# Research Papers — 2026-02 · bundle page 91 of 210 > Full-text markdown of papers #4501–4550 of 10493 published in 2026-02, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 10493-paper 2026-02 archive (50 papers per file). Canonical page: https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-02/page/91 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-02/page/90.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-02/page/92.md) ### Mean Flow Policy with Instantaneous Velocity Constraint for One-step Action Generation Authors: Guojian Zhan, Letian Tao, Pengcheng Wang, Yixiao Wang, Yiheng Li, Yuxin Chen, Hongyang Li, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Shengbo Eben Li Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13810v2 Learning expressive and efficient policy functions is a promising direction in reinforcement learning (RL). While flow-based policies have recently proven effective in modeling complex action distributions with a fast deterministic sampling process, they still face a trade-off between expressiveness and computational burden, which is typically controlled by the number of flow steps. In this work, we propose mean velocity policy (MVP), a new generative policy function that models the mean velocity field to achieve the fastest one-step action generation. To ensure its high expressiveness, an instantaneous velocity constraint (IVC) is introduced on the mean velocity field during training. We theoretically prove that this design explicitly serves as a crucial boundary condition, thereby improving learning accuracy and enhancing policy expressiveness. Empirically, our MVP achieves state-of-the-art success rates across several challenging robotic manipulation tasks from Robomimic and OGBench. It also delivers substantial improvements in training and inference speed over existing flow-based policy baselines. --- ### An end-to-end agentic pipeline for smart contract translation and quality evaluation Authors: Abhinav Goel, Chaitya Shah, Agostino Capponi, Alfio Gliozzo Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.AI, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13808v1 We present an end-to-end framework for systematic evaluation of LLM-generated smart contracts from natural-language specifications. The system parses contractual text into structured schemas, generates Solidity code, and performs automated quality assessment through compilation and security checks. Using CrewAI-style agent teams with iterative refinement, the pipeline produces structured artifacts with full provenance metadata. Quality is measured across five dimensions, including functional completeness, variable fidelity, state-machine correctness, business-logic fidelity, and code quality aggregated into composite scores. The framework supports paired evaluation against ground-truth implementations, quantifying alignment and identifying systematic error modes such as logic omissions and state transition inconsistencies. This provides a reproducible benchmark for empirical research on smart contract synthesis quality and supports extensions to formal verification and compliance checking. --- ### AnomaMind: Agentic Time Series Anomaly Detection with Tool-Augmented Reasoning Authors: Xiaoyu Tao, Yuchong Wu, Mingyue Cheng, Ze Guo, Tian Gao Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13807v2 Time series anomaly detection is critical in many real-world applications, where effective solutions must localize anomalous regions and support reliable decision-making under complex settings. However, most existing methods frame anomaly detection as a purely discriminative prediction task with fixed feature representations, rather than an evidence-driven diagnostic process. As a result, they often struggle when anomalies exhibit strong context dependence, diverse patterns, or domain shifts across datasets. To address these challenges, we propose AnomaMind, an agentic time series anomaly detection framework that reformulates anomaly detection as a sequential decision-making process. AnomaMind operates through a coarse-to-fine workflow that first localizes suspicious intervals, then constructs diagnostic evidence through tool interaction, and finally refines anomaly decisions through self-reflection. The workflow is supported by a toolkit box that combines knowledge memory and numerical diagnostics: visual anomaly patterns mined from training data and domain knowledge provide contextual guidance, while statistical, value-based, change-based, and region-level operators provide measurable evidence for verification. AnomaMind further adopts a hybrid inference mechanism in which general-purpose models handle flexible reasoning, tool invocation, and refinement, while a detection-specific policy is optimized with rule-based rewards for parsable outputs, F1-score alignment, and false-positive control. Extensive experiments under both in-domain and cross-domain settings demonstrate that AnomaMind consistently improves anomaly detection performance and enhances generalization across heterogeneous anomaly patterns, validating the effectiveness of tool-augmented reasoning for anomaly detection. The code is available at https://github.com/Xiaoyu-Tao/AnomaMind-TS. --- ### Gaussian Sequences with Multi-Scale Dynamics for 4D Reconstruction from Monocular Casual Videos Authors: Can Li, Jie Gu, Jingmin Chen, Fangzhou Qiu, Lei Sun Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13806v1 Understanding dynamic scenes from casual videos is critical for scalable robot learning, yet four-dimensional (4D) reconstruction under strictly monocular settings remains highly ill-posed. To address this challenge, our key insight is that real-world dynamics exhibits a multi-scale regularity from object to particle level. To this end, we design the multi-scale dynamics mechanism that factorizes complex motion fields. Within this formulation, we propose Gaussian sequences with multi-scale dynamics, a novel representation for dynamic 3D Gaussians derived through compositions of multi-level motion. This layered structure substantially alleviates ambiguity of reconstruction and promotes physically plausible dynamics. We further incorporate multi-modal priors from vision foundation models to establish complementary supervision, constraining the solution space and improving the reconstruction fidelity. Our approach enables accurate and globally consistent 4D reconstruction from monocular casual videos. Experiments of dynamic novel-view synthesis (NVS) on benchmark and real-world manipulation datasets demonstrate considerable improvements over existing methods. --- ### Fast Physics-Driven Untrained Network for Highly Nonlinear Inverse Scattering Problems Authors: Yutong Du, Zicheng Liu, Yi Huang, Bazargul Matkerim, Bo Qi, Yali Zong, Peixian Han Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.LG, physics.comp-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13805v1 Untrained neural networks (UNNs) offer high-fidelity electromagnetic inverse scattering reconstruction but are computationally limited by high-dimensional spatial-domain optimization. We propose a Real-Time Physics-Driven Fourier-Spectral (PDF) solver that achieves sub-second reconstruction through spectral-domain dimensionality reduction. By expanding induced currents using a truncated Fourier basis, the optimization is confined to a compact low-frequency parameter space supported by scattering measurements. The solver integrates a contraction integral equation (CIE) to mitigate high-contrast nonlinearity and a contrast-compensated operator (CCO) to correct spectral-induced attenuation. Furthermore, a bridge-suppressing loss is formulated to enhance boundary sharpness between adjacent scatterers. Numerical and experimental results demonstrate a 100-fold speedup over state-of-the-art UNNs with robust performance under noise and antenna uncertainties, enabling real-time microwave imaging applications. --- ### Attention in Constant Time: Vashista Sparse Attention for Long-Context Decoding with Exponential Guarantees Authors: Vashista Nobaub Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13804v1 Large language models spend most of their inference cost on attention over long contexts, yet empirical behavior suggests that only a small subset of tokens meaningfully contributes to each query. We formalize this phenomenon by modeling attention as a projection onto the convex hull of key vectors and analyzing its entropic (softmax-like) relaxation. Our main theoretical contribution is a face-stability theorem showing that, under a strict complementarity margin (a support gap (Δ) certified by KKT multipliers), entropic attention concentrates on a constant-size active face: the total mass assigned to inactive tokens decays exponentially as (\exp(-Ω(Δ/\varepsilon))), while the error on the active face scales linearly in the temperature/regularization parameter (\varepsilon). This yields a practical criterion for when sparse long-context decoding is safe and provides a principled knob to trade accuracy for compute. Building on these guarantees, we introduce Vashista Sparse Attention, a drop-in mechanism that maintains a small candidate set per query through a paging-style context selection strategy compatible with modern inference stacks. Across long-context evaluations, we observe stable constant-size effective support, strong wall-clock speedups, and minimal quality degradation in the regimes predicted by the support-gap diagnostics. Finally, we discuss deployment implications for privacy-sensitive and air-gapped settings, where interchangeable attention modules enable predictable latency and cost without external retrieval dependencies. --- ### Cast-R1: Learning Tool-Augmented Sequential Decision Policies for Time Series Forecasting Authors: Xiaoyu Tao, Mingyue Cheng, Chuang Jiang, Tian Gao, Huanjian Zhang, Yaguo Liu Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13802v1 Time series forecasting has long been dominated by model-centric approaches that formulate prediction as a single-pass mapping from historical observations to future values. Despite recent progress, such formulations often struggle in complex and evolving settings, largely because most forecasting models lack the ability to autonomously acquire informative evidence, reason about potential future changes, or revise predictions through iterative decision processes. In this work, we propose Cast-R1, a learned time series forecasting framework that reformulates forecasting as a sequential decision-making problem. Cast-R1 introduces a memory-based state management mechanism that maintains decision-relevant information across interaction steps, enabling the accumulation of contextual evidence to support long-horizon reasoning. Building on this formulation, forecasting is carried out through a tool-augmented agentic workflow, in which the agent autonomously interacts with a modular toolkit to extract statistical features, invoke lightweight forecasting models for decision support, perform reasoning-based prediction, and iteratively refine forecasts through self-reflection. To train Cast-R1, we adopt a two-stage learning strategy that combines supervised fine-tuning with multi-turn reinforcement learning, together with a curriculum learning scheme that progressively increases task difficulty to improve policy learning. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world time series datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of Cast-R1. We hope this work provides a practical step towards further exploration of agentic paradigms for time series modeling. Our code is available at https://github.com/Xiaoyu-Tao/Cast-R1-TS. --- ### Joint Orientation and Weight Optimization for Robust Watertight Surface Reconstruction via Dirichlet-Regularized Winding Fields Authors: Jiaze Li, Daisheng Jin, Fei Hou, Junhui Hou, Zheng Liu, Shiqing Xin, Wenping Wang, Ying He Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13801v1 We propose Dirichlet Winding Reconstruction (DiWR), a robust method for reconstructing watertight surfaces from unoriented point clouds with non-uniform sampling, noise, and outliers. Our method uses the generalized winding number (GWN) field as the target implicit representation and jointly optimizes point orientations, per-point area weights, and confidence coefficients in a single pipeline. The optimization minimizes the Dirichlet energy of the induced winding field together with additional GWN-based constraints, allowing DiWR to compensate for non-uniform sampling, reduce the impact of noise, and downweight outliers during reconstruction, with no reliance on separate preprocessing. We evaluate DiWR on point clouds from 3D Gaussian Splatting, a computer-vision pipeline, and corrupted graphics benchmarks. Experiments show that DiWR produces plausible watertight surfaces on these challenging inputs and outperforms both traditional multi-stage pipelines and recent joint orientation-reconstruction methods. --- ### OMGs: A multi-agent system supporting MDT decision-making across the ovarian tumour care continuum Authors: Yangyang Zhang, Zilong Wang, Jianbo Xu, Yongqi Chen, Chu Han, Zhihao Zhang, Shuai Liu, Hui Li, Huiping Zhang, Ziqi Liu, Jiaxin Chen, Jun Zhu et al. Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13793v1 Ovarian tumour management has increasingly relied on multidisciplinary tumour board (MDT) deliberation to address treatment complexity and disease heterogeneity. However, most patients worldwide lack access to timely expert consensus, particularly in resource-constrained centres where MDT resources are scarce or unavailable. Here we present OMGs (Ovarian tumour Multidisciplinary intelligent aGent System), a multi-agent AI framework where domain-specific agents deliberate collaboratively to integrate multidisciplinary evidence and generate MDT-style recommendations with transparent rationales. To systematically evaluate MDT recommendation quality, we developed SPEAR (Safety, Personalization, Evidence, Actionability, Robustness) and validated OMGs across diverse clinical scenarios spanning the care continuum. In multicentre re-evaluation, OMGs achieved performance comparable to expert MDT consensus ($4.45 \pm 0.30$ versus $4.53 \pm 0.23$), with higher Evidence scores (4.57 versus 3.92). In prospective multicentre evaluation (59 patients), OMGs demonstrated high concordance with routine MDT decisions. Critically, in paired human-AI studies, OMGs most substantially enhanced clinicians' recommendations in Evidence and Robustness, the dimensions most compromised when multidisciplinary expertise is unavailable. These findings suggest that multi-agent deliberative systems can achieve performance comparable to expert MDT consensus, with potential to expand access to specialized oncology expertise in resource-limited settings. --- ### StackingNet: Collective Inference Across Independent AI Foundation Models Authors: Siyang Li, Chenhao Liu, Dongrui Wu, Zhigang Zeng, Lieyun Ding Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13792v3 Artificial intelligence built on large foundation models has transformed language understanding, computer vision, and reasoning, yet these systems remain isolated and cannot readily share their capabilities. Coordinating the complementary strengths of independently developed, black-box foundation models is essential for trustworthy intelligent systems, yet no established method exists. Here we show that such coordination can be achieved through a meta-ensemble framework termed StackingNet, which aggregates the output predictions of independent models at inference. StackingNet improves accuracy, reduces individual-model error and group-wise disparities, ranks model reliability, and identifies or prunes models that degrade performance, all without access to internal parameters or training data. Across language comprehension, visual attribute estimation, and academic paper rating, it consistently outperforms individual models and classic ensembles, with gains that persist when the base models are uniformly strong. These gains stem from variance reduction and consensus alignment among independent models rather than from any emergent group cognition, and they widen as the model pool grows more diverse. By turning model diversity from a source of inconsistency into a resource for cooperation, StackingNet offers a practical path toward coordinated artificial intelligence, where progress emerges not only from larger single models but from principled cooperation among many specialized ones. --- ### MechPert: Mechanistic Consensus as an Inductive Bias for Unseen Perturbation Prediction Authors: Marc Boubnovski Martell, Josefa Lia Stoisser, Lawrence Phillips, Aditya Misra, Robert Kitchen, Jesper Ferkinghoff-Borg, Jialin Yu, Philip Torr, Kaspar Märten Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13791v1 Predicting transcriptional responses to unseen genetic perturbations is essential for understanding gene regulation and prioritizing large-scale perturbation experiments. Existing approaches either rely on static, potentially incomplete knowledge graphs, or prompt language models for functionally similar genes, retrieving associations shaped by symmetric co-occurrence in scientific text rather than directed regulatory logic. We introduce MechPert, a lightweight framework that encourages LLM agents to generate directed regulatory hypotheses rather than relying solely on functional similarity. Multiple agents independently propose candidate regulators with associated confidence scores; these are aggregated through a consensus mechanism that filters spurious associations, producing weighted neighborhoods for downstream prediction. We evaluate MechPert on Perturb-seq benchmarks across four human cell lines. For perturbation prediction in low-data regimes ($N=50$ observed perturbations), MechPert improves Pearson correlation by up to 10.5\% over similarity-based baselines. For experimental design, MechPert-selected anchor genes outperform standard network centrality heuristics by up to 46\% in well-characterized cell lines. --- ### How Do Lexical Senses Correspond Between Spoken German and German Sign Language? Authors: Melis Çelikkol, Wei Zhao Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13790v1 Sign language lexicographers construct bilingual dictionaries by establishing word-to-sign mappings, where polysemous and homonymous words corresponding to different signs across contexts are often underrepresented. A usage-based approach examining how word senses map to signs can identify such novel mappings absent from current dictionaries, enriching lexicographic resources. We address this by analyzing German and German Sign Language (Deutsche Gebärdensprache, DGS), manually annotating 1,404 word use-to-sign ID mappings derived from 32 words from the German Word Usage Graph (D-WUG) and 49 signs from the Digital Dictionary of German Sign Language (DW-DGS). We identify three correspondence types: Type 1 (one-to-many), Type 2 (many-to-one), and Type 3 (one-to-one), plus No Match cases. We evaluate computational methods: Exact Match (EM) and Semantic Similarity (SS) using SBERT embeddings. SS substantially outperforms EM overall 88.52% vs. 71.31%), with dramatic gains for Type 1 (+52.1 pp). Our work establishes the first annotated dataset for cross-modal sense correspondence and reveals which correspondence patterns are computationally identifiable. Our code and dataset are made publicly available. --- ### Comparables XAI: Faithful Example-based AI Explanations with Counterfactual Trace Adjustments Authors: Yifan Zhang, Tianle Ren, Fei Wang, Brian Y Lim Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13784v2 Explaining with examples is an intuitive way to justify AI decisions. However, it is challenging to understand how a decision value should change relative to the examples with many features differing by large amounts. We draw from real estate valuation that uses Comparables-examples with known values for comparison. Estimates are made more accurate by hypothetically adjusting the attributes of each Comparable and correspondingly changing the value based on factors. We propose Comparables XAI for relatable example-based explanations of AI with Trace adjustments that trace counterfactual changes from each Comparable to the Subject, one attribute at a time, monotonically along the AI feature space. In modelling and user studies, Trace-adjusted Comparables achieved the highest XAI faithfulness and precision, user accuracy, and narrowest uncertainty bounds compared to linear regression, linearly adjusted Comparables, or unadjusted Comparables. This work contributes a new analytical basis for using example-based explanations to improve user understanding of AI decisions. --- ### Comparables XAI: Faithful Example-based AI Explanations with Counterfactual Trace Adjustments Authors: Yifan Zhang, Tianle Ren, Fei Wang, Brian Y Lim Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13784v1 Explaining with examples is an intuitive way to justify AI decisions. However, it is challenging to understand how a decision value should change relative to the examples with many features differing by large amounts. We draw from real estate valuation that uses Comparables-examples with known values for comparison. Estimates are made more accurate by hypothetically adjusting the attributes of each Comparable and correspondingly changing the value based on factors. We propose Comparables XAI for relatable example-based explanations of AI with Trace adjustments that trace counterfactual changes from each Comparable to the Subject, one attribute at a time, monotonically along the AI feature space. In modelling and user studies, Trace-adjusted Comparables achieved the highest XAI faithfulness and precision, user accuracy, and narrowest uncertainty bounds compared to linear regression, linearly adjusted Comparables, or unadjusted Comparables. This work contributes a new analytical basis for using example-based explanations to improve user understanding of AI decisions. --- ### MEMTS: Internalizing Domain Knowledge via Parameterized Memory for Retrieval-Free Domain Adaptation of Time Series Foundation Models Authors: Xiaoyun Yu, Li fan, Xiangfei Qiu, Nanqing Dong, Yonggui Huang, Honggang Qi, Geguang Pu, Wanli Ouyang, Xi Chen, Jilin Hu Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13783v1 While Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in generalized forecasting, their performance often degrades significantly when deployed in real-world vertical domains characterized by temporal distribution shifts and domain-specific periodic structures. Current solutions are primarily constrained by two paradigms: Domain-Adaptive Pretraining (DAPT), which improves short-term domain fitting but frequently disrupts previously learned global temporal patterns due to catastrophic forgetting; and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which incorporates external knowledge but introduces substantial retrieval overhead. This creates a severe scalability bottleneck that fails to meet the high-efficiency requirements of real-time stream processing. To break this impasse, we propose Memory for Time Series (MEMTS), a lightweight and plug-and-play method for retrieval-free domain adaptation in time series forecasting. The key component of MEMTS is a Knowledge Persistence Module (KPM), which internalizes domain-specific temporal dynamics, such as recurring seasonal patterns and trends into a compact set of learnable latent prototypes. In doing so, it transforms fragmented historical observations into continuous, parameterized knowledge representations. This paradigm shift enables MEMTS to achieve accurate domain adaptation with constant-time inference and near-zero latency, while effectively mitigating catastrophic forgetting of general temporal patterns, all without requiring any architectural modifications to the frozen TSFM backbone. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate the SOTA performance of MEMTS. --- ### Foundation Model-Driven Semantic Change Detection in Remote Sensing Imagery Authors: Hengtong Shen, Li Yan, Hong Xie, Yaxuan Wei, Xinhao Li, Wenfei Shen, Peixian Lv, Fei Tan Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13780v3 Remote sensing (RS) change detection is essential for interpreting surface dynamics. Semantic change detection (SCD) further enables pixel-level understanding of multi-class transitions, yet remains sensitive to pseudo-changes induced by imaging conditions. Recent RS foundation models extract semantically consistent features across temporal and environmental variations, which is critical for mitigating pseudo-changes. However, existing SCD methods are often rigid and backbone-specific, lacking the flexibility to integrate diverse multi-scale features from emerging foundation models. To this end, we introduce a modular Cascaded Gated Decoder (CG-Decoder) that bridges various backbones and SCD tasks, processing multi-scale features in a coarse-to-fine manner while enabling adaptive change extraction. Building upon the RS foundation model PerA, we present PerASCD, a unified SCD framework. We further propose a Soft Semantic Consistency Loss (SSCLoss) to mitigate numerical instability in mixed-precision training. Extensive experiments on SECOND and LandsatSCD show that PerASCD achieves new state-of-the-art Sek scores (26.11% and 65.21%), surpassing the previous best by 0.61% and 4.95%, respectively. It also demonstrates exceptional data efficiency (outperforming the full-data baseline with 50% data), seamless cross-backbone generalization, and enhanced interpretability. Our approach maintains robust semantic consistency under radiometric variations, providing a reliable SCD solution. Code: https://github.com/SathShen/PerASCD.git. --- ### Skeleton2Stage: Reward-Guided Fine-Tuning for Physically Plausible Dance Generation Authors: Jidong Jia, Youjian Zhang, Huan Fu, Dacheng Tao Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13778v1 Despite advances in dance generation, most methods are trained in the skeletal domain and ignore mesh-level physical constraints. As a result, motions that look plausible as joint trajectories often exhibit body self-penetration and Foot-Ground Contact (FGC) anomalies when visualized with a human body mesh, reducing the aesthetic appeal of generated dances and limiting their real-world applications. We address this skeleton-to-mesh gap by deriving physics-based rewards from the body mesh and applying Reinforcement Learning Fine-Tuning (RLFT) to steer the diffusion model toward physically plausible motion synthesis under mesh visualization. Our reward design combines (i) an imitation reward that measures a motion's general plausibility by its imitability in a physical simulator (penalizing penetration and foot skating), and (ii) a Foot-Ground Deviation (FGD) reward with test-time FGD guidance to better capture the dynamic foot-ground interaction in dance. However, we find that the physics-based rewards tend to push the model to generate freezing motions for fewer physical anomalies and better imitability. To mitigate it, we propose an anti-freezing reward to preserve motion dynamics while maintaining physical plausibility. Experiments on multiple dance datasets consistently demonstrate that our method can significantly improve the physical plausibility of generated motions, yielding more realistic and aesthetically pleasing dances. The project page is available at: https://jjd1123.github.io/Skeleton2Stage/ --- ### On Representation Redundancy in Large-Scale Instruction Tuning Data Selection Authors: Youwei Shu, Shaomian Zheng, Dingnan Jin, Wenjie Qu, Ziyao Guo, Qing Cui, Jun Zhou, Jiaheng Zhang Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13773v1 Data quality is a crucial factor in large language models training. While prior work has shown that models trained on smaller, high-quality datasets can outperform those trained on much larger but noisy or low-quality corpora, systematic methods for industrial-scale data selection in instruction tuning remain underexplored. In this work, we study instruction-tuning data selection through the lens of semantic representation similarity and identify a key limitation of state-of-the-art LLM encoders: they produce highly redundant semantic embeddings. To mitigate this redundancy, we propose Compressed Representation Data Selection (CRDS), a novel framework with two variants. CRDS-R applies Rademacher random projection followed by concatenation of transformer hidden-layer representations, while CRDS-W employs whitening-based dimensionality reduction to improve representational quality. Experimental results demonstrate that both variants substantially enhance data quality and consistently outperform state-of-the-art representation-based selection methods. Notably, CRDS-W achieves strong performance using only 3.5% of the data, surpassing the full-data baseline by an average of 0.71% across four datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/tdano1/CRDS. --- ### Offline-Poly: A Polyhedral Framework For Offline 3D Multi-Object Tracking Authors: Xiaoyu Li, Yitao Wu, Xian Wu, Haolin Zhuo, Lijun Zhao, Lining Sun Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13772v1 Offline 3D multi-object tracking (MOT) is a critical component of the 4D auto-labeling (4DAL) process. It enhances pseudo-labels generated by high-performance detectors through the incorporation of temporal context. However, existing offline 3D MOT approaches are direct extensions of online frameworks and fail to fully exploit the advantages of offline setting. Moreover, these methods often depend on fixed upstream and customized architectures, limiting their adaptability. To address these limitations, we propose Offline-Poly, a general offline 3D MOT method based on a tracking-centric design. We introduce a standardized paradigm termed Tracking-by-Tracking (TBT), which operates exclusively on arbitrary off-the-shelf tracking outputs and produces offline-refined tracklets. This formulation decouples offline tracker from specific upstream detectors or trackers. Under the TBT paradigm, Offline-Poly accepts one or multiple coarse tracking results and processes them through a structured pipeline comprising pre-processing, hierarchical matching and fusion, and tracklet refinement. Each module is designed to capitalize on the two fundamental properties of offline tracking: resource unconstrainedness, which permits global optimization beyond real-time limits, and future observability, which enables tracklet reasoning over the full temporal horizon. Offline-Poly first eliminates short-term ghost tracklets and re-identifies fragmented segments using global scene context. It then constructs scene-level similarity to associate tracklets across multiple input sources. Finally, Offline-Poly refines tracklets by jointly leveraging local and global motion patterns. On nuScenes, we achieve SOTA performance with 77.6% AMOTA. On KITTI, it achieves leading results with 83.00% HOTA. Comprehensive experiments further validate the flexibility, generalizability, and modular effectiveness of Offline-Poly. --- ### NeuroMambaLLM: Dynamic Graph Learning of fMRI Functional Connectivity in Autistic Brains Using Mamba and Language Model Reasoning Authors: Yasaman Torabi, Parsa Razmara, Hamed Ajorlou, Bardia Baraeinejad Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: eess.IV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13770v3 Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong semantic reasoning across multimodal domains. However, their integration with graph-based models of brain connectivity remains limited. In addition, most existing fMRI analysis methods rely on static Functional Connectivity (FC) representations, which obscure transient neural dynamics critical for neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism. Recent state-space approaches, including Mamba, model temporal structure efficiently, but are typically used as standalone feature extractors without explicit high-level reasoning. We propose NeuroMambaLLM, an end-to-end framework that integrates dynamic latent graph learning and selective state-space temporal modelling with LLMs. The proposed method learns the functional connectivity dynamically from raw Blood-Oxygen-Level-Dependent (BOLD) time series, replacing fixed correlation graphs with adaptive latent connectivity while suppressing motion-related artifacts and capturing long-range temporal dependencies. The resulting dynamic brain representations are projected into the embedding space of an LLM model, where the base language model remains frozen and lightweight low-rank adaptation (LoRA) modules are trained for parameter-efficient alignment. This design enables the LLM to perform both diagnostic classification and language-based reasoning, allowing it to analyze dynamic fMRI patterns and generate clinically meaningful textual reports. --- ### OR-Agent: Bridging Evolutionary Search and Structured Research for Automated Heuristic Design Authors: Qi Liu, Ruochen Hao, Can Li, Wanjing Ma Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CE, cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13769v4 Automating heuristic design in complex, experiment-driven domains requires more than iterative mutation of solution algorithms. Current LLM-based evolutionary methods often rely on stochastic mutation loops that lack long-term strategic planning and a formal mechanism to learn from historical failures, leading to inefficient exploration and redundant trials. To address this, we present OR-Agent, a multi-agent research framework designed for automated heuristic design in optimization problems with rich experimental environments. OR-Agent organizes heuristic search as tree-based workflow that explicitly models branching hypothesis generation and systematic backtracking. Furthermore, to address the lack of adaptive learning in current agents, we introduce a hierarchical, optimization-inspired reflection system in which short-term reflections act as verbal gradients, long-term reflections as verbal momentum, and memory compression as semantic weight decay - collectively forming a principled mechanism for governing research dynamics. Extensive experiments on classical combinatorial optimization problems (e.g., TSP, CVRP, bin packing) and simulation-based cooperative driving scenarios demonstrate that OR-Agent outperforms strong evolutionary search baselines. All code and experimental data are publicly available at https://github.com/qiliuchn/OR-Agent. --- ### OR-Agent: Bridging Evolutionary Search and Structured Research for Automated Algorithm Discovery Authors: Qi Liu, Ruochen Hao, Can Li, Wanjing Ma Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CE, cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13769v3 Automating heuristic design in complex, experiment-driven domains requires more than iterative mutation of solution algorithms. Current LLM-based evolutionary methods often rely on stochastic mutation loops that lack long-term strategic planning and a formal mechanism to learn from historical failures, leading to inefficient exploration and redundant trials. To address this, we present OR-Agent, a multi-agent research framework designed for automated heuristic design in optimization problems with rich experimental environments. OR-Agent organizes heuristic search as tree-based workflow that explicitly models branching hypothesis generation and systematic backtracking. Furthermore, to address the lack of adaptive learning in current agents, we introduce a hierarchical, optimization-inspired reflection system in which short-term reflections act as verbal gradients, long-term reflections as verbal momentum, and memory compression as semantic weight decay - collectively forming a principled mechanism for governing research dynamics. Extensive experiments on classical combinatorial optimization problems (e.g., TSP, CVRP, bin packing) and simulation-based cooperative driving scenarios demonstrate that OR-Agent outperforms strong evolutionary search baselines. All code and experimental data are publicly available at https://github.com/qiliuchn/OR-Agent. --- ### MOTIF: Learning Action Motifs for Few-shot Cross-Embodiment Transfer Authors: Heng Zhi, Wentao Tan, Lei Zhu, Fengling Li, Jingjing Li, Guoli Yang, Heng Tao Shen Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13764v1 While vision-language-action (VLA) models have advanced generalist robotic learning, cross-embodiment transfer remains challenging due to kinematic heterogeneity and the high cost of collecting sufficient real-world demonstrations to support fine-tuning. Existing cross-embodiment policies typically rely on shared-private architectures, which suffer from limited capacity of private parameters and lack explicit adaptation mechanisms. To address these limitations, we introduce MOTIF for efficient few-shot cross-embodiment transfer that decouples embodiment-agnostic spatiotemporal patterns, termed action motifs, from heterogeneous action data. Specifically, MOTIF first learns unified motifs via vector quantization with progress-aware alignment and embodiment adversarial constraints to ensure temporal and cross-embodiment consistency. We then design a lightweight predictor that predicts these motifs from real-time inputs to guide a flow-matching policy, fusing them with robot-specific states to enable action generation on new embodiments. Evaluations across both simulation and real-world environments validate the superiority of MOTIF, which significantly outperforms strong baselines in few-shot transfer scenarios by 6.5% in simulation and 43.7% in real-world settings. Code is available at https://github.com/buduz/MOTIF. --- ### SAM4Dcap: Training-free Biomechanical Twin System from Monocular Video Authors: Li Wang, HaoYu Wang, Xi Chen, ZeKun Jiang, Kang Li, Jian Li Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13760v1 Quantitative biomechanical analysis is essential for clinical diagnosis and injury prevention but is often restricted to laboratories due to the high cost of optical motion capture systems. While multi-view video approaches have lowered barriers, they remain impractical for home-based scenarios requiring monocular capture. This paper presents SAM4Dcap, an open-source, end-to-end framework for estimating biomechanical metrics from monocular video without additional training. SAM4Dcap integrates the temporally consistent 4D human mesh recovery of SAM-Body4D with the OpenSim biomechanical solver. The pipeline converts reconstructed meshes into trajectory files compatible with diverse musculoskeletal models. We introduce automated prompting strategies and a Linux-native build for processing. Preliminary evaluations on walking and drop-jump tasks indicate that SAM4Dcap has the potential to achieve knee kinematic predictions comparable to multi-view systems, although some discrepancies in hip flexion and residual jitter remain. By bridging advanced computer vision with established biomechanical simulation, SAM4Dcap provides a flexible, accessible foundation for non-laboratory motion analysis. --- ### Discrete Double-Bracket Flows for Isotropic-Noise Invariant Eigendecomposition Authors: ZhiMing Li, JiaHe Feng Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.LG, math.NA, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13759v2 We study eigendecomposition on $SO(n)$ under streaming observations $C_k = C_{\mathrm{sig}} + σ_k^2 I + E_k$, where the isotropic background $σ_k^2 I$ may be time-varying and arbitrarily large. Standard algorithms couple their stability to $\lVert C_k \rVert_2 \approx σ^2$, forcing step sizes, contraction rates, and iteration counts to degrade with the noise floor. We observe that $σ^2 I$ lies in the center of the matrix algebra and therefore *should never enter* the eigenspace dynamics. We construct a discrete double-bracket flow whose skew-symmetric generator $Ω= (A, \operatorname{diag}(A))$ operates in the tangent Lie algebra $\mathfrak{so}(n)$, where scalar multiples of the identity vanish by antisymmetry. The resulting trajectory, Lyapunov function, and maximal stable step size $η_{\max} = 1/L_C$ depend exclusively on the trace-free signal $C_e$ -- achieving pointwise, pathwise $σ^2$-invariance. We establish input-to-state stability with a noise ball governed solely by trace-free perturbations, prove global convergence via strict-saddle geometry and a discrete Łojasiewicz argument, and extend the framework to top-$k$ eigentracking on the Stiefel manifold $\operatorname{St}(k,n)$ at cost $k$ matrix-vector products per step. --- ### OmniScience: A Large-scale Multi-modal Dataset for Scientific Image Understanding Authors: Haoyi Tao, Chaozheng Huang, Nan Wang, Han Lyu, Linfeng Zhang, Guolin Ke, Xi Fang Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13758v1 Multimodal Large Language Models demonstrate strong performance on natural image understanding, yet exhibit limited capability in interpreting scientific images, including but not limited to schematic diagrams, experimental characterizations, and analytical charts. This limitation is particularly pronounced in open-source MLLMs. The gap largely stems from existing datasets with limited domain coverage, coarse structural annotations, and weak semantic grounding. We introduce OmniScience, a large-scale, high-fidelity multi-modal dataset comprising 1.5 million figure-caption-context triplets, spanning more than 10 major scientific disciplines. To obtain image caption data with higher information density and accuracy for multi-modal large-model training, we develop a dynamic model-routing re-captioning pipeline that leverages state-of-the-art multi-modal large language models to generate dense, self-contained descriptions by jointly synthesizing visual features, original figure captions, and corresponding in-text references authored by human scientists. The pipeline is further reinforced with rigorous quality filtering and alignment with human expert judgments, ensuring both factual accuracy and semantic completeness, and boosts the image-text multi-modal similarity score from 0.769 to 0.956. We further propose a caption QA protocol as a proxy task for evaluating visual understanding. Under this setting, Qwen2.5-VL-3B model finetuned on OmniScience show substantial gains over baselines, achieving a gain of 0.378 on MM-MT-Bench and a gain of 0.140 on MMMU. --- ### T2MBench: A Benchmark for Out-of-Distribution Text-to-Motion Generation Authors: Bin Yang, Rong Ou, Weisheng Xu, Jiaqi Xiong, Xintao Li, Taowen Wang, Luyu Zhu, Xu Jiang, Jing Tan, Renjing Xu Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13751v1 Most existing evaluations of text-to-motion generation focus on in-distribution textual inputs and a limited set of evaluation criteria, which restricts their ability to systematically assess model generalization and motion generation capabilities under complex out-of-distribution (OOD) textual conditions. To address this limitation, we propose a benchmark specifically designed for OOD text-to-motion evaluation, which includes a comprehensive analysis of 14 representative baseline models and the two datasets derived from evaluation results. Specifically, we construct an OOD prompt dataset consisting of 1,025 textual descriptions. Based on this prompt dataset, we introduce a unified evaluation framework that integrates LLM-based Evaluation, Multi-factor Motion evaluation, and Fine-grained Accuracy Evaluation. Our experimental results reveal that while different baseline models demonstrate strengths in areas such as text-to-motion semantic alignment, motion generalizability, and physical quality, most models struggle to achieve strong performance with Fine-grained Accuracy Evaluation. These findings highlight the limitations of existing methods in OOD scenarios and offer practical guidance for the design and evaluation of future production-level text-to-motion models. --- ### RMPL: Relation-aware Multi-task Progressive Learning with Stage-wise Training for Multimedia Event Extraction Authors: Yongkang Jin, Jianwen Luo, Jingjing Wang, Jianmin Yao, Yu Hong Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13748v2 Multimedia Event Extraction (MEE) aims to identify events and their arguments from documents that contain both text and images. It requires grounding event semantics across different modalities. Progress in MEE is limited by the lack of annotated training data. M2E2 is the only established benchmark, but it provides annotations only for evaluation. This makes direct supervised training impractical. Existing methods mainly rely on cross-modal alignment or inference-time prompting with Vision--Language Models (VLMs). These approaches do not explicitly learn structured event representations and often produce weak argument grounding in multimodal settings. To address these limitations, we propose RMPL, a Relation-aware Multi-task Progressive Learning framework for MEE under low-resource conditions. RMPL incorporates heterogeneous supervision from unimodal event extraction and multimedia relation extraction with stage-wise training. The model is first trained with a unified schema to learn shared event-centric representations across modalities. It is then fine-tuned for event mention identification and argument role extraction using mixed textual and visual data. Experiments on the M2E2 benchmark with multiple VLMs show consistent improvements across different modality settings. --- ### Data-driven Bi-level Optimization of Thermal Power Systems with embedded Artificial Neural Networks Authors: Talha Ansar, Muhammad Mujtaba Abbas, Ramit Debnath, Vivek Dua, Waqar Muhammad Ashraf Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13746v1 Industrial thermal power systems have coupled performance variables with hierarchical order of importance, making their simultaneous optimization computationally challenging or infeasible. This barrier limits the integrated and computationally scaleable operation optimization of industrial thermal power systems. To address this issue for large-scale engineering systems, we present a fully machine learning-powered bi-level optimization framework for data-driven optimization of industrial thermal power systems. The objective functions of upper and lower levels are approximated by artificial neural network (ANN) models and the lower-level problem is analytically embedded through Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) optimality conditions. The reformulated single level optimization framework integrating ANN models and KKT constraints (ANN-KKT) is validated on benchmark problems and on real-world power generation operation of 660 MW coal power plant and 395 MW gas turbine system. The results reveal a comparable solutions obtained from the proposed ANN-KKT framework to the bi-level solutions of the benchmark problems. Marginal computational time requirement (0.22 to 0.88 s) to compute optimal solutions yields 583 MW (coal) and 402 MW (gas turbine) of power output at optimal turbine heat rate of 7337 kJ/kWh and 7542 kJ/kWh, respectively. In addition, the method expands to delineate a feasible and robust operating envelope that accounts for uncertainty in operating variables while maximizing thermal efficiency in various scenarios. These results demonstrate that ANN-KKT offers a scalable and computationally efficient route for hierarchical, data-driven optimization of industrial thermal power systems, achieving energy-efficient operations of large-scale engineering systems and contributing to industry 5.0. --- ### OneLatent: Single-Token Compression for Visual Latent Reasoning Authors: Bo Lv, Yasheng Sun, Junjie Wang, Haoxiang Shi Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13738v1 Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting improves reasoning but often increases inference cost by one to two orders of magnitude. To address these challenges, we present \textbf{OneLatent}, a framework that compresses intermediate reasoning into a single latent token via supervision from rendered CoT images and DeepSeek-OCR hidden states. By rendering textual steps into images, we obtain a deterministic supervision signal that can be inspected and audited without requiring the model to output verbose textual rationales. Across benchmarks, OneLatent reduces average output length by $11\times$ with only a $2.21\%$ average accuracy drop relative to textual CoT, while improving output token contribution (OTC) by $6.8\times$. On long-chain logical reasoning, OneLatent reaches $99.80\%$ on ProntoQA and $97.80\%$ on ProsQA with one latent token, with compression up to $87.4\times$, supporting compression-constrained generalization. --- ### Generative Latent Representations of 3D Brain MRI for Multi-Task Downstream Analysis in Down Syndrome Authors: Jordi Malé, Juan Fortea, Mateus Rozalem-Aranha, Neus Martínez-Abadías, Xavier Sevillano Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13731v1 Generative models have emerged as powerful tools in medical imaging, enabling tasks such as segmentation, anomaly detection, and high-quality synthetic data generation. These models typically rely on learning meaningful latent representations, which are particularly valuable given the high-dimensional nature of 3D medical images like brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. Despite their potential, latent representations remain underexplored in terms of their structure, information content, and applicability to downstream clinical tasks. Investigating these representations is crucial for advancing the use of generative models in neuroimaging research and clinical decision-making. In this work, we develop multiple variational autoencoders (VAEs) to encode 3D brain MRI scans into compact latent space representations for generative and predictive applications. We systematically evaluate the effectiveness of the learned representations through three key analyses: (i) a quantitative and qualitative assessment of MRI reconstruction quality, (ii) a visualisation of the latent space structure using Principal Component Analysis, and (iii) downstream classification tasks on a proprietary dataset of euploid and Down syndrome individuals brain MRI scans. Our results demonstrate that the VAE successfully captures essential brain features while maintaining high reconstruction fidelity. The latent space exhibits clear clustering patterns, particularly in distinguishing individuals with Down syndrome from euploid controls. --- ### Discrete Gene Crossover Accelerates Solution Discovery in Quality-Diversity Algorithms Authors: Joshua Hutchinson, J. Michael Herrmann, Simón C. Smith Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13730v1 Quality-Diversity (QD) algorithms aim to discover diverse, high-performing solutions across behavioral niches. However, QD search often stagnates as incremental variation operators struggle to propagate building blocks across large populations. Existing mutation operators rely on gradual variation to solutions, limiting their ability to efficiently explore regions of the search space distant from parent solutions or to spread beneficial genetic material through the population. We propose a mutation operator which augments variation-based operators with discrete, gene-level crossover, enabling rapid recombination of elite genetic material. This crossover mechanism mirrors the biological principle of meiosis and facilitates both the direct transfer of genetic material and the exploration of novel genotype configurations beyond the existing elite hypervolume. We evaluate operators on three locomotion environments, demonstrating improvements in QD score, coverage, and max fitness, with particularly strong performance in later stages of optimization once building blocks have been established in the archive. These results show that the addition of a discrete crossover mutation provides a complementary exploration mechanism that sustains quality-diversity growth beyond the performance demonstrated by existing operators. --- ### Explore Intrinsic Geometry for Query-based Tiny and Oriented Object Detector with Momentum-based Bipartite Matching Authors: Junpeng Zhang, Zewei Yang, Jie Feng, Yuhui Zheng, Ronghua Shang, Mengxuan Zhang Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13728v1 Recent query-based detectors have achieved remarkable progress, yet their performance remains constrained when handling objects with arbitrary orientations, especially for tiny objects capturing limited texture information. This limitation primarily stems from the underutilization of intrinsic geometry during pixel-based feature decoding and the occurrence of inter-stage matching inconsistency caused by stage-wise bipartite matching. To tackle these challenges, we present IGOFormer, a novel query-based oriented object detector that explicitly integrates intrinsic geometry into feature decoding and enhances inter-stage matching stability. Specifically, we design an Intrinsic Geometry-aware Decoder, which enhances the object-related features conditioned on an object query by injecting complementary geometric embeddings extrapolated from their correlations to capture the geometric layout of the object, thereby offering a critical geometric insight into its orientation. Meanwhile, a Momentum-based Bipartite Matching scheme is developed to adaptively aggregate historical matching costs by formulating an exponential moving average with query-specific smoothing factors, effectively preventing conflicting supervisory signals arising from inter-stage matching inconsistency. Extensive experiments and ablation studies demonstrate the superiority of our IGOFormer for aerial oriented object detection, achieving an AP$_{50}$ score of 78.00\% on DOTA-V1.0 using Swin-T backbone under the single-scale setting. The code will be made publicly available. --- ### RGA-Net: A Vision Enhancement Framework for Robotic Surgical Systems Using Reciprocal Attention Mechanisms Authors: Quanjun Li, Weixuan Li, Han Xia, Junhua Zhou, Chi-Man Pun, Xuhang Chen Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13726v1 Robotic surgical systems rely heavily on high-quality visual feedback for precise teleoperation; yet, surgical smoke from energy-based devices significantly degrades endoscopic video feeds, compromising the human-robot interface and surgical outcomes. This paper presents RGA-Net (Reciprocal Gating and Attention-fusion Network), a novel deep learning framework specifically designed for smoke removal in robotic surgery workflows. Our approach addresses the unique challenges of surgical smoke-including dense, non-homogeneous distribution and complex light scattering-through a hierarchical encoder-decoder architecture featuring two key innovations: (1) a Dual-Stream Hybrid Attention (DHA) module that combines shifted window attention with frequency-domain processing to capture both local surgical details and global illumination changes, and (2) an Axis-Decomposed Attention (ADA) module that efficiently processes multi-scale features through factorized attention mechanisms. These components are connected via reciprocal cross-gating blocks that enable bidirectional feature modulation between encoder and decoder pathways. Extensive experiments on the DesmokeData and LSD3K surgical datasets demonstrate that RGA-Net achieves superior performance in restoring visual clarity suitable for robotic surgery integration. Our method enhances the surgeon-robot interface by providing consistently clear visualization, laying a technical foundation for alleviating surgeons' cognitive burden, optimizing operation workflows, and reducing iatrogenic injury risks in minimally invasive procedures. These practical benefits could be further validated through future clinical trials involving surgeon usability assessments. The proposed framework represents a significant step toward more reliable and safer robotic surgical systems through computational vision enhancement. --- ### HybridFlow: A 2-NFE Generative Policy for Real-Time Robotic Manipulation Authors: Zhenchen Dong, Fulin Chen, Jinna Fu, Jiaming Wu, Qingran Wu, Shengyuan Yu, Hongyu Yu, Yide Liu Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13718v2 Generative policies for robotic manipulation must balance action accuracy with inference latency. We present HybridFlow, a three-stage policy inference procedure requiring two network function evaluations (2-NFE). A Global Jump uses the MeanFlow average velocity to generate a coarse action trajectory; a parameter-free ReNoise interpolation constructs a state at a nonzero refinement time; and a Local Refine queries the instantaneous-velocity limit of the same network at that time. This construction reuses a unified model without distillation. Our analysis characterizes interval-composition errors and the attenuation of endpoint error under ReNoise interpolation. Controlled RoboMimic ablations support the MeanFlow proposal and intermediate-state construction, achieving 95% average success with reused noise and 95.5% with fresh noise, versus 78% for one-step MeanFlow. Across five real-robot settings with all policies running on the same Jetson AGX Thor, HybridFlow improves normalized task performance over 16-step Diffusion Policy by 13-68 points with approximately eightfold lower action-generation latency. Additional experiments demonstrate its compatibility as an action expert in a vision-language-action framework. Project page: https://hybridflow-anonymous.pages.dev/ --- ### HybridFlow: A Two-Step Generative Policy for Robotic Manipulation Authors: Zhenchen Dong, Jinna Fu, Jiaming Wu, Shengyuan Yu, Fulin Chen, Yide Liu Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13718v1 Limited by inference latency, existing robot manipulation policies lack sufficient real-time interaction capability with the environment. Although faster generation methods such as flow matching are gradually replacing diffusion methods, researchers are pursuing even faster generation suitable for interactive robot control. MeanFlow, as a one-step variant of flow matching, has shown strong potential in image generation, but its precision in action generation does not meet the stringent requirements of robotic manipulation. We therefore propose \textbf{HybridFlow}, a \textbf{3-stage method} with \textbf{2-NFE}: Global Jump in MeanFlow mode, ReNoise for distribution alignment, and Local Refine in ReFlow mode. This method balances inference speed and generation quality by leveraging the rapid advantage of MeanFlow one-step generation while ensuring action precision with minimal generation steps. Through real-world experiments, HybridFlow outperforms the 16-step Diffusion Policy by \textbf{15--25\%} in success rate while reducing inference time from 152ms to 19ms (\textbf{8$\times$ speedup}, \textbf{$\sim$52Hz}); it also achieves 70.0\% success on unseen-color OOD grasping and 66.3\% on deformable object folding. We envision HybridFlow as a practical low-latency method to enhance real-world interaction capabilities of robotic manipulation policies. --- ### On Theoretically-Driven LLM Agents for Multi-Dimensional Discourse Analysis Authors: Maciej Uberna, Michał Wawer, Jarosław A. Chudziak, Marcin Koszowy Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13713v2 Identifying the strategic uses of reformulation in discourse remains a key challenge for computational argumentation. While LLMs can detect surface-level similarity, they often fail to capture the pragmatic functions of rephrasing, such as its role within rhetorical discourse. This paper presents a comparative multi-agent framework designed to quantify the benefits of incorporating explicit theoretical knowledge for this task. We utilise an dataset of annotated political debates to establish a new standard encompassing four distinct rephrase functions: Deintensification, Intensification, Specification, Generalisation, and Other, which covers all remaining types (D-I-S-G-O). We then evaluate two parallel LLM-based agent systems: one enhanced by argumentation theory via Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), and an identical zero-shot baseline. The results reveal a clear performance gap: the RAG-enhanced agents substantially outperform the baseline across the board, with particularly strong advantages in detecting Intensification and Generalisation context, yielding an overall Macro F1-score improvement of nearly 30\%. Our findings provide evidence that theoretical grounding is not only beneficial but essential for advancing beyond mere paraphrase detection towards function-aware analysis of argumentative discourse. This comparative multi-agent architecture represents a step towards scalable, theoretically informed computational tools capable of identifying rhetorical strategies in contemporary discourse. --- ### Fine-tuned Vision Language Model for Localization of Parasitic Eggs in Microscopic Images Authors: Chan Hao Sien, Hezerul Abdul Karim, Nouar AlDahoul Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13712v1 Soil-transmitted helminth (STH) infections continuously affect a large proportion of the global population, particularly in tropical and sub-tropical regions, where access to specialized diagnostic expertise is limited. Although manual microscopic diagnosis of parasitic eggs remains the diagnostic gold standard, the approach can be labour-intensive, time-consuming, and prone to human error. This paper aims to utilize a vision language model (VLM) such as Microsoft Florence that was fine-tuned to localize all parasitic eggs within microscopic images. The preliminary results show that our localization VLM performs comparatively better than the other object detection methods, such as EfficientDet, with an mIOU of 0.94. This finding demonstrates the potential of the proposed VLM to serve as a core component of an automated framework, offering a scalable engineering solution for intelligent parasitological diagnosis. --- ### HBVLA: Pushing 1-Bit Post-Training Quantization for Vision-Language-Action Models Authors: Xin Yan, Zhenglin Wan, Feiyang Ye, Xingrui Yu, Hangyu Du, Yang You, Ivor Tsang Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13710v2 Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable instruction-following embodied control, but their large compute and memory footprints hinder deployment on resource-constrained robots and edge platforms. While reducing weights to 1-bit precision through binarization can greatly improve efficiency, existing methods fail to narrow the distribution gap between binarized and full-precision weights, causing quantization errors to accumulate under long-horizon closed-loop execution and severely degrade actions. To fill this gap, we propose HBVLA, a VLA-tailored binarization framework. First, we use a policy-aware enhanced Hessian to identify weights that are truly critical for action generation. Then, we employ a sparse orthogonal transform for non-salient weights to induce a low-entropy intermediate state. Finally, we quantize both salient and non-salient weights in the Harr domain with group-wise 1-bit quantization. We have evaluated our approach on different VLAs: on LIBERO, quantized OpenVLA-OFT retains 92.2% of full-precision performance; on SimplerEnv, quantized CogAct retains 93.6%, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art binarization methods. We further validate our method on real-world evaluation suite and the results show that HBVLA incurs only marginal success-rate degradation compared to the full-precision model, demonstrating robust deployability under tight hardware constraints. Our work provides a practical foundation for ultra-low-bit quantization of VLAs, enabling more reliable deployment on hardware-limited robotic platforms. --- ### HBVLA: Pushing 1-Bit Post-Training Quantization for Vision-Language-Action Models Authors: Xin Yan, Zhenglin Wan, Feiyang Ye, Xingrui Yu, Hangyu Du, Yang You, Ivor Tsang Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13710v1 Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models enable instruction-following embodied control, but their large compute and memory footprints hinder deployment on resource-constrained robots and edge platforms. While reducing weights to 1-bit precision through binarization can greatly improve efficiency, existing methods fail to narrow the distribution gap between binarized and full-precision weights, causing quantization errors to accumulate under long-horizon closed-loop execution and severely degrade actions. To fill this gap, we propose HBVLA, a VLA-tailored binarization framework. First, we use a policy-aware enhanced Hessian to identify weights that are truly critical for action generation. Then, we employ a sparse orthogonal transform for non-salient weights to induce a low-entropy intermediate state. Finally, we quantize both salient and non-salient weights in the Harr domain with group-wise 1-bit quantization. We have evaluated our approach on different VLAs: on LIBERO, quantized OpenVLA-OFT retains 92.2% of full-precision performance; on SimplerEnv, quantized CogAct retains 93.6%, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art binarization methods. We further validate our method on real-world evaluation suite and the results show that HBVLA incurs only marginal success-rate degradation compared to the full-precision model, demonstrating robust deployability under tight hardware constraints. Our work provides a practical foundation for ultra-low-bit quantization of VLAs, enabling more reliable deployment on hardware-limited robotic platforms. --- ### Near-Optimal Regret for Policy Optimization in Contextual MDPs with General Offline Function Approximation Authors: Orin Levy, Aviv Rosenberg, Alon Cohen, Yishay Mansour Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13706v1 We introduce \texttt{OPO-CMDP}, the first policy optimization algorithm for stochastic Contextual Markov Decision Process (CMDPs) under general offline function approximation. Our approach achieves a high probability regret bound of $\widetilde{O}(H^4\sqrt{T|S||A|\log(|\mathcal{F}||\mathcal{P}|)}),$ where $S$ and $A$ denote the state and action spaces, $H$ the horizon length, $T$ the number of episodes, and $\mathcal{F}, \mathcal{P}$ the finite function classes used to approximate the losses and dynamics, respectively. This is the first regret bound with optimal dependence on $|S|$ and $|A|$, directly improving the current state-of-the-art (Qian, Hu, and Simchi-Levi, 2024). These results demonstrate that optimistic policy optimization provides a natural, computationally superior and theoretically near-optimal path for solving CMDPs. --- ### Pailitao-VL: Unified Embedding and Reranker for Real-Time Multi-Modal Industrial Search Authors: Lei Chen, Chen Ju, Xu Chen, Zhicheng Wang, Yuheng Jiao, Hongfeng Zhan, Zhaoyang Li, Shihao Xu, Zhixiang Zhao, Tong Jia, Lin Li, Yuan Gao et al. Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13704v2 In this work, we presented Pailitao-VL, a comprehensive multi-modal retrieval system engineered for high-precision, real-time industrial search. We here address three critical challenges in the current SOTA solution: insufficient retrieval granularity, vulnerability to environmental noise, and prohibitive efficiency-performance gap. Our primary contribution lies in two fundamental paradigm shifts. First, we transitioned the embedding paradigm from traditional contrastive learning to an absolute ID-recognition task. Through anchoring instances to a globally consistent latent space defined by billions of semantic prototypes, we successfully overcome the stochasticity and granularity bottlenecks inherent in existing embedding solutions. Second, we evolved the generative reranker from isolated pointwise evaluation to the compare-and-calibrate listwise policy. By synergizing chunk-based comparative reasoning with calibrated absolute relevance scoring, the system achieves nuanced discriminative resolution while circumventing the prohibitive latency typically associated with conventional reranking methods. Extensive offline benchmarks and online A/B tests on Alibaba e-commerce platform confirm that Pailitao-VL achieves state-of-the-art performance and delivers substantial business impact. This work demonstrates a robust and scalable path for deploying advanced MLLM-based retrieval architectures in demanding, large-scale production environments. --- ### Metaphors' journeys across time and genre: tracking the evolution of literary metaphors with temporal embeddings Authors: Veronica Mangiaterra, Chiara Barattieri di San Pietro, Paolo Canal, Valentina Bambini Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13701v1 Metaphors are a distinctive feature of literary language, yet they remain less studied experimentally than everyday metaphors. Moreover, previous psycholinguistic and computational approaches overlooked the temporal dimension, although many literary metaphors were coined centuries apart from contemporary readers. This study innovatively applies tools from diachronic distributional semantics to assess whether the processing costs of literary metaphors varied over time and genre. Specifically, we trained word embeddings on literary and nonliterary Italian corpora from the 19th and 21st centuries, for a total of 124 million tokens, and modeled changes in the semantic similarity between topics and vehicles of 515 19th-century literary metaphors, taking this measure as a proxy of metaphor processing demands. Overall, semantic similarity, and hence metaphor processing demands, remained stable over time. However, genre played a key role: metaphors appeared more difficult (i.e., lower topic-vehicle similarity) in modern literary contexts than in 19th-century literature, but easier (i.e., higher topic-vehicle similarity) in today's nonliterary language (e.g., the Web) than in 19th-century nonliterary texts. This pattern was further shaped by semantic features of metaphors' individual terms, such as vector coherence and semantic neighborhood density. Collectively, these findings align with broader linguistic changes in Italian, such as the stylistic simplification of modern literature, which may have increased metaphor processing demands, and the high creativity of the Web's language, which seems to render metaphor more accessible. --- ### Optimal Regret for Policy Optimization in Contextual Bandits Authors: Orin Levy, Yishay Mansour Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13700v1 We present the first high-probability optimal regret bound for a policy optimization technique applied to the problem of stochastic contextual multi-armed bandit (CMAB) with general offline function approximation. Our algorithm is both efficient and achieves an optimal regret bound of $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{ K|\mathcal{A}|\log|\mathcal{F}|})$, where $K$ is the number of rounds, $\mathcal{A}$ is the set of arms, and $\mathcal{F}$ is the function class used to approximate the losses. Our results bridge the gap between theory and practice, demonstrating that the widely used policy optimization methods for the contextual bandit problem can achieve a rigorously-proved optimal regret bound. We support our theoretical results with an empirical evaluation of our algorithm. --- ### Gradient-Stable Attention Heads Signal LLM Correctness Authors: Sophie Ostmeier, Brian Axelrod, Maya Varma, Asad Aali, Yabin Zhang, Magdalini Paschali, Sanmi Koyejo, Curtis Langlotz, Akshay Chaudhari Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13699v2 Large language models (LLMs) often generate plausible yet incorrect answers, posing risks in safety-critical settings such as medicine. Human evaluation is expensive, and LLM-as-judge approaches risk introducing hidden errors. Recent single-pass white-box methods detect contextual hallucinations using linear probes over model internals, but their generalization to out-of-domain, out-of-task, and training-free settings remains poorly understood. We introduce HeadEntropy, a method that predicts answer correctness by measuring how susceptible each attention head's pattern is to modification under further gradient updates. The key insight is that the trace of the softmax Jacobian is a monotonic function of 2-Renyi entropy, linking attention spread to gradient stability during training, even without the reference annotation. With no training, HeadEntropy reaches 0.736 AUROC, outperforms every training-free baseline in paired comparison and matches a hidden-state probe out-of-domain, at under 1% of inference cost. We evaluate broadly across 5 instruction-tuned LLMs and 5 datasets spanning general knowledge, multi-hop reasoning, mathematical reasoning, claim verification, and medicine. The code is available at https://github.com/StanfordMIMI/HeadEntropy. --- ### Attention Head Entropy of LLMs Predicts Answer Correctness Authors: Sophie Ostmeier, Brian Axelrod, Maya Varma, Asad Aali, Yabin Zhang, Magdalini Paschali, Sanmi Koyejo, Curtis Langlotz, Akshay Chaudhari Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13699v1 Large language models (LLMs) often generate plausible yet incorrect answers, posing risks in safety-critical settings such as medicine. Human evaluation is expensive, and LLM-as-judge approaches risk introducing hidden errors. Recent white-box methods detect contextual hallucinations using model internals, focusing on the localization of the attention mass, but two questions remain open: do these approaches extend to predicting answer correctness, and do they generalize out-of-domains? We introduce Head Entropy, a method that predicts answer correctness from attention entropy patterns, specifically measuring the spread of the attention mass. Using sparse logistic regression on per-head 2-Renyi entropies, Head Entropy matches or exceeds baselines in-distribution and generalizes substantially better on out-of-domains, it outperforms the closest baseline on average by +8.5% AUROC. We further show that attention patterns over the question/context alone, before answer generation, already carry predictive signal using Head Entropy with on average +17.7% AUROC over the closest baseline. We evaluate across 5 instruction-tuned LLMs and 3 QA datasets spanning general knowledge, multi-hop reasoning, and medicine. --- ### No Need to Train Your RDB Foundation Model Authors: Linjie Xu, Yanlin Zhang, Quan Gan, Minjie Wang, David Wipf Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.AI, cs.DB, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13697v2 Relational databases (RDBs) contain vast amounts of heterogeneous tabular information that can be exploited for predictive modeling purposes. But since the space of potential targets is vast across enterprise settings, how can we avoid retraining a new model each time we wish to predict a new quantity of interest? Foundation models based on in-context learning (ICL) offer a convenient option, but so far are largely restricted to single-table operability. In generalizing to multiple interrelated tables, it is essential to compress variably-sized RDB neighborhoods into fixed-length ICL samples for consumption by the decoder. However, the details here are critical: unlike existing supervised learning RDB pipelines, we provide theoretical and empirical evidence that ICL-specific compression should be constrained within high-dimensional RDB columns where all entities share units and roles, not across columns where the relevance of heterogeneous data types cannot be determined without extensive label information. Conditioned on this restriction, we then demonstrate that encoder expressiveness is actually not compromised by excluding trainable parameters. Hence we arrive at a principled family of RDB encoders that can be seamlessly paired with already-existing single-table ICL foundation models, whereby no training or fine-tuning is required. From a practical standpoint, we develop scalable SQL primitives to implement the encoder stage, resulting in the easy-to-use open-source RDBLearn foundation model capable of robust performance on unseen datasets out of the box. --- ### Can a Lightweight Automated AI Pipeline Solve Research-Level Mathematical Problems? Authors: Lve Meng, Weilong Zhao, Yanzhi Zhang, Haoxiang Guan, Jiyan He Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.AI, math.AC, math.CO, math.CT arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13695v2 Large language models (LLMs) have recently achieved remarkable success in generating rigorous mathematical proofs, with "AI for Math" emerging as a vibrant field of research (Ju et al., 2026). While these models have mastered competition-level benchmarks like the International Mathematical Olympiad (Huang et al., 2025; Duan et al., 2025) and show promise in research applications through auto-formalization (Wang et al., 2025), their deployment via lightweight, natural-language pipelines for research problems remains underexplored. In this work, we demonstrate that next-generation models (e.g., Gemini 3 Pro, GPT-5.2 Pro), when integrated into a streamlined automated pipeline optimized for citation-based verification, can solve sophisticated research-grade problems. We evaluate our pipeline on two novel datasets: (1) the ICCM (2025) problem sets (comparable to the S.-T. Yau College Student Mathematics Contest) proposed by leading mathematicians (Shanghai Math Challenge, 2026), and (2) the "First Proof" problem set (Abouzaid et al., 2026), consisting of previously unpublished research questions. Our pipeline generated candidate proofs for all problems in the first two ICCM sets and the "First Proof" set. The solutions for the first two ICCM sets and Problem 4 of the "First Proof" set have been fully verified by our team. All generated proofs have been submitted to the official organization, and our generated results are publicly available at https://github.com/ml1301215/question_sets-test_results. We have open-sourced the code and developed a user-friendly UI for this workflow, accessible at https://github.com/ml1301215/research-math-assistant. --- ### A WDLoRA-Based Multimodal Generative Framework for Clinically Guided Corneal Confocal Microscopy Image Synthesis in Diabetic Neuropathy Authors: Xin Zhang, Liangxiu Han, Tam Sobeih, Yue Shi, Yalin Zheng, Uazman Alam, Maryam Ferdousi, Rayaz Malik Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13693v2 Corneal Confocal Microscopy (CCM) is a sensitive tool for assessing small-fiber damage in Diabetic Peripheral Neuropathy (DPN), yet the development of robust, automated deep learning-based diagnostic models is limited by scarce labelled data and fine-grained variability in corneal nerve morphology. Although Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven foundation generative models excel at natural image synthesis, they often struggle in medical imaging due to limited domain-specific training, compromising the anatomical fidelity required for clinical analysis. To overcome these limitations, we propose a Weight-Decomposed Low-Rank Adaptation (WDLoRA)-based multimodal generative framework for clinically guided CCM image synthesis. WDLoRA is a parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) mechanism that decouples magnitude and directional weight updates, enabling foundation generative models to independently learn the orientation (nerve topology) and intensity (stromal contrast) required for medical realism. By jointly conditioning on nerve segmentation masks and disease-specific clinical prompts, the model synthesises anatomically coherent images across the DPN spectrum (Control, T1NoDPN, T1DPN). A comprehensive three-pillar evaluation demonstrates that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art visual fidelity (Fréchet Inception Distance (FID): 5.18) and structural integrity (Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM): 0.630), significantly outperforming GAN and standard diffusion baselines. Crucially, the synthetic images preserve gold-standard clinical biomarkers and are statistically equivalent to real patient data. When used to train automated diagnostic models, the synthetic dataset improves downstream diagnostic accuracy by 2.1% and segmentation performance by 2.2%, validating the framework's potential to alleviate data bottlenecks in medical AI. --- ### PhGPO: Pheromone-Guided Policy Optimization for Long-Horizon Tool Planning Authors: Yu Li, Guangfeng Cai, Shengtian Yang, Han Luo, Shuo Han, Xu He, Dong Li, Lei Feng Published: 2026-02-14 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.13691v1 Recent advancements in Large Language Model (LLM) agents have demonstrated strong capabilities in executing complex tasks through tool use. However, long-horizon multi-step tool planning is challenging, because the exploration space suffers from a combinatorial explosion. In this scenario, even when a correct tool-use path is found, it is usually considered an immediate reward for current training, which would not provide any reusable information for subsequent training. In this paper, we argue that historically successful trajectories contain reusable tool-transition patterns, which can be leveraged throughout the whole training process. Inspired by ant colony optimization where historically successful paths can be reflected by the pheromone, we propose Pheromone-Guided Policy Optimization (PhGPO), which learns a trajectory-based transition pattern (i.e., pheromone) from historical trajectories and then uses the learned pheromone to guide policy optimization. This learned pheromone provides explicit and reusable guidance that steers policy optimization toward historically successful tool transitions, thereby improving long-horizon tool planning. Comprehensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed PhGPO. ---