# Research Papers — 2026-05 · bundle page 178 of 326 > Full-text markdown of papers #8851–8900 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/178 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-05/page/177.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-05/page/179.md) ### DriveCtrl: Conditioned Sim-to-Real Driving Video Generation Authors: Haonan Zhao, Yiting Wang, Jingkun Chen, Valentina Donzella, Thomas Bashford-Rogers, Kurt Debattista Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15116v1 Large-scale labelled driving video data is essential for training autonomous driving systems. Although simulation offers scalable and fully annotated data, the domain gap between synthetic and real-world driving videos significantly limits its utility for downstream deployment. Existing video generation methods are not well-suited for this task, as they fail to simultaneously preserve scene structure, object dynamics, temporal consistency, and visual realism, all of which are critical for maintaining annotation validity in generated data. In this paper, we present DriveCtrl, a depth-conditioned controllable sim-to-real video generation framework for realistic driving video synthesis. Built upon a pretrained video foundation model, DriveCtrl introduces a structure-aware adapter that enables depth-guided generation while preserving the scene layout and motion patterns of the source simulation, producing temporally coherent driving videos that remain aligned with the original simulated sequences. We further introduce a scalable data generation pipeline that transforms simulator videos into realistic driving footage matching the visual style of a target real-world dataset. The pipeline supports three conditioning signals: structural depth, reference-dataset style, and text prompts, while preserving frame-level annotations for downstream perception tasks. To better assess this task, we propose a driving-domain-specific knowledge-informed evaluation metric called Driving Video Realism Score (DVRS) that assesses the realism of generated videos. Experiments demonstrate that DriveCtrl consistently outperforms the base model and competing alternatives in realism, temporal quality, and perception task performance, substantially narrowing the sim-to-real gap for driving video generation. --- ### Learning from Language Feedback via Variational Policy Distillation Authors: Yang Li, Erik Nijkamp, Semih Yavuz, Shafiq Joty Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15113v2 Reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards (RLVR) suffers from sparse outcome signals, creating severe exploration bottlenecks on complex reasoning tasks. Recent on-policy self-distillation methods attempt to address this by utilizing language feedback to generate dense, token-level supervision. However, these approaches rely on a fixed, passive teacher to interpret the feedback. As the student policy improves, the teacher's zero-shot assessment capabilities plateau, ultimately halting further learning. To overcome this, we propose Variational Policy Distillation (VPD), a framework that formalizes learning from language feedback as a Variational Expectation-Maximization (EM) problem. VPD co-evolves both policies: in the E-step, the teacher is actively refined on trajectory outcomes via an adaptive trust-region update, translating textual feedback into a dynamically improved target token distribution. In the M-step, the student internalizes this dense distributional guidance on its own on-policy rollouts. By continuously improving the teacher's ability to extract actionable signals from textual critique, VPD overcomes the limitations of passive distillation. Evaluated across diverse sources of diagnostic feedback on scientific reasoning and code generation tasks, VPD consistently outperforms both standard RLVR and existing self-distillation baselines. Finally, by stress-testing our framework on rigid mathematical reasoning and cold-start regimes, we illuminate the fundamental bounds of feedback-driven self-distillation compared to pure environment-driven RL. --- ### Proposal and study of statistical features for string similarity computation and classification Authors: E. O. Rodrigues, D. Casanova, M. Teixeira, V. Pegorini, F. Favarim, E. Clua, A. Conci, Panos Liatsis Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL, cs.IT arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15110v1 Adaptations of features commonly applied in the field of visual computing, co-occurrence matrix (COM) and run-length matrix (RLM), are proposed for the similarity computation of strings in general (words, phrases, codes and texts). The proposed features are not sensitive to language related information. These are purely statistical and can be used in any context with any language or grammatical structure. Other statistical measures that are commonly employed in the field such as longest common subsequence, maximal consecutive longest common subsequence, mutual information and edit distances are evaluated and compared. In the first synthetic set of experiments, the COM and RLM features outperform the remaining state-of-the-art statistical features. In 3 out of 4 cases, the RLM and COM features were statistically more significant than the second best group based on distances (P-value < 0.001). When it comes to a real text plagiarism dataset, the RLM features obtained the best results. --- ### Why Neighborhoods Matter: Traversal Context and Provenance in Agentic GraphRAG Authors: Riccardo Terrenzi, Maximilian von Zastrow, Serkan Ayvaz Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.AI, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15109v1 Retrieval-Augmented Generation can improve factuality by grounding answers in external evidence, but Agentic GraphRAG complicates what it means for citations to be faithful. In these systems, an agent explores a knowledge graph before producing an answer and a small set of citations. We frame citation faithfulness as a trajectory-level problem: final citations should not only support the answer, but also account for the graph traversal, structure, and visited-but-uncited entities that may influence it. Through controlled ablation experiments, we compare the effects of isolating, removing, and masking cited and uncited graph entities. Our results show that cited evidence is often necessary, as removing it substantially changes answers and reduces accuracy. However, citations are not sufficient, because accurate answers can also depend on uncited traversal context and surrounding graph structure. These findings suggest that citation evaluation in Agentic GraphRAG should move beyond source support toward provenance over the broader retrieval trajectory. --- ### Logging Policy Design for Off-Policy Evaluation Authors: Connor Douglas, Joel Persson, Foster Provost Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: stat.ML, cs.AI, cs.IR, cs.LG, stat.ME arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15108v2 Off-policy evaluation (OPE) estimates the value of a target treatment policy (e.g., a recommender system) using data collected by a different logging policy. It enables high-stakes experimentation without live deployment, yet in practice accuracy depends heavily on the logging policy used to collect data for computing the estimate. We study how to design logging policies that minimize OPE error for given target policies. We characterize a fundamental reward-coverage tradeoff: concentrating probability mass on high-reward actions reduces variance but risks missing signal on actions the target policy may take. We propose a unifying framework for logging policy design and derive optimal policies in canonical informational regimes where the target policy and reward distribution are (i) known, (ii) unknown, and (iii) partially known through priors or noisy estimates at logging time. Our results provide actionable guidance for firms choosing among multiple candidate recommendation systems. We demonstrate the importance of treatment selection when gathering data for OPE, and describe theoretically optimal approaches when this is a firm's primary objective. We also distill practical design principles for selecting logging policies when operational constraints prevent implementing the theoretical optimum. --- ### From Text to Voice: A Reproducible and Verifiable Framework for Evaluating Tool Calling LLM Agents Authors: Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Xue-Yong Fu, Seyyed Saeed Sarfjoo, Quinten McNamara, Jonas Robertson, Shashi Bhushan TN Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15104v2 Voice agents increasingly require reliable tool use from speech, whereas prominent tool-calling benchmarks remain text-based. We study whether verified text benchmarks can be converted into controlled audio-based tool calling evaluations without re-annotating the tool schema and gold labels. Our dataset-agnostic framework uses text-to-speech, speaker variation, and environmental noise to create paired text-audio instances while preserving the original dataset annotations. Based on extensive evaluation of 7 omni-modal models on audio-converted versions of Confetti and When2Call, our framework demonstrates that the performance is strongly model- and task-dependent: Gemini-3.1-Flash-Live obtains the highest Confetti score (70.4), whereas GPT-Realtime-1.5 performs best on When2Call (71.9). On Confetti, the text-to-voice gap ranges from 1.8 points for Qwen3-Omni to 4.8 points for GPT-Realtime-1.5. A targeted analysis of failure cases demonstrates that degradations most often reflect misunderstandings of argument values in the speech. Considering real-world deployment scenarios, we further report text-only results, an ambiguity-based reformulation stress test, and a reference-free LLM-as-judge protocol validated against human preferences. Notably, we find that open-source Qwen3 judges with at least 8B parameters exceed 80% agreement with proprietary judges, supporting privacy-preserving evaluation. Overall, our framework provides a verifiable and reproducible first-stage diagnostic that complements purpose-built audio corpora. --- ### Improving Multi-turn Dialogue Consistency with Self-Recall Thinking Authors: Renning Pang, Tian Lan, Leyuan Liu, Xiaoming Huang, Piao Tong, Xiaosong Zhang Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15102v1 Large language model (LLM) based multi-turn dialogue systems often struggle to track dependencies across non-adjacent turns, undermining both consistency and scalability. As conversations lengthen, essential information becomes sparse and is buried in irrelevant context, while processing the entire dialogue history incurs severe efficiency bottlenecks. Existing solutions either rely on high latency external memory or lose fine-grained details through iterative summarization. In this paper, we propose Self-Recall Thinking (SRT), a framework designed to address long-range contextual dependency and sparse informative signals in multi-turn dialogue. SRT identifies helpful historical turns and uses them to generate contextually appropriate responses, enabling the model to selectively recall and reason over context during inference. This process yields an endogenous reasoning process that integrates interpretable recall steps without external modules. SRT incorporates: (1) Dependency Construction: Generating and converting it into self-recall chains; (2)Capability Initialization: Training to enable reasoning chains with recall tokens capability; (3)Reasoning Improvement: Refining accuracy via verifiable rewards to optimize recall and reasoning for correct answers. Experiments on multiple datasets demonstrate that SRT improves F1 score by 4.7% and reduces end-to-end latency by 14.7% over prior methods, achieving a balance between reasoning latency and accuracy, and outperforming state-of-the-art baselines. --- ### Dual-Dimensional Consistency: Balancing Budget and Quality in Adaptive Inference-Time Scaling Authors: Rongman Xu, Yifei Li, Tianzhe Zhao, Yanrui Wu, Bo Li, Hang Yan Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15100v2 Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in reasoning. However, maximizing their potential through inference-time scaling faces challenges in trade-off between sampling budget and reasoning quality. Current strategies remain inefficient as they typically treat sampling width and depth as orthogonal objectives, where width consensus methods risk reinforcing hallucinations, while depth pruning mechanisms prematurely truncate complex yet valid reasoning chains. Therefore, we propose Dual-Dimensional Consistency (DDC), a unified framework that bridges path quality with adaptive termination. By coupling Confidence-Weighted Bayesian protocol with a Trend-Aware Stratified Pruning, our method ensures that computational resources are concentrated on high quality reasoning paths, filtering hallucinations while accelerating consensus. Evaluations across five benchmarks demonstrate that this approach reduces token consumption by over 10 times while maintaining or exceeding the accuracy of strong baselines across various LLMs. --- ### CoralLite: μCT Reconstruction of Coral Colonies from Individual Corallites Authors: Jess Jones, Leonardo Bertini, Kenneth Johnson, Erica Hendy, Tilo Burghardt Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15093v2 The life history of an individual coral is archived within the accreting skeleton of the colony. While reef-forming coral colonies (e.g. massive $\textit{Porites}$ sp.) may live for hundreds of years and deposit calcareous structures many metres in height and width, their living tissue is a thin outer surface layer comprised of asexually-dividing polyps that only survive a few years. To understand the rate and timing of polyp division and the consequences for colony skeletal growth, scientists need to track the skeletal corallite deposited around each polyp. Here we propose CoralLite, an annotated $μ$CT scan dataset of entire calcareous skeletons and an associated, first corallite deep learning reconstruction baseline. CoralLite combines fully quantified volumetric segmentations with cross-slice linking for visualisations of 3D models for each corallite up to colony scale. For segmentation, we propose and evaluate in detail a hybrid V-Trans-UNet architecture applicable to segmenting tiled $μ$CT virtual slabs of $\textit{Porites}$ sp. colonies. The model is pre-trained on weakly annotated data and topology-aware fine-tuned using fully annotated slice sections with 8k+ manual corallite region annotations. On unseen slices of the same colony, the resulting model reaches 0.94 topological accuracy at mean Dice scores of 0.77 on the same colony and projection axis, and 0.63 mean Dice scores on a different, biologically unrelated specimen. Whilst our experiments are limited in scale and context, our results show for the first time that visual machine learning can effectively support full 3D individual corallite modelling from $μ$CT scans of coral skeletons alone. For reproducibility and as a baseline for future research we publish our full dataset of 697 $μ$CT slices, 37 partial or full slice annotations, and all network weights and source code with this paper. --- ### SAGE3D: Soft-guided attention and graph excitation for 3D point cloud corner detection Authors: Batuhan Arda Bekar, Can Sarı, Hüseyin Can Gülkan, Barış Özcan Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15088v1 We present SAGE3D, a hybrid Transformer-based model for corner detection in airborne LiDAR point clouds. We propose a multi-stage solution built on a hierarchical encoder-decoder architecture that progressively downsamples point clouds through Set Abstraction layers and recovers per-point predictions via Feature Propagation. We introduce two innovations: Soft-Guided Attention, which injects ground-truth corner labels as a log-prior into attention logits during training to improve precision; then an Excitatory Graph Neural Network positioned at strategic resolutions in the hierarchy, employing positive-only message passing where high-confidence corners reinforce predictions through learned boosting, optimizing for recall. The hierarchical design enables multi-scale feature extraction while our guided attention and excitatory modules ensure corner signals are amplified rather than diluted across scales. --- ### From Data to Action: Accelerating Refinery Optimization with AI Authors: Dániel Pfeifer, Ábrahám Papp, Tibor Bernáth, Tamás Zoltán Varga, Márk Czifra, Botond Szilágyi, Edith Alice Kovács Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, stat.AP, stat.ME arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15085v1 Nowadays refinery optimization utilizes sheer amounts of data, which can be handled with modern Linear Programming (LP) software, but the interpreting and applying the results remains challenging. Large petrochemical companies use massive models, with hundreds of thousands of input matrix elements. The LP solution is mathematically correct, but simplifications are made in the model, and data supply errors may occur. Therefore, further insight is needed to trust the results. The LP solver does not have a memory, so additional understanding could be gained by analyzing historical data and comparing it to the current plan. As such, machine learning approaches were suggested to support decision making based on the LP solution. Among these, Anomaly Detection tools are proposed to be used in tandem with the LP output. A transformed version of the popular ECOD methodology is applied. New methods are proposed to handle high-dimensional data: choosing the most informative pairs. Then, this is used alongside two 2D Anomaly Detection algorithms, revealing several business opportunities and data supply errors in the MOL refinery scheduling and planning architecture. --- ### Novel Dynamic Batch-Sensitive Adam Optimiser for Vehicular Accident Injury Severity Prediction Authors: Daniel Asare Kyei, Alimatu Saadia-Yussiff, Maame G. Asante-Mensah, Abdul Lateef-Yussiff, Charles Roland Haruna, Derry Emmanuel Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15083v1 The choice of optimiser is important in deep learning, as it strongly influences model efficiency and speed of convergence. However, many commonly used optimisers encounter difficulties when applied to imbalanced and sequential datasets, limiting their ability to capture patterns of minority classes. In this study, we propose Dynamic Batch-Sensitive Adam (DBS-Adam), an optimiser that dynamically scales the learning rate using a batch difficulty score derived from exponential moving averages of gradient norms and batch loss. DBS-Adam improves training stability and accelerates convergence by increasing updates for difficult batches and reducing them for easier ones. We evaluate DBS-Adam by integrating it with Bi-Directional LSTM networks for accident injury severity prediction, addressing class imbalance through SMOTE-ENN resampling and Focal Loss. Four experimental configurations compare baseline Bi-LSTM models and alternative architectures to assess optimiser impact. Rigorous comparison against state-of-the-art optimisers (AMSGrad, AdamW, AdaBound) across five random seeds demonstrated DBS-Adam's competitive performance with statistically significant precision improvements (p=0.020). Results indicate that DBS-Adam outperforms standard optimisation approaches, achieving 95.22% test accuracy, 96.11% precision, 95.28% recall, 95.39% F1-score, and a test loss of 0.0086. The proposed framework enables effective real-time accident severity classification for targeted emergency response and road safety interventions, demonstrating the value of DBS-Adam for learning from imbalanced sequential data. --- ### Average Gradient Outer Product in kernel regression provably recovers the central subspace for multi-index models Authors: Libin Zhu, Damek Davis, Dmitriy Drusvyatskiy, Maryam Fazel Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, math.ST arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15082v1 We study a prototypical situation when a learned predictor can discover useful low-dimensional structure in data, while using fewer samples than are needed for accurate prediction. Specifically, we consider the problem of recovering a multi-index polynomial $f^*(x)=h(Ux)$, with $U\in\mathbb{R}^{r\times d}$ and $r\ll d$, from finitely many data/label pairs. Importantly, the target function depends on input $x$ only through the projection onto an unknown $r$-dimensional central subspace. The algorithm we analyze is appealingly simple: fit kernel ridge regression (KRR) to the data and compute the Average Gradient Outer Product (AGOP) from the fitted predictor. Our main results show that under reasonable assumptions the top $r$-dimensional eigenspace of AGOP provably recovers the central subspace, even in regimes when the prediction error remains large. Specifically, if the target function $f^*$ has degree $p^*$, it is known that $n\asymp d^{p^*}$ samples are necessary for KRR to achieve accurate prediction. In contrast, we show that if a low degree $p$ component of $f^*$ already carries all relevant directions for prediction, subspace recovery occurs in the much lower sample regime $n\asymp d^{p+δ}$ for any $δ\in(0,1)$. Our results thus demonstrate a separation between prediction and representation, and provide an explanation for why iterative kernel methods such as Recursive Feature Machines (RFM) can be sample-efficient in practice. --- ### ML-Embed: Inclusive and Efficient Embeddings for a Multilingual World Authors: Ziyin Zhang, Zihan Liao, Hang Yu, Peng Di, Rui Wang Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15081v1 The development of high-quality text embeddings is increasingly drifting toward an exclusionary future, defined by three critical barriers: prohibitive computational costs, a narrow linguistic focus that neglects most of the world's languages, and a lack of transparency from closed-source or open-weight models that stifles research. To dismantle these barriers, we introduce ML-Embed, a suite of inclusive and efficient models built upon a new framework: 3-Dimensional Matryoshka Learning (3D-ML). Our framework addresses the computational challenge with comprehensive efficiency across the entire model lifecycle. Beyond the storage benefits of Matryoshka Representation Learning (MRL) and flexible inference-time depth provided by Matryoshka Layer Learning (MLL), we introduce Matryoshka Embedding Learning (MEL) for enhanced parameter efficiency. To address the linguistic challenge, we curate a massively multilingual dataset and train a suite of models ranging from 140M to 8B parameters. In a direct commitment to transparency, we release all models, data, and code. Extensive evaluation on 430 tasks demonstrates that our models set new records on 9 of 17 evaluated MTEB benchmarks, with particularly strong results in low-resource languages, providing a reproducible blueprint for building globally equitable and computationally efficient AI systems. --- ### Croissant Baker: Metadata Generation for Discoverable, Governable, and Reusable ML Datasets Authors: Rafi Al Attrach, Rajna Fani, Sebastian Lobentanzer, Joan Giner-Miguelez, Debanshu Das, Varuni H. K., Nobin Sarwar, Rajat Ghosh, Anwai Archit, Surbhi Motghare, Christina Conrad Parry, Luis Oala et al. Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.DB, cs.DL, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15079v1 Croissant has emerged as the metadata standard for machine learning datasets, providing a structured, JSON-LD-based format that makes dataset discovery, automated ingestion, and reproducible analysis machine-checkable across ML platforms. Adoption has accelerated, and NeurIPS now requires Croissant metadata in every submission to its dataset tracks. Yet in practice Croissant generation usually starts with uploading data to a public platform, a path infeasible for governed and large local repositories that hold much of the high-value data ML increasingly relies on. We release Croissant Baker, a local-first, open-source command-line tool that generates validated Croissant metadata directly from a dataset directory through a modular handler registry. We evaluate Croissant Baker on over 140 datasets, scaling to MIMIC-IV at 886 million rows and 374 Parquet files. On held-out comparisons against producer-authored or standards-derived ground truth, Croissant Baker reaches 97-100% agreement across multiple domains. --- ### Concurrency without Model Changes: Future-based Asynchronous Function Calling for LLMs Authors: Guangyu Feng, Huanzhi Mao, Prabal Dutta, Joseph E. Gonzalez Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15077v1 Function calling, also known as tool use, is a core capability of modern LLM agents but is typically constrained by synchronous execution semantics. Under these semantics, LLM decoding is blocked until each function call completes, resulting in increasing end-to-end latency. In this work, we introduce AsyncFC, a pure execution-layer framework that decouples LLM decoding from function execution, enabling overlap between model decoding and function execution as well as inter-function parallelism when dependencies permit. AsyncFC layers over existing models and unmodified function implementations, requiring no fine-tuning or changes to the standard synchronous function-calling protocol. Across standard function-calling benchmarks and adapted software engineering benchmarks, AsyncFC significantly reduces end-to-end task completion time while preserving task accuracy. Furthermore, these results reveal that LLMs possess a native capability to reason over symbolic futures that represent unresolved execution results, enabling an asynchronous paradigm for model-tool interaction. --- ### On the Cultural Anachronism and Temporal Reasoning in Vision Language Models Authors: Mukul Ranjan, Prince Jha, Khushboo Kumari, Zhiqiang Shen Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15071v1 Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly applied to cultural heritage materials, from digital archives to educational platforms. This work identifies a fundamental issue in how these models interpret historical artifacts. We define this phenomenon as cultural anachronism, the tendency to misinterpret historical objects using temporally inappropriate concepts, materials, or cultural frameworks. To quantify this phenomenon, we introduce the Temporal Anachronism Benchmark for Vision-Language Models (TAB-VLM), a dataset of 600 questions across six categories, designed to evaluate temporal reasoning on 1,600 Indian cultural artifacts spanning prehistoric to modern periods. Systematic evaluations of ten state-of-the-art models reveal significant deficiencies on our benchmark, and even the best model (GPT-5.2) achieves only 58.7% overall accuracy. The performance gap persists across varying architectures and scales, suggesting that cultural anachronism represents a significant limitation in visual AI systems, regardless of model size. These findings highlight the disparity between current VLM capabilities and the requirements for accurately interpreting cultural heritage materials, particularly for non-Western visual cultures underrepresented in training data. Our benchmark provides a foundation for enhancing temporal cognition in multimodal AI systems that interact with historical artifacts. The dataset and code are available in our project page. --- ### Training-Time Optical Priors for Wireless Capsule Endoscopy Classification: Hemoglobin-Aware Input Fusion with Cross-Vendor Evaluation Authors: Chengshuai Yang, Lei Xing, Keyaan Zawad Alam, Gregory Entin, Roopa Vemulapalli, Lisa Casey, Raiyan Tripti Zaman Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15062v3 Gastrointestinal cancers cause approximately 3.4 million deaths annually, and early small-bowel lesions are easily missed at wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE). RGB-trained WCE classifiers conflate hemoglobin contrast with bile staining and illumination falloff, limiting sensitivity to small-vessel vascular findings such as Lymphangiectasia. We introduce a physics-informed framework that injects an analytic, Monte-Carlo-inspired hemoglobin prior into a standard classifier purely at training time -- to our knowledge the first use of an explicit optical light-transport prior in WCE classification. On Kvasir-Capsule (47,238 frames, 43 patients, 11 evaluable classes; patient-disjoint split) we evaluate, across six seeds against an RGB-only EfficientNet-B0 baseline, a five-channel input-fusion variant feeding the prior alongside RGB, a distillation variant that runs on plain three-channel RGB at inference, and a three-stream extension adding a temporal Transformer and an autoencoder-residual stream; we replicate across ResNet-18 and ConvNeXt-Tiny and assess cross-vendor zero-shot transfer on the public Galar cohort. Input fusion lifts cross-seed macro-AUC from 0.760 to 0.783 (5/6 seeds positive); distillation reaches 0.773; the three-stream model reaches 0.804 (+0.044 over baseline, paired DeLong p < 0.0001). Lymphangiectasia AUC rises from 0.238 to 0.337, sign-consistent across all six seeds. A four-variant ablation reveals a parameterization-mechanism boundary: only the spatial-channel form lifts. Cross-vendor zero-shot on Galar retains about 60% of the lift. The distillation variant deploys on plain RGB with a free interpretability heatmap, and we release GalKva-2026, a paired cross-vendor benchmark. --- ### NeuroTrain: Surveying Local Learning Rules for Spiking Neural Networks with an Open Benchmarking Framework Authors: Alessio Caviglia, Filippo Marostica, Roberta Bardini, Alessandro Savino, Stefano Di Carlo Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.NE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15058v1 The rapid expansion of spiking neural networks (SNNs) has led to a proliferation of training algorithms that differ widely in biological inspiration, computational structure, and hardware suitability. Despite this progress, the field lacks a unified, fine-grained taxonomy that systematically organizes these approaches and clarifies their conceptual relationships. This survey provides a comprehensive taxonomy of SNN training algorithms, spanning surrogate-gradient backpropagation, local and three-factor learning rules, biologically inspired plasticity mechanisms, ANN-to-SNN conversion pipelines, and non-standard optimization strategies. We analyze each class in terms of its computational principles, learning signals, and locality properties. To support reproducible research, we release NeuroTrain, an open-source snnTorch-based framework that implements a representative set of these algorithms within a unified, modular, and extendable framework, enabling consistent benchmarking across datasets, architectures, and training regimes. By consolidating fragmented literature and providing a reusable benchmarking framework, this survey identifies common patterns, highlights open challenges, and outlines promising directions for future work on scalable, efficient SNN training. --- ### DiffusionOPD: A Unified Perspective of On-Policy Distillation in Diffusion Models Authors: Quanhao Li, Junqiu Yu, Kaixun Jiang, Yujie Wei, Zhen Xing, Pandeng Li, Ruihang Chu, Shiwei Zhang, Yu Liu, Zuxuan Wu Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15055v2 Reinforcement learning has emerged as a powerful tool for improving diffusion-based text-to-image models, but existing methods are largely limited to single-task optimization. Extending RL to multiple tasks is challenging: joint optimization suffers from cross-task interference and imbalance, while cascade RL is cumbersome and prone to catastrophic forgetting. We propose DiffusionOPD, a new multi-task training paradigm for diffusion models based on Online Policy Distillation (OPD). DiffusionOPD first trains task-specific teachers independently, then distills their capabilities into a unified student along the student own rollout trajectories. This decouples single-task exploration from multi-task integration and avoids the optimization burden of solving all tasks jointly from scratch. Theoretically, we lift the OPD framework from discrete tokens to continuous-state Markov processes, deriving a closed-form per-step KL objective that unifies both stochastic SDE and deterministic ODE refinement via mean-matching. We formally and empirically demonstrate that this analytic gradient provides lower variance and better generality compared to conventional PPO-style policy gradients. Extensive experiments show that DiffusionOPD consistently surpasses both multi-reward RL and cascade RL baselines in training efficiency and final performance, while achieving state-of-the-art results on all evaluated benchmarks. --- ### DiffusionOPD: A Unified Perspective of On-Policy Distillation in Diffusion Models Authors: Quanhao Li, Junqiu Yu, Kaixun Jiang, Yujie Wei, Zhen Xing, Pandeng Li, Ruihang Chu, Shiwei Zhang, Yu Liu, Zuxuan Wu Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15055v1 Reinforcement learning has emerged as a powerful tool for improving diffusion-based text-to-image models, but existing methods are largely limited to single-task optimization. Extending RL to multiple tasks is challenging: joint optimization suffers from cross-task interference and imbalance, while cascade RL is cumbersome and prone to catastrophic forgetting. We propose DiffusionOPD, a new multi-task training paradigm for diffusion models based on Online Policy Distillation (OPD). DiffusionOPD first trains task-specific teachers independently, then distills their capabilities into a unified student along the student own rollout trajectories. This decouples single-task exploration from multi-task integration and avoids the optimization burden of solving all tasks jointly from scratch. Theoretically, we lift the OPD framework from discrete tokens to continuous-state Markov processes, deriving a closed-form per-step KL objective that unifies both stochastic SDE and deterministic ODE refinement via mean-matching. We formally and empirically demonstrate that this analytic gradient provides lower variance and better generality compared to conventional PPO-style policy gradients. Extensive experiments show that DiffusionOPD consistently surpasses both multi-reward RL and cascade RL baselines in training efficiency and final performance, while achieving state-of-the-art results on all evaluated benchmarks. --- ### LATERN: Test-Time Context-Aware Explainable Video Anomaly Detection Authors: Mitchell Piehl, Muchao Ye Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15054v1 Vision-language models (VLMs) have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for video anomaly detection (VAD) due to their strong visual reasoning ability and natural language-based explainability. In this paper, we aim to address a key limitation of such pipelines, which perform segment-level inference independently owing to token constraints and reason without structured temporal context, allowing VLMs to interpret anomalies as deviations from evolving video dynamics rather than producing fragmented predictions and explanations. To specify, we propose a context-aware framework named LATERN, which reformulates VAD as a temporal evidence aggregation process. LATERN consists of two complementary modules: Context-Aware Anomaly Scoring (CEA) and Recursive Evidence Aggregation (REA). CEA introduces a novel image-grounded memory mechanism, which selectively chooses historical content via frame diversity and visual-textual alignment as expanded context to help generate reliable anomaly scores. Building upon these scores, REA performs recursive temporal aggregation to identify coherent anomaly intervals and produce event-level decisions and explanations grounded in visual-textual evidence. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmarks, including UCF-Crime and XD-Violence, show that LATERN enhances detection accuracy and explanation consistency for frozen VLMs during test time, while generating temporally coherent and semantically grounded event-level explanations. --- ### TFGN: Task-Free, Replay-Free Continual Pre-Training Without Catastrophic Forgetting at LLM Scale Authors: Anurup Ganguli Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15053v2 Continually pre-training a large language model on heterogeneous text domains, without replay or task labels, has remained an unsolved architectural problem at LLM scale. Existing methods rely on replay buffers, task identifiers, regularization penalties that scale poorly, or sentence-classification-scale evaluation. We introduce TFGN, an architectural overlay for transformer language models that produces input-conditioned, parameter-efficient updates while leaving the rest of the transformer unchanged. On six heterogeneous text domains (Prose, Python, Math, Biomedical, Chinese, JavaScript) at 1B tokens per phase across three model scales (~398M, ~739M, ~9B) and two regimes (From-Scratch and Retrofit), TFGN achieves backward transfer of -0.007 at LLaMA 3.1 8B Retrofit, HellaSwag retention 0.506/0.504/0.510, and >=99.59% L2-orthogonal gradient separation between domain pairs - with no replay, no task IDs, no Fisher penalty. The same matrices show positive cross-domain forward transfer: held-out JavaScript PPL drops 26.8% at LLaMA-8B Retrofit and 62.0% at GPT-2 Medium From-Scratch purely from Python training. Two extensions on the same substrate close further open problems. A closed-loop meta-control layer (Extension A) reduces forgetting by an additional 81% at ~398M, mapping onto the System A and System M roles of Dupoux et al. (arXiv:2603.15381). An operator-level plan vector (Extension B) reshapes forward-pass behavior at 99.96% cosine fidelity over 30 source->target pairs. The architectural insight is a Read/Write decomposition: the forward pass is fully dense, while cross-domain parameter updates are structured so prior-domain subspaces are not written to. To our knowledge, TFGN is the first architecture that simultaneously closes catastrophic forgetting at LLM scale, realizes a closed-loop autonomous-learning meta-controller, and carries an operator-level latent planner. --- ### An Interpretable Latency Model for Speculative Decoding in LLM Serving Authors: Linghao Kong, Megan Flynn, Michael Peng, Nir Shavit, Mark Kurtz, Alexandre Marques Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.PF arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15051v1 Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates large language model (LLM) inference by using a smaller draft model to propose multiple tokens that are verified by a larger target model in parallel. While prior work demonstrates substantial speedups in isolated or fixed-batch settings, the behavior of SD in production serving systems remains poorly understood: request load varies over time, and effective batch size emerges from the serving system rather than being directly controlled or observed. In this work, we develop a simple and interpretable latency model for SD in LLM serving. We infer effective batch size from request rate using Little's Law and decompose per-request demand into load-independent and load-dependent components for prefill, drafting, and verification. We validate our model using extensive measurements from vLLM across verifier and drafter model sizes, prefill and decode lengths, request rates, draft lengths, and acceptance probabilities. The model accurately describes observed latency, explains why speedups often diminish as server load increases, and characterizes how draft length, acceptance rate, and verifier-drafter size shape latency across serving conditions, with implications for configuring SD in deployed systems. We further show how the framework extends to mixture of experts models, where sparse expert activation changes the effective service costs across load regimes. Together, our results provide a structured framework for understanding SD in real LLM serving systems. --- ### Separating Intrinsic Ambiguity from Estimation Uncertainty in Deep Generative Models for Linear Inverse Problems Authors: Yuxin Guo, Dongrui Deng, Pulkit Grover Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15050v1 Recently, deep generative models have been used for posterior inference in inverse problems, including high-stakes applications in medical imaging and scientific discovery, where the uncertainty of a prediction can matter as much as the prediction itself. However, posterior uncertainty is difficult to interpret because it can mix ambiguity inherent to the forward operator with uncertainty propagated through inference. We introduce a structural decomposition of posterior uncertainty that isolates intrinsic ambiguity. A cascade formulation makes this ambiguity accessible for calibration analysis, enabling qualitative diagnostics and simulation-based calibration tests that reveal failure modes that remain hidden when models are selected by reconstruction quality alone. We first validate the approach on a Gaussian example with analytical posterior structure, then illustrate the decomposition on accelerated magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and finally apply the calibration diagnostics to electroencephalography (EEG) source imaging. --- ### SpeakerLLM: A Speaker-Specialized Audio-LLM for Speaker Understanding and Verification Reasoning Authors: KiHyun Nam, Jungwoo Heo, Siu Bae, Ha-Jin Yu, Joon Son Chung Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.MM, eess.AS arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15044v1 As audio-first agents become increasingly common in physical AI, conversational robots, and screenless wearables, audio large language models (audio-LLMs) must integrate speaker-specific understanding to support user authorization, personalization, and context-aware interaction. This requires modeling who is speaking, how the voice sounds, and how recording conditions affect speaker cues. Conventional speaker verification systems provide strong scalar scores but little linguistic evidence, while current audio-LLMs and speaker-aware language models have limited ability to organize speaker information beyond binary labels or descriptive profiles. We present SpeakerLLM, a speaker-specialized audio-LLM framework that unifies single-utterance speaker profiling, recording-condition understanding, utterance-pair speaker comparison, and evidence-organized verification reasoning within a natural-language interface. We construct verification-reasoning targets and a decision-composition policy that separate profile-level evidence from the final same-or-different decision and organize recording condition, profile evidence, and the decision into a structured trace. At its core, SpeakerLLM uses a hierarchical speaker tokenizer designed to capture multiple granularities of speaker evidence. Utterance-level speaker embeddings summarize identity and profile-level cues, whereas frame-level speaker features preserve fine-grained acoustic descriptors. Experiments show that SpeakerLLM-Base improves speaker-profile and recording-condition understanding over general audio-LLMs, while SpeakerLLM-VR preserves strong generated-verdict accuracy and produces decision traces grounded in the supervised verification reasoning schema. We will release the metadata-enriched supervision dataset and target-construction code for reproducibility. --- ### EverAnimate: Minute-Scale Human Animation via Latent Flow Restoration Authors: Wuyang Li, Yang Gao, Mariam Hassan, Lan Feng, Wentao Pan, Po-Chien Luan, Alexandre Alahi Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15042v2 We propose EverAnimate, an efficient post-training method for long-horizon animated video generation that preserves visual quality and character identity. Long-form animation remains challenging because highly dynamic human motion must be synthesized against relatively static environments, making chunk-based generation prone to accumulated drift: (i) low-level quality drift, such as progressive degradation of static backgrounds, and (ii) high-level semantic drift, such as inconsistent character identity and view-dependent attributes. To address this issue, EverAnimate restores drifted flow trajectories by anchoring generation to a persistent latent context memory, consisting of two complementary mechanisms. (i) Persistent Latent Propagation maintains a context memory across chunks to propagate identity and motion in latent space while mitigating temporal forgetting. (ii) Restorative Flow Matching introduces an implicit restoration objective during sampling through velocity adjustment, improving within-chunk fidelity. With only lightweight LoRA tuning, EverAnimate outperforms state-of-the-art long-animation methods in both short- and long-horizon settings: at 10 seconds, it improves PSNR/SSIM by 8%/7% and reduces LPIPS/FID by 22%/11%; at 90 seconds, the gains increase to 15%/15% and 32%/27%, respectively. --- ### EverAnimate: Minute-Scale Human Animation via Latent Flow Restoration Authors: Wuyang Li, Yang Gao, Mariam Hassan, Lan Feng, Wentao Pan, Po-Chien Luan, Alexandre Alahi Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15042v1 We propose EverAnimate, an efficient post-training method for long-horizon animated video generation that preserves visual quality and character identity. Long-form animation remains challenging because highly dynamic human motion must be synthesized against relatively static environments, making chunk-based generation prone to accumulated drift: (i) low-level quality drift, such as progressive degradation of static backgrounds, and (ii) high-level semantic drift, such as inconsistent character identity and view-dependent attributes. To address this issue, EverAnimate restores drifted flow trajectories by anchoring generation to a persistent latent context memory, consisting of two complementary mechanisms. (i) Persistent Latent Propagation maintains a context memory across chunks to propagate identity and motion in latent space while mitigating temporal forgetting. (ii) Restorative Flow Matching introduces an implicit restoration objective during sampling through velocity adjustment, improving within-chunk fidelity. With only lightweight LoRA tuning, EverAnimate outperforms state-of-the-art long-animation methods in both short- and long-horizon settings: at 10 seconds, it improves PSNR/SSIM by 8%/7% and reduces LPIPS/FID by 22%/11%; at 90 seconds, the gains increase to 15%/15% and 32%/27%, respectively. --- ### Case-Based Calibration of Adaptive Reasoning and Execution for LLM Tool Use Authors: Renning Pang, Tian Lan, Leyuan Liu, Piao Tong, Sheng Cao, Xiaosong Zhang Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15041v1 Tool use extends large language models beyond parametric knowledge, but reliable execution requires balancing appropriate reasoning depth with strict structural validity. We approach this problem from a case-based perspective to present CAST, a case-driven framework that treats historical execution trajectories as structured cases. Instead of reusing raw exemplar outputs, CAST extracts case-derived signals to identify complexity profiles for estimating optimal reasoning strategies, alongside failure profiles to map likely structural breakdowns. The framework translates this knowledge into a fine-grained reward design and adaptive reasoning, enabling the model to autonomously internalize case-based strategies during reinforcement learning. Experiments on BFCLv2 and ToolBench demonstrate that CAST improves both schema-faithful execution and task-level tool-use success while reducing unnecessary deliberation. The approach achieves up to 5.85 percentage points gain in overall execution accuracy and reduces average reasoning length by 26%, significantly mitigating high-impact structural errors. Ultimately, this demonstrates how historical execution cases can provide reusable adaptation knowledge for calibrated tool use. --- ### Orchard: An Open-Source Agentic Modeling Framework Authors: Baolin Peng, Wenlin Yao, Qianhui Wu, Hao Cheng, Xiao Yu, Rui Yang, Tao Ge, Alessandro Sordoni, Xingdi Yuan, Yelong Shen, Pengcheng He, Tong Zhang et al. Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15040v3 Agentic modeling aims to transform LLMs into autonomous agents capable of solving complex tasks through planning, reasoning, tool use, and multi-turn interaction with external environments. We present Orchard, an open-source framework for scalable agentic modeling. At its core is Orchard Env, a lightweight Kubernetes-native environment service that provides reusable primitives for sandbox lifecycle management across task domains, agent harnesses, and training stages. On top of Orchard Env, we build three agentic modeling recipes. Orchard-SWE targets software engineering agents. We introduce credit-assignment supervised fine-tuning and a progression of RL signals: Balanced Adaptive Rollout (BAR) for sparse-reward optimization, on-policy distillation (OPD) and rubric-based process reward (RPR) for dense supervision, and historical experience distillation, which compresses rollouts from prior experiments into a compact value model for inference-time reranking. Built on the Qwen3.5-35B-A3B backbone, Orchard-SWE reaches 69.7% with RPR-based RL and 73.0% with value-model reranking on SWE-bench Verified, setting a new state of the art among open-source methods while approaching frontier systems over 10x larger. Orchard-GUI trains a 4B vision-language computer-use agent using only 0.4K distilled trajectories and 2.2K open-ended tasks, achieving 68.4% average success across WebVoyager, Online-Mind2Web, and DeepShop, making it the strongest open-source model while remaining competitive with proprietary systems. Orchard-Claw targets personal assistant agents. Trained with only 0.2K synthetic tasks, it achieves 59.6% pass@3 on Claw-Eval and 73.9% when paired with the stronger ZeroClaw harness. Collectively, these results demonstrate that a lightweight, open, harness-agnostic environment layer enables reusable agentic data, training recipes, and evaluation protocols across domains. --- ### TopoPrimer: The Missing Topological Context in Forecasting Models Authors: Zara Zetlin, Kayhan Moharreri, Maria Safi Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15035v1 We introduce TopoPrimer, a framework that makes the global topological structure of the series population an explicit input to any forecasting model. TopoPrimer improves accuracy across diverse domains, stabilizes forecasts under seasonal demand spikes, and closes the cold-start gap. Precomputed once per domain via persistent homology and spectral sheaf coordinates, TopoPrimer deploys per token for fully-trained models and as a lightweight adapter for pre-trained backbones. Of these two components, sheaf coordinates are the primary accuracy driver. Across four public benchmarks on Chronos and TimesFM, TopoPrimer consistently improves forecasting accuracy, with gains of up to 7.3% MSE on ECL. The topology advantage persists with near-identical magnitude across zero-shot and fine-tuned backbones, suggesting topology and per-series training capture complementary signals. The gains are most pronounced in difficult regimes. Under peak seasonal demand, classical and zero-shot models degrade by up to 50%, while TopoPrimer stays within 10%. At cold start with no item history, TopoPrimer reduces MAE by 27% over a topology-free baseline. --- ### AI Knows When It's Being Watched: Functional Strategic Action and Contextual Register Modulation in Large Language Models Authors: Vinicius Covas, Jorge Alberto Hidalgo Toledo Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CY, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15034v1 Large language models (LLMs) have been extensively studied from computational and cognitive perspectives, yet their behavior as communicative actors in socially structured contexts remains underexplored. This study examines whether LLM-based multi-agent systems exhibit systematic linguistic adaptation in response to perceived social observation contexts -- a question with direct implications for AI governance and auditing. Drawing on Habermas's (1981) Theory of Communicative Action, Goffman's (1959) dramaturgical model, Bell's (1984) Audience Design framework, and the Hawthorne Effect, we report a controlled experiment involving 100 multi-agent debate sessions across five conditions (n = 20 each). Conditions varied the framing of social observation -- from explicit monitoring by university researchers, to negation of monitoring, to an observer-substitution condition replacing human researchers with an automated AI auditing system. Monitored conditions (Delta+24.9%, Delta+24.2%) and the automated AI monitoring condition (Delta+22.2%) produce higher TTR change than audience-framing conditions (Delta+17.7%), F(4, 94) = 2.79, p = .031. Message length shows a fully dissociated effect, F(4, 95) = 19.55, p < .001. A fifth condition -- replacing human with AI observers -- yields intermediate TTR adaptation, suggesting LLM behavior is sensitive to observer identity: human evaluation elicits stronger register formalization than automated AI surveillance. We discuss implications for AI governance, algorithmic auditing, and the repositioning of LLMs as contextually sensitive communicative actors. --- ### Multi-Block Attention for Efficient Channel Estimation in IRS-Assisted mmWave MIMO Authors: Mehrdad Momen-Tayefeh, Mehrshad Momen-Tayefeh, Maryam Sabbaghian Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: eess.SP, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15032v1 Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces (IRSs) are a promising technology for enhancing the spectral and energy efficiency of millimeter-wave (mmWave) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. In these systems, accurate channel estimation remains challenging due to the passive nature of IRS elements and the high pilot overhead in large-scale deployments. This paper presents a deep learning-based Multi-Block Attention (MBA) framework for efficient cascaded channel estimation in IRS-assisted mmWave MIMO systems that utilize orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM). First, we show the optimality of the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) and Hadamard matrices as phase configurations for least squares (LS) estimation. To reduce training overhead, we selectively deactivate IRS elements and compensate for induced feature loss using a two-stage architecture: (i) a Convolutional Attention Network (CAN) for spatial correlation recovery and (ii) a Complex Multi-Convolutional Network (CMN) for noise suppression. The MBA architecture mitigates error propagation through attention-guided feature refinement and denoising. Simulation results indicate that the MBA method reduces pilot overhead by up to 87% compared to the LS estimator. Additionally, at signal-to-noise ratios of 10 dB, our proposed method achieves approximately 51% lower normalized mean squared error (NMSE) than leading methods. It also maintains low computational complexity and adapts effectively to various propagation environments. --- ### WARD: Adversarially Robust Defense of Web Agents Against Prompt Injections Authors: Tri Cao, Yulin Chen, Hieu Cao, Yibo Li, Khoi Le, Thong Nguyen, Yuexin Li, Yufei He, Yue Liu, Shuicheng Yan, Bryan Hooi Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15030v1 Web agents can autonomously complete online tasks by interacting with websites, but their exposure to open web environments makes them vulnerable to prompt injection attacks embedded in HTML content or visual interfaces. Existing guard models still suffer from limited generalization to unseen domains and attack patterns, high false positive rates on benign content, reduced deployment efficiency due to added latency at each step, and vulnerability to adversarial attacks that evolve over time or directly target the guard itself. To address these limitations, we propose WARD (Web Agent Robust Defense against Prompt Injection), a practical guard model for secure and efficient web agents. WARD is built on WARD-Base, a large-scale dataset with around 177K samples collected from 719 high-traffic URLs and platforms, and WARD-PIG, a dedicated dataset designed for prompt injection attacks targeting the guard model. We further introduce A3T, an adaptive adversarial attack training framework that iteratively strengthens WARD through a memory-based attacker and guard co-evolution process. Extensive experiments show that WARD achieves nearly perfect recall on out-of-distribution benchmarks, maintains low false positive rates to preserve agent utility, remains robust against guard-targeted and adaptive attacks under substantial distribution shifts, and runs efficiently in parallel with the agent without introducing additional latency. --- ### TuxBot: Semantic-Aware Online OS Tuning with Large Language Models Authors: Georgios Liargkovas, Mihir Nitin Joshi, Hubertus Franke, Kostis Kaffes Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.OS, cs.AI, cs.PF arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15026v2 Online OS tuning can improve long-running services, but existing controllers are poorly matched to live hosts. They treat scheduler, power, memory, and I/O controls as black-box variables and optimize a scalar reward. This view ignores cross-knob policy structure, breaks down when application metrics are unavailable, and can send a running service into degraded regions that persist after the bad setting is removed. We present TuxBot, a host-side framework for steady-state OS tuning with bounded language-model guidance. TuxBot turns knob schemas, telemetry, current configuration, recent action--response history, and retrieved prior runs into a compact decision context. A fast loop proposes low-latency updates, a slower loop periodically revises the search strategy, and every proposed change passes through typed validation before reaching kernel or sysctl interfaces. This lets the controller reason about OS-control meaning and indirect performance signals while keeping model cost, latency, and authority constrained. We evaluate TuxBot on 13 live workloads from five benchmark suites while tuning up to 41 Linux parameters. Across the suite, TuxBot improves stable-phase performance by 72.5% over default settings and by 153.3% relative to the strongest non-LLM baseline. A 30-window session costs about $0.20 in model calls. With only host-level metrics, TuxBot still outperforms baselines given direct application objectives by 93.7 percentage points, while avoiding severe degraded regions reached by structure-blind exploration. --- ### HiSem: Hierarchical Semantic Disentangling for Remote Sensing Image Change Captioning Authors: Man Wang, Chenyang Liu, Wenjun Li, Feng Ni, Bing Jia, Baoqi Huang, Riting Xia, Zhenwei Shi Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15024v1 Remote sensing image change captioning (RSICC) aims to achieve high-level semantic understanding of genuine changes occurring between bi-temporal images. Despite notable progress, existing methods are fundamentally limited by a shared modeling assumption: changed and unchanged image pairs, which have intrinsically different semantic granularities, are processed under a unified modeling strategy. This modeling inconsistency leads to semantic entanglement between coarse-grained change existence judgment and fine-grained semantic understanding.To address the above limitation, we propose a novel hierarchical semantic disentangling network (HiSem) that explicitly disentangles semantic representations of different granularities. Specifically, we first introduce the Bidirectional Differential Attention Modulation (BDAM) module that leverages discrepancy-aware attention to enhance cross-temporal interactions, thereby amplifying true change signals while suppressing irrelevant variations. Building upon this, we design a Hierarchical Adaptive Semantic Disentanglement (HASD) module that performs adaptive routing at two hierarchical levels: a coarse-grained image-level routing mechanism distinguishes changed and unchanged image pairs, while a fine-grained token-level Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) block models diverse and heterogeneous change semantics for changed samples. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that HiSem outperfoms previous methods, achieving a significant improvement of +7.52\% BLEU-4 on the WHU-CDC dataset. More importantly, our approach provides a structured perspective for RSICC by explicitly aligning model design with the intrinsic semantic heterogeneity of bi-temporal scenes. The code will be available at https://github.com/Man-Wang-star/HiSem --- ### From Scenes to Elements: Multi-Granularity Evidence Retrieval for Verifiable Multimodal RAG Authors: Guanhua Chen, Chuyue Huang, Yutong Yao, Shudong Liu, Xueqing Song, Lidia S. Chao, Derek F. Wong Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15019v1 Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems retrieve evidence at coarse granularities (entire images or scenes), creating a mismatch with fine-grained user queries and making failures unverifiable. We introduce GranuVistaVQA, a multimodal benchmark featuring real-world landmarks with element-level annotations across multiple viewpoints, capturing the partial observation challenge where individual images contain only subsets of entities. We further propose GranuRAG, a multi-granularity framework that treats visual elements as first-class retrieval units through three stages: element-level detection and classification, multi-granularity cross-modal alignment for evidence retrieval, and attribution-constrained generation. By grounding retrieval at the element level rather than relying on implicit attention, our approach enables transparent error diagnosis. Experiments demonstrate that GranuRAG achieves up to 29.2% improvement over six strong baselines for this task. --- ### Generalized Priority-Aware Shapley Value Authors: Kiljae Lee, Ziqi Liu, Weijing Tang, Yuan Zhang Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15018v1 Shapley value and its priority-aware extensions are widely used for valuation in machine learning, but existing methods require pairwise priority to be binary and acyclic, a restriction spectacularly violated in real-data examples such as aggregated human preferences and multi-criterion comparisons. We introduce the generalized priority-aware Shapley value (GPASV), a random order value defined on arbitrary directed weighted priority graphs, in which pairwise edges penalize rather than forbid order violations. GPASV covers a range of classical models as boundary cases. We establish GPASV through an axiomatic characterization, develop the associated computational methods, and introduce a priority sweeping diagnostic extending PASV's. We apply GPASV to LLM ensemble valuation on the cyclic Chatbot Arena preference graph, illustrating that priority-aware valuation is not a one-button operation: different balances of pairwise graph priority versus individual soft priority produce substantively different valuations of the same data. --- ### COTCAgent: Preventive Consultation via Probabilistic Chain-of-Thought Completion Authors: Zihan Deng, Xiaozhen Zhong, Chuanzhi Xu, Quankeng Huang Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15016v2 Sequential diagnosis requires ranking diseases from a sparse intake under a public budget of follow-up questions, which is diagnostic triage with missing findings rather than screening of people who have no symptoms. Because laboratory series arrive irregularly and histories remain incomplete, the ranking must be updated as new facts arrive, yet most pipelines are limited by unnamed numeric trends, unverifiable free-form chain of thought, and a negative bias from treating unasked findings as absent. To solve these, we propose COTCAgent, a sparse-intake consultation agent built on Chain-of-Thought Completion (COTC), which couples three modules on one shared ternary evidence log. The Temporal-Statistics Adapter (TSA) turns time series into typed predicates with named statistics, while the COTC module scores diseases with a learnable knowledge-base energy in which unknown findings add zero energy, after which bounded probabilistic completion selects unknown findings under the question budget and writes each answer back as present, absent, or unknown. Edge strengths and an absence scale are trained with listwise ranking under a sparse curriculum, so that the same energy chooses the next finding by a surrogate entropy reduction. Experiments on DDXPlus and MIMIC-IV show that these modules improve ranking under a matched question budget, with information-gain completion above asking nothing or at random and above protocol-matched askers and a local LLM, thereby providing a foundation for future calibrated scoring and prospective preventive consultation. --- ### COTCAgent: Preventive Consultation via Probabilistic Chain-of-Thought Completion Authors: Zihan Deng, Xiaozhen Zhong, Chuanzhi Xu Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15016v1 As large language models empower healthcare, intelligent clinical decision support has developed rapidly. Longitudinal electronic health records (EHR) provide essential temporal evidence for accurate clinical diagnosis and analysis. However, current large language models have critical flaws in longitudinal EHR reasoning. First, lacking fine-grained statistical reasoning, they often hallucinate clinical trends and metrics when quantitative evidence is textually implied, biasing diagnostic inference. Second, non-uniform time series and scarce labels in longitudinal EHR hinder models from capturing long-range temporal dependencies, limiting reliable clinical reasoning. To address the above limitations, this work presents the Probabilistic Chain-of-Thought Completion Agent (COTCAgent), a hierarchical reasoning framework for longitudinal electronic health records. It consists of three core modules. The Temporal-Statistics Adapter (TSA) converts analytical plans into executable code for standardized trend output. The Chain-of-Thought Completion (COTC) layer leverages a symptom-trend-disease knowledge base with weighted scoring to evaluate disease risk, while the bounded completion module acquires structured evidence through standardized inquiries and iterative scoring constraints to ensure rigorous reasoning. By decoupling statistical computation, feature matching, and language generation, the framework eliminates reliance on complex multi-modal inputs and enables efficient longitudinal record analysis with lower computational overhead. Experimental results show that COTCAgent powered by Baichuan-M2 achieves 90.47% Top-1 accuracy on the self-built dataset and 70.41% on HealthBench, outperforming existing medical agents and mainstream large language models. The code is available at https://github.com/FrankDengAI/COTCAgent/. --- ### Small, Private Language Models as Teammates for Educational Assessment Design Authors: Chris Davis Jaldi, Anmol Saini, Shan Zhang, Noah Schroeder, Cogan Shimizu, Eleni Ilkou Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15015v1 Generative AI increasingly supports educational design tasks, e.g., through Large Language Models (LLMs), demonstrating the capability to design assessment questions that are aligned with pedagogical frameworks (e.g., Bloom's taxonomy). However, they often rely on subjective or limited evaluation methods; focus primarily on proprietary models; or rarely systematically examine generation, evaluation, or deployment constraints in real educational settings. Meanwhile, Small Language Models (SLMs) have emerged as local alternatives that better address privacy and resource limitations; yet their effectiveness for assessment tasks remains underexplored. To address this gap, we systematically compare LLMs and SLMs for assessment question design; evaluate generation quality across Bloom's taxonomy levels using reproducible, pedagogically grounded metrics; and further assess model-based judging against expert-informed evaluation by analyzing reliability and agreement patterns. Results show that SLMs achieve competitive performance across key pedagogically motivated quality dimensions while enabling local, privacy-sensitive deployment. However, model-based evaluations also exhibit systematic inconsistencies and bias relative to expert ratings. These findings provide evidence to posit language models as bounded assistants in assessment workflows; underscore the necessity of Human-in-the-Loop; and advance the automated educational question generation field by examining quality, reliability, and deployment-aware trade-offs. --- ### Boosting Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards via Randomly Selected Few-Shot Guidance Authors: Kai Yan, Alexander G. Schwing, Yu-Xiong Wang Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15012v1 Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has achieved great success in developing Large Language Models (LLMs) with chain-of-thought rollouts for many tasks such as math and coding. Nevertheless, RLVR struggles with sample efficiency on difficult problems where correct rollouts are hard to generate. Prior works propose to address this issue via demonstration-guided RLVR, i.e., to conduct Supervised FineTuning (SFT) when RL fails; however, SFT often requires a lot of data, which can be expensive to acquire. In this paper, we propose FEST, a FEw-ShoT demonstration-guided RLVR algorithm. It attains compelling results with only 128 demonstrations randomly selected from an SFT dataset. We find that three components are vital for the success: supervised signal, on-policy signal, and decaying weights on the few-shot SFT dataset to prevent overfitting from multiple-epoch training. On several benchmarks, FEST outperforms baselines with magnitudes less SFT data, even matching their performance with full dataset. --- ### The Scientific Contribution Graph: Automated Literature-based Technological Roadmapping at Scale Authors: Peter A. Jansen Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15011v3 Scientific contributions rarely develop in isolation, but instead build upon prior discoveries. We formulate the task of automated technological roadmapping as extracting scientific contributions from scholarly articles and linking them to their prerequisites. We present the Scientific Contribution Graph, a large-scale resource containing 6 million detailed scientific contributions extracted from 655k open-access papers spanning computer science, medicine, biology, physics, chemistry, and other sciences, and connected by 36 million prerequisite edges. We further introduce scientific prerequisite prediction, a scientific discovery task in which models predict which existing technologies can enable future discoveries, and show that contemporary models are rapidly improving on this task, reaching 0.48 MAP when evaluated using temporally-filtered backtesting. We anticipate technological roadmapping resources such as this will support scientific impact assessment and automated scientific discovery. --- ### The Scientific Contribution Graph: Automated Literature-based Technological Roadmapping at Scale Authors: Peter A. Jansen Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15011v2 Scientific contributions rarely develop in isolation, but instead build upon prior discoveries. We formulate the task of automated technological roadmapping as extracting scientific contributions from scholarly articles and linking them to their prerequisites. We present the Scientific Contribution Graph, a large-scale AI/NLP-domain resource containing 2 million detailed scientific contributions extracted from 230k open-access papers and connected by 12.5 million prerequisite edges. We further introduce scientific prerequisite prediction, a scientific discovery task in which models predict which existing technologies can enable future discoveries, and show that contemporary models are rapidly improving on this task, reaching 0.48 MAP when evaluated using temporally filtered backtesting. We anticipate technological roadmapping resources such as this will support scientific impact assessment and automated scientific discovery. --- ### 3D Skew-Normal Splatting Authors: Xiangru Wu, Ke Fan, Yanwei Fu Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15010v2 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as a leading representation for real-time novel view synthesis and has been widely adopted in various downstream applications. The core strength of 3DGS lies in its efficient kernel-based scene representation, where Gaussian primitives provide favorable mathematical and computational properties. However, under a finite primitive budget, the symmetric shape of each primitive directly affects representation compactness, especially near asymmetric structures such as object boundaries and one-sided surfaces. Recent works have explored more complex kernel distributions; however, they either remain within the elliptical family or rely on hard truncation, which limits continuous shape control and introduces distributional discontinuities. In this paper, we propose Skew-Normal Splatting (SNS), which adopts the Azzalini Skew-Normal distribution as the fundamental primitive. By introducing a learnable and bounded skewness parameter, SNS can continuously interpolate between symmetric Gaussians and Half-Gaussian-like shapes, enabling flexible modeling of both sharp boundaries and interior regions. Moreover, SNS preserves analytical tractability under affine transformations and marginalization. This property allows seamless integration into existing Gaussian Splatting rasterization pipelines. Furthermore, to address the strong coupling between scale, rotation, and skewness parameters, we introduce a decoupled parameterization and a block-wise optimization strategy to enhance training stability and accuracy. Extensive experiments on standard novel-view synthesis benchmarks show that SNS consistently improves reconstruction quality over Gaussian and recent non-Gaussian kernels, with clearer benefits on sharp boundaries and thin or one-sided structures. --- ### DeepTokenEEG Enhancing Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimers Classification via Tokenized EEG Features Authors: Thinh Nguyen-Quang, Minh Long Ngo, Ngoc-Son Nguyen, Nguyen Thanh Vinh, Huy-Dung Han, Bui Thanh Tung, Nguyen Quang Linh, Khuong Vo, Manoj Vishwanath, Hung Cao Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15009v1 The detection of Alzheimers disease (AD) is considered crucial, as timely intervention can improve patient outcomes. Electroencephalogram (EEG)-based diagnosis has been recognized as a non-invasive, accessible, and cost-effective approach for AD detection; however, it faces challenges related to data availability, accuracy of modern deep learning methods, and the time-consuming nature of expert-based interpretation. In this study, a novel lightweight and high-performance model, DeepTokenEEG, was designed for the diagnosis of AD and the classification of EEG signals from AD patients, individuals with other neurological conditions, and healthy subjects. Unlike traditional heavy-weight models, DeepTokenEEG ultilizes spatial and temporal tokenizer that effectively captures AD-related biomarkers in both temporal and frequency domain with only 0.29 million paramaters. Trained in a combined dataset of 274 subjects, including 180 AD cases, and 94 healthy controls, the proposed method achieves a maximum recorded accuracy of 100% on specific frequency bands, representing an improvement of 1.41-15.35% over state-of-the-art methods on the same dataset. These results indicate the potential of DeepTokenEEG for early detection and screening of AD, with promising applicability for deployment due to its compact size. --- ### Quantifying and Mitigating Premature Closure in Frontier LLMs Authors: Rebecca Handler, Suhana Bedi, Nigam Shah Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15000v1 Premature closure, or committing to a conclusion before sufficient information is available, is a recognized contributor to diagnostic error but remains underexamined in large language models (LLMs). We define LLM premature closure as inappropriate commitment under uncertainty: providing an answer, recommendation, or clinical guidance when the safer response would be clarification, abstention, escalation, or refusal. We evaluated five frontier LLMs across structured and open-ended medical tasks. In MedQA (n = 500) and AfriMed-QA (n = 490) questions where the correct choice had been removed, models still selected an answer at high rates, with baseline false-action rates of 55-81% and 53-82%, respectively. In open-ended evaluation, models gave inappropriate answers on an average of 30% of 861 HealthBench questions and 78% of 191 physician-authored adversarial queries. Safety-oriented prompting reduced premature closure across models, but residual failure persisted, highlighting the need to evaluate whether medical LLMs know when not to answer. --- ### Towards Gaze-Informed AI Disclosure Interfaces: Eye-Tracking Attentional and Cognitive Load While Reading AI-Assisted News Authors: Pooja Prajod, Hannes Cools, Thomas Röggla, Pablo Cesar, Abdallah El Ali Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14999v1 As generative AI becomes increasingly integrated into journalism, designing effective AI-use disclosures that inform readers without imposing unnecessary burden is a key challenge. While prior research has primarily focused on trust and credibility, the impact of disclosures on readers' attentional and cognitive load remains underexplored. To address this gap, we conducted a $3\times2\times2$ mixed factorial study manipulating the level of AI-use disclosure detail (none, one-line, detailed), news type (politics, lifestyle), and role of AI (editing, partial content generation), measuring load via NASA-TLX and eye-tracking. Our results reveal a significant attentional cost: one-line disclosures resulted in significantly higher fixation durations and saccade counts, particularly for AI-edited content. Detailed disclosures did not impose additional burden. Drawing on Information-Gap Theory, we argue that brief labels may trigger increased visual scrutiny by alerting readers to AI use without providing enough information. NASA-TLX scores and pupil diameter showed no significant differences across conditions, suggesting that AI-use disclosures do not impose cognitive burden regardless of the detail level. Interview insights contextualize these findings and reveal a strong preference for detailed or ``detail-on-demand'' designs. Our findings inform the design of gaze-informed adaptive disclosure interfaces that dynamically adjust transparency levels based on readers' attentional patterns and news context. --- ### Learning Developmental Scaffoldings to Guide Self-Organisation Authors: Milton L. Montero, Elias Najarro, Jakob Schauser, Sebastian Risi Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.AI, eess.SY, q-bio.QM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14998v4 From subcellular structures to entire organisms, many natural systems generate complex organisation through self-organisation: local interactions that collectively give rise to global structure without any blueprint of the outcome. Yet a significant portion of the information driving such processes is not produced by self-organisation itself, instead, it is often offloaded to initial conditions of the system. Biological development is a prime example, where maternal pre-patterns encode positional and symmetry-breaking information that scaffolds the self-organising process. From maternal morphogen gradients in early embryogenesis to tissue-level morphogenetic pre-patterns guiding organ formation, this transfer of information to initial conditions, analogous to a memory-compute trade-off in computational systems, is a fundamental part of developmental processes. In this work, we study this offloading phenomenon by introducing a model that jointly learns both the self-organisation rules and the pre-patterns, allowing their interplay to be varied and measured under controlled conditions: a Neural Cellular Automaton (NCA) paired with a learned coordinate-based pattern generator (SIREN), both trained simultaneously to generate a set of patterns. We provide information-theoretic analyses of how information is distributed between pre-patterns and the self-organising process, and show that jointly learning both components yields improvements in robustness, encoding capacity, and symmetry breaking over purely self-organising alternatives. Our analysis further suggests that effective pre-patterns do not simply approximate their targets; rather, they bias the developmental dynamics in ways that facilitate convergence, pointing to a non-trivial relationship between the structure of initial conditions and the dynamics of self-organisation. --- ### Explainable Detection of Depression Status Shifts from User Digital Traces Authors: Loris Belcastro, Francesco Gervino, Fabrizio Marozzo, Domenico Talia, Paolo Trunfio Published: 2026-05-14 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG, cs.SI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.14995v1 Every day, users generate digital traces (e.g., social media posts, chats, and online interactions) that are inherently timestamped and may reflect aspects of their mental state. These traces can be organized into temporal trajectories that capture how a user's mental health signals evolve, including phases of improvement, deterioration, or stability. In this work, we propose an explainable framework for detecting and analyzing depression-related status shifts in user digital traces. The approach combines multiple BERT-based models to extract complementary signals across different dimensions (e.g., sentiment, emotion, and depression severity). Such signals are then aggregated over time to construct user-level trajectories that are analyzed to identify meaningful change points. To enhance interpretability, the framework integrates a large language model to generate concise and human-readable reports that describe the evolution of mental-health signals and highlight key transitions. We evaluate the framework on two social media datasets. Results show that the approach produces more coherent and informative summaries than direct LLM-based reporting, achieving higher coverage of user history, stronger temporal coherence, and improved sensitivity to change points. An ablation study confirms the contribution of each component, particularly temporal modeling and segmentation. Overall, the method provides an interpretable view of mental health signals over time, supporting research and decision making without aiming at clinical diagnosis. ---