# Research Papers — 2026-04 · bundle page 222 of 233 > Full-text markdown of papers #11051–11100 of 11612 published in 2026-04, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 11612-paper 2026-04 archive (50 papers per file). Canonical page: https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-04/page/222 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-04/page/221.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-04/page/223.md) ### Scale over Preference: The Impact of AI-Generated Content on Online Content Ecology Authors: Tianhao Shi, Yang Zhang, Xiaoyan Zhao, Fengbin Zhu, Chenyi Lei, Han Li, Wenwu Ou, Tian Yang, Yang Song, Yongdong Zhang, Fuli Feng Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01690v2 The rapid proliferation of Artificial Intelligence-Generated Content (AIGC) is fundamentally restructuring online content ecologies, necessitating a rigorous examination of its behavioral and distributional implications. Leveraging a comprehensive longitudinal dataset comprising tens of millions of users from a leading Chinese video-sharing platform, this study elucidated the distinct creation and consumption behaviors characterizing AIGC versus Human-Generated Content (HGC). We identified a prevalent scale-over-preference dynamic, wherein AIGC creators achieve aggregate engagement comparable to HGC creators through high-volume production, despite a marked consumer preference for HGC. Deeper analysis uncovered the ability of the algorithmic content distribution mechanism in moderating these competing interests regarding AIGC. These findings advocated for the implementation of AIGC-sensitive distribution algorithms and precise governance frameworks to ensure the long-term health of the online content platforms. --- ### CoEvoSkills: Self-Evolving Agent Skills via Co-Evolutionary Verification Authors: Hanrong Zhang, Shicheng Fan, Henry Peng Zou, Yankai Chen, Zhenting Wang, Jiayu Zhou, Chengze Li, Wei-Chieh Huang, Yifei Yao, Kening Zheng, Xue, Liu et al. Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01687v3 Anthropic proposes the concept of skills for LLM agents to tackle multi-step professional tasks that simple tool invocations cannot address. A tool is a single, self-contained function, whereas a skill is a structured bundle of interdependent multi-file artifacts. Currently, skill generation is not only label-intensive due to manual authoring, but also may suffer from human--machine cognitive misalignment, which can lead to degraded agent performance, as evidenced by evaluations on SkillsBench. Therefore, we aim to enable agents to autonomously generate skills. However, existing self-evolving methods designed for tools cannot be directly applied to skills due to their increased complexity. To address these issues, we propose CoEvoSkills, a self-evolving skills framework that enables agents to autonomously construct complex, multi-file skill packages. Specifically, CoEvoSkills couples a Skill Generator that iteratively refines skills with a Surrogate Verifier that co-evolves to provide informative and actionable feedback without access to ground-truth test content. On SkillsBench, CoEvoSkills outperforms five baselines on both Claude Code and Codex, and generalizes strongly to six additional LLMs. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Zhang-Henry/CoEvoSkills. --- ### CoEvoSkills: Self-Evolving Agent Skills via Co-Evolutionary Verification Authors: Hanrong Zhang, Shicheng Fan, Henry Peng Zou, Yankai Chen, Zhenting Wang, Jiayu Zhou, Chengze Li, Wei-Chieh Huang, Yifei Yao, Kening Zheng, Xue Liu, Xiaoxiao Li et al. Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01687v2 Anthropic proposes the concept of skills for LLM agents to tackle multi-step professional tasks that simple tool invocations cannot address. A tool is a single, self-contained function, whereas a skill is a structured bundle of interdependent multi-file artifacts. Currently, skill generation is not only label-intensive due to manual authoring, but also may suffer from human--machine cognitive misalignment, which can lead to degraded agent performance, as evidenced by evaluations on SkillsBench. Therefore, we aim to enable agents to autonomously generate skills. However, existing self-evolving methods designed for tools cannot be directly applied to skills due to their increased complexity. To address these issues, we propose CoEvoSkills, a self-evolving skills framework that enables agents to autonomously construct complex, multi-file skill packages. Specifically, CoEvoSkills couples a Skill Generator that iteratively refines skills with a Surrogate Verifier that co-evolves to provide informative and actionable feedback without access to ground-truth test content. On SkillsBench, CoEvoSkills achieves the highest pass rate among five baselines on both Claude Code and Codex, and also exhibits strong generalization capabilities to six additional LLMs. --- ### Invertible Query-Key Coupling Composes with Attention Mechanisms Authors: Barak Gahtan, Alex M. Bronstein Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01683v2 Scaled dot-product attention forms its queries and keys as independent linear projections, so the two never interact before the dot product that scores them. We study coupled query-key dynamics, a pre-scoring transformation that evolves each token's query and key jointly through a shared invertible coupling before standard scoring. We realize it as an alternating affine map in the style of real non-volume-preserving flows: the coupling is the identity at initialization, adds a small fraction of parameters per head, and leaves the softmax and surrounding architecture unchanged. We place coupling on top of existing attention methods rather than replacing them, and ask whether that composition helps. On WikiText-103, adding coupling to Differential Attention improves on it at both 150M and 455M parameters. At 455M the gain is significant at sequence length 512 (p=0.003, six seeds), survives a Bonferroni correction and replicates on a held-out test split; it also holds across rotary-embedding training lengths 512, 1024, and 2048. The same additive direction appears when coupling is added to query-key normalization (significant at 150M) and Multi-Token Attention (directional). Matched controls attribute the gain to the joint pre-scoring coupling rather than to added capacity, and show that removing the invertibility guarantee preserves the 455M gain yet is far worse than the base method at 150M, so invertibility is what makes the coupling reliable across scales. On its own, coupling lowers perplexity at 60M and 150M (one-sided Welch tests, p<0.05) but the gain narrows with scale and is not significant at 455M. We relate the construction to the expressivity of coupling flows, use an associative-recall study to map where coupling helps and where it degrades sharp retrieval, and conclude that coupling is most useful in composition with a scoring-stage method rather than as a standalone change. --- ### Coupled Query-Key Dynamics for Attention Authors: Barak Gahtan, Alex M. Bronstein Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01683v1 Standard scaled dot-product attention computes scores from static, independent projections of the input. We show that evolving queries and keys \emph{jointly} through shared learned dynamics before scoring - which we call \textbf{coupled QK dynamics} - improves language modeling perplexity and training stability. On WikiText-103 at 60M parameters, coupled dynamics achieves 22.55--22.62 perplexity vs.\ 24.22 for standard attention ($-$6.6--6.9\%), with only 0.11\% additional parameters (shared across both instantiations). A structural ablation isolates coupling as the active ingredient: a symplectic (Hamiltonian) and a non-symplectic (Euler) integrator perform identically when both couple Q and K, while an uncoupled MLP baseline of matched capacity reaches only 23.81 with 8$\times$ higher seed variance. The integration step count (1--7) is similarly irrelevant - a single coupled step suffices. A compute-matched comparison reveals that coupling is a \emph{sample-efficiency} mechanism: standard attention trained for 2.4$\times$ longer (matching wall-clock) reaches the same perplexity, but requires 2.4$\times$ more tokens. The advantage scales to 150M ($-$6.7\%) but narrows at 350M ($-$1.0\%), where Differential Attention (18.93) overtakes coupled dynamics (19.35). The benefit is corpus-dependent: coupling helps on domain-coherent text (WikiText-103 $-$6.6\%, PubMed $-$4.5\%) but degrades on heterogeneous web text ($+$10.3\%) and shows no benefit on GLUE. We characterize when coupling helps and when it does not, providing practical guidelines. --- ### PRISM: Probability Reallocation with In-Span Masking for Knowledge-Sensitive Alignment Authors: Chenning Xu, Mao Zheng, Mingyang Song Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01682v1 Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with token-level hard labels can amplify overconfident imitation of factually unsupported targets, causing hallucinations that propagate in multi-sentence generation. We study an augmented SFT setting in which training instances include coarse sentence-level factuality risk labels and inter-sentence dependency annotations, providing structured signals about where factual commitments are weakly supported. We propose \textbf{PRISM}, a differentiable risk-gated framework that modifies learning only at fact-critical positions. PRISM augments standard SFT with a lightweight, model-aware probability reallocation objective that penalizes high-confidence predictions on risky target tokens, with its scope controlled by span-level risk weights and model-aware gating. Experiments on hallucination-sensitive factual benchmarks and general evaluations show that PRISM improves factual aggregates across backbones while maintaining a competitive overall capability profile. Ablations further show that the auxiliary signal is most effective when used conservatively, and that knowledge masking and model-aware reallocation play complementary roles in balancing factual correction and capability preservation. --- ### Bridging Large-Model Reasoning and Real-Time Control via Agentic Fast-Slow Planning Authors: Jiayi Chen, Shuai Wang, Guangxu Zhu, Chengzhong Xu Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01681v1 Large foundation models enable powerful reasoning for autonomous systems, but mapping semantic intent to reliable real-time control remains challenging. Existing approaches either (i) let Large Language Models (LLMs) generate trajectories directly - brittle, hard to verify, and latency-prone - or (ii) adjust Model Predictive Control (MPC) objectives online - mixing slow deliberation with fast control and blurring interfaces. We propose Agentic Fast-Slow Planning, a hierarchical framework that decouples perception, reasoning, planning, and control across natural timescales. The framework contains two bridges. Perception2Decision compresses scenes into ego-centric topologies using an on-vehicle Vision-Language Model (VLM) detector, then maps them to symbolic driving directives in the cloud with an LLM decision maker - reducing bandwidth and delay while preserving interpretability. Decision2Trajectory converts directives into executable paths: Semantic-Guided A* embeds language-derived soft costs into classical search to bias solutions toward feasible trajectories, while an Agentic Refinement Module adapts planner hyperparameters using feedback and memory. Finally, MPC tracks the trajectories in real time, with optional cloud-guided references for difficult cases. Experiments in CARLA show that Agentic Fast-Slow Planning improves robustness under perturbations, reducing lateral deviation by up to 45% and completion time by over 12% compared to pure MPC and an A*-guided MPC baseline. Code is available at https://github.com/cjychenjiayi/icra2026_AFSP. --- ### BTS-rPPG: Orthogonal Butterfly Temporal Shifting for Remote Photoplethysmography Authors: Ba-Thinh Nguyen, Thi-Duyen Ngo, Thanh-Trung Huynh, Thanh-Ha Le, Huy-Hieu Pham Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01679v1 Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) enables contactless physiological sensing from facial videos by analyzing subtle appearance variations induced by blood circulation. However, modeling the temporal dynamics of these signals remains challenging, as many deep learning methods rely on temporal shifting or convolutional operators that aggregate information primarily from neighboring frames, resulting in predominantly local temporal modeling and limited temporal receptive fields. To address this limitation, we propose BTS-rPPG, a temporal modeling framework based on Orthogonal Butterfly Temporal Shifting (BTS). Inspired by the butterfly communication pattern in the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), BTS establishes structured frame interactions via an XOR-based butterfly pairing schedule, progressively expanding the temporal receptive field and enabling efficient propagation of information across distant frames. Furthermore, we introduce an orthogonal feature transfer mechanism (OFT) that filters the source feature with respect to the target context before temporal shifting, retaining only the orthogonal component for cross-frame transmission. This reduces redundant feature propagation and encourages complementary temporal interaction. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that BTS-rPPG improves long-range temporal modeling of physiological dynamics and consistently outperforms existing temporal modeling strategies for rPPG estimation. --- ### Director: Instance-aware Gaussian Splatting for Dynamic Scene Modeling and Understanding Authors: Yuheng Jiang, Yiwen Cai, Zihao Wang, Yize Wu, Sicheng Li, Zhuo Su, Shaohui Jiao, Lan Xu Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01678v1 Volumetric video seeks to model dynamic scenes as temporally coherent 4D representations. While recent Gaussian-based approaches achieve impressive rendering fidelity, they primarily emphasize appearance but are largely agnostic to instance-level structure, limiting stable tracking and semantic reasoning in highly dynamic scenarios. In this paper, we present Director, a unified spatio-temporal Gaussian representation that jointly models human performance, high-fidelity rendering, and instance-level semantics. Our key insight is that embedding instance-consistent semantics naturally complements 4D modeling, enabling more accurate scene decomposition while supporting robust dynamic scene understanding. To this end, we leverage temporally aligned instance masks and sentence embeddings derived from Multimodal Large Language Models to supervise the learnable semantic features of each Gaussian via two MLP decoders, enabling language-aligned 4D representations and enforcing identity consistency over time. To enhance temporal stability, we bridge 2D optical flow with 4D Gaussians and finetune their motions, yielding reliable initialization and reducing drift. For the training, we further introduce a geometry-aware SDF constraints, along with regularization terms that enforces surface continuity, enhancing temporal coherence in dynamic foreground modeling. Experiments demonstrate that Director achieves temporally coherent 4D reconstructions while simultaneously enabling instance segmentation and open-vocabulary querying. --- ### GPA: Learning GUI Process Automation from Demonstrations Authors: Zirui Zhao, Jun Hao Liew, Yan Yang, Wenzhuo Yang, Ziyang Luo, Doyen Sahoo, Silvio Savarese, Junnan Li Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01676v2 GUI Process Automation (GPA) is a lightweight but general vision-based Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which enables fast and stable process replay with only a single demo. Addressing the fragility of traditional RPA and the non-deterministic risks of current vision language model-based GUI agents, GPA introduces three core benefits: (1) Robustness via Sequential Monte Carlo-based localization to handle rescaling and detection uncertainty; (2) Deterministic and Reliability safeguarded by readiness calibration; and (3) Privacy through fast, fully local execution. This approach delivers the adaptability, robustness, and security required for enterprise workflows. It can also be used as an MCP/CLI tool by other agents with coding capabilities so that the agent only reasons and orchestrates while GPA handles the GUI execution. We conducted a pilot experiment to compare GPA with Gemini 3 Pro (with CUA tools) and found that GPA achieves higher success rate with 10 times faster execution speed in finishing long-horizon GUI tasks. --- ### HOT: Harmonic-Constrained Optimal Transport for Remote Photoplethysmography Domain Adaptation Authors: Ba-Thinh Nguyen, Thi-Duyen Ngo, Thanh-Trung Huynh, Thanh-Ha Le, Huy-Hieu Pham Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01675v1 Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) enables non-contact physiological measurement from facial videos; however, its practical deployment is often hindered by substantial performance degradation under domain shift. While recent deep learning-based rPPG methods have achieved strong performance on individual datasets, they frequently overfit to appearance-related factors, such as illumination, camera characteristics, and color response, that vary significantly across domains. To address this limitation, we introduce frequency domain adaptation (FDA) as a principled strategy for modeling appearance variation in rPPG. By transferring low-frequency spectral components that encode domain-dependent appearance characteristics, FDA encourages rPPG models to learn invariance to appearance variations while retaining cardiac-induced signals. To further support physiologically consistent alignment under such appearance variation, we propose Harmonic-Constrained Optimal Transport (HOT), which leverages the harmonic property of cardiac signals to guide alignment between original and FDA-transferred representations. Extensive cross-dataset experiments demonstrate that the proposed FDA and HOT framework effectively enhances the robustness and generalization of rPPG models across diverse datasets. --- ### Can Heterogeneous Language Models Be Fused? Authors: Shilian Chen, Jie Zhou, Qin Chen, Wen Wu, Xin Li, Qi Feng, Liang He Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01674v2 Model merging aims to integrate multiple expert models into a single model that inherits their complementary strengths without incurring the inference-time cost of ensembling. Recent progress has shown that merging can be highly effective when all source models are \emph{homogeneous}, i.e., derived from the same pretrained backbone and therefore share aligned parameter coordinates or compatible task vectors. Yet this assumption is increasingly unrealistic in open model ecosystems, where useful experts are often built on different families such as Llama, Qwen, and Mistral. In such \emph{heterogeneous} settings, direct weight-space fusion becomes ill-posed due to architectural mismatch, latent basis misalignment, and amplified cross-source conflict. We address this problem with \texttt{HeteroFusion} for heterogeneous language model fusion, which consists of two key components: topology-based alignment that transfers knowledge across heterogeneous backbones by matching functional module structures instead of raw tensor coordinates, and conflict-aware denoising that suppresses incompatible or noisy transfer signals during fusion. We further provide analytical justification showing that preserving the target adapter basis while predicting structured updates leads to a stable and well-conditioned transfer process. Across heterogeneous transfer, multi-source fusion, noisy-source robustness, and cross-family generalization settings, \texttt{HeteroFusion} consistently outperforms strong merging, fusion, and ensemble baselines. --- ### PRCCF: A Persona-guided Retrieval and Causal-aware Cognitive Filtering Framework for Emotional Support Conversation Authors: Yanxin Luo, Xiaoyu Zhang, Jing Li, Yan Gao, Donghong Han Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01671v1 Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) aims to alleviate individual emotional distress by generating empathetic responses. However, existing methods face challenges in effectively supporting deep contextual understanding. To address this issue, we propose PRCCF, a Persona-guided Retrieval and Causality-aware Cognitive Filtering framework. Specifically, the framework incorporates a persona-guided retrieval mechanism that jointly models semantic compatibility and persona alignment to enhance response generation. Furthermore, it employs a causality-aware cognitive filtering module to prioritize causally relevant external knowledge, thereby improving contextual cognitive understanding for emotional reasoning. Extensive experiments on the ESConv dataset demonstrate that PRCCF outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on both automatic metrics and human evaluations. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/YancyLyx/PRCCF. --- ### Hierarchical Memory Orchestration for Personalized Persistent Agents Authors: Junming Liu, Yifei Sun, Weihua Cheng, Haodong Lei, Yuqi Li, Yirong Chen, Ding Wang Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01670v1 While long-term memory is essential for intelligent agents to maintain consistent historical awareness, the accumulation of extensive interaction data often leads to performance bottlenecks. Naive storage expansion increases retrieval noise and computational latency, overwhelming the reasoning capacity of models deployed on constrained personal devices. To address this, we propose Hierarchical Memory Orchestration (HMO), a framework that organizes interaction history into a three-tiered directory driven by user-centric contextual relevance. Our system maintains a compact primary cache, coupling recent and pivotal memories with an evolving user profile to ensure agent reasoning remains aligned with individual behavioral traits. This primary cache is complemented by a high-priority secondary layer, both of which are managed within a global archive of the full interaction history. Crucially, the user persona dictates memory redistribution across this hierarchy, promoting records mapped to long-term patterns toward more active tiers while relegating less relevant information. This targeted orchestration surfaces historical knowledge precisely when needed while maintaining a lean and efficient active search space. Evaluations on multiple benchmarks achieve state-of-the-art performance. Real-world deployments in ecosystems like OpenClaw demonstrate that HMO significantly enhances agent fluidity and personalization. --- ### Robust Embodied Perception in Dynamic Environments via Disentangled Weight Fusion Authors: Juncen Guo, Xiaoguang Zhu, Jingyi Wu, Jingyu Zhang, Jingnan Cai, Zhenghao Niu, Liang Song Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01669v1 Embodied perception systems face severe challenges of dynamic environment distribution drift when they continuously interact in open physical spaces. However, the existing domain incremental awareness methods often rely on the domain id obtained in advance during the testing phase, which limits their practicability in unknown interaction scenarios. At the same time, the model often overfits to the context-specific perceptual noise, which leads to insufficient generalization ability and catastrophic forgetting. To address these limitations, we propose a domain-id and exemplar-free incremental learning framework for embodied multimedia systems, which aims to achieve robust continuous environment adaptation. This method designs a disentangled representation mechanism to remove non-essential environmental style interference, and guide the model to focus on extracting semantic intrinsic features shared across scenes, thereby eliminating perceptual uncertainty and improving generalization. We further use the weight fusion strategy to dynamically integrate the old and new environment knowledge in the parameter space, so as to ensure that the model adapts to the new distribution without storing historical data and maximally retains the discrimination ability of the old environment. Extensive experiments on multiple standard benchmark datasets show that the proposed method significantly reduces catastrophic forgetting in a completely exemplar-free and domain-id free setting, and its accuracy is better than the existing state-of-the-art methods. --- ### M3D-BFS: a Multi-stage Dynamic Fusion Strategy for Sample-Adaptive Multi-Modal Brain Network Analysis Authors: Rui Dong, Xiaotong Zhang, Jiaxing Li, Yueying Li, Jiayin Wei, Youyong Kong Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01667v1 Multi-modal fusion is of great significance in neuroscience which integrates information from different modalities and can achieve better performance than uni-modal methods in downstream tasks. Current multi-modal fusion methods in brain networks, which mainly focus on structural connectivity (SC) and functional connectivity (FC) modalities, are static in nature. They feed different samples into the same model with identical computation, ignoring inherent difference between input samples. This lack of sample adaptation hinders model's further performance. To this end, we innovatively propose a multi-stage dynamic fusion strategy (M3D-BFS) for sample-adaptive multi-modal brain network analysis. Unlike other static fusion methods, we design different mixture-of-experts (MoEs) for uni- and multi-modal representations where modules can adaptively change as input sample changes during inference. To alleviate issue of MoE where training of experts may be collapsed, we divide our method into 3 stages. We first train uni-modal encoders respectively, then pretrain single experts of MoEs before finally finetuning the whole model. A multi-modal disentanglement loss is designed to enhance the final representations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work for dynamic fusion for multi-modal brain network analysis. Extensive experiments on different real-world datasets demonstrates the superiority of M3D-BFS. --- ### DynaVid: Learning to Generate Highly Dynamic Videos using Synthetic Motion Data Authors: Wonjoon Jin, Jiyun Won, Janghyeok Han, Qi Dai, Chong Luo, Seung-Hwan Baek, Sunghyun Cho Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01666v1 Despite recent progress, video diffusion models still struggle to synthesize realistic videos involving highly dynamic motions or requiring fine-grained motion controllability. A central limitation lies in the scarcity of such examples in commonly used training datasets. To address this, we introduce DynaVid, a video synthesis framework that leverages synthetic motion data in training, which is represented as optical flow and rendered using computer graphics pipelines. This approach offers two key advantages. First, synthetic motion offers diverse motion patterns and precise control signals that are difficult to obtain from real data. Second, unlike rendered videos with artificial appearances, rendered optical flow encodes only motion and is decoupled from appearance, thereby preventing models from reproducing the unnatural look of synthetic videos. Building on this idea, DynaVid adopts a two-stage generation framework: a motion generator first synthesizes motion, and then a motion-guided video generator produces video frames conditioned on that motion. This decoupled formulation enables the model to learn dynamic motion patterns from synthetic data while preserving visual realism from real-world videos. We validate our framework on two challenging scenarios, vigorous human motion generation and extreme camera motion control, where existing datasets are particularly limited. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DynaVid improves the realism and controllability in dynamic motion generation and camera motion control. --- ### ContextBudget: Budget-Aware Context Management for Long-Horizon Search Agents Authors: Yong Wu, YanZhao Zheng, TianZe Xu, ZhenTao Zhang, YuanQiang Yu, JiHuai Zhu, Chao Ma, BinBin Lin, BaoHua Dong, HangCheng Zhu, RuoHui Huang, Gang Yu Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01664v1 LLM-based agents show strong potential for long-horizon reasoning, yet their context size is limited by deployment factors (e.g., memory, latency, and cost), yielding a constrained context budget. As interaction histories grow, this induces a trade-off between retaining past information and staying within the context limit. To address this challenge, we propose Budget-Aware Context Management (BACM), which formulates context management as a sequential decision problem with a context budget constraint. It enables agents to assess the available budget before incorporating new observations and decide when and how much of the interaction history to compress. We further develop BACM-RL, an end-to-end curriculum-based reinforcement learning approach that learns compression strategies under varying context budgets. Experiments on compositional multi-objective QA and long-horizon web browsing benchmarks show that BACM-RL consistently outperforms prior methods across model scales and task complexities, achieving over $1.6\times$ gains over strong baselines in high-complexity settings, while maintaining strong advantages as budgets shrink, where most methods exhibit a downward performance trend. --- ### Ontology-Aware Design Patterns for Clinical AI Systems: Translating Reification Theory into Software Architecture Authors: Florian Odi Stummer Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01661v1 Clinical AI systems routinely train on health data structurally distorted by documentation workflows, billing incentives, and terminology fragmentation. Prior work has characterised the mechanisms of this distortion: the three-forces model of documentary enactment, the reification feedback loop through which AI may amplify coding artefacts, and terminology governance failures that allow semantic drift to accumulate. Yet translating these insights into implementable software architecture remains an open problem. This paper proposes seven ontology-aware design patterns in Gang-of-Four pattern language for building clinical AI pipelines resilient to ontological distortion. The patterns address data ingestion validation (Ontological Checkpoint), low-frequency signal preservation (Dormancy-Aware Pipeline), continuous drift monitoring (Drift Sentinel), parallel representation maintenance (Dual-Ontology Layer), feedback loop interruption (Reification Circuit Breaker), terminology evolution management (Terminology Version Gate), and pluggable regulatory compliance (Regulatory Compliance Adapter). Each pattern is specified with Problem, Forces, Solution, Consequences, Known Uses, and Related Patterns. We illustrate their composition in a reference architecture for a primary care AI system and provide a walkthrough tracing all seven patterns through a diabetes risk prediction scenario. This paper does not report empirical validation; it offers a design vocabulary grounded in theoretical analysis, subject to future evaluation in production systems. Three patterns have partial precedent in existing systems; the remaining four have not been formally described. Limitations include the absence of runtime benchmarks and restriction to the German and EU regulatory context. --- ### CORAL: Towards Autonomous Multi-Agent Evolution for Open-Ended Discovery Authors: Ao Qu, Han Zheng, Zijian Zhou, Yihao Yan, Yihong Tang, Shao Yong Ong, Fenglu Hong, Kaichen Zhou, Chonghe Jiang, Minwei Kong, Jiacheng Zhu, Xuan Jiang et al. Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01658v3 Large language model (LLM)-based evolution is a promising approach for open-ended discovery, where progress requires sustained search and knowledge accumulation. Existing methods still rely heavily on fixed heuristics and hard-coded exploration rules, which limit the autonomy of LLM agents. We present CORAL, the first framework for autonomous multi-agent evolution on open-ended problems. CORAL replaces rigid control with long-running agents that explore, reflect, and collaborate through shared persistent memory, asynchronous multi-agent execution, and heartbeat-based interventions. It also provides practical safeguards, including isolated workspaces, evaluator separation, resource management, and agent session and health management. Evaluated on diverse mathematical, algorithmic, and systems optimization tasks, CORAL sets new state-of-the-art results on 10 tasks, achieving 3-10 times higher improvement rates with far fewer evaluations than fixed evolutionary search baselines across tasks. On Anthropic's kernel engineering task, four co-evolving agents improve the best known score from 1363 to 1103 cycles. Mechanistic analyses further show how these gains arise from knowledge reuse and multi-agent exploration and communication. Together, these results suggest that greater agent autonomy and multi-agent evolution can substantially improve open-ended discovery. Code is available at https://github.com/Human-Agent-Society/CORAL. --- ### CORAL: Towards Autonomous Multi-Agent Evolution for Open-Ended Discovery Authors: Ao Qu, Han Zheng, Zijian Zhou, Yihao Yan, Yihong Tang, Shao Yong Ong, Fenglu Hong, Kaichen Zhou, Chonghe Jiang, Minwei Kong, Jiacheng Zhu, Xuan Jiang et al. Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01658v2 Large language model (LLM)-based evolution is a promising approach for open-ended discovery, where progress requires sustained search and knowledge accumulation. Existing methods still rely heavily on fixed heuristics and hard-coded exploration rules, which limit the autonomy of LLM agents. We present CORAL, the first framework for autonomous multi-agent evolution on open-ended problems. CORAL replaces rigid control with long-running agents that explore, reflect, and collaborate through shared persistent memory, asynchronous multi-agent execution, and heartbeat-based interventions. It also provides practical safeguards, including isolated workspaces, evaluator separation, resource management, and agent session and health management. Evaluated on diverse mathematical, algorithmic, and systems optimization tasks, CORAL sets new state-of-the-art results on 10 tasks, achieving 3-10 times higher improvement rates with far fewer evaluations than fixed evolutionary search baselines across tasks. On Anthropic's kernel engineering task, four co-evolving agents improve the best known score from 1363 to 1103 cycles. Mechanistic analyses further show how these gains arise from knowledge reuse and multi-agent exploration and communication. Together, these results suggest that greater agent autonomy and multi-agent evolution can substantially improve open-ended discovery. Code is available at https://github.com/Human-Agent-Society/CORAL. --- ### What Do Claim Verification Datasets Actually Test? A Reasoning Trace Analysis Authors: Delip Rao, Chris Callison-Burch Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01657v1 Despite rapid progress in claim verification, we lack a systematic understanding of what reasoning these benchmarks actually exercise. We generate structured reasoning traces for 24K claim-verification examples across 9 datasets using GPT-4o-mini and find that direct evidence extraction dominates, while multi-sentence synthesis and numerical reasoning are severely under-represented. A dataset-level breakdown reveals stark biases: some datasets almost exclusively test lexical matching, while others require information synthesis in roughly half of cases. Using a compact 1B-parameter reasoning verifier, we further characterize five error types and show that error profiles vary dramatically by domain -- general-domain verification is dominated by lexical overlap bias, scientific verification by overcautiousness, and mathematical verification by arithmetic reasoning failures. Our findings suggest that high benchmark scores primarily reflect retrieval-plus-entailment ability. We outline recommendations for building more challenging evaluation suites that better test the reasoning capabilities verification systems need. --- ### Moiré Video Authentication: A Physical Signature Against AI Video Generation Authors: Yuan Qing, Kunyu Zheng, Lingxiao Li, Boqing Gong, Chang Xiao Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.MM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01654v2 Recent advances in video generation have made AI-synthesized content increasingly difficult to distinguish from real footage. We propose a physics-based authentication signature that real cameras produce naturally, but that generative models cannot faithfully reproduce. Our approach exploits the Moiré effect: the interference fringes formed when a camera views a compact two-layer grating structure. We derive the Moiré motion invariant, showing that fringe phase and grating image displacement are linearly coupled by optical geometry, independent of viewing distance and grating structure. A verifier extracts both signals from video and tests their correlation. We validate the invariant on both real-captured and AI-generated videos from multiple state-of-the-art generators, and find that real and AI-generated videos produce significantly different correlation signatures, suggesting a robust means of differentiating them. Our work demonstrates that deterministic optical phenomena can serve as physically grounded, verifiable signatures against AI-generated video. --- ### Cognitive Energy Modeling for Neuroadaptive Human-Machine Systems using EEG and WGAN-GP Authors: Sriram Sattiraju, Vaibhav Gollapalli, Aryan Shah, Timothy McMahan Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.LG, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01653v2 Electroencephalography (EEG) provides a non-invasive insight into the brain's cognitive and emotional dynamics. However, modeling how these states evolve in real time and quantifying the energy required for such transitions remains a major challenge. The Schrödinger Bridge Problem (SBP) offers a principled probabilistic framework to model the most efficient evolution between the brain states, interpreted as a measure of cognitive energy cost. While generative models such as GANs have been widely used to augment EEG data, it remains unclear whether synthetic EEG preserves the underlying dynamical structure required for transition-based analysis. In this work, we address this gap by using SBP-derived transport cost as a metric to evaluate whether GAN-generated EEG retains the distributional geometry necessary for energy-based modeling of cognitive state transitions. We compare transition energies derived from real and synthetic EEG collected during Stroop tasks and demonstrate strong agreement across group and participant-level analyses. These results indicate that synthetic EEG preserves the transition structure required for SBP-based modeling, enabling its use in data-efficient neuroadaptive systems. We further present a framework in which SBP-derived cognitive energy serves as a control signal for adaptive human-machine systems, supporting real-time adjustment of system behavior in response to user cognitive and affective state. --- ### Cognitive Energy Modeling for Neuroadaptive Human-Machine Systems using EEG and WGAN-GP Authors: Sriram Sattiraju, Vaibhav Gollapalli, Aryan Shah, Timothy McMahan Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.LG, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01653v1 Electroencephalography (EEG) provides a non-invasive insight into the brain's cognitive and emotional dynamics. However, modeling how these states evolve in real time and quantifying the energy required for such transitions remains a major challenge. The Schrödinger Bridge Problem (SBP) offers a principled probabilistic framework to model the most efficient evolution between the brain states, interpreted as a measure of cognitive energy cost. While generative models such as GANs have been widely used to augment EEG data, it remains unclear whether synthetic EEG preserves the underlying dynamical structure required for transition-based analysis. In this work, we address this gap by using SBP-derived transport cost as a metric to evaluate whether GAN-generated EEG retains the distributional geometry necessary for energy-based modeling of cognitive state transitions. We compare transition energies derived from real and synthetic EEG collected during Stroop tasks and demonstrate strong agreement across group and participant-level analyses. These results indicate that synthetic EEG preserves the transition structure required for SBP-based modeling, enabling its use in data-efficient neuroadaptive systems. We further present a framework in which SBP-derived cognitive energy serves as a control signal for adaptive human-machine systems, supporting real-time adjustment of system behavior in response to user cognitive and affective state. --- ### ThinknCheck: Grounded Claim Verification with Compact, Reasoning-Driven, and Interpretable Models Authors: Delip Rao, Feijiang Han, Chris Callison-Burch Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01652v1 We present ThinknCheck, a 1B-parameter verifier for grounded claim verification that first produces a short, structured rationale and then a binary verdict. We construct LLMAggreFact-Think, a 24.1k reasoning-augmented training set derived from LLMAggreFact, and fine-tune a 4-bit Gemma3 model to follow this format. On LLMAggreFact, ThinknCheck attains 78.1 balanced accuracy (BAcc), surpassing MiniCheck-7B (77.4) with 7x fewer parameters; removing the reasoning step reduces BAcc to 57.5. On SciFact, ThinknCheck reaches 64.7 BAcc, a +14.7 absolute gain over MiniCheck-7B. By contrast, zero-shot chain-of-thought on the base Gemma3-1B harms accuracy relative to direct answers, and preference optimization with a simple format+accuracy reward underperforms supervised reasoning. To probe the latter, we introduce GSMClaims and a domain-specialized variant, ThinknCheck-Science, which improves across benchmarks, including 61.0\% accuracy on GSMClaims. Overall, explicit, supervised reasoning enables compact verifiers that are competitive while remaining resource-efficient and interpretable. --- ### Label Shift Estimation With Incremental Prior Update Authors: Yunrui Zhang, Gustavo Batista, Salil S. Kanhere Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01651v1 An assumption often made in supervised learning is that the training and testing sets have the same label distribution. However, in real-life scenarios, this assumption rarely holds. For example, medical diagnosis result distributions change over time and across locations; fraud detection models must adapt as patterns of fraudulent activity shift; the category distribution of social media posts changes based on trending topics and user demographics. In the task of label shift estimation, the goal is to estimate the changing label distribution $p_t(y)$ in the testing set, assuming the likelihood $p(x|y)$ does not change, implying no concept drift. In this paper, we propose a new approach for post-hoc label shift estimation, unlike previous methods that perform moment matching with confusion matrix estimated from a validation set or maximize the likelihood of the new data with an expectation-maximization algorithm. We aim to incrementally update the prior on each sample, adjusting each posterior for more accurate label shift estimation. The proposed method is based on intuitive assumptions on classifiers that are generally true for modern probabilistic classifiers. The proposed method relies on a weaker notion of calibration compared to other methods. As a post-hoc approach for label shift estimation, the proposed method is versatile and can be applied to any black-box probabilistic classifier. Experiments on CIFAR-10 and MNIST show that the proposed method consistently outperforms the current state-of-the-art maximum likelihood-based methods under different calibrations and varying intensities of label shift. --- ### AromaGen: Interactive Generation of Rich Olfactory Experiences with Multimodal Language Models Authors: Awu Chen, Silang Wang, Yunge Wen, Jianing Yu, Zinab Eisa, Ana Julia Santos Lopes, Jas Brooks, Hiroshi Ishii, Paul Pu Liang Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01650v3 Smell's connections with food, memory, and social experience have motivated researchers to bring olfaction into interactive systems. Multimodal AI opens new possibilities for generating smells from natural language, yet it remains unclear whether pretrained models encode sufficient olfactory knowledge to translate language into perceptible compositions. We present AromaGen, an AI-powered 12-channel wearable olfactory system that maps free-form natural-language descriptions to 12 base odorants selected to cover a semantically derived olfactory space, while supporting iterative refinement through natural-language feedback. In a between-subjects study (N=60) across 50 real-world benchmark smells, participants distinguished AromaGen-generated target smells above chance in a three-alternative forced-choice task, with retrieval-augmented AI composition performing comparably to human-expert composition and zero-shot AI composition. Natural-language feedback significantly improved the perceived similarity of both AI- and human-expert compositions. Our findings demonstrate the feasibility of using pretrained multimodal AI, with human aroma composition data, to generate perceptible olfactory experiences from natural language. --- ### AromaGen: Interactive Generation of Rich Olfactory Experiences with Multimodal Language Models Authors: Yunge Wen, Awu Chen, Jianing Yu, Jas Brooks, Hiroshi Ishii, Paul Pu Liang Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01650v2 Smell's deep connection with food, memory, and social experience has long motivated researchers to bring olfaction into interactive systems. Yet most olfactory interfaces remain limited to fixed scent cartridges and pre-defined generation patterns, and the scarcity of large-scale olfactory datasets has further constrained AI-based approaches. We present AromaGen, an AI-powered wearable interface capable of real-time, general-purpose aroma generation from free-form text or visual inputs. AromaGen is powered by a multimodal LLM that leverages latent olfactory knowledge to map semantic inputs to structured mixtures of 12 carefully selected base odorants, released through a neck-worn dispenser. Users can iteratively refine generated aromas through natural language feedback via in-context learning. Through a controlled user study ($N = 26$), AromaGen matches human-composed mixtures in zero-shot generation and significantly surpasses them after iterative refinement, achieving a median similarity of 8/10 to real food aromas and reducing perceived artificiality to levels comparable to real food. AromaGen is a step towards real-world interactive aroma generation, opening new possibilities for communication, wellbeing, and immersive technologies. --- ### Exploring Robust Multi-Agent Workflows for Environmental Data Management Authors: Boyuan Guan, Jason Liu, Yanzhao Wu, Kiavash Bahreini Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01647v2 Embedding LLM-driven agents into environmental FAIR data management is compelling - they can externalize operational knowledge and scale curation across heterogeneous data and evolving conventions. However, replacing deterministic components with probabilistic workflows changes the failure mode: LLM pipelines may generate plausible but incorrect outputs that pass superficial checks and propagate into irreversible actions such as DOI minting and public release. We introduce EnviSmart, a production data management system deployed on campus-wide storage infrastructure for environmental research. EnviSmart treats reliability as an architectural property through two mechanisms: a three-track knowledge architecture that externalizes behaviors (governance constraints), domain knowledge (retrievable context), and skills (tool-using procedures) as persistent, interlocking artifacts; and a role-separated multi-agent design where deterministic validators and audited handoffs restore fail-stop semantics at trust boundaries before irreversible steps. We compare two production deployments. The University's GIS Center Ecological Archive (849 curated datasets) serves as a single-agent baseline. SF2Bench, a compound flooding benchmark comprising 2,452 monitoring stations and 8,557 published files spanning 39 years, validates the multi-agent workflow. The multi-agent approach improved both efficiency - completed by a single operator in two days with repeated artifact reuse across deployments - and reliability: audited handoffs detected and blocked a coordinate transformation error affecting all 2,452 stations before publication. A representative incident (ISS-004) demonstrated boundary-based containment with 10-minute detection latency, zero user exposure, and 80-minute resolution. This paper has been accepted at PEARC 2026. --- ### MonoSAOD: Monocular 3D Object Detection with Sparsely Annotated Label Authors: Junyoung Jung, Seokwon Kim, Jung Uk Kim Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01646v2 Monocular 3D object detection has achieved impressive performance on densely annotated datasets. However, it struggles when only a fraction of objects are labeled due to the high cost of 3D annotation. This sparsely annotated setting is common in real-world scenarios where annotating every object is impractical. To address this, we propose a novel framework for sparsely annotated monocular 3D object detection with two key modules. First, we propose Road-Aware Patch Augmentation (RAPA), which leverages sparse annotations by augmenting segmented object patches onto road regions while preserving 3D geometric consistency. Second, we propose Prototype-Based Filtering (PBF), which generates high-quality pseudo-labels by filtering predictions through prototype similarity and depth uncertainty. It maintains global 2D RoI feature prototypes and selects pseudo-labels that are both feature-consistent with learned prototypes and have reliable depth estimates. Our training strategy combines geometry-preserving augmentation with prototype-guided pseudo-labeling to achieve robust detection under sparse supervision. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The source code is available at https://github.com/VisualAIKHU/MonoSAOD . --- ### TOL: Textual Localization with OpenStreetMap Authors: Youqi Liao, Shuhao Kang, Jingyu Xu, Olaf Wysocki, Yan Xia, Jianping Li, Zhen Dong, Bisheng Yang, Xieyuanli Chen Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.CV, cs.MM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01644v2 Natural language provides an intuitive way to express spatial intent in geospatial applications. While existing localization methods often rely on dense point cloud maps or high-resolution imagery, OpenStreetMap (OSM) offers a compact and freely available map representation that encodes rich semantic and structural information, making it well-suited for large-scale localization. However, text-to-OSM (T2O) localization remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we formulate the T2O localization task, which aims to estimate accurate 2D positions in urban environments from textual scene descriptions without relying on geometric observations or GNSS-based initial location. To support the proposed task, we introduce TOL, a large-scale benchmark spanning multiple continents and diverse urban environments. TOL contains approximately 121K textual queries paired with OSM map tiles and covers about 316 km of road trajectories across Boston, Karlsruhe, and Singapore. We further propose TOLoc, a coarse-to-fine localization framework that explicitly models the semantics of surrounding objects and their directional information. In the coarse stage, direction-aware features are extracted from both textual descriptions and OSM tiles to construct global descriptors, which are used to retrieve candidate locations for the query. In the fine stage, the query text and top-1 retrieved tile are jointly processed, where a dedicated alignment module fuses the textual descriptor and local map features to regress the 2-DoF pose. Experimental results demonstrate that TOLoc achieves strong localization performance, outperforming the best existing method by 6.53\%, 9.93\%, and 8.32\% at 5 m, 10 m, and 25 m thresholds, respectively, and shows strong generalization to unseen environments. Dataset, code and models will be publicly available at: https://github.com/WHU-USI3DV/TOL. --- ### LivingWorld: Interactive 4D World Generation with Environmental Dynamics Authors: Hyeongju Mun, In-Hwan Jin, Sohyeong Kim, Kyeongbo Kong Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01641v2 We introduce LivingWorld, an interactive framework for generating 4D worlds with environmental dynamics from a single image. While recent advances in 3D scene generation enable large-scale environment creation, most approaches focus primarily on reconstructing static geometry, leaving scene-scale environmental dynamics such as clouds, water, or smoke largely unexplored. Modeling such dynamics is challenging because motion must remain coherent across an expanding scene while supporting low-latency user feedback. LivingWorld addresses this challenge by progressively constructing a globally coherent motion field as the scene expands. To maintain global consistency during expansion, we introduce a geometry-aware alignment module that resolves directional and scale ambiguities across views. We further represent motion using a compact hash-based motion field, enabling efficient querying and stable propagation of dynamics throughout the scene. This representation also supports bidirectional motion propagation during rendering, producing long and temporally coherent 4D sequences without relying on expensive video-based refinement. On a single RTX 5090 GPU, generating each new scene expansion step requires 9 seconds, followed by 3 seconds for motion alignment and motion field updates, enabling interactive 4D world generation with globally coherent environmental dynamics. Video demonstrations are available at paper.pnu-cvsp.com/LivingWorld. --- ### Fragile Reasoning: A Mechanistic Analysis of LLM Sensitivity to Meaning-Preserving Perturbations Authors: Shou-Tzu Han, Rodrigue Rizk, KC Santosh Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01639v1 Large language models demonstrate strong performance on mathematical reasoning benchmarks, yet remain surprisingly fragile to meaning-preserving surface perturbations. We systematically evaluate three open-weight LLMs, Mistral-7B, Llama-3-8B, and Qwen2.5-7B, on 677 GSM8K problems paired with semantically equivalent variants generated through name substitution and number format paraphrasing. All three models exhibit substantial answer-flip rates (28.8%-45.1%), with number paraphrasing consistently more disruptive than name swaps. To trace the mechanistic basis of these failures, we introduce the Mechanistic Perturbation Diagnostics (MPD) framework, combining logit lens analysis, activation patching, component ablation, and the Cascading Amplification Index (CAI) into a unified diagnostic pipeline. CAI, a novel metric quantifying layer-wise divergence amplification, outperforms first divergence layer as a failure predictor for two of three architectures (AUC up to 0.679). Logit lens reveals that flipped samples diverge from correct predictions at significantly earlier layers than stable samples. Activation patching reveals a stark architectural divide in failure localizability: Llama-3 failures are recoverable by patching at specific layers (43/60 samples), while Mistral and Qwen failures are broadly distributed (3/60 and 0/60). Based on these diagnostic signals, we propose a mechanistic failure taxonomy (localized, distributed, and entangled) and validate it through targeted repair experiments: steering vectors and layer fine-tuning recover 12.2% of localized failures (Llama-3) but only 7.2% of entangled (Qwen) and 5.2% of distributed (Mistral) failures. --- ### Seclens: Role-specific Evaluation of LLM's for security vulnerablity detection Authors: Subho Halder, Siddharth Saxena, Kashinath Kadaba Shrish, Thiyagarajan M Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01637v1 Existing benchmarks for LLM-based vulnerability detection compress model performance into a single metric, which fails to reflect the distinct priorities of different stakeholders. For example, a CISO may emphasize high recall of critical vulnerabilities, an engineering leader may prioritize minimizing false positives, and an AI officer may balance capability against cost. To address this limitation, we introduce SecLens-R, a multi-stakeholder evaluation framework structured around 35 shared dimensions grouped into 7 measurement categories. The framework defines five role-specific weighting profiles: CISO, Chief AI Officer, Security Researcher, Head of Engineering, and AI-as-Actor. Each profile selects 12 to 16 dimensions with weights summing to 80, yielding a composite Decision Score between 0 and 100. We apply SecLens-R to evaluate 12 frontier models on a dataset of 406 tasks derived from 93 open-source projects, covering 10 programming languages and 8 OWASP-aligned vulnerability categories. Evaluations are conducted across two settings: Code-in-Prompt (CIP) and Tool-Use (TU). Results show substantial variation across stakeholder perspectives, with Decision Scores differing by as much as 31 points for the same model. For instance, Qwen3-Coder achieves an A (76.3) under the Head of Engineering profile but a D (45.2) under the CISO profile, while GPT-5.4 shows a similar disparity. These findings demonstrate that vulnerability detection is inherently a multi-objective problem and that stakeholder-aware evaluation provides insights that single aggregated metrics obscure. --- ### CRIT: Graph-Based Automatic Data Synthesis to Enhance Cross-Modal Multi-Hop Reasoning Authors: Junyoung Sung, Seungwoo Lyu, Minjun Kim, Sumin An, Arsha Nagrani, Paul Hongsuck Seo Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01634v1 Real-world reasoning often requires combining information across modalities, connecting textual context with visual cues in a multi-hop process. Yet, most multimodal benchmarks fail to capture this ability: they typically rely on single images or set of images, where answers can be inferred from a single modality alone. This limitation is mirrored in the training data, where interleaved image-text content rarely enforces complementary, multi-hop reasoning. As a result, Vision-Language Models (VLMs) frequently hallucinate and produce reasoning traces poorly grounded in visual evidence. To address this gap, we introduce CRIT, a new dataset and benchmark built with a graph-based automatic pipeline for generating complex cross-modal reasoning tasks. CRIT consists of diverse domains ranging from natural images, videos, and text-rich sources, and includes a manually verified test set for reliable evaluation. Experiments on this benchmark reveal that even state-of-the-art models struggle on such reasoning tasks. Models trained on CRIT show significant gains in cross-modal multi-hop reasoning, including strong improvements on SPIQA and other standard multimodal benchmarks. --- ### Grounding AI-in-Education Development in Teachers' Voices: Findings from a National Survey in Indonesia Authors: Nurul Aisyah, Muhammad Dehan Al Kautsar, Arif Hidayat, Fajri Koto Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01630v1 Despite emerging use in Indonesian classrooms, there is limited large-scale, teacher-centred evidence on how AI is used in practice and what support teachers need, hindering the development of context-appropriate AI systems and policies. To address this gap, we conduct a nationwide survey of 349 K-12 teachers across elementary, junior high, and senior high schools. We find increasing use of AI for pedagogy, content development, and teaching media, although adoption remains uneven. Elementary teachers report more consistent use, while senior high teachers engage less; mid-career teachers assign higher importance to AI, and teachers in Eastern Indonesia perceive greater value. Across levels, teachers primarily use AI to reduce instructional preparation workload (e.g., assessment, lesson planning, and material development). However, generic outputs, infrastructure constraints, and limited contextual alignment continue to hinder effective classroom integration. --- ### RefinementEngine: Automating Intent-to-Device Filtering Policy Deployment under Network Constraints Authors: Davide Colaiacomo, Chiara Bonfanti, Cataldo Basile Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01627v1 Translating security intent into deployable network enforcement rules and maintaining their effectiveness despite evolving cyber threats remains a largely manual process in most Security Operations Centers (SOCs). In large and heterogeneous networks, this challenge is complicated by topology-dependent reachability constraints and device-specific security control capabilities, making the process slow, error-prone, and a recurring source of misconfigurations. This paper presents RefinementEngine, an engine that automates the refinement of high-level security intents into low-level, deployment-ready configurations. Given a network topology, devices, and available security controls, along with high-level intents and Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) reports, RefinementEngine automatically generates settings that implement the desired intent, counter reported threats, and can be directly deployed on target security controls. The proposed approach is validated through real-world use cases on packet and web filtering policies derived from actual CTI reports, demonstrating both correctness, practical applicability, and adaptability to new data. --- ### OSCAR: Orchestrated Self-verification and Cross-path Refinement Authors: Yash Shah, Abhijit Chakraborty, Naresh Kumar Devulapally, Vishnu Lokhande, Vivek Gupta Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01624v2 Diffusion language models (DLMs) expose their denoising trajectories, offering a natural handle for inference-time control; accordingly, an ideal hallucination mitigation framework should intervene during generation using this model-native signal rather than relying on an externally trained hallucination classifier. Toward this, we formulate commitment uncertainty localization: given a denoising trajectory, identify token positions whose cross-chain entropy exceeds an unsupervised threshold before factually unreliable commitments propagate into self-consistent but incorrect outputs. We introduce a suite of trajectory-level assessments, including a cross-chain divergence-at-hallucination (CDH) metric, for principled comparison of localization methods. We also introduce OSCAR, a training-free inference-time framework operationalizing this formulation. OSCAR runs N parallel denoising chains with randomized reveal orders, computes cross-chain Shannon entropy to detect high-uncertainty positions, and then performs targeted remasking conditioned on retrieved evidence. Ablations confirm that localization and correction contribute complementary gains, robust across N in {4, 8, 16}. On TriviaQA, HotpotQA, RAGTruth, and CommonsenseQA using LLaDA-8B and Dream-7B, OSCAR enhances generation quality by significantly reducing hallucinated content and improving factual accuracy through uncertainty-guided remasking, which also facilitates more effective integration of retrieved evidence. Its native entropy-based uncertainty signal surpasses that of specialized trained detectors, highlighting an inherent capacity of diffusion language models to identify factual uncertainty that is not present in the sequential token commitment structure of autoregressive models. --- ### Expert-Choice Routing Enables Adaptive Computation in Diffusion Language Models Authors: Shuibai Zhang, Caspian Zhuang, Chihan Cui, Zhihan Yang, Fred Zhangzhi Peng, Yanxin Zhang, Haoyue Bai, Zack Jia, Yang Zhou, Guanhua Chen, Ming Liu Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01622v2 Diffusion language models (DLMs) enable parallel, non-autoregressive text generation, yet existing DLM mixture-of-experts (MoE) models inherit token-choice (TC) routing from autoregressive systems, leading to load imbalance and rigid computation allocation. We show that expert-choice (EC) routing is a better fit for DLMs: it provides deterministic load balancing by design, yielding higher throughput and faster convergence than TC. Building on the property that EC capacity is externally controllable, we introduce timestep-dependent expert capacity, which varies expert allocation according to the denoising step. We find that allocating more capacity to low-mask-ratio steps consistently achieves the best performance under matched FLOPs, and provide a mechanistic explanation: tokens in low-mask-ratio contexts exhibit an order-of-magnitude higher learning efficiency, so concentrating compute on these steps yields the largest marginal return. Finally, we show that existing pretrained TC DLMs can be retrofitted to EC by replacing only the router, achieving faster convergence and improved accuracy across diverse downstream tasks. Together, these results establish EC routing as a superior paradigm for DLM MoE models and demonstrate that computation in DLMs can be treated as an adaptive policy rather than a fixed architectural constant. Code is available at https://github.com/zhangshuibai/EC-DLM. --- ### DWDP: Distributed Weight Data Parallelism for High-Performance LLM Inference on NVL72 Authors: Wanqian Li, Jintao Peng, Zongfei Jing, Tianyu Zhang, Ze Long, Xianjie Qiao, Xiaoming Chen, Dongxu Yang, Kefeng Duan, June Yang Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.DC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01621v2 Large language model (LLM) inference increasingly depends on multi-GPU execution, yet existing inference parallelization strategies require layer-wise inter-rank synchronization, making end-to-end performance sensitive to workload imbalance. We present DWDP (Distributed Weight Data Parallelism), an inference parallelization strategy that preserves data-parallel execution while offloading MoE weights across peer GPUs and fetching missing experts on demand. By removing collective inter-rank synchronization, DWDP allows each GPU to progress independently. We further address the practical overheads of this design with two optimizations for split-weight management and asynchronous remote-weight prefetch. Implemented in TensorRT-LLM and evaluated with DeepSeek-R1 on GB200 NVL72, DWDP improves end-to-end output TPS/GPU by 8.8% at comparable TPS/user in the 20-100 TPS/user serving range under 8K input sequence length and 1K output sequence length. --- ### Automatic Image-Level Morphological Trait Annotation for Organismal Images Authors: Vardaan Pahuja, Samuel Stevens, Alyson East, Sydne Record, Yu Su Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01619v3 Morphological traits are physical characteristics of biological organisms that provide vital clues on how organisms interact with their environment. Yet extracting these traits remains a slow, expert-driven process, limiting their use in large-scale ecological studies. A major bottleneck is the absence of high-quality datasets linking biological images to trait-level annotations. In this work, we demonstrate that sparse autoencoders trained on foundation-model features yield monosemantic, spatially grounded neurons that consistently activate on meaningful morphological parts. Leveraging this property, we introduce a trait annotation pipeline that localizes salient regions and uses vision-language prompting to generate interpretable trait descriptions. Using this approach, we construct Bioscan-Traits, a dataset of 80K trait annotations spanning 19K insect images from BIOSCAN-5M. Human evaluation confirms the biological plausibility of the generated morphological descriptions. We assess design sensitivity through a comprehensive ablation study, systematically varying key design choices and measuring their impact on the quality of the resulting trait descriptions. By annotating traits with a modular pipeline rather than prohibitively expensive manual efforts, we offer a scalable way to inject biologically meaningful supervision into foundation models, enable large-scale morphological analyses, and bridge the gap between ecological relevance and machine-learning practicality. --- ### Tex3D: Objects as Attack Surfaces via Adversarial 3D Textures for Vision-Language-Action Models Authors: Jiawei Chen, Simin Huang, Jiawei Du, Shuaihang Chen, Yu Tian, Mingjie Wei, Chao Yu, Zhaoxia Yin Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01618v1 Vision-language-action (VLA) models have shown strong performance in robotic manipulation, yet their robustness to physically realizable adversarial attacks remains underexplored. Existing studies reveal vulnerabilities through language perturbations and 2D visual attacks, but these attack surfaces are either less representative of real deployment or limited in physical realism. In contrast, adversarial 3D textures pose a more physically plausible and damaging threat, as they are naturally attached to manipulated objects and are easier to deploy in physical environments. Bringing adversarial 3D textures to VLA systems is nevertheless nontrivial. A central obstacle is that standard 3D simulators do not provide a differentiable optimization path from the VLA objective function back to object appearance, making it difficult to optimize through an end-to-end manner. To address this, we introduce Foreground-Background Decoupling (FBD), which enables differentiable texture optimization through dual-renderer alignment while preserving the original simulation environment. To further ensure that the attack remains effective across long-horizon and diverse viewpoints in the physical world, we propose Trajectory-Aware Adversarial Optimization (TAAO), which prioritizes behaviorally critical frames and stabilizes optimization with a vertex-based parameterization. Built on these designs, we present Tex3D, the first framework for end-to-end optimization of 3D adversarial textures directly within the VLA simulation environment. Experiments in both simulation and real-robot settings show that Tex3D significantly degrades VLA performance across multiple manipulation tasks, achieving task failure rates of up to 96.7\%. Our empirical results expose critical vulnerabilities of VLA systems to physically grounded 3D adversarial attacks and highlight the need for robustness-aware training. --- ### Analysis of LLM Performance on AWS Bedrock: Receipt-item Categorisation Case Study Authors: Gabby Sanchez, Sneha Oommen, Cassandra T. Britto, Di Wang, Jung-De Chiou, Maria Spichkova Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.AI, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01615v1 This paper presents a systematic, cost-aware evaluation of large language models (LLMs) for receipt-item categorisation within a production-oriented classification framework. We compare four instruction-tuned models available through AWS Bedrock: Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Claude 4 Sonnet, Mixtral 8x7B Instruct, and Mistral 7B Instruct. The aim of the study was (1) to assess performance across accuracy, response stability, and token-level cost, and (2) to investigate what prompting methods, zero-shot or few-shot, are especially appropriate both in terms of accuracy and in terms of incurred costs. Results of our experiments demonstrated that Claude 3.7 Sonnet achieves the most favourable balance between classification accuracy and cost efficiency. --- ### Pseudo-Quantized Actor-Critic Algorithm for Robustness to Noisy Temporal Difference Error Authors: Taisuke Kobayashi Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01613v1 In reinforcement learning (RL), temporal difference (TD) errors are widely adopted for optimizing value and policy functions. However, since the TD error is defined by a bootstrap method, its computation tends to be noisy and destabilize learning. Heuristics to improve the accuracy of TD errors, such as target networks and ensemble models, have been introduced so far. While these are essential approaches for the current deep RL algorithms, they cause side effects like increased computational cost and reduced learning efficiency. Therefore, this paper revisits the TD learning algorithm based on control as inference, deriving a novel algorithm capable of robust learning against noisy TD errors. First, the distribution model of optimality, a binary random variable, is represented by a sigmoid function. Alongside forward and reverse Kullback-Leibler divergences, this new model derives a robust learning rule: when the sigmoid function saturates with a large TD error probably due to noise, the gradient vanishes, implicitly excluding it from learning. Furthermore, the two divergences exhibit distinct gradient-vanishing characteristics. Building on these analyses, the optimality is decomposed into multiple levels to achieve pseudo-quantization of TD errors, aiming for further noise reduction. Additionally, a Jensen-Shannon divergence-based approach is approximately derived to inherit the characteristics of both divergences. These benefits are verified through RL benchmarks, demonstrating stable learning even when heuristics are insufficient or rewards contain noise. --- ### NEMESIS: Noise-suppressed Efficient MAE with Enhanced Superpatch Integration Strategy Authors: Kyeonghun Kim, Hyeonseok Jung, Youngung Han, Hyunsu Go, Eunseob Choi, Seongbin Park, Junsu Lim, Jiwon Yang, Sumin Lee, Insung Hwang, Ken Ying-Kai Liao, Nam-Joon Kim Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01612v1 Volumetric CT imaging is essential for clinical diagnosis, yet annotating 3D volumes is expensive and time-consuming, motivating self-supervised learning (SSL) from unlabeled data. However, applying SSL to 3D CT remains challenging due to the high memory cost of full-volume transformers and the anisotropic spatial structure of CT data, which is not well captured by conventional masking strategies. We propose NEMESIS, a masked autoencoder (MAE) framework that operates on local 128x128x128 superpatches, enabling memory-efficient training while preserving anatomical detail. NEMESIS introduces three key components: (i) noise-enhanced reconstruction as a pretext task, (ii) Masked Anatomical Transformer Blocks (MATB) that perform dual-masking through parallel plane-wise and axis-wise token removal, and (iii) NEMESIS Tokens (NT) for cross-scale context aggregation. On the BTCV multi-organ classification benchmark, NEMESIS with a frozen backbone and a linear classifier achieves a mean AUROC of 0.9633, surpassing fully fine-tuned SuPreM (0.9493) and VoCo (0.9387). Under a low-label regime with only 10% of available annotations, it retains an AUROC of 0.9075, demonstrating strong label efficiency. Furthermore, the superpatch-based design reduces computational cost to 31.0 GFLOPs per forward pass, compared to 985.8 GFLOPs for the full-volume baseline, providing a scalable and robust foundation for 3D medical imaging. --- ### GraphWalk: Enabling Reasoning in Large Language Models through Tool-Based Graph Navigation Authors: Taraneh Ghandi, Hamidreza Mahyar, Shachar Klaiman Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01610v1 The use of knowledge graphs for grounding agents in real-world Q&A applications has become increasingly common. Answering complex queries often requires multi-hop reasoning and the ability to navigate vast relational structures. Standard approaches rely on prompting techniques that steer large language models to reason over raw graph context, or retrieval-augmented generation pipelines where relevant subgraphs are injected into the context. These, however, face severe limitations with enterprise-scale KGs that cannot fit in even the largest context windows available today. We present GraphWalk, a problem-agnostic, training-free, tool-based framework that allows off-the-shelf LLMs to reason through sequential graph navigation, dramatically increasing performance across different tasks. Unlike task-specific agent frameworks that encode domain knowledge into specialized tools, GraphWalk equips the LLM with a minimal set of orthogonal graph operations sufficient to traverse any graph structure. We evaluate whether models equipped with GraphWalk can compose these operations into correct multi-step reasoning chains, where each tool call represents a verifiable step creating a transparent execution trace. We first demonstrate our approach on maze traversal, a problem non-reasoning models are completely unable to solve, then present results on graphs resembling real-world enterprise knowledge graphs. To isolate structural reasoning from world knowledge, we evaluate on entirely synthetic graphs with random, non-semantic labels. Our benchmark spans 12 query templates from basic retrieval to compound first-order logic queries. Results show that tool-based traversal yields substantial and consistent gains over in-context baselines across all model families tested, with gains becoming more pronounced as scale increases, precisely where in-context approaches fail catastrophically. --- ### Swift-SVD: Theoretical Optimality Meets Practical Efficiency in Low-Rank LLM Compression Authors: Ruoling Qi, Yirui Liu, Xuaner Wu, Xiangyu Wang, Ming Li, Chen Chen, Jian Chen, Yin Chen, Qizhen Weng Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01609v2 The deployment of Large Language Models is constrained by the memory and bandwidth demands of static weights and dynamic Key-Value cache. SVD-based compression provides a hardware-friendly solution to reduce these costs. However, existing methods suffer from two key limitations: some are suboptimal in reconstruction error, while others are theoretically optimal but practically inefficient. In this paper, we propose Swift-SVD, an activation-aware, closed-form compression framework that simultaneously guarantees theoretical optimum, practical efficiency and numerical stability. Swift-SVD incrementally aggregates covariance of output activations given a batch of inputs and performs a single eigenvalue decomposition after aggregation, enabling training-free, fast, and optimal layer-wise low-rank approximation. We employ effective rank to analyze local layer-wise compressibility and design a dynamic rank allocation strategy that jointly accounts for local reconstruction loss and end-to-end layer importance. Extensive experiments across six LLMs and eight datasets demonstrate that Swift-SVD outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving optimal compression accuracy while delivering 3-70X speedups in end-to-end compression time. Our code is available at https://github.com/hiahei/Swift-SVD. --- ### From Multi-Agent to Single-Agent: When Is Skill Distillation Beneficial? Authors: Binyan Xu, Dong Fang, Haitao Li, Kehuan Zhang Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01608v5 Multi-agent systems (MAS) for structured data-science tasks externalize analytical control through workflows spanning stages, tools, shared state, verification, and repair. Distilling such workflows into a single-agent skill can reduce orchestration overhead, but it remains unclear which workflow components should cross the control boundary. We distinguish capability resources, which expand what an agent can do, from pipeline guidance, which constrains which solutions it explores. On the same causal-estimation instances, adding task-qualified source pipeline guidance to a capability-matched skill changes normalized utility by +19.6 points under method-selection accuracy but -10.3 points under numerical error. To explain this reversal, we introduce Behavior-Outcome Freedom (F), a pre-synthesis diagnostic of signed behavior-outcome rank mismatch, and formalize its candidate-conditional role through Signed Anchor-Rank Transfer. Motivated by this mechanism, we propose AdaSkill, which preserves validated capability resources, removes runtime orchestration, and conditionally inherits pipeline guidance using a calibrated rule over F. Across 16 capability-matched interventions, the native-scale Full-minus-Discard effect decreases across the continuous F scale (r = -0.80, p < 0.001), while a 15-treatment atomic sweep localizes the reversal to pipeline guidance. Across 11 datasets spanning four structured data-science task families, AdaSkill combines strong task performance with substantially lower deployment overhead. --- ### From Multi-Agent to Single-Agent: When Is Skill Distillation Beneficial? Authors: Binyan Xu, Dong Fang, Haitao Li, Kehuan Zhang Published: 2026-04-02 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01608v4 Multi-agent systems (MAS) tackle complex tasks by distributing expertise, though this often comes at the cost of heavy coordination overhead, context fragmentation, and brittle phase ordering. Distilling a MAS into a single-agent skill can bypass these costs, but this conversion lacks a principled answer for when and what to distill. Instead, the empirical outcome is surprisingly inconsistent: skill lift ranges from a 28% improvement to a 2% degradation across metrics of the exact same task. In this work, we reveal that skill utility is governed not by the task, but by the evaluation metric. We introduce Metric Freedom (F), the first a priori predictor of skill utility. F measures the topological rigidity of a metric's scoring landscape by quantifying how output diversity couples with score variance via a Mantel test. Guided by F, we propose AdaSkill, a two-stage adaptive distillation framework. Stage 1 acts as a selective extraction mechanism, extracting tools and knowledge while discarding restrictive structures on "free" metrics to preserve exploration. Stage 2 applies iterative refinement selectively on free metrics, exploiting their forgiving scoring landscape to safely maximize remaining headroom. Evaluating across 4 tasks, 11 datasets, and 6 metrics, F strongly predicts skill utility (r=-0.85, p<0.0001). Strikingly, identical agent trajectories yield diametrically opposite skill lifts under rigid versus free metrics, demonstrating that skill utility is fundamentally a metric-level property. Driven by this signal, AdaSkill matches or exceeds the original MAS while reducing cost up to 8x and latency by up to 15x. ---