# Research Papers — 2026-05 · bundle page 175 of 326 > Full-text markdown of papers #8701–8750 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/175 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-05/page/174.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-05/page/176.md) ### Njord: A Probabilistic Graph Neural Network for Ensemble Ocean Forecasting Authors: Daniel Holmberg, Joel Oskarsson, Erik Wikingsson, Fredrik Lindsten, Teemu Roos Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG, physics.ao-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15470v2 Ocean dynamics are inherently chaotic, yet existing machine learning ocean models produce only deterministic forecasts. We introduce Njord, a probabilistic data-driven model for ocean forecasting, applicable to both global and regional domains. Njord combines a deep latent variable framework with a graph neural network architecture, enabling sampling each forecast step in a single forward pass. We apply Njord globally at 0.25° resolution and regionally to the Baltic Sea at 2 km resolution. To scale to these large ocean grids we introduce K-means cluster meshes that adapt to irregular sea surface geometry. Experiments demonstrate strong performance on both domains compared to deterministic machine learning baselines, while also providing uncertainty estimates from the sampled ensemble forecasts. On the global OceanBench benchmark, Njord achieves the lowest errors on average across upper-ocean variables when evaluated against real-world observations, with the largest improvements in surface temperature prediction. --- ### Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models for Schema-Constrained Clinical Information Extraction Authors: A H M Rezaul Karim, Ozlem Uzuner Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15467v1 Conversational nurse-patient transcripts contain actionable observations, but converting these transcripts into structured representations at scale remains challenging. Documentation burden is substantial, with prior studies showing clinicians spend large portions of their workday on documentation and related desk work rather than direct patient care. MEDIQA-SYNUR focuses on observation extraction from conversational nurse-patient transcripts, requiring systems to normalize these narratives into a predefined schema with value-type constraints. We propose a modular retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline that uses the training set as an exemplar corpus, combines schema-constrained prompting (full schema vs. pruned candidate schema), deterministic schema-based postprocessing, and a second-pass audit, with two LLM backbones: Llama-4-Scout-17B-16E-Instruct and GPT-5.2 with corresponding embedding models for RAG. Our best configuration uses GPT-5.2 with full schema, RAG, and a second-pass auditing, achieving 80.36% F1 score. Overall, our results show that RAG consistently improves performance, while the optimal degree of schema constraint depends on the model, and second-pass auditing yields modest additional gains by correcting residual schema-adherence errors. --- ### Entity-Centric World Models: Interaction-Aware Masking for Causal Video Prediction Authors: Santosh Kumar Paidi Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15466v2 Learning predictive world models from unlabelled video is a foundational challenge in artificial intelligence. While Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA) have set new benchmarks in semantic classification, they often remain physics-blind, failing to capture the causal dynamics necessary for downstream reasoning. We hypothesize that this stems from standard patch-based masking strategies, which prioritize visual texture over rare but informative kinematic events. We propose Interaction-Aware JEPA (IA-JEPA), which utilizes a self-supervised motion-centric masking strategy to prioritize physical interactions. By specifically targeting entities engaged in collisions or momentum transfers, we force the architecture to reconstruct latent trajectories rather than static background features. Evaluated on the CLEVRER benchmark, IA-JEPA achieves 14.26% accuracy on causal reasoning tasks, a significant lead over the 3.22% achieved by standard patch-masked baselines. Crucially, we demonstrate that IA-JEPA breaks the "static bias" of standard self-supervision by inducing a higher-entropy, more discriminative latent space (+10% entropy gain) that linearizes physical energy ($R^2=0.43$). We show that this interaction bias generalizes to real-world human actions (Something-Something V2) and zero-shot physical puzzles (PHYRE-Lite). Our results provide a scalable, fully self-supervised path toward building foundational world models that begin to internalize the causal structure of the physical world. --- ### Toward World Modeling of Physiological Signals with Chaos-Theoretic Balancing and Latent Dynamics Authors: Yunfei Luo, Xi Chen, Yuliang Chen, Lanshuang Zhang, Md Mofijul Islam, Siwei Zhao, Peter Kotanko, Subhasis Dasgupta, Andrew Campbell, Rakesh Malhotra, Tauhidur Rahman Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG, eess.SP arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15465v1 Physiological time series signals reflect complex, multi-scale dynamical processes of the human body. Existing modeling studies focus on static tasks such as classification, event forecasting, or short-horizon next step prediction, while long-horizon signal-level forecasting and predictive nature of physiological signals remain underexplored. We introduce NormWear-2, a world model that encodes both multivariate physiological signals and clinical intervention variables into a shared latent space and models their joint temporal evolution as a dynamical system. Our approach combines inference from prior pre-trained knowledge (intuition) with instant non-parametric latent state transition adaptation (insight), enabling coherent forecasting across multiple temporal scales, conditioned on heterogeneous clinical interventions. During the pretraining phase, we find that chaos-theoretic balancing of dynamical regime diversity yields more robust representations, with a smaller balanced corpus outperforming one twice its size and capturing bifurcation regimes. We evaluate the world model performance across diverse real-world physiological datasets spanning heterogeneous temporal resolutions and intervention regimes, covering daily life, point-of-care, and clinical settings, including fitness planning, hemodialysis, diabetes management, and surgical monitoring. These evaluation datasets comprise records from 8,026 subjects, spanning study durations from 3.2 hours for high-resolution signal data to 2.3 years for longitudinal clinical biomarker tracking. NormWear-2 achieves the best overall forecasting performance across time, frequency, and latent representation domains, with significant improvements over state-of-the-art time series foundation models, while maintaining competitive downstream representation quality, providing a step toward general-purpose world models for physiological signals. --- ### GRLO: Towards Generalizable Reinforcement Learning in Open-Ended Environments from Zero Authors: Shangjian Yin, Yu Fu, Yue Dong, Zhouxing Shi Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15464v1 Post-training has become a crucial step for unlocking the capabilities of large language models, with reinforcement learning (RL) emerging as a critical paradigm. Recent RL-based post-training has increasingly split into two paradigms: reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), which optimizes models using human preference signals in target domains, and reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR), which operates in verifier-backed environments. The latter has dominated recent reasoning-oriented post-training because it delivers stronger gains and higher efficiency on domain-specific tasks (e.g., reasoning). However, although in-domain RL training achieves promising performance, it still requires a substantial amount of GPU compute, which remains a major barrier to broad adoption. In this work, we study the generalization ability of RLHF learned from scratch from a small set of interactions in open-ended environments, and investigate whether the conversational abilities it explicitly acquires can implicitly transfer to downstream tasks such as mathematical reasoning and code generation, namely GRLO. Specifically, on Qwen3-4B-Base backbone, GRLO improves the average performance across all domains from 24.1 to 63.1 with only 5K prompts and 22.7 GPU hours, requiring about $46\times$ less data and $68\times$ less compute than a strong in-domain RLVR baseline. The resulting model is even competitive with Qwen's released post-trained models which required a much larger training cost. Notably, a subsequent in-domain RLVR stage brings only selective gains, mainly on harder competition-math benchmarks. We hope GRLO offers a simple and efficient recipe for building broadly capable post-trained models. Our code and data will be available at: \href{https://github.com/SJY8460/GRLO}{https://github.com/SJY8460/GRLO}. --- ### Layer-wise Derivative Controlled Networks Authors: Rowan Martnishn, Sean Anderson Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15463v1 As machine learning models grow in complexity, they increasingly struggle with three conflicting demands: the need for high accuracy, the requirement for hardware efficiency, and the necessity of functional stability. Traditional architectures often achieve performance at the expense of spiky or unpredictable behavior, where small changes in input lead to massive swings in output -- a critical flaw for real-world deployment in sensitive environments. This paper introduces ChainzRule (CR), a novel neural architecture designed to harmonize these competing goals. ChainzRule replaces standard piecewise-linear activations with a Polynomial Engine governed by Differential Regularization (DREG). Unlike traditional methods that impose global, coarse-grained constraints on a model's Lipschitz constant, DREG acts as a targeted regularization on intermediate derivatives. This approach suppresses extreme sensitivity without attenuating the representational power inherent in the Polynomial Engine. In head-to-head "Fair Fight" benchmarks, ChainzRule outperformed standard models while using 15.5x fewer parameters. On the MNIST dataset, it reduced peak gradient volatility by an average of 23.1%, ensuring a smoother and more predictable manifold. On Yelp Full ordinal regression under explicit DREG regularization, ChainzRule achieves 70.17% accuracy, validating that derivative-aware regularization is compatible with competitive performance on realistic tasks. By embedding gradient awareness into the architecture via DREG, ChainzRule demonstrates that stability and accuracy need not be competing objectives. --- ### DrugSAGE:Self-evolving Agent Experience for Efficient State-of-the-Art Drug Discovery Authors: Yikun Zhang, Xiwei Cheng, Tianyu Liu, Yuanqi Du, Wengong Jin Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15461v1 Building state-of-the-art (SOTA) predictive models for drug discovery requires expensive search over tools, architectures, and training strategies. Current LLM-based agents can find SOTA solutions through extensive trial and error, but they do not retain the experience accumulated along the way and therefore pay the full search cost on every new task. We propose \method (Self-evolving Agent Experience), a framework that accumulates and reuses experience across tasks to build SOTA drug discovery models efficiently. \method maintains a cross-task memory of verified skills, statistical evidence about effective strategies, and a record of recurring errors and their fixes. In some cases, \method transfers a working solution directly without test-time search. In 33 molecular property prediction tasks, \method ranks first among nine SOTA agents in a single-task setting. With memory accumulated from 16 smaller tasks, \method achieves an averaged normalized score of 0.935 on 17 held-out tasks in a cross-task evaluation setting and outperforms all baseline agents by 10-30\% in a zero-test-time search regime. In summary, our work shows the advantage of cross-task memory for efficient SOTA model development in drug discovery. --- ### Differentially Private Motif-Preserving Multi-modal Hashing Authors: Zehua Cheng, Wei Dai, Jiahao Sun Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15460v1 Cross-modal hashing enables efficient retrieval by encoding images and text into compact binary codes. State-of-the-art methods rely on semantic similarity graphs derived from user interactions for supervision, yet these graphs encode sensitive behavioral patterns vulnerable to link reconstruction attacks. Existing privacy-preserving approaches fail on graph-structured data: Differentially Private SGD destroys relational motifs by treating samples independently, while graph synthesis methods suffer from unbounded local sensitivity in scale-free networks, hub nodes cause single-edge modifications to alter triangle counts by $\mathcal{O}(N)$, necessitating prohibitive noise injection. We term this phenomenon Hubness Explosion. We propose DMP-MH, a Sanitize-then-Distill framework that decouples privacy from representation learning. Our approach first bounds sensitivity by deterministically clipping node degrees, capping the $L_2$-sensitivity of triangle motifs independently of dataset size. A sanitized synthetic graph is then generated via Noisy Mirror Descent under $(ε,δ)$-Edge Differential Privacy. Finally, dual-stream hashing networks distill this topology using a holistic structural loss that enforces cross-modal alignment. Evaluated on MIRFlickr-25K and NUS-WIDE under a strict inductive protocol, DMP-MH outperforms private baselines by up to 11.4 mAP points while retaining up to 92.5% of non-private performance. --- ### Don't Stop Me Yet: Sampling Loss Minima via Dissipative Riemannian Mechanics Authors: Albert Kjøller Jacobsen, Leo Uhre Jakobsen, Johanna Marie Gegenfurtner, Georgios Arvanitidis Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15459v1 The minima of modern neural network loss functions are typically not isolated, rather they form connected components of reparameterization invariant solutions on the training data. Analytically characterizing these solutions is a hard problem, but sampling approaches are feasible. By construction, existing methods either spread over low-loss regions, and thus do not sample reparameterization invariant solutions exactly, or are inherently local, which limits exploration of other minima valleys. We propose sampling such reparameterization invariant models using a dynamical system based on kinetic energy, subject to a gravitational pull and a friction term that dissipates energy from the system. Our proposed sampler, DiMS, is guaranteed to sample exactly from the minimum level sets and depends on physically motivated hyperparameters which allows control over the exploration capabilities of the sampler. We consider uncertainty quantification in Bayesian inference as the motivating problem and observe improved performance compared to previously proposed approaches. --- ### Video Models Can Reason with Verifiable Rewards Authors: Tinghui Zhu, Sheng Zhang, James Y. Huang, Selena Song, Xiaofei Wen, Yuankai Li, Hoifung Poon, Muhao Chen Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15458v1 Video diffusion models have made rapid progress in perceptual realism and temporal coherence, but they remain primarily optimized for plausible generation rather than verifiable reasoning. This limitation is especially pronounced in tasks where generated videos must satisfy explicit spatial, temporal, or logical constraints. Inspired by the role of reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) in reasoning-oriented language models, we introduce VideoRLVR, a practical recipe for optimizing video diffusion models with rule-based feedback. VideoRLVR formulates video reasoning as the generation of verifiable visual trajectories and consists of an SDE-GRPO optimization backbone, dense decomposed rewards, and an Early-Step Focus strategy for efficient training. The Early-Step Focus strategy restricts policy optimization to the early denoising phase, reducing training latency by about 40% while preserving performance. We evaluate VideoRLVR on Maze, FlowFree, and Sokoban, three procedurally generated domains with objective success criteria. Across these tasks, VideoRLVR consistently improves over supervised fine-tuning baselines, with dense decomposed rewards proving especially important in low-success-rate settings. Our RL-optimized model also outperforms the evaluated proprietary and open-source video generation models on these verifiable reasoning benchmarks and out-of-domain benchmarks. These results suggest that verifiable RL can move video models beyond perceptual imitation toward more reliable rule-consistent visual reasoning. --- ### DIPA: Distilled Preconditioned Algorithms for Solving Imaging Inverse Problems Authors: Romario Gualdrón-Hurtado, Roman Jacome, Leon Suarez, Henry Arguello Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15456v1 Solving imaging inverse problems has usually been addressed by designing proper prior models of the underlying signal. However, minimizing the data fidelity term poses significant challenges due to the ill-conditioned sensing matrix caused by physical constraints in the acquisition system. Thus, preconditioning techniques have been adopted in classical optimization theory to address ill-conditioned data-fidelity minimization by transforming the algorithm gradient step to achieve faster convergence and better numerical stability. We extend the preconditioning concept beyond convergence acceleration and use it to improve reconstruction quality. We introduce DIPA: Distilled Preconditioned Algorithms, where a preconditioning operator (PO) is optimized using teacher-guided distillation criteria. Unlike standard model-compression KD, the teacher and student differ by the sensing operators available during reconstruction: the teacher uses a simulated, better-conditioned, and more informative sensing matrix, whereas the student uses the physically feasible sensing matrix. We design different distillation loss functions to transfer different properties of the teacher algorithm to the preconditioned student. The PO can be linear (L-DIPA), allowing interpretability, or non-linear (N-DIPA), parametrized by a neural network, offering better scalability. We validate the proposed PO design across several imaging modalities, including magnetic resonance imaging, compressed sensing, and super-resolution imaging. --- ### Reasoning Models Don't Just Think Longer, They Move Differently Authors: Anders Gjølbye, Lars Kai Hansen, Sanmi Koyejo Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15454v2 Reasoning-trained language models often spend more tokens on harder problems, but longer chains of thought do not show whether a model is merely computing for more steps or following a different internal trajectory. We study this distinction through hidden-state trajectories during chain-of-thought generation across competitive programming, mathematics, and Boolean satisfiability. Raw trajectory geometry is strongly shaped by generation length: longer generations mechanically alter path statistics, so difficulty-dependent comparisons are misleading without adjustment. After residualizing trajectory statistics on length, difficulty remains systematically coupled to corrected trajectory geometry across all domains studied. The clearest reasoning-specific separation appears in the code domain, where harder problems show more direct corrected trajectories and less heterogeneous local curvature in reasoning-trained models than in matched instruction-tuned baselines. Corrected difficulty-geometry coupling is weaker, but still present, in mathematics and Boolean satisfiability. Prompt-stage linear probes do not mirror the code-domain separation, and behavioral annotations show that stronger corrected coupling co-occurs with strategy shifts and uncertainty monitoring. Together, these findings establish length correction as a prerequisite for generation-time trajectory analysis and show that reasoning training can be associated with distinct corrected trajectory geometry, with the strength of the effect depending on the domain. --- ### RIDE: Retinex-Informed Decoupling for Exposing Concealed Objects Authors: Chunming He, Rihan Zhang, Dingming Zhang, Chengyu Fang, Longxiang Tang, Jingjia Feng, Fengyang Xiao, Sina Farsiu Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15450v1 Concealed Object Segmentation (COS) encompasses a family of dense-prediction tasks, including camouflaged object detection, polyp segmentation, transparent object detection, and industrial defect inspection, where targets are visually entangled with their surroundings through different physical mechanisms. Existing methods either operate directly on RGB images or employ \emph{heterogeneous} decompositions (\eg, Fourier, wavelet) that redistribute spatial evidence across scale/frequency coefficients, making pixel-aligned cues less direct. We introduce a fundamentally different perspective: \textbf{homogeneous image decomposition} via Retinex theory, which factorizes an image into illumination and reflectance components within the \emph{same} spatial domain. Our key insight is that visual entanglement enforces appearance matching in the composite space, but this does \emph{not} necessitate simultaneous matching in both component spaces, a phenomenon we formalize as the \textbf{Discriminability Gap Theorem}. Crucially, we show that across diverse COS sub-tasks, the underlying physical processes systematically anti-correlate illumination and reflectance differences, yielding theoretical guarantees that Retinex decomposition preserves or strictly improves total foreground--background discriminability across the full physical regime, with anti-correlation maximizing the gain. Building on this, we propose \textbf{RIDE} comprising: (i) a Task-Driven Retinex Decomposition module that learns segmentation-optimal factorizations end-to-end; (ii) a Discriminability Gap Attention mechanism that adaptively exploits where decomposition helps; and (iii) a Camouflage-Breaking Contrastive loss operating in reflectance feature space. --- ### From LLM-Generated Conjectures to Lean Formalizations: Automated Polynomial Inequality Proving via Sum-of-Squares Certificates Authors: Ruobing Zuo, Hanrui Zhao, Gaolei He, Zhengfeng Yang, Jianlin Wang Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15445v1 Automated proving of polynomial inequalities is a fundamental challenge in automated mathematical reasoning, where rich algebraic structure and a rapidly growing certificate search space hinder scalability. Purely symbolic approaches provide strong guarantees but often scale poorly as the number of variables or the degree increases, due to expensive algebraic manipulations and rapidly growing intermediate expressions. In parallel, LLM-guided methods have made notable progress, particularly on competition-style inequalities with a small number of variables. To address the remaining scalability challenges, we propose NSPI, a neuro-symbolic framework that combines the complementary strengths of LLMs and symbolic computation for polynomial-inequality proving. Concretely, an LLM proposes a conjecture in the form of an approximate polynomial Sum-Of-Squares (SOS) decomposition; we refine it via symbolic computation to obtain an exact polynomial SOS representation, which directly proves the target inequality, and we further certify the proof in Lean, yielding an end-to-end pipeline from heuristic discovery to machine-checked proof. Experiments on challenging benchmarks involving polynomials with up to 10 variables demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed method. --- ### Why are language models less surprised than humans? Testing the Parse Multiplicity Mismatch Hypothesis Authors: William Timkey, Brian Dillon, Tal Linzen Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15440v1 Surprisal theory posits that the processing difficulty of a word is determined by its predictability in context, offering a potential link between human sentence processing and next-word predictions from language models. While language model (LM) surprisals successfully predict reading times in naturalistic text, they systematically underpredict the magnitude of difficulty observed in controlled studies of syntactic ambiguity, particularly in garden path sentences. This mismatch might arise from differences in the computational constraints between humans and LMs. Here we test one such hypothesis, specifically, that LMs may be able to simultaneously consider a greater number of distinct sentence interpretations at once, compared to humans. Using Recurrent Neural Network Grammars (RNNGs) with word-synchronous beam search, we systematically vary the number of simultaneous parses used to compute word surprisal, and then use these surprisals to predict human reading times. Reducing the number of simultaneous active parses indeed increases the magnitude of predicted garden path effects, but not nearly enough to capture the full magnitude of the effects in humans. This suggests that differences in the number of simultaneous parses available to LMs and humans cannot reconcile LM-based surprisal with human sentence processing. --- ### Neural Activation Patterns Across Language Model Architectures: A Comprehensive Analysis of Cognitive Task Performance Authors: Mahdi Naser-Moghadasi, Faezeh Ghaderi Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15436v1 This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of neural activation patterns across six distinct large language model (LLM) architectures, examining their performance on twelve cognitive task categories. Through systematic measurement of final activation values, attention entropy, and sparsity patterns, we reveal fundamental differences in how encoder and decoder architectures process diverse cognitive tasks. Our analysis of 144 task-model combinations demonstrates that mathematical reasoning consistently produces the highest attention entropy across all architectures, while decoder models exhibit significantly higher sparsity patterns compared to encoder models. The findings provide critical insights into the computational characteristics of modern language models and their task-specific neural behaviors, with implications for model selection and optimization in big data applications. --- ### On the Stability of Growth in Structural Plasticity Authors: Lute Lillo, Nick Cheney Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15435v2 Standard deep-learning pipelines usually choose the network architecture before training and keep it fixed throughout optimization. In contrast, a model can also be adapted by editing its structure during training, for example by pruning existing hidden-neuron units or growing new ones. Although growth is appealing for adaptive and continual systems, we show that it is not simply the inverse of pruning. Pruning selects among units that have participated in training from the start, whereas growth inserts new units into an already specialized optimization trajectory. We isolate this insertion problem and show that newborn units are often forward-active but backward-starved: they participate in the forward computation, yet receive much weaker gradient signal than incumbent units. This disadvantage is minor in small MLP benchmarks, but becomes clear in harder image-classification settings with a convolutional trunk. In these settings, \textsc{Grow} can achieve high final accuracy during the structural-editing procedure, while \textsc{Prune} is stronger when performance is averaged over the training trajectory or when the final sparse network is retrained from scratch. Interventions targeting optimizer state, insertion, selection, and trainability show that improving the integration of newborn units can improve adaptive performance, but does not automatically produce better final subnetworks. In continual-learning benchmarks stressing plasticity loss, \textsc{Grow} becomes competitive mainly when new units have enough time to integrate. Together, these results suggest that \textsc{Grow} should be evaluated not only as an architecture-search operator, but as a time-sensitive optimization process whose success depends on insertion stability. --- ### Spectral Priors vs. Attention: Investigating the Utility of Attention Mechanisms in EEG-Based Diagnosis Authors: Tawsik Jawad, Gowtham Atluri, Vikram Ravindra Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15433v2 Electroencephalograph (EEG) timeseries signals are characterized by significant noise and coarse spatial resolution, which complicates the classification of neurodegenerative diseases. Even SOTA deep learning architectures struggle to distinguish between healthy controls and diseased subjects, or between different disease types, due to high intergroup similarity. In this paper, we show that a spectrally selective approach to feature construction enhances class separability. By isolating signal strengths within the primary brainwave bands, we transform high dimensional raw data into high value spectral features. Our results demonstrate that in small datasets a) features derived from frequency and time frequency domain allow traditional machine learning models to match or exceed the performance of SOTA deep learning models, b) Attention mechanism is unable to distill the stable feature signatures that characterize healthy neural activity in both resting and task EEGs, and c) the limitations of attention based models in finding relevant spectral features appear to be robust in that providing frequency selective time domain input do not appreciably improve their performance. We validate our methodology across three open source resting EEG datasets and one task EEG dataset, providing robust empirical evidence for our claims. --- ### Where to Perch in a Tree: Vision-Guidance for Tree-Grasping Drones Authors: Alex Dunnett, Leonie Bottomley, Mirko Kovac, Basaran Bahadir Kocer Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15430v1 This study demonstrates a method to locate an ideal perch location on a tree for vision-guided autonomous tree-perching drones. Various image processing algorithms, including those used for machine learning, image segmentation and binary image morphology, are implemented to assess the shape and structure of a tree. Rather than identifying the closest available branch, this study builds on vision methods by evaluating the potential of each branch, determining its suitability for perching based on factors such as branch width, slope (angle to the horizontal) and curvature. For a given tree-perching drone and a dataset of more than 10,000 urban tree images taken from February to October in a subtropical and temperate monsoon climate, the proposed method successfully produces a result for 76% of feasible targets. A feasible target defined as a tree where the branch diameters are sufficiently thick and where the available perching space is at least equal to the width of a tendon-driven grasping claw. These successful preliminary results create a foundation from which a number of identified improvements and additional features can be developed to create a generalised method; this will involve the incorporation of supplementary data from depth perception and attitude sensors to enhance the branch assessment. --- ### Runtime-Structured Task Decomposition for Agentic Coding Systems Authors: Shubhi Asthana, Bing Zhang, Chad DeLuca, Hima Patel, Ruchi Mahindru Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15425v1 Agentic coding systems increasingly use large language models (LLMs) for software engineering tasks such as debugging, root cause analysis, and code review. However, many existing systems encode task logic, execution flow, and output generation inside monolithic prompts. This design creates brittle behavior, limited debuggability, and high retry costs because failures often require rerunning the full workflow. We present runtime-structured task decomposition, an architectural approach in which task partitioning and execution flow are managed through executable control logic rather than prompt structure alone. LLMs are used only for focused judgment tasks, and outputs are validated against predefined schemas before downstream execution. We evaluate this approach on two software engineering workloads using three configurations: monolithic execution, static decomposition with fixed subtasks and no runtime branching, and runtime-structured decomposition. Each configuration was evaluated across 10 runs. Our results show that decomposition alone does not necessarily reduce retry cost. In the Kubernetes root cause analysis workload, the static decomposition baseline produced a retry cost of 1,632 +/- 145 tokens versus 904 +/- 17 tokens for the monolithic baseline because failures forced reruns of downstream subtasks. A similar pattern appeared in the multi-file debugging workload, where the static baseline consumed 933 tokens compared to 703 tokens for the monolithic system. The runtime-structured approach reran only failed subtasks, reducing retry costs to 436 +/- 132 tokens for root cause analysis and 460 tokens for debugging. Overall, the approach achieved up to 51.7% lower retry cost than monolithic systems and 73.2% lower retry cost than static decomposition baselines, improving efficiency, debuggability, and operational reliability in agentic coding systems. --- ### Social-Mamba: Socially-Aware Trajectory Forecasting with State-Space Models Authors: Po-Chien Luan, Wuyang Li, Yang Gao, Alexandre Alahi Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15424v1 Human trajectory forecasting is crucial for safe navigation in crowded environments, requiring models that balance accuracy with computational efficiency. Efficiently modeling social interactions is key to performance in dense crowds. Yet, most recent methods rely on attention mechanisms, which are effective at capturing complex dependencies, but incur quadratic computational costs that scale poorly with the growing number of neighbors. Recently, Selective State-Space Models have provided a linear-time alternative; however, their inherently sequential design is misaligned with the unstructured and dynamic nature of social interactions. To address this challenge, we propose Social-Mamba, a forecasting architecture that reformulates social interactions as structured sequential processes. At its core is the Cycle Mamba block, a novel module that enables continuous bidirectional information flow. Social-Mamba organizes agents on an egocentric grid and introduces social triplet factorization, which decomposes interactions into temporal, egocentric, and goal-centric scans. These are dynamically integrated through a learnable social gate and global scan to generate accurate and efficient trajectory predictions. Extensive experiments on five trajectory forecasting benchmarks show that Social-Mamba achieves state-of-the-art accuracy while offering superior parameter efficiency and computational scalability. Furthermore, embedding Social-Mamba into a flow-matching framework further enhances both accuracy and efficiency, establishing it as a flexible and robust foundation for future trajectory forecasting research. The code is publicly available: https://github.com/vita-epfl/Social-Mamba --- ### MR2-ByteTrack: CNN and Transformer-based Video Object Detection for AI-augmented Embedded Vision Sensor Nodes Authors: Luca Bompani, Manuele Rusci, Luca Benini, Daniele Palossi, Francesco Conti Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, eess.IV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15423v1 Modern smart vision sensors need on-device intelligence to process video streams, as cloud computing is often impractical due to bandwidth, latency, and privacy constraints. However, these sensory systems typically rely on ultra-low-power microcontrollers (MCUs) with limited memory and compute, making conventional video object detection methods, which require feature storage or multi-frame buffering, unfeasible. To address this challenge, we introduce Multi-Resolution Rescored ByteTrack (MR2-ByteTrack), a Video Object Detection (VOD) method tailored for MCU-based embedded vision nodes. MR2-ByteTrack reduces computational cost by alternating between full- and low-resolution inference, while linking detections across frames via ByteTrack and correcting misclassifications through the Rescore algorithm, which applies probability union rules to aggregate detection confidence scores across frames. We apply our approach to both a CNN-based detector and a Transformer-based model, demonstrating its generality across architectures with fundamentally different spatial processing. Experiments on ImageNetVID demonstrate that MR2-ByteTrack maintains accuracy, achieving mAP scores of up to 49.0 for the CNN-based models and 48.7 for the Transformer, while reducing multiply-accumulate operations by as much as 53\% for the CNNs and 32\% for the Transformer. When deployed on GAP9, an ultra-low-power RISC-V multicore MCU, our method yields up to 55\% energy savings compared to processing only full-resolution images, enabling the first real-time Transformer-based VOD on an MCU-class embedded vision node. Code available at https://github.com/Bomps4/Multi_Resolution_Rescored_ByteTrack/tree/IEEE_Access --- ### DualKV: Shared-Prompt Flash Attention for Efficient RL Training with Large Rollouts and Long Contexts Authors: Jiading Gai, Shuai Zhang, Xiang Song, Bernie Wang, George Karypis Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15422v4 Modern RL post-training methods such as GRPO and DAPO train on N response sequences of R tokens sampled from a shared prompt of P tokens, but standard FlashAttention replicates all P prompt tokens N times across both forward and backward passes -- duplicating compute and memory on identical hidden states. In large-rollout, long-context RL training (N>=16, P>=8K), this redundancy dominates the policy update cost. We observe that in decoder-only models, causal masking makes prompt representations invariant across sequences at every layer, so all per-token operations (norms, projections, MLP) and attention can process the prompt once -- a property not yet exploited at the kernel level for training. We propose DualKV, the first FlashAttention kernel variant that eliminates shared-prompt replication during RL training, via (1) fused CUDA forward and backward kernels that iterate over two disjoint KV regions -- shared context and per-sequence response -- in a single kernel launch, and (2) a data-pipeline redesign in veRL that repacks N(P+R) tokens into P+NR tokens per micro-batch, extending the token reduction from attention to the entire model by a factor rho = N(P+R)/(P+NR). DualKV is mathematically equivalent to standard attention and introduces no approximation. On Qwen3-8B GRPO training with 8xH100 GPUs (N=32, 8K-context), DualKV achieves 1.63--2.09x policy-update speedup, enables 2x larger micro-batches, and raises MFU from 36% to 76%. Similar gains hold for DAPO (2.47x speedup, 77% MFU). At 30B MoE scale on 16xH100, DualKV achieves 3.82x policy-update and 3.38x end-to-end step speedup over FlashAttention (which requires 4-way Ulysses sequence parallelism to avoid OOM). DualKV also extends to hybrid sliding/global attention with head dimension 512 (which FA2 does not support) and integrates with Ulysses sequence parallelism, demonstrated on Gemma-4-31B GRPO at 64K context. --- ### DualKV: Shared-Prompt Flash Attention for Efficient RL Training with Large Rollouts and Long Contexts Authors: Jiading Gai, Shuai Zhang, Xiang Song, Bernie Wang, George Karypis Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15422v3 Modern RL post-training methods such as GRPO and DAPO train on N response sequences of R tokens sampled from a shared prompt of P tokens, but standard FlashAttention replicates all P prompt tokens N times across both forward and backward passes -- duplicating compute and memory on identical hidden states. In large-rollout, long-context RL training (N>=16, P>=8K), this redundancy dominates the policy update cost. We observe that in decoder-only models, causal masking makes prompt representations invariant across sequences at every layer, so all per-token operations (norms, projections, MLP) and attention can process the prompt once -- a property not yet exploited at the kernel level for training. We propose DualKV, the first FlashAttention kernel variant that eliminates shared-prompt replication during RL training, via (1) fused CUDA forward and backward kernels that iterate over two disjoint KV regions -- shared context and per-sequence response -- in a single kernel launch, and (2) a data-pipeline redesign in veRL that repacks N(P+R) tokens into P+NR tokens per micro-batch, extending the token reduction from attention to the entire model by a factor rho = N(P+R)/(P+NR). DualKV is mathematically equivalent to standard attention and introduces no approximation. On Qwen3-8B GRPO training with 8xH100 GPUs (N=32, 8K-context), DualKV achieves 1.63--2.09x policy-update speedup, enables 2x larger micro-batches, and raises MFU from 36% to 76%. Similar gains hold for DAPO (2.47x speedup, 77% MFU). At 30B MoE scale on 16xH100, DualKV achieves 3.82x policy-update and 3.38x end-to-end step speedup over FlashAttention (which requires 4-way Ulysses sequence parallelism to avoid OOM). DualKV also extends to hybrid sliding/global attention with head dimension 512 (which FA2 does not support) and integrates with Ulysses sequence parallelism, demonstrated on Gemma-4-31B GRPO at 64K context. --- ### U-SEG: Uncertainty in SEGmentation -- A systematic multi-variable exploration Authors: Michael Smith, Frank P. Ferrie Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15421v1 In this study, we explore in depth a few under-studied topics at the intersection of uncertainty estimation and segmentation. Prior work has shown that the quality of uncertainty estimates can be very sensitive to a range of variables. As one of the main uses of uncertainty estimation is to help identify and deal with prediction errors in practical scenarios, any factors that affect this must be clearly identified. For example, do more challenging domains or different datasets and architectures result in worse performance when using uncertainty estimates? Can prior frames in a video sequence in fact provide useful uncertainty estimates comparable to other approaches? Is it possible to combine uncertainty estimation approaches, taking advantage of sample diversity, to get better estimates? Finally, when might it make sense to use an ensemble-based uncertainty estimate over a deterministic network? We address these questions by creating a framework for and executing a large scale study across many variables such as datasets, backbones, and downstream tasks, for both semantic and panoptic segmentation. We find that a) the more challenging task of panoptic segmentation usually results in worse performance while high performance variance between datasets and backbones indicates that generalization is not guaranteed, b) time series samples can be useful for specific configurations, but in many cases are not worth the cost, c) sample diversity shows the most promise in the downstream task of calibration, but otherwise fails to beat simpler alternatives, d) a deterministic approach is adequate for some downstream tasks, but ensembles allow for significant improvements if the right conditions can be achieved in deployment. --- ### Lagrangian Flow Matching: A Least-Action Framework for Principled Path Design Authors: Shukai Du, Junzhe Zhang, Yiming Li Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15419v2 Flow matching trains a neural velocity field by regression against a target velocity associated with a prescribed probability path connecting a simple initial distribution to the data distribution. A central design choice is the path itself. Existing constructions, including rectified and optimal-transport-based paths, transport samples along straight lines between coupled endpoints and thus cover only a narrow class of dynamics. We observe that this corresponds to the simplest case of the least-action principle in classical mechanics, in which the kinetic Lagrangian yields free-particle straight-line trajectories. Building on this observation, we propose Lagrangian flow matching, a physics-based framework in which the probability path and velocity field are determined by minimizing the action of a general Lagrangian subject to the continuity equation and the prescribed endpoints. We show that this dynamic problem admits an equivalent static optimal transport (OT) formulation, yielding a family of simulation-free training objectives that recover OT-based flow matching as the kinetic special case and the trigonometric variance-preserving diffusion path as the harmonic-oscillator case. More general Lagrangians give rise to new probability paths and velocity fields, and numerical experiments show that they induce meaningful changes in the learned dynamics while remaining competitive with existing conditional flow matching models. --- ### A Differentiable Ray-Wave Framework for Hybrid Refractive-Diffractive System Modeling and Optimization Authors: Jiazhou Cheng, Margaret Gao, Yixuan Shao, Chenkai Mao, Tom D. Milster, Jonathan A. Fan Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: physics.optics, cs.CV, cs.GR, eess.SP, physics.comp-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15418v2 Hybrid optical systems combining refractive and diffractive optical responses have the potential to support new types of optical behavior, but they are difficult to model and optimize due to the disparate spatial scales and physics exhibited by ray and wave phenomena. In this work, we present a differentiable ray-wave framework for modeling hybrid refractive-diffractive optical systems that operates as a plug-and-play module within standard ray tracing pipelines. Our model uniquely applies to both planar and curvilinear diffractive surfaces and accommodates arbitrary scalar holographic profiles with high spatial frequency responses, with each simulation evaluated at a single wavelength. We analyze ray-wave modeling regimes that optimally account for the spatial frequency properties and spatial curvature of the diffractive surfaces, and we demonstrate the gradient-based end-to-end optimization of hybrid refractive-diffractive systems featuring planar and conformal diffractive surfaces. We anticipate that these modeling capabilities will enable new classes of hybrid optical systems relevant to computational imaging and display applications. --- ### $f$-Trajectory Balance: A Loss Family for Tuning GFlowNets, Generative Models, and LLMs with Off- and On-Policy Data Authors: Jake Fawkes, Jason Hartford Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15417v1 In GFlowNets and variational inference, it has been shown that the mean square error between target and model log probabilities is an effective, low variance, surrogate loss for training generative models. This loss has the property that when evaluated \emph{on-policy} its gradients correspond to those of the KL divergence, while \emph{off-policy} it remains a valid loss with the same global minimizer. In this work, we demonstrate that this construction can be extended to the whole family of $f$-divergences, leading to a family of losses whose on-policy gradients are that of the corresponding $f$-divergence, but retain the same global minimizer off-policy. Specifically, we show that the on-policy gradients lead to a one to one correspondence between translation invariant loss functions on the target and model log probabilities, and $f$-divergences. This equivalence allows us to design new surrogate loss functions for tuning a wide class of generative models that inherit the properties of the corresponding $f$-divergence, such as being more mode covering, whilst being applicable to off-policy data. We apply our losses on a range of tasks, including classic synthetic examples, SynFlowNets for molecule discovery, and asynchronous large language model (LLM) tuning, demonstrating that our models retain their predicted properties on- and off-policy in a wide class of generative models. --- ### Margin-Adaptive Confidence Ranking for Reliable LLM Judgement Authors: Gaojie Jin, Yong Tao, Lijia Yu, Tianjin Huang Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15416v3 Jung et al. (2025) introduce a hypothesis testing framework for guaranteeing agreement between large language models (LLMs) and human judgments, relying on the assumption that the model's estimated confidence is monotonic with respect to human-disagreement risk. In practice, however, this assumption may be violated, and the generalization behavior of the confidence estimator is not explicitly analyzed. We mitigate these issues by learning a dedicated confidence estimator instead of relying on heuristic confidence signals. Our approach leverages simulated annotator diversity and a margin-based ranking formulation to explicitly model how confidently an LLM distinguishes between human-agreement and human-disagreement cases. We further derive generalization guarantees for this estimator, revealing a margin-dependent trade-off that informs the design of an adaptive estimator training procedure. When integrated into fixed-sequence testing, the learned confidence estimator yields improved ranking accuracy and empirically strengthens the monotonic relationship between confidence and disagreement risk, leading to higher success rates in satisfying target agreement levels across multiple datasets and judge models. --- ### Transformer Scalability Crisis: The First Comprehensive Empirical Analysis of Performance Walls in Modern Language Models Authors: Mahdi Naser Moghadasi, Faezeh Ghaderi Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15413v1 Despite the remarkable success of transformer architectures in natural language processing, their scalability limitations remain poorly understood through systematic empirical analysis. This paper presents the first comprehensive large-scale evaluation of 118 transformer models across seven distinct architectural categories, revealing fundamental performance walls that manifest as hard deployment constraints. Our systematic benchmarking methodology uncovers a critical scalability crisis: while 88.1% of models successfully process sequences up to 512 tokens, this drops dramatically to 44.9% at 1024 tokens, with complete failure (0%) at 2048 tokens. Through rigorous analysis of loading times, memory consumption, and computational efficiency across sequence lengths from 128 to 2048 tokens, we demonstrate that compressed models achieve superior parameter efficiency (649.2 tokens/sec/M parameters) compared to large generative models (12.5 tokens/sec/M). Our findings challenge prevailing scaling assumptions and provide the first quantitative evidence that the theoretical O(n2) attention complexity translates into measurable performance walls. This work establishes new benchmarking methodologies for transformer evaluation and provides critical insights for practical deployment decisions in production environments. --- ### From Feedback Loops to Policy Updates: Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for LLM-Based Alpha Factor Discovery Authors: Lingzhe Zhang, Tong Jia, Yunpeng Zhai, Zixuan Xie, Chiming Duan, Minghua He, Philip S. Yu, Ying Li Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CE, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15412v1 Modern quantitative trading increasingly relies on systematic models to extract predictive signals from large-scale financial data, where alpha factor discovery plays a central role in transforming market observations into tradable signals. Recent LLM-based methods have shown promise in automating factor generation, but most of them still rely on prompt-level generation--evaluation--feedback loops for iterative optimization. As the loop becomes longer, repeatedly appended historical candidates and feedback can cause context explosion, increase inference cost, dilute useful information, and introduce feedback drift. Moreover, these methods often depend on very large LLMs whose stable generation preferences may lead to structurally similar expressions, redundant candidates, and search stagnation. To address these limitations, we propose \textsc{QuantEvolver}, a self-evolving alpha factor discovery framework based on reinforcement fine-tuning. Instead of accumulating feedback in the prompt, \textsc{QuantEvolver} converts executable quantitative evaluation into policy updates, enabling a Miner LLM to internalize historical optimization experience through parameter learning. Specifically, \textsc{QuantEvolver} constructs high-quality seed factors, builds diverse seed--time-window training tasks, generates executable Factor DSL expressions, evaluates them through Regime Backtest, and optimizes the Miner LLM with Diversity-Complementarity Reward. During training, high-quality factors are continuously accumulated in a Mined Factor Database, which serves as the final discovered factor library. Extensive experiments on three realistic market benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of \textsc{QuantEvolver}, which consistently improves the primary evaluation metric of each task over existing LLM-based alpha factor discovery baselines, produces higher-quality and more complementary factor pools. --- ### Harnessing Unimodality in Semiparametric Contextual Pricing via Oracle Price Map Learning Authors: Yingying Fan, Yuxuan Han, Jinchi Lv, Xiaocong Xu, Zhengyuan Zhou Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15411v1 We study contextual dynamic pricing in a semiparametric scalar-index valuation model where the latent value is $v_t=μ_\ast(\mathsf c_t)+ξ_t$, with an unknown utility map $μ_\ast$ and an unknown additive noise distribution. The key decision object is the one-dimensional oracle price map $u\mapsto p^\ast(u)$ induced by the scalar index $u=μ_\ast(\mathsf c)$ and the noise tail. Under the $β$-Hölder smoothness of the tail function for $β\geq 2$ and a revenue-geometry condition that gives a unique, stable, interior maximizer, this oracle map is itself $(β-1)$-smooth. We exploit such structure through $\mathsf{ORBIT}$, a modular coarse-to-fine policy that takes a scalar pilot index as input, localizes a benchmark price in each active bin, and learns a local polynomial approximation of the oracle map inside a trust region via bandit convex optimization. For the baseline linear utility model $μ_\ast(\mathsf c)=\mathsf c^\topθ_\ast$, an adaptive elliptical exploration scheme constructs the required scalar pilot online without distributional assumptions on the contexts. The resulting policy achieves regret $\widetilde{O}\big(T^{\frac{2β-1}{4β-3}}+\sqrt{dT}\big)$. For fixed $d$, we establish a matching lower bound in the horizon dependence, unveiling that the nonparametric oracle-map learning term is minimax sharp. The same scalar-pilot interface also yields extensions to sparse high-dimensional linear utility and nonparametric Hölder utility. --- ### Diagonal Adaptive Non-local Observables on Quantum Neural Networks Authors: Huan-Hsin Tseng, Yan Li, Hsin-Yi Lin, Samuel Yen-Chi Chen Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: quant-ph, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15410v1 Adaptive Non-local Observables (ANOs) have shown that making quantum observables dynamic can substantially enlarge the function space of Variational Quantum Algorithms, partly shifting hardware demands from circuit synthesis to measurement design. However, this advantage is accompanied by a steep increase in the number of parameters, as well as the classical optimization cost for varying general Hermitian observables. We propose a special form of ANO that significantly reduces this burden by considering only diagonal observables paired with quantum circuits. Mathematically, this is equivalent to the full ANO of a large parameter space since diagonal matrices are canonical representatives of the ANO space modulo unitary similarity. As a result, Diagonal ANO retains the same capability of full ANO while reducing $k$-local observable complexity from $O(4^k)$ to $O(2^k)$ and lowering the corresponding measurement-side classical computation. In this sense, diagonal ANO preserves much of the benefit of full ANO while encompassing conventional VQCs as a special case. --- ### Energy-based Transport for Amortized Bayesian Inference Authors: Ricardo Baptista, Hojjat Kaveh, Andrew M. Stuart Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: math.NA, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15407v3 We consider amortized Bayesian inference for nonlinear inverse problems using only samples from the joint distribution of parameters and observations, including problems with unknown functions in a Banach space. Classical methods such as Markov chain Monte Carlo solve a new inference problem for each observation, making repeated posterior inference computationally prohibitive, particularly in infinite dimensions. Amortized Bayesian inversion instead learns a reusable map that rapidly generates posterior samples for new observations. We learn an observation-dependent transport map that pushes a reference measure to an approximate posterior. Training minimizes the average energy distance between the posterior and the learned pushforward. Averaging over observations allows generalization across observation instances and efficient amortized inference. Furthermore, the formulation is likelihood-free, requiring only samples from the joint distribution and avoiding likelihood evaluation. In addition, the use of an energy-distance objective removes the need for invertibility of the transport map and for computation of Jacobian determinants, enabling flexible parameterizations in high- and infinite-dimensional settings. Moreover, when the posterior has a density with respect to a Gaussian prior measure, we construct transport maps as the identity plus a learnable map valued in the prior's Cameron--Martin space. This guarantees that the learned posterior remains absolutely continuous with respect to the prior. In infinite dimensions, the transport map is parameterized using neural operators, enabling use at different grid resolutions. We demonstrate the approach on a finite-dimensional problem and PDE-based porous-medium flow and seismic inverse problems. The learned transport captures multimodality and dominant posterior modes while enabling fast sampling. --- ### Capability Conditioned Scaffolding for Professional Human LLM Collaboration Authors: Sen Yang, Yinglei Ma Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15404v1 Large language model personalization typically adapts outputs to user preferences and style but does not account for differences in user evaluation capacity across domains of expertise. This limitation can encourage Professional Domain Drift, where users rely on AI generated reasoning in domains they cannot reliably evaluate. We introduce Capability Conditioned Scaffolding, a typed framework that partitions expertise into strong, mixed, and weak domains and conditions intervention behavior on structured capability profiles. A pilot evaluation across multiple MMLU subsets and four LLM substrates shows consistent profile conditioned intervention behavior, including categorical inversion under profile swapping and selective activation in mixed domain risk zones. These findings suggest that capability aware scaffolding can support more reliable professional human AI collaboration beyond stylistic personalization. --- ### $φ$-Balancing for Mixture-of-Experts Training Authors: Lizhang Chen, Jonathan Li, Qi Wang, Runlong Liao, Shuozhe Li, Chen Liang, Ni Lao, Qiang Liu Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG, math.OC, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15403v1 Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models rely on balanced expert utilization to fully realize their scalability. However, existing load-balancing methods are largely heuristic and operate on noisy mini-batch assignment statistics, introducing bias relative to population-level objectives. We propose $φ$-balancing, a principled framework that directly targets population-level expert balance by minimizing a strictly convex, symmetric, and differentiable potential of the expected routing distribution. Using convex duality, we derive an equivalent min-max formulation and obtain a simple online algorithm via mirror descent, yielding an efficient EMA-based routing adjustment with negligible overhead. Across large-scale pretraining and downstream fine-tuning, $φ$-balancing consistently outperforms prior Switch-style and loss-free baselines, demonstrating more stable and effective expert utilization. --- ### Beyond Partner Diversity: An Influence-Based Team Steering Framework for Zero-Shot Human-Machine Teaming Authors: Wei Sheng, Rohan Paleja Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15400v1 While AI agents are rapidly advancing from isolated tools to interactive collaborators, data-driven human-machine teaming (HMT) methods remain costly in their reliance on human interaction data across domains, teammates, and team sizes. Zero-shot coordination (ZSC) addresses this bottleneck by simulating diverse partner populations to approximate how unseen partners might behave. However, partner coverage alone is insufficient as team settings scale and communication becomes degraded. To remedy this deficiency, we propose Influence-Based Team Steering (IBTS), a framework that uses influence shaping to incentivize agents to discover diverse, high-performing team interaction patterns and further steers ongoing trajectories toward stronger learned coordination modes. We assess IBTS on Overcooked-AI in both two-agent and three-agent settings, allowing us to test whether learned coordination structure transfers beyond dyadic interaction. Our evaluation includes simulated partners, synthetic partner-style variation, and, to our knowledge, the first 30-subject Overcooked-AI HMT study involving two real human teammates and one machine teammate. Across these evaluations, IBTS improves team performance against competing baselines, highlighting the need for scaled ZSC to combine sparse-reward coordination mechanisms with partner-variation coverage rather than relying on diversity alone. --- ### Breakeven complexity: A new perspective on neural partial differential equation solvers Authors: Yijing Zhang, Nicholas Roberts, Tanya Marwah, Mikhail Khodak Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, math.NA, physics.comp-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15399v1 Neural surrogate solvers of partial differential equations (PDEs) promise dramatic speedups over numerical methods, especially in scenarios requiring many solves. However, current accuracy-based evaluations do not fully consider two central issues: (1) neural solvers incur substantial up-front costs for data generation, training, and tuning; and (2) classical solvers can also generate low-fidelity solutions at a sufficiently low simulation cost. To explicitly account for these realities and fully incorporate end-to-end costs, we propose an evaluation framework centered on breakeven complexity, a metric that counts the forward solves before a learned solver is cost-effective relative to an error-equivalent traditional solver. To evaluate this measure, we apply scaling laws to determine how much training budget to allocate to data generation and discuss how to achieve smooth error-matching in diverse settings. We evaluate the breakeven complexity of multiple neural PDE solvers on three PDEs on 2D periodic domains from APEBench and a novel benchmark of flows past multiple obstacles generated by the GPU-native PyFR code. Among other findings, our results suggest that neural PDE solvers become more effective as problems get harder in terms of cost, dimension, rollout, physics regime (e.g. higher Reynolds number), etc. --- ### 3DEditSafe: Defending 3D Editing Pipelines from Unsafe Generation Authors: Nicole Meng, Zheyuan Liu, Meng Jiang, Yingjie Lao Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.GR, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15398v1 Recent advances in 3D generative editing, particularly pipelines based on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), have achieved high-fidelity, multi-view-consistent scene manipulation from text prompts. However, we find that these pipelines also introduce new safety risks when unsafe prompts produce edits that are propagated and optimized across views. In this work, we study unsafe generation in 3D editing pipelines and show that such behavior can lead to coherent, undesirable Not-Safe-For-Work (NSFW) content in the final 3D representation. To address this, we propose 3DEditSafe, a safety-regularized 3D editing framework that constrains unsafe semantic propagation during optimization. 3DEditSafe combines generation-stage safety guidance with rendered-view 3D safety regularization, safe semantic projection, residue suppression, and mask-aware preservation to steer optimization away from unsafe editing directions. We evaluate our approach on EditSplat scenes using an object-compatible unsafe prompt benchmark and show that 2D safety guidance alone is not consistently sufficient to prevent unsafe 3D edits. 3DEditSafe reduces unsafe semantic alignment and view-level attack success rates, while revealing a safety-quality tradeoff in which stronger unsafe suppression can introduce artifacts or reduce unsafe-prompt fidelity. To our knowledge, this work is the first attempt to study and defend against unsafe generation in text-driven 3D editing pipelines, highlighting the need for safety mechanisms that operate directly on optimized 3D representations. --- ### ELDOR: A Dataset and Benchmark for Illegal Gold Mining in the Amazon Rainforest Authors: Kangning Cui, Surendra Bohara, Suraj Prasai, Zishan Shao, Wei Tang, Martin Pillaca, Edwin Flores, Zhen Yang, Gregory Larsen, Evan Dethier, David Lutz, Jean-Michel Morel et al. Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15397v1 Illegal gold mining in the Amazon rainforest causes deforestation, water contamination, and long-term ecosystem disruption, yet remains difficult to monitor at fine spatial scales. Satellite imagery supports large-scale observation, but often misses small mining-related structures and subtle land-cover transitions, especially under frequent cloud cover. We introduce ELDOR, a large-scale UAV benchmark for monitoring environmental and landscape disturbance from illegal gold mining in the rainforest. ELDOR contains manually annotated orthomosaic imagery covering over 2,500 hectares, with pixel-level semantic labels for both mining-related activities and surrounding ecological structures. With this unified annotation source, we establish four benchmark tasks: semantic segmentation, segmentation-derived recognition, direct multi-label classification, and class-presence recognition with vision-language models. Across these tasks, we compare generic and remote-sensing-specific segmentation models, vision foundation model-related segmentation methods, direct multi-label classification methods, and vision-language models under a controlled closed-set protocol. Results show that current methods still struggle with rare small-scale mining structures and fine-grained recovery classes, suggesting the need for context-aware and multimodal modeling. To support domain analysis and practical use, we further build an interactive explorer for domain experts that provides a unified interface for data exploration and model inference. --- ### Representation Without Reward: A JEPA Audit for LLM Fine-Tuning Authors: Biswa Sengupta Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15394v1 Joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEPAs) propose that a model should learn more useful abstractions when trained to predict latent representations rather than observed outputs. For autoregressive language-model fine-tuning the principle entails a stricter requirement: the induced hidden-state geometry must reach the language-model head \emph{and} improve the decoded task metric. We test that requirement under a fixed Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct LoRA harness on natural-language-to-regex generation, comparing twenty-two training-time auxiliaries across trajectory-shape regularisation, distributional constraints, predictor/target asymmetry, Fisher-metric Jacobi residuals, and a decoder-visible JEPA objective constructed to lie in cross-entropy's positive cone. The empirical answer is a structured null: several auxiliaries clear single-cell paired $α= 0.10$ without correction (T3-Local at $Δ= +2.53$~pp, $p = 0.003$ being the strongest), but none survives Bonferroni or Holm--Bonferroni at the relevant family-wise threshold, even though many change curvature, anisotropy, variance, and gradient direction. Decoder-visible JEPA yields the first positive auxiliary--cross-entropy gradient cosine in the study, yet exact match remains inside seed noise; a full-fine-tuning replication of the same auxiliary at $n = 5$ seeds reproduces the null on both benchmarks (TURK: $Δ= +0.04$~pp, $p_{\text{paired}} = 0.96$; SYNTH: $Δ= +0.52$~pp, $p_{\text{paired}} = 0.28$), so the null is robust across LoRA and full fine-tuning for the decoder-visible construction. Hidden-state representation work and decoded-task accuracy are therefore weakly coupled in this regime; we accordingly reframe LLM-domain JEPA evaluation as a coupling problem, in which the operative question is under which metrics useful hidden geometry becomes decoder-visible task signal. --- ### LPDS: Evaluating LLM Robustness Through Logic-Preserving Difficulty Scaling Authors: Philipp Mondorf, Samuel J. Bell, Jesse Dodge, Dieuwke Hupkes Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15393v1 As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed to perform tasks with minimal human oversight, it is crucial that these models operate robustly. In particular, a model that can solve a given problem should not fail simply because certain entities$\unicode{x2013}$such as names, numbers, or other contextual details$\unicode{x2013}$have changed while the underlying problem logic remains the same. Prior work suggests that current LLMs still struggle with this form of robustness: they often succeed on some variations of a problem but fail on others. However, existing evaluations often lack a systematic way to identify which logic-preserving variations are most likely to induce failure. Instead, they typically test a random subset of allowable variations, which can overstate robustness. To address this gap, we introduce logic-preserving difficulty scaling (LPDS), a framework that (i) quantifies the difficulty of a problem variation and (ii) systematically searches the space of allowable variations to find those that maximize difficulty and expose failures. We show that as difficulty increases, performance declines and errors in the models' reasoning chains become more pronounced. We further demonstrate that LPDS efficiently finds difficult problem variations for a model, resulting in performance drops up to 5 times larger compared to random sampling. Finally, we show that fine-tuning on more difficult variations leads to more consistent robustness gains than training on easier ones. --- ### Frequency-domain Event-based Imaging for Selective Surveillance Authors: Megan Birch, James Rick, Adrish Kar, Jason Zutty, Joseph L. Greene Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: physics.optics, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15392v1 Event-based cameras (EBCs) are an attractive sensing modality for surveillance due to their reporting of pixel-level radiance changes with microsecond resolution and high dynamic range, enabling motion extraction while suppressing background. Their asynchronous, sparse output, however, necessitate algorithms that identify targets in event-space without processing full frames. We introduce Frequency Rate Information for Event Space (FRIES), a neuromorphic processing framework that detects periodicity in events, such as rotor rotation and mechanical vibrations, to discriminate and monitor man-made objects. FRIES first applies a time gate to suppress background and noise, then aggregates events into a pixel-wise activity (e.g., density) map and clusters pixels into regions-of-interest (ROIs). A localized spectral analysis is applied to each ROI to extract dominant frequencies used to distinguish structured object signatures from unstructured background and noise. Discriminated targets are visualized using a Resonant Time Surface (RTS), a frequency-selective method that weights events by their phase coherence with the extracted frequencies, rewarding in-sync content and suppressing out-of-sync clutter. We demonstrate FRIES and RTS in a controlled indoor experiment to recover the rotational frequency of a mechanical chopper and drone rotors against a moving background. We further test these methods on an outdoor data to detect a hovering drone against a realistic treeline. These preliminary results establish frequency-domain event processing as a promising front-end for selective surveillance in neuromorphic pipelines and a complementary surveillance modality, leveraging the high temporal resolution to enable spectral discrimination. --- ### PanoWorld: Geometry-Consistent Panoramic Video World Modeling Authors: Le Jiang, Xiangyu Bai, Bishoy Galoaa, Shayda Moezzi, Caleb James Lee, Tooba Imtiaz, Edmund Yeh, Jennifer Dy, Yanzhi Wang, Sarah Ostadabbas Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15391v1 We present PanoWorld, a panoramic video world model that generates geometry-consistent 360$\degree$ video from a single image and a caption. Existing panoramic video methods optimize primarily for visual realism and do not explicitly constrain the underlying 3D scene state, producing outputs that appear plausible yet exhibit inconsistent depth, broken correspondences, and implausible motion across the spherical surface. We address this gap by framing panoramic video generation as a geometry- and dynamics-consistent latent state modeling problem rather than pure visual synthesis. Building on a pre-trained perspective video world model, we introduce two lightweight regularizers: a depth consistency loss against pseudo ground-truth panoramic depth, and a trajectory consistency loss that supervises the 3D world-frame positions of tracked points across time. We further apply spherical-geometry-aware adaptation to the conditioning and positional encoding. We additionally introduce PanoGeo, a unified geometry-aware panoramic video dataset with consistent depth, trajectory, and prompt annotations across diverse real and synthetic sources, used for both training and stratified evaluation. Experiments show that PanoWorld improves geometric consistency over prior panoramic generation methods while maintaining competitive visual realism, establishing that panoramic video generation must be treated as a geometric modeling problem to support the holistic spatial understanding requirements of embodied AI applications. Code is available at https://github.com/ostadabbas/PanoWorld. --- ### Unified High-Probability Analysis of Stochastic Variance-Reduced Estimation Authors: Zhankun Luo, Antesh Upadhyay, M. Berk Sahin, Sang Bin Moon, Anuran Makur, Abolfazl Hashemi Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15388v1 Stochastic estimators are fundamental to large-scale optimization, where population quantities must be inferred from noisy oracle observations. Although influential methods such as momentum, SPIDER, STORM, and PAGE have been highly successful, their analyses are largely estimator-specific and expectation-based, obscuring the structural tradeoffs that determine reliability. In this paper, we develop a unified framework for stochastic variance-reduced estimation based on a recursion with three components: memory retention, reset probability, and a correction term for iterate movement. This framework recovers several classical estimators, motivates new second-order variants, and yields a bias-variance decomposition of estimation error. Our main result is a unified high-probability bound proved using a new dimension-free vector-valued Freedman inequality, valid for smooth normed spaces involving random sums of vector martingales. The result applies in both Euclidean and non-Euclidean settings, including the analysis of mirror-descent-based methods in Banach spaces. As applications, we obtain high-probability oracle complexities for unconstrained optimization with mirror descent, establishing the logarithmic dependence on the confidence level. We also derive the first $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\varepsilon^{-3})$ oracle-complexity bounds for stochastic optimization with expectation constraints, improving upon the existing $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\varepsilon^{-4})$ complexity by leveraging variance-reduced estimation for the first time in this setting. --- ### Is One Score Enough? Rethinking the Evaluation of Sequentially Evolving LLM Memory Authors: Songwei Dong, Zihan Chen, Chengshuai Shi, Peng Wang, Jundong Li, Cong Shen Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15384v1 Memory plays a central role in enabling large language models (LLMs) to operate over sequential tasks by accumulating and reusing experience over time. However, existing evaluations of LLM memory mostly rely on aggregate metrics such as final hold-out accuracy or cumulative online performance, which can obscure critical failure modes such as forgetting and negative transfer. In this paper, we introduce SeqMem-Eval, a diagnostic evaluation framework for sequentially evolving LLM memory. Drawing inspiration from continual learning, it targets a test-time setting in which memory is external, prompt-mediated, and updated without modifying model parameters. Rather than focusing only on final performance, SeqMem-Eval evaluates how memory states evolve, generalize, consolidate experience, and retain useful information during sequential inference. Specifically, it measures online utility, hold-out generalization, backward transfer, and forgetting, providing a finer-grained view of memory quality. Through extensive experiments across diverse tasks and memory methods, we show that higher final or cumulative accuracy does not necessarily imply better memory quality: many methods exhibit strong performance gains while suffering from substantial forgetting or negative transfer. Moreover, different memory designs exhibit distinct trade-offs between adaptability and stability that remain invisible under standard evaluation metrics. --- ### MorphoHELM: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Evaluating Representations for Microscopy-Based Morphology Assays Authors: Emre Hayir, Lorin Crawford, Alex X. Lu Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15383v1 Microscopy images contain rich information about how cells respond to perturbations, making them essential to applications like drug screening. To quantify images, researchers often use representation extraction methods, and recent years have seen a proliferation of deep learning methods. While measuring the quality of these representations is essential, evaluation remains fragmented, with each proposed model evaluated on different tasks and datasets, using custom pipelines and metrics, making it difficult to fairly compare models. Here, we introduce MorphoHELM, a comprehensive open benchmark for evaluating feature extraction methods for Cell Painting, the most widely-used morphological profiling assay. MorphoHELM consolidates evaluation standards in the field, extends and corrects them to be more robust, and evaluates on the widest range of methods to date. A defining feature of the benchmark is that each task is evaluated at different degrees of batch effects (or technical noise), directly quantifying how the ability of methods to detect biological signal degrades as noise increases. Together, these properties enable MorphoHELM to detect trade-offs between methods, and we demonstrate that models that excel at certain kinds of biological signal are weaker at others. We show that no existing model outperforms classic computer vision analytic strategies across all settings, which remain the strongest general use-case representations. All datasets, code, and evaluation tools are publicly available at https://github.com/microsoft/MorphoHELM. --- ### Eskwai for Students: Generative AI Assistant for Legal Education in Ghana Authors: George Boateng, Philemon Badu, Patrick Agyeman-Budu, Samuel Ansah, Evans Atompoya, Evan Igwilo, Lord Baah, Frederick Abu-Bonsrah, Victor Wumbor-Apin Kumbol Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CY, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15380v1 Recent advances in generative AI have shown their potential to be leveraged for legal education. Yet, work on the development and deployment of such systems for legal education in the Global South is limited. In this work, we developed Eskwai for Students, a generative AI assistant to help law students with their legal education. Eskwai for Students is a retrieval augmented generation (RAG) system that provides answers to a wide range of legal questions for law students grounded in a curated database of over 12K case laws and 1.4K legislation in Ghana. We deployed Eskwai for Students in a longitudinal study of 30 months (2.5 years) used by 3.1K law students in Ghana who made 32K queries. We evaluated the helpfulness of our AI, and provided insight into the kinds of queries law students submit to this generative AI tool, which raises some ethical concerns. This work contributes to an understanding of how law students in the Global South are using generative AI for their studies and the ways it could be leveraged responsibly to advance legal education. --- ### Ensemble Monitoring for AI Control: Diverse Signals Outweigh More Compute Authors: Eugene Koran, Yejun Yun, Samantha Tetef, Benjamin Arnav, Pablo Bernabeu-Pérez Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15377v2 As AI systems are increasingly deployed in autonomous agentic settings at scale, it is important to ensure the actions they take are safe and aligned with user intent. Monitoring agent actions is a key safety mechanism, yet reliable monitors remain difficult to build and the scale of these systems makes human oversight impractical. We show that combining signals from diverse monitors into an ensemble improves detection of misaligned actions. We build 12 GPT-4.1-Mini monitors using both prompting and fine-tuning strategies. We evaluate them on coding tasks where candidate solutions pass standard tests but fail on adversarial inputs. In this setting, diverse ensembles outperform both individual monitors and homogeneous ensembles. Our best 3-monitor ensemble achieves 2.4x greater detection performance gain compared to an ensemble composed of three identical monitors, with the same ensemble performing strongly on an independent dataset. We contend that these results show that diversity - not scale - drives gains. The best ensembles combine strong individual performance with low correlation between monitors. Furthermore, fine-tuned monitors appear in every top-performing ensemble and maintain this advantage on out-of-distribution attack types, suggesting that fine-tuning enables detection capabilities that prompting alone does not elicit. These results support ensemble monitoring as a practical AI control strategy for safety gains at reasonable inference costs. --- ### Adesua: Development and Feasibility Study of an AI WhatsApp Bot for Science Learning in West Africa Authors: George Boateng, Evans Atompoya, Philemon Badu, Samuel John, Samuel Ansah, Patrick Agyeman-Budu, Victor Wumbor-Apin Kumbol Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15376v1 Sub-Saharan Africa faces persistently high student-teacher ratios and shortages of qualified teachers, limiting students' access to personalized learning support and formative assessment. To address this challenge, we present Adesua, a WhatsApp-based AI Teaching Assistant for science education that extends the Kwame for Science platform. Adesua leverages WhatsApp's widespread adoption in Africa to provide accessible, curriculum-aligned learning support for Junior High School (JHS) and Senior High School (SHS) students across West Africa. The system integrates curated textbooks and 33 years of national examination questions with generative AI to enable conversational question answering and automated assessment with feedback via a WhatsApp bot. Students can ask science questions, take timed or untimed multiple-choice tests by topic or exam year, and receive instant grading and detailed explanations of correct and incorrect responses. A 6-month feasibility deployment in 2025 had 56 active users in Ghana, including students and parents. Quantitative evaluation showed a high perceived usefulness, with a helpfulness score of 93.75\% for AI-generated answers, albeit with a small number of ratings (n=16). These preliminary results provide a basis for more extensive future evaluation of a WhatsApp-based AI assistant to assess its potential to offer scalable, low-cost personalized learning support and formative assessment in resource-constrained educational contexts. ---