# Research Papers — 2026-07 · bundle page 118 of 222 > Full-text markdown of papers #5851–5900 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/118 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/117.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/119.md) ### RENEW: Towards Learning World Models and Repairing Model Exploitation from Preferences Authors: Logan Mondal Bhamidipaty, Mykel Kochenderfer, Subramanian Ramamoorthy Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14180v1 World models are widely used in offline reinforcement learning (RL) to improve sample efficiency and generate experience beyond a fixed dataset. However, they are vulnerable to model exploitation where data coverage is thin. Prior work addresses this either by collecting more expert demonstrations, which is often expensive, unsafe, or unavailable, or by conservative algorithms that avoid uncertain regions, which limits generalization. We propose instead to repair exploitation directly using human preferences over imagined rollouts, leveraging the strong intuitive physics that allows humans to easily spot egregious dynamics hallucinations. We formalize this as Dynamics Learning from Human Feedback (DLHF), a Bradley-Terry preference loss over trajectory log-likelihoods under a learned dynamics model. Unfortunately, naive DLHF is sample inefficient, so we introduce RENEW, which uses epistemic uncertainty to focus finetuning where the model is most exploitable. We evaluate on several Jumanji and classic control environments and find that while naive DLHF requires an outsize preference budget, RENEW makes the framework practical by improving sample efficiency, limiting catastrophic forgetting, and reducing exploitation in pretrained world models. Taken together, our results provide initial evidence that preferences can supervise world model dynamics directly, offering a new approach to addressing exploitation in offline model-based RL. --- ### OvAi Focus: AI-based Multi-class Segmentation of Functional Ovaries and Adnexal Masses in Gynecological Ultrasound Authors: Niccolò Tallone, Francesca Salis, Pio Raffaele Fina, Roberta Massobrio, Rosilari Bellacosa Marotti, Daniele Conti, Luca Fuso, Luca Mariani, Annamaria Ferrero, Alessandro Arena, Stefano Cosma, Dan Grisaru et al. Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14179v1 Ovarian cancer is the deadliest gynecological malignancy; accurate and objective segmentation of adnexal masses and functional ovaries in ultrasound (US) remains challenging due to operator variability and morphological complexity. We present OvAi Focus (SynDiag s.r.l., Italy), a stand-alone AI software medical device that performs multi-class semantic segmentation of functional ovaries and adnexal masses, distinguishing cystic from solid components. The system was trained and independently validated on a multicenter dataset of 1,081 adult women from 6 centers across Italy and Israel. Segmentation achieved DICE scores of 0.87 (complete lesion), 0.85 (cystic), 0.68 (solid), and 0.62 (functional ovary), in line with or superior to state-of-the-art approaches across heterogeneous acquisition settings. --- ### ReasFlow: Assisting Reasoning-Centric Scientific Discovery in Applied Mathematics via a Knowledge-Based Multi-Agent System Authors: Yutong He, Daibo Li, Guohong Li, Jiahe Geng, Zhengyang Huang, Can Ren, Zekun Zhang, Yifan Liu, Shuchen Zhu, Hengrui Zhang, Boao Kong, Ming Sun et al. Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.AI, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14178v3 Recent advances in Large Language Models have fueled autonomous AI agents capable of tackling complex scientific tasks, yet existing automated research systems remain predominantly focused on empirically driven domains with quantitative benchmarks, leaving theory-driven discovery, particularly in mathematically grounded disciplines requiring rigorous proofs and synthesis of domain knowledge, largely underexplored. Key challenges include the difficulty of verifying theoretical reasoning at scale, insufficient reasoning ability for autonomous frontier exploration, and a scarcity of procedural heuristics in the literature. We introduce ReasFlow, an end-to-end autonomous agent system for reasoning-centric scientific discovery that operationalizes a collaborative paradigm where the human expert acts as Principal Investigator while the agent executes rigorous derivations as a capable graduate student. ReasFlow incorporates (i) a robust internal verification loop that audits logical coherence and corrects fundamental errors prior to human inspection, and (ii) an automated knowledge retrieval and self-improvement mechanism that proactively surfaces both declarative facts and overlooked procedural heuristics, substantially reducing expert intervention. The system unifies literature synthesis, algorithm design, theorem proving, experimentation, and manuscript preparation in a single system. Deployed to autonomously generate five complete research papers with rigorous theoretical and empirical content from minimal prompts, ReasFlow consistently achieves the highest evaluation scores among state-of-the-art open-access baselines under a curated LLM-based review rubric. ReasFlow is publicly accessible via the ReasLab platform, providing a collaborative workspace for AI-assisted theoretical research. Github repo: https://github.com/reaslab/ReasFlow.git. --- ### ReasFlow: Assisting Reasoning-Centric Scientific Discovery in Applied Mathematics via a Knowledge-Based Multi-Agent System Authors: Yutong He, Daibo Li, Guohong Li, Jiahe Geng, Zhengyang Huang, Can Ren, Zekun Zhang, Yifan Liu, Shuchen Zhu, Hengrui Zhang, Boao Kong, Ming Sun et al. Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.AI, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14178v2 Recent advances in Large Language Models have fueled autonomous AI agents capable of tackling complex scientific tasks, yet existing automated research systems remain predominantly focused on empirically driven domains with quantitative benchmarks, leaving theory-driven discovery, particularly in mathematically grounded disciplines requiring rigorous proofs and synthesis of domain knowledge, largely underexplored. Key challenges include the difficulty of verifying theoretical reasoning at scale, insufficient reasoning ability for autonomous frontier exploration, and a scarcity of procedural heuristics in the literature. We introduce ReasFlow, an end-to-end autonomous agent system for reasoning-centric scientific discovery that operationalizes a collaborative paradigm where the human expert acts as Principal Investigator while the agent executes rigorous derivations as a capable graduate student. ReasFlow incorporates (i) a robust internal verification loop that audits logical coherence and corrects fundamental errors prior to human inspection, and (ii) an automated knowledge retrieval and self-improvement mechanism that proactively surfaces both declarative facts and overlooked procedural heuristics, substantially reducing expert intervention. The system unifies literature synthesis, algorithm design, theorem proving, experimentation, and manuscript preparation in a single system. Deployed to autonomously generate five complete research papers with rigorous theoretical and empirical content from minimal prompts, ReasFlow consistently achieves the highest evaluation scores among state-of-the-art open-access baselines under a curated LLM-based review rubric. ReasFlow is publicly accessible via the ReasLab platform, providing a collaborative workspace for AI-assisted theoretical research. Github repo: https://github.com/reaslab/ReasFlow.git. --- ### Low-Latency Relay Selection in NR-V2X Vehicular Communications via Graph Isomorphism Networks with Edge Features Authors: Giambattista Amati, Federica Mangiatordi, Emiliano Pallotti, Simone Angelini, Pierpaolo Salvo, Paola Vocca Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.LG, cs.NI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14176v1 Reliable, low-latency uplink connectivity is a key requirement for C-V2X networks in dense urban environments, where fast channel variations and blockages often degrade direct vehicle-to-infrastructure links. Multi-hop relaying can restore coverage, but relay-link activation under radio, capacity, and routing constraints results in an NP-hard optimisation problem, typically solved via Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP), whose runtime scales poorly with graph size. This paper introduces an edge-aware Learning-to-Optimise framework for real-time relay selection. Each V2X snapshot is modelled as a directed graph: node features encode vehicle state and traffic demand, while edge features capture radio-link capacity. An offline MILP oracle generates optimal relay configurations that supervise a Graph Isomorphism Network with Edge Features (GINE), enabling edge-level relay activation through a single forward pass, with tightly bounded inference latency. To bridge learning and exact optimisation, we also propose a hybrid GINE-Pruned MILP (GP-MILP) strategy in which GINE predictions prune the MILP search space. Experiments on a large-scale dataset generated via an OSM-SUMO-GEMV$^2$ pipeline show that GINE closely matches MILP decisions at the link level (accuracy 0.9589), F1-score (0.9544) on validation) and yields consistent end-to-end connectivity gains over a 1-hop MILP baseline (up to 9.2% with four RSUs and 12% with two RSUs). Inference latency remains tightly bounded, with all evaluated instances completing within 5~ms. Moreover, GP-MILP preserves MILP-equivalent solutions (same objective value) while achieving solver runtimes below 30~ms for more than 98%) of the graph instances, making MILP-grade optimisation compatible with stringent NR-V2X latency budgets. --- ### How Much of a 10-K Matters? Aggregation-Dependent Value of Full-Text versus Risk-Factor Sentiment Authors: Sanggyu Sean Choi Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.LG, q-fin.CP, q-fin.MF, q-fin.ST arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14174v1 Financial sentiment extraction has largely relied on news text and supervised extraction against return labels alone, leaving 10-K filings -- and volatility, the target risk disclosure is arguably best suited to informing -- comparatively unexplored. We extend a supervised lexicon-learning approach to 10-K filings and their Item 1A risk-factor sections, training sentiment scores against both return and volatility labels at three levels of aggregation: sector, portfolio, and individual firm. Across 1,383 filings from 94 Nasdaq-100 technology constituents (2006--2023), we evaluate the resulting twelve sentiment metrics on classification accuracy, correlation with realised market outcomes, and qualitative lexical content. Full-filing text produces more accurate sentiment at the sector and portfolio level for both targets, but this reverses at the individual-firm level, where the narrower Item 1A section performs better -- an effect we attribute to the interaction between document volume and the amount of independent training signal available at each level of aggregation. A Loughran-McDonald dictionary baseline is consistently, strongly negatively correlated with price at every level tested, underscoring the value of a supervised approach for regulatory disclosure text. These findings, and the design choices they motivate, establish the sentiment-generation methodology underlying a subsequent, larger-scale, multi-source system. --- ### The Cost and Network Limits of Space-Based AI Compute Authors: Kees van Berkel Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.DC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14172v1 This paper evaluates whether large-scale AI data centers deployed in low-Earth orbit (LEO) could become a cost-effective alternative to terrestrial facilities. The analysis compares orbital and ground-based systems across launch cost, power generation, cooling, radiation exposure, and atmospheric reentry, as well as compute-network performance. A key distinction is the shift from terrestrial Clos networks to space-based mesh networks using laser inter-satellite links. Using bisection bandwidth, bisection intensity, and roofline-style models, we show that while LEO-based inference may be feasible, training frontier-scale LLMs in orbit is unlikely to be competitive with terrestrial data centers. --- ### Branching Policy Optimization: Sandbox-Native Language Agent Reinforcement Learning Authors: Bowei He, Yankai Chen, Xiaokun Zhang, Xue Liu Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14171v1 Reinforcement learning has emerged as the dominant paradigm for training large language model (LLM) agents that interact with executable sandboxes. State-of-the-art algorithms such as PPO, RLOO, and GRPO inherit their rollout topology from RLHF: for each prompt, N independent trajectories are sampled from the initial state, and an advantage is computed by subtracting a group baseline. This design ignores a defining property of agent sandboxes. They are deterministic, snapshottable, and resumable from any intermediate state. We argue that this property enables a fundamentally different rollout topology: rather than N independent trees of depth T, one can construct a single tree of N leaves whose siblings share prefixes, and therefore share variance. We instantiate this idea as Branching Policy Optimization (BPO), a sandbox-native RL algorithm that (i) adaptively snapshots the sandbox at high-entropy decision points along a backbone trajectory, (ii) forks K alternative actions per branch point and rolls out each to termination, and (iii) computes per-step advantages from sibling returns rather than from independent prompts. We prove this estimator is unbiased and has strictly lower variance than the trajectory-level baseline, with the reduction equal to the prefix-explained portion of return variance. On WebShop, ALFWorld, and SWE-bench Verified with Qwen2.5-7B and Llama-3.1-8B backbones, BPO improves success by 3.6--6.1 absolute points over GRPO and RLOO at matched compute, halves gradient-norm variance, and matches the best baseline using 38% fewer policy updates. --- ### When a Verified World Model Still Loses: Play-Adequacy vs Prediction-Accuracy in LLM-Synthesized Code World Models Authors: Javier Aguilar Martín Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14169v2 Large language models can synthesize a game's rules as executable code - a Code World Model (CWM) - which a classical planner then searches over. Such models are typically accepted when they reach high transition accuracy on sampled trajectories. We argue this is the wrong notion of adequacy for planning. We show four things. (1) An LLM-synthesized CWM can pass a sampling gate at 100% transition accuracy and be $\geq 98\%$ state-accurate on the planner's own search distribution, yet lose systematically at play, because the $<1\%$ it gets wrong is exactly the pivotal dynamics; the play cost of the omitted rule is $0.091$ (seed-clustered 95% CI $(0.065,0.117)$, $n=4800$). We call this the verified-vs-correct gap, and confirm it end-to-end through the synthesis pipeline. (2) The harm follows a quantitative law, $\mathrm{danger}=\mathrm{play\_cost}\times(1-\mathrm{rarity})^N$, whose $(1-\mathrm{rarity})^N$ gate-miss factor is proven exact and whose play cost is empirically bounded. (3) The failure is not repaired by more data: LLM synthesis behaves as rule translation, not rule inference, and did not infer the omitted rule across models (GPT-5.x) and data regimes (including DAgger and targeted examples). (4) The same mechanism recurs on the belief-inference function of imperfect-information CWMs: we prove a coverage bound (a size-$N$ gate is identifying when $N\gtrsim b^{d_{\max}}$), explaining why shallow games such as Kuhn poker show no gap, and hand-construct Beacon, a verified-but-wrong inference function that passes the gate yet loses every game. These results suggest adequacy for planning-oriented world models should be measured on the search distribution or by play directly, not by prediction accuracy on sampled transitions. --- ### Structured Feedback Improves Repair in an LLM Agent Loop Authors: Jaideep Ray, Ankit Goyal Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14167v1 LLM agents often retry after external validation rejects a candidate, but the interface between validation and the next model call remains underspecified. We introduce VeriHarness, a code-controlled agent loop in which models generate candidates while external validators control acceptance, budgets, and traces. We use it to compare raw diagnostics with feedback that identifies the failure location, observed value, and admissible alternatives. Across 50 paired TextWorld games under a four-call cap, feedback containing all three fields raises terminal success from 14/50 to 36/50 for Qwen2.5-Coder-14B (+44 percentage points) and from 8/50 to 29/50 for Llama-3.1-8B (+42 points). Ablations locate most of the gain in the admissible alternatives: feedback containing only the location and observed value remains near the raw diagnostic baseline. Presenting the complete repair information in prose instead of a keyed JSON record yields nearly the same success, providing no evidence that JSON syntax itself improves repair. The ordering persists across the tested call budgets and one sampled-decoding setting. --- ### Towards Reliable AI-Assisted Analog Design: Template-Constrained LLM Agents for SAR ADC Generation Authors: Dimple Vijay Kochar, Hae-Seung Lee, Anantha P. Chandrakasan Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.AR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14165v1 While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant capability in software code generation, their application to analog Electronic Design Automation (EDA) is bottlenecked. Owing to limited circuit topology understanding and data, directly prompting LLMs and multimodal models leads to hallucinations and failure to produce schematics capable of passing rigorous SPICE simulations, as we show in our work. Instead, we propose an end-to-end, multi-step LLM agentic framework ATLAS, capable of generating a functional Successive Approximation Register (SAR) Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) that successfully passes simulation validation. To adhere to the rigid constraints of analog design, we utilize expert knowledge to ground the LLM in its planning, selection, parameterization, and iterative modification. As part of ATLAS, we introduce Template-Constrained Generation - which unlike other template-based works - builds towards a more generalized SAR ADC generation flow. We demonstrate a strong proof-of-concept of our framework by developing SAR ADCs across technology nodes and input specs. Overall, our expert-knowledge grounded multi-step agentic ATLAS establishes a pragmatic foundation for integrating LLMs into reliable analog design methodologies. --- ### A vision foundation model for single-cell biology via spatial gene cartography Authors: Ridvan Yesiloglu, Sakib Mostafa, James Zou, Ash Alizadeh, Jiajun Wu, Lei Xing, Ehsan Adeli, Md Tauhidul Islam Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: q-bio.QM, cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14163v1 Most single-cell foundation models are adapted from language models, representing each cell as a sequence of gene tokens. This discards the relationships among genes and often the magnitude of their expression. We present scVision, a vision foundation model that instead renders each cell as a continuous image. Using optimal transport, it places genes at fixed positions on a single shared, pan-tissue layout so that co-expressed genes become spatial neighbours, turning a transcriptome into an image in which gene programs appear as local texture. We pretrain a vision transformer by masked image modelling on 72 million human cells and use the frozen encoder with no fine-tuning. In zero-shot evaluations on six independent, held-out studies, scVision is the most accurate cell-type annotator and recovers gene programs without supervision, ahead of existing foundation models and classical baselines; on multi-study integration it matches the strongest token-based model while conserving the most biological structure, without ever seeing a batch label. Permuting the gene layout with the network fixed sharply lowers accuracy, more than removing the vision transformer itself, showing that biologically meaningful position, not the network, carries the signal. By preserving expression magnitude and gene relationships, scVision reframes single-cell representation learning as a vision problem, connecting it to the mature methods of computer vision. --- ### VideoRAE: Taming Video Foundation Models for Generative Modeling via Representation Autoencoders Authors: Zhihao Xie, Junfeng Wu, Xinting Hu, Junchao Huang, Li Jiang Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14088v2 Video generation models typically rely on 3D-VAEs trained for pixel-level reconstruction, whose latent spaces may underrepresent semantic structure. We introduce VideoRAE, a representation autoencoder that converts features from a frozen video foundation model into compact, reconstruction-capable latents for video generation. A lightweight 1D self-attention projector compresses multi-scale hierarchical features, producing continuous latents for Diffusion Transformers and discrete tokens for autoregressive models through multi-codebook high-dimensional quantization. During decoding, a local-global representation alignment objective transfers semantic structure from the frozen encoder and removes the need for KL regularization. Comprehensive experiments show that VideoRAE achieves strong reconstruction in both continuous and discrete regimes. On UCF-101, autoregressive and diffusion generators built on VideoRAE achieve class-conditional gFVD scores of 40 and 93, respectively, while converging approximately five times faster than autoencoder baselines. In controlled 2B-parameter text-to-video experiments, replacing LTX-VAE with VideoRAE accelerates convergence and consistently improves VBench performance. These results establish frozen video foundation representations as compact, versatile, and generation-friendly video latents. Code and models are available at https://zhxie0117.github.io/VideoRAE/. --- ### VideoRAE: Taming Video Foundation Models for Generative Modeling via Representation Autoencoders Authors: Zhihao Xie, Junfeng Wu, Xinting Hu, Junchao Huang, Li Jiang Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14088v1 Video generative models commonly rely on latent spaces learned by 3D Variational Autoencoders (3D-VAEs). However, conventional 3D-VAEs are mainly optimized for pixel-level reconstruction, which can limit the semantic and spatio-temporal structure captured by their latents. Meanwhile, Video Foundation Models (VFMs) such as V-JEPA 2 and VideoMAEv2 show strong video understanding capabilities, yet whether their frozen representations can be transformed into compact, reconstruction-capable, and generation-friendly video latents remains largely unexplored. We answer this question with VideoRAE, a representation autoencoder that leverages multi-scale hierarchical features from a frozen video foundation encoder and compresses them with a lightweight 1D self-attention projector. VideoRAE supports both continuous latents for Diffusion Transformers and discrete tokens for autoregressive models via multi-codebook high-dimensional quantization. During decoding, a local-and-global representation alignment objective with the frozen VFM teacher improves semantic preservation and enables training without KL regularization. Experiments show that VideoRAE achieves strong reconstruction in both continuous and discrete regimes. On UCF-101, it obtains state-of-the-art class-to-video gFVDs of 40 and 93 with AR and DiT generators, respectively, while converging approximately 5x faster than competing autoencoder baselines. In a controlled 2B-scale text-to-video study, replacing LTX-VAE with VideoRAE leads to faster convergence under comparable settings. These results validate frozen VFM representations as versatile and generation-friendly video latents. The model and code will be released on https://zhxie0117.github.io/VideoRAE. --- ### Leveraging unlabelled data for generalizable neural population decoding Authors: Ximeng Mao, Nanda H. Krishna, Avery Hee-Woon Ryoo, Matthew G. Perich, Guillaume Lajoie Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.LG, q-bio.NC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14086v1 Robust and accurate neural decoders are integral to neurotechnologies such as brain-computer interfaces and closed-loop experiments. Recent work has shown that tokenizing neural data at the spike level facilitates multi-session pretraining and delivers state-of-the-art decoding performance. However, current spike-based models are restricted to supervised learning (SL), limiting training to datasets with paired behavioural labels. To address this limitation, we introduce MOJO (Masked autOencoder-based JOint training), a training framework for spike-tokenizing models that jointly leverages self-supervised learning (SSL) via masked autoencoding and SL objectives. We evaluate MOJO on three spiking datasets spanning monkey motor cortex during reaching tasks and multi-regional mouse recordings during vision and decision making tasks, demonstrating superior performance over purely SL-trained models. This improvement is especially pronounced when training with limited labelled data, particularly in few-shot finetuning, where only a small amount of labelled data from a new session is available. Incorporating SSL also yields more interpretable neuronal representations, improving performance on brain region classification and spike-statistics prediction without explicit optimization for these tasks. We further show that MOJO generalizes beyond spiking data to human electrocorticography during speech, where it continues to outperform purely SL-trained models and achieves performance comparable to neuro-foundation models (NFMs) designed specifically for continuous signals. Overall, augmenting spike-tokenizing models with SSL improves performance in label-impoverished settings and enables the use of unlabelled data across various tasks and species, while generalizing to other neural modalities. These results suggest a path towards more flexible and scalable data usage when training NFMs. --- ### Linear Independent Component Analysis via Optimal Transport Authors: Ashutosh Jha, Michel Besserve, Simon Buchholz Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14081v1 Linear Independent Component Analysis (ICA) recovers jointly independent source signals from their linear mixtures. To achieve this, classical ICA algorithms attempt to maximize non-Gaussianity, measured by negentropy, which is linked to independence by information theory. Because exact negentropy optimization is intractable, they rely on proxy contrast functions, such as fourth-order cumulants, and parametric log-likelihoods. We propose instead to measure non-Gaussianity using the squared Wasserstein distance $W_2^2$ to a standard Gaussian. We prove that the Wasserstein distance between a standard normal distribution and linear projections of the data is maximized when the projection recovers an independent component. Based on this observation, we propose the OT-ICA algorithm which finds this projection by gradient-based optimization. Empirical evaluation on simulated data shows that OT-ICA outperforms proxy-based methods for different distributions of the latent variables. Application to EEG artifact removal and econometric price discovery confirm OT-ICA can be used for applied ICA tasks without distributional assumptions. --- ### From Pixels to States: Rethinking Interactive World Models as Game Engines Authors: Zhen Li, Zian Meng, Shuwei Shi, Mingliang Zhai, Jiaming Tan, Chuanhao Li, Kaipeng Zhang Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14076v1 Building interactive worlds that respond coherently to player actions has long been a shared goal of computer graphics, games, and artificial intelligence. Recent video generative models provide a data-driven route toward this goal by predicting future observations conditioned on user actions, and are increasingly regarded as potential next-generation game engines. Realizing a genuinely interactive game world, however, requires interaction outcomes that follow rules over evolving game conditions, consequences that persist over long horizons, and a generation loop that operates in real time. Conventional game engines realize these properties through a recurrent action-state-observation loop, in which player actions update an explicit game state according to predefined rules and observations are rendered from the resulting state. Taking this loop as an organizing lens, this paper examines interactive game world modeling along four dimensions: player action control, game state dynamics, state-observation persistence, and real-time interactive generation. For each dimension, we start from the capabilities required by an interactive game world, group existing approaches into representative families, and discuss the strengths and trade-offs of each family. Complementing this analysis, we present a scalable data engine for Black Myth: Wukong that collects over 90 hours of gameplay with frame-aligned player actions, ground-truth game states, and visual observations, together with structured and semantic annotations, as a resource for state-aware game world modeling. We hope this paper offers a clear picture of where the field stands and fosters progress toward interactive game worlds. --- ### MetaPerch: Learning from metadata for bioacoustics foundation models Authors: Mustafa Chasmai, Vincent Dumoulin, Jenny Hamer Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.LG, cs.SD arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14072v1 Bioacoustic foundation models rely on large-scale citizen science platforms like Xeno-Canto for geographically and ecologically diverse data. Recent work has shown that supervision alone can produce SotA species detection models when trained on this large-scale data -- however, there remains unutilized potential in the form of recording metadata readily available within these community-driven data hubs. In this work, we explore the use of metadata -- such as location and time -- as auxiliary supervision signals, allowing the model to leverage species-metadata correlations in its learned representation. Auxiliary metadata losses provide additional information beyond vocalizations alone that can encourage a richer, more robust representation that generalizes better to species distribution and acoustic domain shifts -- important challenges for deployment in real-world passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) settings. We introduce MetaPerch, a new foundation model that achieves strong species identification performance across multiple challenging domains and present an extensive empirical study of the effects of 9 diverse metadata sources on 17 bioacoustic datasets. --- ### Screening of Biosecurity Features in Metagenomic Data with Evo 2 Probes Authors: Jeremy Guntoro, Alexander Dack, Dylan Danno, Michaela Jančovičová, Križan Jurinović, Vanessa Smilansky Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: q-bio.GN, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14070v1 Genomic foundation models such as Evo 2 learn rich sequence representations, but their value for biosecurity screening is largely unexplored. We ask how much biosecurity-relevant signal is linearly accessible in these representations by training minimal linear and attention probes on frozen Evo 2 layer-26 activations, without fine-tuning the underlying model. Across held-out metagenomic test sets, the probes detect antimicrobial resistance (AMR) with strong discrimination: a linear probe reaches a region-level ROC-AUC of 0.888 (mean-pool), rising to 0.977 with a single-head attention probe. The probes resolve finer-grained AMR drug-class subcategories and separate them from unrelated functional genes, providing additional evidence that the learned signal is not explained solely by generic functional-gene status. Bacterial virulence is also decodable, though more weakly (region-level ROC-AUC 0.833). The AMR probe retains comparable ranking performance on simulated short reads without retraining, enabling evaluation before assembly in settings where assembly is computationally costly or unreliable. It achieves a read-level ROC-AUC of 0.898 (mean-pool), comparable to the mean-pooled full-region result. Within SynGenome, AMR-associated prompt labels are only weakly recoverable from Evo 1.5-generated sequences; these prompt-derived labels do not establish the function of the generated response sequences. A complementary sparse-autoencoder analysis recovers interpretable resistance-associated features but proves less consistent than the supervised probes. Together, these results position lightweight embedding-based probes as a fast, inexpensive first-pass detection layer for metagenomic biosurveillance and map both strengths and current limits of the approach. This work was conducted as part of the AIxBio Hackathon 2026 hosted by BlueDot Impact, Apart Research, and Cambridge Biosecurity Hub. --- ### Minimax Theory of Likelihood-Based Deep Learning for Speckle Regression Authors: Soham Jana Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: math.ST, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14064v1 Speckle noise is a multiplicative noise commonly encountered in coherent imaging modalities such as synthetic aperture radar, optical coherence tomography, and digital holography. Although deep learning methods, in practice, have achieved state-of-the-art performance for speckle denoising, their fundamental statistical limits remain largely unexplored. Unlike additive noise models, multiplicative speckle noise makes the regression function unidentifiable from the conditional mean, rendering conventional least-squares-based deep learning approaches inapplicable. We study the minimax estimation of smooth nonparametric regression functions using likelihood-based deep neural network (DNN) estimators under a model with both multiplicative speckle noise and additive Gaussian noise. Our framework accommodates both low-dimensional and sparse high-dimensional features. We establish finite-sample upper bounds on the estimation error of the proposed DNN estimators and derive minimax lower bounds for nonparametric function recovery under our model, showing that they match up to logarithmic factors in the sample size. Moreover, these minimax rates coincide, up to logarithmic factors, with those for nonparametric regression under additive Gaussian noise alone, demonstrating that the intrinsic difficulty of estimation remains essentially unchanged despite the challenges posed by multiplicative speckle noise. Numerical experiments further supports consistency of our DNN-based despeckling methods and demonstrate their effectiveness. --- ### Hindcast: Replaying Prediction Markets to Evaluate LLM Forecasters Authors: Xiao Ye, Jacob Dineen, Evan Zhu, Shijie Lu, Kevin Song, Ben Zhou Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14051v1 Forecasters are evaluated by backtesting, which replays resolved questions and grades the probability the system would have assigned before the outcome was known. For LLMs, two channels leak the answer into this test. A model that retrieves can surface reports written after the event, turning forecasting into a lookup, and each new model is trained on data closer to the event, so a question that lay in the future for last year's models sits inside this year's training data. Either way, the test grades recall while claiming to grade foresight. We introduce Hindcast, which closes both leaks by grading a model as if it stood at a chosen past date $t_0$, before the outcome existed in either channel. Hindcast replays resolved Polymarket prediction markets against a frozen snapshot of public Reddit, lets the model read only posts written before $t_0$, and scores each forecast against both what happened and the market's own price at $t_0$, itself a human forecast made from the same past information. Because the cutoff is set per market and the snapshot never changes, the evaluation re-runs on new markets as models improve, without going stale. Once the leak is closed, retrieval still helps most models, but only where Reddit discussed the event beforehand. Where the archive carried only speculation, retrieval hurts. --- ### Deep Interaction: An Efficient Human-AI Interaction Method for Large Reasoning Models Authors: Hefeng Zhou, Jinxuan Zhang, Jiong Lou, Yuxin Liu, Chaochao Lu, Jingjing Qu, Jie Li Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14049v1 The emergence of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has significantly enhanced the ability of large language models (LLMs) to tackle complex, multi-step tasks. However, when errors occur, current interaction approaches typically involve re-generating another response that may make mistakes again, or users laboriously flag the faulty step in follow-up turns that may get responses <You are right, I made a mistake here> followed by similar errors recurring. To address this issue, we propose an efficient human intervention mechanism for precisely correcting reasoning errors in LLMs, termed Deep Interaction. Our approach enables direct editing of the original response, allowing erroneous parts to be corrected while preserving accurate reasoning steps. We refine the edited CoT into a distilled prompt, which then steers the LLM along the corrected reasoning path. Experimental results show that our method achieves over a 25% improvement in correction success rate and reduces token usage by approximately 40% on STEM tasks reasoning compared to baseline approaches. --- ### Earthquaker-AI: A Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework with Rubric-Based Assessment for Primary School Earthquake Education Authors: Xanthi Kokkinou, Chaido Mizeli, Nafsika Koulaxidou, Marina Delianidi, Konstantinos Diamantaras Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14046v1 This paper presents Earthquaker-AI, a hybrid educational framework building upon a previously implemented educational robotics project by integrating a conversational AI assistant based on Retrieval-Augmented Generation. It aims to enhance earthquake preparedness and conscious action among primary-school students. The system extends the award-winning STEM project Earthquaker moving from mechanical simulation with Lego WeDo2 to cognitive and metacognitive processing. The robotics component uses Lego WeDo2 automation to simulate seismic response, letting students interact with sensors and actuators as tangible representations of protective actions. The assistant operates as a guided learning mechanism aligning student responses with safety guidelines, while providing rubric-based verbal feedback that supports self-regulated learning and calmness under emergency conditions. Earthquaker-AI follows a progressive learning trajectory aligned with cognitive development. In early grades, the focus is on basic recognition of safety actions through multiple-choice questions, assessed via a two-dimensional rubric. In middle grades, students identify correct action sequences through multiple-choice questions, evaluated via a three-axis rubric. In upper grades, the approach shifts to verbal production, requiring short written responses assessed via a four-dimensional rubric that includes clarity of expression. The dialogic module uses RAG to match student queries semantically with official guidelines, generating safe, accurate responses. Experimental evaluation shows high groundedness and accuracy, with a low hallucination rate. Overall, Earthquaker-AI combines hands-on engagement, information processing, and reflective practice. Combining robotics, rubrics, and AI promotes technological literacy, self-regulation, and responsible use of digital systems, contributing to early crisis-management skills. --- ### AI-accelerated End-to-End Framework for Rapid Professional Upskilling Authors: Tam Nguyen, Hung Nguyen, Robert Ogburn Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14044v1 By 2030, 59 of every 100 workers will need reskilling or upskilling, yet the average time to close an enterprise skills gap grew from roughly 3 days in 2014 to 36 days in 2018. Most current frameworks accelerate single stages of upskilling programs and generally lack industry validation. We present an end-to-end framework that applies AI acceleration across five stages of knowledge acquisition, content development, content review and verification, teaching, and assessment development; with a strong focus on both production and learning efficiency. Three strong external signals validates the framework: the US National Association of State Boards of Accountancy reviewed and approved an upskilling program built on the framework for continuing-professional-education credits; 3 learners followed the program and passed the NVIDIA Certified Professional in Agentic AI exam in a significantly short amount of time, with 14 more in progress; the program's knowledge base supports complex downstream analysis such as the production of a robust 1,267 risk item dataset for managing multi-agent AI system risks. --- ### Multi-Expert Routing for Multi-Domain Low-Resource OCR: A Manchu Case Study Authors: Zhan Chen, Jiqiao Ma, Chih-wen Kuo Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14041v1 Historical Manchu OCR must accommodate various visually distinct writing styles, including regular script, running script, and the semi-cursive chancery hand used in palace memorials, despite limited labeled data. We study a multi-expert system that reuses checkpoints from an iterative fine-tuning process as domain specialists and uses a lightweight page-level image classifier to dispatch pages by visual style. When the checkpoint pool lacks a suitable specialist, we train an additional expert for that domain. On three frozen test sets, the routed system matches the selected specialist for each style at two-decimal precision: 0.30 percent CER on regular script, 1.57 percent on memorials, and 4.83 percent on running script. The router achieves 99.3 percent page-level domain accuracy and matches the domain-label oracle at the same precision. Two of the three selected specialists were not trained specifically for their final domain; only the running-script expert was trained with that domain as its target. We report the evaluation protocol, router design, and per-page predictions to make the comparison reproducible. --- ### Can an Old Dog Be Taught New Tricks? Taking LLMs Beyond Sentence Level Translation Authors: Alaina Brandt Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14040v1 Automatic translation systems, from CAT tools to MT, overwhelmingly treat translation as a sentence-by-sentence act. This paper asks whether LLMs can be moved beyond that paradigm through whole-document, corpus-informed translation. We present PAT (Pragmatic Auto-Translator), a RAG-based system that pairs user-configured specifications with context from a comparable corpus of authentic longform texts in U.S. English and Latin American Spanish, passing retrieved paragraph-, section-, and document-level examples to an LLM for whole-document generation. The goal is draft translation for professional verification: target texts reformulated to fit their Spanish-language context, where discourse organization, rhetorical style, and pragmatic norms differ meaningfully from English. We evaluated six automatic translations of essays on generative AI across three projects using a customized MQM typology, assessed by two trained evaluators working from U.S. English into LATAM and Mexican Spanish. Results show that a limited prompt produced no meaningful reformulation, and specifications and corpus-informed translations at times showed substantial reformulation, though not always to effect. We find that LLMs can be moved toward reformulation and away from the sentence-by-sentence paradigm, though more work is needed to improve the effectiveness of those reformulations. In this paper, we discuss considerations related to automatic translation system design, corpus construction, and translation quality evaluation methodology and results. --- ### Early Adoption of Agentic Coding Tools by GitHub Projects Authors: Maliha Noushin Raida, Daqing Hou Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.CY, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14037v2 Agentic coding tools are increasingly capable of generating and submitting pull requests (PRs) to software projects, introducing new forms of human-agent collaboration in software development. While prior studies have examined PR-level outcomes of agent-generated contributions, less is known about how agentic coding tools are adopted and managed at the project level. In this paper, we analyze 25,264 agentic PRs from 2,361 popular GitHub repositories to investigate (1) the adoption of agentic coding tools, (2) project-level agentic PR productivity, and (3) human-agent collaboration patterns. Our results show that the median repository generates only one to two agentic PRs during a three-month period, indicating that intensive adoption remains concentrated in a small subset of projects. At the same time, small projects (1-5 contributors) exhibit higher participation ratios and average levels of agentic PR activity than medium-sized and large projects. We also observe substantial variation in project-level agentic PR productivity. While a small number of projects exceed an industry-reported estimate of 36 PRs per participant during the three-month observation period, most projects remain below this threshold. Finally, human-agent collaboration is dominated by a single-human oversight model, in which one developer reviews and/or modifies the agent's contributions, while multi-human collaboration patterns remain uncommon. These findings provide early empirical evidence on how open-source projects organize human oversight around agentic coding tools and suggest that successful integration of agent-generated contributions depends not only on advances in agent capabilities but also on the human and organizational processes that govern their use. Because this study captures an early snapshot of agent adoption, future work should continue to track how adoption patterns evolve over time. --- ### SPECS: Speciated Evolutionary Circuit Synthesis Authors: Yağız Gençer, Stefan Uhlich, Andrea Bonetti, Arun Venkitaraman, Chia-Yu Hsieh, Lorenzo Servadei Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14027v1 We propose SPECS, a genetic algorithm for automated analog circuit synthesis with joint topology and sizing optimization. SPECS is inspired by NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT), an evolutionary algorithm originally developed to synthesize neural networks. By reformulating the genome representation and adapting the genetic operators to the analog circuit domain, we successfully transfer the core principles of NEAT to analog circuit synthesis. Circuit-specific wiring constraints are incorporated to ensure valid and physically meaningful designs throughout the evolutionary process, and speciation is used to preserve innovation while maintaining population diversity. We evaluate the proposed method on a set of computational circuit synthesis tasks consisting of square, cube, square root, and cube root functions. Experimental results demonstrate that SPECS outperforms benchmark methods across all tasks in both solution quality and reliability. The synthesized circuits and their schematics are available in the supplementary repository. --- ### Improving Wind and Solar Power Prediction with Efficient Wrapper-based Feature Selection: An Empirical Study Authors: Daniel Grillmeyer, Marius Hadry, Michael Stenger, Vanessa Borst, Veronika Lesch, Samuel Kounev Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14024v1 With rising global energy demand and growing awareness of climate change and its impacts, the share of renewable energies in the global energy mix continues to grow. Unlike conventional power generation, the output of renewable energy sources cannot be controlled as consistently due to their dependence on environmental conditions. Therefore, reliable prediction of current and future energy production is essential. In this paper, we report findings from two structured literature reviews on real-world renewable energy prediction tasks: wind turbine power curve modeling and photovoltaic power prediction. For the former, we conducted a comprehensive literature review ourselves, while for the latter, we synthesize the key findings regarding frequently selected input features based on an existing survey. Across both domains, our analysis reveals that despite the large number of available monitoring and environmental variables, only limited or unsystematic methods for feature selection exist. To address this gap, we propose Cluster-based Sequential Feature Selection (CSFS), a novel, model-agnostic, clustering-based wrapper method for automatic, efficient, and reliable feature selection in renewable energy prediction pipelines. To support reproducibility and reuse, we provide an open-source implementation of CSFS on GitHub. We empirically evaluate the proposed approach on both use cases and compare it with established feature selection techniques such as wrapper-based sequential feature selection (SFS), filter-based methods, and Random Forest's embedded feature importance. The results show that the wrapper-based methods overall provide better-performing selections of features. CSFS achieves a predictive performance comparable to SFS while reducing computational cost by an average of 21%. --- ### Transforming Rank: How Architecture Navigates the Spectral Pathologies of Depth Authors: Katie Everett Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14018v1 We investigate how each component of the Transformer feedforward block architecture design determines how much rank survives across depth at initialization. We reinterpret skip connections and normalization, long understood as controlling magnitude, as mechanisms for preserving gradient rank across depth, since the very matrix multiplications and nonlinear activations that make the network expressive also reduce the rank. We show that skip connections trade off rank collapse against ensemble-like behavior, controlled by the relative scales of the branch and the skip: skip connections route the gradient around the residual branch, where rank is lost, rather than along the long gradient paths that encourage the layers to compose. The placement of the normalization layer controls this same tradeoff by setting the branch-to-skip ratio across depth, unifying much of the normalization placement and depth scaling literature, in particular why rank collapses for Post-Norm but plateaus for Pre-Norm. Other aspects of the architecture, like the two-matrix structure that expands and contracts the width, use additional parameters to preserve the representation or branch Jacobian rank. The second matrix decorrelates a coherent mean spike that would grow across blocks with a single matrix and uncentered activation, preventing the residual representation from collapsing. The width expansion between the two matrices keeps the branch Jacobian full rank: applying the rank-reducing activation in this expanded space leaves enough directions to span the original, at a width that follows a Marchenko--Pastur law. The initialization rank of the input--output Jacobian predicts which networks train on CIFAR-10. Taken together, we recast architecture design for deep networks as navigating an intrinsic tradeoff among rank collapse, ensemble-like behavior, and parameter count. --- ### Lighthouse RL: Sample-Efficient Circuit Optimization via Strategic Reset Points Authors: Mustafa Emre Gürsoy, Stefan Uhlich, Ryoga Matsuo, Yağız Gençer, Arun Venkitaraman, Chia-Yu Hsieh, Andrea Bonetti, Eisaku Ohbuchi, Lorenzo Servadei Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14008v1 In this paper, we introduce Lighthouse RL, a sample-efficient reinforcement learning (RL) approach for analog circuit sizing. Traditional methods lack generalization across different performance targets, while standard RL approaches waste resources exploring unpromising regions. Our method addresses these inefficiencies through a strategic reset strategy that initializes episodes from high-performing configurations discovered during training, called "lighthouses". These states, which are closer to the target objectives, guide exploration toward promising regions. When compared to RL and Bayesian optimization methods from the literature, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on a 2D benchmark problem and on two analog circuits, showing significant improvements in sample efficiency (up to 1.72x faster), optimization performance (100% vs. 0-87% success rate), generalization (75% vs. 0-50% extrapolation success), and objective maximization. This efficiency is particularly valuable for computationally expensive black-box optimization problems, and our reset strategy can be used as a plug-and-play enhancement for any RL-based optimization approach. --- ### Rethinking Penetration Testing for AI-Enabled Systems: From Resource Compromise to Behavioral Objective Violation Authors: Mohammad Allahbakhsh, Mohammad Hassan Bahari, Moslem Attar-Raouf Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14006v1 Penetration testing traditionally evaluates whether adversaries can exploit weaknesses in software, infrastructure, configurations, or operational controls to achieve security-relevant compromise. This paradigm remains necessary for AI-enabled systems, but it is no longer sufficient. In such systems, adversaries may influence prompts, retrieved content, sensor inputs, training data, memory, tools, or human-AI interaction loops to alter system behavior without directly compromising the underlying infrastructure. This paper reframes penetration testing for AI-enabled systems as objective-driven behavioral evaluation. We define an AI-enabled system as one in which learned models materially influence behavior affecting operational outcomes, and we define AI-enabled penetration as the feasible induction of AI-governed behavior that violates one or more operational objectives under an explicit threat model. This definition preserves conventional penetration testing while extending it to adversarial pathways such as prompt injection, indirect prompt injection, data poisoning, sensor manipulation, retrieval poisoning, tool misuse, and agentic misalignment. We further propose a testing workflow that identifies operational objectives, maps AI-governed behavior, analyzes adversarial influence surfaces, defines behavioral failure criteria, executes scenario-based tests, and reports evidence linking adversarial action to objective violation. A running example involving an AI-enabled security operations center assistant illustrates how penetration may occur through behavioral influence rather than infrastructure compromise. Together, the definitions, workflow, and example provide a technical framework for evaluating adversarial success in deployed AI-enabled systems. --- ### M$^\text{4}$World: A Multi-view Multimodal Driving World Model for Interactive Object Manipulation and Minute-long Streaming Authors: Ke Cheng, Hanqiao Ye, Lei Shi, Yahui Liu, Yunhan Shen, Jingtao Dong, Zhenke Wang, Wenxuan Ao, Weixiang Xu, Kaining Huang, Shuhan Shen Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14005v1 Driving-world generation has emerged as a core capability for scalable autonomous-driving simulation, yet existing methods remain limited in object-level controllability and long-horizon stability. We present M$^\text{4}$World, a Multi-view and Multimodal generative driving world model that synthesizes future surround-view video streams and synchronized LiDAR scans while supporting interactive object Manipulation and stable Minute-long streaming. Fine-grained object manipulation is realized through a flexible conditioning interface that supports explicit control over both the spatial layout and visual appearance of individual objects. Stable minute-long streaming, on the other hand, is achieved through a multi-stage training framework that enables online causal generation in only four denoising steps while maintaining coherent world dynamics throughout extended rollouts. Building on these components, we introduce an efficient few-clip post-training as well as a suite of visual reference-conditioned generation models, preserving general generation ability while allowing rare-case customization for long-tail controllability. To assess controllability beyond realism, we further introduce an automated VLM-based judging pipeline that evaluates scene-level condition adherence, view-wise object controllability, and cross-view object consistency. Comprehensive experiments show that M$^\text{4}$World consistently delivers high generation quality, precise controllability, and stable minute-long streaming. Together with downstream long-tail augmentation and scene editing, these results demonstrate the potential of M$^\text{4}$World for controllable, scalable driving simulation. --- ### Do Agent Optimizers Compound? A Continual-Learning Evaluation on Terminal-Bench 2.0 Authors: Wenxiao Wang, Priyatham Kattakinda, Soheil Feizi Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14004v1 Most reported gains from agent-optimization methods are one-shot: an agent is optimized against a fixed benchmark and the resulting improvement is reported as if it were a stable property of the method. This does not test the setting that matters for deployed agents, where optimization is applied recursively as new failures and new tasks appear over time. The central question this raises is whether optimizer-driven gains compound: after an agent has been optimized once, can it be optimized again on newly arrived tasks without eroding the gains the first round produced? We study this question with a two-phase continual-learning evaluation built from hard tasks in Terminal-Bench 2.0, comparing three approaches to agent-harness optimization (GEPA, Meta Harness, and RELAI's Verifiable Continual Learning, RELAI-VCL) under identical optimization budgets. All three methods improve over the baseline agent in the conventional, static, single-phase setting. However, once new tasks are introduced, the methods diverge sharply: GEPA's optimized agent transfers below the unoptimized baseline, Meta Harness transfers well but fails to improve further once given a second optimization budget, and RELAI-VCL is the only method that both transfers positively to unseen tasks and continues improving after those tasks are folded into the optimization objective, reaching the highest pass rate at every evaluated stage and the highest lifelong average pass rate overall (76.4% vs. 66.0% for GEPA, 64.6% for Meta Harness, and 58.7% for the baseline). Our key observation was that optimization gains compounded only when regression control was built into the optimization loop, providing an inductive bias against shortcut solutions that fail to generalize. --- ### Lyapunov Exponent as Physics-Informed Dense Reward: RL Discovery of Stabilization Beyond the Kapitza Pendulum Authors: Slava Andrejev Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.14001v1 We suggest using the Lyapunov characteristic exponent (LCE) as a dense reward signal for the reinforcement learning problem of stabilizing the inverted pendulum with vertical motion. With LCE, the agent not only successfully found the oscillatory motion known as the Kapitza pendulum but also damped the pendulum's pivoting, leaving it in a strictly upright position. --- ### The Dynamic Verifiable Multi-Agent Human Agentic Loyalty Loop (DVM-HALL) Model and the Net Human-Agent Score (NHAS) in Autonomous Commerce Authors: Sai Srikanth Madugula, Peplluis Esteva de la Rosa, Daya Shankar Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.SI, cs.AI, cs.GT, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13998v1 The rapid proliferation of Agentic Artificial Intelligence fundamentally disrupts traditional customer loyalty paradigms. As AI evolves from passive recommendation algorithms to autonomous, goal-directed agents capable of executing purchasing decisions, the conventional understanding of consumer-brand relationships requires a structural reevaluation. By synthesizing extant literature across human-machine teaming, consumer decision-making, and algorithmic trust dynamics, we demonstrate that traditional loyalty models fail to account for algorithmic bounded rationality and constructed autonomy. To address this, we introduce the Dynamic Verifiable Multi-Agent Human Agentic Loyalty Loop (DVM-HALL) model. We formalize brand choice via a softmax probability formulation where human emotional equity, agentic machine-experience utility, calibrated trust, delegated authority, and verifiable execution jointly determine selection. The model features recursive updating mechanisms to dynamically calibrate trust and delegation after each interaction. Crucially, the framework integrates a verifiable execution layer for Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and tokenized loyalty settings, incorporating execution risks -- such as gas costs, slippage, MEV exposure, and smart-contract vulnerabilities -- as core predictors of agentic brand preference. Furthermore, we introduce the Net Human-Agent Score (NHAS), an auditable, risk-weighted metric designed to measure human-agent alignment using human feedback, execution logs, benchmark comparisons, and verifiable receipts. Finally, we propose a comprehensive three-stage empirical validation plan spanning controlled shopping experiments, multi-agent market simulations, and DeFi testbeds. This framework provides the foundational theory required for brands to navigate the impending transition toward machine customers. --- ### TRACE: Turn-level Reward Assignment via Credit Estimation for Long-Horizon Agents Authors: Leitian Tao, Baolin Peng, Wenlin Yao, Tao Ge, Hao Cheng, Mike Hang Wang, Jianfeng Gao, Sharon Li Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13988v1 Multi-turn agents solve complex tasks through extended sequences of tool interactions before producing a final answer, making credit assignment a fundamental challenge during post-training. Outcome rewards provide reliable supervision for short-horizon reasoning, but become sparse and high-variance as trajectories grow to tens or hundreds of tool calls. They can also be misleading: a failed rollout may contain many useful actions that move the agent closer to the goal, yet outcome-only training assigns them the same negative advantage as the eventual mistake. We propose TRACE (Turn-level Reward Assignment via Credit Estimation), a dense credit-assignment method for agentic reinforcement learning. TRACE represents rollouts as state transitions at tool-call boundaries, obtains gold-answer log-probabilities from a frozen reference model, transforms them into log-ratio state values, and derives per-action rewards as Temporal-Difference changes in those values. This requires no additional critic or process-label training, and its one-step log-ratio TD component telescopes across redundant tool calls. On long-horizon complex search, TRACE substantially improves base-model tool-use ability using pure RL, without a cold-start supervised fine-tuning stage, an agentic mid-training stage, or training on live-web data. On the closed-web BrowseComp-Plus benchmark, it raises Qwen3-4B from $7.2$ to $35.6$ and Qwen3-30B-A3B from $8.4$ to $42.6$. The learned search behavior also transfers to open-web benchmarks, and the learning curves show earlier improvement and faster convergence during RL training. --- ### Task-Specific Feature Fusion Method for Multi-Task Affective Behavior Analysis Authors: Jiajun Sun, Zhe Gao Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13986v1 The 11th Affective Behavior Analysis in-the-wild (ABAW11) Multi-Task Learning Challenge requires a unified system to predict valence-arousal, categorical expressions, and facial action units from the official s-Aff-Wild2 images. Although these tasks are naturally related through facial behavior, our validation experiments show that they benefit from different visual features, temporal processing strategies, fusion mechanisms, and calibration procedures. In this paper, we study task-adaptive feature fusion for ABAW11 multi-task affective behavior analysis. We first adapt two pretrained visual backbones, DINOv2 ViT-L and DINOv3 ConvNeXt-base, on an external expression-oriented facial image set and then freeze them to extract complementary frame-level features from the official ABAW11 data. On top of these frozen features, we systematically compare frame-level prediction heads, temporal convolutional heads, post-hoc temporal smoothing, LightGBM models, feature concatenation, gated fusion, residual fusion, late logit fusion, threshold calibration, and shared MTL structures. The final system selects task-specific fusion and prediction strategies rather than forcing all tasks to share a single architecture. On the ABAW11 validation set, the selected system achieves an EXPR macro-F1 of 0.4222, an AU macro-F1 of 0.5402, and a mean VA CCC of 0.6717, resulting in an overall validation score of 1.6341. The results suggest that task-adaptive fusion of frozen visual features is a simple and effective strategy for ABAW-style multi-task affective behavior analysis. --- ### Multimodal Empirical Bayes Variational Autoencoders for Joint Longitudinal and Time-to-Event Modeling Authors: Anders Sjöberg, Nils Olsson, Marcus Baaz, Mats Jirstrand Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13984v1 Longitudinal tumor measurements, dropout information, and genetic covariates provide complementary information about treatment response, but integrating these data sources within a single population modeling framework remains challenging. We extend the empirical Bayes variational autoencoder (EB-VAE) framework to joint longitudinal and time-to-event modeling and evaluate it on tumor growth data. The framework represents inter-individual variability using latent individual effects regularized by a covariate-conditioned empirical Bayes prior, while a decoder maps these latent effects to tumor-volume trajectories. To account for informative dropout, the decoder was augmented with a hazard model, yielding joint predictions of tumor growth and time to dropout. We further compared fully neural and hybrid semi-mechanistic decoder formulations and incorporated genomic covariates through a genetics-conditioned prior adaptation. The hybrid decoder recovered treatment-effect parameters broadly consistent with previously reported nonlinear mixed-effects estimates, while achieving prior predictive performance comparable to the neural decoder. The joint model reproduced both tumor-volume distributions and dropout patterns in held-out individuals, and genetic conditioning improved individual-level prior predictions in both cutaneous melanoma and breast cancer experiments. Stability selection identified several biologically plausible genetic indicators, including alterations in BRAF, NRAS, NF1, and MDM2. These results demonstrate that EB-VAE provides a flexible probabilistic framework for combining neural dynamics, mechanistic structure, time-to-event modeling, and high-dimensional covariates in pharmacometric applications. --- ### Screening Is Effective for Visual Recognition Authors: Shunya Shimomura, Kazuhiro Hotta Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13983v1 Vision Transformer (ViT) has been widely used as a powerful framework for modeling global dependencies among image patches. However, its core component, self-attention assigns softmax-normalized relative weights to all patches, making it difficult to evaluate the relevance between patches independently. In visual recognition, images often contain many background or redundant patches, yet self-attention cannot explicitly reject such irrelevant patches, which may introduce unnecessary information into feature aggregation. To address this limitation, Screening has been proposed in the field of language modeling, where the relevance of each token is independently evaluated based on query-key similarity and low-relevance tokens are explicitly excluded through thresholding. In this work, we propose VisionScreen, a new vision model that extends Screening mechanism to visual recognition. VisionScreen treats image patches as tokens arranged on a two-dimensional grid and extends absolute relevance estimation based on query-key similarity to the two-dimensional spatial domain. This allows each patch to selectively aggregate only content-wise and spatially relevant patches without relying on competition among patches. Experiments on image classification benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms conventional ViT. These results suggest that Screening can be effective for visual recognition, offering an alternative to relative feature aggregation based on softmax attention. --- ### Music-to-Dance Generation via Atomic Movements Authors: Xinhao Cai, Yixuan Sun, Minghang Zheng, Qingchao Chen, Xin Jin, Song-chun Zhu, Yang Liu Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13978v1 Music-driven dance generation aims to produce human motion that is both rhythmically synchronized and semantically consistent with music. While recent neural approaches have achieved impressive visual realism, they typically model motion as a continuous signal and neglect its compositional nature, making generated dances structurally incoherent and difficult to control. In this work, we introduce a structure-aware framework that models choreography as a sequence of atomic movements-semantically interpretable motion events that serve as the building blocks of dance. To construct this atomic movement vocabulary, we first segment large-scale dance data and cluster them into atomic movement groups. We then employ a large language model to semantically relabel and refine the clusters, yielding a set of interpretable and reusable atomic movements. Based on these atomic movement annotations, we design a two-stage generation framework that mirrors the human choreography process. In the atomic movement planning stage, the model predicts the type, duration, and timing of atomic movements conditioned on the input music, forming a symbolic dance allocation. In the completion stage, a transition-aware generator synthesizes smooth and stylistically coherent motion conditioned on the planned structure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method produces dances with significantly improved structural coherence, rhythmic alignment, and perceptual naturalness compared to existing baselines, while providing enhanced interpretability and controllable editing through explicit structural representation. --- ### Constraint-Aware Counterfactual Editing for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis Authors: S M Rafiuddin, Vamsi Krishna Pavuluri, Atriya Sen Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13977v1 Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) requires models to identify sentiment toward specific aspects rather than relying on the global polarity of a sentence. This makes counterfactual evaluation especially challenging: a valid counterfactual should flip the sentiment of one target aspect while preserving the sentiment of all non-target aspects, semantic meaning, fluency, and factual consistency. Existing counterfactual generation methods often focus on sentence-level label flipping and may produce edits that are fluent but aspect-invalid, semantically drifting, or contradictory. To address this limitation, we propose CAVE-ABSA, a Constraint-Aware Validated Editing framework for generating and validating aspect-level counterfactuals. CAVE-ABSA localizes the opinion span associated with the target aspect, performs controlled counterfactual rewriting, refines candidates through a repair module, and filters them using aspect-level verification, semantic similarity, AMR-guided structural preservation, edit minimality, fluency, and contradiction detection. The framework is designed to construct validated counterfactual ABSA datasets for robustness evaluation and data augmentation. By explicitly separating generation from validation, CAVE-ABSA provides a principled approach for producing meaningful aspect-local counterfactuals and for testing whether ABSA models truly rely on aspect-grounded sentiment reasoning. --- ### CF-Net: Conflict Fusion with Speaker Normalisation and Certainty Weighting for Ambivalence/Hesitancy Recognition Authors: Tung Hung Bui, Hong Hai Nguyen, Van Thong Huynh Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13976v2 Detecting ambivalence and hesitancy (AH) in unconstrained video is challenging because the target signal is inherently ambiguous and expressed through subtle cross-modal incongruence rather than prototypical affect. We present CF-Net, a deep multimodal network submitted to the 3rd Edition of the AH Video Recognition Challenge (ABAW 11th, ECCV 2026), targeting the BAH dataset. CF-Net encodes visual, audio, and transcript streams with frozen SigLIP2, HuBERT, and DistilBERT backbones, normalises backbone features per speaker to reduce identity leakage, and fuses them via a ConflictFusion module that explicitly computes pairwise cross-modal incongruence. Training combines certainty-weighted focal loss, manifold mixup, and modality dropout; an auxiliary certainty-regression head uses ambiguity annotations to stabilise learning on genuinely borderline samples. CF-Net achieves a Macro F1 of 0.7155 on the BAH validation set and 0.7364 (AP = 0.7439) on the private challenge test set. --- ### DeltaMerge-LowRes: Composing Language and Task Deltas for Low-Resource Adaptation Authors: Son Ha Xuan, Xuan-Bach Le, Phat T. Tran-Truong Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13967v1 Adapting a multilingual encoder to a new language \emph{and} a new task with only a few hundred gold examples is a common low-resource NLP setting, yet the two axes are usually fused via an expensive language--task fine-tuning run. We ask whether they can instead be trained separately and recombined in weight space. \DeltaMergeLowRes{} learns a language delta $Δ_L$ from unlabeled monolingual text and a task delta $Δ_T$ from labeled English data, then composes them at inference under one of four rules: additive, activation-guided, sparsity-aware, and a novel \emph{cross-axis TIES}. The new rule adapts the TIES-Merging steps of trimming, sign election, and merging to the language and task axes rather than to two task axes. Holding $(Δ_L,Δ_T)$ fixed across rules on four task families and four African languages ($158$ evaluated cells, $10{,}000$-sample paired bootstrap per cell), we find: (i) cross-axis TIES wins summarisation on $3/4$ languages by $+4$ to $+7$ chrF (chrF $18.59$ vs.\ $13.80$ task-only); (ii) it improves QA F1 by $+2.32$ and EM by $+2.91$; and (iii) sparsity-aware merging cuts classification ECE by $36\%$ at parity macro-F1. The composition rule materially changes what the merged model preserves, suppresses, and calibrates. We release all JSON traces and a claim ledger. --- ### PlumeQuant: Uncertainty-aware consistency assessment of methane plume masks and emission-rate estimates Authors: Parisa Masnadi Khiabani, Wolfgang Jentner, Alireza Rangrazjeddi, Michael C. Wimberly, Binbin Weng, David Ebert, Charles Nicholson Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CV, astro-ph.IM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13945v1 Imaging spectrometers increasingly distribute source-resolved methane plume products in which the plume mask, integrated mass enhancement (IME), plume length, emission rate, and uncertainty are physically and algorithmically linked. Using 63 EMIT-derived Carbon Mapper plume records from 27 scenes, we show that these published scalar quantities do not uniquely constrain the plume boundary: substantially different yet plausible masks reproduce the same IME, plume length, and emission rate. Genetic-algorithm (GA) ensembles conditioned on the published IME and plume length make this equifinality explicit: the high-confidence core selected by nearly all target-consistent masks covers a median of 13% of the plausible footprint envelope, and ambiguity is largest for weak, low-overlap plumes. The diagnostics come from PlumeQuant, which recomputes IME, plume length, emission rate, and five-term uncertainty from distributed product components under stated conventions and evaluates four mask representations: the distributed reference mask, a transparent Carbon Mapper-informed analogue (CM-like), the GA ensemble, and optional expert edits. The CM-like mask is generated per plume without access to the reference mask or published quantities, with settings fixed once on a scene-disjoint 44-plume development split. It reproduced published IME with +0.72% median difference and emission rate with +0.16% (6.98% mean absolute), reached 0.843 median intersection-over-union against the reference masks, and matched the published uncertainty scale (median ratio 1.01). Holdout mean absolute errors were 7.6% (IME), 9.5% (length), and 6.1% (rate). These are product-level consistency diagnostics, not independent validation. They flag weak, offset, or ambiguous plumes for expert review. --- ### Beyond the $d^{2.5}$-mixing bound for Dikin walks on polytopes Authors: Yunbum Kook Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.DS, cs.LG, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13943v1 Inspired by interior-point methods (IPM) for structured convex optimization, Kannan and Narayanan introduced the Dikin walk for sampling uniformly from polytopes in 2009. As in IPMs, the Dikin walk is affine-invariant, and its convergence is governed by the barrier geometry used to define its local proposal. They showed that the Dikin walk with the logarithmic barrier for a polytope in $\mathbb{R}^{d}$ with $m$ linear inequalities mixes in $md$ iterations. In 2017, Chen, Dwivedi, Wainwright, and Yu improved this to $d^{2.5}$ using a Lewis-weight barrier, and conjectured that the correct mixing time should be $d^{2}$. We make progress toward this conjecture by improving the previous $d^{2.5}$-mixing bound. For exponential sampling over a polytope, we prove that the Dikin walk with a scaled Lee--Sidford metric mixes from a warm start in $d^{2.25}$ iterations. This also yields an improved cold-start complexity via a known annealing framework. The main technical ingredient is improved average self-concordance of the Lee--Sidford metric, which gives high acceptance probability for the Metropolis filter along a random Dikin proposal. While previous analyses were effectively limited to second-order control due to technical difficulties, we develop a principled higher-order analysis. The proof combines a selective higher-order expansion of recursive bottleneck terms, a moving orthonormal-frame calculus for higher derivatives of the Lewis weights, and Wiener-chaos decompositions via multiple stochastic integrals to control the resulting Gaussian polynomials. --- ### Peak-End-Net: A Peak-End Rule Inspired Framework for Generalizable Video Aesthetic Assessment Authors: Geng Li, Haiwen Li, Rui Chen, Jing Tang, Lei Sun, Xiangxiang Chu Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13941v1 Video aesthetic assessment (VAA) aims to predict how aesthetically pleasing a video is, yet remains far less explored than other visual assessment tasks. Its progress is hindered not only by the scarcity of large-scale benchmarks, but also by the intrinsic subjectivity of aesthetic judgment, which is shaped by human perception. In this paper, we revisit VAA from a psychological perspective and propose \textit{Peak-End-Net}, a lightweight and interpretable framework inspired by the \textit{peak-end rule}, which suggests that people tend to judge a temporal experience mainly according to its salient moments and the ending. Building on this intuition, we first transfer knowledge from image aesthetic assessment (IAA) to VAA by introducing a pretrained IAA head to produce frame-wise aesthetic priors, which serve as surrogate signals for identifying aesthetically salient moments and guiding \textit{peak-end rule}-based temporal aggregation. To further capture how a video evolves aesthetically over time, we design an aesthetic rhythm encoder that models temporal progression beyond isolated moments. Additionally, we refine the overall assessment through a dynamic gated fusion mechanism to improve robustness under distribution shift. Our method is built on a frozen vision transformer (ViT) and requires only a small number of trainable parameters, making it scalable and parameter-efficient. Extensive experiments on two existing VAA benchmarks, including in-domain evaluation on VADB and cross-domain testing on DIVIDE-3K, demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, affirming the value of psychologically grounded modeling for VAA. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/AMAP-ML/Peak-End-Net. --- ### A Self-Evolving Agent for Longitudinal Personal Health Management Authors: Haoran Li, Jiebi Deng, Tong Jin, Jinghong Han, Yuxin Wang, Zexin Wang, Qingyi Si, Weikang Gong, Xiahai Zhuang, Jia You, Wei Cheng, Jianfeng Feng et al. Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13940v1 Personal health management unfolds over repeated encounters, yet most health AI systems treat each request in isolation. We developed HealthClaw, an open-source agent architecture that updates support as a person's routines, preferences, measurements and risks change. It separates shared safety rules and medical knowledge from private longitudinal memory containing profile facts, reusable procedures and episodic traces. After each episode, induction determines what should update the profile, revise a procedure, remain episodic or be excluded. We evaluated HealthClaw with a synthetic year-long benchmark and nine 200-case biomedical tasks. Across 900 longitudinal support probes, answer accuracy increased from 0.2% with current-query prompting to 45.7% with HealthClaw, while prompt-side context exposure was 71.7% lower than with full-history prompting. In 100 privacy probes, HealthClaw produced higher privacy-aware answer quality and fewer unsafe disclosures than both baselines. Across the biomedical tasks, the mean absolute gain in the task-specific primary metric was 27.0 percentage points, and seven gains remained significant after false-discovery-rate correction. These offline benchmarks support governed, self-evolving memory for longitudinal personal health agents, although clinical effectiveness requires prospective evaluation. HealthClaw is publicly available at https://github.com/HC-Guo/HealthClaw. --- ### A novel unsupervised machine learning strategy to handle multimodal cardiac PET/MRI data Authors: Brunnhilde Ponsi, Thomas Carlier, Lara Marteau, Aurélien Monnet, Thomas Eugène, Jean-Michel Serfaty, Nicolas Piriou, Hatem Necib Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG, physics.med-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13936v1 Arrhythmogenic left ventricular cardiomyopathy is a genetic myocardial disease difficult to diagnose due to the lack of gold standard criteria. Simultaneous PET/MR imaging, combined with multiparametric quantitative analysis, could facilitate the identification of different profiles related to the phenotype and progression of cardiomyopathy. This preliminary study focuses on a methodological strategy for dealing with PET/MRI data, including inter-patient data linkage and regional analysis. Two-step clustering was applied to T1 and T2 maps, LGE, and 18F-FDG-PET images of 99 patients genetically diagnosed with arrhythmogenic left ventricular cardiomyopathy. Each patient's images were independently z-scored and summed into a single volume, which was clustered into supervoxels. Thirty-two inter-patient groups of supervoxels were obtained by spectral clustering. An "abnormality" score was assigned to each cluster and modality, and used to visualise abnormal regions likely associated with disease. They enabled the generation of automated textual and bullseye health reports for each patient, which were compared with cardiac imager assessments using balanced accuracy in repeated nested cross-validation. This approach was further validated on a larger cohort of 167 numerical phantoms. The reports generated by clustering accurately identified most of the cardiac physicians' observations (BA = 0.76 $\pm$ 0.04 in repeated nested cross-validation on patients, and BA $\ge$ 0.8 on phantoms). Furthermore, the identified abnormal clusters closely matched their visual observations, facilitating the identification of varying degrees of fibrosis or inflammation on the images. This approach enables a more systematic handling of multimodal PET/MRI data to characterise myocardial heterogeneity in arrhythmogenic left ventricular cardiomyopathy patients. --- ### SIVA-RL: Sensitivity-Invariance Visual Alignment for Multimodal Reinforcement Learning Authors: Cheng Tang, Junzhi Ning, Min Cen, Wei Li, Xinyi Zeng, Pinxian Zeng, Rongbin Li, Qiming Zhu, Yuqiang Li, Junjun He, Yirong Chen, Ming Hu Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13931v1 Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) drives multimodal reasoning, but answer-level correctness does not guarantee that a vision-language model grounds its predictions in visual evidence. Existing visual-intervention methods contrast policy behavior on original and modified images, yet assign supervision by the type of intervention rather than its observed effect. This assumption fails: identical operators produce heterogeneous outcomes across samples. We propose SIVA-RL, a Sensitivity-Invariance Visual Alignment framework that replaces operator-conditioned regularization with sample-wise, outcome-conditioned supervision. SIVA-RL constructs localized interventions through token-aligned, distance-constrained within-image PatchSwap. A frozen audit policy then scores each clean-intervention pair, and the observed reward drop becomes soft routing weights. Large-drop pairs drive sensitivity alignment, low-drop pairs drive clean-anchored invariance alignment, and ambiguous pairs are down-weighted. This design decouples intervention construction from supervision assignment and is compatible with both GRPO and DAPO backbones. Across nine multimodal reasoning benchmarks spanning mathematical, logical, and vision-dependent tasks, SIVA-RL improves 3B and 7B models over matched RL baselines in every setting. It yields an 8.79 percentage-point gain on vision-dependent reasoning and up to 14.9% relative overall improvement across all four GRPO- and DAPO-based configurations. ---