# Research Papers — 2026-05 · bundle page 93 of 326 > Full-text markdown of papers #4601–4650 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/93 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-05/page/92.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-05/page/94.md) ### NudgeVAD: Language-Nudged End-to-End Driving via FiLM Residuals Authors: Chieh-Chi Yang, Yu-Hsiang Chen, Yi-Ting Chen Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24531v1 Natural-language instructions promise controllable end-to-end driving, but their benefit can be hidden when planners already receive reliable high-level commands. We propose NudgeVAD, a frozen-planner residual framework that uses language as a calibrated nudge to a VAD trajectory. With identity-initialized FiLM and a zero-initialized residual head, NudgeVAD is equivalent to the frozen planner at initialization, so learned deviations arise only from language-conditioned residuals. We evaluate NudgeVAD along a command-reliability axis. With reliable commands, language improves the initial planner but becomes nearly redundant once compared against VAD-FT (UNCOND), a compute-matched VAD model fine-tuned without language. With random commands, however, language becomes essential: detaching text degrades ADE6s to 3.166 m, while NudgeVAD with text recovers 2.806 m and outperforms VAD-FT (UNCOND) by 0.312 m. These results show that language is not universally additive; it is most valuable when the categorical command channel is unreliable. --- ### Unveil: Unified Visual-Textual Integration and Distillation for Multi-modal Document Retrieval Authors: Hao Sun, Yingyan Hou, Jiayan Guo, Bo Wang, Chunyu Yang, Jinsong Ni, Yan Zhang Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24530v1 Document retrieval in real-world scenarios faces significant challenges due to diverse document formats and modalities. Traditional text-based approaches rely on tailored parsing techniques that disregard layout information and are prone to errors, while recent parsing-free visual methods often struggle to capture fine-grained textual semantics in text-rich scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose \textbf{Unveil}, a novel visual-textual embedding framework that effectively integrates textual and visual features for robust document representation. Through knowledge distillation, we transfer the semantic understanding capabilities from the visual-textual embedding model to a purely visual model, enabling efficient parsing-free retrieval while preserving semantic fidelity. Experimental results demonstrate that our visual-textual embedding method surpasses existing approaches, while knowledge distillation successfully bridges the performance gap between visual-textual and visual-only methods, improving both retrieval accuracy and efficiency. --- ### Hypothesis Generation and Inductive Inference in Children and Language Models Authors: Jeffrey Qin, Wasu Top Piriyakulkij, Zhuangfei Gao, Mia Radovanovic, Jessica Sommerville, Kevin Ellis, Marta Kryven Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24528v2 Real world decision-making requires constructing mental models under uncertainty over evidence, over the underlying causal rules, and over the state of the world itself. Which computational principles underpin human inference under such conditions, and do LLM-based agents exhibit similar behavior given matching constraints? We address these questions using an inductive inference Box Task in which participants, human children and LLM-based agents, infer a latent cause through sequential interaction with an uncertain environment. We formalize this task as program induction with Bayesian particle-based inference, admitting two complementary interpretations: (1) as a constraint satisfaction process over hypotheses, and (2) as a program synthesis problem in which hypotheses are executable programs evaluated against evidence. Using the constraint-based formulation, we show that children's behavior is best explained by a combination of subjective evidence reliability and online hypothesis generation, accounting for both their evidence-seeking patterns and their dissociation between task completion and rule generalization. Using the program synthesis formulation, we treat LLM-based agents as model organisms: controllable systems that allow systematic manipulation of task conditions. Across backends, LLM-based agents replicate children's responses to changes in evidence reliability and observability, including discounting unreliable evidence, seeking to resolve partial information, and dissociating between task completion and causal generalization. At the same time, LLM-based agents tend to over-observe and over-comply with instructions relative to children. These results suggest that while children and LLM-based agents adapt similarly to environmental structure, their information-seeking behavior exhibits distinct underlying costs and inductive biases. --- ### TRAFA: Anticipating User Actions to Reduce Errors in Procedural Tasks with Predictive Feedback Authors: Sassan Mokhtar, Lars Doorenbos, Fatemeh Jabbari, Marius Bock, Dominik Bach, Juergen Gall Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24526v1 Interactive assistance systems typically provide feedback after an action has been completed, supporting error recovery but not preventing the error itself. We present TRAFA, a real-time predictive feedback system for procedural tasks that intervenes before errors are committed. TRAFA operationalizes predictive feedback through a Track-Forecast-Act framework that tracks hand and object state, forecasts user motion conditioned on scene context, and triggers feedback when a predicted action is likely to violate task constraints. We instantiate this pipeline in a sequential assembly setting and evaluate it through both technical benchmarking and a controlled user study against conventional reactive feedback. Our results show that predictive feedback improves task accuracy and efficiency while maintaining a comparable number of feedback events. These findings position feedback timing as a key dimension in system design and show how real-time anticipation can be integrated into interactive systems to prevent errors before they occur. --- ### What Are We Actually Decoding? Source Attribution for Non-Invasive Brain-to-Language Retrieval Authors: Xinyu Zhang, Sichao Liu, Runhao Lu, Alexandra Woolgar, Lihui Wang Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL, q-bio.NC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24524v1 In non-invasive neural language decoding, results can be inflated by sources that are not stimulus-evoked neural evidence: decoder priors, embedding-based metrics, and non-neural structural nuisances such as signal duration. The methodological challenge is therefore attribution: a reported gain is more informative when it can be traced to a specific source. We recast stimulus-locked MEG-to-audio retrieval as an auditing framework that separates apparent performance into three sources - structural shortcuts, window-level stimulus-locked evidence, and cross-window contextual aggregation - and provides a diagnostic for each. Signal-blind Gaussian noise reaches 66.3% Rank@1 (R@1) under variable-length decoding but collapses to near chance once fixed-duration windows and stimulus-identity splits are enforced, isolating structural leakage. Under these controls, fixed-window retrieval recovers measurable MEG-audio discriminability, while an oracle sentence-bucket diagnostic shows that 95.7% of Top-1 errors select the wrong sentence, localising the residual bottleneck to sentence-level competition. We audit this contextual source with Group Context Bias (GCB), an inference-time additive logit bias that pools sentence-consistent evidence across windows while leaving the base retrieval scores and candidate pool fixed. Used as a score-space intervention, GCB makes the contextual source measurable: R@1 shifts from 44% to 52% on Gwilliams and from 22% to 29% on MOUS under the same fixed setting. GCB is auditable under this design: its effect collapses under random-grouping perturbations and vanishes when local evidence is attenuated in MEG or is near chance in EEG, supporting its use as a controlled source-attribution intervention. These results suggest that brain-to-language performance should be source-attributed, not merely reported. --- ### MindAlign: Bridging EEG, Vision, and Language for Zero-Shot Visual Decoding Authors: Zexuan Chen, Sichao Liu, Runhao Lu, Huichao Qi, Alexandra Woolgar, Xi Vincent Wang, Lihui Wang Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL, q-bio.NC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24523v1 Visual decoding from brain signals is a key challenge at the intersection of computer vision and neuroscience, requiring methods that bridge neural representations and computational models of vision. We introduce a tri-modal contrastive framework for EEG-based visual decoding that aligns EEG, visual, and textual representations within a unified latent space. Our approach follows a two-stage design. First, we pre-train an EEG encoder via masked reconstruction on unlabeled trials, learning spatio-temporal regularities that transfer robustly to downstream tasks. Second, we jointly align EEG, image, and LLM-generated textual descriptions through contrastive learning, where text supervision acts as a semantic regularizer that injects linguistic structure into the shared space without overwhelming the primary EEG-image signal. The encoder integrates subject-specific adaptation, graph-attention over channels, and temporal-spatial convolutional embeddings. On the Things-EEG2 200-way zero-shot benchmark, our framework achieves 54.1% Top-1 and 83.4% Top-5 accuracy, substantially exceeding the strongest prior baseline (32.4% / 64.0%), with paired Wilcoxon tests confirming significance (p < 0.01) over all in-subject baselines. We validate generalization on Things-MEG. Analysis reveals that compact embedding geometries (CN-CLIP) outperform much larger backbones, and that decoding aligns with established neurophysiology of visual processing. This work is a critical step towards robust, semantically-grounded visual decoding from non-invasive temporal neural signals. The source code is publicly available in https://github.com/anon-eeg/eeg_image_decoding. --- ### AnnotateMissense: a genome-wide annotation and benchmarking framework for missense pathogenicity prediction Authors: Muhammad Muneeb, David B. Ascher Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: q-bio.GN, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24520v1 Missense variant interpretation remains challenging because pathogenicity depends on heterogeneous evidence from population frequency, evolutionary conservation, transcript context, amino acid substitution severity, prior pathogenicity predictors and protein-language-model-derived features. We present AnnotateMissense, a scalable annotation, benchmarking and genome-wide prediction framework for missense variant interpretation. AnnotateMissense integrates hg38 missense variants derived from dbNSFP v5.1 with ANNOVAR annotations, dbNSFP transcript/protein descriptors, AlphaMissense scores, ESM-derived features, conservation metrics, population-frequency variables, established pathogenicity predictors and engineered amino acid/codon-context features. Using 132,714 ClinVar-labelled missense variants, we benchmarked machine-learning and deep-learning models under controlled feature configurations. The full 303-feature benchmark set achieved the strongest performance with XGBoost, reaching mean MCC = 0.9411 and ROC-AUC = 0.9950 across stratified five-fold cross-validation. Restricted naive and location-oriented feature sets achieved lower best MCC values of 0.4989 and 0.5113, respectively. Circularity-controlled ablations showed that removing prior-predictor, population-frequency and clinically overlapping evidence reduced performance, whereas excluding AlphaMissense and ESM-derived features alone had minimal effect. Temporal ClinVar validation on newly observed pathogenic/benign variants achieved MCC = 0.7613, accuracy = 0.8798 and F1-score = 0.8750. The final model was applied to 90,643,830 hg38 missense variants to generate AnnotateMissense pathogenicity scores and binary prediction labels. Code and outputs are available at https://github.com/MuhammadMuneeb007/CAGI7_Annotate_All_Missense and https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19981867. --- ### Grammatically-Guided Sparse Attention for Efficient and Interpretable Transformers Authors: Spandan Pratyush Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24518v1 The quadratic complexity of self-attention in Transformer models remains a significant bottleneck for processing long sequences and deploying large language models efficiently. For this approach, there has been significant research into Sparse Attention, and Deepseek Sparse Attention has combined various methods of creating segments of tokens to reduce the time complexity. This paper introduces a novel approach, Grammatically-Guided Sparse Attention, which constrains attention computations based on the grammatical roles of tokens. By leveraging Parts-of-Speech (POS) tags, attention masks are dynamically generated that enforce linguistically coherent connections between tokens, reducing the computational graph without sacrificing essential linguistic dependencies. Two masking strategies are proposed and evaluated: a hard mask that strictly allows only predefined grammatical interactions, and a soft mask that biases attention towards these interactions. The experiments, conducted on the SST-2 sentiment classification task using a DistilBERT-like architecture, demonstrate that Grammatically-Guided Sparse Attention maintains comparable accuracy to full attention while significantly reducing the theoretical computational overhead. Preliminary results show accuracy values of 0.8200 for hard masking and 0.8165 for soft masking, closely matching the 0.8200 of full attention, providing a path towards more efficient, interpretable, and linguistically-informed Transformer architectures. --- ### ECHO: Terminal Agents Learn World Models for Free Authors: Vaishnavi Shrivastava, Piero Kauffmann, Ahmed Awadallah, Dimitris Papailiopoulos Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24517v1 CLI agents are the closest thing language models have to an embodied setting: the model emits commands, the terminal executes them, and the returned stream -- stdout, errors, files, logs, and traces -- records the consequences. We argue that this stream is a supervision signal, but standard agent RL discards it: GRPO-style training updates action tokens with sparse outcome-level rewards while ignoring environment responses already in the rollout. Failed rollouts provide little policy-gradient signal despite containing rich evidence about how the environment responds. We introduce ECHO (Environment Cross-entropy Hybrid Objective), a hybrid objective that combines the standard policy-gradient loss on action tokens with an auxiliary loss that trains the policy to predict environment observation tokens resulting from its own actions. ECHO reuses the same forward pass as GRPO, requires no additional rollouts, and turns terminal feedback into dense supervision for all rollouts. ECHO doubles GRPO pass@1 on TerminalBench-2.0: Qwen3-8B improves from 2.70% to 5.17%, and Qwen3-14B from 5.17% to 10.79%. ECHO also produces policies that better predict terminal dynamics, even on trajectories they did not generate: across held-out rollouts, it sharply reduces environment-token cross-entropy while GRPO alone barely changes it. From base Qwen3-8B, ECHO matches expert-SFT-then-GRPO performance on held-out terminal tasks without expert demonstrations, and recovers roughly half of the expert-SFT initialization benefit on TerminalBench-2.0. In some settings, the environment prediction loss alone enables verifier-free self-improvement, allowing policies to improve on unseen OOD tasks by learning only from environment interactions. Together, these results suggest that environment observations are not merely context for future actions, but a dense, on-policy supervision signal already present in every rollout. --- ### Adaptive Punishment for Cooperation in Mixed-Motive Games Authors: Min Tang, Fanqi Kong, Linyuan Lü, Xue Feng Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.MA, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24516v1 Mixed-motive scenarios are ubiquitous in real-world multi-agent interactions, where self-interested agents often defect for immediate rewards, overlooking the potential of altruistic cooperation to improve long-term gains and collective welfare. Peer punishment can deter defection, but as costly second-order altruism, its persistent imposition may undermine the punisher's interests. Existing approaches often struggle to effectively implement punishment to promote cooperation. To balance the efficacy and cost of punishment, we propose Adaptive Punishment for Cooperation (APC), a distributed method that determines punishment intensity based on both a dynamic punishment probability and the severity of defection. This dynamic probability substantially reduces costly and ineffective punishment while also promotes cooperation. To accurately assess defection and its severity, we use a defection awareness module, whose learning is guided by game reward. Theoretical analysis and empirical results show APC performs effectively in iterated public goods game. Empirically, APC also significantly outperforms existing baselines across sequential social dilemmas, learning rational and effective punishment policies that foster cooperation by strategically deterring defection. --- ### Lake Detection and Water Quality Estimation in Sentinel-2 Data Authors: Iulia Pleşu, Alexandra Băicoianu, Ioana Cristina Plajer Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24515v1 With climate change and increasing human pressure on natural landscapes, inland water resources are becoming progressively scarcer, more vulnerable, and more difficult to manage sustainably. Reliable and automated methods for detecting, monitoring, and assessing surface water bodies are therefore of growing scientific and practical importance. In this paper, we investigate and compare three distinct machine learning architectures for water body identification and monitoring. Their performance is evaluated through quantitative metrics and real-world examples. Furthermore, a direct comparison with classical NDWI thresholding is conducted on a representative test image to highlight differences between data-driven and index-based approaches. This analysis allows us to identify the best-performing model in terms of accuracy, robustness, and practical applicability. Beyond detection, a major challenge for meaningful water quality assessment lies in the consistent and interpretable visualization of spectral water indices. Standard color mapping techniques are often inadequate or potentially misleading for environmental applications. To address this gap, we propose a suite of meaningful color schemes adapted for water quality indices, facilitating clearer interpretation, comparison, and decision-making for human users. --- ### Zeroth-Order Nonconvex Nonsmooth Optimization with Heavy-Tailed Noise Authors: Zhuanghua Liu, Luo Luo Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24513v1 This paper considers the nonconvex nonsmooth problem in which the objective function is Lipschitz continuous. We focus on the stochastic setting where the algorithm can access stochastic function value evaluations with heavy-tailed noise, which is prevalent in many popular machine learning applications. We propose a stochastic zeroth-order algorithm that refines the framework of online-to-nonconvex conversion by clipping the two-point gradient estimator. The theoretical analysis shows that our algorithm can find a $(δ, ε)$-Goldstein stationary point with zeroth-order oracle complexity of ${\mathcal O}(d^{\frac{p}{2(p-1)}}δ^{-1}ε^{-\frac{2p-1}{p-1}})$, where $d$ is the problem dimension and $p\in(1,2)$ is the order of bounded moments. Note that our dependence on dimension $d$ matches the best-known results of stochastic zeroth-order optimization for finding the sub-optimal solution of a stochastic convex nonsmooth problem. In addition, our dependence on accuracy parameters $δ$ and $ε$ is consistent with that of the best-known stochastic first-order algorithms for stochastic nonconvex nonsmooth problems. Finally, we conduct numerical experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. --- ### Φ-Noise: Training-Free Temporal Video Conditioning via Phase-Based Noise Manipulation Authors: Ofir Abramovich, Nadav Z. Cohen, Adi Rosenthal, Ariel Shamir Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.GR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24509v1 Latent video diffusion models generate videos by progressively transforming Gaussian noise into realistic samples conditioned on text or visual inputs. However, existing conditioning methods often require additional training and computational overhead. Motivated by recent findings on the importance of frequency components in generative models, we propose a simple, training-free approach for motion-conditioned video generation by injecting low-frequency phase information from a reference video directly into the diffusion noise latents. Our method transfers motion cues without modifying the model architecture or inference pipeline. Using several applications, we demonstrate effective control over both appearance and dynamics in generated videos, while achieving competitive or superior results compared to more complex conditioning approaches. --- ### FDDet: Achieving Data-Efficient Food Defect Detection Under Real-World Scenarios Authors: Ruihao Xu, Yong Liu, Yansong Tang Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24508v1 Food defect detection is critical for automated quality control, yet existing studies lack unified benchmarks and suffer from data scarcity. We introduce FDD-48, a comprehensive dataset with fine-grained annotations across 13 food types and 48 defect categories under diverse real-world conditions. To improve detection with limited labeled data, we propose FDDet, a semi-supervised framework featuring two key components: (1) BBoxMixUp, a data augmentation technique that mixes same-category defect regions to reduce spurious feature associations, and (2) CGPC (Consistency-Guided Pseudo-Label Calibration), which filters pseudo-labels based on intra-sample consistency. Experiments show FDDet significantly outperforms mainstream detectors on FDD-48, demonstrating its effectiveness for food defect detection under data-limited scenarios. --- ### FoodMonitor: Benchmarking MLLMs for Explainable Compliance Analysis Authors: Ruihao Xu, Xingming Shui, Jingxuan Niu, Yiqin Wang, Jilin Yu, Haoji Zhang, Yansong Tang Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24503v1 As AI-powered compliance monitoring becomes increasingly important in public governance and industrial safety, the ability to provide verifiable evidence and traceable accountability signals is essential. However, existing video anomaly detection datasets focus on event-level binary classification, lacking the rule-driven, explainable analysis required for real-world compliance scenarios. We introduce FoodMonitor, a benchmark for explainable compliance analysis in commercial kitchen surveillance. FoodMonitor comprises 477 video clips with 3,307 violation annotations across a dual-channel design covering both person-level and environment-level violations. Each annotation specifies which rule was violated, what non-compliant behavior occurred, and who committed it with frame-level bounding boxes. We establish a unified evaluation protocol with a two-stage matching mechanism that separately assesses spatial localization and semantic understanding, along with a composite metric ($C_{\text{score}}$) that balances environment and person detection performance. Systematic evaluation of several state-of-the-art multimodal large language models reveals that the best-performing model achieves only 0.360 $C_{\text{score}}$, with spatial localization and fine-grained rule understanding emerging as the primary bottlenecks. Our analysis identifies two distinct failure modes: localization-dominated errors and semantics-dominated errors, providing diagnostic insights for future model development. --- ### Implicit Binarization via Complex Phase Dynamics in Combinatorial Optimization Authors: Khen Cohen, Mark Glass, Meir Feder, Yaron Oz Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cond-mat.stat-mech, cs.LG, math.CO, physics.comp-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24502v1 We introduce a physics-inspired continuous relaxation framework that yields substantially improved solutions for NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems, including Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO), binary sparse coding, and planted-solution Ising models. By parameterizing discrete binary variables as continuous wave-like states on the complex unit circle, we inherently smooth highly non-convex energy landscapes. We show that representing binary variables as complex phases reveals an implicit regularization mechanism that promotes convergence toward discrete states. Extracting this mechanism yields significant improvements even within standard real-valued optimization frameworks, using this regularizer explicitly. Empirically, this regularization yields vastly higher ground-state convergence rates than standard real-valued alternatives. Our models achieved zero error in large-scale 160x160 QUBO tasks under severe noise (sigma=0.25), and outperformed traditional algorithms (OMP and LASSO) in underdefined sparse coding with perfect recovery at sigma=0.15. The solver's robustness was further validated by recovering exact ground-state configurations in 8 out of 11 rigorously engineered planted-solution benchmarks. --- ### EgoAdapt: A Multi-Scene Egocentric Adaptation Method for CVPR 2026 HD-EPIC VQA Challenge Authors: Zhiwei Chen, Yupeng Hu, Zixu Li, Zhiheng Fu, Guozhi Qiu, Weili Guan, Liqiang Nie Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24500v2 This technical report presents our solution, EgoAdapt (Egocentric Adaptation via Category, Calibration, and Consistency), to the CVPR 2026 HD-EPIC VQA challenge. HD-EPIC evaluates whether a vision-language model can reason over realistic first-person kitchen videos, where the evidence for an answer may be a short hand-object interaction, a long recipe trajectory, a spatial relation to a fixture, or a subtle gaze cue. The benchmark contains 26K multiple-choice questions across seven macro-categories: recipe, ingredient, nutrition, fine-grained action, 3D perception, object motion, and gaze. We observe that the main difficulty is not only model capacity, but also the mismatch between a single generic inference recipe and the heterogeneous temporal, spatial, and semantic structure of the benchmark. Our method, EgoAdapt, introduces three inference-time components: (1) category-conditioned routing with per-category prompts, frame budgets, and sampling rates; (2) calibrated option scoring that evaluates all candidate answers with letter-token likelihoods and generation agreement instead of relying only on direct generation; and (3) test-time consistency adaptation that aggregates predictions across option permutations and verification-style prompts for ambiguous cases. This design substantially improves over the available HD-EPIC baselines. --- ### Reasoning as an Attack Surface: Adaptive Evolutionary CoT Jailbreaks for LLMs Authors: Jianan Li, Simeng Qin, Xiaojun Jia, Lionel Z. Wang, Tianhang Zheng, Xiaoshuang Jia, Yang Liu, Xiaochun Cao Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24497v1 Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning and generation tasks and are increasingly deployed in real-world applications. However, their explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) mechanism introduces new security risks, making them particularly vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. Existing approaches often rely on static CoT templates to elicit harmful outputs, but such fixed designs suffer from limited diversity, adaptability, and effectiveness. To overcome these limitations, we propose an adaptive evolutionary CoT jailbreak framework, called AE-CoT. Specifically, the method first rewrites harmful goals into mild prompts with teacher role-play and decomposes them into semantically coherent reasoning fragments to construct a pool of CoT jailbreak candidates. Then, within a structured representation space, we perform multi-generation evolutionary search, where candidate diversity is expanded through fragment-level crossover and a mutation strategy with an adaptive mutation-rate control mechanism. An independent scoring model provides graded harmfulness evaluations, and high-scoring candidates are further enhanced with a harmful CoT template to induce more destructive generations. Extensive experiments across multiple models and datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed AE-CoT, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art jailbreak methods. --- ### EgoAction: Egocentric Action Composition with Reliability-Aware Temporal Fusion for the EPIC-KITCHENS Action Detection Challenge at CVPR 2026 Authors: Zhiheng Fu, Zixu Li, Zhiwei Chen, Fangxu Liu, Yupeng Hu, Weili Guan, Liqiang Nie Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24496v2 The EPIC-KITCHENS-100 Action Detection challenge evaluates whether a model can localize the start and end of each action in long untrimmed egocentric videos and assign the corresponding verb--noun action label. In this report, we formulate our submission as EgoAction (Egocentric Action Composition with Reliability-Aware Temporal Fusion), a unified decoupled detection and fusion pipeline. The pipeline uses EPIC-finetuned VideoMAE-L features, trains separate noun and verb temporal detectors with causal temporal modeling, composes action hypotheses from top noun--verb pairs, and introduces a confidence-adaptive boundary fusion rule at post-processing time. The key observation is that verb and noun streams often fail differently: verb scores are sensitive to motion transitions, whereas noun scores are sensitive to hand-object visibility and object clutter. A fixed arithmetic mean of their predicted boundaries can therefore amplify localization errors when one stream degenerates. We replace this hard-coded mean with Dynamic Weighted Fusion (DWF), which normalizes the maximum noun and verb classification confidences into proposal-wise boundary weights and linearly combines the two intervals. This lightweight tensor-only operator shifts boundary authority toward the more reliable stream while preserving the decoupled action scoring mechanism. Together with sliding-window inference, top-K noun--verb action composition, and class-wise Soft-NMS, EgoAction provides a compact and reproducible system for egocentric temporal action detection. --- ### Med-R2: An Adversarial Benchmark for Evidence-Grounded Reasoning in Medical VLMs Authors: Wen Ma, Fucheng Niu, Zhiting Fan, Zikai Xiao, Jiaxiang Liu, Zuozhu Liu Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24492v1 Vision-language models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in general medical visual question answering, yet due to limited interpretability, it remains unclear whether their predictions reflect evidence-grounded clinical reasoning or reliance on spurious priors. We introduce Med-R2 Bench, a hierarchical benchmark aligned with the clinical workflow to evaluate adversarial robustness with visual grounding. We design stepwise QA tasks to assess whether reasoning chains are strictly grounded in visual evidence across the four clinical stages, and employ adversarial perturbations to test robustness against misleading cues. Med-R2 comprises 42,432 images, 31 task categories, and 110,406 QA pairs. Evaluation across 14 VLMs reveals a sequential performance degradation along the four-stage clinical workflow. Adversarial experiments show that models rely heavily on correct prompts to guess answers. Even when provided with explicit visual cues, the models struggle to accurately align textual descriptions. Finally, we demonstrate stepwise fine-tuning using our hierarchical data significantly improves reasoning robustness, highlighting its potential to drive future improvements in evidence-based medical AI. --- ### Market Regime Council for Dynamic Credit Assignment in Multi-Agent LLM Decision Systems Authors: Yunhua Pei, Zerui Ge, Jin Zheng, John Cartlidge Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG, q-fin.PM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24490v1 Multi-agent LLM decision systems for portfolio management still lack a principled way to assign credit across specialist agents, remain vulnerable to cold-start dominance under regime shifts, and offer limited transparency into how final allocations are formed. We propose Market Regime Council (MRC), a cooperative multi-agent decision system that computes exact Shapley credits across all single, pairwise, and Grand-coalition outputs for online agent weighting. Instantiated with N=3 specialist agents, at each trading period, MRC recomputes coalition-based Shapley weights from exponentially weighted performance histories, uses a Bayesian adaptive mixture to stabilize early periods, applies regime-dependent multipliers to adjust agent authority, and records each rebalance through a five-layer causal trace. Over 1,037 trading days across 13 crypto assets and five seeds, MRC achieves a Sharpe ratio of 1.51 and a cumulative return of 440.1%, ranking first on CR, SR, and IR among active baselines and attaining the lowest MDD among active methods. Ablation results show that the gains come from Shapley-weighted integration across coalition outputs rather than from any single stage in isolation. Code and demo data are included in the supplementary material. --- ### TIGER: Text-Informed Generalized Enzyme-Reaction Retrieval Authors: Yuhang Zhang, Keyan Ding, Peilin Chen, Han Liu, Can Lin, Ruixi Chen, Shiqi Wang, Qi Song Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.AI, q-bio.BM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24489v1 Enzyme-reaction retrieval is a fundamental problem in computational biology, underpinning enzyme characterization, reaction mechanism elucidation, and the rational design of metabolic pathways and biocatalysts. As a bidirectional task, it entails both enzyme-to-reaction and reaction-to-enzyme mapping. However, existing approaches suffer from poor generalization across tasks and distributions, with performance highly sensitive to dataset splits and substantial asymmetry between retrieval directions. To address these challenges, we present TIGER, a Text-Informed Generalized Enzyme-Reaction Retrieval framework that leverages protein-to-text generation models to distill textual semantic knowledge from enzyme sequences, providing a generalized representation that bridges enzymes and biochemical reactions. To ensure the quality and reliability of textual semantics, we design a Dynamic Gating Network that adaptively fuses text-derived knowledge with sequence features, enabling more consistent and informative enzyme representations, while a Structure-Shared Feature Projector aligns enzyme and reaction representations within a unified latent space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, under bidirectional retrieval supervision, TIGER significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across diverse distributions and exhibits strong robustness and transferability across tasks. --- ### Appearance-Invariant Detection of Suggestive Motion via Laban Movement Descriptors Authors: Jaehoon Ahn, Jeonghan Kong, Moon-Ryul Jung Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.CV, cs.GR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24488v2 Content moderation in online multiplayer 3D virtual environments is increasingly automated, yet detection has focused on images, video, and audio, leaving suggestive motion a blind spot. We present a motion-only classification pipeline that detects suggestive and explicit movement from SMPL skeleton trajectories using Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) descriptors. On a dataset spanning everyday, artistic, suggestive, and explicit movement (17+ hours of video), a logistic regression trained on 61-feature LMA descriptors reaches 68% binary SFW/NSFW accuracy (70% random forest) under a leak-free evaluation protocol. At this level, our descriptor performs comparably to a learned video model trained on the same motion re-rendered as appearance-free video, a gray figure with no clothing, skin, or scene. The indirectness (tortuosity) of each joint's trajectory, measured as the ratio of the joint's path length to its net displacement, peaks at the suggestive tier, showing that the Direct-to-Indirect polarity of Laban's Space factor provides an interpretable marker of the shift from functional to suggestive motion. Ultimately, Laban-based kinematic descriptors offer a lightweight, interpretable approach to suggestive-motion detection: every decision decomposes into named, theory-grounded features. Because the classifier operates on pose trajectories alone, moderation can run directly on avatar poses in virtual environments, with no appearance data. --- ### AgentFugue: Agent Scaling for Long-Horizon Tasks through Collective Reasoning Authors: Yuyang Hu, Hongjin Qian, Shuting Wang, Jiongnan Liu, Tong Zhao, Xiaoxi Li, Zheng Liu, Zhicheng Dou Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24486v1 Recent progress on long-horizon agentic tasks has been driven largely by scaling up individual agents through stronger models, better tools, and more effective scaffolding. In contrast, much less is understood about scaling out: whether multiple peer agents, all targeting the same task, can become an additional source of capability without relying on explicit role specialization or workflow orchestration. We study this question and propose AgentFugue, a collective reasoning framework built around a shared reasoning hub. As peer agents explore the same task in parallel, the hub records concise notes on what each agent has established, attempted, or ruled out, and enables each agent to selectively access what other agents have discovered in a form useful for its current search. This design turns otherwise isolated trajectories into a connected ecology of reusable intermediate reasoning without requiring centralized planning. We instantiate the hub as a plug-in communication layer, trained with supervised fine-tuning and end-to-end reinforcement learning. Across the challenging long-horizon settings we study, AgentFugue improves over strong baselines. Our results suggest that collective reasoning can turn scaling out peer agent systems into a distinct source of capability gains, rather than merely a way of spending more compute. --- ### SPACE: Unifying Symmetric and Asymmetric Routing Problems for Generalist Neural Solver Authors: Rongsheng Chen, Changliang Zhou, Canhong Yu, Yuanyao Chen, Yu Zhou, Zhuo Chen, Zhenkun Wang Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24484v1 Generalist neural routing solvers have shown great potential in solving diverse vehicle routing problems (VRPs) with a unified model. However, existing solvers are typically limited to symmetric settings or degrade in performance when switching to asymmetric settings due to input inconsistencies or inherent structural differences, substantially limiting their practicality in real-world scenarios that encompass both scenarios. To address this limitation, we define the spatial position of each node based on the relative distances to a specific set of pivots and further propose a Spatial Pivot-Aligned Coordinate-free Embedding (SPACE) framework that unifies node representation and solution generation across symmetric and asymmetric VRPs. Specifically, we construct a bidirectional Frechet representation using a novel furthest pivot sampling strategy to enable invariant node representations across distinct problem settings. Furthermore, we introduce a weight-decomposed adaptive decoding mechanism that decouples geometric perception from problem representations, mitigating the overfitting of constraint decisions to a specific geometry setting. Extensive experiments on 110 VRP variants, comprising 55 symmetric problems and their asymmetric counterparts, demonstrate that SPACE achieves promising zero-shot generalization in both symmetric and asymmetric VRPs. --- ### OmniEgo-R$^2$: A Routed Reasoning Framework for the 1st Cross-Domain EgoCross Challenge at CVPR 2026 Authors: Zixu Li, Zhiwei Chen, Zhiheng Fu, Wenbo Wang, Yupeng Hu, Weili Guan, Liqiang Nie Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24481v3 The 1st Cross-Domain EgoCross Challenge at EgoVis, CVPR 2026 evaluates whether multimodal large language models can reason over egocentric videos across surgery, industry, extreme sports, and animal perspective. We achieved second place in both the Source-Limited and Open-Source tracks. In this report, we formulate EgoCross as a robust cross-domain embodied video reasoning problem rather than a simple multiple-choice visual question answering task. We identify three key challenges: (C1) temporal boundary ambiguity, where critical state transitions are sparsely sampled and often occur between frames; (C2) cross-domain semantic granularity mismatch, where the same capability requires different domain-specific visual grammar; and (C3) decision instability under close options, where long multimodal reasoning can select unsupported distractors or produce malformed outputs. To address them, we propose OmniEgo-R$^2$ (Omnidomain Egocentric Routed Reasoning), a unified routed reasoning pipeline consisting of temporal-evidence normalization, domain-agnostic capability routing, structured perception--dynamics--decision reasoning, boundary-aware option verification, and defensive answer calibration. OmniEgo-R$^2$ uses the Qwen3-VL-4B-SFT checkpoints on each EgoCross domain as the visual-language backbone, and wraps them with lightweight test-time reasoning and parsing programs. Our final submissions obtain 66.35% overall accuracy in the Source-Limited track and 66.77% in the Open-Source track, ranking second in both leaderboards. The codes are available on https://github.com/Lee-zixu/OmniEgo-R2 --- ### The Normalized Maximum Likelihood for Regular Non-Smooth Models: Measure-Theoretic Foundations and Geometric Sampling Authors: Trenton Lau, Gary P. T. Choi Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.LG, cs.IT, math.ST arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24477v1 The Normalized Maximum Likelihood (NML) codelength, or stochastic complexity, represents a principled criterion for universal coding. While recent coarea-based formulations provided a calculation method for smooth models, this framework collapses for the non-smooth estimators ubiquitous in modern machine learning (e.g., Lasso, Sparse SVMs). In this work, we provide a rigorous framework for computing the NML for regular path-differentiable Lipschitz (PDL) estimators. By applying classical geometric measure theory and bridging the coarea formula with conservative Jacobians, we prove that the stochastic complexity for non-smooth models is well-posed and theoretically consistent with the outputs of modern Automatic Differentiation. To compute this quantity exactly, we introduce the Propose-and-Project Metropolis-Hastings (PDL-PPMH) sampler, a geometric MCMC algorithm capable of traversing the non-differentiable level sets of the maximum likelihood estimator. We theoretically justify its components, including a stochastic tangent space proposal and a provably convergent non-smooth projection solver. We demonstrate the method's robustness by sampling from a high-dimensional Lasso posterior ($P=2000$), while simultaneously quantifying the computational scaling that governs the trade-off between exactness and mixing time. Crucially, we empirically demonstrate that our exact NML criterion provides a highly data-efficient alternative to cross-validation, achieving statistically indistinguishable predictive optima without requiring data splitting. Altogether, our work paves the way for the theoretical analysis of the NML codelength for regular non-smooth models. --- ### Robust Fuzzy Multi-view Learning under View Conflict Authors: Siyuan Duan, Yuan Sun, Dezhong Peng, Yingke Chen, Xi Peng, Peng Hu Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.MM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24475v1 Trusted multi-view classification aims to deliver reliable fusion for accurate predictions and has recently attracted substantial attention in both academia and industry. However, existing TMVC methods typically assume strict alignment across different views during both training and testing phases, which is often impractical in real-world scenarios. This limitation motivates us to revisit TMVC and extend it to a more challenging setting: how to mitigate the impact of view conflict (VC) during both training and inference. To tackle this setting, existing TMVC methods suffer from three critical limitations: underestimated uncertainty, misleading decisions, and overfitting to VC. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel Robust Fuzzy Multi-View Learning (R-FUML) framework grounded in Fuzzy Set Theory. Specifically, R-FUML models network outputs as fuzzy memberships to quantify category credibility and uses an entropy-based method for reliable multi-view fusion. To this end, we present a Robust Multi-view Fusion (RMF) strategy that accounts for both view-specific uncertainty and inter-view conflicts, thereby alleviating the adverse impacts of VC on decision-making. To identify and conquer VC during training, we further design a Robust Learning Against VC (RLVC) framework. RLVC isolates conflicting samples by leveraging neural networks' memory effects and then retrains the model by applying a penalty to these conflicting views. Extensive experiments across eight public datasets demonstrate that R-FUML consistently outperforms 15 state-of-the-art baselines in robustness and uncertainty estimation. The code will be released upon acceptance. --- ### TempRet: Temporal Enhancement and Two-Stage Reranking for CVPR 2026 EPIC-KITCHENS-100 Multi-Instance Retrieval Challenge Authors: Zixu Li, Yupeng Hu, Zhiwei Chen, Zhiheng Fu, Xiaowei Zhu, Weili Guan, Liqiang Nie Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24470v3 Video-text retrieval has witnessed remarkable progress driven by large-scale vision-language pretraining, yet most existing approaches inherit an implicit assumption from image-text retrieval: that visual semantics can be captured frame-by-frame. This assumption overlooks the temporal dynamics of egocentric videos. The EPIC-KITCHENS-100 Multi-Instance Retrieval (MIR) challenge further raises the bar by providing soft-label relevance matrices rather than binary labels, demanding models that can resolve graded semantic correspondences across modalities. In this report, we present our solution, termed TempRet, to the CVPR 2026 EPIC-KITCHENS-100 MIR challenge. Our approach builds upon a CLIP-based dual-encoder backbone and introduces two key components to address the temporal and cross-modal challenges. First, a temporal transformer operates exclusively on the video side, modeling inter-frame dependencies through learnable positional encodings and multi-head self-attention over frame-level CLIP features. Second, a two-stage reranking pipeline first retrieves Top-K candidates via the dual-encoder, then refines their scores using a cross-encoder equipped with an Image-Text Matching (ITM) head. The entire system is trained with Symmetric Multi-Similarity Loss to exploit the soft-label relevance matrices provided by the challenge. Our method achieves 67.97% average mAP and 82.92% average nDCG on the EK-100 MIR benchmark, demonstrating the effectiveness of temporal modeling and cross-modal refinement for egocentric video retrieval. --- ### SAM: State-Adaptive Memory for Long-Horizon Reasoning Agent Authors: Yuyang Hu, Hongjin Qian, Shuting Wang, Jiongnan Liu, Ziliang Zhao, Jiejun Tan, Zheng Liu, Zhicheng Dou Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24468v1 Long-horizon agentic reasoning requires large language models to act over long interaction histories containing thoughts, tool calls, observations, and partial conclusions. The challenge is not merely that these histories grow long, but that information needed for the current decision may be scattered across distant steps and only become relevant later. Existing approaches address this difficulty by truncating the interaction history, compressing it into shorter surrogates, or retrieving selected parts of it for reuse, but they do not explicitly model how access to past interaction should adapt to the agent's evolving state. We instead cast long-horizon reasoning as a problem of state-adaptive memory. To this end, we propose State-Adaptive Memory~(SAM), a standalone framework that consolidates ongoing interaction into compact memory cues while preserving raw trajectory pages for intent-driven recall. These cues are not treated as replacements for history; rather, they serve as lightweight handles that allow the agent to reconstruct temporally distant information according to its current needs, without retraining the underlying backbone. We further optimize the memory module through expert-guided supervision and reinforcement learning, aligning it with trajectory-level utility. Across BrowseComp, BrowseComp-ZH, WideSearch, and HLE, SAM consistently outperforms strong baselines over diverse agent backbones. Our results suggest that explicit memory modeling provides a simple and effective foundation for long-horizon agentic reasoning. --- ### Coarse-to-Fine Domain Incremental Learning with Attentive Distillation for Mining Footprint Segmentation in Multispectral Imagery Authors: Alif Tri Handoyo, Vincent C. S. Lee, Rizka Widyarini Purwanto, Alex M. Lechner, Deanna Kemp, Muhamad Risqi U. Saputra Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24460v2 Automatically mapping and segmenting global mining footprints using remote sensing and deep learning is critical for monitoring the socio-environmental risks and impacts of mining, yet its progress is hindered by the scarcity of fine-grained annotated data. Although large-scale datasets with coarse boundaries are widely available, leveraging them to improve fine-grained segmentation is challenging due to significant domain shift. To address this, we propose MineC2FNet, a coarse-to-fine domain incremental learning framework that exploits abundant coarse data to enhance fine-grained mining footprint segmentation. MineC2FNet adopts a teacher-student architecture with attentive distillation at both the feature and prediction levels, selectively transferring generalized knowledge from the coarse domain while enabling boundary refinement using limited fine-grained data (fine domain). We further introduce an expertly validated dataset of 219 images with precise boundary annotations across diverse geographies and commodities. Extensive experiments against state-of-the-art approaches, including domain adaptation and domain incremental learning methods, demonstrate that MineC2FNet achieves superior performance while effectively handling domain shift. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/risqiutama/MineC2FNet. --- ### Balancing Fairness, Privacy, and Accuracy: A Multitask Adversarial Framework for Centralized Data-Driven Systems Authors: Imesh Ekanayake, Elham Naghizade, Jeffrey Chan Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24458v1 The integration of fairness and privacy in centralized data-driven applications is critical, especially as these systems increasingly influence sectors with significant societal impact. Current methods rarely address privacy, fairness, and accuracy together, which can potentially compromise ethical standards and privacy regulations. However, balancing these three objectives is quite challenging since each of objective often imposes conflicting requirements on the design and training of models, making it difficult to optimize one without compromising the others. This paper introduces a novel multitask adversarial model that treats fairness and privacy as integral objectives rather than afterthoughts, and learns a latent representation that hides sensitive attributes while preserving essential task-related information. Our approach dynamically balances fairness with accuracy and privacy through an optimized cost function with minimal performance loss even under strict conditions. Extensive testing on diverse datasets shows the ability of our model to achieve high standards of fairness and privacy without significant sacrifice to accuracy. Benchmarking against state-of-the-art privacy and fairness standards shows that our method enhances the robustness of privacy, fairness, and accuracy optimization, proving its adaptability across various datasets. --- ### Asymmetric Adaptation-based Real-time Fault Diagnosis Under Transitional Operating Conditions Authors: Hongshuo Zhao, Zeyi Liu, Xiao He Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: eess.SY, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24457v1 Data streams in real-world industrial scenarios often contain transitional operating conditions that are uncovered during offline training, leading to significant distribution shifts. To bridge the gap between static offline models and dynamic online data, a novel asymmetric adaptation-based fault diagnosis method is proposed in this paper. Specifically, in the offline stage, we employ domain generalization techniques to extract domain-invariant features from multiple stable conditions and construct robust normalized fault prototypes as reference anchors. Subsequently, during online inference, we design an online test-time adaptation method based on a periodic prototype re-projection mechanism to dynamically update prototype positions. Furthermore, we utilize the geometric distribution derived from anchors to guide the updates of classifiers and adopt an asymmetric learning rate strategy for the feature extractor and classifier. The proposed approach ensures rapid adaptation to new transitional conditions while preserving the discriminative power inherited from the offline domain generalization initialization. Experimental results demonstrate that this mechanism effectively leverages offline generalized knowledge to guide online inference, significantly improving robustness in non-stationary environments. --- ### EgoProx: Evaluating MLLMs on Egocentric 3D Proximity Reasoning Across a Cognitive Hierarchy Authors: Jinzhao Li, Yinuo Chen, Dongxu Piao, Panwang Pan, Yifan Yu, Dong Wang, Honglei Yan, Liang Yue, Shaofei Wang, Yixin Chen, Siyuan Huang, Miao Liu Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24456v2 Humans constantly reason about 3D proximity, the relations between their body and surrounding objects, to guide perception and action in daily life. Whether multimodal large language models (MLLMs) can perform such embodied 3D reasoning remains unclear. To this end, we introduce EgoProx, a benchmark for egocentric 3D proximity reasoning. We organize our tasks along a cognitive chain, covering intention, exploration, exploitation, and chain-of-actions reasoning. We also design an agent based data engine that produces diverse and consistent QA pairs at scale. We benchmark prevailing MLLMs on EgoProx and conduct additional analyses with dataset specific and task specific instruction tuning. We observe large cross-domain gains, indicating that current MLLMs contain some spatial knowledge; however, they still struggle to effectively leverage it for spatial reasoning VQA. --- ### Decompose-and-Refine: Structured Legal Question Answering with Parametric Retrieval Authors: Jihyung lee, Hyounghun Kim, Gary Lee Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24454v1 Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance in the legal domain, demonstrating notable potential in Legal Question Answering (LQA). However, unlike general QA, LQA requires answers that are not only accurate but also rigorously grounded in explicit legal authority. In statutory LQA, many questions require multi-hop reasoning across multiple legal issues, substantially increasing the risk of hallucination, thereby making accurate retrieval of supporting statutory provisions a critical prerequisite. Despite recent progress in multi-hop QA, existing approaches often rely on reasoning in natural language or retrieval without explicit query reformulation, leaving the vocabulary gap between user questions and statutory text largely unaddressed. To address this challenge, we propose Decompose-and-Refine (DaR), a statute-grounded LQA framework that tightly integrates step-wise question decomposition with parametric knowledge-based query refinement. DaR progressively decomposes a complex legal question into atomic sub-questions and generates statute-aligned parametric queries for each sub-question, enabling the selection of a single most central statutory provision corresponding to each legal issue. We evaluate DaR on KoBLEX, a Korean multi-hop LQA benchmark grounded in statutory law, using Qwen3-32B and Gemma3-27B. Experimental results demonstrate that DaR consistently improves both retrieval accuracy and final answer quality over existing approaches. Moreover, by explicitly separating sub-questions and their corresponding statutory provisions, DaR facilitates transparent, issue-level verification of complex legal reasoning processes. --- ### Code2UML: Agentic LLMs with context engineering for scalable software visualization Authors: Alin-Gabriel Văduva, Anca-Ioana Andreescu, Simona-Vasilica Oprea, Adela Bâra Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24453v1 Large Language Model (LLM)-based code analysis tools are adopted to automate software documentation tasks. However, the scalability of these approaches to real codebases, where Intermediate Representations (IR) exceed LLM context limits, remains underexplored. This paper introduces an agentic architecture with context engineering for automated UML diagram generation from source code repositories. It employs a hierarchy of five specialized agents: PlannerAgent, AnalyzerAgent, DiagramAgent, CorrectorAgent and DependencyAnalyzerAgent, built on the Claude Agent SDK, each addressing a distinct cognitive subtask. A deterministic, importance-weighted IR compaction layer transforms full project IRs into diagram-specific views guaranteed to fit within token constraints, requiring no LLM calls and completing in milliseconds. Thus, we evaluate the system across 12 open-source repositories in 4 programming languages (Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python) and 7 UML diagram types, producing 84 observations assessed on 5 automated metrics. Results demonstrate high syntactic validity (mean: 91.5%, with component and deployment diagrams reaching 100%), strong relationship precision (mean: 0.858) and consistent structural quality (mean: 81.7/100, with cross-language variance of 3.1 points). Entity recall averaged 0.313, reflecting deliberate architectural prioritization over exhaustive coverage. A sensitivity analysis (31 to 4,578 IR entities) confirms that quality scores remain stable regardless of scale. --- ### Temporal Concept Drift in Legal Judgment Prediction: Neural Baselines Across Three Epochs of Ukrainian Court Decisions Authors: Volodymyr Ovcharov Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24452v1 Legal NLP benchmarks evaluate models on randomly split data, implicitly assuming that legal language is stationary. We test this assumption by fine-tuning four transformer encoders -- XLM-RoBERTa (base and large) and their legal-domain variants -- on Ukrainian court decisions from three temporal epochs defined by geopolitical disruptions: pre-war (2008-2013), hybrid war (2014-2021), and full-scale invasion (2022-2026). Each model is trained on one epoch and evaluated on all three, producing a 3x3 cross-temporal generalization matrix. Four findings emerge. (1) Forward degradation is severe: models trained on pre-war data lose up to 27.2 percentage points of macro-F1 when applied to full-scale invasion era decisions. (2) The degradation is asymmetric: backward transfer (full-scale to pre-war) is substantially more robust than forward transfer, consistent with the hypothesis that legal language is additive. (3) Legal-domain pretraining (Legal-XLM-R) does not improve absolute performance but reduces forward degradation magnitude and asymmetry. (4) Chronological continual learning eliminates catastrophic forgetting for general XLM-R: pre-war knowledge is fully retained (+1.8 to +6.2 pp) while full-scale performance gains +16.5 to +19.0 pp; reverse-chronological training causes severe forgetting. Cross-jurisdictional pretraining on Swiss Judgment Prediction data improves absolute performance but does not reduce temporal degradation magnitude, confirming that temporal drift is an intrinsic property of legal language evolution. The dataset (428K decisions across three epochs) is publicly available as a LEXTREME contribution. --- ### Phonetic Modeling of Dialectal Variation in Vietnamese Speech Authors: Quan Ngoc Hoang, Long Hoang Huu Nguyen, Nghia Hieu Nguyen, Kiet Van Nguyen, Ngan Luu-Thuy Nguyen Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24451v1 Vietnamese exhibits substantial dialectal phonetic variation across Northern, Central, and Southern regions, where identical lexical items may be realized with markedly different pronunciations. Such variation poses challenges for automatic speech recognition (ASR) and remains difficult to model computationally due to the complex relationship between Vietnamese orthography and phonology. Existing approaches typically address dialect variability at the word level, assuming dialect-invariant mappings between spelling and pronunciation, which limits their ability to capture systematic phonetic differences. We propose a dialect-aware phonetic framework that explicitly models Vietnamese phonological structure and dialectal variation at both the vocabulary and decoding levels. The framework introduces a phonetic vocabulary that decomposes each syllable into structured phonetic components and maps them to dialect-specific IPA representations, together with a phonetic-structure decoder that jointly predicts these components. Experiments on the UIT-ViMD, a only-available dataset for multi-dialect in Vietnamese, show that the proposed approach outperforms various pre-trained baselines, \textbf{especially matches the performance of the strongest pretrained wav2ve2-base-vi-250h} across dialects while \textbf{using substantially fewer parameters and no external pretraining}. Code for experimental reproducibility will be publicly available upon the acceptance of this paper. --- ### Vision-Guided Outdoor Flight and Obstacle Evasion via Reinforcement Learning Authors: Shiladitya Dutta, Aayush Gupta, Varun Saran, Avideh Zakhor Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.RO, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24449v1 Although quadcopters boast impressive traversal capabilities enabled by their omnidirectional maneuverability, the need for continuous pilot control in complex environments impedes their application in GNSS and telemetry-denied scenarios. To this end, we propose a novel sensorimotor policy that uses stereo-vision depth and visual-inertial odometry (VIO) to autonomously navigate through obstacles in an unknown environment to reach a goal point. The policy is comprised of a pre-trained autoencoder as the perception head followed by a planning and control LSTM network which outputs velocity commands that can be followed by an off-the-shelf commercial drone. We leverage reinforcement and privileged learning paradigms to train the policy in simulation through a two-stage process: 1) initial training with optimal trajectories generated by a global motion planner acting as a supervisory backbone, 2) further fine-tuning in a curriculum environment. To bridge the sim-to-real gap, we employ domain randomization and reward shaping to create a policy that is both robust to noise and domain shift. In outdoor experiments, our approach achieves successful zero-shot transfer to both obstacle environments and a drone platform that were never encountered during training. --- ### SILSM: A Sustainable Interactive Level Set Method for Progressive Refinement Authors: Jiachen Song, Dazhi Zhang, Fanghui Song, Zhichang Guo, Shengzhu Shi Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24448v1 Interactive segmentation aims to precisely isolate target objects using sparse user guidance. However, traditional methods often suffer from heavy interaction burdens and parameter sensitivity, while deep learning approaches struggle with data dependency and iterative instability. Motivated by these limitations, we propose the Sustainable Interactive Level Set Method (SILSM). The proposed level set evolution equation incorporates interaction, regularization, and segmentation terms. Specifically, high-order regularization is employed to maintain numerical stability, and unlike traditional methods, we decouple user guidance into an independent interaction term to enable direct manual control over the zero-level set evolution. Furthermore, we develop a numerical algorithm tailored for multiple interactions, which facilitates dynamic refinement by effectively updating the segmentation results based on sequential user inputs. We theoretically demonstrate that the high-order term provides stronger regularization constraints than the conventional length term, while the interaction term ensures segmentation strictly within the user-selected region. Experimental results further demonstrate that the proposed method is robust to interactive inputs, achieves competitive performance at the first interaction, and supports stable multi-round interactions with progressively improved segmentation quality. --- ### Benchmarking Composed Image Retrieval for Applied Earth Observation Authors: Bill Psomas, Dionysis Christopoulos, Thanasis Petropoulos, Nikos Efthymiadis, Ioannis Kakogeorgiou, Ondřej Chum, Yannis Avrithis, Giorgos Tolias, Konstantinos Karantzalos Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24442v1 Remote sensing composed image retrieval (RSCIR) enables search in large satellite image archives using composed queries that combine a reference image with a textual modifier. Although RSCIR offers a flexible interface for expressing targeted retrieval intent, the transferability of modern composition methods to Earth observation (EO) imagery and their relevance to operational EO workflows remain underexplored. We address this gap through a unified benchmark and an application-oriented study. First, we systematically adapt and evaluate representative composed image retrieval methods with six vision-language backbones on PatternCom under a standardized protocol, analyzing their behavior across backbones, composition strategies, and query types. Second, we introduce xView2-CIR, a change-centric dataset for disaster and damage monitoring, where retrieval is conditioned on scene identity and a target post-event state. Our results show that training-free composition methods provide strong and scalable baselines for EO retrieval, while change-centric retrieval presents different challenges from attribute-based retrieval, particularly due to the need to preserve scene identity. Overall, this study establishes a practical benchmark for RSCIR and positions composed retrieval as a complementary tool for remote sensing image retrieval, archive exploration, and change analysis. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/billpsomas/rscir. --- ### CAffNet: Hard Constraint-Affine Neural Networks Authors: Yang Zhao, Jungeun Lee, Jeong hwan Jeon, Sze Zheng Yong Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24437v2 We present a novel framework for embedding hard constraint satisfaction into neural network (NN) architectures, specifically feedforward neural networks and transformers, with input-dependent affine constraints of arbitrary cardinality. Traditional constraint enforcement approaches either rely on penalty-based soft constraints, which offer no guarantee of satisfaction, or on post-processing methods that enforce constraints after the NN is trained, which may lead to suboptimality. We introduce a trainable constraint-affine (CAffine) layer into NNs, yielding CAffNet, which goes beyond enforcing affine constraints via fixed orthogonal or parallel projections and enables joint optimization with network parameters. Moreover, we impose no restrictions on the constraint space dimensions and establish that our construction preserves the universal approximation properties of NNs, while providing provable guarantees on constraint adherence for all inputs. Experimental validation demonstrates robust performance across diverse domains requiring guaranteed constraint satisfaction. The code is available at https://github.com/ice-t-lab/CAffNet.git. --- ### CAffNet: Hard Constraint-Affine Neural Networks Authors: Yang Zhao, Jungeun Lee, Jeong hwan Jeon, Sze Zheng Yong Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24437v1 We present a novel framework for embedding hard constraint satisfaction into neural network (NN) architectures, specifically feedforward neural networks and transformers, with input-dependent affine constraints of arbitrary cardinality. Traditional constraint enforcement approaches either rely on penalty-based soft constraints, which offer no guarantee of satisfaction, or on post-processing methods that enforce constraints after the NN is trained, which may lead to suboptimality. We introduce a trainable constraint-affine (CAffine) layer into NNs, yielding CAffNet, which goes beyond enforcing affine constraints via fixed orthogonal or parallel projections and enables joint optimization with network parameters. Moreover, we impose no restrictions on the constraint space dimensions and establish that our construction preserves the universal approximation properties of NNs, while providing provable guarantees on constraint adherence for all inputs. Experimental validation demonstrates robust performance across diverse domains requiring guaranteed constraint satisfaction. --- ### A Reinforcement Learning Inspired Latent Yield Based Adaptive Algorithm Switching Mechanism Authors: Jayprakash S. Nair, Jimson Mathew, Shivashankar B. Nair Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.MA, cs.LG, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24436v1 Selecting the most suitable algorithm for a given problem instance remains a challenging task, particularly in online or dynamic environments where problem characteristics evolve over time. Relying solely on instantaneous performance metrics can result in a reactive and unstable behaviour, often leading to suboptimal algorithm switching. This paper introduces a computationally efficient approach for aggregating an algorithm's performance across multiple problem instances that is fairly immune to erratic variations in instance features. Inspired by features inherent to Reinforcement Learning (RL), this technique encapsulates rewards and penalties into a latent yield that, in turn, triggers exploitation and exploration, consequently resulting in adaptive algorithm switching. The proposed technique employs island models, inspired by Genetic Algorithms, to facilitate parallel exploration and performance exchanges among algorithm populations inhabiting local repertoires. Experimental evaluations on sorting algorithms and robotic obstacle avoidance tasks demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the approach, highlighting its potential in domains where adaptive algorithm selection is critical. --- ### Smoother Action Chunking Flow Policy via Prior-Corrected Orthogonal Trust-Region Guidance Authors: Kai Fang, Hailong Pei, Xuemin Chi Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.RO, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24433v1 Flow-matching robot policies commonly use action-chunking inference for efficient closed-loop control, but chunk boundaries can introduce discontinuous action transitions. Existing RTC guidance improves continuity by injecting correction signals during denoising, yet its weight schedule is weak at intermediate timesteps and its unconstrained correction direction may introduce transverse perturbations. We propose POTR, a **p**rior-corrected **o**rthogonal **t**rust-**r**egion guidance method. First, we incorporate a data-prior scale $σ_d$ into the RTC guidance weight, yielding stronger intermediate-time correction. Second, we decompose the guidance vector into components parallel and perpendicular to the denoising velocity, and constrain the perpendicular component within a trust region. On LIBERO with $π_{0.5}$, POTR improves success rate and consistently reduces chunk-boundary discontinuity, acceleration, and jerk compared with RTC. Ablations show that the prior-corrected weight provides the main correction gain, while the orthogonal trust region further improves stability. --- ### Found in Conversation: LLMs Teach Themselves to Close the Multi-Turn Gap Authors: Tianlang Chen, Shirley Wu, Jure Leskovec Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24432v1 Large Language Model (LLM) interactions are typically underspecified, with users clarifying all necessary details across multiple conversational turns. Yet recent work shows that LLMs perform far worse in this multi-turn setting than in a single turn with same information being available at once, a phenomenon termed "Lost-in-Conversation." However, bridging this gap effectively remains an open problem. Here we introduce Found in Conversation (FiC), a training framework where a model teaches itself to find and recover its single-turn competence given underspecified multi-turn prompts. We develop View-Asymmetric Self-Distillation, which distills across two views of the same task information--single-turn view for the teacher, multi-turn view for the student--transferring strong single-turn behavior into weak multi-turn behavior. This requires no stronger external teacher, which is unavailable as even frontier LLMs exhibit this gap. Across model families (Llama, Qwen, Phi, and OLMo) and sizes (3B-14B), FiC recovers at least 92% of single-turn performance and reaches 100% on two Llama backbones, yielding more efficient and helpful multi-turn conversations with single-turn capabilities intact. --- ### Representation-Guided Discrete Molecular Graph Retrosynthesis Authors: Jiahai Huang, Anjie Qiao, Zhen Wang, Defu Lian, Yutong Lu Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24428v1 Stochastic process-based molecular graph generators have become the state of the art for template-free single-step retrosynthesis. However, these models are typically trained only on product-reactant pairs, thereby acquiring chemistry-relevant representations in an indirect and implicit manner. Meanwhile, recent advances in computer vision demonstrate that offering representation guidance to a generator can effectively distill semantics from pretrained encoders into DiTs, substantially improving both convergence and generation quality. Whether similar gains extend to the retrosynthesis task, and what graph-specific design choices can make them work, remains an open question. To address these questions, we conduct a systematic empirical study over a unified design space spanning teacher molecular representations, endpoint and granularity choices, injection depths in the denoiser, correspondence strategies and guidance scheme. Guided by these considerations, we develop Graph-oriented Representation Guidance (GRG), which achieves 58.6 / 77.2 / 83.4 / 87.1 top-1 / 3 / 5 / 10 accuracy on USPTO-50k, while increasing diversity to 15.5, both substantially outperforming the adopted base generator. Notably, GRG consistently improves all top-k metrics in out-of-distribution settings, suggesting that representation guidance facilitates the acquisition of intrinsic chemical semantics. Meanwhile, the introduced representation guidance reduces the number of epochs by 35% and the wall-clock time by 30% to reach comparable performance. In addition, we introduce a simple yet effective representation-similarity-based reranking mechanism, which further improves the top of the ranked list without training an additional verifier. --- ### SEAL: Synergistic Co-Evolution of Agents and Learning Environments Authors: Yihao Hu, Zhihao Wen, Xiujin Liu, Pan Wang, Xin Zhang, Wei Wu Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24426v1 Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly improved through interaction, yet most self-evolution methods adapt either the policy or the learning environment in isolation. We identify this structural gap as \emph{Agent-Environment Misalignment}: the agent's capability frontier changes during training, while the environment that provides supervision remains static or only weakly coupled to the agent's revealed failures. We propose SEAL, a closed-loop co-evolution framework for interactive tool-use agents. SEAL collects on-policy trajectories under executable verification, diagnoses failed rollouts into turn-level failure labels, and uses these diagnoses as a shared signal for both environment-side adaptation and model-side policy optimization. The environment evolves its training-time learning interface by exposing clearer tool affordance cues, constraint information, and recovery-oriented feedback, while the policy is updated with diagnosis-guided advantage reweighting. Extensive experiments across in-distribution and out-of-distribution multi-turn tool-use evaluations show that SEAL improves low-resource agent learning: with only 400 training samples, it yields +8.25 to +26.25 average-point gains across three backbones and exhibits positive out-of-distribution transfer. These results demonstrate the value of jointly adapting the learner and its training-time learning substrate for robust self-improving LLM agents. --- ### Momentum Streams for Optimizer-Inspired Transformers Authors: Jingchu Gai, Nai-Chieh Huang, Jiayun Wu Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24425v1 The residual update of a pre-norm Transformer layer admits an interpretation as one step of a first-order optimizer acting on a surrogate token energy, wherein the attention and MLP sublayers function as gradient oracles. Based on this observation, we build a family of optimizer-inspired Transformers (triple-momentum, Adam/AdamW, Muon, SOAP) and compare them under matched compute. In our main pretraining experiment, the triple-momentum TMMFormer achieves the lowest validation loss, outperforming the vanilla Transformer and prior architectural variants. A controlled ablation and supporting theory show that momentum, not preconditioning, is the main source of the gain. We further show that TMMFormer and other momentum-based designs reach flatter minima than the vanilla Transformer, which leads to less forgetting and better generalization. --- ### Benchmarking the Limits of In-Context Reinforcement Learning for Ad-Hoc Teamwork Authors: Yuheng Jing, Kai Li, Ziwen Zhang, Jiajun Zhang, Zeyao Ma, Jiaxi Yang, Lei Zhang, Zhe Wu, Jinmin He, Junliang Xing, Jian Cheng Published: 2026-05-23 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.24423v2 In-Context Reinforcement Learning (ICRL) has enabled foundation agents to adapt instantaneously to novel tasks, yet its efficacy in Ad-Hoc Teamwork (AHT)-where coordination with unknown partners is required-remains unexplored. To rigorously evaluate this, we introduce a large-scale benchmark ICRL4AHT, built upon a high-throughput JAX implementation of Overcooked-V2. Our benchmark includes a large, diverse teammate suite spanning both RL and heuristic policies, enabling controlled train-test shifts, and provides a reproducible end-to-end pipeline for teammate generation, learning-history collection, dataset construction, and online multi-episode evaluation. We evaluate representative history-conditioned ICRL algorithms, including Algorithm Distillation (AD) and Decision-Pretrained Transformer (DPT), across millions of transitions. Results reveal notable limitations: contrary to their success in single-agent domains, these baselines fail to exhibit robust test-time adaptation in multi-agent settings. Specifically, these methods frequently underperform random baselines across both unseen teammate and unseen layout tracks, with no clear in-context improvement over long horizons. These findings highlight the challenges of strategic inference under partial observability within the OvercookedV2 AHT protocol, establishing our benchmark as a critical testbed for next-generation coordination algorithms. ---