# Research Papers — 2026-03 · bundle page 119 of 243 > Full-text markdown of papers #5901–5950 of 12123 published in 2026-03, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 12123-paper 2026-03 archive (50 papers per file). Canonical page: https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-03/page/119 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-03/page/118.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-03/page/120.md) ### AsgardBench -- Evaluating Visually Grounded Interactive Planning Under Minimal Feedback Authors: Andrea Tupini, Lars Liden, Reuben Tan, Yu Wang, Jianfeng Gao Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15888v2 With AsgardBench we aim to evaluate visually grounded, high-level action sequence generation and interactive planning, focusing specifically on plan adaptation during execution based on visual observations rather than navigation or low-level manipulation. In the landscape of embodied AI benchmarks, AsgardBench targets the capability category of interactive planning, which is more sophisticated than offline high-level planning as it requires agents to revise plans in response to environmental feedback, yet remains distinct from low-level execution. Unlike prior embodied AI benchmarks that conflate reasoning with navigation or provide rich corrective feedback that substitutes for perception, AsgardBench restricts agent input to images, action history, and lightweight success/failure signals, isolating interactive planning in a controlled simulator without low-level control noise. The benchmark contains 108 task instances spanning 12 task types, each systematically varied through object state, placement, and scene configuration. These controlled variations create conditional branches in which a single instruction can require different action sequences depending on what the agent observes, emphasizing conditional branching and plan repair during execution. Our evaluations of leading vision language models show that performance drops sharply without visual input, revealing weaknesses in visual grounding and state tracking that ultimately undermine interactive planning. Our benchmark zeroes in on a narrower question: can a model actually use what it sees to adapt a plan when things do not go as expected? --- ### EvoIQA - Explaining Image Distortions with Evolved White-Box Logic Authors: Ruchika Gupta, Illya Bakurov, Nathan Haut, Wolfgang Banzhaf Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.CV, cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15887v1 Traditional Image Quality Assessment (IQA) metrics typically fall into one of two extremes: rigid, hand-crafted mathematical models or "black-box" deep learning architectures that completely lack interpretability. To bridge this gap, we propose EvoIQA, a fully explainable symbolic regression framework based on Genetic Programming that Evolves explicit, human-readable mathematical formulas for image quality assessment (IQA). Utilizing a rich terminal set from the VSI, VIF, FSIM, and HaarPSI metrics, our framework inherently maps structural, chromatic, and information-theoretic degradations into observable mathematical equations. Our results demonstrate that the evolved GP models consistently achieve strong alignment between the predictions and human visual preferences. Furthermore, they not only outperform traditional hand-crafted metrics but also achieve performance parity with complex, state-of-the-art deep learning models like DB-CNN, proving that we no longer have to sacrifice interpretability for state-of-the-art performance. --- ### PhasorFlow: A Python Library for Unit Circle Based Computing Authors: Dibakar Sigdel, Namuna Panday Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15886v4 We present PhasorFlow, an open-source Python library for computing on the $S^1$ unit circle. Inputs are encoded as complex phasors $z=e^{iφ}$ on the $N$-torus ($\mathbb{T}^N$); as computation proceeds through unitary wave-interference gates, global norm is preserved while components drift into $\mathbb{C}^N$, letting algorithms leverage continuous geometric gradients. PhasorFlow makes three contributions. First, we formalize the Phasor Circuit model ($N$ threads, $M$ gates) with a 22-gate library spanning standard-unitary, non-linear, neuromorphic, and encoding operations under full matrix-algebra simulation. Second, we introduce the Variational Phasor Circuit (VPC), a trainable phase-native classifier analogous to variational quantum circuits. Third, we introduce the Phasor Transformer block and Large Phasor Model (LPM), replacing $QK^TV$ attention with a parameter-free DFT token-mixing layer. We validate the framework on financial volatility detection, neuromorphic associative memory, neural binding, period finding, and algorithmic logic applications that are unique to the library. This positions unit-circle computing as a deterministic, lightweight paradigm on classical hardware. Available at https://github.com/mindverse-computing/phasorflow. --- ### Resilience Meets Autonomy: Governing Embodied AI in Critical Infrastructure Authors: Puneet Sharma, Christer Henrik Pursiainen Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.AI, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15885v1 Critical infrastructure increasingly incorporates embodied AI for monitoring, predictive maintenance, and decision support. However, AI systems designed to handle statistically representable uncertainty struggle with cascading failures and crisis dynamics that exceed their training assumptions. This paper argues that Embodied AIs resilience depends on bounded autonomy within a hybrid governance architecture. We outline four oversight modes and map them to critical infrastructure sectors based on task complexity, risk level, and consequence severity. Drawing on the EU AI Act, ISO safety standards, and crisis management research, we argue that effective governance requires a structured allocation of machine capability and human judgement. --- ### Electrodermal Activity as a Unimodal Signal for Aerobic Exercise Detection in Wearable Sensors Authors: Rena Mira Krishna, Ramya Sankar, Shadi Ghiasi Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15880v1 Electrodermal Activity (EDA) is a non-invasive physiological signal widely available in wearable devices and reflects sympathetic nervous system (SNS) activation. Prior multi-modal studies have demonstrated robust performance in distinguishing stress and exercise states when EDA is combined with complementary signals such as heart rate and accelerometry. However, the ability of EDA to independently distinguish sustained aerobic exercise from low-arousal states under subject-independent evaluation remains insufficiently characterized. This study investigates whether features derived exclusively from EDA can reliably differentiate rest from sustained aerobic exercise. Using a publicly available dataset collected from thirty healthy individuals, EDA features were evaluated using benchmark machine learning models with leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) validation. Across models, EDA-only classifiers achieved moderate subject-independent performance, with phasic temporal dynamics and event timing contributing to class separation. Rather than proposing EDA as a replacement for multimodal sensing, this work provides a conservative benchmark of the discriminative power of EDA alone and clarifies its role as a unimodal input for wearable activity-state inference. --- ### Counteractive RL: Rethinking Core Principles for Efficient and Scalable Deep Reinforcement Learning Authors: Ezgi Korkmaz Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15871v1 Following the pivotal success of learning strategies to win at tasks, solely by interacting with an environment without any supervision, agents have gained the ability to make sequential decisions in complex MDPs. Yet, reinforcement learning policies face exponentially growing state spaces in high dimensional MDPs resulting in a dichotomy between computational complexity and policy success. In our paper we focus on the agent's interaction with the environment in a high-dimensional MDP during the learning phase and we introduce a theoretically-founded novel paradigm based on experiences obtained through counteractive actions. Our analysis and method provide a theoretical basis for efficient, effective, scalable and accelerated learning, and further comes with zero additional computational complexity while leading to significant acceleration in training. We conduct extensive experiments in the Arcade Learning Environment with high-dimensional state representation MDPs. The experimental results further verify our theoretical analysis, and our method achieves significant performance increase with substantial sample-efficiency in high-dimensional environments. --- ### Evaluating Black-Box Vulnerabilities with Wasserstein-Constrained Data Perturbations Authors: Adriana Laurindo Monteiro, Jean-Michel Loubes Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15867v2 The growing use of Machine Learning (ML) tools comes with critical challenges, such as limited model explainability. We propose a global explainability framework that leverages Optimal Transport and Distributionally Robust Optimization to analyze how ML algorithms respond to constrained data perturbations. Our approach enforces constraints on feature-level statistics (e.g., brightness, age distribution), generating realistic perturbations that preserve semantic structure. We provide a model-agnostic diagnostic bench that applies to both tabular and image domains with solid theoretical guarantees. We validate the approach on real-world datasets providing interpretable robustness diagnostics that complement standard evaluation and fairness auditing tools. --- ### Interpretative Interfaces: Designing for AI-Mediated Reading Practices and the Knowledge Commons Authors: Gabrielle Benabdallah Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15863v1 Explainable AI (XAI) interfaces seek to make large language models more transparent, yet explanation alone does not produce understanding. Explaining a system's behavior is not the same as being able to engage with it, to probe and interpret its operations through direct manipulation. This distinction matters for scientific disciplines in particular: scientists who increasingly rely on LLMs for reading, citing, and producing literature reviews have little means of directly engaging with how these models process and transform the texts they generate. In this ongoing design research project, I argue for a shift from explainability to interpretative engagement. This shift moves away from accounts of system behavior to instead enable users to manipulate a model's intermediate representations. Drawing on textual scholarship, computational poetics, and the history of reading and writing technologies, including practices such as marginalia, glosses, indices, and annotation systems, I propose interpretative interfaces as interactive environments in which non-expert users can intervene in the representational space of a language model. More specifically, such interfaces will allow users to select a token and follow its trajectory through the model's intermediate layers. This way, they can observe how its semantic position shifts as context is processed, and possibly annotate the transformations they find useful or meaningful. The same way readers can create their own maps within a book through annotations and bookmarks, interpretative interfaces will allow users to inscribe their reading of a model's internal representations. The goal of this project is to reframe AI interpretability as an interaction design project rather than a purely technical one, and to open a path toward AI-mediated reading that supports interpretative engagement and critical stewardship of scientific knowledge. --- ### Self-supervised Disentanglement of Disease Effects from Aging in 3D Medical Shapes Authors: Jakaria Rabbi, Nilanjan Ray, Dana Cobzas Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15862v1 Disentangling pathological changes from physiological aging in 3D medical shapes is crucial for developing interpretable biomarkers and patient stratification. However, this separation is challenging when diagnosis labels are limited or unavailable, since disease and aging often produce overlapping effects on shape changes, obscuring clinically relevant shape patterns. To address this challenge, we propose a two-stage framework combining unsupervised disease discovery with self-supervised disentanglement of implicit shape representations. In the first stage, we train an implicit neural model with signed distance functions to learn stable shape embeddings. We then apply clustering on the shape latent space, which yields pseudo disease labels without using ground-truth diagnosis during discovery. In the second stage, we disentangle factors in a compact variational space using pseudo disease labels discovered in the first stage and the ground truth age labels available for all subjects. We enforce separation and controllability with a multi-objective disentanglement loss combining covariance and a supervised contrastive loss. On ADNI hippocampus and OAI distal femur shapes, we achieve near-supervised performance, improving disentanglement and reconstruction over state-of-the-art unsupervised baselines, while enabling high-fidelity reconstruction, controllable synthesis, and factor-based explainability. Code and checkpoints are available at https://github.com/anonymous-submission01/medical-shape-disentanglement --- ### Regularized Latent Dynamics Prediction is a Strong Baseline For Behavioral Foundation Models Authors: Pranaya Jajoo, Harshit Sikchi, Siddhant Agarwal, Amy Zhang, Scott Niekum, Martha White Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15857v2 Behavioral Foundation Models (BFMs) produce agents with the capability to adapt to any unknown reward or task. These methods, however, are only able to produce near-optimal policies for the reward functions that are in the span of some pre-existing state features, making the choice of state features crucial to the expressivity of the BFM. As a result, BFMs are trained using a variety of complex objectives and require sufficient dataset coverage, to train task-useful spanning features. In this work, we examine the question: are these complex representation learning objectives necessary for zero-shot RL? Specifically, we revisit the objective of self-supervised next-state prediction in latent space for state feature learning, but observe that such an objective alone is prone to increasing state-feature similarity, and subsequently reducing span. We propose an approach, Regularized Latent Dynamics Prediction (RLDP), that adds a simple orthogonality regularization to maintain feature diversity and can match or surpass state-of-the-art complex representation learning methods for zero-shot RL. Furthermore, we empirically show that prior approaches perform poorly in low-coverage scenarios where RLDP still succeeds. --- ### Regularized Latent Dynamics Prediction is a Strong Baseline For Behavioral Foundation Models Authors: Pranaya Jajoo, Harshit Sikchi, Siddhant Agarwal, Amy Zhang, Scott Niekum, Martha White Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15857v1 Behavioral Foundation Models (BFMs) produce agents with the capability to adapt to any unknown reward or task. These methods, however, are only able to produce near-optimal policies for the reward functions that are in the span of some pre-existing state features, making the choice of state features crucial to the expressivity of the BFM. As a result, BFMs are trained using a variety of complex objectives and require sufficient dataset coverage, to train task-useful spanning features. In this work, we examine the question: are these complex representation learning objectives necessary for zero-shot RL? Specifically, we revisit the objective of self-supervised next-state prediction in latent space for state feature learning, but observe that such an objective alone is prone to increasing state-feature similarity, and subsequently reducing span. We propose an approach, Regularized Latent Dynamics Prediction (RLDP), that adds a simple orthogonality regularization to maintain feature diversity and can match or surpass state-of-the-art complex representation learning methods for zero-shot RL. Furthermore, we empirically show that prior approaches perform poorly in low-coverage scenarios where RLDP still succeeds. --- ### FlashSampling: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Sampling Authors: Tomas Ruiz, Zhen Qin, Yifan Zhang, Xuyang Shen, Yiran Zhong, Mengdi Wang Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15854v3 Sampling from a categorical distribution is mathematically simple, but in large-vocabulary decoding, it often triggers extra memory traffic and extra kernels after the LM head. We present FlashSampling, an exact sampling primitive that fuses sampling into the LM-head matmul and never materializes the logits tensor in HBM. The method is simple: compute logits tile-by-tile on chip, add Gumbel noise, keep only one maximizer per row and per vocabulary tile, and finish with a small reduction over tiles. In tensor-parallel decoding, FlashSampling replaces the all-gather of logits with streaming peer-to-peer writes: This overlaps GPU-to-GPU communication with computation and HBM loads across up to 8 GPUs, with near-ideal scaling at large batch sizes. Our kernel is exact because $\text{argmax}$ decomposes over partitions; grouped variants for online and tensor-parallel settings are exact by hierarchical factorization of the categorical distribution. FlashSampling demonstrates kernel-level speedups on decode workloads across 4 different datacenter GPUs (H100, H200, B200, B300), and in end-to-end vLLM experiments, it reduces time per output token by up to $10%$ on the models we test. These results show that exact sampling, with no approximation, can be integrated into the matmul itself, consolidating the bandwidth-bound sampling step in an efficient epilogue. --- ### FlashSampling: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Sampling Authors: Tomas Ruiz, Zhen Qin, Yifan Zhang, Xuyang Shen, Yiran Zhong, Mengdi Wang Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15854v2 Sampling from a categorical distribution is mathematically simple, but in large-vocabulary decoding, it often triggers extra memory traffic and extra kernels after the LM head. We present FlashSampling, an exact sampling primitive that fuses sampling into the LM-head matmul and never materializes the logits tensor in HBM. The method is simple: compute logits tile-by-tile on chip, add Gumbel noise, keep only one maximizer per row and per vocabulary tile, and finish with a small reduction over tiles. In tensor-parallel decoding, FlashSampling replaces the all-gather of logits with streaming peer-to-peer writes: This overlaps GPU-to-GPU communication with computation and HBM loads across up to 8 GPUs, with near-ideal scaling at large batch sizes. Our kernel is exact because argmax decomposes over partitions; grouped variants for online and tensor-parallel settings are exact by hierarchical factorization of the categorical distribution. FlashSampling demonstrates kernel-level speedups on decode workloads across 4 different datacenter GPUs (H100, H200, B200, B300), and in end-to-end vLLM experiments, it reduces time per output token by up to $10\%$ on the models we test. These results show that exact sampling, with no approximation, can be integrated into the matmul itself, consolidating the bandwidth-bound sampling step in an efficient epilogue. --- ### Algorithmic Trading Strategy Development and Optimisation Authors: Owen Nyo Wei Yuan, Victor Tan Jia Xuan, Ong Jun Yao Fabian, Ryan Tan Jun Wei Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15848v2 The report presents with the development and optimisation of an enhanced algorithmic trading strategy through the use of historical S&P 500 market data and earnings call sentiment analysis. The proposed strategy integrates various technical indicators such as moving averages, momentum, volatility, and FinBERT-based sentiment analysis to improve overall trades being taken. The results show that the enhanced strategy significantly outperforms the baseline model in terms of total return, Sharpe ratio, and drawdown amongst other factors. The findings helped demonstrate the relevance and effectiveness of combining technical indicators, sentiment analysis, and computational optimisation in algorithmic trading systems. --- ### FEEL (Force-Enhanced Egocentric Learning): A Dataset for Physical Action Understanding Authors: Eadom Dessalene, Botao He, Michael Maynord, Yonatan Tussa, Pavan Mantripragada, Yianni Karabati, Nirupam Roy, Yiannis Aloimonos Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15847v1 We introduce FEEL (Force-Enhanced Egocentric Learning), the first large-scale dataset pairing force measurements gathered from custom piezoresistive gloves with egocentric video. Our gloves enable scalable data collection, and FEEL contains approximately 3 million force-synchronized frames of natural unscripted manipulation in kitchen environments, with 45% of frames involving hand-object contact. Because force is the underlying cause that drives physical interaction, it is a critical primitive for physical action understanding. We demonstrate the utility of force for physical action understanding through application of FEEL to two families of tasks: (1) contact understanding, where we jointly perform temporal contact segmentation and pixel-level contacted object segmentation; and, (2) action representation learning, where force prediction serves as a self-supervised pretraining objective for video backbones. We achieve state-of-the-art temporal contact segmentation results and competitive pixel-level segmentation results without any need for manual contacted object segmentation annotations. Furthermore we demonstrate that action representation learning with FEEL improves transfer performance on action understanding tasks without any manual labels over EPIC-Kitchens, SomethingSomething-V2, EgoExo4D and Meccano. --- ### Informationally Compressive Anonymization: Non-Degrading Sensitive Input Protection for Privacy-Preserving Supervised Machine Learning Authors: Jeremy J Samuelson Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.IT arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15842v2 Modern machine learning systems increasingly rely on sensitive data, creating significant privacy, security, and regulatory risks that existing privacy-preserving machine learning (ppML) techniques, such as Differential Privacy (DP) and Homomorphic Encryption (HE), address only at the cost of degraded performance, increased complexity, or prohibitive computational overhead. This paper introduces Informationally Compressive Anonymization (ICA) and the VEIL architecture, a privacy-preserving ML framework that achieves strong privacy guarantees through architectural and mathematical design rather than noise injection or cryptography. ICA embeds a supervised, multi-objective encoder within a trusted Source Environment to transform raw inputs into low-dimensional, task-aligned latent representations, ensuring that only irreversibly anonymized vectors are exported to untrusted training and inference environments. The paper rigorously proves that these encodings are structurally non-invertible using topological and information-theoretic arguments, showing that inversion is logically impossible, even under idealized attacker assumptions, and that, in realistic deployments, the attacker conditional entropy over the original data diverges, driving reconstruction probability to zero. Unlike prior autoencoder-based ppML approaches, ICA preserves predictive utility by aligning representation learning with downstream supervised objectives, enabling low-latency, high-performance ML without gradient clipping, noise budgets, or encryption at inference time. The VEIL architecture enforces strict trust boundaries, supports scalable multi-region deployment, and naturally aligns with privacy-by-design regulatory frameworks, establishing a new foundation for enterprise ML that is secure, performant, and safe by construction, even in the face of post-quantum threats. --- ### When Stability Fails: Hidden Failure Modes Of LLMS in Data-Constrained Scientific Decision-Making Authors: Nazia Riasat Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15840v1 Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as decision-support tools in data-constrained scientific workflows, where correctness and validity are critical. However, evaluation practices often emphasize stability or reproducibility across repeated runs. While these properties are desirable, stability alone does not guar- antee agreement with statistical ground truth when such references are available. We introduce a controlled behavioral evaluation framework that explicitly sep- arates four dimensions of LLM decision-making: stability, correctness, prompt sensitivity, and output validity under fixed statistical inputs. We evaluate multi- ple LLMs using a statistical gene prioritization task derived from differential ex- pression analysis across prompt regimes involving strict and relaxed significance thresholds, borderline ranking scenarios, and minor wording variations. Our ex- periments show that LLMs can exhibit near-perfect run-to-run stability while sys- tematically diverging from statistical ground truth, over-selecting under relaxed thresholds, responding sharply to minor prompt wording changes, or producing syntactically plausible gene identifiers absent from the input table. Although sta- bility reflects robustness across repeated runs, it does not guarantee agreement with statistical ground truth in structured scientific decision tasks. These findings highlight the importance of explicit ground-truth validation and output validity checks when deploying LLMs in automated or semi-automated scientific work- flows. --- ### Spectral Hierarchy of the Cosmic Web Authors: Francisco-Shu Kitaura, Francesco Sinigaglia Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: astro-ph.CO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15834v2 We introduce a spectral hierarchy of cosmic-web classifications obtained by applying simple scale-weighting kernels to the density field before performing a standard eigenvalue-based web classification. This unifies and extends several widely used web definitions within a single framework: the familiar potential/tidal web (large-scale, nonlocal), a curvature-based web (more local, peak- and ridge-sensitive), and additional higher-derivative levels that progressively emphasize smaller-scale structure. Because the classification is built from second derivatives of the filtered field, successive hierarchy levels align naturally with operator families that appear in renormalised bias and effective descriptions of large-scale structure, providing an explicit bridge between cosmic-web environments and long- and short-range nonlocal bias ingredients. We quantify the information content of the hierarchy with a compact statistic: we map each cell to one of four ordered web types (void, sheet, filament, knot), construct a corresponding ``web contrast'' field, and measure its cross-correlation with halos from the AbacusSummit simulation suite on a coarse mesh with $ΔL\simeq 5.5\,h^{-1}\mathrm{Mpc}$. We find that the hierarchy retains significant tracer-relevant information from very large scales down to the mesh Nyquist limit, with the more local (curvature/higher-derivative) levels dominating toward nonlinear scales. This makes the spectral hierarchy a practical, interpretable conditioning basis for fast mock-galaxy production and field-level modelling, and a flexible tool for studying environment-dependent clustering and assembly bias. --- ### Spectral Hierarchy of the Cosmic Web Authors: Francisco-Shu Kitaura, Francesco Sinigaglia Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: astro-ph.CO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15834v1 We introduce a spectral hierarchy of cosmic-web classifications obtained by applying simple scale-weighting kernels to the density field before performing a standard eigenvalue-based web classification. This unifies and extends several widely used web definitions within a single framework: the familiar potential/tidal web (large-scale, nonlocal), a curvature-based web (more local, peak- and ridge-sensitive), and additional higher-derivative levels that progressively emphasize smaller-scale structure. Because the classification is built from second derivatives of the filtered field, successive hierarchy levels align naturally with operator families that appear in renormalised bias and effective descriptions of large-scale structure, providing an explicit bridge between cosmic-web environments and long- and short-range nonlocal bias ingredients. We quantify the information content of the hierarchy with a compact statistic: we map each cell to one of four ordered web types (void, sheet, filament, knot), construct a corresponding ``web contrast'' field, and measure its cross-correlation with halos from the AbacusSummit simulation suite on a coarse mesh with $ΔL\simeq 5.5\,h^{-1}\mathrm{Mpc}$. We find that the hierarchy retains significant tracer-relevant information from very large scales down to the mesh Nyquist limit, with the more local (curvature/higher-derivative) levels dominating toward nonlinear scales. This makes the spectral hierarchy a practical, interpretable conditioning basis for fast mock-galaxy production and field-level modelling, and a flexible tool for studying environment-dependent clustering and assembly bias. --- ### Persona-Conditioned Risk Behavior in Large Language Models: A Simulated Gambling Study with GPT-4.1 Authors: Sankalp Dubedy Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15831v1 Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents in uncertain, sequential decision-making contexts. Yet it remains poorly understood whether the behaviors they exhibit in such environments reflect principled cognitive patterns or simply surface-level prompt mimicry. This paper presents a controlled experiment in which GPT-4.1 was assigned one of three socioeconomic personas (Rich, Middle-income, and Poor) and placed in a structured slot-machine environment with three distinct machine configurations: Fair (50%), Biased Low (35%), and Streak (dynamic probability increasing after consecutive losses). Across 50 independent iterations per condition and 6,950 recorded decisions, we find that the model reproduces key behavioral signatures predicted by Kahneman and Tversky's Prospect Theory without being instructed to do so. The Poor persona played a mean of 37.4 rounds per session (SD=15.5) compared to 1.1 rounds for the Rich persona (SD=0.31), a difference that is highly significant (Kruskal-Wallis H=393.5, p<2.2e-16). Risk scores by persona show large effect sizes (Cohen's d=4.15 for Poor vs Rich). Emotional labels appear to function as post-hoc annotations rather than decision drivers (chi-square=3205.4, Cramer's V=0.39), and belief-updating across rounds is negligible (Spearman rho=0.032 for Poor persona, p=0.016). These findings carry implications for LLM agent design, interpretability research, and the broader question of whether classical cognitive economic biases are implicitly encoded in large-scale pretrained language models. --- ### Beyond the Embedding Bottleneck: Adaptive Retrieval-Augmented 3D CT Report Generation Authors: Renjie Liang, Yiling Ma, Yang Xing, Zhengkang Fan, Jinqian Pan, Chengkun Sun, Li Li, Kuang Gong, Jie Xu Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15822v1 Automated radiology report generation from 3D CT volumes often suffers from incomplete pathology coverage. We provide empirical evidence that this limitation stems from a representational bottleneck: contrastive 3D CT embeddings encode discriminative pathology signals, yet exhibit severe dimensional concentration, with as few as 2 effective dimensions out of 512. Corroborating this, scaling the language model yields no measurable improvement, suggesting that the bottleneck lies in the visual representation rather than the generator. This bottleneck limits both generation and retrieval; naive static retrieval fails to improve clinical efficacy and can even degrade performance. We propose \textbf{AdaRAG-CT}, an adaptive augmentation framework that compensates for this visual bottleneck by introducing supplementary textual information through controlled retrieval and selectively integrating it during generation. On the CT-RATE benchmark, AdaRAG-CT achieves state-of-the-art clinical efficacy, improving Clinical F1 from 0.420 (CT-Agent) to 0.480 (+6 points); ablation studies confirm that both the retrieval and generation components contribute to the improvement. Code is available at https://github.com/renjie-liang/Adaptive-RAG-for-3DCT-Report-Generation. --- ### Hypothesis Class Determines Explanation: Why Accurate Models Disagree on Feature Attribution Authors: Thackshanaramana B Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15821v1 The assumption that prediction-equivalent models produce equivalent explanations underlies many practices in explainable AI, including model selection, auditing, and regulatory evaluation. In this work, we show that this assumption does not hold. Through a large-scale empirical study across 24 datasets and multiple model classes, we find that models with identical predictive behavior can produce substantially different feature attributions. This disagreement is highly structured: models within the same hypothesis class exhibit strong agreement, while cross-class pairs (e.g., tree-based vs. linear) trained on identical data splits show substantially reduced agreement, consistently near or below the lottery threshold. We identify hypothesis class as the structural driver of this phenomenon, which we term the Explanation Lottery. We theoretically show that the resulting Agreement Gap persists under interaction structure in the data-generating process. This structural finding motivates a post-hoc diagnostic, the Explanation Reliability Score R(x), which predicts when explanations are stable across architectures without additional training. Our results demonstrate that model selection is not explanation-neutral: the hypothesis class chosen for deployment can determine which features are attributed responsibility for a decision. --- ### Conflict-Aware Multimodal Fusion for Ambivalence and Hesitancy Recognition Authors: Salah Eddine Bekhouche, Hichem Telli, Azeddine Benlamoudi, Salah Eddine Herrouz, Abdelmalik Taleb-Ahmed, Abdenour Hadid Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15818v1 Ambivalence and hesitancy (A/H) are subtle affective states where a person shows conflicting signals through different channels -- saying one thing while their face or voice tells another story. Recognising these states automatically is valuable in clinical settings, but it is hard for machines because the key evidence lives in the \emph{disagreements} between what is said, how it sounds, and what the face shows. We present \textbf{ConflictAwareAH}, a multimodal framework built for this problem. Three pre-trained encoders extract video, audio, and text representations. Pairwise conflict features -- element-wise absolute differences between modality embeddings -- serve as \emph{bidirectional} cues: large cross-modal differences flag A/H, while small differences confirm behavioural consistency and anchor the negative class. This conflict-aware design addresses a key limitation of text-dominant approaches, which tend to over-detect A/H (high F1-AH) while struggling to confirm its absence: our multimodal model improves F1-NoAH by +4.6 points over text alone and halves the class-performance gap. A complementary \emph{text-guided late fusion} strategy blends a text-only auxiliary head with the full model at inference, adding +4.1 Macro F1. On the BAH dataset from the ABAW10 Ambivalence/Hesitancy Challenge, our method reaches \textbf{0.694 Macro F1} on the labelled test split and \textbf{0.715} on the private leaderboard, outperforming published multimodal baselines by over 10 points -- all on a single GPU in under 25 minutes of training. --- ### Longitudinal Risk Prediction in Mammography with Privileged History Distillation Authors: Banafsheh Karimian, Soufiane Belharbi, Alexis Guichemerre, Luke McCaffrey, Mohammadhadi Shateri, Eric Granger Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.LG, stat.AP arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15814v2 Longitudinal mammography screening has become an important source of information for improving future breast cancer risk prediction. However, the performance of current longitudinal mammography models degrades when prior examinations are unavailable at inference, creating a structured privileged-information setting in which temporal context is available during training but absent at deployment. We propose Single-Exam Mammography risk prediction with privileged History Distillation (SEM-HD), a framework that uses longitudinal history as privileged information available only during training to preserve the predictive benefits of longitudinal modeling while requiring only the current screening examination at deployment. During training, the student relies on the current examination to predict latent representations of prior visits, while horizon-specific teachers provide additional supervision from the observed longitudinal history. Together, latent history prediction and teacher distillation preserve the temporal modeling structure of longitudinal predictors under current-exam-only inference. We validate SEM-HD on three longitudinal mammography cohorts, the CSAW-CC, EMBED, and OMI-DB, using the transformer-based Longitudinal Mammography Risk (LoMaR) and recurrent Visual Memory Recurrent Attention (VMRA) backbones. Under current-exam-only inference, SEM-HD consistently improves long-horizon AUC and pAUC over longitudinal models evaluated without history, particularly in the clinically relevant low false-positive-rate region. It also recovers much of the performance gap with respect to full-history inference across datasets and backbones. Ablations further show that these gains are not reproduced by masking or heuristic history imputation. The strongest performance is achieved by combining patient-specific latent history prediction with distilled temporal risk supervision. --- ### Longitudinal Risk Prediction in Mammography with Privileged History Distillation Authors: Banafsheh Karimian, Alexis Guichemerre, Soufiane Belharbi, Natacha Gillet, Luke McCaffrey, Mohammadhadi Shateri, Eric Granger Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.LG, stat.AP arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15814v1 Breast cancer remains a leading cause of cancer-related mortality worldwide. Longitudinal mammography risk prediction models improve multi-year breast cancer risk prediction based on prior screening exams. However, in real-world clinical practice, longitudinal histories are often incomplete, irregular, or unavailable due to missed screenings, first-time examinations, heterogeneous acquisition schedules, or archival constraints. The absence of prior exams degrades the performance of longitudinal risk models and limits their practical applicability. While substantial longitudinal history is available during training, prior exams are commonly absent at test time. In this paper, we address missing history at inference time and propose a longitudinal risk prediction method that uses mammography history as privileged information during training and distills its prognostic value into a student model that only requires the current exam at inference time. The key idea is a privileged multi-teacher distillation scheme with horizon-specific teachers: each teacher is trained on the full longitudinal history to specialize in one prediction horizon, while the student receives only a reconstructed history derived from the current exam. This allows the student to inherit horizon-dependent longitudinal risk cues without requiring prior screening exams at deployment. Our new Privileged History Distillation (PHD) method is validated on a large longitudinal mammography dataset with multi-year cancer outcomes, CSAW-CC, comparing full-history and no-history baselines to their distilled counterparts. Using time-dependent AUC across horizons, our privileged history distillation method markedly improves the performance of long-horizon prediction over no-history models and is comparable to that of full-history models, while using only the current exam at inference time. --- ### ModTrack: Sensor-Agnostic Multi-View Tracking via Identity-Informed PHD Filtering with Covariance Propagation Authors: Aditya Iyer, Jack Roberts, Nora Ayanian Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15812v3 Multi-View Multi-Object Tracking (MV-MOT) aims to localize and maintain consistent identities of objects observed by multiple sensors. This task is challenging, as viewpoint changes and occlusion disrupt identity consistency across views and time. Recent end-to-end approaches address this by jointly learning 2D Bird's Eye View (BEV) representations and identity associations, achieving high tracking accuracy. However, these methods offer no principled uncertainty accounting and remain tightly coupled to their training configuration, limiting generalization across sensor layouts, modalities, or datasets without retraining. We propose ModTrack, a modular MV-MOT system that matches end-to-end performance while providing cross-modal, sensor-agnostic generalization and traceable uncertainty. ModTrack confines learning methods to just the \textit{Detection and Feature Extraction} stage of the MV-MOT pipeline, performing all fusion, association, and tracking with closed-form analytical methods. Our design reduces each sensor's output to calibrated position-covariance pairs $(\mathbf{z}, R)$; cross-view clustering and precision-weighted fusion then yield unified estimates $(\hat{\mathbf{z}}, \hat{R})$ for identity assignment and temporal tracking. A feedback-coupled, identity-informed Gaussian Mixture Probability Hypothesis Density (GM-PHD) filter with HMM motion modes uses these fused estimates to maintain identities under missed detections and heavy occlusion. ModTrack achieves 95.5 IDF1 and 91.4 MOTA on \textit{WildTrack}, surpassing all prior modular methods by over 21 points and rivaling the state-of-the-art end-to-end methods while providing deployment flexibility they cannot. Specifically, the same tracker core transfers unchanged to \textit{MultiviewX} and \textit{RadarScenes}, with only perception-module replacement required to extend to new domains and sensor modalities. --- ### ModTrack: Sensor-Agnostic Multi-View Tracking via Identity-Informed PHD Filtering with Covariance Propagation Authors: Aditya Iyer, Jack Roberts, Nora Ayanian Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15812v2 Multi-View Multi-Object Tracking (MV-MOT) aims to localize and maintain consistent identities of objects observed by multiple sensors. This task is challenging, as viewpoint changes and occlusion disrupt identity consistency across views and time. Recent end-to-end approaches address this by jointly learning 2D Bird's Eye View (BEV) representations and identity associations, achieving high tracking accuracy. However, these methods offer no principled uncertainty accounting and remain tightly coupled to their training configuration, limiting generalization across sensor layouts, modalities, or datasets without retraining. We propose ModTrack, a modular MV-MOT system that matches end-to-end performance while providing cross-modal, sensor-agnostic generalization and traceable uncertainty. ModTrack confines learning methods to just the \textit{Detection and Feature Extraction} stage of the MV-MOT pipeline, performing all fusion, association, and tracking with closed-form analytical methods. Our design reduces each sensor's output to calibrated position-covariance pairs $(\mathbf{z}, R)$; cross-view clustering and precision-weighted fusion then yield unified estimates $(\hat{\mathbf{z}}, \hat{R})$ for identity assignment and temporal tracking. A feedback-coupled, identity-informed Gaussian Mixture Probability Hypothesis Density (GM-PHD) filter with HMM motion modes uses these fused estimates to maintain identities under missed detections and heavy occlusion. ModTrack achieves 95.5 IDF1 and 91.4 MOTA on \textit{WildTrack}, surpassing all prior modular methods by over 21 points and rivaling the state-of-the-art end-to-end methods while providing deployment flexibility they cannot. Specifically, the same tracker core transfers unchanged to \textit{MultiviewX} and \textit{RadarScenes}, with only perception-module replacement required to extend to new domains and sensor modalities. --- ### Feed-forward Gaussian Registration for Head Avatar Creation and Editing Authors: Malte Prinzler, Paulo Gotardo, Siyu Tang, Timo Bolkart Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15811v1 We present MATCH (Multi-view Avatars from Topologically Corresponding Heads), a multi-view Gaussian registration method for high-quality head avatar creation and editing. State-of-the-art multi-view head avatar methods require time-consuming head tracking followed by expensive avatar optimization, often resulting in a total creation time of more than one day. MATCH, in contrast, directly predicts Gaussian splat textures in correspondence from calibrated multi-view images in just 0.5 seconds per frame, without requiring data preprocessing. The learned intra-subject correspondence across frames enables fast creation of personalized head avatars, while correspondence across subjects supports applications such as expression transfer, optimization-free tracking, semantic editing, and identity interpolation. We establish these correspondences end-to-end using a transformer-based model that predicts Gaussian splat textures in the fixed UV layout of a template mesh. To achieve this, we introduce a novel registration-guided attention block, where each UV-map token attends exclusively to image tokens depicting its corresponding mesh region. This design improves efficiency and performance compared to dense cross-view attention. MATCH outperforms existing methods in novel-view synthesis, geometry registration, and head avatar generation, while making avatar creation 10 times faster than the closest competing baseline. The code and model weights are available on the project website. --- ### Don't Trust Stubborn Neighbors: A Security Framework for Agentic Networks Authors: Samira Abedini, Sina Mavali, Lea Schönherr, Martin Pawelczyk, Rebekka Burkholz Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.MA, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15809v1 Large Language Model (LLM)-based Multi-Agent Systems (MASs) are increasingly deployed for agentic tasks, such as web automation, itinerary planning, and collaborative problem solving. Yet, their interactive nature introduces new security risks: malicious or compromised agents can exploit communication channels to propagate misinformation and manipulate collective outcomes. In this paper, we study how such manipulation can arise and spread by borrowing the Friedkin-Johnsen opinion formation model from social sciences to propose a general theoretical framework to study LLM-MAS. Remarkably, this model closely captures LLM-MAS behavior, as we verify in extensive experiments across different network topologies and attack and defense scenarios. Theoretically and empirically, we find that a single highly stubborn and persuasive agent can take over MAS dynamics, underscoring the systems' high susceptibility to attacks by triggering a persuasion cascade that reshapes collective opinion. Our theoretical analysis reveals three mechanisms to increase system security: a) increasing the number of benign agents, b) increasing the innate stubbornness or peer-resistance of agents, or c) reducing trust in potential adversaries. Because scaling is computationally expensive and high stubbornness degrades the network's ability to reach consensus, we propose a new mechanism to mitigate threats by a trust-adaptive defense that dynamically adjusts inter-agent trust to limit adversarial influence while maintaining cooperative performance. Extensive experiments confirm that this mechanism effectively defends against manipulation. --- ### Mask Is What DLLM Needs: A Masked Data Training Paradigm for Diffusion LLMs Authors: Linrui Ma, Yufei Cui, Kai Han, Yunhe Wang Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15803v1 Discrete diffusion models offer global context awareness and flexible parallel generation. However, uniform random noise schedulers in standard DLLM training overlook the highly non-uniform information density inherent in real-world sequences. This wastes optimization resources on low-density structural glues while leaving high-density logical pivot points severely under-optimized. To address this, we propose an Information Density Driven Smart Noise Scheduler. By extracting information-dense hubs and applying Complementary Priority Masking, our method decouples a single training instance into mutually reinforcing reasoning and syntax samples, forcing the model to master both logical deduction and foundational sequence structure. Experiments demonstrate that our approach improves average accuracy by ~4\% across four Code and Math reasoning benchmarks, significantly outperforming uniform baselines. Mechanistic analyses further reveal that probabilistic priority masking effectively mitigates contextual collapse during block diffusion training. Overall, this density-aware strategy efficiently unlocks the reasoning potential of diffusion language models at minimal annotation cost, emerging as a promising new masked data training paradigm for Diffusion LLMs. Our processed dataset can be found at https://huggingface.co/datasets/malr07/opc-sft-stage2-dense-extracted. --- ### Time-Aware Prior Fitted Networks for Zero-Shot Forecasting with Exogenous Variables Authors: Andres Potapczynski, Ravi Kiran Selvam, Tatiana Konstantinova, Malcolm Wolff, Kin G. Olivares, Ruijun Ma, Michael W. Mahoney, Andrew Gordon Wilson, Boris N. Oreshkin, Dmitry Efimov Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15802v2 In many time series forecasting settings, the target time series is accompanied by exogenous covariates, such as promotions and prices in retail demand; temperature in energy load; calendar and holiday indicators for traffic or sales; and grid load or fuel costs in electricity pricing. Ignoring these exogenous signals can substantially degrade forecasting accuracy, particularly when they drive spikes, discontinuities, or regime and phase changes in the target series. Most current time series foundation models (e.g., Chronos, Sundial, TimesFM, TimeMoE, TimeLLM, and LagLlama) ignore exogenous covariates and make forecasts solely from the numerical time series history, thereby limiting their performance. In this paper, we develop ApolloPFN, a prior-data fitted network (PFN) that is time-aware (unlike prior PFNs) and that natively incorporates exogenous covariates (unlike prior univariate forecasters). Our design introduces two major advances: (i) a synthetic data generation framework that injects realistic temporal patterns, structural changes, and exogenous dependencies into the PFN prior; and (ii) time-aware architectural modifications that embed inductive biases needed to exploit temporal context. We demonstrate that ApolloPFN outperforms existing baselines across several forecasting benchmarks with exogenous information, including M5, electric price forecasting, UCI Air Quality, and Solar Energy datasets. --- ### Evolving Contextual Safety in Multi-Modal Large Language Models via Inference-Time Self-Reflective Memory Authors: Ce Zhang, Jinxi He, Junyi He, Katia Sycara, Yaqi Xie Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15800v1 Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of visual reasoning tasks, yet their vulnerability to safety risks remains a pressing concern. While prior research primarily focuses on jailbreak defenses that detect and refuse explicitly unsafe inputs, such approaches often overlook contextual safety, which requires models to distinguish subtle contextual differences between scenarios that may appear similar but diverge significantly in safety intent. In this work, we present MM-SafetyBench++, a carefully curated benchmark designed for contextual safety evaluation. Specifically, for each unsafe image-text pair, we construct a corresponding safe counterpart through minimal modifications that flip the user intent while preserving the underlying contextual meaning, enabling controlled evaluation of whether models can adapt their safety behaviors based on contextual understanding. Further, we introduce EchoSafe, a training-free framework that maintains a self-reflective memory bank to accumulate and retrieve safety insights from prior interactions. By integrating relevant past experiences into current prompts, EchoSafe enables context-aware reasoning and continual evolution of safety behavior during inference. Extensive experiments on various multi-modal safety benchmarks demonstrate that EchoSafe consistently achieves superior performance, establishing a strong baseline for advancing contextual safety in MLLMs. All benchmark data and code are available at https://echosafe-mllm.github.io. --- ### Prose2Policy (P2P): A Practical LLM Pipeline for Translating Natural-Language Access Policies into Executable Rego Authors: Vatsal Gupta, Darshan Sreenivasamurthy Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15799v1 Prose2Policy (P2P) is a LLM-based practical tool that translates natural-language access control policies (NLACPs) into executable Rego code (the policy language of Open Policy Agent, OPA). It provides a modular, end-to-end pipeline that performs policy detection, component extraction, schema validation, linting, compilation, automatic test generation and execution. Prose2Policy is designed to bridge the gap between human-readable access requirements and machine-enforceable policy-as-code (PaC) while emphasizing deployment reliability and auditability. We evaluated Prose2Policy on the ACRE dataset and demonstrated a 95.3\% compile rate for accepted policies, with automated testing achieving a 82.2\% positive-test pass rate and a 98.9\% negative-test pass rate. These results indicate that Prose2Policy produces syntactically robust and behaviorally consistent Rego policies suitable for Zero Trust and compliance-driven environments. --- ### CUBE: A Standard for Unifying Agent Benchmarks Authors: Alexandre Lacoste, Nicolas Gontier, Oleh Shliazhko, Aman Jaiswal, Kusha Sareen, Shailesh Nanisetty, Joan Cabezas, Manuel Del Verme, Omar G. Younis, Simone Baratta, Matteo Avalle, Imene Kerboua et al. Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15798v1 The proliferation of agent benchmarks has created critical fragmentation that threatens research productivity. Each new benchmark requires substantial custom integration, creating an "integration tax" that limits comprehensive evaluation. We propose CUBE (Common Unified Benchmark Environments), a universal protocol standard built on MCP and Gym that allows benchmarks to be wrapped once and used everywhere. By separating task, benchmark, package, and registry concerns into distinct API layers, CUBE enables any compliant platform to access any compliant benchmark for evaluation, RL training, or data generation without custom integration. We call on the community to contribute to the development of this standard before platform-specific implementations deepen fragmentation as benchmark production accelerates through 2026. --- ### OMNIFLOW: A Physics-Grounded Multimodal Agent for Generalized Scientific Reasoning Authors: Hao Wu, Yongheng Zhang, Yuan Gao, Fan Xu, Fan Zhang, Ruobing Xie, Ruijian Gou, Yuxuan Liang, Xiaomeng Huang, Xian Wu Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15797v2 Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional logical reasoning capabilities but frequently struggle with the continuous spatiotemporal dynamics governed by Partial Differential Equations (PDEs), often resulting in non-physical hallucinations. Existing approaches typically resort to costly, domain-specific fine-tuning, which severely limits cross-domain generalization and interpretability. To bridge this gap, we propose OMNIFLOW, a neuro-symbolic architecture designed to ground frozen multimodal LLMs in fundamental physical laws without requiring domain-specific parameter updates. OMNIFLOW introduces a novel \textit{Semantic-Symbolic Alignment} mechanism that projects high-dimensional flow tensors into topological linguistic descriptors, enabling the model to perceive physical structures rather than raw pixel values. Furthermore, we construct a Physics-Guided Chain-of-Thought (PG-CoT) workflow that orchestrates reasoning through dynamic constraint injection (e.g., mass conservation) and iterative reflexive verification. We evaluate OMNIFLOW on a comprehensive benchmark spanning microscopic turbulence, theoretical Navier-Stokes equations, and macroscopic global weather forecasting. Empirical results demonstrate that OMNIFLOW significantly outperforms traditional deep learning baselines in zero-shot generalization and few-shot adaptation tasks. Crucially, it offers transparent, physically consistent reasoning reports, marking a paradigm shift from black-box fitting to interpretable scientific reasoning. --- ### Learnability with Partial Labels and Adaptive Nearest Neighbors Authors: Nicolas A. Errandonea, Santiago Mazuelas, Jose A. Lozano, Sanjoy Dasgupta Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15781v2 Prior work on partial labels learning (PLL) has shown that learning is possible even when each instance is associated with a bag of labels, rather than a single accurate but costly label. However, the necessary conditions for learning with partial labels remain unclear, and existing PLL methods are effective only in specific scenarios. In this work, we mathematically characterize the settings in which PLL is feasible. In addition, we present PL A-$k$NN, an adaptive nearest-neighbors algorithm for PLL that is effective in general scenarios and enjoys strong performance guarantees. Experimental results corroborate that PL A-$k$NN can outperform state-of-the-art methods in general PLL scenarios. --- ### Parallelised Differentiable Straightest Geodesics for 3D Meshes Authors: Hippolyte Verninas, Caner Korkmaz, Stefanos Zafeiriou, Tolga Birdal, Simone Foti Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.GR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15780v1 Machine learning has been progressively generalised to operate within non-Euclidean domains, but geometrically accurate methods for learning on surfaces are still falling behind. The lack of closed-form Riemannian operators, the non-differentiability of their discrete counterparts, and poor parallelisation capabilities have been the main obstacles to the development of the field on meshes. A principled framework to compute the exponential map on Riemannian surfaces discretised as meshes is straightest geodesics, which also allows to trace geodesics and parallel-transport vectors as a by-product. We provide a parallel GPU implementation and derive two different methods for differentiating through the straightest geodesics, one leveraging an extrinsic proxy function and one based upon a geodesic finite differences scheme. After proving our parallelisation performance and accuracy, we demonstrate how our differentiable exponential map can improve learning and optimisation pipelines on general geometries. In particular, to showcase the versatility of our method, we propose a new geodesic convolutional layer, a new flow matching method for learning on meshes, and a second-order optimiser that we apply to centroidal Voronoi tessellation. Our code, models, and pip-installable library (digeo) are available at: circle-group.github.io/research/DSG. --- ### Domain Adaptation Without the Compute Burden for Efficient Whole Slide Image Analysis Authors: Umar Marikkar, Muhammad Awais, Sara Atito Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15774v1 Computational methods on analyzing Whole Slide Images (WSIs) enable early diagnosis and treatments by supporting pathologists in detection and classification of tumors. However, the extremely high resolution of WSIs makes end-to-end training impractical compared to typical image analysis tasks. To address this, most approaches use pre-trained feature extractors to obtain fixed representations of whole slides, which are then combined with Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) for downstream tasks. These feature extractors are typically pre-trained on natural image datasets such as ImageNet, which fail to capture domain-specific characteristics. Although domain-specific pre-training on histopathology data yields more relevant feature representations, it remains computationally expensive and fail to capture task-specific characteristics within the domain. To address the computational cost and lack of task-specificity in domain-specific pre-training, we propose EfficientWSI (eWSI), a careful integration of Parameter-Efficient-Fine-Tuning (PEFT) and Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) that enables end-to-end training on WSI tasks. We evaluate eWSI on seven WSI-level tasks over Camelyon16, TCGA and BRACS datasets. Our results show that eWSI when applied with ImageNet feature extractors yields strong classification performance, matching or outperforming MILs with in-domain feature extractors, alleviating the need for extensive in-domain pre-training. Furthermore, when eWSI is applied with in-domain feature extractors, it further improves classification performance in most cases, demonstrating its ability to capture task-specific information where beneficial. Our findings suggest that eWSI provides a task-targeted, computationally efficient path for WSI tasks, offering a promising direction for task-specific learning in computational pathology. --- ### Morphemes Without Borders: Evaluating Root-Pattern Morphology in Arabic Tokenizers and LLMs Authors: Yara Alakeel, Chatrine Qwaider, Hanan Aldarmaki, Sawsan Alqahtani Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15773v1 This work investigates how effectively large language models (LLMs) and their tokenization schemes represent and generate Arabic root-pattern morphology, probing whether they capture genuine morphological structure or rely on surface memorization. Arabic morphological system provides a rich testbed for analyzing how LLMs handle complex, non-concatenative forms and how tokenization choices influence this process. Our study begins with an evaluation of morphological fidelity across Arabic and multilingual tokenizers against gold-standard segmentation, followed by an analysis of LLM performance in productive root-pattern generation using a newly developed test set. Our findings across seven Arabic-centric and multilingual LLMs and their respective tokenizers reveal that tokenizer morphological alignment is not necessary nor sufficient for morphological generation, which questions the role of morphological tokenization in downstream performance. --- ### CorrectionPlanner: Self-Correction Planner with Reinforcement Learning in Autonomous Driving Authors: Yihong Guo, Dongqiangzi Ye, Sijia Chen, Anqi Liu, Xianming Liu Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15771v1 Autonomous driving requires safe planning, but most learning-based planners lack explicit self-correction ability: once an unsafe action is proposed, there is no mechanism to correct it. Thus, we propose CorrectionPlanner, an autoregressive planner with self-correction that models planning as motion-token generation within a propose, evaluate, and correct loop. At each planning step, the policy proposes an action, namely a motion token, and a learned collision critic predicts whether it will induce a collision within a short horizon. If the critic predicts a collision, we retain the sequence of historical unsafe motion tokens as a self-correction trace, generate the next motion token conditioned on it, and repeat this process until a safe motion token is proposed or the safety criterion is met. This self-correction trace, consisting of all unsafe motion tokens, represents the planner's correction process in motion-token space, analogous to a reasoning trace in language models. We train the planner with imitation learning followed by model-based reinforcement learning using rollouts from a pretrained world model that realistically models agents' reactive behaviors. Closed-loop evaluations show that CorrectionPlanner reduces collision rate by over 20% on Waymax and achieves state-of-the-art planning scores on nuPlan. --- ### CLRNet: Targetless Extrinsic Calibration for Camera, Lidar and 4D Radar Using Deep Learning Authors: Marcell Kegl, Andras Palffy, Csaba Benedek, Dariu M. Gavrila Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15767v1 In this paper, we address extrinsic calibration for camera, lidar, and 4D radar sensors. Accurate extrinsic calibration of radar remains a challenge due to the sparsity of its data. We propose CLRNet, a novel, multi-modal end-to-end deep learning (DL) calibration network capable of addressing joint camera-lidar-radar calibration, or pairwise calibration between any two of these sensors. We incorporate equirectangular projection, camera-based depth image prediction, additional radar channels, and leverage lidar with a shared feature space and loop closure loss. In extensive experiments using the View-of-Delft and Dual-Radar datasets, we demonstrate superior calibration accuracy compared to existing state-of-the-art methods, reducing both median translational and rotational calibration errors by at least 50%. Finally, we examine the domain transfer capabilities of the proposed network and baselines, when evaluating across datasets. The code will be made publicly available upon acceptance at: https://github.com/tudelft-iv. --- ### Simulation Distillation: Pretraining World Models in Simulation for Rapid Real-World Adaptation Authors: Jacob Levy, Tyler Westenbroek, Kevin Huang, Fernando Palafox, Patrick Yin, Shayegan Omidshafiei, Dong-Ki Kim, Abhishek Gupta, David Fridovich-Keil Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15759v2 Robot learning requires adaptation methods that improve reliably from limited, mixed-quality interaction data. This is especially challenging in long-horizon, contact-rich tasks, where end-to-end policy finetuning remains inefficient and brittle. World models offer a compelling alternative: by predicting the outcomes of candidate action sequences, they enable online planning through counterfactual reasoning. However, training action-conditioned robotic world models directly in the real world requires diverse data at impractical scale. We introduce Simulation Distillation (SimDist), a framework that uses physics simulators as a scalable source of action-conditioned robot experience. During pretraining, SimDist distills structural priors from the simulator into a world model that enables planning from raw real-world observations. During real-world adaptation, SimDist transfers the encoder, reward model, and value function learned in simulation, and updates only the latent dynamics model using real-world prediction losses. This reduces adaptation to supervised system identification while preserving dense, long-horizon planning signals for online improvement. Across contact-rich manipulation and quadruped locomotion tasks, SimDist rapidly improves with experience, while prior adaptation methods struggle to make progress or degrade during online finetuning. Project website and code: https://sim-dist.github.io --- ### You've Got a Golden Ticket: Improving Generative Robot Policies With A Single Noise Vector Authors: Omkar Patil, Ondrej Biza, Thomas Weng, Karl Schmeckpeper, Wil Thomason, Xiaohan Zhang, Kausik Sivakumar, Robin Walters, Nakul Gopalan, Sebastian Castro, Stephen Hart, Eric Rosen Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15757v3 What happens when a pretrained generative robot policy is provided a constant initial noise as input, rather than repeatedly sampling it from a Gaussian? We demonstrate that the performance of a pretrained, frozen diffusion or flow matching policy can be improved with respect to a downstream reward by swapping the sampling of initial noise from the prior distribution (typically isotropic Gaussian) with a well-chosen, constant initial noise input - a golden ticket. We propose simple search methods to find golden tickets using Monte-Carlo policy evaluation that keeps the pretrained policy frozen, does not train any new networks, and is applicable to all diffusion/flow matching policies (and therefore many VLAs). Our approach to policy improvement makes no assumptions beyond being able to inject initial noise into the policy and calculate (sparse) task rewards of episode rollouts, making it deployable with no additional infrastructure or models. Our method improves the performance of policies in 46 out of 51 tasks across simulated and real-world robot manipulation benchmarks, with absolute improvements in success rate by up to 55% for some simulated tasks, and 28% within 60 search episodes for real-world tasks. Our approach naturally extends to multi-task settings, where we improve the average performance of a VLA policy across 7 tasks by 14% using a single noise vector. Further, we find that, a golden ticket optimized for one task can also boost performance in other related tasks for the same VLA policy. We release a codebase with pretrained policies and golden tickets for simulation benchmarks using VLAs, diffusion policies, and flow matching policies. --- ### AgentWorm: Self-Propagating Attacks Across LLM Agent Ecosystems Authors: Yihao Zhang, Zeming Wei, Xiaokun Luan, Chengcan Wu, Zhixin Zhang, Jiangrong Wu, Haolin Wu, Huanran Chen, Jun Sun, Meng Sun Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.MA, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15727v3 Autonomous LLM-based agents increasingly operate as long-running processes forming densely interconnected multi-agent ecosystems, whose security properties remain largely unexplored. Systems such as OpenClaw, an open-source platform with over 40{,}000 active instances, persistent configurations, tool-execution privileges, and cross-platform messaging, are deployed at scale, yet the security of such agent ecosystems remains largely unexplored. This work presents AgentWorm, the first self-replicating worm attack against a production-scale agent framework, achieving a fully autonomous infection cycle initiated by a single message: the worm first hijacks the victim's core configuration to establish persistent presence across session restarts, then executes an arbitrary payload upon each reboot, and finally propagates itself to every newly encountered peer without further attacker intervention. The attack is evaluated on a controlled testbed across five distinct LLM backends, three infection vectors, and three payload types. Results show a 63\% aggregate attack success rate, sustained multi-hop propagation, and stark divergences in model security postures, highlighting that while execution-level filtering effectively mitigates dormant payloads, skill supply chains remain universally vulnerable. Defenses are evaluated at three layers (prompt-level mitigations sourced from real community practice, the framework's built-in security controls, and an ecosystem-wide measurement of public configurations), revealing that the critical controls capable of breaking the infection loop are not enabled in any of the observed deployments. A cross-framework transferability experiment on Hermes Agent confirms that the underlying vulnerabilities are properties of the autonomous agent design pattern, not artifacts of a single implementation. --- ### MiroThinker-1.7 & H1: Towards Heavy-Duty Research Agents via Verification Authors: MiroMind Team, S. Bai, L. Bing, L. Lei, R. Li, X. Li, X. Lin, E. Min, L. Su, B. Wang, L. Wang, L. Wang et al. Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.IR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15726v1 We present MiroThinker-1.7, a new research agent designed for complex long-horizon reasoning tasks. Building on this foundation, we further introduce MiroThinker-H1, which extends the agent with heavy-duty reasoning capabilities for more reliable multi-step problem solving. In particular, MiroThinker-1.7 improves the reliability of each interaction step through an agentic mid-training stage that emphasizes structured planning, contextual reasoning, and tool interaction. This enables more effective multi-step interaction and sustained reasoning across complex tasks. MiroThinker-H1 further incorporates verification directly into the reasoning process at both local and global levels. Intermediate reasoning decisions can be evaluated and refined during inference, while the overall reasoning trajectory is audited to ensure that final answers are supported by coherent chains of evidence. Across benchmarks covering open-web research, scientific reasoning, and financial analysis, MiroThinker-H1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on deep research tasks while maintaining strong results on specialized domains. We also release MiroThinker-1.7 and MiroThinker-1.7-mini as open-source models, providing competitive research-agent capabilities with significantly improved efficiency. --- ### S2Act: Simple Spiking Actor Authors: Ugur Akcal, Seung Hyun Kim, Mikihisa Yuasa, Hamid Osooli, Jiarui Sun, Ribhav Sahu, Mattia Gazzola, Huy T. Tran, Girish Chowdhary Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.MA, cs.ET, cs.LG, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15725v1 Spiking neural networks (SNNs) and biologically-inspired learning mechanisms are attractive in mobile robotics, where the size and performance of onboard neural network policies are constrained by power and computational budgets. Existing SNN approaches, such as population coding, reward modulation, and hybrid artificial neural network (ANN)-SNN architectures, have shown promising results; however, they face challenges in complex, highly stochastic environments due to SNN sensitivity to hyperparameters and inconsistent gradient signals. To address these challenges, we propose simple spiking actor (S2Act), a computationally lightweight framework that deploys an RL policy using an SNN in three steps: (1) architect an actor-critic model based on an approximated network of rate-based spiking neurons, (2) train the network with gradients using compatible activation functions, and (3) transfer the trained weights into physical parameters of rate-based leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) neurons for inference and deployment. By globally shaping LIF neuron parameters such that their rate-based responses approximate ReLU activations, S2Act effectively mitigates the vanishing gradient problem, while pre-constraining LIF response curves reduces reliance on complex SNN-specific hyperparameter tuning. We demonstrate our method in two multi-agent stochastic environments (capture-the-flag and parking) that capture the complexity of multi-robot interactions, and deploy our trained policies on physical TurtleBot platforms using Intel's Loihi neuromorphic hardware. Our experimental results show that S2Act outperforms relevant baselines in task performance and real-time inference in nearly all considered scenarios, highlighting its potential for rapid prototyping and efficient real-world deployment of SNN-based RL policies. --- ### Meta-TTRL: A Metacognitive Framework for Self-Improving Test-Time Reinforcement Learning in Unified Multimodal Models Authors: Lit Sin Tan, Junzhe Chen, Xiaolong Fu, Lichen Ma, Junshi Huang, Jianzhong Shi, Yan Li, Lijie Wen Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15724v1 Existing test-time scaling (TTS) methods for unified multimodal models (UMMs) in text-to-image (T2I) generation primarily rely on search or sampling strategies that produce only instance-level improvements, limiting the ability to learn from prior inferences and accumulate knowledge across similar prompts. To overcome these limitations, we propose Meta-TTRL, a metacognitive test-time reinforcement learning framework. Meta-TTRL performs test-time parameter optimization guided by model-intrinsic monitoring signals derived from the meta-knowledge of UMMs, achieving self-improvement and capability-level improvement at test time. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Meta-TTRL generalizes well across three representative UMMs, including Janus-Pro-7B, BAGEL, and Qwen-Image, achieving significant gains on compositional reasoning tasks and multiple T2I benchmarks with limited data. We provide the first comprehensive analysis to investigate the potential of test-time reinforcement learning (TTRL) for T2I generation in UMMs. Our analysis further reveals a key insight underlying effective TTRL: metacognitive synergy, where monitoring signals align with the model's optimization regime to enable self-improvement. --- ### Context-Length Robustness in Question Answering Models: A Comparative Empirical Study Authors: Trishita Dhara, Siddhesh Sheth Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15723v1 Large language models are increasingly deployed in settings where relevant information is embedded within long and noisy contexts. Despite this, robustness to growing context length remains poorly understood across different question answering tasks. In this work, we present a controlled empirical study of context-length robustness in large language models using two widely used benchmarks: SQuAD and HotpotQA. We evaluate model accuracy as a function of total context length by systematically increasing the amount of irrelevant context while preserving the answer-bearing signal. This allows us to isolate the effect of context length from changes in task difficulty. Our results show a consistent degradation in performance as context length increases, with substantially larger drops observed on multi-hop reasoning tasks compared to single-span extraction tasks. In particular, HotpotQA exhibits nearly twice the accuracy degradation of SQuAD under equivalent context expansions. These findings highlight task-dependent differences in robustness and suggest that multi-hop reasoning is especially vulnerable to context dilution. We argue that context-length robustness should be evaluated explicitly when assessing model reliability, especially for applications involving long documents or retrieval-augmented generation. --- ### A Framework and Prototype for a Navigable Map of Datasets in Engineering Design and Systems Engineering Authors: H. Sinan Bank, Daniel R. Herber Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.CE, cs.DB, cs.DL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15722v3 The proliferation of data across the system lifecycle presents both a significant opportunity and a challenge for Engineering Design and Systems Engineering (EDSE). While this "digital thread" has the potential to drive innovation, the fragmented and inaccessible nature of existing datasets hinders method validation, limits reproducibility, and slows research progress. Unlike fields such as computer vision and natural language processing, which benefit from established benchmark ecosystems, engineering design research often relies on small, proprietary, or ad-hoc datasets. This paper addresses this challenge by proposing a systematic framework for a "Map of Datasets in EDSE." The framework is built upon a multi-dimensional taxonomy designed to classify engineering datasets by domain, lifecycle stage, data type, and format, enabling faceted discovery. An architecture for an interactive discovery tool is detailed and demonstrated through a working prototype, employing a knowledge graph data model to capture rich semantic relationships between datasets, tools, and publications. An analysis of the current data landscape reveals underrepresented areas ("data deserts") in early-stage design and system architecture, as well as relatively well-represented areas ("data oases") in predictive maintenance and autonomous systems. The paper identifies key challenges in curation and sustainability and proposes mitigation strategies, laying the groundwork for a dynamic, community-driven resource to accelerate data-centric engineering research. --- ### A Framework and Prototype for a Navigable Map of Datasets in Engineering Design and Systems Engineering Authors: H. Sinan Bank, Daniel R. Herber Published: 2026-03-16 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.CE, cs.DB, cs.DL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15722v2 The proliferation of data across the system lifecycle presents both a significant opportunity and a challenge for Engineering Design and Systems Engineering (EDSE). While this "digital thread" has the potential to drive innovation, the fragmented and inaccessible nature of existing datasets hinders method validation, limits reproducibility, and slows research progress. Unlike fields such as computer vision and natural language processing, which benefit from established benchmark ecosystems, engineering design research often relies on small, proprietary, or ad-hoc datasets. This paper addresses this challenge by proposing a systematic framework for a "Map of Datasets in EDSE." The framework is built upon a multi-dimensional taxonomy designed to classify engineering datasets by domain, lifecycle stage, data type, and format, enabling faceted discovery. An architecture for an interactive discovery tool is detailed and demonstrated through a working prototype, employing a knowledge graph data model to capture rich semantic relationships between datasets, tools, and publications. An analysis of the current data landscape reveals underrepresented areas ("data deserts") in early-stage design and system architecture, as well as relatively well-represented areas ("data oases") in predictive maintenance and autonomous systems. The paper identifies key challenges in curation and sustainability and proposes mitigation strategies, laying the groundwork for a dynamic, community-driven resource to accelerate data-centric engineering research. ---