process RL framework that does not require reverse-process trajectories or likelihood estimation. However, applying such RL methods to MeanFlow remains underexplored. DiffusionNFT optimizes instantaneous velocities, whereas MeanFlow samples with average velocities. To bridge this gap, we introduce MeanFlowNFT. Inspired by the MeanFlow identity, which bridges average and instantaneous velocities, we construct an induced instantaneous-velocity predictor. We apply the DiffusionNFT objective to this predictor, making reward optimization well-defined for MeanFlow. Sampling remains based on the average velocity, preserving MeanFlow's fast few-step generation. We further prove that MeanFlowNFT inherits DiffusionNFT's strict policy-improvement guarantee. Experiments on image and video generation show that MeanFlowNFT consistently improves baselines. Moreover, it outperforms prior state-of-the-art RL-tuned few-step generators on most metrics ($6$ of $8$ on SD3.5-M), and can even surpass multi-step RL-tuned diffusion while using only a few sampling steps. For instance, on Wan 2.1, $4$-step MeanFlowNFT reaches a VBench score of $84.33$, surpassing $50$-step LongCat-Video RL ($82.57$).

SkillCorpus: Consolidating and Evaluating the Open Skill Ecosystem for Real-World LLM Agents

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.15557v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agent skills, SKILL files that package reusable procedural knowledge for an LLM agent, are a popular mechanism for extending agent capabilities. Public repositories now host them in large and growing numbers, yet these artifacts are fragmented, redundant, and uneven in quality, and their value in practice is unclear. A core question remains open, namely how to consolidate this open-source SKILL ecosystem into a single usable corpus, and what bounds its benefit on real-world agent tasks. We present SkillCorpus, a framework that aggregates, curates, matches, and evaluates the open skill ecosystem at scale. It filters ~821,000 crawled skills through a multi-stage pipeline into 96,401 skills organised by a 16-class taxonomy and three quality facets (utility, robustness, safety), and pairs them with a fine-tuned retrieval-and-selection stack that matches task-relevant skills. We evaluate end-to-end across three benchmarks (SkillsBench, GDPVal, QwenClawBench), two harnesses, and two open backbones with a frontier robustness check. Integrating SkillCorpus yields consistent gains across all three benchmarks, largest on SkillsBench (+7.5 pp). An operational analysis traces the gains to a coverage boundary and a harness boundary. SkillCorpus is, to our knowledge, the first end-to-end account of when a curated, retrieval-served community corpus improves real agent tasks, and where it does not. The dataset, models, and code will be released upon acceptance.

PACE: Persona Adaptation through Conversational Elicitation in Human-Robot Interaction

Peizhen Li, Longbing Cao, Megani Rajendran, Timothy Liu, Aik Beng Ng, Simon See — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.15579v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Equipping humanoid robots with coherent and adaptable personas is crucial for fostering natural, engaging, and trustworthy human-robot interaction (HRI). However, existing approaches often rely on static, hard-coded identities that lack the flexibility to adapt to individual user contexts. In this paper, we present PACE (Persona Adaptation through Conversational Elicitation), a novel framework for the interactive generation and deployment of structured personas on the Ameca humanoid robot. Our system introduces an Interactive Persona Elicitation Pipeline, enabling the robot to dynamically synthesize a tailored, psychologically grounded identity through user Q&A. This elicitation process feeds into a persona prompt compilation phase, generating a structured persona prompt built upon multi-perspective dimensions. We detail the Embodied System Integration required to translate this structured specification into expressive, multimodal humanoid behaviors. Through a comprehensive empirical HRI evaluation, we assess the impact of dynamically generated personas on user trust, perceived anthropomorphism, persona consistency, personal relevance, and interaction quality compared to a generic baseline. These contributions establish a scalable pathway for deploying personalized, interactive, and reliable identities in embodied humanoid assistants. Video demo is available at: https://lipzh5.github.io/PACE/

Frontier AI performance across the business disciplines: a case-grounded benchmark of knowledge work and analytical reasoning

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.16057v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are improving rapidly as reflected in benchmark scores, yet these AI benchmarks largely test capabilities such as factual recall, narrow question answering, mathematical problem-solving, and coding and agentic tool-use. What remains poorly measured is AI progress on the analytical knowledge work white-collar professionals perform daily, including synthesizing complex information, exercising judgment under uncertainty and incomplete information, applying strategic and adversarial thinking in multi-stakeholder settings, weighing trade-offs, and producing defensible, structured analyses. This gap is even more pronounced for subjective components of such work, where success can be challenging to define. The "case method" form of education practiced by top business schools provides a natural foundation for addressing this measurement gap, and we construct BusinessCaseBench, a benchmark spanning hundreds of questions drawn from business cases across eighteen disciplines, each paired with a grading rubric derived from the expert-written instructor case solution. On BusinessCaseBench, frontier AI models already score highly against instructor rubrics, and capability within one model family improves substantially over two years. These results provide strong evidence that AI performance on this class of work is already high and rapidly improving, with implications for business schools, where case pedagogy trains undergraduates and MBAs in this kind of analytical reasoning, and for entry-level professional roles, where such skills have historically anchored early-career work.

From Novelty to Normalisation: Tracking Changing Perceptions of AI in Higher Education, 2024-2026

Juliana Gerard, Morgan Macleod, Kelly Norwood, Aisling Reid, Muskaan Singh — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.16223v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The rapid integration of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has reshaped the landscape of higher education. Students have embraced tools such as ChatGPT with striking speed, while teaching staff and institutions have responded with greater caution. Existing research on AI perceptions has mainly been cross-sectional, providing single-point snapshots that view attitudes as stable rather than evolving. This paper presents a longitudinal study of AI perceptions in higher education, tracking undergraduates, doctoral researchers, teaching staff and non-teaching staff at Ulster University across three survey waves between 2024 and 2026 (n=1,665). A quantitative survey design measured familiarity, reported use and perceived risk; results show that students rapidly normalised AI use over the period, moving from tentative experimentation to routine engagement, while staff expressed persistent concerns about academic integrity, assessment design, and critical thinking. Doctoral and non-teaching staff occupied intermediate positions, reflecting both pragmatic adoption and institutional caution. The student-staff gap widened as institutional policy struggled to keep pace with actual practice. By tracking these shifts directly rather than reconstructing them from disconnected studies, the paper moves beyond descriptive accounts of AI attitudes and demonstrates the importance of capturing perceptions in real time. The findings carry significant implications for adaptive institutional policy, AI literacy initiatives, and targeted staff training.

Operator-Aware Mixed-Precision Tolerance Calibration for Tensor Kernels

Dipankar Sarkar — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.16228v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Most tensor-kernel correctness tests go through a fixed-shape all close-style check with hand-picked absolute and relative tolerances. The thresholds are copied across the corpus and rarely revisited. We mine the element-wise error distribution of every test case from accumulated cloud GPU runs across the 26-entry gpuemu corpus and 2 dtypes (8,076 result rows). We then ask one empirical question: what absolute tolerance would the kernel itself, observed under its correct implementation, justify? The answer is much tighter than the current hand-picked atol. The largest tightening is attention_triton fp16 at $2{,}184\times$. Restricted to the seven LLM-style buggy variants for which the corpus ships a paired correct counterpart, calibrated per-(op, dtype) tolerances raise bug-detection recall from 73.2% (1,805 of 2,467) to 82.4% (2,034 of 2,467), an absolute gain of 9.3 percentage points (+229 new detections). The control false-positive count rises from 0 to 20 out of 1,882 correct-control cases (+1.1 percentage points).

OpenMHC: Accelerating the Science of Wearable Foundation Models

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.16235v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mobile and wearable devices offer an unprecedented opportunity for continuous, passive health monitoring and active health coaching. However, the largest wearable datasets are not publicly available for research, and leading wearable foundation models trained on such datasets are rarely open-weight or come with reproducible training code. To accelerate open science in wearable health, we release OpenMyHeartCounts (OpenMHC), the largest and most comprehensive open-access wearable health dataset to date, alongside open-source implementations of recent wearable foundation models. OpenMHC, derived from over a decade of data collected through the My Heart Counts study app, includes >60 million hours of wearable data across 19 sensor channels (e.g., step count, heart rate, sleep, workouts) and up to 169 linked variables, including health, lifestyle, mood, and behavior from 11,894 consenting participants. Furthermore, we introduce a unified, open benchmark that enables standardized comparison of wearable health models across three tracks: health and behavior downstream prediction, multivariate data imputation, and time-series forecasting. We benchmark classical methods alongside recent wearable and multivariate time series foundation models. By open-sourcing data, code, and model weights at this unprecedented scale, we aim to democratize wearable health AI research and enable the community to drive open progress in this domain.

Discovery by Dreaming: Cross-Domain Recombination in Artificial Memory

Oliver Zahn, James Evans, David Eagleman — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.16256v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Dreams splice together people, places, and times that never met. Neuroscience suggests this recombination is not noise, but a function driving insight and creative discovery. This reframes memory consolidation: rather than merely defending against forgetting, its measurable value lies in recombining knowledge across experiences that have not yet co-occurred. We test this directly by isolating the recombinatory-replay mechanism and implementing it in two architecturally unrelated systems: a LoRA fine-tuning pipeline (DREAMS) and a symbolic engine replaying structured knowledge objects (SAPIENCE). Both systems converge on the same finding: cross-domain consolidation creates value, while within-domain rehearsal does not. The symbolic arm surfaces novel cross-domain connections at 85.7%, a +21 percentage point (pp) gain over baseline. The neural arm improves overall by +5.64 pp, but on subtasks explicitly requiring cross-domain transfer (like unseen math reasoning on GSM8K), gains reach +14.5 pp. This effect is a genuine property of the weights--not a prompt artifact--as prepending the same material in-context to a 671B-parameter model actually reverses the gain. We validate this prediction against documented discoveries across 50,000 real papers and state a falsifiable hippocampal-recording prediction to distinguish recombination from rehearsal. Ultimately, this principle is substrate-general, tracking real discovery at scale. Reading the literature teaches a model to recall what it has seen, but producing discovery requires a separate offline phase that recombines knowledge across domains--the computational analog of dreaming. Consolidation is not for remembering, but for discovering.

The JEPA Predictor: A Transferable Operator for Occluded Feature Completion

William Nguyen, Christopher Nguyen — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.16274v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) train a predictor jointly with their encoder, but downstream deployment discards the predictor and reads features from the encoder alone. The predictor is, by construction, a learned operator from visible-context features to features at masked positions, the structure a partial-view classifier needs. We show that this operator is portable across encoder families. We first establish that, at heavy mask, retaining the frozen predictor on a JEPA encoder substantially closes the accuracy gap against the strongest non-JEPA discriminative baselines. We then bolt the frozen predictors of I-JEPA and V-JEPA 2 onto four non-JEPA hosts (CLIP, DINOv3, DINOv2, MAE) through a single linear projection between feature spaces, fit in closed form on 500 ImageNet-1k images. Across both ImageNet-9 and Stanford Dogs and across three mask fractions, the lift over each host's masked-encoder baseline grows monotonically with the mask fraction K in every host-donor pair. CLIP paired with the I-JEPA predictor recovers most of the accuracy that masking removed on ImageNet-9 at heavy occlusion, and lifts fine-grained Stanford Dogs from 15.9% to 52.1% (+36 pp). The mechanism is identifiable: the projection pays a fixed cost on visible patches and the predictor provides a growing benefit on masked patches; the benefit dominates the heavy-occlusion regime. At low K on fine-grained classification the projection cost exceeds the benefit, defining the boundary where the linear bridge breaks down. The frozen JEPA predictor functions as a portable operator for occluded feature completion across encoder families, requiring no retraining of either model while fitting matched linear probes per mask fraction.

Strength-Parity Ensembling with Parameter-Isolated Experts for Multi-Task Affect Recognition

Tung Hung Bui, Hong Hai Nguyen, Van Thong Huynh — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.16290v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Leading entries on the multi-task track of the 11th ABAW challenge rely on heavy ensembling, yet which member is worth adding to an already strong ensemble is rarely made explicit. We study this question for joint valence-arousal estimation, 8-way expression recognition, and 12-way action-unit detection from a single unconstrained face, under partial, long-tailed labels and a rule that forbids pretraining on Aff-Wild2. Building on a shared affect-latent that marginalizes the missing labels across two affect-supervised backbones, we propose a strength-parity rule: an added member lowers the ensemble error only when it is both decorrelated from the current members and a near-peer of them in individual accuracy. The rule exposes a concrete obstacle, as on a single backbone re-seeding and even distinct fine-tuning curricula re-converge to a prediction correlation of 0.98 and add no diversity. Parameter-isolation removes it: confining each adaptation to a disjoint low-rank subspace of a shared backbone yields experts that stay decorrelated at 0.91 while remaining near-peers, the strongest of them an AffectNet-adapted expert. The resulting system raises the overall validation score to 1.6949, against the organizers ConvNeXt-with-MixAugment baseline of 0.45; with per-AU calibration and by pooling the shared-latent heads valence-arousal byproduct as a further near-peer, the strongest configuration reaches 1.7259. Source code are available at https://github.com/cprl-team/MTL-ABAW-11th.

It Depends on the Dataset: When a Brain-Encoding Model's Predicted Responses Beat Their Visual Backbone for Video Memorability

Carson Rodrigues — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.16292v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Brain-encoding foundation models predict fMRI responses to video, audio, and text well enough to win the Algonauts 2025 challenge. We ask whether their predicted responses, obtained with no scanner, are a useful feature lens for a downstream human-behavior task: forecasting the memorability of short videos. We project each clip into TRIBE v2's predicted cortical space and forecast short-term memorability with ridge regression, against a matched control: the model's own V-JEPA2 visual backbone taken before the brain projection. The answer is dataset-dependent, and cleanly so. Within Memento10k the backbone wins (Spearman 0.594 vs 0.544 for the brain projection); within VideoMem the brain projection wins (0.415 vs 0.368, delta +0.047, 95% CI [+0.009, +0.088]). Both within-dataset gaps have bootstrap intervals excluding zero, in opposite directions. Cross-dataset transfer inherits the split: trained on Memento10k and tested on VideoMem the brain projection beats the backbone (+0.076), while the reverse loses heavily (-0.311). Each representation transfers best onto the dataset it already fits better. The VideoMem advantage is not a sample-size artifact (it survives matched training size and a PCA-then-ridge pipeline) and not mere compression of the backbone (a compressed or heavily regularized backbone tops out below the brain projection, which also beats a transfer-tuned backbone, +0.053). So predicted-brain features carry a small but real memorability signal the backbone misses on one dataset and not the other: not a domain-general prior, but a dataset-specific representation. A vision-orthogonal component (partial Spearman 0.19, permutation p=2.5e-4) localizes to ventral occipito-temporal cortex. Analysis code is released; the datasets and the predicted-response arrays derived from them are not redistributed, because the VideoMem licence forbids it without prior written approval.

AEVAL: From Anecdotal to Deterministic Testing for Agentic Skill Workflows

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.16345v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modern agentic systems increasingly rely on skills: installable packages of natural language and code that teach an LLM agent to perform a domain task. As skill repositories grow, developers need automated quality signals on every change, yet evaluation today is largely anecdotal: a developer asks an agent to "try the skill," watches a demo, and forms a subjective impression. This yields neither reproducibility across runs nor comparability across versions, and scales poorly to marketplaces where one regression can silently break dozens of downstream workflows. We present AEVAL (Agentic Evaluation), a CI-integrated framework that replaces this practice with a deterministic, reproducible test pipeline for agentic skills. Every skill change triggers a test event: the skill runs against a developer declared evaluation contract inside an automated executor, emitting a structured, evidence grounded quality signal that downstream CI can route on. A key ingredient is a structural separation between executor and grader, preventing a subtle but pervasive failure mode: an agent that silently self-corrects during execution and then grades its own patched outputs as passing. Our contributions are: (i) a deterministic, change-triggered evaluation protocol with per-skill contracts and per-run artifact schemas; (ii) a formalization of self correction bias as a distinct failure mode of naive agentic evaluators; (iii) an executor/grader separation with a first-attempt grading rule and explicit self-correction tracking; and (iv) a tiered, grounded evidence fix suggestion scheme (LV1 causal, LV2 quality) posted as inline merge-request comments. Validated on real skills in a production agentic stack across multiple agent SDKs, AEVAL converts spurious 100% pass rates into reproducible first-attempt fail signals with an auditable record of every executor fix.

To Police or to Guide: How Higher Education Computer Science Instructors Design and Implement Generative AI Policies

Xingjian Gu, Wells Lucas Santo, James M. Zumel Dumlao, Barbara Ericson — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.16475v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While generative AI tools are directly changing how undergraduate computer science is learned and taught, they are also reshaping the relationships between instructors and students. In contrast to existing tool-oriented research on how instructors view and adopt AI, this study investigates how instructors think about their roles and responsibilities to students through their course AI policies. Based on 13 semi-structured interviews with CS instructors in the US, we found that while instructors recognize that AI tools could harm student learning, AI policies primarily seek to AI-proof assessments without directly addressing student learning. Although policies such as switching to paper exams can preserve assessment integrity in the short term, instructors report extra burden of policing student AI use behaviors and worsening relationships with students. Based on the experiences of several interviewees, we make recommendations on AI policies that are more learning-oriented and could guide students toward healthier AI usage instead.

CNS-Edit++: Category-Agnostic 3D Editing with Coupled Neural Shape Representation

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.16577v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper presents a latent-space 3D shape editing framework built upon a coupled neural shape (CNS) representation and a neural feature volume optimization. This work extends CNS-Edit, built on Coupled Neural Shape optimization, to CNS-Edit++, by generalizing the category-specific coupled representation to category-agnostic 3D shape editing with foundation models. The Coupled Neural Shape (CNS) representation couples a global latent code that captures high-level shape semantics with a 3D neural feature volume that provides spatial context for local shape manipulation. Then we formulate a coupled neural shape optimization procedure that co-optimizes these two components subject to a given editing operation. Our framework can be instantiated on both the category-specific 3D inversion model and category-agnostic 3D foundation models. We provide various shape editing operators, including copy, resize, delete, mix, point-wise drag, and region-wise drag, each of which is formulated as an objective to guide the CNS optimization. To preserve regions outside the editing area, we further introduce two complementary region-wise control mechanisms, i.e., KV-cache replacement and latent feature regularization. Extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluations across different 3D generative models demonstrate the strong capabilities of our approach over state-of-the-art solutions.

PAVXploreRL: Physical-Action-Visual World Model Reinforcement Learning with Action Exploration

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.16602v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Action-conditioned world models are a key component of embodied AI, serving as scalable policy evaluators that reduce reliance on expensive real-world rollouts. To accurately capture diverse action-induced dynamics, such models should satisfy three key objectives-Physical Plausibility (P), Action Adherence (A), and Visual Fidelity (V), collectively referred to as PAV-while remaining robust to both in-distribution (ID) expert demonstrations and out-of-distribution (OOD) actions. However, existing methods primarily rely on ID action-video pairs and pixel-level reconstruction losses, which do not explicitly optimize PAV objectives and generalize poorly beyond expert data. To address this, we propose PAVXploreRL, a reinforcement learning framework built on a pretrained latent world model that explicitly optimizes PAV objectives through reward-driven training. To improve action generalization, our method jointly leverages ID trajectories and noise-driven OOD action exploration, without paired video supervision. Experiments show that PAVXploreRL consistently outperforms pretrained baselines, achieving a 5.6% average gain across benchmarks and producing higher-quality PAV properties. As a policy evaluator, it also yields more reliable performance estimates and reduces the overestimation bias of prior expert-only world models such as Ctrl-World. Code: https://github.com/Social-AI-Studio/PAVXploreRL

Tractable Query Answering under Epistemic Confidentiality Policies in DL Ontologies (extended version)

Lorenzo Marconi, Daniela Rieti, Riccardo Rosati — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.16715v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study Controlled Query Evaluation (CQE), a declarative approach to confidentiality-preserving data access, in the context of Description Logic (DL) ontologies, and for confidentiality policies expressed through Epistemic Dependencies (EDs). We first address the problem of answering queries (specifically, Boolean unions of conjunctive queries) under known semantics for CQE (GA- and IGA-entailment). Our results show that if the TBox is expressed in $\text{DL-Lite}_{\mathcal{R}}$, CQE is computationally intractable in general. Moreover, in the presence of EDs, the IGA semantics has recently been proven not to satisfy an important confidentiality preservation property known as indistinguishability. With the goal of defining computationally easier and confidentiality-preserving forms of CQE, we introduce a new semantics for CQE, based on the notion of minimal policy violation (MPV). We show that the new semantics provides a sound approximation of the previous ones, while satisfying the indistinguishability property. We also prove that, in the case of $\text{DL-Lite}_{\mathcal{R}}$ ontologies, query entailment under the MPV semantics can be decided in polynomial time in data complexity. Finally, we present a software implementation of our framework that we used to evaluate the feasibility of this new approach using an existing benchmark for OWL 2 QL.

Test-Time Registers as Global Priors for Tokenized Image Generation

Cheng-Yao Hong, Yifan Wang, Yuewei Lin, Chenyu You — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.16824v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Attention-based models often develop attention sinks, where a small number of tokens repeatedly attract attention and accumulate unusually large activations. In vision transformers, these outliers are closely related to registers, which have been diagnostically linked to global, low-frequency image structure. Existing work has largely studied registers through interpretability analyses and linear probes, leaving open whether they can be operationalized as plug-and-play signals for generation without retraining. We revisit this question in tokenized image generation. Using OpenCLIP and DINOv2 on ImageNet, we find that test-time register features exhibit stronger low-frequency concentration than both [CLS] readouts and patch-mean features, and show a consistent (albeit moderate) correlation with pixel-space DCT low-frequency energy. Motivated by these diagnostics, we introduce RegToken, a training-free procedure that converts register structure into a small set of global prior tokens by (i) NFN-based layer localization, (ii) TokenRank-guided subspace extraction, and (iii) a projection-and-conservation update on the register subspace. Inserted into a frozen compact 1D token generation pipeline, RegToken improves ImageNet generation and alignment metrics (e.g., FID-5k 20.5 to 20.1, SigLIP 3.6 to 3.9) without modifying pretrained weights, and accelerates test-time optimization (Steps@$\tau$ 74 to 52). Overall, our results suggest that structures often viewed as attention artifacts can be repurposed as lightweight global priors for tokenized generation.

Real-World Evaluation of an AI Agent Drafting Translational Impact Summaries

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.16989v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Introduction. Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) programs must document their scholars' research impact, but assembling each scholar's record by hand takes staff an estimated 15 hours and does not scale to a full cohort. An artificial intelligence (AI) agent could serve as a tool to gather scholar data across platforms and disciplines. Methods. We built a human-in-the-loop AI agent that assembles a dossier of sourced evidence for each scholar and drafts one-sentence Translational Science Benefits Model (TSBM) impact summaries for staff review. We evaluated it in the impact-reporting workflow of one CTSA hub across 10 career-development (KL2/K12) scholars. Two evaluation staff independently coded all 507 findings as accept, edit, or reject; the primary measure was the unanimous usable rate, defined as the share both accepted or edited. Results. Both reviewers accepted or edited 81.7% of the agent's findings. Reviewers each spent a median of 14 minutes per scholar, replacing an estimated 15 hours of manual assembly. Inter-rater agreement was moderate (Cohen's kappa 0.43 on the usable-versus-reject decision). A profile discovery study found the agent's recall close to human search. The agent's impact evidence spanned all four TSBM domains, and about a third of the reviewed findings fell in non-scholarly categories that routine processes tend to miss. Reviewers rated synthesis accuracy 4.5 and usefulness 4.8 on a 5-point scale. Conclusions. A human-in-the-loop AI agent can serve as the first-pass author of a scholar's impact record, shifting staff from collecting and writing to reviewing, and making cohort-scale impact reporting feasible.

Censorship Resistance and Throughput with Multiple Concurrent Proposers

Aditya Saraf, Ioannis Kaklamanis, Sarisht Wadhwa, Fatima Elsheimy — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.16995v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Censorship resistance is the defining advantage of blockchains over their centralized counterparts. Yet block proposers censor transactions for many reasons, from legal consequences to economic incentives. We study economically-incentivized censorship, modeled by an adversary who bribes proposers to exclude a target transaction, and define the economic censorship resistance (eCR) of a transaction as the adversary's expected cost of successful censorship divided by the user's expected payment for inclusion. Single-proposer systems are structurally weak by this measure: under a first-price auction the adversary need only match the user's bid, and fee burning pushes eCR to a few percent of what the user pays. We therefore turn to multiple concurrent proposers (MCP), where block capacity is divided among $n$ proposers and the block is the union of their sub-blocks. While MCP can substantially increase the cost of censorship by requiring the adversary to bribe many proposers, it also introduces transaction duplication, reducing throughput. The resulting trade-off depends critically on the transaction fee mechanism (TFM), which determines how fees are shared among competing proposers. We create a game theoretic model where validators construct blocks from a shared mempool, subject to an adversary's bribery attempt. We provide an algorithm that solves for the mixed equilibrium of a given mempool, which is characterized by the probability of including each transaction. This algorithm works for a wide class of TFMs, and allows us to calculate the expected throughput and censorship resistance for any bid distribution. We then use simulations to show how the eCR and throughput vary as the number of proposers increases. We compare three TFMs, finding that the duplication-penalizing TFM dominates the others across many settings. We also validate our findings with empirical Ethereum data.

SAVEstate: A Method for Documenting Player Reflection in Digital Games

Nisha Devasia, Michele Newman, Safinah Ali, Julie A. Kientz, Jin Ha Lee — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.17128v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In recent years, interest in eudaimonic player experiences (PX) - concerning reflection, meaning-making, and personal growth - has increased. However, most games user research methods are not well-suited to study eudaimonic PX, as they have been developed to evaluate features of hedonic PX, such as flow, immersion, and playability. To more deeply explore eudaimonic PX, we require methods that can 1) investigate how moment-to-moment PX shapes player reflection and 2) explore how players reengage and reinterpret their experiences longitudinally. In this paper, we present SAVEstate, a method that uses documentation as a means of studying player reflection. SAVEstate consists of two phases: reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action, which allow researchers to probe players' in-situ reflections and how they reengage with their gameplay, respectively. Using SAVEstate, we were able to observe in-situ meaning-making and connect it to post-game reflection-on-action, and view synchronous sensemaking across multiple participants. We also developed an open-source desktop application for researchers to adapt in their own SAVEstate deployments. We discuss implications for how researchers might use SAVEstate to conduct future research in meaningful PX.

Fenced Citation-Context Retrieval for Case Law: Temporal Leakage and Degree Control Across Two Jurisdictions

Yao Liu, Tien-Ping Tan, Zhilan Liu — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.17142v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Prior case retrieval (PCR) aims to identify the precedent cases relevant to the facts of a query case. Incoming citation context, the text with which later cases characterize a case when citing it, is a powerful relevance signal, yet it is typically evaluated without a temporal constraint, so the retriever is credited with citations made after the query. We introduce a zero-training, temporally fenced retriever that augments BM25 with incoming citation context restricted to citations predating the query, together with a temporal-admission decomposition that quantifies the phantom fraction: the share of a citation-context gain attributable to citations not known to predate the query. Experiments span two jurisdictions, U.S. federal (CLERC) and European (ECtHR-PCR) case law. On ECtHR-PCR, without any training, the fenced retriever outperforms a strong degree-controlled baseline across the full recall ladder, and a temporal-admission decomposition attributes 14.9% (validation) of an unfenced citation-context gain over BM25 to citations not known to predate the query. Citation-context retrieval must therefore be temporally fenced and degree-controlled before its reported gains can be interpreted.

Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Energy Management for Hydrogen-Enabled Community Microgrids Under Uncertainty

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.17248v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Hydrogen-enabled community microgrids can improve renewable energy utilization and local resilience, but their operation is complicated by intermittent generation, uncertain residential demand, dynamic electricity prices, and the coupled dynamics of battery and hydrogen storage. This paper develops a proximal policy optimization (PPO)-based energy management system (EMS) for a grid-connected community microgrid integrating photovoltaic and wind generation, battery storage, an electrolyzer, hydrogen storage, a fuel cell, and diesel backup. The EMS is formulated as a Markov decision process with an 11-dimensional state and three continuous control actions for battery, diesel, and hydrogen dispatch; grid exchange is determined from the residual power balance. The framework is evaluated using 8,760 hourly observations for a 1,000-household community in Rockhampton, Australia. Under the normal operating scenario, the learned policy produced a net annual operating revenue of A$195,690.67, a renewable fraction of 91.2%, a carbon intensity of 0.085 kg CO2/kWh under the adopted accounting boundary, and 99.77% load satisfaction. With the hourly grid-outage probability increased from 1% to 5%, the policy retained A$169,892.21 in net operating revenue and supplied 98.79% of demand, supported by a 413% increase in battery discharge and a 429% increase in diesel generation. The results demonstrate the potential of PPO for coordinated battery-hydrogen dispatch while also highlighting sensitivity to renewable-profile variability, training stability, and the choice of evaluation boundary.

Chebyshev Manifold Adaptation

Jiawen Li — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.17377v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The paper presents a new parameter-efficient adaptation method called ChebyMA (Chebyshev Manifold Adaptation). ChebyMA adopts weight matrices through a multi-surface superposition of Chebyshev polynomial bases evaluated on learnable coordinates and combined via trainable coefficient matrices, replacing standard linear projections with highly expressive continuous function approximation. Theoretically, we establish an Approximation Expressivity Theorem, proving from the perspective of function approximation theory that single-manifold ChebyMA guarantees convergence in Frobenius norm error of reconstruction. Besides, drawing on Kolmogorov $n$-width intuition, we demonstrate the expressive advantages of multi-manifold superposition ($S > 1$) in decoupling high-dimensional complex features. Experimental results on Computer Vision CIFAR datasets(CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100)\cite{CIFAR} and Natural Language Processing (AG News, SST-2) datasets demonstrate that ChebyMA consistently achieves a superior parameter-accuracy Pareto front compared to standard full-parameter fine-tuning, LoRA\cite{LoRA}, TLoRA\cite{TLoRA}, and StelLA\cite{StelLA}. ChebyMA significantly outperforms other tested methods in tested datasets, validating its solid theoretical foundation for generality with purely vectorized computations.

Quantifying Diversity of Thought: A Predictive Law of Weighted LLM Ensemble Lift

Junade Ali — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.17384v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper provides an experimentally verified formal law for calculating the uplift that diversity of thought provides in Large Language Model (LLM) ensembles. From first principles, we derive an exact decomposition of LLM ensemble lift into rescue and damage masses, which yields a compact heuristic for calculating uplift. From this we extract the metrics which predict ensemble performance: an accuracy-adjusted correctness correlation, $\phi_{\mathrm{adj}}$, together with the accuracy gap and collective accuracy of the pair. We test the law on 767,520 inferences from ten open-weight models over two graduate-level science benchmarks, together with a novel agentic cybersecurity benchmark in which each model conducts digital-forensics investigations by multi-turn tool use in a network-isolated sandbox (23,520 graded trials including abstentions); all votes are released openly. Calibrated once on SuperGPQA at a 40:60 vote split, the heuristic predicts lift on the calibration set with Spearman's $\rho=0.84$ and, with its coefficients frozen, transfers to two datasets never used in calibration ($\rho=0.51$ on GPQA Diamond and $0.84$ on the forensic tasks), whilst the measured swap mass tracks realised lift with $R^2\ge 0.96$ throughout. Raw $\phi$ has almost no predictive power ($R^2\le 0.09$ throughout); the accuracy-adjusted $\phi_{\mathrm{adj}}$ is markedly superior ($R^2=0.67$ on SuperGPQA), and the heuristic combining these metrics is the most stable pre-pooling predictor across the three datasets.

Decoder-Preserving Sparse Autoencoders: Which Readouts Survive Sparse Compression?

Aniket Deshpande — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.17425v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) compress model activations into sparse codes, but equal reconstruction error and sparsity can preserve different linearly decodable signals. We formalize this ambiguity as a matrix-valued distortion between optimal ridge-prediction operators and train decoder-preserving SAEs by combining this distortion with reconstruction loss. In a rank relaxation, an isotropic task prior saturates per-mode omission costs without changing PCA's ordering, whereas a structured prior can change which modes are retained. A controlled sparse experiment shows that a declared prior protects held-out combinations from its task subspace. On GPT-2 small block 8, DPSAE reduces held-out decoder distortion by 10.6--11.4% across three paired runs while matching reconstruction NMSE. The same checkpoints pass an average natural-text output-KL noninferiority test, but one matched Pythia pair shows no improvement in probes restricted to a few sparse features. These results show that reconstruction quality does not determine which refitted linear readouts survive sparse compression, and that readout preservation is distinct from learning cleaner benchmark concepts or preserving every frozen-model behavior.

Can AI Agents Really Complete RTL-to-GDS? Lessons from Benchmarking Tool-Interactive EDA Workflows

Jinyuan Deng, Zhengrui Chen, Xufeng Wei, Tianyu Xing, Chenyi Wen, Cheng Zhuo — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.17528v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLM-driven agent systems have emerged as a promising paradigm for electronic design automation (EDA), demonstrating strong potential for automating complex design workflows. However, existing evaluations primarily examine individual language models on isolated EDA tasks, providing limited insight into how different agent systems perform across complete EDA flows. In this work, we present FluxBench, a systematic evaluation of AI agents on end-to-end EDA workflows under unified prompts, tool environments, and technology library settings. Our evaluation covers representative scenarios, including RTL generation with open-source toolchains and an RTL-to-GDS flow using closed-source commercial EDA tools for industrial applications. Through these workflows, we assess agents' capabilities in RTL code generation, iterative repair, tool-feedback utilization, logic synthesis, placement and routing (P&R), and Engineering Change Order (ECO) automation. To further characterize the efficiency of agent systems, we introduce Token ROI, a cost-efficiency metric that measures effective improvements in EDA artifacts relative to token usage and runtime cost. Experimental results show that, even when built on the same foundation model, different agent system architectures can exhibit performance gaps of up to 86.27%. Moreover, among systems with comparable task performance, Token ROI can differ by as much as $105.92\times$. In the RTL-to-GDS flow using PicoRV32 as a case study, FluxEDA achieves an end-to-end score of up to 97.94, outperforming Claude Code equipped with domain-specific EDA skills by up to $8.39\times$. These results indicate that domain-specific skills alone are insufficient to improve agent performance in large-scale EDA scenarios. Instead, both agent system design and foundation model capability play critical roles in enabling effective automated EDA workflows.

Retain or Consolidate? Budget-Dependent Operator Selection for Language Agent Memory

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.17545v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Language agents depend on memory across interactions. However, the limited context windows of large language models (LLMs) and their inference costs constrain how much memory can be used at once. Existing systems mainly follow two strategies: memory retention and memory consolidation. Retention keeps raw records and preserves exact details, but relevant evidence may not fit under a tight budget; consolidation compresses and combines records, improving coverage per token but risking the loss of query-critical details. Neither strategy is universally preferable. This raises two central questions: when should consolidation replace retention, and which operator -- Merge, Abstract, or Rewrite -- should be selected? We formalize this decision by decomposing each operator's utility into a coverage effect on evidence omitted by retention and a signed replacement effect on raw evidence that already fits. Their balance explains why the preferred action changes with relative budget pressure. We implement this mechanism with Offline Abstraction-Safety (OAS), a lightweight learner that estimates action utilities from pre-generation features with held-out harm calibration. The public LongMemEval and LoCoMo benchmarks show the same budget-dependent pattern. On LongMemEval, consolidation improves absolute accuracy by up to 48% under tight budgets, whereas retention is preferable under loose budgets; LoCoMo replicates this crossover at a smaller budget, consistent with its shorter evidence. On both datasets, cross-note abstraction and merging generally outperform local rewriting when compression is necessary.

Protecting Floating-Point Computation for DNN Binaries with MBA Obfuscation

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.17603v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) have become a foundational component of modern computing systems with a wide range of applications, such as computer vision, edge intelligence, etc. For the sake of low latency and data privacy, DNN models are increasingly compiled into executables and deployed on local devices. However, that exposes the models to model theft, enabling adversaries to recover proprietary assets via reverse engineering techniques. While code obfuscation naturally emerges for protecting executables from reverse engineering, existing schemes are primarily designed for traditional programs, focusing on complex control flow structures and integer-based operations. They are fundamentally inappropriate for DNN binaries, which exhibit relatively simple code structures and heavily rely on floating-point computation. In this paper, we propose FLOB, an obfuscation framework that protects floating-point computations in DNN binaries using Mixed Boolean-Arithmetic (MBA) transformations. Our approach lifts floating-point values into a higher-precision binary expansion space and performs MBA transformations at the representation level. The computation is carried out entirely in the lifted space, and the final result is then projected back to the target precision, yielding outputs that are semantically equivalent under the original floating-point format, without introducing additional rounding error. The experimental results show that FLOB outperforms the state-of-the-art obfuscation schemes against existing reverse engineering analyzers and deobfuscators, while preserving computational correctness without introducing additional numerical error, allowing flexible trade-off between protection and performance. Specifically, FLOB reduces the operator recovery rate to 4.51% on average, achieving a 32.82 percentage-point reduction compared to existing methods.

PC-Seg: Progressive Cross-View Consistency for 3D OCT Segmentation from Sparse 2D Annotations

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.17718v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Volumetric segmentation of optical coherence tomography (OCT) images is essential for diagnosing ocular diseases but requires labor-intensive voxel-wise annotations. While semi-supervised learning (SSL) can reduce annotation costs, most existing methods process data slice by slice and fail to exploit the inherent 3D spatial context. We propose PC-Seg, a progressive cross-view consistency framework that learns high-accuracy 3D segmentation models from sparse 2D annotations. Unlike conventional multi-view approaches, PC-Seg uses a single 2D model to learn cross-view consistency from standard B-scans and orthogonal slices, thereby generating reliable volumetric pseudo-labels. These pseudo-labels are then distilled into a 3D model, followed by a co-training stage in which the 2D and 3D models mutually refine each other through ensemble pseudo-labeling. Experiments on the MSHC and Duke DME datasets demonstrate that PC-Seg achieves accuracy comparable to fully supervised learning while using labels for only about 0.7% of the training data, outperforming state-of-the-art semi-supervised and retinal layer segmentation methods. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/gsisaoki/pc-seg-official.

SR-Agent: An Experience-Driven Agentic Framework for Post-Ranking Strategy Refinement in E-Commerce Recommendation

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.17719v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: User experience is a first-class objective in industrial e-commerce recommender systems (RS). Post-ranking strategies, which govern diversity, similarity, and exposure over a ranked list, are widely deployed in industrial RS for their simplicity and low serving cost. However, as the online recommendation environment evolves continuously, these statically configured strategies gradually become stale, thereby degrading the user experience. Refining them typically relies on manual inspection, diagnosis, and updates, making it slow, costly, and difficult to scale or reuse. Although recent LLM-based agents (e.g., RecUserSim, SimUSER, and Self-EvolveRec) offer promising directions, none of them close the full loop of automated, self-evolving strategy refinement. To bridge this gap, we introduce SR-Agent, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first agentic framework deployed to refine post-ranking strategies in industrial RS. SR-Agent unifies three components: (i) a UserSim agent that applies inspection skills to surface user-perceived bad cases; (ii) an Analysis agent that consolidates recurring bad cases into structured, reusable diagnoses; and (iii) a constrained Strategy Refinement Harness that maps diagnoses to typed and bounded actions, gated by a four-stage reward pipeline with reversible rollback. Deployed on the Kuaishou e-commerce platform, SR-Agent continuously runs this refinement loop and, in a one-month online A/B test, increases order volume by 0.71%, browsing depth by 0.34%, and clicked-category diversity by 0.48%, while markedly shortening the refinement cycle and lowering operational cost.

Weakly Non-Negative Supermartingales for Omega-Regular Verification

Toru Takisaka, Hongjie Qing, Libo Zhang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.17798v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Martingale-based methods are central to probabilistic program verification, but strong global non-negativity requirements can exclude simple certificates from tractable template classes. Relaxing this requirement enlarges the search space for automated synthesis, but naive relaxations are unsound in the probabilistic setting. We introduce lazy Streett supermartingales and their lexicographic extension, showing that weak non-negativity can nevertheless be used soundly to certify almost-sure satisfaction of $\omega$-regular properties with polynomial templates under a broad class of sampling distributions, including all bounded-support distributions. This extends prior weakly non-negative methods from termination to general $\omega$-regular verification. We further give a compositional account of lexicographic certificates in terms of one-dimensional ones. Experiments on 170 polynomial probabilistic-program benchmarks show increases of 20.0-23.5 percentage points in verification success over the strongly non-negative baseline.

A Hardware-oriented Approach for Efficient Bayesian Inference Computation and Deployment

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.17855v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Bayesian inference provides a principled foundation for reasoning under uncertainty, but its computational cost hinders deployment on resource-constrained edge devices. In this paper, we present a hardware-oriented methodology for accelerating discrete Bayesian inference on commercial off-the-shelf embedded GPUs. We identify that the latency of a broad class of variational message-passing algorithms is dominated by tensor contractions. Our approach restructures the memory layout of these operations using two complementary merging strategies that produce compact, regularly-shaped primitives better suited for efficient GPU execution. We then introduce optional sparse array representations and a tensor-clustering scheme to reduce the memory footprint. We instantiate the methodology and produce optimized variants of three message-passing algorithms for Hidden Markov Models (HMMs), namely variational filtering, variational message passing, and marginal message passing. Furthermore, we complement this with a machine-learning-based autotuner that automatically selects the best-performing algorithmic variant for a given generative model specification. Benchmarked on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin AGX across 770 randomly sampled realistic Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) configurations, our implementations achieve speedups of up to 5x, with typical gains of 2-2.5x, while producing numerically identical outputs to the baseline implementations.

Harness TTS: Towards Context-Aware Expressive Speech Synthesis with Harness Layer

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.17900v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Expressive speech synthesis for voice assistants requires flexible style control that adapts to explicit requests and broader interaction context. We propose Harness TTS, a lightweight control layer that wraps around a TTS engine to externalize and govern its expressive behavior. It reformulates style control as closed-set prompt-tool routing: offline, a compact registry of stylistic prompt tools is constructed with structured metadata; online, an LLM planner selects the appropriate tool based on a priority-aware observation schema, and the TTS executor synthesizes speech using the corresponding prompt audio. We evaluate Harness TTS on both routing and synthesis tasks. In routing, Qwen3-4B achieves Top-1 accuracies of 74.3%, 43.0%, and 64.6% on explicit, implicit, and conflict subsets. For synthesis, experiments on CosyVoice3 and VoxCPM2 show that Harness TTS outperforms instruction-only control, achieving higher instruction-following win rates (margins of 23.1-35.6 points on CosyVoice3 and 13.8-20.0 points on VoxCPM2) and improving UTMOSv2 scores by 0.11-0.38. Moreover, the 4B planner delivers its first tool recommendation in under 50 ms in standard mode, introducing negligible latency for real-time interaction. These results demonstrate that equipping TTS engines with a dedicated Harness layer offers a practical, auditable, and context-aware solution for voice assistant expression control.

Counting Lattice Rectangles in $O(n\log n)$ Operations

Dmitry Babichev, Tatiana Shpakova — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.17961v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Let $F(n)$ be the number of rectangles, not necessarily axis-parallel, whose vertices belong to the $n\times n$ square grid of lattice points. We give an exact algorithm that computes one prescribed value $F(n)$ in $O(n\log n)$ arithmetic operations and $O(n^{3/4})$ arithmetic words of working memory. The algorithm decomposes the count into M\"obius divisor layers, partitions weighted floor-moment queries by a truncated Euclidean coefficient-cone recursion, and reuses uniform marker grids along common coefficient paths. Each marker requires only its uniform cell and constant-size corrections at nearby boundaries, which select an exact precompiled cell operator. All integer operands have $O(\log n)$ bits. An exact 128-bit C++ implementation for the reported input range is compared experimentally with the previous $O(n\log^2 n)$ algorithm.

MoGe-3: Fine-Detail Monocular Geometry Estimation with Self-Guided Sparse Volumetric Refinement

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.17967v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Monocular geometry estimation has recently achieved impressive performance across diverse scenes. However, state-of-the-art models still face notable distortion in local 3D structure, especially in fine details, like thin structures and small objects. We attribute this limitation to an architectural mismatch: most current models decode 3D geometry within a 2D parameterization, where feature interactions are governed by image-plane proximity rather than true 3D spatial relationships. This inadvertently mixes features from geometrically distant surfaces, resulting in over-smoothed geometry particularly around thin or elongated structure. In this paper, we propose MoGe-3, a fine-detail monocular geometry estimation model with Self-Guided Sparse 3D Refinement (SSR) that lifts monocular geometry modeling from 2D image space to 3D space for high-fidelity metric-scale point maps. MoGe-3 lifts the coarse point map from a foundation base model onto a sparse voxel shell and refines it via SSR. The SSR employs sparse convolutions that aggregate features based on 3D spatial locality, avoiding feature mixing across depth discontinuities. Extensive experiments on diverse datasets demonstrate that MoGe-3 significantly outperforms existing approaches in recovering fine detailed 3D geometry across both quantitative metrics and qualitative visualizations. Project page: https://qft-333.github.io/moge3page/

Computing All Lattice-Rectangle Counts by Rational Staircase Sums

Dmitry Babichev, Denis Pinchuk — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.17982v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Let $F(n)$ be the number of rectangles, not necessarily axis-parallel, whose vertices belong to the $n\times n$ square grid of lattice points. We compute the complete table $F(1),\ldots,F(N)$ exactly in $O(M(N)\log N)$ coefficient-ring operations and $O(N\log N)$ ring elements of working memory, where $M(N)$ is a regular bound for multiplying degree-$N$ polynomials. The ring-level statement assumes that $6$ is invertible; over $\mathbb Z$ the only division is instead performed exactly in the elementary boundary term. With quasi-linear polynomial multiplication the arithmetic bound is $O(N\log^2 N)$. The algorithm applies a square-root cover before coefficient extraction and evaluates the resulting rational wedge and triangular sums by a local-denominator divide-and-conquer recursion. Primitive directions are recovered coefficientwise by M\"obius inversion, followed by five prefix sums. A modular number-theoretic-transform (NTT) implementation with certified Chinese-remainder (CRT) recovery is evaluated experimentally against the $O(N^{3/2})$ all-values algorithm.

A Direct Approach to Hermite Interpolation

Simon Bossoney, Marc Troyanov — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.17998v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a family of polynomials satisfying the natural duality relations for Hermite interpolation, analogous to the classical Lagrange interpolation polynomials. They yield an explicit closed formula for the Hermite interpolant with arbitrary multiplicities, without recourse to divided differences, recursive corrections, or auxiliary B\'ezout identities. We also give a detailed account of Hermite's original approach to the problem, based on an integral formula, which he used both to derive the interpolating polynomial and to estimate the interpolation error for holomorphic data.

ExpertPlex: A High-Goodput Disaggregated Serving System for MoE LLMs with Adaptive Persistent Kernels

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18002v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLMs scale Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) parameters for superior intelligence, but massive weights and dynamic computation impede efficient serving. Existing instance-level prefill-decode disaggregation isolates the phases on separate full-model replicas. As MoE weights grow, each instance may span tens to hundreds of GPUs, making resource allocation increasingly coarse. Configured prefill-to-decode ratios thus often mismatch demand, overprovisioning one phase while overloading the other. Prefill-decode colocation avoids this duplication, but existing Green Context solutions partition each GPU by phase and fix phase resources during a kernel. They cannot track resource changes across operations or layerwise variation in routed expert load, causing head-of-line blocking or idle reserved resources. Partitioning every GPU also leaves each phase with fewer local resources, forces wider parallelism and more communication, and lets prefill and decode traffic interfere on the shared network. We present ExpertPlex, which shares massive MoE experts across phases while disaggregating lightweight attention modules. Expert sharing eliminates over 95% of duplicate model weights and multiplexes dynamically sparse computation, while attention disaggregation reduces attention communication cost. ExpertPlex further uses (1) adaptive persistent kernels to schedule dynamic expert computation at tile granularity for efficient, isolated execution; (2) attention-initiated MoE communication to avoid network interference and enable cross-phase communication-computation overlap; and (3) a tile-to-cluster model to optimize these mechanisms for maximum goodput. Experiments serving MiniMax-M2.7 and GLM-5.1-FP8 show that ExpertPlex improves goodput by up to 2.01$\times$ over instance-level prefill-decode disaggregation and 1.66$\times$ over prefill-decode colocation.

Human Grounded Evaluation of Large Language Models for Optical Network Automation

Kiarash Rezaei, Omran Ayoub, Paolo Monti, Carlos Natalino — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18068v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted for network automation, yet their output quality and inference cost can vary substantially across LLM families. We present HuGLEN, a stepwise evaluation pipeline that uses an LLM-as-a-judge together with a small set of expert ratings to enable scalable and reproducible comparison of candidate LLMs, and to rank them using a quality efficiency score (QES). We demonstrate HuGLEN for translating outputs from an explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) model for the optical network quality of transmission (QoT) estimation task into operator-friendly explanations. Our results show that a medium-sized LLM (12B parameters) achieves the highest QES, indicating the best trade-off between explanation quality and efficiency. Overall, HuGLEN reduces the human-labeling burden while supporting consistent model selection for operator-facing automation tasks.

Enhancing Rubric-based RL via Self-Distillation

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18082v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Rubric-based RL has recently shown promise in improving LLMs on open-ended tasks. A widely recognized limitation of rubric-based RL is limited exploration: criteria that no rollout manages to satisfy (Unexplored Criteria, UC) receive no optimization signal. Recent methods address this by incorporating rubric information as external guidance during rollout, yet they introduce a train-inference mismatch: the policy is optimized on rollouts produced under external guidance while this guidance is absent at inference time, causing error accumulation through autoregressive decoding. Moreover, these exploration-focused approaches overlook a fundamentally different failure mode that we term Suppressed Criteria (SC) -- criteria that are satisfied by some rollouts yet whose learning signals are lost during optimization because scalar reward aggregation assigns them non-positive aggregate advantages. Our analysis reveals that SC are remarkably prevalent: over 57% of samples exhibit this failure mode throughout training, with an average of 1.8 SC per sample. To simultaneously address both UC and SC without introducing training-inference mismatch, we propose Criterion-Distilled Policy Optimization (CriPO), which enhances rubric-based RL via on-policy self-distillation. For UC, CriPO constructs a criterion-injection self-teacher and computes a localized forward-KL loss to inject missing behaviors into the policy. For SC, CriPO employs a counterfactual self-teacher to locate criterion-relevant tokens in negative-advantage rollouts and flips their token-level advantages to positive values, preserving useful patterns that would otherwise be suppressed. Experiments on medicine and science benchmarks demonstrate that CriPO consistently outperforms rubric-based RL, achieving stronger final performance with approximately $2\times$ fewer optimization steps.

SuperPass: Fast-Tracking Blocking Threads to Mitigate Priority Inversion on Mobile Devices

Lei Li, Yu Liang, Riwei Pan, Youcheng Sun, Nan Guan, Tei-Wei Kuo, Chun Jason Xue — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18097v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Priority inversion occurs when a high-priority thread is delayed by a lower-priority one. Although well studied in real-time systems, its impact in general-purpose OSes (e.g., Android) remains underexplored. On Android, we find that priority inversions happen frequently and can delay latency-critical threads, degrading user experience. For example, the foreground app's UI thread is frequently blocked by low-priority threads, with blocking durations of up to 210 ms, enough to cause dropped frames. Existing solutions designed for real-time systems fail to eliminate long priority-inversion blockings on latency-critical threads and may introduce high overhead on Android. To solve this problem, we uncover two insights on Android: 1) long blockings are mainly due to the accumulated CPU waiting time of low-priority blocking threads rather than their critical-section latency; and 2) although latency-critical threads can be blocked by many concurrent readers, tracking a limited number of them is sufficient to achieve good responsiveness with low overhead in most cases. Guided by these insights, we propose SuperPass, a lightweight kernel mechanism that mitigates priority inversion by fast-track scheduling of low-priority threads blocking latency-critical threads. It introduces a scheduler fast track that grants immediate CPU access to threads blocking latency-critical threads, and employs a lock-level detector that effectively identifies most such blocking threads. We evaluate SuperPass on a Google Pixel 8 smartphone. Taking UI thread as a case study, SuperPass decreases the 99.9th-percentile blocking duration by 72.0% and blocking count by 47.7% on average compared to the default scheduler, and reduces janky frames by 29.2% with a system-wide CPU overhead of only 0.74%. SuperPass also outperforms existing approaches including priority inheritance, real-time UI promotion, and Proxy Execution.

FinSAgent: Corpus-Aligned Multi-Agent RAG Framework for Evidence-Grounded SEC Filing Question Answering

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18102v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Financial question answering over U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings requires retrieving and synthesizing heterogeneous evidence dispersed across long, standardized, and highly redundant disclosures. Existing retrieval-augmented and multi-agent systems typically derive retrieval queries directly from the user's question and rank candidates by semantic similarity. Together, these choices create prior-corpus misalignment: a mismatch between model priors and the target filings' structure, terminology, and evidence standards. As a result, query generation misses corpus-specific evidence, while semantic reranking favors topically similar but evidentially invalid false-positive chunks. We propose FinSAgent, an evidence-grounded multi-agent framework that reframes SEC filing QA as corpus-aligned retrieval planning and corrects both ends with a single principle: inject corpus-side conditioning wherever model priors would otherwise dominate. FinSAgent combines (1) role-specialized agents anchored to the mandated 10-K item structure, (2) database-aware query decomposition that conditions each agent's sub-queries on a lightweight, summary-level view of the local corpus, and (3) multi-path retrieval with a learned feature-gated reranker that separates evidential validity from semantic similarity. Across five offline financial QA benchmarks, FinSAgent improves retrieval coverage and answer correctness over strong single-agent and multi-agent baselines; in a three-arm randomized online experiment with 1,000 anonymous user ratings, it also receives higher scores than baselines.

Occlusion-Aware Panoptic Segmentation with Joint Position Embedding and Occlusion-Level Attention

Wenbo Wei, Jun Wang, Shan Raza, Abhir Bhalerao — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18112v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Panoptic segmentation in complex scenes remains challenging because of occlusions, yet modern approaches often neglect occlusion modelling. In this paper, we propose Position Embedding Modulation with Occlusion Level Attention (PEMOLA), a novel occlusion-aware module that can be seamlessly integrated into transformer-based panoptic segmentation. To obtain occlusion cues, we train an occlusion classifier on the COCO-OLAC dataset. The classifier derives the occlusion-level attention, which serves as spatial guidance, while the occlusion labels are encoded into a learnable embedding to produce channel-wise weights. Through joint modulation, PEMOLA elegantly introduces the occlusion priors into the position embedding, thereby improving the occlusion modelling. We further annotate the Cityscapes dataset with occlusion levels, termed Cityscapes Occlusion Labels for All Computer Vision Tasks (Cityscapes-OLAC), following the same labelling protocol as COCO-OLAC, to evaluate the cross-dataset generalisation ability of PEMOLA. Extensive experiments on COCO-OLAC and Cityscapes-OLAC demonstrate that PEMOLA consistently improves panoptic segmentation quality while introducing minimal computational overhead. These results highlight the importance of occlusion modelling, where incorporating occlusion-level attention helps deliver robust panoptic segmentation under occlusion. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/wenbo-wei/PEMOLA.

HOMIE: Human-object Centric Video Personalization via Multimodal Intelligent Enhancement

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.18217v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Human-object centric video personalization (HOCVP) is a core task within subject-driven video generation. However, existing methods suffer from two key limitations. First, most approaches focusing on inter-subject personalization still struggle to strike a balance between high subject fidelity and accurate interaction patterns between humans and diverse objects, especially when objects represent abstract concepts such as logos. Second, while intra-subject references (e.g., OCR maps, multi-view inputs) are expected to enhance subject fidelity, most existing works lack mechanisms to understand such latent correspondence. To address both challenges, we propose HOMIE, an HOCVP framework that tackles both inter- and intra-subject input settings in a unified manner. Compared to previous approaches, HOMIE proposes a better MLLM integration strategy to extract knowledge of reference-level relationships without compromising the controllability of text encoders or incurring costly re-alignment. Specifically, we introduce global multimodal guidance within self-attention to better align MLLM-derived semantic features with VAE tokens. Furthermore, we propose modality-reference embedding to differentiate tokens from MLLM features and VAE tokens and associate intra-subject reference image tokens. Extensive experiments validate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across various HOCVP tasks. Project Page: https://yiyangcai.github.io/homie-page.github.io/

When Are Scoring Rules Proper? Bridging Theory and Practice in Survival Model Evaluation

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2212.05260v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Proper scoring rules encourage probabilistic predictions that match the true underlying distribution and are central to model evaluation, with increasing relevance in automated workflows such as AutoML. In survival analysis, however, their behavior under censoring is not fully understood. We study commonly used squared and logarithmic scoring rules for right-censored survival data under independent censoring, introducing a notion of marginal properness based on observable outcomes. Within this framework, we show that the SBS, evaluated at a fixed time point, along with its integrated version (ISBS) and the RCLL are strictly proper when all individuals eventually experience the event, but can become improper under finite follow-up or in the presence of cure fractions. For the SBS, we derive a closed-form expression that reveals the true mechanism: residual mass, corresponding to individuals who remain event-free at study end, systematically biases the score toward underestimating survival, with the effect increasing at later evaluation times and under heavier censoring. Through simulation experiments, we examine how these issues manifest in finite samples and under misspecification. The SBS exhibits pronounced improperness at late evaluation times and poor discrimination between models. The ISBS is more robust due to temporal integration but remains sensitive to tail regularity violations, exhibiting detectable improperness and reduced discriminatory power. The RCLL behaves consistently with strict properness and effectively separates misspecified models. Overall, our results demonstrate how theoretical improperness can translate into misleading model comparisons, underscoring the need for further methodological development in survival model evaluation under censoring and realistic data conditions.

Bulk Service Queueing for Transit Resilience under Short Random Service Suspensions

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2301.00918v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Short service suspensions are common in public transit systems, but their operational impacts remain difficult to quantify. We develop an analytical framework for measuring the resilience of a transit line under short random service suspensions. Vehicle movement is represented by a two state process in which vehicles either travel normally or stop during a suspension, and the induced stochastic headways enter a bulk service queueing model with finite vehicle capacity and passenger carryover. The model yields two classes of resilience indicators. Stability conditions determine whether station queues remain bounded, while closed form expressions characterize the mean and variance of station level queue length and waiting time. We construct an independent renewal approximation for headways whose common marginal distribution is obtained by taking the positive part of a raw headway formed from the incident adjusted scheduled headway and the difference between two independent compound Poisson exponential variables. The renewal approximation preserves the marginal effects of short suspensions while omitting serial dependence and delay propagation across multiple vehicles. Combining the resulting passenger arrival distribution with a Markov representation of passenger loads across stations allows the resilience indicators to be computed sequentially along the route. Numerical experiments show that short suspensions disproportionately affect congested stations and that changes in incident duration and scheduled headway can dominate comparable changes in vehicle capacity. A recursive first in, first out simulation assesses the analytical approximations and clarifies the role of headway variability.

Bayesian inference of composition-dependent phase diagrams

Timofei Miryashkin, Olga Klimanova, Vladimir Ladygin, Alexander Shapeev — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2309.01271v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Phase diagrams serve as a highly informative tool for materials design, encapsulating information about the phases that a material can manifest under specific conditions. In this work, we develop a method in which Bayesian inference is employed to combine thermodynamic data from molecular dynamics (MD), melting point simulations, and phonon calculations, process these data, and yield a temperature-concentration phase diagram. The employed Bayesian framework yields not only the free energies of different phases as functions of temperature and concentration but also the uncertainties of these free energies originating from statistical errors inherent to finite-length MD trajectories. Furthermore, it extrapolates the results of the finite-atom calculations to the infinite-atom limit and facilitates the choice of temperature, chemical potentials, and the number of atoms conducting the next simulation with which will be the most efficient in reducing the uncertainty of the phase diagram. The developed algorithm was successfully tested on two binary systems, Ge-Si and K-Na, in the full range of concentrations and temperatures.

Democratizing Advanced High-Throughput Imaging via Cross-Instrument Deep Learning-Enabled Modality Transfer

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2403.18026v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: High-throughput imaging is often constrained by a trade-off between acquisition speed and image quality. Fast imaging modalities, such as wide-field fluorescence microscopy, enable large-scale data acquisition but suffer from reduced contrast and resolution, whereas high-resolution techniques, like confocal or super-resolution techniques, provide superior image quality at the cost of reduced throughput and increased instrument time. Here, we present a deep learning-based approach for modality transfer across independent microscopes, enabling the transformation of low-quality images acquired on fast systems into high-quality representations comparable to those obtained using advanced imaging platforms. To achieve this, we employed a generative adversarial network (GAN)-based model trained on paired datasets acquired on physically separate wide-field and confocal microscopes, demonstrating that image quality can be reliably transferred between independent instruments. Importantly, this approach enables a workflow in which high-throughput imaging can be performed on fast, accessible microscopy systems while preserving the ability to computationally recover high-quality structural information. High-resolution microscopy can then be reserved for algorithm training and targeted validation, reducing acquisition time and improving overall experimental efficiency. This workflow supports a model in which shared imaging facilities provide access to advanced instrumentation without requiring individual research groups to procure dedicated high-end systems. Together, our results establish deep learning-enabled modality transfer as a practical strategy for bridging independent microscopy systems and supporting scalable, high-content imaging workflows.

Linear convergence of proximal descent schemes on the Wasserstein space

Razvan-Andrei Lascu, Mateusz B. Majka, David \v{S}i\v{s}ka, {\L}ukasz Szpruch — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2411.15067v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate proximal descent methods, inspired by the minimizing movement scheme introduced by Jordan, Kinderlehrer and Otto, for optimizing entropy-regularized functionals on the Wasserstein space. We establish linear convergence under flat convexity assumptions, thereby relaxing the common reliance on geodesic convexity. Our analysis circumvents the need for discrete-time adaptations of the Evolution Variational Inequality (EVI). Instead, we leverage a uniform logarithmic Sobolev inequality (LSI) and the entropy ``sandwich" lemma, extending the analysis from arXiv:2201.10469 and arXiv:2202.01009. The major challenge in the proof via LSI is to show that the relative Fisher information is well-defined at every step of the scheme. Since the relative entropy is not Wasserstein differentiable, we prove that along the scheme the iterates belong to a certain class of Sobolev regularity, and hence the relative entropy has a unique Wasserstein sub-gradient, and that the relative Fisher information is indeed finite.

Generalized Least Squares Kernelized Tensor Factorization

Mengying Lei, Lijun Sun — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2412.07041v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recovering incomplete multidimensional tensor-structured data is a fundamental task in many real-world applications. Smoothness-constrained low-rank tensor factorization effectively captures global and long-range correlations, but often struggles to characterize short-scale, high-frequency, or locally varying structures. We propose GLSKF, a complementary Generalized Least Squares Kernelized Tensor Factorization framework, for multidimensional spatiotemporal data completion. GLSKF additively integrates a covariance-regularized low-rank global component with an explicitly modeled locally correlated residual component under a GLS objective, enabling effective modeling of both global dependencies and localized variations. A covariance norm regularizer encodes spatiotemporal dependencies in both components: structured covariances are imposed on the latent factor columns to enforce smoothness in the global factorization, whereas compactly supported sparse kernels are used to model local correlations in the residual. We develop an alternating least squares algorithm with blockwise linear-system updates that exploit the Kronecker structure of the covariance matrices under missing data and facilitate fast conjugate gradient solves. Additional computational gains are obtained by exploiting the sparsity and Toeplitz structure of the local residual covariance matrices for efficient matrix-vector multiplications. We evaluate GLSKF on four real-world multidimensional data-completion tasks: traffic speed imputation, color image completion, digital video recovery, and MRI data reconstruction. Experimental results demonstrate that GLSKF achieves superior reconstruction performance and favorable scalability across a range of tensor completion tasks, supporting its broad applicability to multidimensional data completion.

Dimension reduction for path signatures

Christian Bayer, Martin Redmann — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2412.14723v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper focuses on the mathematical framework for reducing the complexity of models using path signatures. The structure of these signatures, which can be interpreted as collections of iterated integrals along paths, is discussed and their applications in areas such as stochastic differential equations (SDEs) and financial modeling are pointed out. In particular, exploiting the rough paths view, solutions of SDEs continuously depend on the lift of the driver. Such continuous mappings can be approximated using (truncated) signatures, which are solutions of high-dimensional linear systems. In order to lower the complexity of these models, this paper presents methods for reducing the order of high-dimensional truncated signature models while retaining essential characteristics. The derivation of reduced models and the universal approximation property of (truncated) signatures are treated in detail. Numerical examples, including applications to the (rough) Bergomi model in financial markets, illustrate the proposed reduction techniques and highlight their effectiveness.

A Convergent ADMM Algorithm for Grain Boundary Energy Minimization

Yue Wu, Luchan Zhang, Yang Xiang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2412.17058v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we study a constrained minimization problem that arise from materials science to determine the dislocation (line defect) structure of grain boundaries. The problems aims to minimize the energy of the grain boundary with dislocation structure subject to the constraint of Frank's formula. In this constrained minimization problem, the objective function, i.e., the grain boundary energy, is nonconvex and separable, and the constraints are linear. To solve this constrained minimization problem, we modify the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) with an increasing penalty parameter. We provide a convergence analysis of the modified ADMM in this nonconvex minimization problem, with settings not considered by the existing ADMM convergence studies. Specifically, in the linear constraints, the coefficient matrix of each subvariable block is of full column rank. This property makes each subvariable minimization strongly convex if the penalty parameter is large enough, and contributes to the convergence of ADMM without any convex assumption on the entire objective function. We prove that the limit of the sequence from the modified ADMM is primal feasible and is the stationary point of the augmented Lagrangian function. Furthermore, we obtain sufficient conditions to show that the objective function is quasi-convex and thus it has a unique minimum over the given domain. Numerical examples are presented to validate the convergence of the algorithm, and results of the penalty method, the augmented Lagrangian method, and the modified ADMM are compared.

Ab-initio simulation of excited-state potential energy surfaces with transferable deep quantum Monte Carlo

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2503.19847v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The accurate quantum chemical calculation of excited states is a challenging task, often requiring computationally demanding methods. When entire ground and excited potential energy surfaces (PESs) are desired, for instance to predict the interaction of light excitation and structural changes, one is often forced to use cheaper computational methods at the cost of reduced accuracy. Here we introduce a method for the geometrically transferable optimization of neural network wave functions that leverages weight sharing and dynamical ordering of electronic states. Our method enables the efficient prediction of ground and excited-state PESs and their intersections at the highest accuracy, demonstrating up to two orders of magnitude cost reduction compared to single-point calculations.We validate our approach on four challenging excited-state PESs, namely ethylene, the carbon dimer, the methylenimmonium cation, and a rubredoxin active site model containing 96 electrons, illustrating the potential of transferable deep-learning QMC as a practical framework for studying electronic excitations in molecules.

FE-MCFormer: a novel time-frequency interpretable architecture for machinery fault diagnosis under strong noise environments

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2505.06285v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Interpretable fault diagnosis (FD) plays a critical role in industrial manufacturing, as it improves human-machine understanding and operational efficiency. However, harsh operating environments often introduce strong background interference or noise, which weakens the discriminative capability and interpretability of existing FD methods. To address this issue, this paper proposes FE-MCFormer, a time-frequency fusion framework for robust and time-frequency interpretable fault diagnosis under strong noise conditions. A frequency adaptive learning layer (FALL) is developed to perform learnable spectral reconstruction, which explicitly suppresses noise-dominated frequency responses while preserving fault-sensitive harmonic structures. Furthermore, a multiscale time-frequency fusion (MSTFF) architecture is designed to jointly capture localized impulsive characteristics and structured global spectral interactions. Extensive experiments on a rolling bearing dataset and a real-world centrifugal compressor dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves stable and interpretable diagnostic performance under severe noise environments down to -10 dB SNR. The results indicate that FE-MCFormer provides an effective framework for turbomachinery fault diagnosis in complex noisy environments.

A Geometry-Aware AI Emulator for the Coupled Whole Atmosphere from Earth Surface to the Ionosphere and Thermosphere

Jiahui Hu, Wenjun Dong — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2506.19340v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Whole-atmosphere models such as WACCM-X resolve coupling from the Earth surface to the Mesosphere-Lower-Thermosphere (MLT), and Ionosphere-Thermosphere (IT) systems with expensive computational costs. Here we introduce CAM-NET, a geometry-aware Spherical Fourier Neural Operator (SFNO) surrogate for emulating WACCM-X variability from Earth surface to IT region. CAM-NET is trained on 3-hourly WACCM-X simulations and predicts neutral winds, temperature, pressure-coordinate vertical velocity, electron density, and zonal ion drift. The framework combines a Spherical Fourier Neural Operator (SFNO) backbone with a newly developed lightweight module that extends the frozen atmospheric representation to plasma variables. For the held-out simulation, CAM-NET preserves the dominant IT morphology and remains stable during multi-day autoregressive rollouts. Spherical-harmonic diagnostics show that the model retains low-degree variability while damping high-wavenumber mesospheric structures, especially near 90 km where gravity wave breaks. CAM-NET is intended as a computationally efficient emulator of WACCM-X, rather than an operational forecasting system. These results demonstrate its potential for rapid ensemble experiments, uncertainty quantification, and sensitivity studies of large-scale coupled whole atmospheric variability.

Robust Belief-State Policy Learning for Quantum Network Routing Under Decoherence and Time-Varying Conditions

Amirhossein Taherpour, Abbas Taherpour, Tamer Khattab, Mazen Hasna — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2509.08654v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Quantum network routing requires online decisions under probabilistic entanglement generation, finite quantum memories, decoherence, imperfect operations, and classical feedback, while the controller has incomplete knowledge of the physical state. This paper develops a robust belief-state routing framework based on a quantum partially observable Markov decision process (q-POMDP) and a feasibility-masked graph neural network (GNN). The model uses atomic micro-epochs in which each selected operation completes before the next decision boundary. This enables explicit accounting of memory reservations, pair-instance inventories, purification consumption, swapping outcomes, release decisions, queue service, and completion-time delivery fidelity. The controller maintains a classical belief over hidden physical states, including latent environmental conditions, and uses this belief to evaluate feasible actions and update posterior pair states. To make planning scalable, we introduce feasibility-stratified prototypes, identifier-free signatures, and role-aware action matching, which preserve hard resource constraints while enabling value transfer across structurally similar information states. A cached q-POMDP planner is then fused with a role-aware GNN policy through an adaptive trust rule, with a safe fallback for previously unseen feasibility signatures. We provide theoretical guarantees on feasibility, value approximation, policy performance, robustness, regret, and learning variance. Simulations over finite-memory quantum-network topologies show that the proposed hybrid controller improves high-fidelity goodput, reduces below-threshold deliveries, and maintains lower online decision cost than planner-only control, while outperforming heuristic, purification-aware, and learning-based baselines.

Acoustic Simulation Framework for Multi-channel Replay Speech Detection

Michael Neri, Tuomas Virtanen — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2509.14789v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Replay speech attacks pose a significant threat to voice-controlled systems, especially in smart environments where voice assistants are widely deployed. While multi-channel audio offers spatial cues that can enhance replay detection robustness, existing datasets and methods predominantly rely on single-channel recordings. Moreover, previous studies highlighted that generalization of this attack to new environments is challenging, requiring new methods for generating data encompassing various acoustic conditions. Hence, in this work we introduce an acoustic simulation framework designed to simulate multi-channel replay speech configurations using publicly available resources. Using the framework, we train the state-of-the-art multi-channel replay detector M-ALRAD and evaluate its generalisation on the ReMASC real-recording corpus without any real training data. To improve the exploitation of spatial information, we extend M-ALRAD with inter-channel phase difference features computed for adjacent microphone pairs, augmenting the beamformed representation with directional cues. Synthetic datasets are available at https://github.com/michaelneri/synthetic-ReMASC.

Low-Rank Evolutionary Deep Neural Networks via Adaptive Tangent-Space Reduction

Jiahao Zhang, Shiheng Zhang, Guang Lin — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2509.16395v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evolutionary deep neural networks (EDNNs) solve time-dependent partial differential equations by evolving the neural-network parameters sequentially in time through a local least-squares problem. Their main computational bottleneck is that each time step requires the solution of a dense linear system whose dimension equals the total number of trainable parameters. We propose a low-rank evolutionary deep neural network (LR-EDNN) method that reduces this cost through adaptive tangent-space projection. This construction replaces direct bilinear low-rank factor evolution by a linear reduced problem while preserving the sequential-in-time structure of EDNN. We construct the reduced Jacobian directly through layerwise Jacobian-vector products, without forming the full Jacobian. We further establish a finite-time comparison estimate: the deviation of the LR-EDNN trajectory from full EDNN is bounded by a discrete Gr\"onwall accumulation of the local tangent-space projection defects, with amplification governed by the assumed Lipschitz and directional-coercivity constants. Numerical experiments on a porous-medium equation with drift, one- and two-dimensional Allen-Cahn equations, and two-dimensional viscous Burgers' equations demonstrate that LR-EDNN substantially reduces computational cost while maintaining the accuracy and qualitative fidelity of the full EDNN solver when the rank is chosen adequately.

A Unified Approach to Quantum Key Leasing with a Classical Lessor

Fuyuki Kitagawa, Jiahui Liu, Shota Yamada, Takashi Yamakawa — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2510.08079v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Secure key leasing allows a cryptographic key to be leased as a quantum state in such a way that the key can later be revoked in a verifiable manner. In this work, we propose a modular framework for constructing secure key leasing with a classical-lessor, where the lessor is entirely classical and, in particular, the quantum secret key can be both leased and revoked using only classical communication. Based on this framework, we obtain classical-lessor secure key leasing schemes for public-key encryption (PKE), pseudorandom function (PRF), and digital signature. We adopt the strong security notion known as security against verification key revealing attacks (VRA security) proposed by Kitagawa et al. (Eurocrypt 2025) into the classical-lessor setting, and we prove that all three of our schemes satisfy this notion under the learning with errors assumption. Our PKE scheme improves upon the previous construction by Goyal et al. (Eurocrypt 2025), and our PRF and digital signature schemes are respectively the first PRF and digital signature with classical-lessor secure key leasing property.

A reverse entropy power inequality for i.i.d. log-concave random variables

Zhen Fu, Jiange Li — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2510.09206v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We show that $h_\infty(X+Y)\leq h_\infty(Z+W)$, where $X, Y$ are independent log-concave random variables, and $Z, W$ are exponential random variables having the same respective $\infty$-R\'enyi entropies. Analogs for integer-valued monotone log-concave random variables are also obtained. Our main tools are decreasing rearrangement, majorization, and the change of measure.

On the role of fractional Brownian motion in models of chemotaxis and stochastic gradient ascent

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2511.18745v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Cell migration often exhibits long-range temporal correlations and anomalous diffusion, even in the absence of external guidance cues such as chemical gradients or topographical constraints. This raises a fundamental question: do such correlations enhance a cell's ability to navigate complex environments? In this work, we explore how temporally correlated noise (modeled using fractional Brownian motion) influences chemotactic search dynamics. Through computational experiments, we show that superdiffusive motion, when combined with gradient-driven migration, enables robust exploration of the chemoattractant landscape. Cells reliably reach the global maximum of the concentration field, even in the presence of spatial noise, secondary cues, or irregular signal geometry. We quantify this behavior by analyzing the distribution of first hitting times under varying degrees of temporal correlation. Notably, our results are consistent across diverse conditions, including flat and curved substrates, and scenarios involving both primary and self-generated chemotactic signals. Beyond biological implications, these findings also offer insight into the design of optimization and sampling algorithms that benefit from structured stochasticity.

Tumor-anchored deep feature random forests for out-of-distribution detection in lung cancer segmentation

Aneesh Rangnekar, Harini Veeraraghavan — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2512.08216v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Accurate segmentation of lung tumors from 3D computed tomography (CT) scans is essential for automated treatment planning and response assessment. Despite self-supervised pretraining on numerous datasets, state-of-the-art transformer backbones remain susceptible to out-of-distribution (OOD) inputs, often producing confidently incorrect segmentations with potential for risk in clinical deployment. Hence, we introduce RF-Deep, a lightweight post-hoc random forests-based framework that leverages deep features trained with limited outlier exposure, requiring as few as 40 labeled scans (20 in-distribution and 20 OOD), to improve scan-level OOD detection. RF-Deep repurposes the hierarchical features from the pretrained-then-finetuned segmentation backbones, aggregating features from multiple regions-of-interest anchored to predicted tumor regions to capture OOD likelihood. We evaluated RF-Deep on 2,232 CT volumes spanning near-OOD (pulmonary embolism, COVID-19 negative) and far-OOD (kidney cancer, healthy pancreas) datasets. RF-Deep achieved AUROC >~93 on the challenging near-OOD datasets, where it outperformed the next best method by 4--7 percentage points, and produced near-perfect detection (AUROC >~99) on far-OOD datasets. The approach also showed transferability to two blinded validation datasets under the ensemble configuration (COVID-19 positive and breast cancer; AUROC >~94). RF-Deep maintained consistent performance across backbones of different depths and pretraining strategies, demonstrating applicability of post-hoc detectors as a safety filter for clinical deployment of tumor segmentation pipelines.

A Covariance-Surrogate Framework for Movable-Antenna Enabled Anti-Jamming with Unknown Jammers

Lebin Chen, Ming-Min Zhao, Qingqing Wu, Min-Jian Zhao, Rui Zhang — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2512.20380v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we investigate a movable antenna (MA) enabled anti-jamming optimization problem, where a legitimate uplink system is exposed to multiple jammers with unknown jamming channels. To enhance the anti-jamming capability of the considered system, an MA array is deployed at the receiver, and the antenna positions and the minimum-variance distortionless-response (MVDR) receive beamformer are jointly optimized to maximize the output signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR). The main challenge arises from the fact that the interference covariance matrix is unknown and nonlinearly dependent on the antenna positions. To overcome these issues, we propose a surrogate objective by replacing the unknown covariance with the sample covariance evaluated at the current antenna position anchor. Under a two-timescale framework, the surrogate objective is updated once per block (contains multiple snapshots) at the current anchor position, while the MVDR beamformer is adapted on a per-snapshot basis. We establish a local bound on the discrepancy between the surrogate and the true objective by leveraging matrix concentration inequalities, and further prove that a natural historical-averaging surrogate suffers from a non-vanishing geometric bias. Building on these insights, we develop a low-complexity projected trust-region (TR) surrogate optimization (PTRSO) algorithm that maintains the locality of each iteration via TR constraints and enforces feasibility through projection, which is guaranteed to converge to a stationary point near the anchor. Numerical results verify the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed PTRSO algorithm, which consistently achieves higher output SINR than existing baselines.

Segmented Continuous Optimization

Teymur Aghayev — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2602.20857v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Segmented curve fitting remains an essential approach for the comprehensive analysis of local patterns in non-stationary time-series data. However, traditional regression algorithms primarily focus on linear or polynomial functions, which can be insufficient for analyzing raw signals with oscillatory or transcendental behavior. In this paper, we propose Segmented Continuous Optimization (SCO), a framework that performs piecewise continuous curve fitting on various non-linear models, including trigonometric, polynomial, and exponential. SCO presents a novel signal representation by optimizing a user-defined model in segments with $C^1$ continuity to properly analyze the data's local and global trends. The framework is tested for accuracy and efficiency across all included models. Finally, we provide examples using velocity and EEG datasets to demonstrate the algorithm's practical usage in examining signal patterns, optimized parameters, derivatives, and integrals of the final fit.

BBP transition and the leading eigenvector of the spiked Wigner model with inhomogeneous noise

Leonardo S. Ferreira, Fernando L. Metz — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2604.18523v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The spiked Wigner ensemble is a prototypical model for high-dimensional inference. We study the spectral properties of an inhomogeneous rank-one spiked Wigner model in which the variance of each entry of the noise matrix is itself a random variable. In the high-dimensional limit, we derive exact equations for the spectral edges, the outlier eigenvalue, and the distribution of the components of the outlier eigenvector. These equations determine the BBP transition line that separates the gapped phase, where the signal is detectable, from the gapless phase. In the gapped regime, the distribution of the outlier eigenvector provides a natural estimator of the spike. We solve the equations for a noise matrix whose variances are generated from a truncated power-law distribution. In this case, the BBP transition line is non-monotonic, showing that an inhomogeneous noise can enhance signal detectability.

Theoretical guarantees for stochastic gradient sampling methods via Gaussian convolution inequalities

Daniel Paulin, Peter A. Whalley — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2604.24632v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We derive first-order (in the stepsize) bounds on the bias in Wasserstein distances of the invariant measure of stochastic gradient kinetic Langevin dynamics with minimal assumptions on the stochastic gradient noise. These bounds sharpen existing non-asymptotic guarantees for stochastic-gradient MCMC methods and provide a quantitative resolution of a previously open problem on invariant measure accuracy. The main technical ingredients are new Gaussian convolution inequalities controlling the Wasserstein-$p$ distance between a Gaussian convolved with a mean-zero perturbation and the Gaussian itself. We anticipate that these inequalities will be of independent interest beyond the present application. To complement the theory, we illustrate the benefits of stochastic gradient sampling methods on a one-dimensional model, a Bayesian logistic regression example and a Bayesian random-effect model including comparison with pseudo-marginal MCMC methods.

Simulation of Non-Hermitian Hamiltonians with Bivariate Quantum Signal Processing

Joshua M. Courtney — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2605.12450v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We achieve query-optimal quantum simulations of non-Hermitian Hamiltonians $H_{\mathrm{eff}} = H_R + iH_I$, where $H_R$ is Hermitian and $H_I \succeq 0$, using a bivariate extension of quantum signal processing (QSP) with non-commuting signal operators. The algorithm encodes the interaction-picture Dyson series as a polynomial on the bitorus, implemented through a structured multivariable QSP (M-QSP) circuit. A constant-ratio condition guarantees scalar angle-finding for M-QSP circuits with arbitrary non-commuting signal operators. A degree-preserving sum-of-squares spectral factorization permits scalar complementary polynomials in two variables. Angles are deterministically calculated in a classical precomputation step, running in $\mathcal{O}(d_R \cdot d_I)$ classical operations. Operator norms $\alpha_R\,,\beta_I$ contribute additively with query complexity $\mathcal{O}((\alpha_R + \beta_I)T + \log(1/\varepsilon)/\log\log(1/\varepsilon))$ matching an information-theoretic lower bound in the separate-oracle model, where $H_R$ and $H_I$ are accessed through independent block encodings. The postselection success probability is $e^{-2\beta_I T}\|e^{-iH_{\mathrm{eff}}T}|\psi_0\rangle\|^2\cdot (1 - \mathcal{O}(\varepsilon))$, decomposing into a state-dependent factor $\|e^{-iH_{\mathrm{eff}}T}|\psi_0\rangle\|^2$ from the intrinsic barrier and an $e^{-2\beta_I T}$ overhead from polynomial block-encoding.

Global Automation Atlas

Prashant Garg, Tommaso Crosta, Jasmin Baier — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2605.17086v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Automation can displace or complement labour, but this need not be constant across economies. Existing exposure measures typically assign fixed scores to tasks or occupations and capture cross-country variation through employment structure. Here we show that feasible automation depends jointly on task content and country-level conditions. We use a large language model to classify 18,797 work tasks in 124 economies by exposure, labour margin, technology channel and artificial-intelligence materiality. Construct-matched components of the measure correlate strongly with established exposure indices, observed work-related ChatGPT use, AI preparedness and firm-reported adoption. The exposed share of tasks ranges from 3.3% to 61.6%, rises with income yet remains heterogeneous within income groups. Lower-income economies are more concentrated in rule-based and labour-substituting forms of automation, whereas physical execution, planning and inference channels, together with labour-augmenting uses of artificial intelligence, become more prominent with development. Country conditioning changes occupation exposure rankings, especially in lower-income economies. Combined with employment data, we find that women are disproportionately employed in occupations with substitution-facing exposure. Machine-learning hypothesis generation identifies digital records, capital equipment, local judgement, trust-based markets and data integration as conditions associated with exposure differences.

The Cognitive Kardashev Scale: Quantifying the Material Envelope of Civilisational Computation

Sachin Sharma — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2605.22840v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: How much thinking can a civilisation do? Kardashev ranked civilisations by the energy they command. This paper borrows his ladder and asks how much machine cognition each rung could support. The arithmetic is deliberately simple. A civilisation has some total power. Only a fraction of that can be spared for computing, and each joule spent buys computation at whatever efficiency the hardware of the day has reached. The product of the three sets a ceiling on machine thought. To keep the resulting quantities intelligible, I express them in units of the human brain's own processing rate, as a rough yardstick rather than a claim about minds. Calibrating the ceiling against present-day supercomputers and AI accelerators led me to two conclusions I did not expect at the outset. Even today's energy supply could support far more machine cognition than humanity actually uses, so physical capacity is not what binds. And whether energy or hardware efficiency becomes the constraint over the coming decade turns on engineering choices that have not yet been made. On the question that may matter most, who gets access to the cognition it describes, the scale is silent. That is a matter of political economy, and the calibration is offered as an input to that debate.

SCALMU: Synthetically-trained Coupling of Adaptive Learned Multiplicative Updates for Hyperspectral-Multispectral Fusion

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2605.30973v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: HyperSpectral-MultiSpectral Image (HSI-MSI) fusion aims to recover a high-resolution hyperspectral image from a low-resolution HSI and a high-resolution MSI. Classical methods such as Coupled Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (CNMF) benefit from a strong physical interpretability but suffer from inferior results compared to their deep-learning counterparts. To address this limitation, we propose SCALMU (Synthetically-trained Coupling of Adaptive Learned Multiplicative Updates), a novel blind unrolled neural network architecture that integrates adaptive learnable matrices within the classical framework of CNMF multiplicative updates, improving its results. Due to its architectural proximity with CNMF, the resulting algorithm preserves physical interpretability and nonnegativity constraints. To overcome the scarcity of supervised training data, we generate a synthetic HSI-MSI dataset using the dead leaves model and train SCALMU end-to-end under synthetic supervision. Experiments on several datasets show that SCALMU outperforms state-of-the-art methods and highlights the potential of blind fusion trained with synthetic data. The code is available at https://github.com/xinxinxu99/SCALMU.git

Signed Evidence Flow: Conflict-Aware and Stability-Calibrated Data Analysis

Jeffery Opoku, David Banahene — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.21875v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern data analysis usually gives a prediction without showing whether the evidence behind it is clear, conflicting, or stable. Two cases can have the same fitted confidence even when one has mostly agreeing evidence and the other has strong support and strong opposition. We propose Signed Evidence Flow (SEF), which combines a fitted prediction rule with signed feature attributions to measure support, opposition, conflict, and perturbation stability. We prove that confidence determines conflict exactly when it also determines total evidence mass, derive the remaining conditional variance, and state when conflict can improve loss prediction beyond confidence and other audit variables. We also connect conflict to geometric decision fragility. Across healthcare, Covertype, black-box, finance, and ten external data sets, conflict sometimes separates risk among predictions that already appear confident. Cross-fitted tests show added error-ranking information beyond confidence and attribution entropy on several data sets, including two large finance tasks. The direction is not universal: in some tasks, lowconflict cases are riskier. We therefore introduce ScopeGate, a held-out permutation diagnostic that checks the direction before SEF is used for review triage. SEF is consequently an audit tool rather than a universal risk score: it describes evidence structure, while an independent calibration sample determines whether that structure is useful in the target population.

Suboptimal and Reduced-Order MPC via Timescale Separation

Stefano Di Gregorio, Guido Carnevale, Giuseppe Notarstefano — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2606.24641v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we propose a generalized framework for the design and analysis of suboptimal and reduced-order nonlinear Model Predictive Control (MPC) architectures. The proposed framework manages real-time operation of MPC schemes by (i) computing the control action suboptimally, i.e., by running a generic optimal control algorithm for a finite number of iterations, and (ii) relying on a reduced-order model that neglects part of the plant dynamics (accounting for, e.g., unmodeled dynamics or a low-level compensator). To rigorously handle the interplay between optimization error and model mismatch, we treat the sampling time as a tunable design parameter. We analyze the resulting closed-loop system, comprising the full-order physical plant interconnected with the iterative optimization algorithm (treated as a dynamical system), by leveraging tools from timescale separation. We prove that operating at a sufficiently fast sampling rate ensures that the closed-loop system maintains recursive feasibility and achieves an exponentially stable equilibrium point. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is validated on an underactuated two-link robotic arm through virtual experiments in the high-fidelity MuJoCo physics engine.

Computer vision-based neural networks for radioisotope identification in urban environments

Masen Bachleda, Alea Minar, Ayush Panigrahy, Peter Lalor — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.00270v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Algorithm development for radioisotope identification in mobile urban search scenarios face significant challenges from non-uniform backgrounds, momentary source encounters, and severe class imbalance between rare threat signatures and background measurements. We present a machine learning-based approach to this problem that converts list-mode gamma-ray data into two-dimensional waterfall spectrograms and applies computer vision architectures to the resulting images. Rather than treating waterfalls as conventional images, we employ a representation where consecutive time spectra can form input channels, similar to RGB channels in color images. This representation encodes both spectral and temporal information, enabling neural networks to more effectively learn patterns that distinguish source signatures from background fluctuations. We evaluate three architectures, a multilayer perceptron (MLP), convolutional neural network (CNN), and vision transformer (ViT), on the Radiological Anomaly Detection and Identification (RADAI) benchmark dataset. At a false positive rate of less than one false alarm per hour, our CNN outperforms the previous-best non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) method across all global metrics, achieving true detection, classification, and identification rates of 0.4334, 0.3965, and 0.2950 respectively, compared to 0.4151, 0.3611, and 0.2625 for NMF. At lower false positive rate constraints, the neural network approaches show comparable but ultimately lower performance than NMF, indicating opportunities for further research.

Finding a stationary point of a stochastic convex problem

Felipe Areces, John Duchi, Malo Sommers — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.06883v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We consider the problem of finding stationary points for stochastic convex optimization problems. Rather than surrogates to stationarity, such as a proximity-to-stationarity guarantee or small gradient of the Moreau envelope, we ask for a stronger notion: that the subdifferential of the objective actually contains a small element. This criterion is non-trivial, because subdifferentials of convex functions fail to converge uniformly, even in arbitrarily small neighborhoods of the optimum. Our convergence guarantees rely on dimension theory to decompose the graph of the subdifferential of a convex function, showing how stochastic sampling preserves "pieces" of these graphs, and allowing effective application of proximal-point-like methods.

The Post Correspondence Problem for free groups is undecidable

Andr\'e Carvalho — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.13951v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We prove that the Post Correspondence Problem for finitely generated free groups is undecidable, even when one of the two homomorphisms is injective and has finite-index image. This resolves a longstanding open problem in algorithmic group theory. The proof proceeds through a connection with finite-state transducers. Given a cyclic tag system $\mathcal C$, we effectively construct a finite partial deterministic inverse transducer $\mathcal T_{\mathcal C}$ whose fixed-point set is nontrivial if and only if $\mathcal C$ halts. We then associate to any such transducer two homomorphisms $g,h\colon F_Y\longrightarrow F_A,$ with $h$ injective, such that their equalizer is nontrivial precisely when the transducer has a nontrivial fixed loop. As an immediate consequence, the rank of these equalizers cannot be computed in general, answering a question posed by Stallings in 1984. We further prove that there is no algorithm which decides whether the fixed subgroup of a virtual endomorphism of a finitely generated free group is trivial. Finally, we apply the main result to show that the stabilizer problem is undecidable for free subgroups of $\operatorname{SL}_4(\mathbb Z)$, and that the upper-right-corner problem is undecidable for free subgroups of $\operatorname{SL}_5(\mathbb Z)$, even when the given generators are promised to form a free basis, improving on recent results of Breuillard and Kocharyan.

Circuit complexity lower bounds for quantum spin glasses

Omar Al-Ghattas, David Gamarnik — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.14384v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A central question in quantum information theory is the circuit complexity of states arising from standard many-body models. We study this question for quantum $p$-spin glasses, random Hamiltonians whose interactions act on $p$-tuples of qubits through Pauli strings. Anschuetz, Gamarnik, and Kiani (arXiv:2404.07231) showed that the optimum energy is separated from the best energy achievable by product states. This leaves open whether shallow circuits can close the gap, since even depth-one circuits can generate entanglement. We show that the entanglement needed to close the product-state gap cannot be generated at shallow depth. When the average interaction degree grows with $n$, we prove that, for all sufficiently large fixed $p$, any circuit preparing an $n$-qubit state whose normalized energy is within a fixed positive constant of the optimum must have depth $\Omega_p(\log n)$. In the bounded-average-degree regime, we prove a fixed-depth obstruction: for every fixed $D$, a sufficiently large degree prefactor rules out depth-$D$ preparation of near-ground states. Both results hold uniformly over circuits with an arbitrary number of ancilla qubits. Our results give an obstruction in the spirit of the No Low-Energy Trivial States problem of Freedman and Hastings (arXiv:1301.1363), but for random quantum spin glasses rather than code-based Hamiltonians such as those of Anshu, Breuckmann, and Nirkhe (arXiv:2206.13228), whose ground states admit polynomial-size preparation circuits. This setting opens a probabilistic route to NLTS-like questions: we recast state-preparation lower bounds for random quantum Hamiltonians as uniform control of Gaussian processes indexed by shallow circuits.

What does the model actually see? Evaluation protocols and input availability in data-driven prediction of room acoustic parameters

Ak{\i}n Oktav — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.15243v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Machine-learnt models are increasingly used to predict ISO 3382-1 room acoustic parameters from sparse measurements, with reported coefficients of determination frequently above 0.85. This paper shows that such figures are often determined by the evaluation protocol rather than by the model. Using a multi-condition measurement campaign in a 264-seat conference hall and a 180-seat concert hall, three model families were evaluated under a factorial protocol ablation: validation splits either row-based or grouped by receiver position, and input features either including measured-at-test quantities or restricted to source-receiver geometry and environmental state. Row-based splits with measured-at-test inputs reproduce the high reported accuracies (mean $R^2$ 0.81 for the core parameters); grouping the splits by position and restricting inputs to information available at an unmeasured position reduces these to 0.09-0.57, reordering the apparent difficulty of parameter classes. A hybrid CNN evaluated with the target's own impulse response as input is shown to exploit it as a position fingerprint rather than as transferable acoustic information; training-only signal access yields no gain for any parameter tested, including reverberation time. Under the deployment-consistent protocol, the spread between Random Forest, the hybrid CNN, and inverse-distance weighting is an order of magnitude smaller than the spread between protocols for a fixed model; the learnt models retain a genuine advantage for sound strength and reverberation time, and the high accuracy of the original pipelines re-emerges as condition interpolation at measured positions (band means 0.80-0.88), a distinct and operationally useful task.

QR-SPPS: Quantum-Native Retail Shock Propagation and Policy Stress Simulator

Sumit Tapas Chongder — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.16275v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Classical supply chain risk models treat node failures as statistically independent events, systematically underestimating correlated cascade failures across multi-tier supplier networks. We present QR-SPPS (Quantum-Native Retail Shock Propagation and Policy Stress Simulator), a quantum-native framework for retail supply chain risk analysis implemented on the Qiskit ecosystem using OpenFermion-based Ising Hamiltonian encoding. A 40-node, four-tier supply network is mapped to a 40-qubit Hamiltonian with ZZ coupling terms representing correlated supplier dependencies. A hardware-efficient Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) computes the stress ground state, revealing entangled cascade failures that differ substantially from classical Monte Carlo predictions. We further introduce the application of ADAPT-VQE gradient screening for counterfactual policy evaluation, enabling real-time ranking of six crisis interventions without repeated variational optimization. Finally, Density-of-States Quantum Phase Estimation (DOS-QPE) reconstructs the eigenspectrum through Trotter evolution and estimates Boltzmann-weighted catastrophe probabilities as a function of market-volatility temperature, providing a quantum-native tail-risk metric compatible with Value-at-Risk analysis. The framework demonstrates scalable quantum algorithms for correlated supply chain stress propagation, policy optimization, and systemic risk quantification while highlighting the exponential computational barriers faced by classical simulation at industrial-scale problem sizes.

Lipschitz Continuity in Deep Learning: A Systematic Review of Theoretical Foundations, Estimation Methods, Regularization Approaches, and Certifiable Robustness

R\'ois\'in Luo, James McDermott, Colm O'Riordan — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.16329v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Lipschitz continuity is a fundamental property of neural networks that characterizes their sensitivity to input perturbations. It plays a pivotal role in deep learning, governing \textbf{robustness}, \textbf{generalization} and \textbf{optimization dynamics}. Despite its importance, research on Lipschitz continuity is scattered across various domains, lacking a unified perspective. This paper addresses this gap by providing a systematic review of Lipschitz continuity in deep learning. We explore its \textbf{theoretical foundations}, \textbf{estimation methods}, \textbf{regularization approaches}, and \textbf{certifiable robustness}. By reviewing existing research through the lens of Lipschitz continuity, this survey serves as a comprehensive reference for researchers and practitioners seeking a deeper understanding of Lipschitz continuity and its implications in deep learning.

Batteries and the British Energy System

Waqquas Bukhsh — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.16526v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Batteries are becoming a central part of modern energy systems, especially as electricity, transport and heat are decarbonised. In Great Britain, batteries already play an important role by providing flexibility and acting as a buffer for the system, and their importance will continue to grow as the system moves towards net zero by 2050. This perspective reviews how the role of batteries in Great Britain is evolving, their current value, and the growing contribution of batteries in the transport sector.It argues that the full value of electric vehicle batteries will only be realised through coordinated dispatch and better integration into system operation. Evidence from future scenarios developed by the National Energy System Operator (NESO) shows that while electric vehicles could provide most of the storage capacity, unmanaged charging could create challenges for the system rather than benefits. Unlocking this value will require improvements in market design, optimisation, and control strategies.

A Deep Reinforcement Learning Algorithm for the Vehicle Routing Problem with Stochastic Demands and Outsourcing

Mohsen Dastpak, Fausto Errico, Ola Jabali — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.16875v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce the vehicle routing problem with stochastic demands and outsourcing options (VRP-SDO), in which a logistics service provider partitions customer requests into customers outsourced to a common carrier and customers committed to its fixed fleet. The latter induces a vehicle routing problem with stochastic demands (VRP-SD), solved dynamically. Demands are revealed upon visit; residual demand may be served by other vehicles or after restocking at the depot. Work beyond the regular shift incurs overtime costs, and the unit outsourcing cost decreases with the expected outsourced demand. The objective is to minimize expected travel, overtime, and outsourcing costs. We propose an iterative two-level methodology whose first level partitions customers into committed and outsourced subsets, while the second level estimates the expected VRP-SD routing cost. To avoid solving this problem from scratch at every iteration, we learn an offline routing policy that estimates costs almost instantly for any committed subset. An iterated local search establishes the first-level partitions. We formulate the second level as a Markov decision process and solve it with a deep Q-network whose state is represented by a graph attention network aggregating customer and vehicle information by relevance to the acting vehicle. Trained offline on instances with variable customer cardinality and locations, the policy applies to any daily customer realization; online fine-tuning improves the cost approximation. Experiments show that our policy reduces routing costs by 19.6% relative to a state-of-the-art method and by at least 29.6% over classical heuristics. Our overall algorithm saves 13.7% on average over the version without the attention-based representation and generates high-quality decisions within minutes, whereas benchmarks without an offline-trained estimator require over an hour.

Alignment of a Total Automation Economy

David McAllester — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.17015v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We consider economic theory from the perspective of a total automation economy, one with no human involvement in production either in manufacturing or in management. One can naturally ask whether a total automation economy is fundamentally a centrally planned economy or, alternatively, whether efficiency demands decentralization into local decisions by competing agents -- agentic production. A soviet economist, Leonid Kantorovich, developed linear programming as a method companies or governments can use to optimize production. Ironically, he is also generally credited with showing that the most efficient production is achieved through decentralization -- a free market economy with competing agents. Here we review Kantorovich's dualization in detail. We take the objective of the economy to be maximizing production weighted by (human) market price. A fundamental issue is whether an automated pursuit of this objective might have alignment vulnerabilities as the economy evolves. Another question is whether dualization provides insight into the utility of agentic AI systems (multi-agent AI systems) generally.

Kernel Regression with Tensor Trains and Hadamard Overparameterization

Duc Thien Nguyen, Konstantinos Slavakis, Eleftherios Kofidis, Dimitris Pados — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

arXiv:2607.17390v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Kernel regression with tensor trains and Hadamard overparameterization (KReTTaH) is introduced as a training-data-free, interpretable, and nonparametric framework for multi-way data imputation. The imputation problem is reformulated as regression in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces (RKHS), where the tensor regression coefficients are explicitly constrained to lie on fixed-rank tensor-train (TT) manifolds and structured via Hadamard overparameterization to promote sparsity and high representational efficiency. Rather than relying on costly cross-validation, KReTTaH jointly optimizes the TT coefficient tensors and the kernel covariance matrices within a Riemannian product-manifold framework -- the former on fixed-rank TT manifolds, the latter on the manifold of positive-definite matrices -- thereby enabling automated kernel-hyperparameter selection. Numerical tests on two challenging applications -- imputation of high-dimensional functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data and recovery of missing edge flows in dynamic graphs -- demonstrate that KReTTaH consistently outperforms state-of-the-art tensor-, Bayesian-, and neural-network-based baselines in terms of modeling accuracy.