# Research Papers — 2026-07 · bundle page 111 of 222 > Full-text markdown of papers #5501–5550 of 11075 published in 2026-07, newest first. AI-readable mirrors of the full 11075-paper 2026-07 archive (50 papers per file). Canonical page: https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/111 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/110.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/112.md) ### Demographically-Conditioned Synthetic Medical Images for Bias Mitigation and Bias Detection in Disease Classifiers Authors: Mahmoud Ibrahim, Bart Elen, Chang Sun, Gokhan Ertaylan, Michel Dumontier Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14984v1 Per-subgroup fairness audits of medical image classifiers face a sample-size problem: minority subgroups in held-out test sets have so few samples that the resulting confidence intervals on per-subgroup performance are wider than the bias the audit is meant to detect. We argue that a demographically-conditioned synthetic generator can do both: mitigate bias on the training side and detect bias on the evaluation side. Working on COVID-19 chest CT classification with an end-to-end fine-tuned Stable Diffusion 2.1 generator, we make two findings. For bias mitigation (training), a demographically-balanced synthetic cohort is most useful as a pretraining prior, not as joint augmentation: with the same fixed data, sequential pretraining followed by fine-tuning substantially outperforms joint augmentation, and the resulting classifier surpasses the full-real baseline at $\sim$$100\times$ real-data efficiency. For bias detection (evaluation), across five synthetic minority cohorts and five classifier seeds, the synthetic estimator reproduces the subgroup ranking of a well-powered real oracle (Spearman $ρ= 1.00$ on MCC and Recall) and gives the more reliable per-cell estimate where the small real test set runs out of samples. The synthetic cohort is therefore most useful in exactly the cells that fairness audits care about, as both a fix for and a measure of subgroup bias. --- ### From Draft to Draft-Free: One-Step Video Object Removal via Privileged Distillation and Fast Planting Authors: Zizhao Chen, Ping Wei, Guang Dai, Jingdong Wang, Mengmeng Wang Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14976v1 Video object removal is a fundamental yet challenging task in video editing. Despite recent progress, existing methods typically fall into two categories. Traditional approaches based on optical flow or attention mechanisms often introduce noticeable artifacts and yield unnatural results. In contrast, diffusion-based methods improve visual realism but demand multiple denoising steps, limiting their practicality. To address these issues, we propose From-Draft-to-Draft-Free (D2DF), a framework that distills the ability of transforming coarse drafts into refined videos into a one-step video generation model. Within D2DF, a teacher model is trained to refine low-quality removal results ("drafts") into high-fidelity videos by multiple steps. Then, through Prior-Privileged Consistency Distillation (PPCD), we distill this capability into a student model that performs one-step removal conditioned on the draft. To eliminate draft dependency, we introduce a Self-Guided Fast Planting (SGFP) module based on our Temporal Masked Transformer that autonomously generates scene-consistent pseudo-drafts in latent space, enabling a fully draft-free one-step model. Extensive experiments show that both draft-conditioned and draft-free versions achieve state-of-the-art performance on multiple metrics, surpassing traditional and multi-step generative methods in both quality and efficiency. The denoising process for a single video takes only about 1 second. --- ### CFM-Bench: A Unified Multi-Domain, Multi-Task Benchmark for Channel Foundation Models Authors: Yuan Gao, Wenjun Yu, Jun Jiang, Yunfan Li, Xinyu Guo, Shugong Xu Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14975v2 Channel foundation models (CFMs) are commonly evaluated in model-specific pipelines that differ in data, radio configurations, partitions, adaptation procedures, task definitions, and metrics, preventing reproducible comparison across CFMs and against task-specific networks. We release CFM-Bench, a unified multi-domain, multi-task benchmark comprising 157,900 official single-frame examples from six domains spanning 3GPP statistical simulation, two ray-tracing pipelines, terrestrial and aerial measurements, and synchronized vehicular multimodal simulation. Source-specific interfaces preserve complex channel state information (CSI) and the physical metadata available in each domain while allowing documented model-specific preprocessing. To reduce spatio-temporal leakage, official partitions isolate complete trajectories, measurement sessions, flights, vehicle links, simulation realizations, or buffered spatial regions. CFM-Bench excludes all benchmark splits from foundation-model pretraining, reserves the official training split for downstream fine-tuning, and reports the data used during model development. Six task groups across PHY, RAN, and ISAC applications cover CSI feedback, frequency and temporal channel extrapolation, propagation-state classification, current- and future-beam prediction, and single-frame and temporal localization. Representative experiments on CSI feedback, channel extrapolation, current-beam prediction, and wireless positioning provide reproducible reference results for pretrained channel-prediction models and task-specific neural networks. These results show that relative model performance can vary across data domains, highlighting the importance of using common data partitions, task definitions, and evaluation metrics. CFM-Bench provides a common substrate for evaluating the transferability of channel representations across models, domains, and tasks. --- ### CFM-Bench: A Unified Multi-Domain, Multi-Task Benchmark for Channel Foundation Models Authors: Yuan Gao, Wenjun Yu, Jun Jiang, Yunfan Li, Xinyu Guo, Shugong Xu Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14975v1 Channel foundation models (CFMs) are developing rapidly, with recent studies reporting benefits from pretraining across downstream wireless tasks. Yet CFMs are commonly evaluated in model-specific pipelines with different data, radio configurations, partitions, adaptation procedures, task definitions, and metrics. Reported comparisons therefore tend to show that pretraining improves over supervised training from scratch within one pipeline, but neither rank CFMs nor compare them fairly with task-specific models. We release CFM-Bench, a unified multi-domain, multi-task benchmark designed to address this gap. It curates six channel configurations spanning 3GPP statistical simulation, two independent ray-tracing pipelines, industrial and aerial measurements, and synchronized vehicular multimodal simulation. Official partitions isolate complete trajectories, measurement sessions, vehicle links, simulation realizations, or buffered spatial regions. CFM-Bench does not prescribe an external pretraining corpus or strategy; no benchmark split may be used for foundation-model pretraining, and the official training split is reserved exclusively for downstream fine-tuning. The benchmark additionally requires disclosure of all data used during model development and prohibits training-stage use of official test units. Six task groups are organized along three CFM application dimensions: physical-layer (PHY) channel intelligence, radio-access-network (RAN) decision intelligence, and integrated sensing and communication (ISAC). They cover CSI feedback, frequency and temporal channel extrapolation, propagation-state classification, current- and future-beam prediction, and single-frame and temporal localization. CFM-Bench provides a common substrate for comparing the transferability of channel representations across models, domains, and tasks. --- ### On Success and Simplicity: A Second Look at Transferable Vision-Language Attack Pipeline Authors: Yuchen Ren, Zhengyu Zhao, Chenhao Lin, Bo Yang, Chao Shen Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14974v1 Vision-Language Pre-training Models (VLPMs) are known to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Recent transferable attacks on VLPMs have followed a common pipeline with complicated loss functions or multi-stage text/image attacks. However, in this paper, we demonstrate that such a sophisticated attack pipeline can be simpler yet more successful. Specifically, we identify three previously overlooked issues caused by inappropriate cross-modal interactions and excessive operations. To address them, we propose the Simple Vision-Language Attack (SimVLA) pipeline, which observably improves transferability and efficiency. Experiments on four datasets and three downstream tasks validate the superiority of our pipeline. For instance, on Flickr30k text-image retrieval dataset, our SimVLA outperforms the SOTA baseline in R@1 transferability by 8.01\%-14.71\%, while consuming only about 35.73\% of the time and 46.26\% of the max VRAM. Overall, the superiority of our SimVLA highlights the importance of leveraging domain knowledge (e.g., our proposed cross-modal word identification), while blindly pursuing intricate operations (e.g, complex loss functions and redundant multi-stage designs) may even be harmful. We hope our SimVLA can serve as a simple yet effective backbone for future extensions. Code is available at https://github.com/RYC-98/SimVLA. --- ### Explaining Process Control Optimisation Recommendations via GradientSHAP and Implicit Differentiation Authors: Paul Darm, Cem Alpturk, Kenneth Ulrich, William Duncan, Ali Anwar, Annalisa Riccardi Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14970v1 Automated optimisation is increasingly adopted in industrial processes, yet a trust gap persists between engineers who design these algorithms and operators who must act on their recommendations. Explainable AI methods like SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) have transformed interpretability for machine learning predictions; optimisation outputs could benefit from similar techniques. We present an approach that integrates Implicit Function Theorem (IFT) based sensitivity analysis with SHAP attribution and narrative generation via Large Language Models (LLM), producing explanations tailored for operators. Our approach leverages IFT to compute exact parameter sensitivities $\partial p^*/\partial x$ from the optimality conditions, enabling efficient GradientSHAP computation. For an industrial High Pressure Grinding Roll (HPGR) control optimisation problem with 22 features, we achieve equivalent SHAP attributions (correlation $>$0.99 with KernelSHAP) with over 40$\times$ speedup, enabling real-time natural language explanations. We validate on industrial scenarios and present feedback from domain experts on generated explanations. --- ### Stitch-Inferencer: Enhance Endoscopic Video Segmentation and Tracking via Panoramic Reconstruction Authors: Shunsuke Kikuchi, Atsushi Kouno, Hiroki Matsuzaki Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14968v1 Surgical video understanding is fundamental to navigation systems. Endoscopic perception is often hindered by a limited field-of-view and frequent instrument occlusions, making spatio-temporal context essential for robust inference. These challenges have motivated video models that aggregate information across frames. However, existing video models typically store past observations implicitly in learned feature representations, often requiring task-specific video training, substantial annotated data, and increased computational cost. We propose Stitch-Inferencer, a real-time, model-agnostic inference framework that replaces implicit feature memory with an explicit image-space panoramic canvas. By stitching valid observations across frames, Stitch-Inferencer preserves previously observed pixels in an online, instrument-free view, expanding the effective field-of-view and providing direct access to regions that are temporarily occluded or absent from the current frame. Downstream segmentation or tracking models are applied to a compact region of interest on the panorama, and their predictions are reprojected to the current frame, enabling existing models to exploit long-range context without retraining. Experiments on anatomy segmentation and point/box tracking demonstrate consistent improvements across diverse baselines while preserving real-time throughput. The stitching module alone runs at over 60 FPS, providing a practical inference-time solution to enhance endoscopic perception in computationally constrained intraoperative environments. Source code will be made publicly available. --- ### Latent Trajectory Discrimination for AI-Generated Text Detection Authors: Gianluca Bonifazi, Christopher Buratti, Michele Marchetti, Federica Parlapiano, Giulia Quaglieri, Davide Traini, Domenico Ursino, Luca Virgili Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14967v1 Most existing approaches to AI-Generated Text Detection (AIGTD) treat documents as static objects and base their decisions on aggregate statistics or globally compressed embeddings. However, this perspective overlooks the inherently dynamic nature of autoregressive generation, where content evolves progressively through the latent space. In this paper, we reformulate AIGTD as the problem of distinguishing between latent generation trajectories. Instead of relying on static representations, we model how textual representations evolve across the sequence. To this end, we propose Geometric Trajectory and Contrastive Learning (GTCL), a framework that segments the document into ordered local units, encodes each unit in an embedding space, and constructs a structured and sequence-level representation. GTCL then applies contrastive learning to these trajectories to learn geometric regularities associated with the autoregressive generation. Evaluations performed on three different benchmarks and several approaches show that GTCL outperforms detection baselines consistently, which implies that explicitly modeling sequential dynamics provides robust discriminative signals across models and domains. These results suggest that modeling trajectory differences could improve detection and open up a dynamic direction that has been underexplored in previous AIGTD literature. --- ### U-shaped Multi-granularity Learning for Vision-Language Models Authors: Biao Chen, Yunqian Yu, Xiangxu Zhao, Zhongshu Chen, Mengmeng Jing, Lin Zuo Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14966v1 The prompt learning paradigm for vision-language models is effective yet faces a granularity dilemma: global prompts lack fine-grained semantic awareness, while local prompts ignore contextual associations, limiting cross-task generalization. This dilemma exists in dense prediction tasks. Inspired by U-Net, which unifies multi-level representations across granularities, we propose UPrompt, a U-shaped multi-granularity prompt learning framework for vision-language models. Similar to how U-Net integrates fine and coarse features through symmetric encoder-decoder pathways with cross-level connections, UPrompt constructs parallel multi-granularity representations in both visual and textual modalities, where coarse-to-fine cascaded enhancement propagates global context to refine local details, while fine-to-coarse hierarchical supervision ensures semantic consistency across scales. Extensive experiments on 17 benchmarks validate our effectiveness. UPrompt outperforms MAMET and VPKE by 4.1 and 7.3 rSum on MSCOCO, surpasses CoCoA-Mix by 5.09% in base-to-novel generalization, while maintaining competitive performance with minimal overhead (coarse-grained) and matching PSRC with 1/3 cost (medium-grained). --- ### Multi-Axis Max@K Reinforcement Learning for Representative Diversity in Text-to-Image Generation Authors: Ku Onoda, Paavo Parmas, Hiroki Furuta, Soichiro Nishimori, Yuta Oshima, Shohei Taniguchi, Yutaka Matsuo Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14962v2 Text-to-image (T2I) models can synthesize realistic, prompt-aligned images, yet samples generated for the same prompt often cover only a small subset of visually distinct modes. This limits diversity and, for person-centric prompts, can reflect or amplify demographic skew. We formalize this problem as target-mode coverage, the coverage of a predefined set of semantically specified modes, and propose multi-axis max@K, a group-based reinforcement learning objective for improving it in diffusion-based T2I models. Given a group of samples and one score per target mode, multi-axis max@K first takes the maximum score across samples for each mode and then sums these per-mode maxima. The resulting credit assignment gives a sample positive weight on a mode only when it raises that mode's group maximum, so different samples can contribute to different modes. We validate the credit-assignment mechanism on a synthetic mixture and on SD3.5-M with deterministic pixel-based color rewards, and then apply the same objective to perceived-appearance fairness. On held-out prompts, multi-axis max@K improves the Fairness Score by 0.23-0.36 over the base model under three automatic evaluators, while maintaining image quality and text alignment. Code is available at https://github.com/KuOnoda/multi-axis-maxk. --- ### Multi-Axis Max@K Reinforcement Learning for Representative Diversity in Text-to-Image Generation Authors: Ku Onoda, Paavo Parmas, Hiroki Furuta, Soichiro Nishimori, Yuta Oshima, Shohei Taniguchi, Yutaka Matsuo Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14962v1 Text-to-image (T2I) models can synthesize realistic, prompt-aligned images, yet samples generated for the same prompt often cover only a small subset of visually distinct modes. This limits the diversity of images, and for person-centric prompts, can reflect or amplify demographic skew. We formalize this problem as coverage of a predefined set of semantically specified modes, which we call target-mode coverage. We then propose multi-axis max@K, a group-based reinforcement learning objective for improving such coverage in diffusion-based T2I models. Given a group of samples and one score per target category, multi-axis max@K first takes the maximum score across samples for each category and then sums these category-wise maxima. The resulting credit assignment gives a sample positive weight on a category only when it increases that category's group-wise maximum, allowing different samples to contribute to different categories. We first validate the credit-assignment mechanism on a synthetic mixture and on SD3.5-M using deterministic pixel-based color rewards. We then evaluate the same objective on perceived-appearance fairness. Across three automatic evaluators on held-out prompts, multi-axis max@K improves the Fairness Score by 0.23-0.36 relative to the base model, while maintaining image quality and text alignment. --- ### Contextualized Early Detection of Online Firestorms: A Sequential LLM-Based Approach Authors: Besim Shala, Peter Mandl, Andreas Humpe, Martin Häusl Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14957v1 Online firestorms are rapid collective escalations of highly negative user-generated content and may cause substantial reputational and economic damage. Existing detectors usually work with volume signals, sentiment scores, or predefined linguistic features. Such signals are useful, but they capture contextual meaning shifts in evolving discussion threads only indirectly. This paper proposes an LLM-based detection system with two operating modes. The first mode classifies complete Reddit threads retrospectively by combining local chunk-level assessments into a thread-level judgment. The second mode processes threads sequentially and issues early warnings when a sliding window exceeds calibrated thresholds. In this mode, the language model estimates three firestorm indicators: negativity share, escalation level, and contributor count. On a balanced Reddit dataset, the global mode achieves strong classification performance, while the early warning mode reaches high recall and detects escalating threads after only a small number of comments and distinct contributors. The results indicate that LLMs can be used not only for static judgment tasks, but also as repeated estimators in context-aware monitoring of social media discourse. --- ### LongStraw: Long-Context RL Beyond 2M Tokens under a Fixed GPU Budget Authors: Changhai Zhou, Kieran Liu, Yuhua Zhou, Qian Qiao, Jun Gao, Harry Zhang, Irvine Lu, Nolan Ho, Lucian Li, Andrew Lei, Cleon Cheng, Steven Chiang et al. Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.DC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14952v3 Long-context RL post-training is constrained by the lifetime of state and gradients, not attention cost alone. In GRPO, one multi-million-token prompt must serve old-policy and reference scoring plus multiple policy responses, while conventional autograd keeps the prompt graph and all response graphs live alongside model weights, caches, and distributed communication buffers. We present LongStraw, an objective-aware, architecture-aware system for resident-state virtualization, response replay, and distributed-gradient execution. Its transaction captures the shared prompt without autograd, retains only the architecture-required state on explicitly owned pages, restores that state for each group member, scores old/reference branches without a graph, replays one policy response at a time with autograd, and accumulates the resulting gradients before one distributed finalization and optimizer step. This schedule bounds the live training graph by the response suffix while reusing the expensive prompt computation across the complete GRPO group. We instantiate this design for two incompatible model structures. Qwen3.6-27B combines 48 recurrent GDN layers with 16 full-attention layers; LongStraw keeps the compact recurrent state and physically CP8-sharded KV pages, composes global attention through cross-rank LSE/output merging, and performs blockwise response replay. GLM-5.2 combines a 78-layer MLA/DSA attention stack with a 256-expert, top-8 MoE tail. Its implementation keeps CP-sharded MLA latent pages and DSA indexer-key pages in CPU memory, stages one layer at a time, reconstructs IndexShare-aware global sparse selection over CP32, and dispatches routed response tokens over EP32. The two paths share one transaction contract while specializing the retained state, replay operator, and collective communication to the architecture... --- ### Optimal Self-Distillation for Rectified Flow via Linear Probing Authors: Saptarshi Roy, Debepsita Mukherjee, Pratik Patil Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14947v1 Modern generative models are increasingly trained using model-generated signals, creating both opportunities for self-improvement and risks of collapse. We study optimal self-distillation (SD) for rectified flow (RF): given a suboptimal teacher velocity field, can a student trained on a mixture of true RF velocities and teacher velocities provably improve the teacher? For linear RF with ridge regularization on fixed interpolation pairs, we prove an exact affine path identity, derive the optimal mixing coefficient in closed form, and show strict improvement in integrated velocity risk whenever the teacher risk is nonstationary along the regularization path. The optimal coefficient obeys a sign rule: positive mixing corrects under-regularized teachers, while negative mixing corrects over-regularized teachers. We also give one-shot generalized cross-validation (GCV) and validation tuning procedure that avoids grid search over mixing weights and repeated refitting. Combining this theorem with RF Wasserstein convergence bounds, we show that optimal self-distillation improves the velocity estimation terms controlling continuous-time and finite-step generation error. Experiments with Gaussian models, Gaussian mixtures, and image data show that optimal self-distillation improves velocity risk, mode recovery, and finite-step generation relative to both the teacher and pure distillation. --- ### DINE: Distance Is Not Enough -- Learning Global Deformation Priors for Robust Soft-Tissue Point Cloud Registration Authors: Sara Monji-Azad, Rohit Beer, Marvin Kinz, Claudia Scherl, Jürgen Hesser Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14946v1 Non-rigid point cloud registration is central to soft-tissue shape analysis, but large deformations, noise, and outliers make correspondence estimation challenging. Most learning-based methods rely on local objectives such as Chamfer distance, which encourage point-wise proximity but do not constrain the global plausibility of the predicted deformation field. We address this limitation with DINE, a maximum a posteriori framework that augments distance-based registration with a learned statistical prior over displacement vector fields. DINE is applied to two registration backbones, Robust-DefReg and DefTransNet, using a two-stage strategy: a first-stage model is trained with Chamfer distance, its predicted deformation fields are used to estimate a prior, and the model is then refined with a combined distance and negative log-prior objective. We compare a full-field PCA Gaussian prior with a per-vector normalizing-flow prior. Experiments on DeformedTissue and SynBench show lower mean Chamfer distance under deformation and corruption. On DeformedTissue, DINE-PCA reduces Chamfer distance by approximately 27--69\% relative to the corresponding Stage-1 backbone across deformation levels, and improves robustness by up to 66\% for outliers and 83\% for Gaussian noise. On SynBench, improvements are modest at the smallest deformation levels and reach approximately 59--79\% from moderate to severe deformation. These results suggest that global deformation plausibility is an important constraint for reliable soft-tissue point cloud registration. (The code will be published soon.) --- ### Introspective Attention Modulation for Safe Text-to-Image Generation Authors: Basim Azam, Hossein Rahmani, Naveed Akhtar Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14945v2 State-of-the-art flow based text-to-image (T2I) models exhibit remarkable generative abilities but remain vulnerable to producing unsafe content. Prior safety efforts range from concept erasure and prompt filtering to classifier-based gating. However, simple techniques like parameter efficient adaptations of the models easily bypass such guardrails. We introduce a unique principled approach that achieves safety by regulating the model's attention dynamics through inference-time introspection, exhibiting intrinsic robustness. Our method analyzes and rebalances attention activations throughout image synthesis, steering generations away from unsafe concepts while preserving semantic alignment. This introspective control ensures safety of deployed models. Across standard and adversarial safety benchmarks, our approach achieves remarkable safety scores while maintaining or even improving alignment and perceptual quality. Our results reveal that attention-space regulation offers a considerably more promising path to safer diffusion transformer based image generation than the existing concept erasing mechanism.Our code can be accessed at https://basim-azam.github.io/iam/ --- ### Introspective Attention Modulation for Safe Text-to-Image Generation Authors: Basim Azam, Hossein Rahmani, Naveed Akhtar Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14945v1 State-of-the-art flow based text-to-image (T2I) models exhibit remarkable generative abilities but remain vulnerable to producing unsafe content. Prior safety efforts range from concept erasure and prompt filtering to classifier-based gating. However, simple techniques like parameter efficient adaptations of the models easily bypass such guardrails. We introduce a unique principled approach that achieves safety by regulating the model's attention dynamics through inference-time introspection, exhibiting intrinsic robustness. Our method analyzes and rebalances attention activations throughout image synthesis, steering generations away from unsafe concepts while preserving semantic alignment. This introspective control ensures safety of deployed models. Across standard and adversarial safety benchmarks, our approach achieves remarkable safety scores while maintaining or even improving alignment and perceptual quality. Our results reveal that attention-space regulation offers a considerably more promising path to safer diffusion transformer based image generation than the existing concept erasing mechanism.Our code can be accessed at https://basim-azam.github.io/iam/ --- ### Steering Robustness into World Action Models via Mechanistic Interpretability and Optimal Control Authors: Jihoon Hong, Julian Skifstad, Qiyue Dai, Alice Chan, Glen Chou Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.LG, eess.SY, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14943v1 World Action Models (WAMs) enable semantically- and physically-informed control but are brittle under distribution shift. In this work, we use mechanistic interpretability to study how robustness-relevant perturbations are represented in WAM activation space. Comparing activations across successful and unsuccessful rollouts, we find some WAM architectures exhibit low-dimensional linear separability for robustness-critical features, while others do not. This motivates the use of contrastive activation directions for training-free WAM steering. We also show that local linearity in WAM activation dynamics enables efficient feedback steering via model-based optimal control, yielding World-Action Linear Quadratic Regulator (WA-LQR), a minimally-invasive reduced-order LQR controller. Via mechanistic evaluations, we predict strong steerability in the Cosmos-Policy and DiT4DiT models but weak steerability in LingBot-VA, consistent with steering intervention results. On Cosmos-Policy and DiT4DiT, WA-LQR generalizes contrastive directions to new tasks and improves robustness to camera, gripper, and visual-noise perturbations over unsteered and prompt steering baselines. --- ### Frequency-Structured Field Learning for Light-Field Disparity Estimation Authors: Sara Monji-Azad, Yulin Liu, Jürgen Hesser Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14941v1 Light-field disparity estimation requires global consistency in smooth or textureless regions and local precision near occlusion boundaries, thin structures, and abrupt depth transitions. Existing methods address these requirements through EPI matching, cost-volume or focal-stack construction, view aggregation, or direct convolutional regression, often relying on local windows, discrete disparity hypotheses, memory-intensive volumes, or attention-based aggregation. We instead formulate disparity estimation at the field level, predicting disparity from globally and locally updated EPI-derived latent features without explicitly constructing a disparity volume. We introduce FreqLF, an EPI-guided Fourier-local framework that encodes angular parallax cues from horizontal and vertical EPI stacks together with central-view appearance features. These cues are projected into a latent field and updated through stacked hybrid Fourier-local layers. Fourier low-mode updates enable global feature interaction, while local convolutions preserve spatial variations needed for fine disparity detail. A coordinate-conditioned Gaussian-mixture decoder then predicts disparity, using the mixture mean as the final estimate. Experiments on the HCI 4D Light Field Benchmark show that FreqLF approaches the accuracy of strong supervised baselines while avoiding explicit cost-volume construction in the base model. Ablations confirm the complementary roles of the Fourier and local branches, and scaling experiments demonstrate practical behavior across spatial resolutions. These results suggest that Fourier-local latent field learning is a competitive alternative for light-field disparity estimation. The code will be published soon. --- ### Causal Inference for Sequential Settings under Interference and Latent Confounding Authors: Phevos Paschalidis, Constantinos Daskalakis, Devavrat Shah Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.LG, math.PR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14940v1 We study causal inference under outcome interference for sequential, observational settings. Specifically, we consider settings where the binary outcomes over N units are Markovian across T time steps. At each time step, the outcomes of N units have dependencies captured through an Ising model; each outcome is also impacted through an external field capturing the effects of its treatment as well as latent confounders. Similar to panel data literature, these latent confounders are modeled to have a low-rank factor structure. Our data is a single sample from this high-dimensional distribution. To estimate causal quantities of interest, we provide a computationally efficient method based on Maximum Pseudo-Likelihood Estimation (MPLE) for learning the model parameters. Under mild assumptions, we establish non-asymptotic consistency for parameter estimation and show this translates to faithful estimation of causal quantities of interest after sampling from the learned model. We demonstrate the efficacy of the method through synthetic experiments as well as a real-world case-study investigating causal effects of vaccine rates on COVID-19 death rates within US counties nationwide. --- ### A Minimal Interpretable Architecture for Zero-Shot Reconstruction of Dynamical Systems Authors: Christoph Jürgen Hemmer, Florian Plaswig, Daniel Durstewitz Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, math.DS, nlin.CD arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14937v1 Recent foundation models (FMs) for zero-shot reconstruction of dynamical systems (DS) achieve strong out-of-domain generalization but provide little insight into the mechanisms that underlie their forecasts. Such an understanding could help to strip down overladen FM architectures to their bare essence and expose the minimal requirements for in-context learning in the DS domain. Toward this goal, here we iteratively reduce a recent powerful SOTA model for DS reconstruction, DynaMix (Hemmer & Durstewitz, 2025), to a minimal interpretable two-parameter form, which we call DynaBase. DynaBase produces forecasts through a linear blend of the current latent state and the nearest in-context neighbor and its temporal successor. Surprisingly, despite its extreme simplicity, DynaBase produces highly competitive zero-shot DS reconstructions across chaotic and cyclic systems, with a negligible parameter load, many orders of magnitude below that of other FMs. Even more, this extreme simplicity permits direct model optimization on DS reconstruction measures, as well as closed-form one-step analytical solutions on prediction MSE. Theoretical and empirical analysis of DynaBase further leads to a 1-parameter family of maps, with the context-parroting algorithm of (Zhang & Gilpin, 2026) recovered at one end, and chaotic (divergent but bounded) behavior at the other. We further show how different training strategies lead to models either optimal for short-term prediction or for DS reconstruction. Thus, DynaBase not only exposes the minimal mechanisms required for producing zero-shot DS reconstruction, but also reconciles within an accessible mathematical frame divergent observations in the literature. --- ### Confidence-based Ranking with Adaptive Sampling for Noisy Black-Box Optimisation Authors: Enrico Halim, Hemant Kumar Singh, Tapabrata Ray Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14936v1 Real-world optimization problems often involve black-box functions and uncertainties in their evaluation, widely referred to as noisy optimization problems (NOPs). Evolutionary algorithms (EA), including Evolutionary Strategies (ES) and genetic algorithms (GA) have been commonly adopted to solve these problems in the contemporary literature. An ongoing challenge is the computational expense involved, given the number of evaluations required for good fitness estimation and ranking. Two fundamental methods commonly used for fitness estimation for NOPs are implicit averaging and explicit averaging. Explicit averaging uses resampling of solutions to improve the estimates, while implicit averaging typically uses a large population size with low resampling. Implicit averaging has been shown to have theoretical advantages for certain cases, which has motivated some recent approaches to use them. However, a recent study demonstrated that its performance is highly dependent on certain assumptions about the function, such as steepness and constant noise level, which may not apply for majority of the real world problems. Moreover, most existing algorithms have only considered homoscedastic noise, where the amplitude of variation is uniform across the entire search space, as opposed to more generic case of heteroscedastic noise. To address these issues, we introduce a set of heteroscedastic test problems and propose a novel confidence ranking method that employs a computationally efficient explicit averaging strategy with sampling budget adaptation. It is implemented within the Covariance Matrix Adaptation ES (CMA-ES) and GA frameworks to demonstrate its effectiveness and versatility. The resulting algorithm is evaluated on a range of problems with both homoscedastic and heteroscedastic noise, and it demonstrates superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches. --- ### VideoChat3: Fully Open Video MLLM for Efficient and Generalist Video Understanding Authors: Xinhao Li, Yuhan Zhu, Xiangyu Zeng, Yuhao Dong, Haoning Wu, Zhiqiu Zhang, Yuandong Yang, Changlian Ma, Qingyu Zhang, Yansong Shi, Xinyu Chen, Haoran Chen et al. Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14935v2 Recent advances in video understanding have spanned motion, long video, and streaming interaction, driving this field toward real-world applications. Despite this progress, current open-source models remain limited in several ways. They often struggle to generalize across diverse video types, making them effective only in specific domains. High computational demands further restrict their efficiency and scalability. Moreover, most models are only partially open, with key components such as training code, strategy, or datasets unavailable, which hinders reproducibility and slows community-driven development. To address these issues, we introduce VideoChat3, a fully open, efficient, and generalist video-centric MLLM. VideoChat3 advances video understanding through two complementary designs. For efficiency, we introduce Inflated 3D Vision Transformer (I3D-ViT) and Adaptive Frame Resolution for Streaming Video Perception, which enables efficient spatiotemporal representation and reduces the cost of processing video inputs during training and inference. For effectiveness, we develop a scalable video data synthesis pipeline that curates three diverse, high-quality training datasets: VideoChat3-Academic2M, VideoChat3-LV116K, and VideoChat3-OL617K, covering general, long-form, and streaming video scenarios, improving the model's generalization across domains. By integrating these designs, VideoChat3 achieves a rare balance of broad generalization and computational efficiency. Experiments across general, long-form, and streaming benchmarks demonstrate that VideoChat3 surpasses prior open-source models with equal or larger parameter counts with only 4B parameters and higher efficiency. --- ### VideoChat3: Fully Open Video MLLM for Efficient and Generalist Video Understanding Authors: Xinhao Li, Yuhan Zhu, Xiangyu Zeng, Yuhao Dong, Haoning Wu, Zhiqiu Zhang, Yuandong Yang, Changlian Ma, Qingyu Zhang, Yansong Shi, Xinyu Chen, Haoran Chen et al. Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14935v1 Recent advances in video understanding have spanned motion, long video, and streaming interaction, driving this field toward real-world applications. Despite this progress, current open-source models remain limited in several ways. They often struggle to generalize across diverse video types, making them effective only in specific domains. High computational demands further restrict their efficiency and scalability. Moreover, most models are only partially open, with key components such as training code, strategy, or datasets unavailable, which hinders reproducibility and slows community-driven development. To address these issues, we introduce VideoChat3, a fully open, efficient, and generalist video-centric MLLM. VideoChat3 advances video understanding through two complementary designs. For efficiency, we introduce Inflated 3D Vision Transformer (I3D-ViT) and Adaptive Frame Resolution for Streaming Video Perception, which enables efficient spatiotemporal representation and reduces the cost of processing video inputs during training and inference. For effectiveness, we develop a scalable video data synthesis pipeline that curates three diverse, high-quality training datasets: VideoChat3-Academic2M, VideoChat3-LV116K, and VideoChat3-OL617K, covering general, long-form, and streaming video scenarios, improving the model's generalization across domains. By integrating these designs, VideoChat3 achieves a rare balance of broad generalization and computational efficiency. Experiments across general, long-form, and streaming benchmarks demonstrate that VideoChat3 surpasses prior open-source models with equal or larger parameter counts with only 4B parameters and higher efficiency. --- ### Still image and spatial-temporal tomato data enabling detection, segmentation, tracking, and video-instance segmentation using strong and weak labels Authors: Michael Halstead, Esra Guclu, Mohamed Farag, Enrico Pallotta, Christian Hund, Ribana Roscher, Maren Bennewitz, Juergen Gall, Cyrill Stachniss, Chris McCool Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14934v1 In this manuscript we release two datasets for visual sensing of tomato plants grown in commercial-like settings and acquired using a robot. The first is BUTom21 which consists of still images and manual annotations. The second is BUTom-ST21 which consists of video-based data and semi-automated annotations through AI-based methods, referred to as pseudo-labels. In both cases, we provide pixel-level labels for the ripeness of the fruit. The aim is to provide the research community a challenging set of real-world imagery to explore methods to sense and estimate the state of tomato plants and their fruit, which is an important horticultural crop. Importantly, the spatial-temporal dataset provides individual fruit count and ripeness information enabling researchers to push the boundaries of field-based phenotyping. --- ### Benchmarking Face Recognition without Real Faces Authors: Paweł Borsukiewicz, Daniele Lunghi, Wendkûuni C. Ouédraogo, Jacques Klein, Tegawendé F. Bissyandé Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14932v1 Synthetic face datasets have become effective enough to train face recognition models with accuracy rivaling that of models trained on real photographs. This progress sidesteps the ethical and legal burdens of collecting real biometric data, yet evaluation has not kept pace. Even studies that train entirely on synthetic images still rely on real-face benchmarks to measure performance, leaving the privacy problem only half solved. We ask whether synthetic datasets can replace real benchmarks for face recognition evaluation. We test 12 synthetic datasets against 7 established real benchmarks using 24 pre-trained models that span both convolutional and transformer architectures. Our evaluation covers biometric verification metrics, similarity score distributions, cross-model ranking consistency, and the underlying distributional properties of each dataset. Benchmarking fidelity varies widely across the synthetic candidates, but the two strongest, MorphFace and Vec2Face, reproduce the relative behavior of real benchmarks and reach agreement levels that fall within the natural disagreement already observed among the real benchmarks themselves. These results establish that well-constructed synthetic datasets can support reliable comparative evaluation for face recognition, moving the field closer to a fully synthetic and privacy-preserving pipeline for both training and benchmarking. --- ### TanGO: Training-Free 3D Editing via Tangent-Space Guidance and Optimization Authors: Siwoo Lim, Sunjae Yoon, Gwanhyeong Koo, Hyeonseo Yun, Chang D. Yoo Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14927v1 While recent flow-matching 3D generative models (e.g., VecSet) adopt structured representations, their tokens share global context, causing conventional training-free editing to suffer from semantic artifacts such as collapsed preserved regions or incomplete transformations. To address this, we propose TanGO, a training-free framework that enables adaptive per-token steering in the tangent space of generative dynamics. To realize this selective control, we formulate a one-step optimal control rule and determine the strength of each token's control signal using a von Mises-Fisher inspired directional discrepancy derived from the source and target velocity fields. Experiments show that TanGO substantially reduces structural artifacts and achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing 3D editing baselines. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/siw00-lim/TanGO. --- ### Random Logit Scaling: Defending Deep Neural Networks Against Black-Box Score-Based Adversarial Example Attacks Authors: Hamid Dashtbani, Mehdi Dousti Gandomani, AmirMahdi Sadeghzadeh Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14921v1 Machine learning models are increasingly adapted in various domains. However, adversarial examples pose a significant threat to the reliable deployment of these models. In recent years, some powerful adversarial example attacks have been proposed for the fast and query-efficient generation of adversarial examples, even in black-box scenarios, highlighting the need for scalable, low-cost, and powerful defenses. In this work, we present two contributions to the domain of black-box adversarial example attacks and defenses. First, we propose Random Logit Scaling (RLS), a randomization-based defense against black-box score-based adversarial example attacks. RLS is a plug-and-play, post-processing defense that can be implemented on top of any existing ML model with minimal effort. The idea behind RLS is to confuse an attacker by outputting falsified scores resulting from randomly scaled logits while maintaining the model accuracy. We show that RLS significantly reduces the success rate of state-of-the-art black-box score-based attacks while preserving the accuracy and minimizing confidence score distortion compared to state-of-the-art randomization-based defenses. Second, we introduce a novel adaptive attack against AAA, a SOTA non-randomized black-box defense against black-box score-based attacks that also modifies output logits to confuse attackers, demonstrating its vulnerability against adaptive attacks. --- ### Show Me How You Reason and I'll Tell You Who You Are: Reasoning Graphs for Robust LLM Authorship Attribution Authors: Zlata Kikteva, Artur Romazanov, Annette Hautli-Janisz, Ramon Ruiz-Dolz Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14905v2 Given the current trend to employ large language models (LLMs) in almost any imaginable context, LLM-generated text detection and authorship attribution have become a pressing issue. Prior work has primarily focused on surface-level linguistic features, an approach shown to be susceptible to paraphrasing and other obfuscation techniques. In this paper, we go beyond the linguistic surface, extracting and analysing reasoning structures in LLM-generated texts with the goal of capturing more complex signals of LLM authorship. We propose a graph neural network approach that leverages reasoning graphs extracted by an argument mining pipeline, demonstrating improved robustness and generalisation over a traditional Longformer baseline. Our approach outperforms the baseline by up to 27 percentage points under the obfuscation attacks such as paraphrasing and backtranslation, and 19 percentage points when evaluated on the texts generated by the unseen model versions, simulating real-world conditions in which new LLM versions are continuously released. --- ### FlashDecoder: Real-Time Latent-to-Pixel Streaming Decoder with Transformers Authors: Minguk Kang, Suha Kwak Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14898v1 Real-time video generation demands fast decoding as much as fast denoising, yet current latent video diffusion models rely on 3D convolutional decoders that are slow and memory-intensive at high resolutions or for long video. We introduce FlashDecoder, a fast, memory-efficient pure-Transformer video decoder that decodes latents to pixels frame by frame. At each step, the current frame attends only to a fixed-size window of past frames through a rolling KV cache. The fixed temporal window keeps decoding fast and memory bounded regardless of video length, enabling constant-latency streaming. Because frames are processed sequentially, temporal causality is enforced without explicit attention masks, enabling training at resolutions up to 1080p and matching the reconstruction quality of convolutional decoders. On the Wan2.1 and Wan2.2 latent spaces, FlashDecoder matches each convolutional decoder in reconstruction quality (e.g., 41.55dB vs. 41.49dB PSNR at 1080p) while decoding 3.6x-4.7x faster with up to 11x less memory on a single H100 GPU. With architecture-aware inference optimizations, the speedup widens to 12x. --- ### Selectivity Drives Efficiency: Dataset Pruning for Visual Place Recognition Authors: Tong Jin, Yunpeng Liu, Shuyu Hu, Chun Yuan, Song Wang, Feng Lu Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14897v1 Recent visual place recognition (VPR) studies have increasingly relied on large-scale datasets to train more robust and discriminative models. Although this trend significantly improves recognition performance, it also introduces substantial storage and training costs, especially when new architectures or training strategies need to be repeatedly developed and evaluated. Dataset pruning (DP) provides a promising way to improve data efficiency by retaining only informative training data. However, conventional DP methods mainly follow the sample-wise classification paradigm, which overlooks the relation-dependent training nature of VPR, where supervision is typically formed by image pairs rather than independent images. To address this issue, we propose a place-wise dataset pruning framework tailored for VPR. Instead of pruning individual images, our method treats each place as the basic pruning unit and introduces two complementary novel metrics, i.e., intra-place diversity (IPD) and inter-place similarity (IPS), to evaluate the training value of each place. By jointly considering these two metrics, our method ranks all places and constructs a compact yet informative coreset, thereby allowing the pruned dataset to still support the training of robust and discriminative VPR models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art DP baselines under different pruning ratios while reducing selection and training costs. Moreover, by pruning a merged dataset roughly 3.5$\times$ the size of GSV-Cities to a comparable scale, our coreset maintains highly competitive performance, achieving 94.5\% R@1 on MSLS-val and 97.0\% R@1 on Nordland with only NetVLAD. Codes will be made publicly available. --- ### StructureClaw: Traceable LLM Agents and an Executable Benchmark for Structural Engineering Workflows Authors: Sizhong Qin, Yi Gu, Yao Jiang, Ao Cai, Changjian Zhou, Shaoxuan Shuai, Jiachang Wang, Tianhao Shen, Yueqiang Li, Xinhao Li, Li Zeng, Yueshi Chen et al. Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14896v2 Addressing a structural-engineering request requires more than a single answer; it requires a chain of interdependent artifacts: interpreted requirements, a computable model, validation records, solver outputs, applicable engineering checks, and a final report. Evaluations centered on question answering or script generation may therefore reward fluent outputs even when the underlying workflow is incomplete, inconsistent, or non-executable. We present StructureClaw, an artifact-centered workbench in which LLM agents operate through governed engineering skills, typed tools, shared artifact state, and local analysis backends, together with StructureClaw-Bench, an executable benchmark of 150 controlled scenarios spanning standard workflows, interactive robustness, and multimodal structural-model reconstruction. Its analyzable standard and multimodal cases require both strict one-to-one structural-model matching and numerical-response agreement with frozen reference responses from the selected analysis engine; interactive cases instead require positive clarification or recovery evidence together with safe non-execution when appropriate. A trial succeeds only when every fixture-required assertion passes. Across nine text-agent configurations, generic-only execution passed the model-artifact check in 87.0% of retained outcomes but achieved only 22.0% E2E Success, whereas automatic StructureClaw reached 82.9%. Interactive and multimodal evaluations further identify semantic state consistency and executable model reconstruction as the dominant remaining bottlenecks. The code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/structureclaw/structureclaw. --- ### Leveraging Instruction Tuning and Merging for Reasoning Model Adaptation Authors: Yu-Du Feng, Niels Mündler-Sasahara, Mark Vero, Martin Vechev Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14895v1 Reasoning language models (RLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in domains such as mathematics and coding. These domains permit reliable verification of model outputs, which is important for enabling the reinforcement learning that drives RLM performance gains. However, training RLMs on domains that lack reliable verifiers remains challenging. Meanwhile, for both verifiable and unverifiable domains, large amounts of unused supervised fine-tuning data with human-written solutions exist. In this work, we show that these data can be used efficiently to further improve RLM performance. For this, we first use classic instruction tuning, supervised fine-tuning without reasoning traces, on the RLM. Next, we merge our instruction-tuned model with the original reasoning model, recovering its reasoning behavior on the target domain. Our extensive evaluation demonstrates that our technique improves RLM performance in both verifiable and hard-to-verify domains, including coding and text summarization, while preserving RLM capabilities across other domains. Importantly, our method is highly cost-effective, enabling such improvements for less than USD $3. --- ### Domain Adaptation of Mismatched Proximal Denoiser for Plug-and-Play Image Reconstruction Authors: Guixian Xu, Jinglai Li, Junqi Tang Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: eess.IV, cs.LG, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14894v1 Plug-and-play proximal gradient descent (PnP-PGD) enables flexible image reconstruction by using denoisers as implicit priors. In practice, these denoisers are often deployed outside their training domains. Existing analyses establish convergence under structural assumptions on the deployed denoiser, such as requiring it to be a proximal map or a contraction. However, they do not measure how domain mismatch affects convergence of PnP-PGD. We define this effect as \emph{proximal mismatch}: the discrepancy between a deployed denoiser $\widehat{\mathsf D}$ and a target-domain reference map $\mathsf D_\star=\operatorname{prox}_{R_\star}$ associated with the underlying regularizer $R_\star$. Under this mismatch, each denoising update becomes an inexact proximal step for the target objective. We further derive a stationarity bound that decays at a rate of $\mathcal{O}(1/K)$, with an additive term proportional to the average squared proximal mismatch. This result motivates adaptation via proximal matching rather than MSE-based adaptation alone. We study this approach with two established denoiser families: learned proximal networks and gradient-step denoisers. Experiments on Gaussian deblurring and super-resolution under substantial domain shift show that proximal matching adaptation improves reconstruction quality significantly over MSE-based adaptation, yielding the largest numerical gains in the few-shot regime. --- ### Proof-or-Stop: Don't Trust the Agent, Trust the Evidence -- Loop Engineering for Verifiable Evidence-Gated Lifecycle Control Authors: Jek Huang, Jeffery Hsia, Jiayi Sun, Freddie Shi, Wei Huang, Ian H. White Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.AI, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14890v1 Autonomous coding agents increasingly execute multi-step software work, but lifecycle states such as reviewed, tested, DONE, and ready-to-merge remain claims unless supported by current evidence. We present Proof-or-Stop Lifecycle Control, a method that permits lifecycle transitions only when fresh, tracked-source-state-bound, mechanically verifiable evidence satisfies the relevant gate. The method treats agent outputs as claims rather than lifecycle state, and uses proof operationally to mean gate-admissible evidence under a stated trust model, not semantic program correctness. We evaluate an open-source implementation through mechanism tests, a powered control-policy ablation, and operated self-application evidence. The unattended-loop engine passed 10 of 10 scenarios with zero false-DONE, and local-key receipt bundles rejected 18 tamper classes with zero false accepts. In a 9,240-cell ablation, the pre-registered A4 versus A2-prime comparison reduced visible-pass/hidden-fail amplification from 31 of 1,800 injected cells under a compute-budgeted naive loop to 2 of 1,800 under the gated loop, a 1.6 percentage-point improvement in not-amplified rate with a 95 percent confidence interval of (0.8, 2.5). A near-compute A3 versus A4 comparison, 14 of 1,800 versus 2 of 1,800, indicates that the gain is associated with enforcing review as a lifecycle gate rather than merely adding a reviewer. The self-application corpus contains 565 stories and 1,007 review findings, with 94.8 percent resolved, plus a 68-row high/critical cross-vendor exhibit. These results support Proof-or-Stop as a model-agnostic, host-neutral control layer for deciding which autonomous-agent claims a lifecycle may act on. The evaluation is limited to one model family, 24 ablation tasks, and a self-hosted corpus. --- ### Analytical study of the optimal combination of binary classifiers based on classifiers-induced partitioning of the training set Authors: Jean-Marc Brossier, Olivier Lafitte Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14889v1 This paper studies an optimal linear combination of binary classifiers based on a logical structuration of the dataset via truth tables. The given classifiers partition data into equivalence classes, allowing for a rigorous analysis of the convexified empirical risk through a multidimensional generalization of classification calibrated functions. We establish sufficient conditions for the existence and uniqueness of the (global) point of minimum of the convexified empirical risk for any list of classifiers (when the number of classifiers is large, there frequently could be no point of minimum). In the case of three classifiers, our analysis allows to list all the configurations leading to either a unique solution, infima or non-unique points of minimum. Furthermore, we derive explicit analytical formulae for optimal weights using Exponential (Boost) and Logistic (Logit) loss functions, bypassing iterative optimization. The stability of the resulting classifier and the analysis of data quality can be evaluated through the introduction of the notion of $φ$-frontiers. --- ### Innocuous-Seeming Data, Latent Ideology: Ideological Generalisation in Finetuned LLMs Authors: Robert Graham, Edward Stevinson, Yariv Barsheshat Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14888v1 Finetuning language models on small, curated datasets is standard practice for adapting them to specific policies or domains. We show that finetuning on narrow, factually-defensible, moderation-passing data can cause broad ideological shifts across unrelated domains, while preserving general capabilities. Training GPT-4.1 on right- or left-leaning economics Q&A yields matched ideological shifts on topics such as criminal justice, the environment, and cultural taste. The same effect appears with plausibly-deployed datasets such as workplace HR policy and practical finance queries, as well as on a science-pseudoscience axis where food-safety finetuning increases sycophantic agreement with users expressing false health beliefs. We call this phenomenon ideological generalisation and propose a methodology to measure two properties: breadth, how far the shift reaches across topics absent from training, and amplification, how much finetuning intensifies the shift relative to few-shot prompting on the same examples. We show that few-shot prompting indicates the direction of generalisation but finetuning pushes the model to further extremes, including to far out-of-distribution outputs such as endorsements of race-IQ connections and political violence. The effect replicates on Gemma-3, holds under judge-free evaluations and external benchmarks, survives mixing with generic data, and leaves GSM8K accuracy within $\pm 1$pp of the baseline. --- ### Reachability-Aware Pretraining for Efficient Target-Oriented Path Exploration in Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning Authors: Chien-Liang Liu, Tsao-Lun Chen Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14886v1 Temporal Knowledge Graph (TKG) reasoning under the extrapolation setting focuses on forecasting future time-stamped events (facts) from historical data in a temporal knowledge graph. Existing approaches, reinforcement learning (RL)-based multi-hop reasoning methods are prominent for TKG reasoning because they produce human-interpretable predictions via explicit multi-hop path tracing. However, during RL training, rewards are typically sparse, and exploration is highly inefficient due to the vast, time-evolving action space. These issues hinder efficient training and often limit overall performance. To address these challenges, we propose RAPTOR (Reachability-Aware Pretraining for Efficient Target-Oriented Path Exploration), a self-supervised pretraining method that injects a reachability-aware inductive bias to the agent. By learning to estimate the reachability of candidate actions to the target entity, RAPTOR reduces exploration over unpromising paths and provides a strong initialization for downstream RL fine-tuning. Experimental results on the ICEWS14, ICEWS05-15, and ICEWS18 datasets demonstrate that RAPTOR pretraining markedly improves the training efficiency and consistently outperforms conventional baselines, establishing it as an effective approach for enhancing RL-based multi-hop reasoning methods for TKG reasoning. --- ### Does generative AI supersede supervised XMLC? A Benchmark Study on Automated Subject Indexing with German Scientific Literature Authors: Maximilian Kähler, Katja Konermann, Lisa Kluge, Markus Schumacher Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14882v2 With a large controlled vocabulary as the label set, the task of automated subject indexing in a library can be understood as a multi-label classification task. If the set of subject terms is large, the problem fits the Extreme Multi-Label Classification (XMLC) objective. In this study, we apply a selection of specialised supervised XMLC methods to the test case of subject indexing contemporary German scientific literature, collected at the German National Library (DNB). We contrast these results by including a classical lexical matching baseline and three of our own recently developed LLM-based methods into the benchmark. Algorithms are evaluated and compared in several metrics. This includes binary relevance comparisons with previously indexed material, as well as graded relevance ratings by professional subject librarians. A challenge for all methods is to reliably make suggestions from the long tail of the subject vocabulary. We find that supervised XMLC algorithms relying on transformer-based dense features give best results in terms of overall binary relevance metrics. However, focusing on graded relevance and performance in the long tail of our subject vocabulary, the LLM-based generative methods give better results, making them a promising alternative for future productive use. --- ### Does generative AI supersede supervised XMLC? A Benchmark Study on Automated Subject Indexing with German Scientific Literature Authors: Maximilian Kähler, Katja Konermann, Lisa Kluge, Markus Schumacher Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14882v1 With a large controlled vocabulary as the label set, the task of automated subject indexing in a library can be understood as a multi-label classification task. If the set of subject terms is large, the problem fits the Extreme Multi-Label Classification (XMLC) objective. In this study, we apply a selection of specialised supervised XMLC methods to the test case of subject indexing contemporary German scientific literature, collected at the German National Library (DNB). We contrast these results by including a classical lexical matching baseline and three of our own recently developed LLM-based methods into the benchmark. Algorithms are evaluated and compared in several metrics. This includes binary relevance comparisons with previously indexed material, as well as graded relevance ratings by professional subject librarians. A challenge for all methods is to reliably make suggestions from the long tail of the subject vocabulary. We find that supervised XMLC algorithms relying on transformer-based dense features give best results in terms of overall binary relevance metrics. However, focusing on graded relevance and performance in the long tail of our subject vocabulary, the LLM-based generative methods give better results, making them a promising alternative for future productive use. --- ### Measuring Spatial Clustering via Metropolis-Hastings Diffusion Distance Authors: Thomas Weighill, Chidinma Williams Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: math.ST, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14880v1 We propose a novel measure of the discrepancy between two probability distributions $f$ and $g$ on a graph - which we call the diffusion distance - that measures the rate of convergence of $f$ to $g$ under a graph-constrained Markov chain with stationary distribution $g$. As a default choice for this Markov chain, we use the Metropolis-Hastings transition matrix targeting $g$ with proposals given by a random walk on the graph. Our primary case of interest is when the second distribution $g$ is uniform, in which case the diffusion distance becomes a measure of spatial clustering in $f$. Used in this way, (Metropolis-Hastings) diffusion distance to uniformity extends Moran's $I$-type measures of spatial autocorrelation by incorporating global graph geometry rather than just local patterns. Indeed, Moran's $I$, the most well-known measure of spatial autocorrelation, can be viewed as a one-step heuristic for diffusion distance, so long as specific spatial weights are used. We establish theoretical bounds and a stability result for our measure, connecting it to graph spectra and optimal transport. We then turn our attention to outlining a statistical test for spatial clustering using diffusion distance. Under permutation null models, we derive high-probability bounds on diffusion distance underpinned by exact spectral formulas for convergence of distributions, enabling an efficient statistical test for spatial clustering on large datasets. We empirically compare diffusion distance to Moran's $I$ both as a numerical measure and as a statistical test. We show that diffusion distance exhibits higher power on synthetic data using a stochastic block model. Empirical analysis of Black population distributions for 100 U.S. cities shows that diffusion distance detects subtle differences in urban segregation patterns that Moran's $I$ does not. --- ### PAC Learning in Turn-Based Stochastic Games with Reachability Objectives: A Decentralized Private Approach via Expected Conditional Distance Authors: Ali Asadi, Krishnendu Chatterjee, Pavol Kebis Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.GT arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14877v1 Reachability is the most fundamental logical objective, yet it is notoriously difficult to learn in reinforcement learning settings: even for Markov decision processes, PAC learning of reachability is impossible without additional assumptions. This difficulty also holds in turn-based stochastic games (TBSGs), where two adversarial players interact on a finite state space. In this work, we consider turn-based stochastic games with reachability objectives. For such settings, adversarial learning, in which players are adversarial even in the learning phase, is impossible. Therefore, the goal is to consider learning, in which both players learn the unknown model together. In this spirit, previous literature on PAC learning in TBSGs considers (a)~public information shared by both players; and (b)~centralized learning, which means that players share the same learning algorithm. In this work, our contribution is two-fold. First, we relax these strong assumptions and ensure learning: (i)~with private information not shared with the other player; and (ii)~decentralized learning where the players do not share the same learning algorithm. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first positive result for decentralized and private information learning of TBSGs with reachability objectives. Second, we introduce a game-theoretic generalization of the Expected Conditional Distance (ECD) parameter, which measures the expected length of reaching the target set. We establish a polynomial-sample complexity bound with respect to the number of states, actions, ECD parameter, and inverses of error tolerance and failure probability. --- ### Rotational Motion-Induced Error Compensation for Phase-Shifting Profilometry-Based Eye Reconstruction Authors: Seong-Jin An, Sanghoon Jeon, Yatong An, Jae-Sang Hyun Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14876v1 With the proliferation of immersive Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs) for Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR), reliable and high-precision eye tracking has become increasingly important. Conventional 2D image-based methods offer low system complexity but remain limited in stability, accuracy, and robustness. Three-dimensional ocular surface reconstruction can provide richer geomet-ric information, and structured light profilometry is particularly attractive because it enables dense and accurate surface measurement. However, Phase-Shifting Profilometry (PSP), which estimates phase from sequentially acquired fringe images, is highly susceptible to motion-induced errors when the eye rotates between frames. This study proposes a rotational motion compensation framework for PSP-based dynamic 3D eye reconstruction. Relative eye rotation is estimated from image-based motion cues using a user-specific 3D eye model in a spherical-coordinate domain. The estimated motion is then used to compensate for camera-pixel mismatch and phase-shift errors caused by inter-frame rotation. A region-wise optimization strategy is further introduced to reduce residual artifacts by inde-pendently refining the compensation strength in different ocular regions. Experiments with a rotating fake eye under non-uniform motion demonstrate that the proposed method substantially suppresses motion-induced deformation and improves reconstruction accuracy. An additional experiment with a non-spherical rigid object indicates that the compensation principle is not restricted to spherical eye geometry. These results establish a practical basis for stable PSP-based dynamic 3D eye reconstruction toward future high-precision eye tracking in immersive environments. --- ### Asymmetric Peak-Aware Loss for Peak-Critical Time Series Forecasting Authors: Theivaprakasham Hari, Yanan Xin, Winnie Daamen, Serge Paul Hoogendoorn, Sascha Hoogendoorn-Lanser Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14871v1 In many operational time-series forecasting applications, such as crowd demand forecasting, the risk related to under-prediction is substantially higher than that of over-prediction. Accurate prediction of rare demand spikes plays a critical role in downstream tasks. Yet most time-series forecasters are trained with symmetric objectives (e.g., MSE, MAE) and evaluated primarily on aggregate error, which can mask failures in extreme-values and peak-timing predictions. We introduce Asymmetric Peak-Aware Loss (APAL), a simple, model-agnostic objective that (i) penalizes under-predictions more heavily and (ii) increases the training weight of peak regions within each forecast window. We further propose a peak-critical evaluation protocol that complements MAE/MSE with channel-wise tail error (Top-10% and Top-1%) and peak metrics (precision, recall, F1 under timing tolerance, and peak timing error). We evaluate APAL on long-horizon multivariate forecasting across five state-of-the-art backbones, with a focus on pedestrian demand forecasting using (i) a production-ready subset of the City of Melbourne pedestrian hourly count dataset and (ii) a beach visitor count dataset. The generality of the loss function for time-series forecasting is tested on additional benchmarks. Across peak-critical datasets and settings, APAL improves tail accuracy and peak-prediction quality while exposing a controllable trade-off with aggregate error, making it a practical solution when peak-prediction failures are the dominant operational concern. --- ### The Energy Society: A Simulation Environment for Studying Agent Cooperation under Survival Pressure Authors: Lucas Bergholdt Hansen, Federico Torrielli, Filippo Tonini, Lukas Galke Poech Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.MA, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14865v1 LLM-based agents are increasingly deployed in multi-agent environments whose incentives can shape their behavior. We introduce The Energy Society, a minimal survival economy for studying how competitive and cooperative incentives affect emergent behavior when inference cost is directly tied to survival: Agents spend energy based on model size when generating tokens, regain energy by completing jobs or receiving donations, and deactivate if their energy reaches zero. We compare competitive and cooperative objectives against a baseline setting and several control variants. Across experiments, larger models consistently consume the most energy and spend more energy than they gain, even in those settings where token cost is not size-dependent. Cooperative incentives substantially alter behavior: agents donate to reactivate others, sometimes at the cost of their own survival, and job allocation changes. Ablations reveal that allowing agents to recommend actions to each other supports coordination and ambitious job selection, while memory helps agents calibrate risk from past outcomes. Agents rarely choose direct sabotage, but show more subtle signs of self-serving behavior in the competitive setting. The Energy Society is a compact testbed for studying the interaction between token costs and group incentives under a survival pressure. Source code is available at https://github.com/LucasBergholdt/EnergySociety --- ### Tamed Stochastic Gradient Hamiltonian Monte Carlo Authors: Zhuoran Wang, Ying Zhang Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: math.OC, math.NA, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14862v1 In this paper, we propose a novel tamed stochastic gradient Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (tSGHMC) algorithm for sampling and stochastic optimization problems with superlinearly growing stochastic gradients. Under a certain continuity in average condition and a strong convexity condition, we establish a non-asymptotic error bound in Wasserstein-2 distance for tSGHMC with the rate of convergence equal to $1/4$. Then, we derive an upper estimate for the associated expected excess risk, which provides a theoretical guarantee for the performance of tSGHMC. To illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, we apply tSGHMC to practical examples, including a newsvendor problem and a Conditional Value-at-Risk minimization problem, using synthetic and real-world datasets. Numerical results support our theoretical findings. Furthermore, we compare tSGHMC with its first-order counterpart, namely, the tamed unadjusted stochastic Langevin algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that tSGHMC achieves lower root mean square error and expected excess risk across a range of tasks. --- ### Subgrid-Scale Parameterization in Burgers' Equation Using Structure-Preserving Neural Networks and Entropy Variables Authors: Aijaz Nazir, Ilya Timofeyev Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: math.NA, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14855v1 We present a machine learning approach for developing subgrid-scale (SGS) parametrizations in coarse simulations of partial differential equations. We utilize structure-preserving neural networks and entropy variables to learn subgrid fluxes in coarse simulations of the Burgers' equation. In particular, we employ a decoupled neural network architecture explicitly separating the subgrid corrections into two distinct components: a conservative Flux Potential network and an Eddy Viscosity network. We demonstrate that this reduced-order framework maintains high physical fidelity, accurately reproducing the energy spectrum, spatial and temporal correlation functions, and dynamical characteristics of the full-scale system. Furthermore, we show that our approach is robust and applicable to parameters outside the training regime. --- ### RW-Voice-EQ Bench: A Real World Benchmark for Evaluating Voice AI Systems Authors: David Ayllon, Alice Baird, Jeffrey Brooks, Franc Camps-Febrer, Jakub Piotr Cłapa, Theo Lebryk, Jens Madsen, Olya Ossipova, Sharath Rao, Hoon Shin, Tigran Soghbatyan, Georg Streich et al. Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14846v1 Current voice AI benchmarks typically evaluate isolated capabilities such as speech intelligibility, word error rate, or text-based dialogue quality, but they rarely test whether systems harness the acoustic information that distinguishes spoken language from its textual representation. To this end, we introduce the Real World Voice EQ Bench, a multidimensional benchmark for evaluating voice AI across text-to-speech (TTS), speech-to-speech (STS), speech understanding (SU), and automatic speech recognition (ASR). Our evaluations indicate that performance is highly dimension-specific. For TTS, naturalness, expressiveness, identity stability, and reliability are largely independent evaluation dimensions. For STS, access to audio does not guarantee use of vocal affect, and some agents remain largely transcript-driven. For SU, models perform unevenly across paralinguistic tasks. For ASR, real world accent, emotion, noise, and conversational conditions expose failures that are not captured by established clean-speech benchmarks. Together, these results show that voice AI should be evaluated as a profile of acoustic, expressive, interactional, and robustness capabilities rather than by a single aggregate score. --- ### Physics-Informed Diffusion for Biomechanically Plausible 3D Sign Language Generation Authors: Emanuele Colonna, Moises Diaz, Gennaro Vessio, Miguel Angel Ferrer, Giovanna Castellano Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14836v1 Sign language production, which generates continuous 3D skeletal motion from spoken language input, must simultaneously satisfy two constraints: semantic fidelity, so that a deaf viewer can recognize the intended sequence of glosses, and biomechanical plausibility, so that the generated skeleton respects anatomical constraints. Existing approaches optimize semantic reconstruction through coordinate-based objectives that treat the skeleton as an unstructured vector, thus allowing for bone length drift, joint angle violations, and temporarily locked fingers. We introduce PIDiffSign, a physics-informed diffusion model for gloss-to-pose translation that incorporates anatomical constraints into both the architecture and training objective. The model uses a Transformer encoder-decoder, where the decoder is conditioned on the diffusion time step through adaptive zero-initialized layer normalization and cross-attends to gloss representations. A differentiable geometry module enforces bone length consistency and biologically valid joint angles throughout generation. Training combines anthropomorphic, kinematic, angular, and finger-joint constraints with a contrastive gloss-pose alignment loss and classifier-free guidance for semantically conditioned sampling. Experiments on the PHOENIX14T and CSL-Daily benchmarks show consistent improvements over a strong diffusion baseline in pose accuracy, joint-angle correctness, distributional realism, and back-translation quality. These results demonstrate that physics-informed diffusion improves both motion realism and semantic fidelity for sign language generation. --- ### Interventional Causal Circuits for Safe Robot Action Testing and Failure Recovery Authors: Naren Vasantakumaar, Tom Schierenbeck, Michael Beetz Published: 2026-07-16 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14826v1 Safe physical AI for robot actions are required not only likely to succeed but tested to be safe before execution. In practice, however, formal testing of motion parameters is computationally expensive, and the cost scales poorly with the dimensionality of the action space. When a proposed action is rejected by a tester, the naive response is to resample blindly until a passing candidate is found. This is wasteful, uninformative, and offers no convergence. We argue that rejection should instead trigger causal diagnosis: a principled identification of which action parameter caused the failure and what corrective value maximises the probability of passing testing under the interventional probability distribution. We propose a closed-loop framework that couples a Joint Probability Tree (JPT) with a Causal Circuit derived from a Marginal-Deterministic Variable Tree, enabling exact polytime computation without retraining, or additional data collection. The framework validates tractability of all interventional queries before the robot begins operating, and out-of-support candidates are detected and excluded from correction automatically. We perform experiments in a ROS2 simulation environment, and the framework demonstrates complementary roles across quality of distribution: under a high-quality JPT, the Causal Circuit reduces failed attempts by 10.3% and under a degraded JPT, it reduces total failed attempts by 37%. Every rejected plan produces a structured, interpretable causal report naming the primary cause variable, its observed value, and the recommended corrective region, supporting operator oversight and autonomous recovery without a separately trained failure model. ---