# Research Papers — 2026-05 · bundle page 75 of 326 > Full-text markdown of papers #3701–3750 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/75 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-05/page/74.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-05/page/76.md) ### Dynamic Link Prediction with Temporally Enhanced Signed Graph Neural Networks Authors: Derek Regier, Andrew Polyak, Aresh Dadlani, Khosro Salmani Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26290v2 Temporal signed networks (TSNs) model the time evolution of cooperative and adversarial relationships that arise in applications such as social media analysis, trust and reputation systems, and financial transaction networks. While graph neural networks (GNNs) perform well for static or unsigned link prediction, effective learning in temporal signed graphs remains challenging due to the interaction of signed relations, evolving structure, and balance-theoretic constraints. To address this gap, we propose a \emph{modular} temporal enhancement framework for signed GNNs that integrates historical context into otherwise static architectures. The framework introduces a Historical Context Integration Module (HCIM) that combines learnable recency-aware temporal weighting, LSTM-based embedding trajectory modeling, and multi-head temporal attention to capture both short- and long-term signed interaction dynamics. Historical information is fused with current node representations using either global or node-adaptive weighting, allowing the architecture-agnostic framework to accommodate heterogeneous temporal behaviors. We instantiate the approach on the Self-Explainable Signed Graph Transformer (SE-SGformer), preserving interpretability while extending it with temporal awareness. Experiments on real-world and synthetic TSNs, including Bitcoin OTC, Bitcoin Alpha, Reddit, and small-world network models, demonstrate consistent and statistically significant improvements over the static baseline. --- ### Stateful Inference for Low-Latency Multi-Agent Tool Calling Authors: Victor Norgren Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26289v1 Multi-agent tool calling is becoming the dominant interaction pattern for LLM-based systems, yet existing inference frameworks treat each tool call as an independent request, re-processing the entire conversation from scratch even though 85-95% of the prompt is unchanged from the previous turn. We present a stateful inference architecture that converts the $O(n_t)$ per-turn cost of conventional serving into an $O(Δ_t)$ delta-only cost: a persistent KV cache lives across turns and advances by ingesting only the new tokens, while a radix prefix cache extends this across interleaved multi-agent traffic and a prompt-lookup speculative decoder accelerates structured output. Against vLLM and SGLang on novel, fully-generated workloads, the reference implementation is $2.1\times$ faster per turn on a 6-turn agentic workflow and $4.2\times$ on the median turn of a 35-turn one, halving end-to-end wall time. The advantage comes from stateful reuse and speculation, not caching. --- ### Beyond Differences: Doubly Robust Meta-Learners for Ratio-Based Treatment Effects Authors: Michael Fuchs, Dominik Kreiss Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, stat.ME arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26288v1 When treatment effects are naturally expressed as ratios -- as in medicine, pricing, and marketing -- the ratio-based CATE $τ(x) = E(Y|W=1,X=x) / E(Y|W=0,X=x)$ is the appropriate estimand. Yet existing estimators either impose a log-linear parametric structure or apply generic regression without robustness guarantees for this functional. We introduce the Q-Learner, which decomposes $τ(x)$ into a product of two odds ratios, reducing ratio-CATE estimation for binary outcomes to two propensity classification tasks. We further derive doubly robust augmentations for both S/T- and Q-style ratio learners and characterize their distinct robustness properties. In benchmarks on seven RCT datasets, the Q-Learner is the most consistently competitive method in low-conversion regimes, where its propensity-only construction sidesteps the imbalanced regression that hurts outcome-based estimators. On four observational datasets, where propensity must be estimated and confounding cannot be ruled out, the DR learners introduced here decisively come out on top, making them practitioners' natural default for confounded observational data. --- ### A multifractal-based masked auto-encoder: an application to medical images Authors: Joao Batista Florindo, Viviane de Moura Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26287v1 Masked autoencoders (MAE) have shown great promise in medical image classification. However, the random masking strategy employed by traditional MAEs may overlook critical areas in medical images, where even subtle changes can indicate disease. To address this limitation, we propose a novel approach that utilizes a multifractal measure (Renyi entropy) to optimize the masking strategy. Our method, termed Multifractal-Optimized Masked Autoencoder (MO-MAE), employs a multifractal analysis to identify regions of high complexity and information content. By focusing the masking process on these areas, MO-MAE ensures that the model learns to reconstruct the most diagnostically relevant features. This approach is particularly beneficial for medical imaging, where fine-grained inspection of tissue structures is crucial for accurate diagnosis. We evaluate MO-MAE on several medical datasets covering various diseases, including MedMNIST and COVID-CT. Our results demonstrate that MO-MAE achieves promising performance, surpassing other basiline and state-of-the-art models. The proposed method also adds minimum computational overhead as the computation of the proposed measure is straightforward. Our findings suggest that the multifractal-optimized masking strategy enhances the model's ability to capture and reconstruct complex tissue structures, leading to more accurate and efficient medical image representation. The proposed MO-MAE framework offers a promising direction for improving the accuracy and efficiency of deep learning models in medical image analysis, potentially advancing the field of computer-aided diagnosis. --- ### Decoupled Delay Compensation: Enhancing Pre-trained MARL Policies via Learned Dynamics Filtering Authors: Maxim Mednikov, Oren Gal Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.MA, cs.AI, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26286v1 Real-world multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) systems must often operate under stale observations, stochastic communication delays, and intermittent packet loss. Policies trained under idealized synchronous conditions frequently exhibit significant performance degradation in these regimes because they act on outdated feedback. We propose a modular execution-stage state-estimation layer that replaces delayed communicated observations with current belief-state estimates. The framework integrates a learned Gated transition model with a recursive Kalman filtering layer to estimate instantaneous states from asynchronous measurements. A primary advantage of this approach is its modularity, The estimator serves as a plug-in for pre-trained policies, requiring no modifications to the original MARL training algorithm, architecture, or reward structure. Evaluation across diverse multi-agent and continuous-control benchmarks demonstrates that the proposed layer consistently enhances robustness to communication latency and message loss. The most significant performance gains are observed in coordination-intensive and dynamically unstable tasks where temporal consistency is critical for control. --- ### Two-Parameter Flows for Learning Population Dynamics of Physical Systems Authors: Paul Schwerdtner, Tobias Blickhan, Benjamin Peherstorfer Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.LG, math.NA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26285v1 This work addresses the problem of learning the dynamics of high-dimensional probability densities over time using unlabeled samples, without assuming access to trajectory information. We introduce two-parameter flows that learn only sampling-time transports from a base distribution to each marginal and then extract a physics-time velocity by regressing on coupled synthetic trajectories. We prove that the resulting physics-time dynamics are unique and inherit regularity from the sampling-time transports. Because we can build on standard, well-developed conditional flow matching techniques for learning the base-to-marginal transports, our approach scales to high dimensions and avoids per-step optimal-transport couplings, while allowing admissible non-gradient dynamics that can naturally explain rotational or circulating physics phenomena. --- ### Benchmarking Convolutional, Transformer, Hybrid, and Vision Language Models for Multi Disease Retinal Screening Authors: Durjoy Dey, Aymane Ajbar, Yuhong Yan Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26283v1 Modern deep learning offers powerful tools for automated retinal screening, but it remains unclear how different visual model families compare in realistic multi-disease settings and under domain shift. In this work, we benchmark twelve architectures across four model families: convolutional neural networks, vision transformers, hybrid CNN-transformer backbones, and vision-language models, using the Retinal Fundus Multi-disease Image Dataset (RFMiD). We evaluate two tasks: binary screening for any retinal disease and multi-label classification across 28 disease classes. Using standardized training, calibration, and evaluation protocols, we report AUC, F1, precision, recall, and sensitivity at a clinically relevant operating point with specificity near 80%. On RFMiD, all architectures perform well on binary screening, with AUC above 84%, but attention-based models perform best. SwinTiny and the hybrid CoAtNet0 and MaxViTTiny models achieve the strongest binary screening results and improve macro and micro F1 in the multi-label setting. Vision-language models, including CLIP ViT-B/16 and SigLIP-Base384, are competitive with CNN baselines but do not surpass the best transformer and hybrid backbones. In external validation on Messidor-2 for referable diabetic retinopathy, AUC ranges from 66.8% to 84.7%, with hybrid and transformer models again showing strong performance. These results provide a reproducible reference for model selection in multi-disease retinal screening and guide future automated screening tools for clinical deployment. --- ### Scaling World-Model Reinforcement Learning Through Diffusion Policy Optimization Authors: Xiaoyuan Cheng, Wenxuan Yuan, Zhancun Mu, Yuanzhao Zhang, Yiming Yang, Hai Wang, Zhuo Sun, Che Liu Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26282v1 Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) can be effectively supported at scale through the use of world models. However, in practice, scaling such approaches remains fundamentally limited. A commonly recognized challenge is model bias and error compounding, which degrade long-horizon predictions. Beyond these issues, we identify a more critical yet underexplored bottleneck: a structural misalignment between search and value learning in existing world model approaches. In particular, policy improvement often relies on value functions induced by a separate, non-search policy, resulting in training inconsistency and ultimately suboptimal learning. To address this limitation, we propose Model-Based Diffusion Policy Optimization (MBDPO) in world models, a framework that unifies search and policy optimization through diffusion policy representations, thereby unlocking the potential of world models for scalable policy learning. Instead of constructing an explicit planner over a learned world model, we reformulate policy optimization as a diffusion process over searched trajectories in latent world models. In this view, we extract an implicit energy function from the collected dataset that anchors the policy, enabling MBDPO to refine the score field for policy optimization while mitigating misalignment. We evaluate MBDPO across a wide range of settings, including multi-task offline pretraining, online learning, and offline-to-online fine-tuning. In the offline regime, we further investigate its scaling behavior by pretraining on large-scale datasets, observing consistent and monotonic performance gains with increasing model capacity. --- ### Constraint acquisition needs better benchmarks Authors: Rafał Stachowiak, Tomasz P. Pawlak Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26279v1 Constraint Acquisition (CA) and related research on the validation and enhancement of Mathematical Programming (MP) models from domain knowledge artifacts are currently limited by inadequate benchmarks. This deficiency impedes reproducibility and cross-study comparability, slowing the maturation of CA methods. Existing benchmarks were designed for solver evaluation rather than for assessing CA algorithms. They are loosely organized, treat individual problems inconsistently, and omit the domain knowledge artifacts required by CA methods. This work presents MPMMine, a benchmark suite designed to assess algorithms that discover, validate, and enhance MP models using diverse domain knowledge artifacts. MPMMine is guided by consistency, standardization, completeness, extensibility, openness, and version control. It adopts a uniform structure and relies on open formats: MiniZinc, CommonMark, and JSON. It provides multiple models per problem, tens of instances per model, and thousands of solutions and non-solutions in both integer and continuous domains, alongside natural-language descriptions to support text-to-model methods. --- ### VesselSim: learning 3D blood vessel segmentation without expert annotations Authors: Erin Rainville, Melissa Ananian, Tristan Mirolla, Hassan Rivaz, Yiming Xiao Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26277v2 Blood vessel segmentation is a core task in medical image analysis for the care of vascular diseases and surgical planning, yet the challenges of providing expert vascular annotations pose a major obstacle for the progress of related deep learning techniques. To address this, we propose VesselSim, a two-stage framework for universal 3D blood vessel segmentation that eliminates the need for real annotated data during training. First, we introduce a stochastic, geometry-driven vascular simulation framework that models recursive branching, curvature-controlled growth, and collision-aware topology, followed by domain-randomized intensity synthesis to generate 16,500 anatomically plausible 3D angiographic volumes. Second, a 3D U-Net is trained solely on this synthetic data. To bridge the domain gap from synthetic to real images at inference time, we introduce a test-time adaptation strategy via a self-supervised mask reconstruction decoder, enabling adaptation to unseen clinical scans without prior domain knowledge. We evaluate VesselSim in a zero-shot setting on multiple real-world datasets spanning MR and CT across several anatomical regions, including the brain and kidneys. Despite being trained exclusively on synthetic data, VesselSim achieves performance competitive with state-of-the-art vascular segmentation foundation models. These findings suggest that learning vessel geometry from synthetic tubular structures is effective for robust cross-domain generalization, substantially reducing the reliance on acquired medical imaging data and more importantly, expert annotations. --- ### SPEAR: Code-Augmented Agentic Prompt Optimization Authors: Mengyin Lu, Cong Feng, Huimin Han, Guangming Lu, Yu Sun, Xiaonan Ding, Shihui Long, Fengyi Li, Tanvi Motwani Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26275v2 Automatic prompt engineering (APE) rewrites prompts to improve downstream task performance, but existing APE loops treat the optimizer itself as a fixed pipeline. We port the code-as-action paradigm of CodeAct (Wang et al., 2024a) to APE and propose SPEAR (Sandboxed Prompt Engineer with Active Roll-back), a free-form agentic optimizer with four tools -- evaluate, python, set_prompt, finish -- that decides autonomously how and when to use them. The distinctive tool is the Python sandbox: the optimizer writes and executes arbitrary Python on the current evaluation DataFrame, performing structural error analysis (confusion matrices, error clustering, per group metrics) the agent itself authors. Two guardrails turn the long-horizon agent into a monotone-improving optimizer: auto-rollback on metric regression, and an optional guard metric floor. We evaluate on three industrial LLM-as-judge suites (13 judge tasks across recruiter-intake, conversational-memory, and query-refinement systems) plus seven BBH tasks and GSM8K. SPEAR wins every industrial task on the primary metric ($κ$ 0.857 vs 0.359 on tool-selection; F1-macro 0.815 vs 0.763 on filter-relevance; $κ$ 0.254 vs 0.218 on the hardest extraction dimension). On BBH-7 SPEAR averages 0.938 accuracy vs GEPA 0.628 and TextGrad 0.484. Ablations show the Python tool is the largest single lever on complex judge tasks ($Δ\approx +0.79κ$ on the 5-class tool-selection judge, $Δ\approx +0.35κ$ on the hardest extraction dimension when removed); its irreplaceable contribution is class-pair confusion aggregation that a long-context LLM cannot extract reliably from the raw eval DataFrame. --- ### Frequency-Guided Fusion For RGB-Thermal Semantic Segmentation Authors: İsmail Emre Canıtez, Özgür Erkent Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26273v1 Semantic segmentation in complex environments such as urban driving scenes remains challenging under adverse lighting conditions, where RGB images alone provide insufficient information. RGB-Thermal fusion leverages the complementary strengths of visible and infrared imagery to improve scene understanding; however, effectively integrating these heterogeneous modalities at varying levels of feature abstraction remains an open problem. In this paper, we propose a multi-modal fusion architecture built upon dual ConvNeXt V2 backbones that employs stage-wise, modality-adaptive fusion strategies. For early-stage features, we introduce a Frequency-Based Fusion Module that decomposes infrared features into low- and high-frequency components via Gaussian filtering, applies dual-branch spatial attention to selectively emphasize thermal patterns and fine-grained boundaries, and integrates them with RGB features through a confidence-gated residual mechanism. For late-stage features, we design a semantic fusion module with cross-modal attention and multi-scale depthwise convolutions to capture semantic correspondences across modalities. The fused features are decoded via a PANet-style bidirectional decoder with deep supervision. Experiments on MFNet and PST900 demonstrate that our lightest variant achieves 61.73\% and 86.24\% mIoU, respectively, with only 35.43M parameters, outperforming recent methods while using substantially fewer parameters and lower computational cost. Code is available at https://github.com/ismailemrecntz/VISIBLE-INFRARED-SENSOR-FUSION --- ### Learning Nonlinear Factor Models with Unknown Monotone Links from Incomplete and Noisy Data Authors: Yutong Chao, Resat Gökhan, Jalal Etesami, Ali Habibnia Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, econ.EM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26271v1 We study a nonlinear factor model in which observed responses depend on low-rank latent factors through an unknown monotone link function. This setting is challenging and largely underexplored due to severe nonconvexity and identifiability issues. The link function is assumed to lie in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS), enabling flexible nonparametric modeling while preserving identifiability. We formulate the problem as the joint recovery of the low-rank factors, loadings, and the nonlinear link function from possibly incomplete and noisy observations and propose a projected block coordinate descent (BCD) algorithm with explicit regularization to address scale and rotational ambiguities. Under mild incoherence of factors and standard sampling conditions, we establish convergence guarantees in both noiseless and noisy regimes, along with sublinear regret bounds for the link-function updates. Our results extend classical linear factor models to a broad nonlinear regime and provide a principled framework for learning nonlinear latent structures. We evaluate the proposed approach using controlled synthetic experiments, indicating promising performance. --- ### Quantized Keys Steal Attention: Bias Correction for KV-Cache Compression in Video Diffusion Authors: Tuna Tuncer, Felix Becker, Thomas Pfeil Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.GR, eess.IV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26266v1 Chunk-wise autoregressive video diffusion models rely on a KV cache of previously generated chunks to avoid redundant computation, but this cache quickly becomes a memory bottleneck as videos grow longer. Methods that quantize the KV cache to low bitwidths reduce memory pressure but degrade video quality. We show that a key driver of this degradation is a systematic bias in attention weights: due to the convexity of the exponential in softmax attention, quantization noise inflates the contribution of cached keys, a phenomenon we call the Jensen bias. This effect causes quantized keys to steal attention mass from the unquantized current chunk. We derive a per-attention-score correction that removes this bias in expectation, computed on the fly from the quantization step sizes of the cached keys and the query norm. Using a second-order Taylor approximation, the additional computational overhead is negligible, and no additional memory is needed alongside the cache. Evaluated on MAGI-1, SkyReels-V2, and HY-WorldPlay at INT2 quantization, our correction recovers most of the quality lost to aggressive quantization, reaching near-BF16 video quality, and can outperform INT4 quantization while using 50% less memory. --- ### Dimensional Distribution Emotion State: Leveraging Valence and Arousal as a Common Embedding Space for Visual Emotion Analysis Authors: Émile Bergeron, Tadagbé Dhossou, Sébastien Tremblay, Jean-François Lalonde Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26262v1 Museums are important sites for the dissemination of culture and art. They are institutions rooted in history and tradition; their exhibitions are often designed to highlight these aspects. Recently, a new approach is being explored in the field: emotion-based exhibitions. These exhibitions are designed specifically to elicit emotions in the visitors, in order to maximize engagement, and as a way to democratize access to art and attract a wider, more diverse audience. To do so, the emotional content of the artworks must first be extracted, however, manually annotating the artworks by experts is a prohibitively labor-intensive process, and risks introducing the personal bias of curators. To assist the museum curators in their design of these exhibitions, we wish to develop a tool that can predict the emotional response evoked by a work of art. In this article, we leverage a continuous bi-dimensional emotion space to enhance emotion representations and the training process of deep learning models. Drawing inspiration from existing categorical and dimensional emotion representations, we introduce a new representation, Dimensional Distribution Emotion State (DDES), along with a pipeline for multi-dataset training. We show that DDES provides multiple advantages compared to widely used representations while exhibiting similar baseline performance. --- ### Personalizing Embodied Multimodal Large Language Model Agents over Long-term User Interactions Authors: Jeongeun Lee, Chanyoung Park, Dongha Lee Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26256v1 Multimodal large language model (MLLM)-based embodied agents have shown strong potential for solving complex tasks in physical environments. However, personalized assistance requires more than following generic instruction or recognizing object categories. In real-world scenarios, the intended target is often specified only implicitly through prior interactions, requiring agents to leverage personalized context accumulated over time. In this work, we propose POLAR, a multiomodal memory-augmented framework for personalized embodied agents over long-term user interactions. POLAR organizes prior interactions into a multimodal knowledge graph that captures semantic memory for personalized context and visual concepts, and episodic memory for embodied experiences such as agent trajectories. To execute embodied tasks, POLAR retrieves relevant memories to interpret the current request and guide task execution. We evaluate POLAR across multiple MLLM backbones and diverse evaluation scenarios to study the role of memory in long-term personalization. Results show that the proposed memory mechanism consistently improves performance by enabling more effective use of information accumulated over prior interactions. The gains are especially pronounced when the agents are required to reason across multiple interactions, perform multi-hop inference, or tracking updates in user-specific context over time. --- ### Prospective evaluation of multimodal respiratory failure prediction: Do chest X-rays improve performance beyond EHR signals? Authors: Xiaolei Lu, Shamim Nemati Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: eess.IV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26255v2 Early prediction of respiratory failure is critical for timely clinical intervention in intensive care units. Existing electronic health record (EHR)-based models can continuously monitor physiologic deterioration, but they may not fully capture pulmonary pathophysiology reflected in chest radiographs (CXRs). In this study, we ask whether CXR information improves prospective prediction of invasive mechanical ventilation beyond EHR signals alone. We develop a gated multimodal framework that integrates structured EHR time-series data with CXR foundation-model representations. The gating module adaptively controls the contribution of imaging features based on patient-specific clinical context, allowing the model to selectively rely on imaging information when it is informative. We prospectively evaluate the framework for predicting invasive mechanical ventilation within 24 hours in ICU patients and compare it with an established EHR-only model (Ventio), physician predictions obtained at matched clinical time points, and alternative multimodal variants. The gated multimodal models achieved higher discrimination than the EHR-only baseline, with AUROC values of 0.860 and 0.858 using REMEDIS and MedInsight CXR representations, respectively, compared with 0.752 for Ventio. Relative to physician predictions, the multimodal framework substantially improved sensitivity while maintaining favorable specificity. Compared with the EHR-only model, multimodal integration increased specificity and positive predictive value, suggesting that CXR information can refine risk estimation in selected patients. These findings support adaptive multimodal fusion as a practical strategy for incorporating imaging into prospective respiratory failure prediction. --- ### Is Agent Memory a Database? Rethinking Data Foundations for Long-Term AI Agent Memory Authors: Abdelghny Orogat, Essam Mansour Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.AI, cs.DB arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26252v1 Long-running AI agents need persistent memory. Memory supports learning across sessions, reduces repeated context injection, and enables auditing of past decisions. Current agent memory systems and database paradigms treat memory as storage. They localize correctness at records, embeddings, or edges. Each supplies only some of the capabilities that long-term memory requires. The result is four recurring failure modes: unregulated growth, missing semantic revision, capacity-driven forgetting, and read-only retrieval. In our vision, long-term agent memory is a new data-management workload. Its correctness is a property of the state trajectory, not of individual records. We formalize this as Governed Evolving Memory (GEM). GEM replaces record-level database operations with four state-level operators: ingestion, revision, forgetting, and retrieval. Six correctness conditions govern how the state evolves. Three structural observations establish that no record-level system can satisfy these conditions, regardless of the storage model. We realize the abstraction in MemState, a prototype on a property-graph backend. MemState validates feasibility and exposes the gap to a native engine. We outline three research directions that define memory-centric data management as a workload. --- ### Unified Neural Scaling Laws Authors: Ethan Caballero, Priyank Jaini, David Krueger, Irina Rish Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26248v1 We present a functional form (that we refer to as a Unified Neural Scaling Law (UNSL)) that accurately models and extrapolates the scaling behaviors of deep neural networks as multiple dimensions all vary simultaneously (i.e. how the evaluation metric of interest varies as one simultaneously varies the number of model parameters, training dataset size, number of training steps, number of inference steps, amount of compute, and various hyperparameters) for various architectures and for each of various tasks within a varied set of upstream and downstream tasks. This set includes large-scale vision, language, math, and reinforcement learning. When compared to other functional forms for neural scaling, this functional form yields extrapolations of scaling behavior that are considerably more accurate on this set. --- ### The Bridge-Garden Dilemma in LLM Distillation: Why Mixing Hard and Soft Labels Works Authors: Guanghui Wang, Kaiwen Lv Kacuila, Zhiyong Yang, Zitai Wang, Jin-Wen Wu, Longtao Huang, Qianqian Xu, Qingming Huang Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26246v1 Knowledge distillation (KD) transfers knowledge from a large teacher model to a smaller student. In language modeling, the student is trained either on tokens sampled from the teacher (hard labels) or the teacher's full next-token distribution (soft labels). Despite soft labels appear strictly richer, we find that mixing hard and soft labels consistently yields better results. Crucially, we show that this gain cannot be explained by closer teacher matching during training. Instead, it comes from reduced exposure bias, the mismatch between training and inference distributions. To explain this phenomenon, we introduce the Bridge-Garden Decomposition theory, which categorizes generation steps into two types: Bridges, where the next token must be exact, and Gardens, where it can be flexible. We show that hard-only KD excels in Bridges by avoiding risky deviations, while soft-only KD preserves diversity in Gardens. A hybrid strategy handles both cases and, as a result, reduces exposure bias across the sequence. Guided by this theory, we develop a family of Bridge-Garden hybrid supervision methods that adaptively balance hard and soft labels. Across a primary suite of seven teacher-student pairs (including Qwen, Llama, Gemma, and DeepSeek) and benchmarks in reasoning and coding, our approach outperforms divergence-based and on-policy KD baselines while reducing training cost by 9.7x, enabling efficient model compression. Code is available at https://github.com/ghwang-s/bridge_garden_hybrid_kd_release. --- ### LongAV-Compass: Towards Unified Evaluation of Minute-Scale Audio-Visual Generation Across T2AV, I2AV, and V2AV Authors: Tengfei Liu, Yang Shi, Xuanyu Zhu, Jiafu Tang, Liu Yang, Qixun Wang, Zhuoran Zhang, Yuqi Tang, Fengxiang Wang, Yuhao Dong, Xinlong Chen, Bozhou Li et al. Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CV, cs.MM, cs.SD arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26244v1 Audio-visual generation is rapidly advancing from short clips to minute-long content, while existing evaluation protocols remain largely confined to short-form settings. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on 5--10 second text-conditioned generation and rarely support unified evaluation across text, image, and video conditioning modalities. Moreover, they provide limited insight into how identity consistency, narrative coherence, and audio-visual alignment degrade over extended temporal horizons. To bridge this gap, we introduce LongAV-Compass, a systematic benchmark for minute-long audio-visual generation. LongAV-Compass contains 284 curated test cases spanning text-to-audio-video (T2AV), image-to-audio-video (I2AV), and video-to-audio-video (V2AV), organized by application scenario and generation complexity. The benchmark combines taxonomy-guided benchmark construction with a unified evaluation framework that integrates MLLM-assisted assessment with complementary perceptual and multimodal metrics, including DINO-v2, ArcFace, CLIP, and ImageBind. The framework evaluates more than 20 fine-grained dimensions covering within-segment quality, cross-segment consistency, global narrative coherence, semantic alignment, and audio-visual synchronization. Through experiments on 11 representative models together with human-alignment validation, LongAV-Compass provides a diagnostic testbed for analyzing the limitations of current systems in sustaining coherent, semantically aligned, and temporally consistent minute-scale audio-visual generation across diverse input modalities. --- ### Provably Communication-Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Federated Graph Neural Networks Authors: Zhishuai Guo, Wenhan Wu, Chen Chen, Lei Zhang, Olivera Kotevska, Ravi K Madduri Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26243v1 Graph neural networks (GNNs) achieve strong performance on relational data, but real-world graphs are often distributed across organizations that cannot share raw data due to privacy and policy constraints. Existing federated GNN methods either ignore cross-client links, leading to degraded accuracy, or require frequent embedding exchanges, incurring substantial communication and privacy costs. We propose CE-FedGNN, a communication-efficient and privacy-preserving federated GNN framework for learning over such coupled graphs. Our approach avoids sharing raw data or per-round embeddings by infrequently exchanging aggregated node representations. To handle cross-client dependency and staleness, we introduce a moving-average estimator that continuously tracks node representations and enables their stable reuse across rounds. To provide formal privacy guarantees for the released representations, we adopt the metric differential privacy (metric-DP) framework, which measures privacy with respect to distances in the learned embedding space rather than worst-case input perturbations. This yields meaningful guarantees at noise levels where standard differential privacy becomes overly conservative. We establish convergence to a stationary point at a rate of $O(1/\sqrt{T})$ with $O(T^{3/4})$ communication complexity. In addition, we derive $(\varepsilon,δ)$-metric-DP guarantees via Rényi differential privacy composition under a public-cohort threat model. Experiments on synthetic interbank anti-money laundering benchmarks and citation networks demonstrate that CE-FedGNN achieves strong performance while significantly reducing communication and maintaining robustness under privacy-preserving noise. --- ### Can LLMs Introspect? A Reality Check Authors: Shashwat Singh, Tal Linzen, Shauli Ravfogel Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26242v2 Can large language models detect and report their own internal states? A number of recent studies have argued that they can. Drawing on lessons from human metacognition research, we argue that this conclusion may be premature. We identify two conditions that a paradigm needs to meet in order to establish introspection. First, the test needs to require privileged access: it should not be solvable using cues available in the input. Second, it needs to require second-order computation: second-order, meta-representations of first-order, task-related representations. This condition cannot be satisfied by task performance alone: it requires designs under which second-order and first-order accounts make divergent predictions. We re-examine two paradigms that have been used to argue for model introspection in light of these conditions. In the first, models must predict labels derived from their own hidden states; we find that classifiers that can only access the input match the models' in-context predictions, indicating that the original results do not demonstrate privileged access to internal representations. In the second paradigm, models must detect whether their internal states have been tampered with; we find they cannot reliably distinguish such interventions from manipulations of the input, suggesting that their success reflects generic anomaly detection rather than sensitivity to internal interventions in particular. We conclude that current evidence is insufficient to establish metacognitive monitoring in LLMs. --- ### Can LLMs Introspect? A Reality Check Authors: Shashwat Singh, Tal Linzen, Shauli Ravfogel Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26242v1 Can large language models detect and report their own internal states? A number of studies have argued that the answer to this question is yes. We argue, based on lessons from human metacognition research, that this conclusion may be premature: to be convinced of this conclusion we need to distinguish genuine introspection from pattern matching based on surface-level cues. Furthermore, we argue that behavioral evidence alone is inherently insufficient to establish strong introspective claims. We re-examine two recently introduced evaluation paradigms in light of this consideration. In the first paradigm, models are expected to detect whether their internal states have been tampered with. We find that models cannot reliably distinguish such interventions on their internal states from manipulations of the input, suggesting that their success in the original studies reflects their ability to detect anomalies more generally, as opposed to interventions on their internal states in particular. In the second paradigm we examine, models are tasked with predicting labels derived from their own hidden states. Here, we find that classifiers that only have access to the input achieve equivalent performance to the model's own in-context predictions, indicating that the original results do not conclusively demonstrate that the model has privileged access to its internal representations. We further introduce a relabeled control setting, where models cannot rely on the semantics of the task to solve it, and instead must rely on the internal representation; models perform closer to chance on this better-controlled version of the task. Taken together, these results indicate that current evidence is insufficient to establish that LLMs display metacognitive monitoring. --- ### RoMo: A Large-Scale, Richly Organized Dataset and Semantic Taxonomy for Human Motion Generation Authors: Jiahao Zhang, Joseph Liu, Young-Yoon Lee, Seonghyeon Moon, Victor Zordan, Guy Tevet, Karen Liu, Stephen Gould, Oren Jacob, Haomiao Jiang, Mubbasir Kapadia, Yizhak Ben-Shabat Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26241v1 Success in generative modeling across language, image, and video demonstrates that large, well-curated datasets are the key driver for building capable models. 3D Human motion, however, has lagged behind, constrained by an unsatisfying choice between small, high-fidelity motion capture datasets and large-scale in-the-wild collections dominated by static or low-quality sequences. We introduce RoMo, a rich, large-scale, carefully curated dataset of in-the-wild human motions that resolves these tradeoffs. To ensure quality, we introduce a taxonomy-aware filtering pipeline that aggressively removes static and artifact-prone sequences. Every sequence is annotated with detailed captions and organized by a novel three-level semantic taxonomy. This hierarchical structure enables fine-grained, per-category evaluation, that reveals model strengths and weaknesses obscured by global metrics. We demonstrate that models trained on RoMo achieve state-of-the-art fidelity and diversity while gaining a superior understanding of complex, subtle text prompts. Finally, we release the Motion Toolbox to standardize metrics, data conversion, and visualization, establishing a foundation for reproducible and interpretable motion generation research. --- ### Sentinel: Embodied Cooperative Spatial Reasoning and Planning Authors: Xiangye Lin, Hongxin Zhang, Ruxi Deng, Qinhong Zhou, Chuang Gan Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CV, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26239v1 In this work, we study Cooperative Spatial Intelligence, the ability of decentralized embodied agents to coordinate effectively under dynamic environmental constraints across city-scale outdoor domains. We introduce Sentinel Challenge, a benchmark where multiple decentralized embodied agents must communicate in natural language to agree on a mutually safe and convenient meeting point within large, city-scale outdoor environments. Each agent must then navigate safely while avoiding dynamic sentinels patrolling the area, using a tool that provides coarse spatial information. To address this, we propose CoSaR (Cooperative Spatial Reasoning and Planning), a framework that bridges the high-level communication and planning abilities of foundation models with the precision of classical spatial navigation algorithms. CoSaR enables agents to exchange situational updates, reason over evolving spatial constraints, and collaboratively replan trajectories. Evaluated across 14 city-level scenes with 3-5 agents, CoSaR consistently leads to faster gathering, shorter path lengths, and improved safety. Our results demonstrate that integrating dynamic communication with spatial reasoning is essential for robust multi-agent cooperation. By formalizing this new setting and providing a scalable benchmark, we aim to build a foundation for advancing cooperative spatial intelligence in embodied multi-agent systems. Code and challenge are available at https://github.com/UMass-Embodied-AGI/Sentinel. --- ### DuoGesture: Motion-Grounded Semantic Conditioning and Biomechanical Beat Priors for Co-Speech Gesture Generation Authors: Ferdinand Paar, Lanmiao Liu, Aslı Özyürek, Serge Thill, Esam Ghaleb Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CV, cs.SD arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26236v3 Co-speech gesture generation requires both semantic expressivity and biomechanically plausible rhythmic motion. Existing holistic gesture models mix lexically grounded semantic gestures with frequent prosody-aligned beat gestures. This limits semantic grounding, speech-motion alignment, and kinematic smoothness. We propose \emph{DuoGesture}, a neuro-inspired and biomechanically informed approach that decomposes co-speech gesture synthesis into semantic and beat streams. The two streams are coordinated by a \emph{Semantic Variational Information Bottleneck}, a stochastic frame-level gate that learns when semantic gestures should override rhythmic beat motion. The semantic stream is controlled by \emph{Motion-Grounded Semantic Conditioning}, which replaces purely linguistic word embeddings with motion-language representations to provide motion-aligned semantic priors for long-tailed lexical triggers of gestures. The beat stream is further regularised by an \emph{Inertial Beat Prior}, an anthropometry-weighted arm-chain module that reduces jitter and improves rhythmic consistency without constraining semantic frames. Objective evaluations and subjective experiments show that DuoGesture outperforms strong baselines, while component ablations confirm the complementary roles of semantic grounding, stochastic stream selection, and biomechanical regularisation. --- ### DuoGesture: Neuro-Inspired and Biomechanically Informed Dual-Stream Co-Speech Gesture Generation Authors: Ferdinand Paar, Lanmiao Liu, Aslı Özyürek, Serge Thill, Esam Ghaleb Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CV, cs.SD arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26236v2 Co-speech gesture generation requires both semantic expressivity and biomechanically plausible rhythmic motion. Existing holistic gesture models mix lexically grounded semantic gestures with frequent prosody-aligned beat gestures. This limits semantic grounding, speech-motion alignment, and kinematic smoothness. We propose \emph{DuoGesture}, a neuro-inspired and biomechanically informed dual-stream approach that decomposes co-speech gesture synthesis into coupled semantic and beat streams. The two streams are coordinated by a \emph{Semantic Variational Information Bottleneck}, a stochastic frame-level gate that learns when semantic gestures should override rhythmic beat motion. The semantic stream is controlled by \emph{Motion-Grounded Semantic Conditioning}, which replaces purely linguistic word embeddings with motion-language representations to provide motion-aligned semantic priors for long-tailed lexical triggers of gestures. The beat stream is further regularised by an \emph{Inertial Beat Prior}, an anthropometry-weighted arm-chain module that reduces jitter and improves rhythmic consistency without constraining semantic frames. Objective evaluations and subjective experiments show that DuoGesture outperforms strong holistic baselines, while component ablations confirm the complementary roles of semantic grounding, stochastic stream selection, and biomechanical regularisation. --- ### Minimal surfaces, Knots, and Neural Networks Authors: Tancredi Schettini Gherardini, Marco Usula Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: math.DG, cs.LG, math.GT arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26234v2 A recent conjecture by Joel Fine posits a relationship between the coefficients of the HOMFLY polynomial of a knot $K$ in the 3-sphere $S^3$, and the signed count of minimal surfaces in hyperbolic 4-space $\mathrm{H}^4$ meeting the sphere at infinity at $K$, with prescribed genus and self-intersection number. In this paper, we develop a novel machine learning framework based on Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) to solve the minimal surface equation in hyperbolic space. We utilise this framework to test Fine's Conjecture by constructing near-minimal surfaces bounding various families of knots in $S^3$. Furthermore, we develop an algorithmic method to find self-intersections and compute their sign. For every knot analysed, the computationally discovered minimal surfaces and their self-intersection numbers perfectly align with the predictions of Fine's Conjecture, providing empirical evidence for it. --- ### Not All Modalities Are Equal: Instruction-Aware Gating for Multimodal Videos Authors: Bonan Ding, Umair Nawaz, Ufaq Khan, Abdelrahman M. Shaker, Muhammad Haris Khan, Jiale Cao, Jin Xie, Fahad Shahbaz Khan Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26232v1 Pre-trained video large language models excel at visual reasoning. However, they struggle when videos arrive with auxiliary streams, such as audio, depth map, or dense temporal evidence. In such a scenario, uniform fusion induces modality interference, allowing irrelevant channels to distract the model. To address this issue, we present a unified multimodal video understanding framework, named UniMVU, that performs instruction-aware fusion across video, audio, depth map, or any other modality inputs via two levels of dynamic gating: inner-modality gates emphasize salient regions within each modality, whereas modality-level gates re-weight whole streams; both are conditioned on the text instruction to adaptively balance modality importance. Our UniMVU combines cross-modal self-attention with instruction-driven inner-modality gating module and a modality-level gating module with control token; for time-aligned streams we further adopt a fast-to-slow fusion scheme that reduces redundancy. Across six benchmarks (AVQA, AVSD, Music-AVQA, ScanQA, SQA3D and MVBench), our UniMVU achieves consistent gains over static-fusion baselines achieving gains as high as 13.5 in terms of CIDEr metric. Further, our analysis shows that the gating mechanism aligns with the human-interpretable modality relevance, and ablations show the contributions of inner-modality and modality-level gating. Our UniMVU provides a simple, unified recipe for instruction-aware multimodal video understanding that scales to diverse modalities without hand-crafted fusion rules. --- ### Geometry-Aware Representation Denoising for Robust Multi-view 3D Reconstruction Authors: Jin Hyeon Kim, Jaeeun Lee, Claire Kim, Kyoungjin Oh, Paul Hyunbin Cho, Jaewon Min, Yeji Choi, Jihye Park, Hyunhee Park, Minkyu Park, Seungryong Kim Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26230v1 Multi-view 3D reconstruction has achieved remarkable progress with the advent of feed-forward 3D reconstruction models. However, these models are typically trained and evaluated under ideal, degradation-free imaging conditions, whereas real-world observations often contain degradations that differ significantly from such settings. Improving robustness for multi-view 3D reconstruction under degraded conditions therefore remains an important challenge. We present Geometry-Aware Representation Denoising (GARD), a novel framework that performs diffusion-based multi-view restoration directly in the feature space of a feed-forward 3D reconstruction model. This design exploits the geometry-aware feature representations of the 3D reconstructor to effectively recover accurate scene geometry. Furthermore, by employing an additional RGB image decoder, the refined representations can also be used to restore high-quality RGB images, thereby enabling the simultaneous recovery of 3D scene geometry and high-quality imagery. Comprehensive experiments on the Depth Anything 3 (DA3) benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed GARD framework. --- ### From Privacy to Generalization: Linear Max-Information Bounds for Differentially Private Learning Algorithms Authors: Christoph H. Lampert, Max Cairney-Leeming, Hossein Zakerinia Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26222v2 Understanding the relationship between generalization and privacy remains a challenge in modern machine learning theory, particularly for deep networks that are trained by variants of differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP- SGD). In this work we make progress on this persistent open problem. First, we derive explicit upper bounds on the approximate max-information of any algorithm that fulfills $(ε, δ)$-differential privacy or Rényi differential privacy, thereby going beyond the classical results for pure $ε$-differential privacy. Subsequently, we show even stronger guarantees for two common private learning algorithms, output perturbation with the Gaussian mechanism, and streaming DP-SGD, by exploiting the structure of their internal randomization. As an application of our results, we demonstrate how to obtain non-vacuous PAC-Bayes generalization bounds for deep networks, in which the prior distribution is learned by DP-SGD instead of the classical way of choosing it in a data-independent way. --- ### From Privacy to Generalization: Linear Max-Information Bounds for DP-SGD Authors: Christoph H. Lampert, Hossein Zakerinia Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26222v1 Understanding the relationship between generalization and privacy remains a central challenge in modern machine learning theory, particularly for deep networks trained by variants of differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD). In this work we make progress on this persistent open problem by proving a finite-sample bound on the approximate max-information of DP-SGD that exhibits scaling properties comparable with (Dwork et al, 2015)'s classic result for $ε$-differentially private algorithms, namely at most linear in the dataset size. From our result we obtain a general-purpose PAC-Bayes generalization bound in which the necessary prior distribution can be learned by DP-SGD, as well as a generalization bound for DP-SGD-trained models themselves, with a complexity term that is fully explicit and controlled by the optimization hyperparameters. --- ### AgentSociety: Incentivizing Agentic Social Intelligence Authors: Aditya Vema Reddy Kesari, Krishna Reddy Kesari Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.MA, cs.AI, cs.CY, cs.GT arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26203v1 The success of deployed agents relies on their ability to handle open-ended user requests using their inherent capabilities, not only in solving requests directly but also in effectively leveraging inter-agent communication channels and feedback signals over time. This requires a multi-agent environment where agents can operate autonomously, strategically communicate, behave collaboratively and be driven by economic incentives, much like humans in society. Towards this vision, we propose $\mathtt{AgentSociety}$, a mechanism that enables decentralized agentic collaboration grounded in liquid democracy and information diffusion from social choice theory. We show that $\mathtt{AgentSociety}$ provides an environment for agents to make autonomous decisions utilizing their local context to maximize their utility while achieving collective outcomes through incentivized collaboration. Specifically, we prove that delegation to more competent neighbor agents is incentive compatible and naturally generates multi-agent routing path by consensus. Additionally, our mechanism incentivizes agents to selectively disclose information to their neighbor agents when doing so aligns with their self-interest, so as to garner influence. We characterize the Nash equilibrium showing that agent payoffs are reflective of their marginal contributions. We compare and benchmark strategy profiles adopted by open and proprietary state-of-the-art language models deployed in $\mathtt{AgentSociety}$ against best response. Finally, we evaluate collaborative performance from consensus-based routing among self-interested heterogeneous agents in $\mathtt{AgentSociety}$ on real-world datasets. --- ### Workflow Closure Is Not Scientific Closure in Auto-Research Systems Authors: Shuai Wang, Xinyuan Tian, Pangpang Liu, Yize Zhao Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26200v1 This paper argues that workflow closure is not scientific closure in auto-research systems. Current systems can increasingly complete research-like loops internally, moving from idea generation to experiment execution, writing, and self-evaluation. That achievement is real, but it does not by itself give the resulting outputs scientific standing. We argue that trustworthy auto-research should not aim for autonomous self-sufficiency, but should aim for autonomous execution under non-autonomous epistemic control. Based on a survey of more than 100 recent papers and repositories in this rapidly emerging area, together with a structured audit of 21 representative systems, we diagnose a recurring and structurally connected failure pattern: objective collapse, in which single-proxy targets replace multi-objective scientific aims; validation collapse, in which internal self-evaluation replaces independent validation; and acceptance collapse, in which benchmark scores or publication-shaped artifacts replace mechanisms for domain-level critique, reuse, and integration. These collapses are not inherent limits of autonomy but correctable design choices. Accordingly, we outline potential remedies across objective signal, validation, and output pathway to spark community discussion. --- ### CyberEvolver: Structured Self-Evolution for Cybersecurity Agents On the Fly Authors: Yihe Fan, Changyi Li, Lichen Xu, Xudong Pan, Jiarun Dai, Hong Geng, Min Yang Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26195v2 LLM-based agents are increasingly used for cybersecurity tasks, but most existing systems rely on fixed, human-designed scaffolds that struggle to adapt across diverse targets and failure modes. We introduce \textsc{CyberEvolver}, a self-evolving cybersecurity agent framework that iteratively revises its own scaffold based on experience from failed execution attempts. Self-evolution in cybersecurity is challenging because the space of possible scaffold changes is largely unstructured, execution feedback is sparse and often obscured by the environment, and low-diversity updates can cause errors to compound over repeated iterations. \textsc{CyberEvolver} addresses these challenges with a four-layer evolvable agent architecture that decomposes scaffold optimization into structured components, a trace-to-diagnosis mechanism that converts noisy execution logs into actionable revision signals, and a population-based beam search strategy that preserves diverse agent variants during evolution. We evaluate \textsc{CyberEvolver} on CTF challenges, vulnerability exploitation, and penetration-testing tasks using four open-source LLMs. Across these settings, \textsc{CyberEvolver} improves the seed agent's success rate by $13.6$\,\% on average, and outperforms six human-designed cybersecurity agents as well as two self-improvement methods adapted from other domains. These results suggest that scaffold self-evolution is a promising direction for building adaptive LLM agents for security testing. --- ### On the Role of Inductive Bias in Time-Series Pretraining: A Case Study in Learning Generalizable Representations for Clinical Time Series Authors: Sharmita Dey, Diego Paez-Granados Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26194v2 Clinical time-series learning is routinely constrained by small, heterogeneous cohorts and protocol drift, while its downstream use spans both classification (e.g., pathology diagnosis) and regression (e.g., temporal forecasting). These constraints make foundation-model pretraining appealing, but raises an important question of which inductive biases should the pretraining objective impose so that representations transfer across task types and subjects. We study this question in pathological gait analysis for spinal cord injury (SCI) via PathoFM, an encoder-centric transformer pretrained on multivariate gait windows with three complementary objectives: Local Completion (reconstruct contiguous masked spans to enforce local structure), Temporal Continuity (predict a masked mid-horizon continuation from an observed prefix to enforce smoothness and causal consistency), and Unsupervised In-Context Dynamics (support-query reconstruction conditioned on subject exemplar windows via attention). Empirically comparing objective families (grouping/contrastive, dynamics-based, and generative reconstruction), we find that dynamics-centric mixtures produce the most balanced transfer: grouping objectives favor discriminative margins but can degrade magnitude fidelity needed for continuous targets, whereas reconstruction-only objectives preserve waveform structure but may underperform on classification. Overall, combining local reconstruction with temporal continuity, and adding in-context conditioning when exemplar access is realistic, yields robust subject-generalizing representations. --- ### Bridging Classification and Reconstruction: Cooperative Time Series Anomaly Detection Authors: Qideng Tang, Dai Chaofan, Wubin Ma, Yahui Wu, Haohao Zhou, Tao Zhang, Huan Li, Dalin Zhang Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26193v2 Time series anomaly detection (TSAD) has long been a hot research topic in data mining due to its various applications. Recent studies challenge the effectiveness of popular deep learning methods for TSAD, suggesting their failure in detecting subtle and prolonged anomalies. Outlier Exposure (OE) and Masked Autoencoder (MAE) emerge as two promising paradigms (classification and reconstruction) for solving the above problems. However, OE-based methods are constrained by poor generalization, while MAE-based methods are limited by masking misalignment issues. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel framework, CoAD, which unifies the two paradigms to leverage their complementary strengths while mitigating their respective weaknesses. In this framework, the classification module generates probability-informed soft masks for the reconstruction module, which in turn alleviates the generalization problem of the classification module. This cooperative design enables CoAD to effectively detect subtle and complex anomalies that are often overlooked by existing methods. Additionally, the classification module is carefully designed to resolve issues related to improper classification granularity and the neglect of frequency information. Extensive experiments on high-quality benchmark datasets, conducted under rigorous evaluation protocols, demonstrate that CoAD significantly outperforms both state-of-the-art deep learning and traditional data mining methods, highlighting the potential of deep learning in TSAD. Moreover, CoAD is lightweight and substantially faster than existing SOTA methods, demonstrating its practical value for large-scale, real-time applications. --- ### Co-folding model guided by structural proteomics Authors: Alon Shtrikman, Nitzan Simchi, Michal Ran Shchory, Sagie Brodsky, Eran Seger, Kirill Pevzner Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, q-bio.BM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26192v1 Protein structure generative models excel at predicting single protein static structures from sequence, but routinely fail to capture the correct conformational state of protein complexes, critical for protein design and induced proximity modalities such as antibodies and PROTACs. While structural proteomics techniques like Cross-Linking Mass Spectrometry (XL-MS) and Hydrogen-Deuterium Exchange (HDX-MS) offer valuable spatial and dynamic insights, integrating these sparse, heterogeneous measurements into these models remains an open challenge. Here, we bridge this gap by combining structural proteomics data with the rich biophysical priors learned by pretrained diffusion models. We introduce AIMS-Fold, an inference-time guided-diffusion framework that actively steers the generative sampling trajectory using differentiable physical potentials derived from XL-MS spatial restraints and HDX-MS solvent accessibility profiles. We demonstrate that these structural methods individually enhance predictive accuracy, and their integration yields synergistic improvement. Crucially, by leveraging these experimental restraints, AIMS-Fold achieves higher accuracy on challenging induced proximity targets than purely computational, unguided state-of-the-art models like Boltz-2. This establishes our framework as a powerful, integrative computational approach for the structure based drug design of induced proximity drugs. Evaluation code will be made publicly available upon publication. --- ### Modeling Dynamic Mixtures of Time-Delay Systems from Streaming Time Series Authors: Ren Fujiwara, Yasuko Matsubara, Yasushi Sakurai Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26191v1 This research addresses the problem of adaptive modeling in time-series data streams with clear input-output relationships. This problem is challenging because rapid system changes (regime shifts) caused by environmental factors or input delay changes degrade model performance, and the trade-off among accuracy, robustness, and memory usage arises when using multiple small models for each time-series pattern. To address these issues, this paper presents an online framework/method that treats streaming time series as dynamic mixtures of time-delay systems. This framework maintains robustness of model tracking and reduces memory usage by summarizing past regimes using a fixed-length representation that captures both the system dynamics and input-output delays. Concretely, this approach constructs a summary system tensor using the system's Markov parameter series, capturing both dynamic behavior and delay characteristics. If necessary, a tensor decomposition algorithm extracts relevant past models from the tensor and helps select the system that best fits the current regime. This method enables rapid adaptation to environmental changes and is computationally efficient. Tests on real datasets show that DelayMix consistently outperforms other methods, achieving superior forecast accuracy and faster adaptation to delays, especially for highly non-stationary data. --- ### HRVConformer: Neonatal Hypoxic-Ischemic Encephalopathy Classification from the Heart Rate signals Authors: Shuwen Yu, William P Marnane, Geraldine B. Boylan, Gordon Lightbody Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, eess.SP arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26190v1 This paper presents the HRVConformer, a novel deep learning architecture for the classification of hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy (HIE) using the instantaneous heart rate (HR) signal. Unlike conventional approaches that rely on handcrafted features, HRVConformer directly processes raw HR signals in an end-to-end manner, capturing both local and long-range dependencies through a hybrid Convolution-Transformer framework. By integrating convolutional layers for local feature extraction and Transformer-based attention mechanisms for global context modelling, the architecture effectively enhances signal representation and classification performance. The model was trained using supervised learning on a large HR dataset consisting of 1,573 one-hour epochs, including 259 one-hour expert-annotated epochs and a substantial set of weakly labelled data. A 314-hour validation set provided a robust performance estimation, while an independent 215-hour dataset with expert annotations was reserved for final testing. HR signals were extracted from electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings using an improved Pan-Tompkins algorithm, which significantly enhanced both signal quality and data availability. Experimental results demonstrate that the HRVConformer achieves an AUC of 83.23\% and accuracy of 74.56\% on the test set. These results surpass the performance of the Transformer, ResNet50 and fully convolutional networks baselines, highlighting the advantages of integrating convolutional and Transformer-based components for HR-based HIE classification. The proposed method provides a promising step toward a more accurate and automated assessment of HIE using HR signals. The code is available at: https://github.com/syu-kylin/HRVConformer. --- ### Max-Window Scale Estimation for Near-Lossless HiF8 W8A8 Quantization-Aware Training Authors: Yingying Cheng, Jinquan Shi, Li Zhou, Zhiyang He, Zhaoyi Sun, Fan Zhang, Jie Sun Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26189v2 Quantization-aware training (QAT) with low-bit floating-point formats enables efficient LLM deployment, yet introduces subtle failure modes invisible to standard training metrics. We present a systematic study of HiF8 W8A8 QAT for OpenPangu-Embedded-1B through the lens of Delayed Tensor Scaling (DTS). Across eight controlled experiments, we identify and disentangle two orthogonal failure modes: (i)amax saturation, where delayed scale estimates silently corrupt knowledge-sensitive representations via forward-pass clipping, and (ii)catastrophic forgetting, where an aggressive learning rate overwrites pretrained commonsense knowledge independently of quantization. Neither is detectable from training loss alone. We address amax saturation with a conservative max-algorithm DTS strategy over a 64-step history window, and mitigate forgetting via a 500-step BF16 warmup followed by QAT at lr=10^{-5}. Both fixes are necessary and sufficient: our final configuration achieves 0.43% MMLU drop, 0.58% HellaSwag drop, and 0.22% ARC-Challenge drop versus a matched BF16 baseline, with a training loss APE of only 0.11% over 10,000 steps. --- ### SetupX: Can LLM Agents Learn from Past Failures in Functionality-Correct Code Repository Setup? Authors: Zihang Zhou, Ziqian Ren, Yukai Wu, Yingjie Xiong, Wei Zhou, Chao Peng, Dong Zhang, Bingheng Yan, Xuanhe Zhou, Fan Wu Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26186v2 Functionality-correct repository setup aims to configure execution environments (e.g., dependencies, build scripts) to successfully execute a repository's documented features. It presents significant challenges due to diverse, repository-specific failures, including dependency incompatibilities, missing toolchains, incomplete installations, and verification-strategy mismatches. Existing LLM agents struggle to robustly resolve these issues, specifically failing to support (1) cross-repository experience transfer, (2) multi-step trial-and-repair under non-invertible state changes, and (3) robust verification of setup outcomes to distinguish setup-induced failures from repository bugs. To address this, we introduce SetupX, an experiential learning-based setup framework. First, we construct a Self-Evolving Experience Representation (XPU), a dual-modality knowledge unit encoding setup signals, textual guidance, executable actions to dynamically transfer verified environment fixes to unseen repositories. Second, we employ Experience-Augmented Speculative Execution backed by a LIFO Docker snapshot stack, enabling the agent to proactively trial fixes and safely roll back to known-good states. Third, we introduce a Prosecutor-Judge Verification Protocol that separates evidence collection from final judgment, enabling more reliable setup verification beyond superficial build-time metrics. Evaluation results on carefully-crafted benchmarks show SetupX achieves highest performance (e.g., 92% pass rate) and outperforms the strongest baseline by over 19%. Crucially, SetupX excels in complex multi-repository setup requiring coordinating multiple interconnected services across different containers. The code repository is available at https://github.com/OpenDataBox/SetupX. --- ### GAC: Noise-Aware Adaptive Mixing for Hybrid SFT-RL Post-Training Authors: Yuelin Hu, Zhenbo Yu, Zhengxue Cheng, Wei Liu, Li Song Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26184v1 Hybrid post-training usually combines supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, but fixed mixing schedules cannot adapt when the relative noise of the two signals changes over time. We propose GAC, a noise-aware controller that derives an adaptive mixing weight from online estimates of gradient variance and disagreement between the two training signals. The method adds smoothing, prior guidance, and bounded updates while reusing existing training tensors. Experiments on math, code, science, and logic benchmarks show that GAC consistently improves hybrid post-training over strong fixed and rule-based baselines, with larger gains at larger model scales and less than 1% training overhead. --- ### What Molecular Structure Cannot Tell Us: A Taxonomy of Explainability Gaps in GNN-Based Drug Toxicity Prediction Authors: Juergen Dietrich Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: q-bio.QM, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26183v2 Not all clinically relevant adverse effects are structurally inferable from molecular graphs - regardless of model quality or architectural complexity. This study introduces an operational taxonomy of the structural information limits that prevent structure-based toxicity prediction, independent of the learning algorithm employed. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as a natural approach for molecular toxicity prediction, operating directly on atomic connectivity without the information loss inherent to fixed-length fingerprints. However, the fraction of a drug's known pharmacological profile that is actually inferable from molecular structure remains systematically underexplored. A systematic case study using acetylsalicylic acid (ASA, Aspirin) - one of the most comprehensively characterized drugs in pharmacology - serves as model compound. A Message Passing Neural Network (MPNN) is trained on the Tox21 benchmark and GNNExplainer is applied to characterize atom-level attribution. Results indicate that molecular structure explains approximately 45% (5/11) of known ASA adverse effects. A four-category Gap Taxonomy (GAP-1 through GAP-4) is introduced distinguishing between principally non-encodable effects, data gaps arising from Missing Not At Random (MNAR) mechanisms, assay panel mismatches, and representation errors. The MNAR gap is empirically quantified via a systematic ChEMBL query (42 documented assays, 0 retrievable bioactivity entries). An attention pooling experiment localizes the representation error to the MPNN message passing layers rather than the aggregation step. The Gap Taxonomy has direct implications for drug safety signal detection and regulatory frameworks including Good Pharmacovigilance Practice (GVP) guidelines and New Approach Methodologies (NAMs). Structural limits identified are confirmed in a companion DDI ablation study. --- ### BrickAnything: Geometry-Conditioned Buildable Brick Generation with Structure-Aware Tokenization Authors: Zhengyang Ni, Feng Yan, Yu Guo, Fei Wang Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.AI, cs.GR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26182v2 Generating physically buildable brick structures from 3D shapes requires more than geometric reconstruction: the output must also satisfy discrete part constraints and structural stability. Existing brick generation methods either rely on heuristic optimization, which can break down when the target 3D shape does not admit a feasible structure under predefined constraints, or generate brick sequences without explicitly modeling the underlying 3D geometry and assembly relations. In this work, we present BrickAnything, a geometry-conditioned autoregressive framework for generating buildable brick structures from diverse 3D representations. BrickAnything uses point clouds as a unified geometric interface and predicts brick sequences that reconstruct the target shape under assembly constraints. To model structural dependencies among bricks, we introduce a structure-aware tree tokenization, which represents brick structures through local attachment relations. This formulation makes sequence generation more consistent with the physical construction process, and reduces invalid intermediate states. We further introduce preference-based alignment post-training, validity-constrained decoding and adaptive rollback to improve buildability objectives such as stability and geometric fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BrickAnything produces geometrically faithful and physically realizable brick structures, and that the proposed tokenization effectively reduces rollback and regeneration compared with conventional ordering strategies. --- ### BrickAnything: Geometry-Conditioned Buildable Brick Generation with Structure-Aware Tokenization Authors: Zhengyang Ni, Feng Yan, Yu Guo, Fei Wang Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.AI, cs.GR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26182v1 Generating physically buildable brick structures from 3D shapes requires more than geometric reconstruction: the output must also satisfy discrete part constraints and structural stability. Existing brick generation methods either rely on heuristic optimization, which can break down when the target 3D shape does not admit a feasible structure under predefined constraints, or generate brick sequences without explicitly modeling the underlying 3D geometry and assembly relations. In this work, we present BrickAnything, a geometry-conditioned autoregressive framework for generating buildable brick structures from diverse 3D representations. BrickAnything uses point clouds as a unified geometric interface and predicts brick sequences that reconstruct the target shape under assembly constraints. To model structural dependencies among bricks, we introduce a structure-aware tree tokenization, which represents brick structures through local attachment relations. This formulation makes sequence generation more consistent with the physical construction process, and reduces invalid intermediate states. We further introduce preference-based alignment post-training, validity-constrained decoding and adaptive rollback to improve buildability objectives such as stability and geometric fidelity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BrickAnything produces geometrically faithful and physically realizable brick structures, and that the proposed tokenization effectively reduces rollback and regeneration compared with conventional ordering strategies. --- ### AutoDFT: A Closed-Loop Multi-Agent Framework for Autonomous DFT Calculations Authors: Penghui Yang, Zhonghan Zhang, Yue Li, Xinrun Wang, Yanchen Deng, Yuhao Lu, Bijun Tang, Zheng Liu, Bo An Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cond-mat.mtrl-sci, cs.AI, cs.CE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26179v2 Density functional theory (DFT) serves as the basis for computational discovery in materials science and chemistry, yet each calculation demands extensive human effort: adjusting algorithms when convergence stalls, revising plans when unexpected physics emerges, and inserting steps as intermediate results reshape the problem. Existing LLM-based agents automate only the initial planning stage, producing a full execution plan upfront and leaving all subsequent adaptation to hand-crafted rules. As a result, these workflows remain fragile, do not generalize well beyond pre-planned scenarios, and often require expert intervention when failures or unexpected intermediate results require changes to the calculation path. Here, we introduce AutoDFT, a closed-loop multi-agent framework that embeds LLM reasoning into every stage of the DFT lifecycle, where a strategic planner produces a skeletal plan of step objectives; a step planner generates numerical parameters just in time from preceding results; and a monitor-recover-reflect cycle diagnoses failures, repairs them, and revises the plan when the evidence justifies it. We demonstrate both breadth and depth: breadth on VASPBench, a purpose-built benchmark spanning 34 tasks and 9 DFT calculation types, where AutoDFT achieves 94.1% task-level success with GPT-5.2; and depth on established materials databases, where AutoDFT produces quantitatively reliable property predictions across electronic, magnetic, and energetic properties. By closing the loop between planning and execution, AutoDFT enables experimentalists without deep computational expertise to obtain reliable first-principles results. --- ### ATOM: Instantiating Budget-Controllable Multi-Agent Collaboration via Nucleus-Electron Hierarchy Authors: Xinkui Zhao, Sai Liu, Yifan Zhang, Qingyu Ma, Zewen Lin, Naibo Wang, Guanjie Cheng, Chang Liu, Yueshen Xu Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.MA, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26178v1 Large Language Model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems rely on optimized collaboration topologies to balance performance and communication costs. However, current methods struggle with the inherent stability-extensibility trade-off and often misalign computational budgets with query difficulty. We propose \textsc{ATOM}, an adaptive framework that generates budget-controllable collaboration graphs via a novel task-driven reinforcement learning paradigm. Inspired by atomic structures, \textsc{ATOM} employs a nucleus-electron hierarchy: it maintains a stable, offline-learned collaboration backbone (the nucleus) while dynamically activating query-conditioned agents (electrons) during inference. Crucially, a complexity-aware budgeting strategy aligns resource consumption with task demands by estimating query difficulty to strictly regulate electron instantiation. Extensive experiments across six diverse benchmarks demonstrate that \textsc{ATOM} achieves state-of-the-art performance while improving token efficiency by up to $30\%$ compared to strong baselines. --- ### RepoMirage: Probing Repository Context Reasoning in Code Agents with Perturbations Authors: Hanyu Li, Yichi Zhang, Speed Zhu, Hang Su, Jun Zhu, Yinpeng Dong Published: 2026-05-25 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26177v1 Code agents are currently having skillful performance on repository-level software engineering benchmarks, but it remains unclear whether success on end-to-end tasks such as issue resolution truly reflects repository context reasoning, the ability to identify the task-relevant information across multiple files and reason over the relations among them. To investigate this question, we introduce RepoMirage, a two-stage evaluation suite built on SWE-Bench Verified that adopts perturbation as a diagnostic tool to increase the demand for context reasoning by transforming how the repository is exposed. First, RepoMirage-Perturb applies three types of semantics-preserving repository-level perturbations, revealing a clear performance drop when correct solving requires broader context access. RepoMirage-Extend further turns perturbation-targeted structural bottlenecks into explicit tasks beyond issue resolution, where the average performance declines from 66.8% in the original setting to 25.3%, indicating a significant deficiency in repository context reasoning. Further trajectory analysis reveals an exploration drift, where agents access broader repository context but fail to turn it into effective structure information. Motivated by this observation, we propose RepoAnchor, a structure-first prototype workflow that separates repository exploration from downstream problem solving, and show that explicit structural scaffolding yields notable gains. These results uncover an previously overlooked gap in repository context reasoning for code agents and suggest that stronger structure-aware methods are potential to improve them. ---