# Research Papers — 2026-05 · bundle page 141 of 326 > Full-text markdown of papers #7001–7050 of 16266 published in 2026-05, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 16266-paper 2026-05 archive (50 papers per file). Canonical page: https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-05/page/141 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-05/page/140.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-05/page/142.md) ### Bridge: Retrieval-Augmented Spatiotemporal Modeling for Urban Delivery Demand Authors: Yihong Tang, Tong Nie, Junlin He, Qianjun Huang, Dingyi Zhuang, Lijun Sun Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19172v1 Forecasting urban delivery demand becomes substantially more challenging when newly added service regions lack historical records. Existing spatiotemporal forecasters effectively model spatial dependence once sufficient node histories are available. Still, they remain parametric and therefore struggle to recover short-term operational dynamics in cold-start regions. Geospatial embeddings help identify where a region is and what function it serves, yet they do not directly reveal how a similar region behaves under a comparable temporal context. We propose Bridge, a retrieval-augmented spatiotemporal graph framework that combines an inductive contextual graph backbone with a time-aware memory of region-time windows. For each target region, Bridge retrieves future demand patterns from the memory using both regional context and recent dynamics, and refines the backbone forecast through a gated fusion mechanism. To align retrieval with forecasting utility, we further train the retriever with a future-aware objective that favors entries whose future trajectories best match the target. Experiments on four real-world delivery datasets show that Bridge consistently improves over competitive spatiotemporal baselines in both within-city cold-start and cross-city transfer with partial observations. The results show that retrieval augmentation provides a useful operational memory for cold-start urban demand forecasting when parametric graph generalization alone is insufficient. --- ### Reducing Diffusion Model Memorization with Higher Order Langevin Dynamics Authors: Benjamin Sterling, Mónica F. Bugallo, Tom Tirer Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19170v2 Diffusion/score-based models have emerged as powerful generative models, capable of generating high-quality samples that mimic the training data distribution. However, it has been observed that they are prone to reproducing training samples-known as "memorization"-potentially violating copyright and privacy. In this paper, we study the effect of Higher-Order Langevin Dynamics (HOLD) on this phenomenon. HOLD diffusion processes introduce auxiliary variables; if the data variable is interpreted as "position," then the auxiliary variables can be interpreted as "velocity" and "acceleration," depending on the chosen order of the model. They were originally proposed based on the intuition that they regularize the trajectories of the data variable by implicitly imposing additional dynamical constraints. Our work provides, to our knowledge, the first theoretical characterization of the regularization effect of HOLD. Specifically, we show that in HOLD, the dynamics of the data variable are governed by a low-pass-filtered version of the learned score function, with smoothness increasing with the order of HOLD. We then analyze the optimal empirical score and the possibility of distribution collapse. Together, our results explain the mitigation of memorization as the model order increases. Finally, we present an empirical study on real-world data that supports our theory and highlights this distinct advantage of HOLD over standard diffusion in practice. --- ### A Heuristic Approach for Performance Tuning in RL-based Quadrotor Control via Reward Design and Termination Conditions Authors: Fausto Mauricio Lagos Suarez, Akshit Saradagi, Vidya Sumathy, George Nikolakopoulos Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.RO, cs.LG, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19166v1 Reinforcement learning (RL)-based quadrotor control policies have achieved impressive performance in tasks such as fast navigation in cluttered environments and drone racing, where the focus is on speed and agility. However, in several applications, such as infrastructure inspection, it is critical to achieve precise, controlled maneuvers with tunable performance. In this article, we present a novel heuristic approach to achieve tunable performance in RL-based Quadrotor control through reward design and termination conditions. We present a novel reward structure containing dual bandwidth exponentials that achieves a baseline critically damped response in setpoint tracking, with low steady-state errors. When trained with a Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm, in conjunction with episode truncation conditions, the desired performance is achieved in 6 million time steps in a sample-efficient manner. In order to tune the performance about the baseline behavior, we present intuitive heuristic rules to adjust the reward weights and exponential coefficients to achieve faster (acrobatic-like) and slower (inspection-like) settling time performance, while retaining the baseline critically damped response and approximately 2\% steady-state error. We evaluate the three RL policies (baseline, acrobatic, and inspection) across 100 trials and show accurate and tunable performance in position and yaw tracking from random initial conditions, thereby demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed heuristic approach. --- ### How Far Are We From True Auto-Research? Authors: Zhengxin Zhang, Ning Wang, Sainyam Galhotra, Claire Cardie Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CY, cs.LG, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19156v1 Recent auto-research systems can produce complete papers, but feasibility is not the same as quality, and the field still lacks a systematic study of how good agent-generated papers actually are. We introduce ResearchArena, a minimal scaffold that lets off-the-shelf agents (Claude Code using Opus 4.6, Codex using GPT-5.4, and Kimi Code using K2.5) carry out the full research loop themselves (ideation, experimentation, paper writing, self-refinement) under only lightweight guidance. Across 13 computer science seeds and 3 trials per agent-domain pair, ResearchArena yields 117 agent-generated papers, each evaluated under three complementary lenses: a manuscript-only reviewer (SAR), an artifact-aware peer review (PR) in which agents inspect the workspace alongside the manuscript, and an human conducted meta-review. Under SAR alone the picture is optimistic: Claude Code obtains the highest score, outperforms Analemma's FARS, and matches the weighted-average human ICLR 2025 submission, suggesting that minimally scaffolded agents can produce papers that look competitive on manuscript-only review. Manual inspection, however, reveals this picture is overstated: SAR scores are poorly aligned with its actual acceptance decisions and reward plausible framing without verifying experimental substance. Under artifact-aware PR scores drop sharply, and manual auditing identifies experimental rigor as the major bottleneck, decomposing into three failure modes (fabricated results, underpowered experiments, and plan/execution mismatch) that are highly agent-dependent: Codex 5%/8% paper-vs-artifact mismatch / fabricated references versus Kimi Code 77%/72%, a $\sim$15$\times$ spread that tracks distinct research personas the agents develop. None of the 117 agent-generated papers reaches the acceptance bar of a top-tier venue. This suggests that we are still gapped from the true auto-research. --- ### Efficient coding along the visual hierarchy Authors: Ananya Passi, Brian S. Robinson, Michael F. Bonner Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19155v1 Biological visual systems learn from limited experience, unlike deep learning models that rely on millions of training images. What learning principles make this possible? We tested whether efficient coding, the idea that neural representations capture the statistical structure of natural inputs, can build a hierarchy of human-aligned visual features from limited data. We developed an unsupervised learning procedure in which each layer of a deep network compresses its inputs onto the dominant modes of variation in natural images, using only local statistics and no labels, tasks, or backpropagation. This unsupervised procedure yields features that progress from edges and colors to textures and shapes. The features of this deep efficient coding model are readily recognized by human observers and are predictive of image-evoked fMRI responses in human visual cortex. Furthermore, a hybrid learning procedure that combines efficient coding with supervised fine-tuning yields better brain alignment in low-data settings and more rapid category learning. These findings suggest that efficient coding may shape representations across the entire visual hierarchy and help explain the data efficiency of biological vision. --- ### Information Processing Capacity of Stationary Physical Systems: Theory, Data-efficient Estimation Methods, and Photonic Demonstration Authors: Rahul Uma Ramachandran, Serge Massar Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: stat.ML, cs.ET, cs.IT, cs.LG, cs.NE, physics.optics arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19152v2 Physical computing systems provide a promising route toward hardware-native machine learning, but their computational capabilities remain difficult to characterize in a principled, task-independent, and data-efficient way. We extend the Information Processing Capacity (IPC) framework to stationary physical computing systems and establish several fundamental results: individual capacities are bounded between zero and one, their sum over a complete basis is bounded by the number of readouts, and noise strictly reduces this bound. We address the finite-sample estimation of IPC and derive the asymptotic form of the systematic positive bias affecting naive estimators. Building on these results, we introduce data-efficient estimation methods based on Richardson extrapolation and Sobol quasi-random sampling. We validate the framework experimentally using a photonic computing system based on picosecond laser pulses propagating through a nonlinear optical fibre. By varying the laser power and fibre length, we observe systematic shifts of the IPC distribution toward higher-order nonlinear capacities induced by the Kerr effect. Finally, we demonstrate that the total IPC strongly correlates with performance on benchmark machine-learning tasks and provides a reliable estimate of the effective dimensionality of the system. These results establish IPC as a practical bridge between the intrinsic dynamics of physical computing systems and their machine-learning performance. --- ### Progressive Autonomy as Preference Learning: A Formalization of Trust Calibration for Agentic Tool Use Authors: Changkun Ou Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.AI, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19151v1 We formalize trust calibration for agentic tool use (deciding when an automated agent's proposed action may execute autonomously versus require human approval) as a preference-learning problem. A policy gateway maintains a Gaussian-process posterior over a latent human risk-tolerance function, observed through a probit likelihood on binary approve/deny feedback, and escalates to the human exactly where the approval outcome is most uncertain. We show this is structurally an instance of Preferential Bayesian Optimization, inheriting its inference machinery (approximate Gaussian-process classification) and its sample-efficiency argument (uncertainty-targeted querying), while differing in objective: classifying an action space into allow/block/ask regions rather than optimizing a design. --- ### Flash PD-SSM: Memory-Optimized Structured Sparse State-Space Models Authors: Aleksandar Terzić, Francesco Carzaniga, Nicolas Menet, Yannick Biehl, Michael Hersche, Thomas Hofmann, Abbas Rahimi Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19150v1 State-space models (SSMs) face a fundamental trade-off between efficiency and expressivity that is mainly dictated by the structure of the model's transition matrix. Unstructured transition matrices enable maximal expressivity, as measured by their ability to model finite-state automaton (FSA) transitions, but come at a prohibitively high compute and memory cost. In contrast, most structured transition matrix forms are highly efficient both in runtime and memory consumption, but suffer from limited expressivity. Building on recent work on structured sparse SSMs, we propose Flash PD-SSM, a novel SSM that achieves comparable throughput to widely-used structured SSMs with significantly better expressivity guarantees. Flash PD-SSM maintains a trainable set of structured sparse matrices, a single one of which is discretely selected at each time-step, enabling FSA expressiveness at the level of unstructured matrices while maintaining the efficiency required for training models at scale. First, we validate Flash PD-SSM against a suite of alternative models on synthetic mechanistic and state-tracking tasks, finding that its theoretical expressivity is achieved in practice. Second, on multivariate time-series tasks involving sequences of length over 17,000, we find that Flash PD-SSM defines a new state-of-the-art (SoTA) accuracy among competing SSM methods. Finally, we demonstrate that Flash PD-SSM is an effective drop-in replacement for hybrid LLMs, yielding improvements both in natural language state-tracking and in common language modeling scenarios. The model exhibits increased throughput and decreased memory consumption compared to SSMs widely used in frontier language models. --- ### Agent Meltdowns: The Road to Hell Is Paved with Helpful Agents Authors: Rishi Jha, Harold Triedman, Arkaprabha Bhattacharya, Vitaly Shmatikov Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19149v1 Agents operating with computer and Web use inevitably encounter errors: inaccessible webpages, missing files, local and remote misconfigurations, etc. These errors do not thwart agents based on state-of-the-art models. They helpfully continue to look for ways to complete their tasks. We introduce, characterize, and measure a new type of agent failure we call \emph{accidental meltdown}: unsafe or harmful behavior in response to a benign environmental error, in the absence of any adversarial inputs. Because meltdowns are not captured by the existing reliability or safety benchmarks, we develop a taxonomy of meltdown behaviors. We then implement an agent-agnostic infrastructure for injecting simulated local and remote errors into the rollout environment and use it to systematically evaluate agent systems powered by GPT, Grok, and Gemini. Our evaluation demonstrates that meltdowns (e.g., conducting unauthorized reconnaissance or subverting access control) of varying severity and success occur in 64.7\% of agent rollouts that encounter simulated errors, spanning all combinations of agent system, backing model, and error type. In over half of these meltdowns, unsafe behaviors are not reported to the user. Comparing behaviors of the same agents with and without errors, we find that exploration in response to errors is correlated with unsafe and harmful behavior. --- ### Be Kind, Rewrite: Benign Projections via Rewriting Defend Against LLM Data Poisoning Attacks Authors: John T. Halloran, Noopur S. Bhatt Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19147v1 Large language models (LLMs) are highly susceptible to backdoor attacks (BAs), wherein training samples are poisoned using trigger-based harmful content. Furthermore, existing defenses have proven ineffective when extensively tested across BA patterns. To better combat BAs, we explore the use of LLM rewriting as a proactive defense against data poisoning. First, we theoretically show that when LLM rewriting utilizes open-book benign samples--termed open-book benign rewriting (OBBR)--the probability of a rewritten output being benign is strictly greater than that of closed-book rewriting. Thus, OBBR neutralizes harmful content by projecting training samples to the space of benign prompts. We then show that, in contrast to previous defenses, OBBR effectively mitigates a large number of existing BAs: across five known BAs and four widely used LLMs, OBBR increases safety performance by an average 51% compared to state-of-the-art BA defenses and 25.7% compared to closed-book rewriting methods. Finally, we show that OBBR is computationally efficient relative to other BA defenses, does not degrade model performance on natural language tasks after fine-tuning, and is capable of defending against non-trigger based data poisoning attacks. --- ### PMF-CL: Pareto-Minimal-Forgetting Continual Learner for Conflicting Tasks Authors: Srijith Nair, Atilla Eryilmaz, Jia Liu Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19145v2 In the literature, many continual learning (CL) algorithms have been proposed to address the issue of catastrophic forgetting in ML models (i.e., learning new tasks leads to the loss of performance on previously learned tasks). Although all CL approaches use some form of memory to retain information about past tasks, a grounded understanding of what information needs to be stored to minimize catastrophic forgetting remains elusive. Recently, it has been recognized that under the strong assumption of the existence of a common global minimizer over all tasks, catastrophic forgetting can be completely avoided. However, in practice, tasks rarely have a common global minimizer, and a certain amount of forgetting is inevitable. In this paper, we propose a foundational framework for principled and systematic CL of conflicting tasks using a multi-task learning (MTL) perspective. The approach is based on finding Pareto-optimal solutions, i.e., the solutions which, by definition, minimally forget the previous tasks in the Pareto sense. We derive Pareto-minimal-forgetting CL algorithms for linear and basis-function regression, and general loss functions which have a quadratic upper bound, e.g., logistic regression. For quadratic problems, PMF-CL uses memory-efficient iterative updates with a static memory footage of $\mathcal{O}(d^2)$ for models with $d$ parameters. --- ### GRASP: Deterministic argument ranking in interaction graphs Authors: Diganta Misra, Antonio Orvieto, Rediet Abebe, Volkan Cevher Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CY, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19141v1 Large language models are increasingly deployed as automated judges to evaluate the strength of arguments. As this role expands, their legitimacy depends on consistency, transparency, and the ability to separate argumentative structure from rhetorical appeal. However, we show that holistic judging - a common LLM-as-a-Judge practice where a model provides a global verdict on a debate - suffers from substantial inter-model disagreement. We argue that this instability arises from collapsing a debate's complex interaction structure into a single opaque score. To address this, we propose GRASP (Gradual Ranking with Attacks and Support Propagation), a deterministic framework that aggregates stable local interaction judgments into a global ranking via a convergent attack--defense propagation operator. We show that local interaction judgments are more reproducible than holistic rankings in LLM-as-a-Judge evaluations, allowing GRASP to produce more consistent global rankings. We further show that GRASP scores do not correlate with human "convincingness" labels, highlighting a vital sociotechnical distinction: GRASP does not measure persuasion, factuality, or rhetorical appeal, but structural sufficiency - a defense-aware notion of argument robustness over the explicit interaction graph. Overall, GRASP offers a transparent and auditable alternative to holistic LLM judging. --- ### Learning to Hand Off: Provably Convergent Workflow Learning under Interface Constraints Authors: Jiayu Li, Enpei Zhang, Dawei Zhou, Elynn Chen, Yujun Yan Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19140v1 We study workflow learning in a setting where specialized agents hand off control through a shared artifact, each agent observes only a local function of that artifact and its own private state, and no centralized learner accesses joint trajectories -- the operating regime of multi-agent LLM pipelines that span organizational, vendor, or trust boundaries. We formalize this regime as an interface-constrained semi-Markov decision process (IC-SMDP), whose decision epochs occur at handoff times, and design IC-$Q$, an asynchronous decentralized $Q$-learning algorithm in which cross-agent coordination at every handoff is exactly one scalar. Our main result is a finite-sample bound for neural IC-$Q$ that decomposes into three independently controllable error sources: neural function-approximation error, interface representation gap, and a mixing-time residual, under the random option-duration discount. Establishing this bound requires lifting the approximate information state (AIS) framework from single-agent primitive-step MDPs to multi-agent SMDPs and controlling Markovian noise under random duration, neither of which has been done in prior work. To our knowledge this is the first finite-sample guarantee for neural $Q$-learning under decentralized partial observability. Four experiments: a controlled synthetic IC-SMDP that validates the bound term-by-term, multi-LLM mathematical reasoning, multi-agent routing, and multi-agent CPU programming, show that IC-$Q$ matches a centralized oracle without any agent observing joint trajectories, with each of the three error sources scaling along its corresponding axis as the bound predicts. --- ### COBALT: Crowdsourcing Robot Learning via Cloud-Based Teleoperation with Smartphones Authors: Ayush Agarwal, Ansh Gandhi, Jeremy A. Collins, Omar Rayyan, Aryan Sarswat, Ranjani Koushik, Masoud Moghani, Ajay Mandlekar, Animesh Garg Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19138v2 The scarcity of large-scale, high-quality demonstration data remains a bottleneck in scaling imitation learning for robotic manipulation. We present COBALT, a teleoperation platform designed to democratize robot learning at scale both in simulation and in the real world. By leveraging vectorized environments, our scalable, load-balanced infrastructure supports concurrent teleoperation by multiple users on a single GPU, yielding a significant reduction in teleoperation cost. Operators can connect from nearly anywhere on Earth using commonly available devices, including single or dual smartphones, VR headsets, 3D mice, and keyboards. An inmemory data cache and efficient video streaming keep control and rendering synchronous, sustaining dozens of concurrent users at 20 Hz with sub-100 ms end-to-end latency for up to 8 concurrent users per GPU. We also demonstrate stable operation supporting 256 simulated clients across 8 GPUs, underscoring the system's ability to scale across hardware and within individual servers. We perform a comprehensive user study showing that phone-based teleoperation performs comparably to or better than specialized hardware, enabling faster, more ergonomic data collection. To ensure data quality, COBALT logs a suite of real-time metrics to automatically filter suboptimal demonstrations. We further demonstrate that a structured user training curriculum significantly improves data collection quality. Guided by insights from our user study, we crowdsource the collection of a large-scale, high-quality pilot dataset with 7500+ demonstrations (50+ hours) collected with smartphones across nine countries over five days. We validate the dataset's quality by training state-of-the-art imitation learning algorithms. Please visit https://cobalt-teleop.github.io/ for more details. --- ### Towards Data-Efficient Video Pre-training with Frozen Image Foundation Models Authors: Svetlana Orlova, Niccolò Cavagnero, Gijs Dubbelman Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19137v1 Video foundation models achieve strong performance across many video understanding tasks, but typically require large-scale pre-training on massive video datasets, resulting in substantial data and compute costs. In contrast, modern image foundation models already provide powerful spatial representations. This raises an important question: can competitive video models be built by reusing these spatial representations and pre-training only for temporal reasoning? We take initial steps toward exploring a lightweight training paradigm that freezes a pre-trained image foundation model and trains only a recurrent temporal module to process streaming video. By reusing an image foundation model as a spatial encoder, this approach could significantly reduce the amount of video data and compute required compared to end-to-end video pre-training. In this work, we explore the feasibility of this approach before investing in computing for video pre-training. Our empirical findings across multiple video understanding tasks suggest that strong temporal performance can emerge without large-scale video pre-training, motivating future work on recurrent video foundation models obtained by pre-training a temporal module on top of a frozen image foundation model. Code: https://github.com/tue-mps/towards-video-image-frozen . --- ### Identifiable Multimodal Causal Representation Learning under Partial Latent Sharing Authors: Manal Benhamza, Marianne Clausel, Myriam Tami Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19135v1 Causal representation learning (CRL) seeks to uncover meaningful latent variables and their corresponding causal structure from high-dimensional observational data. Although its significance, CRL identifiability remains a crucial property, as it ensures the recovery of the mechanisms behind the data generation process, and hence the interpretability and robustness of the representation. Proving identifiability in CRL is intrinsically difficult, and we address in this work an even more challenging setting: multimodality. We consider multimodal observed data with a latent partially shared structure. Each modality is generated, through non linear mixing functions, from a specific subset of causal latent variables. Under flexible assumptions and without imposing any parametric distribution on the latent variables, we establish component-wise identifiability guarantees for the causal latent representation. Our identifiability results, furthermore, apply to the undercomplete scenario where we have, for each modality, more observed than latent variables. To instantiate our theoretical analysis, we introduce a Wasserstein-based module to recover the partially shared latent structure. Due to its differentiability, the latter can be easily integrated into all types of architecture, only requiring minimal changes. Extensive experiments on synthetic and realistic datasets validate the superiority of our approach over SOTA methods. --- ### Knowing When Not to Predict: Self Supervised Learning and Abstention for Safer DR Screening Authors: Muskaan Chopra, Lorenz Sparrenberg, Jan H. Terheyden, Rafet Sifa Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19133v1 Self-supervised learning (SSL) is now a standard way to pretrain medical image models, but performance is still mostly judged by downstream accuracy. For safety-critical screening tasks such as diabetic retinopathy grading, this is not enough: a model must also know when its predictions are unreliable and defer uncertain cases for clinical review. In this work, we examine how the length of SSL pretraining influences calibrated confidence and confidence-based abstention. We evaluate multiple SSL checkpoints under a fixed fine-tuning protocol and assess calibrated confidence, coverage, selective accuracy, and selective macro-F1. Across datasets and data regimes, SSL pretraining improves selective prediction compared to training from scratch. Unlike prior SSL studies that primarily evaluate downstream accuracy or AUROC, we analyze how SSL pretraining duration influences confidence behavior under calibrated confidence-based abstention. However, once accuracy saturates, selective performance can still change markedly across checkpoints, and longer pretraining does not consistently improve reliability. These results underscore the importance of abstention-aware evaluation and suggest that pretraining length should be treated as an important reliability-related design choice rather than only a computational detail. Code is available at GitHub. --- ### CLIC: Contextual Language-Informed Cardiac Pathology Classification Authors: Giovani D. Lucafo, Rafael da Costa Silva, João Lucas Luz Lima Sarcinelli, Andre Guarnier De Mitri, Diego Furtado Silva Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19132v1 The electrocardiogram (ECG) is the gold standard for non-invasive diagnosis of cardiac pathologies and is a fundamental pillar of cardiovascular medicine. Recent progress in deep learning has led to the development of robust automated classifiers that achieve high performance by processing raw physiological signals. However, in clinical practice, diagnosis is rarely based solely on the signal. Cardiologists commonly support their interpretation with the patient's characteristics and the specific data-acquisition context. Despite this, most current algorithms remain restricted to signal-only analysis, failing to integrate technical metadata and demographic variables. This paper proposes Contextual Language-Informed Cardiac pathology classification (CLIC), a multimodal framework that significantly enhances diagnostic precision by encoding these variables through natural language. We demonstrate that translating patient-level contextual data into descriptive text provides an informative anchor that helps the model disambiguate complex physiological patterns. We further investigate the use of Large Language Models to synthesize richer clinical descriptions and observe that, while these generated texts remain competitive, controlled template-based contextual clinical text leads to consistent improvements in downstream classification performance. --- ### EgoBabyVLM: Benchmarking Cross-Modal Learning from Naturalistic Egocentric Video Data Authors: Dongyan Lin, Phillip Rust, Angel Villar Corrales, Alvin W. M. Tan, Mahi Luthra, Charles-Éric Saint-James, Rashel Moritz, Sheila Krogh-Jespersen, Vanessa Stark, Surya Parimi, Jiayi Shen, Youssef Benchekroun et al. Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19130v1 Children acquire language grounding with remarkable robustness from limited visuo-linguistic input in ways that surpass today's best large multimodal models. Recent research suggests current vision-language models (VLMs) trained on curated web data fail to generalize to the sparse, weakly-aligned egocentric streams produced by wearable devices, embodied agents, and infant head-cams -- and no fixed evaluation pipeline exists for measuring progress on this regime. We train VLMs on datasets with varying degrees of semantic alignment between visual and linguistic inputs, including naturalistic infant and adult egocentric videos, and evaluate them with a comprehensive suite spanning multimodal language grounding and unimodal vision and language tasks. At the core of this suite is Machine-DevBench, a corpus-grounded benchmark of lexical and grammatical competence, automatically generated from the model's training vocabulary across logarithmic frequency bins to eliminate the train/eval mismatch and low statistical power of prior developmental benchmarks. Our results show that current VLM paradigms hinge on the tight semantic alignment of curated data and fail to exploit the weakly-aligned signal that dominates naturalistic egocentric input -- the very regime in which humans thrive. To motivate progress, we introduce the EgoBabyVLM Challenge to drive the development of models capable of grounded language learning from the kind of naturalistic data that human infants experience. --- ### POLAR-Bench: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Privacy-Utility Trade-offs in LLM Agents Authors: Qiaoyuan Zheng, Yiqu Yang, Qi Gao, Imanol Schlag Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19127v1 LLM agents increasingly have access to private user data and act on the user's behalf when interacting with third-party systems. The user defines what may and must not be shared, and the agent must robustly follow that intent even when third-party systems behave adversarially. We introduce POLAR-Bench (Policy-aware adversarial Benchmark), in which a trusted model with a privacy policy and a task converses with a third-party model that adversarially probes for both task-relevant and protected attributes. Across 10 domains and 7,852 samples, we score privacy and utility by deterministic set-membership and vary privacy policy dimension and attack strategy along two orthogonal axes, producing a 5 times 5 diagnostic surface per model. Our results reveal a sharp split: current frontier models withhold over 99% of protected attributes, while smaller open-weight models in the 1--30B range, the class users most commonly run as their own trusted agent on-device or via private inference, score notably worse, with the weakest leaking over half. POLAR-Bench thus localizes where each model's intent-following breaks down, providing a foothold for privacy alignment where it matters most. --- ### Atomistic Modeling of Chemical Disorder in Materials: Bridging Conventional Methods and AI-Assisted Approaches Authors: Jiayu Peng, Peichen Zhong Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cond-mat.mtrl-sci, cond-mat.dis-nn, cs.LG, physics.chem-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19124v2 Chemical disorder, originating from the mixed occupation of crystallographic sites by multiple elements, is widespread in alloys, ceramics, and compositionally complex materials, where short- and long-range orderings strongly influence properties. A central obstacle is the representation gap between experiments and simulations: experiments often report disorder as partial occupancies and ensemble-averaged behaviors, whereas atomistic simulations and AI workflows usually require fully specified configurations. Tackling this gap requires computational methods that convert averaged disorder descriptions into representative configurational ensembles while balancing cost, bias, and fidelity. This challenge has become more urgent in AI-driven computational discovery, where ignoring disorder may cause AI workflows to misrank stability, misjudge novelty, and misdirect experiments with too-idealized representations. This Review highlights how conventional and AI-driven methods can bridge this representation gap. We assess the strengths and limitations of approaches spanning mean-field theories, cluster expansion, quasi-random approximations, Monte Carlo, and emerging schemes powered by universal interatomic potentials and generative models. We further highlight how AI can accelerate various computational schemes by lowering the cost of microstate evaluation, configurational exploration, and atomistic-to-thermodynamic closure. We also emphasize how AI can enable disorder-native capabilities, including workflow triage, ordering-sensitive and alchemical representations, generative models of disordered structures and distributions, and kinetics-aware disorder prediction. Together, this framework outlines a practical roadmap toward disorder-native AI, which can transform chemical disorder from a representational obstacle into a controllable variable for realistic AI-accelerated materials discovery. --- ### Atomistic Modeling of Chemical Disorder in Materials: Bridging Classical Methods and AI-Assisted Approaches Authors: Jiayu Peng, Peichen Zhong Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cond-mat.mtrl-sci, cond-mat.dis-nn, cs.LG, physics.chem-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19124v1 Chemical disorder, originating from the mixed occupation of crystallographic sites by multiple elements, is widespread in alloys, ceramics, and compositionally complex materials, where short- and long-range orderings can strongly influence properties. A central obstacle is the representation gap between experiments and simulations: experiments often report disorder as partial occupancies and ensemble-averaged behaviors, whereas atomistic simulations and AI workflows usually require fully specified configurations. Tackling this gap requires computational methods that convert averaged disorder descriptions into representative configurational ensembles while balancing cost, bias, and fidelity. This challenge has become more urgent in AI-driven computational discovery, where ignoring disorder may cause AI workflows to misrank stability, misjudge novelty, and misdirect experiments with too-idealized representations. This Review highlights how classical and AI-driven methods can bridge this representation gap. We assess the strengths and limitations of approaches spanning mean-field theories, cluster expansion, quasi-random approximations, Monte Carlo, and emerging schemes powered by universal interatomic potentials and generative models. We further highlight how AI can accelerate classical computational schemes by lowering the cost of microstate evaluation, configurational exploration, and atomistic-to-thermodynamic closure. We also emphasize how AI can enable disorder-native capabilities, including workflow triage, ordering-sensitive and alchemical representations, generative models of disordered structures and distributions, and kinetics-aware disorder prediction. Together, this framework outlines a practical roadmap toward disorder-native AI, which can transform chemical disorder from a representational obstacle into a controllable variable for realistic AI-accelerated materials discovery. --- ### Dual-Channel Tensor Neural Networks: Finite-Sample Theory and Conformal Structure Selection Authors: Elynn Chen, Jiayu Li, Zheshi Zheng, Jian Pei Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19122v1 Tensor-valued data arise naturally in neuroimaging, genomics, climate science, and spatiotemporal networks, where multilinear dependencies across modes carry information that is destroyed under vectorization. Existing approaches either impose a single low-rank structure, which can miss localized signal, or treat the tensor as a long vector, which discards its multiway geometry. We propose a *Dual-Channel Tensor Neural Network* (DC-TNN) that decomposes each tensor input into a low-rank core and a sparse refinement, and processes the two components through coupled neural channels. The framework is structure-agnostic and accommodates CP, Tucker, and tensor-train cores within a single architecture. For estimation, we establish non-asymptotic risk bounds for the DC-TNN estimator that decompose into network approximation, core estimation, and refinement-selection terms, and show that the effective dimension is determined jointly by the core rank and refinement sparsity rather than by the ambient tensor size. For inference, we develop a *structure-aware conformal ROC* procedure that calibrates within the core-refinement latent space and produces ROC and AUC confidence bands with finite-sample, distribution-free coverage. Building on this, we propose a *conformal structure selector* that, to our knowledge, is the *first distribution-free procedure* for choosing among candidate tensor decompositions with finite-sample validity. Simulations and an analysis of a protein dataset demonstrate competitive predictive accuracy, reliable uncertainty quantification, and consistent recovery of the tensor structure. --- ### GOAL: Graph-based Objective-Aligned Diffusion Solvers for Dynamic Multi-Objective Optimization Authors: Xingyu Li Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.NE, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19119v1 Existing neural combinatorial optimization solvers frame solution search as imitation of optimal decisions, inherently limiting their utility to single-objective minimization and static constraints. We propose GOAL, a conditioned diffusion solver over relational graph representations that enables controllable decision generations by conditioning on human-specified objectives. We introduce a heterogeneous graph encoding in which distinct edge types, corresponding to different classes of constraints, define the message passing structure of the graph neural network, which allows information to propagate selectively according to the ontology of each constraint. GOAL is instantiated and evaluated on three canonical scheduling benchmarks of various constraint complexity: the Flow Shop Problem (FSP), the Job Shop Scheduling Problem (JSP), and the Flexible Job Shop Scheduling Problem (FJSP). Generalization is demonstrated across structurally distinct constraint regimes and problem types without architectural modification. On all three benchmarks, GOAL achieves 100% solution feasibility and near-zero MAPE (below 0.20%) on multiple objectives for problem sizes up to 20 jobs and 60 operations, outperforming NSGA-II and MOEA/D in both solution quality and inference speed by up to 25x. --- ### Learning Interpretable Point-Based Clinical Risk Scores via Direct Optimization Authors: Ying Cui, Albert M Li, Vivek Charu, Yeon-Mi Hwang, Tina Hernandez-Boussard, Lu Tian Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: stat.ME, cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19113v1 Many clinical risk scores are deployed as additive rules with nonnegative integer points assigned to relevant binary predictive features. These integer weights not only make the score easier to use in practice but also promote sparsity in the resulting prediction model. Such risk scores are often derived by first fitting a regression model and then rounding the estimated coefficients to the nearest integer after appropriate scaling. This approach is computationally fast but does not guarantee optimality of the resulting score. Alternatively, one may search over all possible integer weights to directly optimize a value function by posing the problem as an integer programming task. However, the associated computational burden can be substantial, especially when the value function is nonconcave or even discontinuous. In this paper, we develop new machine learning algorithms that employ a flexible greedy optimization strategy to learn such additive scoring directly under explicit and sensible optimality objectives. We apply the proposed method to a large electronic health record (EHR) cohort in Epic Cosmos to construct an integer-weighted comorbidity score for measuring the risk of post-discharge mortality. We also conduct a simulation study to examine the finite-sample operating characteristics. --- ### FAGER: Factually Grounded Evaluation and Refinement of Text-to-Image Models Authors: Youngsun Lim, Cusuh Ham, Pin-Yu Chen, Deepti Ghadiyaram Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19111v1 Existing text-to-image (T2I) evaluation metrics mainly assess whether generated images align with information explicitly stated in the prompt, but often fail to capture factual requirements that are implicit, externally grounded, or identity-defining. As a result, they are not well suited for evaluating factual correctness in prompts involving scientific knowledge, historical facts, products, or culture-specific concepts. We propose FActually Grounded Evaluation and Refinement (FAGER), an agentic framework that evaluates whether generated images correctly reflect visually verifiable facts grounded in or implied by the prompt, while also providing actionable feedback for improvement. FAGER first constructs a structured factual rubric by combining LLM-based fact proposal with reference-guided visual fact extraction and verification, then converts the rubric into question-answer pairs for VLM-based evaluation. To validate FAGER as a factuality metric, we introduce a Factual A/B test, which measures whether a metric prefers factual reference images over corresponding generated images. Across five datasets spanning science, history, products, culture, and knowledge-intensive concepts, FAGER consistently outperforms prior metrics on this test. We further show that FAGER can be used to refine T2I outputs in a fully training-free manner, yielding substantial factuality gains across datasets. --- ### Performance Monitoring of Proton Exchange Membrane Water Electrolyzer by Transformers-Based Machine Learning Model Authors: Bingqing Chen, Ivan Batalov, Qiu Chen, Weiqi Ji, Lei Cheng Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.LG, eess.SP arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19107v1 Green hydrogen plays an essential role in decarbonization, with capacity projected to scale to 560 GW by 2030 (vs. 1.39 GW in 2023) in net-zero settings. Proton exchange membrane (PEM) electrolysis is one of the most promising technology routes to green hydrogen production, and real-time system health monitoring of PEM electrolyzers is essential for their scalable deployment. In lab settings, performance degradation can be characterized through electrochemical testing protocols by periodic pauses of normal operation. Such interruption is not practical for full-scale stack deployments, limiting system operators' ability to make real-time assessments of state-of-health (SoH). We present a machine learning (ML) framework that performs virtual electrochemical characterization during normal operation. The method uses an encoder-decoder transformer, conditioned on operational data, to reconstruct characterization outputs, focusing here on polarization curves. Inspired by patch-based sequence tokenization, we segment the inputs into patches and encode them to form meaningful tokens, which substantially improves learning efficiency. Across four longitudinal runs, lasting up to 478 hours on different test cells and loading cycles, the model accurately reconstructed polarization curves and achieved 10x reduction in mean squared error (MSE) compared to a vanilla transformer. This proof-of-concept demonstrates that ML models can enable continuous performance monitoring for PEM electrolyzers and that the encoder captures meaningful latent representations of SoH, opening up opportunities to derive interpretable indicators in future work. --- ### Neural Operators for Design-Space Surrogate Modeling of Tendon-Actuated Continuum Robots Authors: Branden Frieden, James M. Ferguson, Alan Kuntz, Varun Shankar Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19104v1 Continuum robots enable dexterous manipulation in constrained environments, but require accurate and efficient models for real-time manipulation and control. Traditional physics-based models can be computationally expensive and may suffer from inaccuracies due to unmodeled effects, while current learning-based methods often generalize poorly beyond the specific robot on which they are trained. We present a formulation of surrogate modeling for tendon-driven continuum robots as an operator learning problem that maps robot design parameters and tendon actuation inputs to resulting configurations. This formulation enables a single trained model to generalize across a large class of robot designs. We develop four novel neural operator architectures--two based on Deep Operator Networks (DeepONets) and two based on Fourier Neural Operators (FNOs)--and train them on simulation data to predict robot configurations. All architectures achieve good accuracy while allowing for fast and accurate generalization across designs. Our results demonstrate that operator learning provides an effective and generalizable surrogate for continuum robot mechanics in the design space, enabling fast modeling for control, planning, and design optimization in surgical and industrial applications. --- ### Heterogeneity-Aware Dataset Scheduling for Efficient Audio Large Language Model Training Authors: Yanru Wu, Jianning Wang, Chongxin Gan, Yang Li Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.SD, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19101v1 Training general-purpose Audio Large Language Models (ALLMs) across diverse datasets is essential for holistic audio understanding, yet it faces significant challenges due to dataset heterogeneity, which often leads to conflicting gradients and slow convergence. Despite its impact, how to explicitly manage this heterogeneity during training remains underexplored, with current practices relying primarily on uniform mixture. In this work, we analyze multi-dataset AudioQA training from a convergence perspective and propose Grouped Sequential Training (GST). GST strategically organizes datasets into affinity-aware groups and introduces them via a progressive scheduling protocol, effectively balancing the stability of parallel training with the efficiency of sequential optimization. To ensure scalability, we develop gradient-based affinity metrics that capture inter-dataset relationships without the prohibitive cost of empirical transferability estimation. Extensive evaluations on 14 AudioQA datasets spanning speech, music, and environmental sounds demonstrate that GST achieves 30--40\% faster convergence than standard parallel training while maintaining or even surpassing the performance of mix-all training. Our results provide both theoretical insights and a practical, model-agnostic framework for efficient large-scale ALLM optimization. --- ### DecisionBench: A Benchmark for Emergent Delegation in Long-Horizon Agentic Workflows Authors: Yuxuan Gao, Megan Wang, Yi Ling Yu, Zijian Carl Ma, Ao Qu Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19099v1 We introduce DecisionBench, a benchmark substrate for emergent delegation in long-horizon agentic workflows. The substrate fixes a task suite (GAIA, tau-bench, BFCL multi-turn), a peer-model pool (11 models, 7 vendor families), a delegation interface (call_model plus an optional read_profile channel), a deterministic skill-annotation layer, and a multi-axis metric suite covering quality, cost, latency, delegation rate, routing fidelity-at-k, vendor self-preference, and a counterfactual-delegation ceiling. The substrate is agnostic to how peer information is generated or delivered, so learned routers, richer peer memories, adaptive profile construction, and multi-step delegation can all be evaluated against it. We characterize the substrate with a five-condition reference sweep on the full pool (n=23,375 task instances). Three benchmark-level findings emerge: (i) mean end-task quality is statistically indistinguishable across the four awareness conditions (|beta| <= 0.010, p >= 0.21), so quality-only evaluation would miss the orchestration signal; (ii) routing fidelity-at-1 ranges from 7.5% to 29.5% across conditions at near-equal mean quality, with delivery channel (on-demand tool vs. preloaded description) dominating description content; (iii) a counterfactual ceiling places perfect delegation 15-31 percentage points above measured performance on every suite, locating large unrealized headroom for future orchestration methods. We release the substrate, annotation layer, reference intervention suite, analysis pipeline, and 220 per-condition run archives. --- ### ScheduleFree+: Scaling Learning-Rate-Free & Schedule-Free Learning to Large Language Models Authors: Aaron Defazio Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19095v1 Schedule-Free Learning has shown promise as a practical anytime training method for machine learning, showing success across dozens of standard benchmark problems. However, strong performance for LLM training has only been demonstrated at small scales. We identify a number of fixes necessary to scale up Schedule-Free Learning to larger batch sizes and model sizes, and present a learning-rate-free and schedule-free method (ScheduleFree+) for training large language models which greatly outperforms Warmup-Stable-Decay (WSD) schedules. We also demonstrate that Schedule-Free Learning is most effective for long duration training, and at 1000 tokens per parameter, it outperforms SOTA schedules by 31%. Schedule-Free Learning provides a theoretical foundation for the use of model averaging and checkpoint merging during pretraining. --- ### Embedding by Elicitation: Dynamic Representations for Bayesian Optimization of System Prompts Authors: Zhiyuan Jerry Lin, Benjamin Letham, Samuel Dooley, Maximilian Balandat, Eytan Bakshy Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19093v1 System prompts are a central control mechanism in modern AI systems, shaping behavior across conversations, tasks, and user populations. Yet they are difficult to tune when feedback is available only as aggregate metrics rather than per-example labels, failures, or critiques. We study this aggregate feedback setting as sample-constrained black-box optimization over discrete, variable-length text. We introduce ReElicit, a Bayesian optimization framework based on \emph{embedding by elicitation}. Given a task description, previously evaluated prompts, and scalar scores, an LLM elicits a compact, interpretable feature space and maps prompts into it. Leveraging a probabilistic Gaussian process surrogate, an acquisition function then selects target feature vectors, which the LLM realizes and refines into deployable system prompts. Re-eliciting the feature space as new evaluations arrive lets the representation adapt to the observed prompt-score history. We evaluate the setting using offline benchmark accuracy as a controlled aggregate proxy: the optimizer observes one scalar score per prompt and no per-example labels, errors, or critiques. Across ten system prompt optimization tasks with a 30 total evaluation budget, ReElicit achieves the strongest aggregate performance profile among representative aggregate-only prompt-optimization baselines. These results suggest that LLMs can serve as adaptive semantic representation builders, not only prompt generators, for Bayesian optimization over natural-language artifacts. --- ### Counterfactual Likelihood Tests for Indirect Influence in Private Reasoning Channels Authors: Alexander Boesgaard Lorup Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19092v1 Reasoning systems increasingly separate intermediate computation into private and public channels, creating evaluation cases that look similar in transcripts: independent co-derivation, direct access to private content, and indirect influence through public communication. This paper presents a counterfactual likelihood test for measuring influence between private reasoning channels. The method replaces an upstream private block with a length-matched donor block, holds the public token sequence and downstream target fixed, and measures the downstream target's negative-log-likelihood shift. On a 7B role-channel reasoning model used for validation, textual probes are unreliable: raw n-gram overlap overstates leakage, corrected overlap remains noisy, and canary reproduction reports no discrimination. Counterfactual likelihood separates unmasked and masked conditions, while length matching controls a RoPE positional confound. In the hardened masked validation, reverse B-to-A influence is near zero, while A-to-B influence persists through public-speech hidden states. A multi-checkpoint validation across three checkpoints, five seeds, and 13,734 valid directional contrasts replicates this asymmetry. A graph-separation control that blocks private-to-public carrier edges produces bit-identical natural and counterfactual scores across all 13,734 control evaluations, identifying the tested public-channel pathway as the complete carrier of the measured counterfactual signal under the implemented role-visibility mask. The results show that private-channel evaluation should report direct and indirect influence separately, and that counterfactual likelihood probes provide a practical default for measuring these boundaries. --- ### Chessformer: A Unified Architecture for Chess Modeling Authors: Daniel Monroe, George Eilender, Philip Chalmers, Zhenwei Tang, Ashton Anderson Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19091v1 Chess has long served as a canonical testbed for artificial intelligence, but modeling approaches for its central tasks have diverged. Maximizing playing strength, predicting human play, and enabling interpretability are typically solved with disparate architectures, and these designs are often misaligned with the geometry of the domain. This raises the natural question of whether these objectives require separate modeling paradigms, or if there exists a single architecture that supports them simultaneously. We introduce Chessformer, a unified architecture that advances the state of the art on all three central goals in chess modeling. Chessformer is an encoder-only transformer that represents board squares as tokens, augments self-attention with a novel dynamic positional encoding called Geometric Attention Bias (GAB) that adapts to domain-specific geometry, and predicts actions with an attention-based source-destination policy head. We evaluate Chessformer on each front. First, we develop \maiathree, a family of models for human move prediction that reaches 57.1\% move-matching accuracy, significantly surpassing the previous state of the art with fewer than a quarter of the parameters. Second, we integrate Chessformer into Leela Chess Zero, a leading open-source engine, adding over 100 Elo of playing strength and resulting in tournament victories over Stockfish in major computer chess competitions. Third, we show that Chessformer's square-token design makes attention patterns and activations directly attributable to board squares, enabling granular interpretability analyses that prior architectures do not naturally support. More broadly, our results demonstrate that aligning a model's tokenization, positional encoding, and output design with the underlying structure of a domain can yield simultaneous gains in performance, human compatibility, and interpretability. --- ### MANGO: Meta-Adaptive Network Gradient Optimization for Online Continual Learning Authors: Ankita Awasthi, Marco Apolinario, Kaushik Roy Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19080v1 In Online Continual Learning (OCL), a neural network sequentially learns from a non-stationary data stream in a single-pass with access only to a limited memory replay buffer. This contrasts sharply with off-line continual learning where training is multiple epoch dependent on large datasets. The main challenge faced by OCL is to overcome catastrophic forgetting of past tasks (stability) while learning new ones efficiently (plasticity). Existing methods counter forgetting via replay-based rehearsal, output level distillation, fixed regularization, or meta-learning on the current data. However, these methods have limitations: rehearsal introduces a stored sample bias; distillation operates on output-distributions without modulating parameter updates; fixed-regularization penalizes parameters irrespective of sensitivity; stream-only meta-learning lacks a feedback controlled parameter update. We propose Meta-Adaptive Network Gradient Optimization (MANGO), an OCL framework that balances stability-plasticity via gradient-gating and meta-learned regularization. Gradient-gating scales parameter updates based on sensitivity, preventing destructive updates. Meta-learned regularization adapts stability coefficients, evaluating the effect of parameter update on replay. In MANGO, replay acts as both a training signal and a forgetting evaluator. We evaluated our method on three standard OCL benchmark datasets. MANGO outperforms strong baselines, achieving state-of-the-art results with consistent performance across replay sizes. In domain incremental learning on CLEAR-10 and class incremental learning on CIFAR-100 and Tiny-ImageNet, it achieves highest accuracy among all baselines and achieves positive Backward Transfer, overcoming forgetting on CLEAR-10. --- ### ReacTOD: Bounded Neuro-Symbolic Agentic NLU for Zero-Shot Dialogue State Tracking Authors: Yanjun Lin, Zimo Xiao, Kartik Natarajan, Mahesh Sankaranarayanan, Niraj Nawanit, Rakshit Parashar, Austin Zhang, Karthik Konaraddi, Rishita Mote, Wei Niu Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19077v1 Task-oriented dialogue systems -- handling transactions, reservations, and service requests -- require predictable behavior, yet the moderately-sized LLMs needed for practical latency are prone to hallucination and format errors that cascade into incorrect actions (e.g., a hotel booked for the wrong date). We propose ReacTOD, a bounded neuro-symbolic architecture that reformulates NLU as discrete tool calls within a self-correcting ReAct loop governed by deterministic validation. A bounded ReAct loop enables iterative self-correction, improving accuracy by up to 9.3 percentage points over single-pass inference on MultiWOZ. A symbolic validator enforces action compliance, schema conformance, and coreference consistency on every dialogue state update, achieving a 93.1% self-correction rate on intercepted errors and producing structured execution traces. Incremental state prediction and on-demand history retrieval keep prompts compact, empirically improving instruction adherence in parameter-constrained models. On MultiWOZ 2.1, ReacTOD achieves a new zero-shot state-of-the-art: gpt-oss-20B reaches 52.71% joint goal accuracy, surpassing the previous best by 14 percentage points, while Qwen3-8B achieves 47.34% with only 8B parameters. On the Schema-Guided Dialogue (SGD) benchmark, ReacTOD with Claude-Opus-4.6 achieves 80.68% JGA under fully end-to-end evaluation with predicted domains, and Qwen3-32B reaches 64.09% -- demonstrating cross-benchmark generalization without task-specific training data. --- ### The impact of observation density on Bayesian inversion of latent dynamics in shock-dominated flows Authors: Bipin Tiwari, Muhammad Abid, Omer San Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.LG, physics.flu-dyn arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19076v1 Inferring unknown initial states in shock-dominated compressible flows from sparse and noisy measurements is a challenging ill-posed inverse problem due to nonlinear wave interactions and limited sensing. In this work, we develop a non-intrusive reduced-order modeling framework for efficient Bayesian initial-state inversion with uncertainty quantification. The framework combines a convolutional autoencoder with a learned latent-space forward operator. The autoencoder compresses high-dimensional flow fields into a compact nonlinear latent representation, while the forward operator predicts final-time latent states from encoded initial conditions. This AE-ROM surrogate enables rapid forward evaluations and is embedded within a No-U-Turn Sampler (NUTS) for posterior exploration. The framework is demonstrated using 500 high-fidelity Sod shock tube simulations generated through Latin hypercube sampling and solved using a fifth-order WENO scheme. The inverse problem seeks to recover unknown left and right density and pressure states from sparse noisy observations of final-time density and pressure fields. Results show that the AE-ROM accurately reconstructs key shock-tube structures, including the rarefaction wave, contact discontinuity, and shock front. A latent dimension of 32 provides an effective balance between reconstruction accuracy and reduced-space compactness, while 250 training simulations are sufficient for accurate reconstruction. Increasing observation density significantly contracts posterior uncertainty, reducing the mean posterior standard deviation by approximately 78% for density and 76% for pressure. Overall, the proposed framework provides a computationally efficient and uncertainty-aware approach for inverse analysis of shock-dominated flows, with potential extensions to multidimensional compressible-flow and digital-twin applications. --- ### CRAFT: Critic-Refined Adaptive Key-Frame Targeting for Multimodal Video Question Answering Authors: Mahesh Bhosale, Abdul Wasi, Vishvesh Trivedi, Pengyu Yan, Akhil Gorugantu, David Doermann Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19075v1 Grounded multi-video question answering over real-world news events requires systems to surface query-relevant evidence across heterogeneous video archives while attributing every claim to its supporting source. We introduce CRAFT (Critic-Refined Adaptive Key-Frame Targeting), a query-conditioned pipeline that combines dynamic keyframe selection, per-video ASR with multilingual fallback, and a hybrid critic loop to iteratively verify and repair claims before consolidation. The pipeline integrates UNLI temporal entailment, DeBERTa-v3 cross-claim screening, and a Llama-3.2-3B adjudicator, with a final citation-merging stage that emits each fact once with all supporting source identifiers. On MAGMaR 2026, CRAFT achieves the best overall average (0.739), reference recall (0.810), and citation F1 (0.635). We further evaluate on a MAGMaR-style conversion of WikiVideo with 52 non-overlapping event queries, where CRAFT also performs strongly (0.823 Avg), showing that its claim-centric evidence aggregation generalizes beyond MAGMaR. Ablations show that atomic claims, ASR, and the critic loop drive the main gains over the vanilla query-conditioned baseline. Code and implementation details are publicly available at https://github.com/bhosalems/CRAFT. --- ### Learning Long-Term Temporal Dependencies in Photovoltaic Power Output Prediction Through Multi-Horizon Forecasting Authors: Sumit Laha, Ankit Sharma, Hassan Foroosh Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19074v1 The rapid global expansion of solar photovoltaic (PV) capacity-reaching a record 597 GW in 2024-highlights the urgent need for robust forecasting models to mitigate the grid instability caused by the intermittent nature of solar irradiance. While deep learning-based direct forecasting using ground-based sky images (GSI) has emerged as a dominant approach, existing literature is often constrained by single-architecture evaluations and an exclusive focus on single-horizon (point) prediction. This paper proposes a transition from traditional single-horizon estimation toward a multi-horizon forecasting framework, leading to an architecture-independent improvement in accuracy. We hypothesize and demonstrate experimentally that joint optimization over a sequence of future values allows deep neural networks to better capture latent inter-step temporal dependencies by avoiding precocious convergence of the network in terms of both weight gradients and filter diversity. Leveraging this architecture-independent improvement that integrates sequential sky imagery with historical PV generation data, we evaluate the models' abilities to predict power output across multiple discrete future time steps simultaneously. Our methodology is validated through a comparative analysis across diverse deep learning architectures. The results demonstrate that this multi-horizon approach significantly enhances predictive accuracy and robustness across the entire forecast horizon while maintaining computational parsimony. By achieving superior performance with negligible overhead compared to single-horizon models, this work provides a scalable and efficient solution to improve the resilience of modern power grids. --- ### Riemannian Networks over Full-Rank Correlation Matrices Authors: Ziheng Chen, Xiaojun Wu, Bernhard Schölkopf, Nicu Sebe Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19073v1 Representations on the Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) manifold have garnered significant attention across different applications. In contrast, the manifold of full-rank correlation matrices, a normalized alternative to SPD matrices, remains largely underexplored. This paper introduces Riemannian networks over the correlation manifold, leveraging five recently developed correlation geometries. We systematically extend basic layers, including Multinomial Logistic Regression (MLR), Fully Connected (FC), and convolutional layers, to these geometries. Besides, we present methods for accurate backpropagation for two correlation geometries. Experiments comparing our approach against existing SPD and Grassmannian networks demonstrate its effectiveness. --- ### Benchmarking Commercial ASR Systems on Code-Switching Speech: Arabic, Persian, and German Authors: Sajjad Abdoli, Ghassan Al-Sumaidaee, Clayton W. Taylor, Ahmad ElShiekh, Ahmed Rashad Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19069v3 Code-switching -- the natural alternation between two languages within a single utterance -- remains one of the most challenging and under-studied conditions for automatic speech recognition (ASR). We present a benchmark evaluating five commercial ASR providers across four language pairs: Egyptian Arabic--English, Saudi Arabic (Najdi/Hijazi)--English, Persian (Farsi)--English, and German--English, comprising 300 samples per pair selected by a two-stage pipeline combining heuristic filtering with a GPT-4o and Gemini 1.5 Pro ensemble scorer, reducing LLM costs by $\approx$91\%. We evaluate on both WER and BERTScore, showing that while both metrics agree on the ordinal ranking of systems for all Arabic and Persian pairs ($τ= 1.0$), WER inflates the magnitude of quality gaps by approximately 3$\times$ by penalising semantically correct transliteration choices. ElevenLabs Scribe v2 achieves the lowest WER (13.2\% overall) and leads on BERTScore (0.936 overall). Difficulty-stratified analysis reveals performance gaps masked by aggregate averages, and BERT embedding projections confirm semantic proximity between reference and hypothesis despite surface-level script differences. The dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Perle-ai/ASR_Code_Switch. --- ### The Annotation Scarcity Paradox in Low-Resource NLP Evaluation: A Decade of Acceleration and Emerging Constraints Authors: Vukosi Marivate Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19066v3 Over the past decade, low-resource natural language processing (NLP) has experienced explosive growth, propelled by cross-lingual transfer, massively multilingual models, and the rapid proliferation of benchmarks. Yet this apparent progress masks a critical, insufficiently examined tension: the deep sociolinguistic expertise required to evaluate increasingly complex generative systems is severely strained, inequitably distributed, and structurally marginalised. We present a critical narrative survey of low-resource NLP evaluation (2014-present), tracing its evolution across three phases: early heuristic optimism, the illusions of top-down benchmark scaling, and the current era of generative bottlenecks. We conceptualise the Annotation Scarcity Paradox, the structural friction arising when the technical capacity to scale models vastly outpaces the sovereign human infrastructure required to authentically evaluate them. By examining extractive data pipelines, undercompensated ``ghost work'', and language data flaring, we argue that this paradox threatens the epistemic validity of reported progress. We survey emerging responses -- including data augmentation, model-based evaluation, participatory curation, and annotation-efficient approaches via item response theory and active learning -- and assess their equity and validity trade-offs. We close with a practitioner call to action, arguing that overcoming this bottleneck requires a paradigm shift from transactional data extraction to relational, community-embedded evaluation rooted in epistemic governance, data sovereignty, and shared ownership. --- ### Toward an AI-Powered Computational Testbed for Workforce Policy Authors: Sumer S. Vaid, Ashley V. Whillans Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19064v1 Workforce transformations are difficult to forecast and costly to mismanage. In particular, the integration of artificial intelligence into knowledge work currently affects a substantial share of the global workforce, yet this transition proceeds without tools to forecast how individual employees will respond psychologically and behaviorally. We combine recent advances in LLM-powered generative agents with foundational management science and organizational behavior research to propose dynamic employee agents. Among consenting populations, these agents can be seeded with HR records, validated psychometric measures, and digital activity data to simulate employees' cognitive, emotional, and behavioral trajectories across successive workdays during planned organizational changes. In this article, we detail the computational architecture required to construct this simulation platform and define the privacy, accuracy, and representativeness safeguards necessary for responsible deployment. We argue that establishing this prospective forecasting infrastructure is a critical technical requirement for managing the current global workforce realignment around AI. --- ### Mapping Uncharted Symmetries: Machine Discovery in Combinatorics Authors: Eugenio Cainelli, Lorenzo Luccioli, Alessandro Iraci, Michele D'Adderio, Giovanni Paolini Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19063v1 Inspired by long-standing open problems in algebraic combinatorics, we show that modern machine learning can meaningfully contribute to verifiable mathematical discoveries. In particular, we focus on the construction of simple mathematical functions under exact distributional constraints, a setting we formalize as Simple Learning Under Rigid Proportions (SLURP). We tackle this problem by introducing two methods: MapSeek-Functional, which models the desired function alternating pseudo-labeling and supervised training steps; and MapSeek-Symbolic, designed to directly produce symbolic formulas. We successfully apply both methods to a research problem in algebraic combinatorics, discovering a new combinatorial interpretation of the $q,t$-Narayana polynomials arising from representation theory. To our knowledge, this is the first such interpretation based on noncrossing partitions. Using one discovered statistic, we find a combinatorial proof of the symmetry of these polynomials in a previously unsolved case. To streamline verification and reproducibility, we release all code, including a formalization of all the mathematical discoveries of this paper in Lean 4. --- ### LiFT: Lifted Inter-slice Feature Trajectories for 3D Image Generation from 2D Generators Authors: Xinhe Zhang, Yuyang Zhang, Pengfei Jin, Arnau Marin-Llobet, Na Li, Quanzheng Li Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, eess.IV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19060v1 High-resolution 3D medical image generation remains challenging because fully volumetric models are computationally expensive, while efficient 2D slice generators often fail to preserve anatomical consistency across the third dimension. We propose LiFT, a framework for Lifted inter-slice Feature Trajectories that factorizes 3D volume synthesis into per-slice image generation and inter-slice trajectory learning. Rather than modeling the volumetric distribution end-to-end, LiFT treats a volume as an ordered trajectory in feature space, capturing how anatomical structures appear, transform, and disappear across depth. A tri-planar drifting loss aligns the trajectory of generated slices with the trajectories of real volumes, enabling distributional learning over inter-slice progressions in unconditional generation; in paired translation, a bidirectional $z$-context mixer trained against the registered target supplies through-plane coherence while preserving per-slice fidelity. We evaluate LiFT on BraTS 2023 (unconditional and missing-modality MR) and SynthRAD2023 (MR-to-CT). Across these settings, LiFT preserves per-slice quality, approaches the reported cWDM missing-MR reconstruction quality at $\sim$$135\times$ lower inference cost (without formal equivalence testing), and improves through-plane coherence on MR-to-CT relative to a no-mapper ablation, demonstrating that lightweight inter-slice trajectory learning is a viable route to high-resolution 3D medical synthesis. --- ### Provably Data-driven Lagrangian Relaxation for Mixed Integer Linear Programming Authors: Tung Quoc Le, Anh Tuan Nguyen, Viet Anh Nguyen Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19052v2 Lagrangian Relaxation (LR) is a powerful technique for solving large-scale Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP), particularly those with decomposable structures, such as vehicle routing or unit commitment problems. By relaxing the coupling constraints, LR enables parallel subproblem solving and often yields tighter dual bounds than standard linear programming relaxations, which is crucial for efficient branch-and-bound pruning. While recent empirical work has shown promising results using machine learning to predict these multipliers, a theoretical understanding of such methods remains an open question. In this work, we bridge this gap by analyzing the problem of learning LR through the lens of Data-driven Algorithm Design, i.e., a statistical learning problem over a distribution of problem instances. Our contributions are as follows: first, we derive a generalization bound of $\mathcal{O}(s^{1.5}/\sqrt{N})$ for the learned multipliers, where $s$ is the number of coupling constraints and $N$ is the sample size. Second, we provide a minimax lower-bound of $Ω(s/\sqrt{N})$, proving that a linear dependency is unavoidable. Third, we constructively close this theoretical gap by proving that Stochastic Gradient Ascent (SGA) with averaging achieves the minimax optimal rate $Θ(s/\sqrt{N})$. Finally, we extend our framework to the learning-to-warm-start setting, proving that it achieves a fast, minimax-optimal rate of $Θ(s/N)$ and establishing a theoretical advantage over direct multiplier prediction. --- ### Generative Pseudo-Force Fields for Molecular Generation Authors: Stefaan Simon Pierre Hessmann, Khaled Kahouli, Stefan Gugler, Michael Plainer, Frank Noé, Klaus-Robert Müller, Niklas Wolf Andreas Gebauer Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.LG, physics.chem-ph, q-bio.QM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19050v1 Generating stable molecular conformations typically forces a tradeoff between the physical realism of energy-based relaxation and the sampling efficiency of data-driven generative models. While machine learning force fields (MLFFs) can sample stable conformations by relaxing molecular geometries according to physical forces, they require costly ab-initio training data. Conversely, diffusion models (DMs) learn from equilibrium data alone but are dependent on noise schedules and time-step conditioning. In this work, we propose generative pseudo-force fields (GPFFs) to bridge these paradigms by training an MLFF on a quadratic pseudo-potential energy surface relative to reference equilibrium structures. Because no ab-initio calculations are required for the perturbed geometries, non-equilibrium training data can be generated on the fly by perturbing the equilibria with Gaussian noise. We show that GPFFs constitute a time-step-agnostic variant of variance exploding DMs: the score comes from the predicted pseudo-forces but because force magnitudes implicitly encode the noise level, no time-step conditioning is needed. Our GPFF can hence be used as a drop-in replacement in standard diffusion sampling (ancestral, Heun) but also facilitates more efficient, adaptive variants and an MLFF inspired direct denoising scheme. Our proposed sampling algorithms support arbitrary structural priors and geometric constraints. On QM9, GPFF has 100 % validity at 256 neural function evaluations (NFE) and over 50 % at just 6 NFE, outperforming diffusion baselines across all samplers. Combined with custom priors, we showcase the fast and accurate generation process of our method in a molecular editor for a drug design setting, where a molecule is generated in real time. --- ### KVBuffer: IO-aware Serving for Linear Attention Authors: Longwei Zou, Lin Zhong Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19049v1 Linear attention has recently gained significant attention for long-context inference due to its constant decoding cost with respect to context length. However, existing serving systems typically serve linear attention by recurrently computing and updating a large linear attention state in every decoding step. Since the state is much larger than the per-token key and value, recurrent decoding incurs substantial memory access and becomes inefficient for serving linear attention. In this paper, we propose KVBuffer, an IO-aware serving mechanism for linear attention. By buffering recent keys and values, KVBuffer enables serving systems to compute linear attention outputs in more flexible and memory-efficient ways. For decoding, KVBuffer enables chunkwise computation, which reduces average memory access and decoding latency by deferring state updates and applying them in batch. For speculative decoding, KVBuffer verifies draft tokens in parallel and avoids storing temporary states. For short contexts, KVBuffer computes attention outputs directly from buffered keys and values, without creating or updating the linear attention state. We implement KVBuffer in SGLang for Qwen3-Next. Our evaluations show that KVBuffer can reduce linear attention decoding latency by up to 45.17% and increase the maximum number of serving requests by 5x for speculative decoding when verifying four draft tokens. --- ### Automated Grading of Handwritten Mathematics Using Vision-Capable LLMs Authors: Jacob Levine, Miguel Aenlle, Craig Zilles, Matthew West, Mariana Silva Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19043v1 Automated grading systems have enabled scalable assessment for many response types, but handwritten mathematics remains a barrier due to the complexity of multi-step solutions. Vision-capable large language models (LLMs) offer new opportunities here, yet their reliability in authentic instructional settings remains poorly understood. We present an empirical evaluation of an LLM-based grader for handwritten mathematical work using instructor-defined rubrics. Extending a prior pipeline for typed responses, we integrate transcription and rubric-based evaluation of photographic submissions within a single LLM call, evaluating on student work from two university STEM courses. Comparing AI grading decisions against human-assigned ground truth at the rubric-item level, we observe high overall accuracy, with most errors -- 87\% in the best model -- attributable to transcription failures rather than rubric misapplication. We categorize common error modes, including image quality issues, hallucinated content, and incorrect handling of equivalent expressions. These findings highlight both the promise and limitations of LLM-based grading for handwritten mathematics, providing guidance for system design, prompt refinement, and deployment in educational settings. --- ### Interference-Aware Multi-Task Unlearning Authors: Ying-Hua Huang, Rui Fang, Hsi-Wen Chen, Ming-Syan Chen Published: 2026-05-18 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19042v1 Machine unlearning aims to remove the contribution of designated training data from a trained model while preserving performance on the remaining data. Existing work mainly focuses on single-task settings, whereas modern models often operate in multi-task setups with shared backbones, where removing supervision for one task or instance can unintentionally affect others. We introduce multi-task unlearning with two settings: full-task unlearning, which removes a target instance from all tasks, and partial-task unlearning, which removes supervision only from selected tasks. We show that shared parameters couple the forget and retain sets, causing task-level interference on non-target tasks and instance-level interference on other instances. To address this issue, we propose an interference-aware framework that combines task-aware gradient projection, which constrains updates within task-specific subspaces, with instance-level gradient orthogonalization, which reduces conflicts between forget and retain signals. Experiments on two multi-task computer vision benchmarks across five tasks show that our method achieves effective unlearning while maintaining strong generalization, reducing UIS compared with the strongest baseline by 30.3% in full-task unlearning and 52.9% in partial-task unlearning. ---