# Research Papers — 2026-07 · bundle page 119 of 222 > Full-text markdown of papers #5901–5950 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/119 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/118.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/120.md) ### VAIOM: Continuous-Input, Discrete-Output Decoder-Only Financial Sequence Modeling Authors: Yiming Ma, Xinyu Chen Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.LG, q-fin.CP arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13929v1 Financial observations are continuous, heterogeneous, and noisy, whereas decoder-only next-token models are usually built around discrete symbolic inputs. We introduce Vector-Input Autoregressive Inference for Ordinal-Return Modeling (VAIOM), a decoder-only Transformer for probabilistic next-return modeling on one-hour foreign-exchange bars. VAIOM separates input representation from output likelihood: continuous multivariate financial-event vectors preserve numerical structure at the input, while a categorical distribution over the next volatility-normalized return bucket supports cross-entropy training and likelihood evaluation. The selected 0.9M Hybrid Continuous Input model combines continuous event features with categorical asset metadata, a Mixture-of-Market-States return head, Gap, volatility-regime, and Ordinal auxiliary objectives, and full-sequence supervision. Models and preprocessing are fit using pre-2024 Train data; models are selected on 2024H2 Validation and evaluated without refitting on two 2025 Test periods. Across three independent training seeds, every model outperforms fixed single-bar LightGBM baseline in both Test halves. For the canonical checkpoint, paired gains over LightGBM are 0.029 and 0.043 bits per event. Validation experiments show that continuous input improves over discrete-token input under the same categorical return objective, full-sequence supervision improves over last-position training, and auxiliary representation shaping together with a mixture-structured return head improves return likelihood in controlled comparisons. A supporting capacity study finds that the smallest evaluated complete architecture rung achieves the strongest Validation likelihood on the present corpus. --- ### Plausible Deniability Guarantees for Whistleblowers Authors: Leo Richter, Matt J. Kusner Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13928v1 Whistleblowers are a key safeguard against organizational wrongdoing, but the threat of retaliation deters reporting. Existing whistleblower-protection proposals lack formal privacy guarantees, and existing differential privacy mechanisms do not directly target the natural threat model -- one in which the audited organization itself observes auditor selection decisions and uses them to identify reporters. We formalize protection against a strong-adversary threat model as per-report $(0, δ)$-differential privacy on the transcript of audit selections. Within this framework we prove that a natural approach -- randomized response applied at the selection step -- can never outperform uniform random auditing by more than $δ$ at any horizon. We then give a generic mechanism that reduces private auditing to private continual counting: any $(0, δ)$-DP continual counter plugs in by post-processing, and the audit transcript inherits the same per-report guarantee. Instantiating the reduction with a recent work in continual counting yields per-report $(0, δ)$-DP with noise scaling as $O(\sqrt{\log T})$ across a horizon of $T$ audit decisions. A utility theorem shows that the selection error vanishes whenever the noisy report gap between the most-reported organization and the runner-up grows faster than $\sqrt{\log T}$. Simulations show a substantial improvement over randomized response. --- ### Cyclone: Diffusion Model for Cycle-Consistent Weather Editing from Unpaired Driving Data Authors: Thang-Anh-Quan Nguyen, Moussab Bennehar, Luis Guillermo Roldao Jimenez, Nathan Piasco, Dzmitry Tsishkou, Laurent Caraffa, Jean-Philippe Tarel, Roland Brémond Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13927v1 Reliable perception under diverse weather conditions remains a major challenge for autonomous driving systems. A common strategy to improve robustness is either to synthesize adverse weather conditions for training perception models or to apply weather-removal techniques to recover clean inputs. However, existing approaches typically rely on synthetic data augmentation or physics-based, task-specific models that require paired training data and often struggle to generate realistic weather effects or generalize robustly to out-of-domain scenarios. Toward this problem, we present Cyclone, a unified framework for weather editing based on latent diffusion, equipped with cycle-consistent constraints and knowledge from image-text models. Cyclone enables the generation of multiple weather conditions across diverse scenes while eliminating the need for paired data. Experimental results show that our approach produces more realistic, structure-preserving outputs than existing baselines and leads to consistent improvements across several downstream driving perception tasks. Furthermore, we demonstrate that Cyclone can be distilled to a video diffusion model for temporally consistent weather editing. --- ### Thresholded Cross-Attention for Reliable Intensity-Chromaticity Fusion in Low-Light Image Enhancement Authors: Yanyi Wu, Xu Zhang, Junkai Chen, Laibin Chang, Jiaqi Ma, Shi Chen, Linwei Zhu, Jianglei Di, Huan Zhang Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13925v1 Low-Light Image Enhancement (LLIE) requires a careful balance among noise suppression, color fidelity, and efficiency. Recent HVI-based methods alleviate color entanglement by decoupling intensity and chromaticity, yet how reliably the two streams are fused again is an overlooked factor that largely determines the final quality. We observe that the confidence of cross-stream attention is strongly layer-dependent, so the fixed-quota selection of Top-K sparse attention is mismatched to it, discarding informative dependencies in some layers while retaining noisy ones in others. Motivated by this observation, we propose TCA-Net, a network built around Thresholded Cross-Attention that targets reliable intensity-chromaticity fusion in the HVI space rather than introducing yet another color representation. At its core, TCA replaces the rigid Top-K quota with a fixed confidence threshold whose retained cardinality is input- and layer-adaptive, retaining only high-confidence cross-stream interactions while suppressing unreliable ones. Around this core, two complementary designs clean up the fusion before and after it: a Phase-guided Fourier Interaction Module provides a structure-aware brightness initialization for the intensity stream prior to fusion, and a Decoupled Dual-Stream Guidance Module constructs residual intensity features to suppress chromaticity leakage during reconstruction. A Scale-Aware Consistency Regularization further improves structural robustness under scale perturbations during training. Extensive experiments on LOL-v1, LOL-v2, Sony-Total-Dark, and LSRW-Huawei demonstrate that TCA-Net delivers competitive restoration accuracy, improved color fidelity, and a compact parameter size. --- ### Generative Compilation: On-the-Fly Compiler Feedback as AI Generates Code Authors: Niels Mündler-Sasahara, Hristo Venev, Dawn Song, Martin Vechev, Jingxuan He Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.PL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13921v2 Languages with rich static semantics, such as Rust, provide stronger guarantees for AI-generated code, but their strictness makes generation more difficult. Off-the-shelf compilers can provide useful feedback post-generation, but does not guide intermediate generation steps, such as those during autoregressive LLM decoding. Constrained decoding intervenes earlier by rejecting invalid tokens during sampling, but requires white-box model access and costly reimplementation for semantic constraints. We introduce generative compilation, the first approach to obtaining compiler feedback on partial programs during generation. The core technical device is a sealor: a lightweight, mostly syntax-guided transformation that converts partial programs into complete ones that standard compilers can diagnose. It is designed such that possible-to-complete partial programs are never rejected, while preserving enough code context to catch genuine dead ends early. We construct such a sealor on a core Rust-like calculus and prove that it satisfies these properties, all mechanized in Lean. We extend it to the first partial-program checker for real Rust. We evaluate our method on challenging repository-level Rust coding tasks, across both frontier black-box and open-weight models. We show that generative compilation reduces non-compiling outputs and improves functional correctness, relative to standard post-generation feedback. It does so by detecting a broad range of errors close to their source and early during generation, thereby reducing errors cascades and enabling focused diagnostics. More broadly, generative compilation is a step toward making compilers a first-class citizen of AI-assisted programming active during generation, rather than a separate post-generation check. --- ### DeepStress: Stress-Testing Deep Search Agents Authors: Ismael Rousseau, Geraldine Damnati, Frederic Bechet Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13920v1 While search agents demonstrate impressive capabilities in multi-step question answering, their robustness to poor-quality evidence remains under-explored. This phenomenon occurs rarely in realistic benchmarks but can lead to dramatic failure in real life applications. Therefore in this study we propose DeepStress, a stress testing framework that controls the frequency of challenging evidence by replacing the retrieval module of search agents with a controlled synthetic environment. We use this framework to control three dimensions that can affect document reliability: trustworthiness, relevance, and factuality. Testing several search agents on HotpotQA and BrowseCompPlus, we demonstrate that agents exhibit substantial differences in their ability to handle unreliable information and propose new metrics that better document systems outcomes as well as the interactions between conflicting parametric and retrieved knowledge. --- ### An Efficient Newton Algorithm for Nonnegative Matrix Factorization with the Kullback-Leibler Divergence Authors: Damien Lesens, Jérémy E. Cohen, Bora Uçar Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13919v1 Nonnegative Matrix Factorization (NMF) is a fundamental tool in unsupervised learning, which approximates a nonnegative matrix by the product of two low-rank nonnegative factors. The Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence is best suited to measure the data to model discrepancy when the decomposed data sample follows a Poisson distribution, which is the case for count datasets such as term-document matrices or images. Most KL-NMF algorithms in the literature minimize a separable majorant of the loss to find their next iterate. We argue that this method has reached its limits and propose to use instead the second-order Taylor expansion of the loss, leading to a Newton-type method. We minimize this non-separable surrogate by proposing a generalization of the well-known HALS algorithm. This yields an efficient KL-NMF algorithm which provably converges and which competes favorably with state-of-the-art algorithms on a large variety of datasets. --- ### Partially Correlated Verifier Cascades in LLM Harnesses: Concave Log-Odds, Polynomial Reliability, and Blind-Spot Ceilings Authors: Jiangang Han Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: math.ST, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13918v1 Serial verification gates are a core reliability primitive in LLM harnesses: a candidate answer is returned only if $k$ verifier calls all accept it. Under conditionally independent gates, the recent Odds Law (arXiv:2606.15712) shows that posterior log-odds grow linearly in $k$, so failure decays exponentially, and states that "a tight theory of partially correlated verifier cascades remains open." This note gives a minimal such theory. Modeling the per-instance false-accept rate on the generator's own errors as a latent variable $α\sim G$ (de Finetti), the exact cascade posterior is $\ell_k = \ell_0 - \ln m_k$, with $m_k$ the $k$-th moment of $G$. Then: (i) $\ell_k$ is concave in $k$ for every non-degenerate $G$ -- the Odds Law is its tangent at the first gate and an upper bound; (ii) for Beta$(a,b)$ latents, failure decays polynomially, $1-r_k \asymp k^{-b}$, with correlation parameter $ρ_v = 1/(a+b+1)$; (iii) a blind-spot atom of mass $1-π$ at $α=1$ caps the evidence extractable from any number of gates at $-\ln(1-π)$ nats, so reliability saturates below 1; (iv) letting the true-accept rate also vary ($β\sim H$) yields a trichotomy -- gates eventually always help, plateau, or actively harm -- decided by the upper-tail exponents of $G$ and $H$, with closed-form crossover $k^\dagger$. The mechanism is survivorship: errors surviving gates are the high-$α$ ones. The theory is measurable: $R$ repeated verdicts per instance identify the first $R$ moments of $G$, so two verdicts identify $ρ_v$; beta-binomial likelihood and NPMLE recover the reliability curve and the ill-posed ceiling. In synthetic tests, independence-based extrapolation underestimates failure by 20x at $k=5$ and ~3000x at $k=10$; the correlated fit at $R=8$ tracks held-out depths. The practical lever is decorrelation -- changing model family, modality, or evidence source -- not adding gates. --- ### How to Guide LLM Generation: Dual-Surrogate Guided Search for Automated Heuristic Design Authors: Yuhan Wang, Chaoda Peng, Xingyu Wu, Sheng-Hao Wu, Zhi-Hui Zhan Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13911v1 Large language models (LLMs) have made automated heuristic design (AHD) increasingly practical by generating executable heuristic code from task descriptions and evaluator feedback. Yet under a limited query and evaluation budget, search efficiency depends critically on a pre-generation decision. Before each LLM query and black-box evaluation, the system must choose which archived heuristics to reuse as parents and which generation operator should transform them. Existing methods typically choose such actions with predefined rules, leaving the expected outcome of each concrete operator-parent action only indirectly modeled. Therefore, we propose \emph{\fullmethod{}} (\method{}), a surrogate-guided action-selection module for operator-parent selection in LLM-based AHD. \method{} guides the LLM code-generation process by scoring pre-generation actions with two complementary surrogates. Specifically, a transition surrogate is proposed to predict the latent distribution of the child representation induced by an operator-parent action, while an instance-conditioned utility surrogate is proposed to estimate the expected performance of sampled child latents. Moreover, we propose an uncertainty-aware acquisition rule that combines predicted utility, utility uncertainty, and transition uncertainty to select the next LLM generation action. Across a diverse heuristic-design suite, \method{} is competitive with strong LLM-AHD baselines, and ablation and action-selection analyses suggest that its behavior goes beyond simple archive ranking or fixed operator preferences. --- ### The 2nd International StepUP Competition for Biometric Footstep Recognition: From Steps to Strides Authors: Robyn Larracy, Anant Gupta, Gourav Gupta, Ethan Eddy, Maxime Devanne, Cyril Meyer, Jin-Chern Chiou, Yueh-Shan Lee, Zong-Han Lu, Aaron Tabor, Erik Scheme Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13905v1 The International StepUP Competition Series was launched to advance research in pressure-based footstep biometrics through a standardized and challenging evaluation framework. Using the large-scale StepUP-P150 dataset (with more than 200,000 high-resolution dynamic footsteps from 150 individuals) and a previously unreleased test set, the 2nd edition of the competition addressed three key challenges: (1) generalization to unseen users with limited enrollment data, (2) robustness to domain shift caused by variations in footwear and walking speed and (3) effective fusion of paired left-right footsteps. While the first two challenges built on the inaugural competition, this edition introduced more extreme cross-domain conditions and moved beyond isolated footsteps to stride-level verification, enabling new opportunities for representation learning and inter-step information fusion. The competition attracted 26 registrants from academia and industry, with a best equal error rate of 8.00% achieved by the ArogyaPandit Research Team using a spatiotemporal CNN combined with an ensemble-based scoring strategy. The top solutions showcase the value of harnessing temporal patterns and of incorporating inference-time normalization and calibration strategies to improve scoring. However, the results also reveal that recognizing users in unseen personal footwear remains a challenge, especially in the presence of distractors with similar characteristics. --- ### High-Order Question Generation in a Multilingual Educational Context Authors: Suna-Şeyma Uçar, Itziar Aldabe, Nora Aranberri, Orphée De Clercq Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13901v1 Critical thinking is a fundamental skill that helps learners move beyond simple memorization. One way to develop this skill is through high-order questioning. However, crafting such questions remains a challenge for educators, and classroom practices tend to rely on low-order questions. Large Language Models have demonstrated strong capabilities in generating high-order questions, especially when guided by prompts based on Bloom's Taxonomy. Yet, existing research has largely centered on this framework and focused only on English. This study addresses these gaps by introducing prompts grounded in two alternative frameworks: Claim-Evidence-Reasoning and Divergent Questioning within a multilingual context using Basque, Spanish, and English. Results indicate that while both an open-source and a proprietary model rather effectively generate questions in all three languages, only about half of the answerable questions are recognized by teachers as high-order. A positive finding is that the alternative frameworks produce structurally and conceptually varied questions, suggesting they could complement each other and provide viable alternatives to Bloom's Taxonomy. --- ### AIMO Interpretability Challenge Authors: Michal Štefánik, Philipp Mondorf, Andreas Waldis, Qianying Liu, Chuan Yang, Michal Spiegel, Josef Kuchař, Marek Kadlčík, Adam Vawda-Oomerjee, Chaoran Liu, Simon Frieder, Barbara Plank et al. Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13899v1 We propose the AIMO Interpretability Challenge, a competition on distinguishing robust from spurious reasoning in frontier mathematical language models based on the models' internal mechanisms. The challenge is motivated by a central limitation of standard reasoning benchmarks: strong final-answer accuracy does not reveal whether a model relies on stable reasoning mechanisms or exploits brittle reasoning shortcuts. Building on AI Mathematical Olympiad (AIMO) problems and submissions, together with resources from the Fields Model Initiative, the competition will provide (1) newly-published olympiad-level math reasoning problems and their symbolic representations, allowing generation of novel functional variants, (2) access to frontier reasoning models, and (3) assessments of models' adversarial robustness on these problems. Participants will use these resources, along with our computing infrastructure support, to develop methods for identifying which models solve problems robustly. Our competition will also create a new, open robustness benchmark and baseline systems, aiming to provide a lasting foundation for standard benchmarking in mathematical reasoning and interpretability. Scientifically, the competition connects interpretability and generalization research around a central question in AI research: can we determine if, and to what extent, the decision-making of frontier AI models is generalizable and thus, reliable? --- ### RF Spectrogram Anomaly Detection with Quantum Kitchen Sinks: Architecture, Representation, and Hardware Validation Authors: Abdallah Aaraba, Alexis Vieloszynski, Remon Polus, Soumaya Cherkaoui, Ola Ahmad Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13897v3 The broadcast nature of wireless channels exposes radio-frequency (RF) networks to anomalous and malicious transmissions, making anomaly detection a fundamental requirement for secure spectrum management. Quantum Kitchen Sinks (QKS) offer a lightweight hybrid quantum feature map suitable for near-term quantum devices, yet their behavior on structured signal data remains poorly understood. In this paper, we extend the standard QKS template with multi-depth data re-uploading and ring entanglement, and evaluate the resulting pipeline on controlled RF spectrogram anomaly detection. We introduce a validation-locked five-stage ablation protocol that systematically separates the effects of shallow architecture, re-uploading depth, episode budget, input representation, and classical readout. Across the completed benchmark, Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) representations consistently dominate raw and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) inputs, moderate-depth entangled QKS configurations form the strongest operating regime, and QKS improves over matched classical direct-readout baselines across all evaluated representation-readout pairs on the held-out test set, with the best configuration reaching a test Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.8778 and a test F1 of 0.7995. The study bridges two levels of realism: real measured sub-6\,GHz cellular signals on the data side and real-device validation on the ibm_quebec Quantum Processing Unit (QPU) on the computing side, with AUROC deviations below 0.013 relative to simulation. These results provide a practical, reproducible framework for deploying QKS-based anomaly detection in wireless networks. --- ### Fine-Grained Vision-Language Pretraining with Organ-Conditioned Pattern Tokens for CT Understanding Authors: Guoliang You, Xiaomeng Chu Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13892v1 Computed tomography (CT) vision-language pretraining from paired volumes and radiology reports is a scalable yet challenging task. Existing methods commonly adopt global scan-report contrast, which is scalable but obscures heterogeneous organ evidence. Meanwhile, direct organ-level alignment remains coarse, since the same anatomy can exhibit multiple distinct radiological appearances. Therefore, pretraining requires a finer alignment unit: the organ-conditioned radiological pattern. In this work, we propose OCP-CT, an organ-conditioned pattern-token alignment framework for CT vision-language pretraining. Specifically, OCP-CT preserves a stable global CT-report contrastive branch and introduces an organ pattern interface: sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) routes image and text tokens according to latent radiological patterns, learnable slots query the routed tokens into continuous pattern tokens, and paired token contrast aligns image-text pattern tokens with structured soft targets built from report-derived clinical similarity. On the publicly available CT-RATE and RAD-ChestCT benchmarks, OCP-CT achieves average AUROCs of 84.5% and 69.9% for zero-shot abnormality diagnosis, respectively. Compared with the strongest prior reported results, these results yield absolute AUROC gains of 6.7 and 0.8 percentage points. --- ### PiVoT: A Variational Solution for Real-time Large-scale Multi-object Detection and Tracking under Heavy Clutter Authors: Runze Gan, Qing Li, Simon J. Godsill, Mike E. Davies, James R. Hopgood Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV, eess.SP, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13891v1 Multi-object detection and tracking from noisy point clouds remain challenging in many data-scarce radar applications. Current Bayesian trackers based on Poisson measurement models offer a training-free solution but struggle to achieve accuracy and efficiency under severe clutter, large object populations, and full-resolution Doppler point clouds. We address this with PiVoT, a fast, clutter-resilient multi-object tracker for both positional and Doppler measurements. PiVoT performs end-to-end detection and tracking of a large and time-varying number of objects without external clustering or detectors, through joint inference of object states, shapes, existence probabilities, data association, and measurement rates. Its efficiency is driven by several variational inference innovations, such as theoretically justified birth pruning, quadratic-to-linear complexity reductions for exact updates, and a computationally efficient Doppler Poisson model. Experiments show that PiVoT substantially outperforms existing Bayesian trackers in challenging scenes, while also demonstrating exceptional scalability to a thousand objects, robustness to clutter visually inseparable from objects, and real-time operation on full-scale modern automotive radar datasets, where it attains performance comparable to a deep-learning detection benchmark as a training-free joint detector and tracker. --- ### Experience Memory Graph: One-Shot Error Correction for Agents Authors: Wenjun Wang, Yuchen Fang, Fengrui Liu, Zibo Liang, Kai Zheng Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13884v2 Large Language Model (LLM) agents have shown remarkable capabilities in autonomous decision-making by generating sequential trajectories of states, actions, and observations. However, in complex, long-horizon tasks, these agents frequently suffer from compounding errors and struggle to recover from failures. Existing self-correction mechanisms rely on prompt-based reflection, which is inherently brittle, incurs heavy time and API costs due to iterative trial-and-error loops, and produces task-specific memory that may be hard to generalize to new scenarios. To address this, we propose Experience Memory Graph (EMG), a framework that reformulates agent failure recovery as a graph matching problem. At training time, we convert both failed exploration trajectories and successful expert trajectories into directed action decision graphs. By matching these graphs, we extract common subgraphs (successful workflows) and graph edit paths that explicitly indicate how to correct failures (e.g., which actions to add, delete, or relabel under a given observation), and store them in a memory graph with intra-task nodes and cross-task edges. At test time, EMG retrieves relevant insights and guides the agent in a single, loop-free execution. Experiments on ALFWorld and ScienceWorld show that EMG consistently outperforms state-of-the-art reflection baselines in success rate and average reward, while requiring no test-time trial-and-error. --- ### Experience Memory Graph: One-Shot Error Correction for Agents Authors: Wenjun Wang, Yuchen Fang, Fengrui Liu, Zibo Liang, Kai Zheng Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13884v1 Large Language Model (LLM) agents have shown remarkable capabilities in autonomous decision-making by generating sequential trajectories of states, actions, and observations. However, in complex, long-horizon tasks, these agents frequently suffer from compounding errors and struggle to recover from failures. Existing self-correction mechanisms rely on prompt-based reflection, which is inherently brittle, incurs heavy time and API costs due to iterative trial-and-error loops, and produces task-specific memory that may be hard to generalize to new scenarios. To address this, we propose Experience Memory Graph (EMG), a framework that reformulates agent failure recovery as a graph matching problem. At training time, we convert both failed exploration trajectories and successful expert trajectories into directed action decision graphs. By matching these graphs, we extract common subgraphs (successful workflows) and graph edit paths that explicitly indicate how to correct failures (e.g., which actions to add, delete, or relabel under a given observation), and store them in a memory graph with intra-task nodes and cross-task edges. At test time, EMG retrieves relevant insights and guides the agent in a single, loop-free execution. Experiments on ALFWorld and ScienceWorld show that EMG consistently outperforms state-of-the-art reflection baselines in success rate and average reward, while requiring no test-time trial-and-error. --- ### Verifying formulas for interventional distributions Authors: Francesco Freni, Leonard Henckel, Sebastian Weichwald Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: stat.ME, cs.AI, cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13883v1 We formalize verification in causal graphical models: deciding whether a given observational formula identifies a target interventional distribution. This opens a problem complementary to identification, asking not whether any identifying formula exists, but whether the given formula is identifying. We show that even sound and complete solutions to identification do not solve verification. We propose a falsifier as a first practical route forward, prove that it induces an almost-surely correct verifier for regular exponential-family models, and use the resulting verifier to develop the gateway test, which finds all sets admissible for use in a front-door formula. --- ### Unleashing Multimodal Large Language Models for Training-free HOI Detection in the Wild Authors: Ting Lei, Jialin Liu, Zhu Xu, Yuxin Peng, Yang Liu Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13881v1 Human-object interaction detection (HOID) has traditionally been formulated as a supervised detection problem over predefined interaction categories. While such paradigms achieve strong performance on closed-set benchmarks, they fundamentally entangle interaction understanding with dataset-specific supervision, limiting their ability to generalize to open-world and compositional scenarios. Recent HOI detectors attempt to leverage MLLMs through prompting strategies to transfer interaction-specific knowledge. However, such prompt-based approaches primarily focus on extracting discriminative representations from pretrained models, while underexploring their inherent multimodal reasoning capabilities. As a result, they struggle to provide informative contextual reasoning for ambiguous and open-world interaction scenarios. In this work, we present AgentHOI, a training-free, agentic framework that transfers the generalist multimodal reasoning capabilities of foundation models to HOI detection in the wild. Instead of learning interaction classifiers, AgentHOI modularly orchestrates complementary vision foundation modules to perform open-ended semantic reasoning and spatial grounding in a coordinated manner. To address the challenges of incomplete interaction discovery and ambiguous localization in complex scenes, we introduce two key mechanisms: (1) Context-aware Multi-round Reasoning, which progressively refines interaction hypotheses to ensure exhaustive and compositional HOI discovery, and (2) Multifaceted Interaction Localization, which enhances grounding precision by generating instance-specific descriptions that integrate semantic, spatial, and appearance cues. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AgentHOI achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art supervised and weakly supervised methods in real-world settings, despite requiring no HOID data for training. --- ### Task-Oriented Sensing and Covert Transmissions for Collaborative Multi-AUV Systems Authors: Xueyao Zhang, Chenyang Yan, Bo Yang, Xuelin Cao, Zhiwen Yu, Bin Guo, George C. Alexandropoulos, Merouane Debbah, Chau Yuen Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13880v1 In underwater covert cooperative missions, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) often cannot rely on active sonar to continuously obtain complete information, since active sensing and frequent communications increase the risk of exposure. As a result, AUVs primarily rely on passive observation, an approach that yields incomplete local perception and limited task efficiency. Although underwater acoustic communications can mitigate this limitation through information sharing, they are simultaneously constrained by long delays, severe interference, low reliability, and the risk of covert exposure. Existing communications-oriented multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) studies often model communication as an ideal information flow, whereas traditional communication optimization primarily focuses on link-level performance. However, both are insufficient to characterize the actual contribution of perceptual information to cooperative tasks under realistic conditions of covert physical communications. This paper proposes a Sensed Information Value Realization Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (SVR-MARL) framework that leverages practical information to characterize the utility of information for cooperative tasks and learns distributed cooperative policies under realistic communication and covert constraints. Through a case study of covert multi-AUV cooperative localization and tracking, the potential of the proposed framework to improve collaborative task efficiency while reducing unnecessary communication and exposure risks is demonstrated. --- ### AI-Augmented Adaptive Digital Twin Modeling for Brain Tumor Evolution Prediction and Treatment Scheduling Authors: Wenxi Liu, Michael Trimboli, Xianqi Li Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13877v2 Brain tumor progression exhibits spatially heterogeneous growth, patient-specific treatment response, and complex interactions with surrounding anatomy, making accurate long-term prediction challenging. We propose an AI-augmented adaptive digital twin (DT) framework for brain tumor evolution prediction and treatment scheduling. The framework integrates an interpretable reaction--diffusion (RD) model, a 3D residual learning module for model-form correction, patient-specific DT updating during recursive rollout, and model predictive control (MPC) for constrained chemotherapy and radiotherapy scheduling. Experiments on 387 synthetic tumor trajectories with 120-step evolution show that the baseline RD model captures tumor location and overall temporal behavior but underestimates heterogeneous tumor burden during long-horizon prediction. Hybrid RD--residual modeling reduces masked voxel-wise mean squared error by 84.3% and increases Dice overlap by 43.5% relative to the RD baseline under dense simulated observations. Online DT updating further reduces mean squared error by 45.9% and improves Dice overlap by 9.6% compared with the non-updated hybrid model. In MPC-based scheduling simulations, the updated DT controller reduces final tumor burden by 22.4% relative to a fixed treatment schedule under the terminal-burden objective. Together, these results demonstrate a unified framework for patient-specific initialization, mechanistic modeling, adaptive learning, and constrained treatment optimization. Although validated using patient-data-informed synthetic trajectories rather than clinical longitudinal data, the proposed framework establishes a foundation for future translation to real-world adaptive treatment planning. --- ### AI-Augmented Adaptive Digital Twin Modeling for Brain Tumor Evolution Prediction and Treatment Scheduling Authors: Wenxi Liu, Michael Trimboli, Xianqi Li Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13877v1 Brain tumor progression exhibits spatially heterogeneous growth, patient-specific treatment response, and complex interactions with surrounding anatomy, making accurate long-term prediction challenging. We propose an AI-augmented adaptive digital twin (DT) framework for brain tumor evolution prediction and treatment scheduling. The framework integrates an interpretable reaction--diffusion (RD) model, a 3D residual learning module for model-form correction, patient-specific DT updating during recursive rollout, and model predictive control (MPC) for constrained chemotherapy and radiotherapy scheduling. Experiments on 387 synthetic tumor trajectories with 120-step evolution show that the baseline RD model captures tumor location and overall temporal behavior but underestimates heterogeneous tumor burden during long-horizon prediction. Hybrid RD--residual modeling reduces masked voxel-wise mean squared error by 84.3% and increases Dice overlap by 43.5% relative to the RD baseline under dense simulated observations. Online DT updating further reduces mean squared error by 45.9% and improves Dice overlap by 9.6% compared with the non-updated hybrid model. In MPC-based scheduling simulations, the updated DT controller reduces final tumor burden by 22.4% relative to a fixed treatment schedule under the terminal-burden objective. Together, these results demonstrate a unified framework for patient-specific initialization, mechanistic modeling, adaptive learning, and constrained treatment optimization. Although validated using patient-data-informed synthetic trajectories rather than clinical longitudinal data, the proposed framework establishes a foundation for future translation to real-world adaptive treatment planning. --- ### Relevance-Aware Rule: Structural Deletion of Irrelevant Conditions in Decision Trees Authors: Jung-Sik Hong, Jeongeon Lee, Min Kyu Sim, Sangheum Hwang Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13874v1 Decision trees generate interpretable if--then rules, yet they contain irrelevant conditions (IRCs). These IRCs arise from the structural mechanism of tree splitting and persist even in modern optimal sparse tree induction algorithms. Existing IRC deletion methods overlook this structural mechanism; therefore, they either preserve the original tree too loosely to remain reliable, or too strictly to achieve meaningful simplification. This study provides theoretical foundations for reliable IRC deletion by establishing theorems and propositions related to the underlying IRC mechanism. The key finding is that a binary split shifts class proportions in opposite directions relative to the parent. Specifically, an increase in the class-1 proportion along one branch necessitates an increase in the class-0 proportion along its sibling, thereby generating a C1-link and a C0-link. Based on this structural fact, we propose a structural IRC deletion framework. Relative to each leaf, links that increase the leaf-class proportion are matched, whereas links that increase the proportion of the opposite leaf-class are mismatched. These mismatched links are flagged as structurally suspicious IRC candidates. Rather than deleting them outright, the framework rigorously diagnoses their relevance by assessing prediction reliability. It selectively deletes conditions that are structurally and empirically irrelevant, while strictly protecting those whose deletion would reduce the rule's reliability. Experimental results confirm that the proposed framework achieves substantial rule simplification without sacrificing the reliability of the original tree. --- ### Towards Enhancing 3D Spatial Reasoning in Medical Multimodal Large Language Models Authors: Zhuoyuan Fu, Zeshang Li, Yiqiong Zhang, Hangui Lin, Yan Shu, Yan Li, Binyang Li, Yaru Zhao Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13860v1 While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in 2D medical image understanding, their extension to 3D volumetric imaging remains hindered by prohibitive annotation costs and dataset opacity. Current data formats, predominantly consisting of rigid Visual Question Answering (VQA) pairs or unstructured final clinical reports, typically fail to capture explicit clinical reasoning. To address this limitation, we introduce a large-scale structured reasoning dataset constructed via a novel slice-wise data synthesis paradigm. Inspired by the genuine diagnostic workflow of radiologists, this paradigm models visual cognition by decomposing the complex 3D reading process, translating global clinical priors into fine-grained, per-slice observations that are subsequently synthesized into an interpretable Chain-of-Thought (CoT). Crucially, this synthesized reasoning framework enforces essential clinical principles: sequential spatial tracking, multi-slice spatial awareness for artifact mitigation, and differential exclusion. To validate this approach, we instruction-tune a standard 2D-pretrained MLLM baseline using the synthesized data to enhance its volumetric comprehension. Comprehensive evaluations across multiple 3D medical benchmarks demonstrate that our method yields significant performance improvements over the 2D baseline. Furthermore, the resulting model exhibits robust spatial reasoning capabilities and rivals resource-intensive native 3D architectures, effectively bridging the performance gap. Ultimately, this data-centric strategy unlocks deep volumetric understanding and highly interpretable clinical logic without requiring computationally expensive 3D-specific pre-training. The complete repository, including datasets and training workflows, is publicly available at https://github.com/2020420145009/hounsfield. --- ### SPyCE: Skill-Policy Co-evolution for Multimodal Agents Authors: Ru Zhang, Weijie Qiu Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13854v2 Multimodal agents that think with images iteratively manipulate visual evidence and invoke tools across many steps. Existing reinforcement learning methods reduce trajectories to scalar rewards, forcing the policy to discover reusable tool-use patterns from scratch on every new task; memory-based alternatives retain past experience, yet they rely on test-time retrieval, without updating the policy to absorb reusable patterns from that experience. Our key insight is that multimodal reasoning trajectories should be distilled into reusable skills that co-evolve with the policy during training, rather than being consumed as rewards or retrieved from a static store. To this end, we propose SPyCE (Skill-Policy Co-evolution), a framework that distills trajectories into a hierarchical skill library and updates it throughout reinforcement learning. Execution skills capture local visual operations, while workflow skills encode high-level priors that orchestrate tool use. During training, the policy model conditions on retrieved skills to guide its rollouts, while the skill library evolves using valuable rollouts generated by the policy. This creates a closed loop in which improved policies yield better skills, and the evolving skill library, in turn, provides stronger priors for policy rollouts. Experiments across eight benchmarks demonstrate that SPyCE consistently outperforms both RL-based and memory-based baselines. Further analysis reveals that both the hierarchical skill design and the co-evolution mechanism are critical to our design. These results suggest joint skill-policy optimization as a promising paradigm for building capable multimodal agents. --- ### SPyCE: Skill-Policy Co-evolution for Multimodal Agents Authors: Ru Zhang, Weijie Qiu Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13854v1 Multimodal agents that think with images iteratively manipulate visual evidence and invoke tools across many steps. Existing reinforcement learning methods reduce trajectories to scalar rewards, forcing the policy to discover reusable tool-use patterns from scratch on every new task; memory-based alternatives retain past experience, yet they rely on test-time retrieval, without updating the policy to absorb reusable patterns from that experience. Our key insight is that multimodal reasoning trajectories should be distilled into reusable skills that co-evolve with the policy during training, rather than being consumed as rewards or retrieved from a static store. To this end, we propose SPyCE (Skill-Policy Co-evolution), a framework that distills trajectories into a hierarchical skill library and updates it throughout reinforcement learning. Execution skills capture local visual operations, while workflow skills encode high-level priors that orchestrate tool use. During training, the policy model conditions on retrieved skills to guide its rollouts, while the skill library evolves using valuable rollouts generated by the policy. This creates a closed loop in which improved policies yield better skills, and the evolving skill library, in turn, provides stronger priors for policy rollouts. Experiments across eight benchmarks demonstrate that SPyCE consistently outperforms both RL-based and memory-based baselines. Further analysis reveals that both the hierarchical skill design and the co-evolution mechanism are critical to our design. These results suggest joint skill-policy optimization as a promising paradigm for building capable multimodal agents. --- ### Quantum Topological Data Encoding Authors: Adam Wesołowski, Dimitrios Thanos, Daniel Leykam, Lirandë Pira Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: quant-ph, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13847v1 Many datasets encountered across a wide range of domains possess rich geometric and topological structure that is difficult to capture using conventional vector-based representations. Quantum machine learning offers the possibility of processing high-dimensional data in Hilbert spaces, but its practical success depends critically on how classical data is encoded into quantum states. We introduce \emph{quantum topological data encoding} (QTDE), a general framework for encoding topological information into quantum states via topology-driven quantum evolution. Our method generalises an existing topology-driven quantum encoding framework to higher-dimensional data. We test the proposed method on clique-complexes classification tasks, and provide preliminary evidence that topology-driven quantum representations can capture discriminative information beyond that available through direct comparisons of classical topological descriptors. The proposed quantum representations consistently outperform a baseline based on direct comparisons of the combinatorial Laplacians describing the underlying topological structure. We indicate several areas of application where the framework can be used to provide a more efficient and reliable data representation. --- ### Heavy-Tailed Flow Matching via Random Clocks Authors: Zhouhao Yang, Yezhen Wang, Kenji Kawaguchi, Vladimir Braverman, Haoyang Cao Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13841v1 Heavy-tailed data arise in many domains where rare events carry disproportionate importance, such as imbalanced image datasets, financial returns, and weather extremes. Standard diffusion and flow-matching models typically begin from Gaussian noise or Gaussian source distributions, which yield tractable training targets but provide a poor inductive match for heavy-tailed data. We propose Heavy-Tailed Flow Matching via Random Clocks (HTFM), a framework that portrays heavy-tailed sources as mixtures of clock-conditioned Gaussian sources. Conditioning on a given clock path, the source distribution and flow are Gaussian; marginalizing over the clock gives a Gaussian scale mixture covering Gaussian, $α$-stable, and Student-t families. To make the clock-conditioned vector field practical, we encode the path-valued clock using truncated logsignature features, allowing the velocity field to adapt to the realized conditional space with negligible overhead. Empirically, on 2D imbalanced $α$-stable mixtures, CIFAR10-LT, and HRRR weather fields, HTFM improves mode coverage, sample quality, and tail-statistic recovery over Gaussian flow matching and competitive heavy-tailed baselines, while retaining the low-NFE sampling advantage of flow matching. Moreover, the random-clock formulation further provides a practical tail-control interface: by varying only the clock law or tail parameter, the same architecture can calibrate the ``heaviness'' of generated tails across different distribution families. --- ### AI-Augmented Human Resource Management? Insights from German companies Authors: Yannick Kalff, Katharina Simbeck Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13839v2 This study examines the integration of AI into Human Resource Management in German companies. We ask if and how AI-based technologies are \enquote{augmenting} human resource management. Organisations employ generative AI or predictive analytics to transform traditional human resource functions, to streamline routine tasks and to reallocate resources toward strategic, people-centred activities. Our findings from interviews and group discussions and a survey (N=410) reveal that while AI tools enhance HR analytics capabilities, their adoption mainly serves efficiency and rationalising goals. The introduction of AI tools is shaped by organisational transformation factors such as digital infrastructure, co-determination frameworks, and ethical implications. The research highlights both the strategic potential for improved talent development and the challenges posed by data governance and algorithmic transparency. Overall, this work contributes to understanding the ambiguous role of technological change in HR, which promises to augment predictive capabilities yet serves the ends of efficiency and rationalisation. --- ### NodeImport: Imbalanced Node Classification with Node Importance Assessment Authors: Nan Chen, Zemin Liu, Bryan Hooi, Bingsheng He, Jun Hu, Jia Chen Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13837v1 In real-world applications, node classification on graphs often faces the challenge of class imbalance, where majority classes dominate training, resulting in biased model performance. Traditional GNNs often struggle in such scenarios, as they tend to overfit to majority classes while underrepresenting minority classes. Existing solutions, which either prioritize nodes based on class size or synthesize new nodes for minority classes, often fall short of effectively addressing this imbalance issue. This paper introduces an approach to class-imbalanced node classification by utilizing a balanced meta-set for importance measurement, where a training node is considered significant if it enhances model performance under an unbiased setting. Our method identifies important nodes that can counteract class imbalance and utilizes them for model training, allowing for fine-grained and dynamic node selection throughout the training process. We theoretically derive a formula to directly assess node importance, reducing computational overhead and providing an intuitive threshold for node selection. Guided by this metric, we develop a novel framework that filters valuable labeled, unlabeled, and synthetic nodes that enhance model performance in an unbiased context. A key advantage of this framework is its separation of the synthetic node generation process from the filtering process, ensuring compatibility with various node generation methods. Furthermore, we introduce a strategy to construct a high-quality meta-set that closely approximates the overall feature distribution, ensuring robust representation of each class. We evaluate our framework, NodeImport, across multiple datasets using popular GNN architectures, demonstrating its superiority over existing baselines. Our results highlight the flexibility and effectiveness of the framework in mitigating class imbalance, leading to improved outcomes. --- ### Recursive ArUco Markers: A Scalable Fiducial Marker Design for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Landing Pads Authors: Rafael Munoz-Salinas, Francisco Jose Romero-Ramirez, Sergio Garrido-Jurado Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13830v2 Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) increasingly rely on visual fiducial markers for autonomous navigation and precision landing. However, standard markers suffer from limited operational ranges, becoming undetectable when the camera is either too far or too close. While recursive and fractal markers have been proposed to address this issue, existing approaches either require the marker's center to remain visible, making them vulnerable to occlusion, or are limited in their recursion depth and placement. We propose a novel Recursive ArUco marker design. Our method allows any standard fiducial marker to be transformed into a recursive marker with an arbitrary depth. By employing a modified bit-sampling strategy during detection, we embed complete markers within both the black and white bits of the parent marker. This approach guarantees unlimited recursion depth and robust detection even with partial occlusion, as it does not rely on the marker's center being visible. Furthermore, by maintaining a single, unique identifier across all recursive scales, our proposal provides an extensive dictionary of multiple unique landing pads. This capability allows fleets of UAVs to operate simultaneously, with each drone landing at its designated location -- a feature not supported by existing Fractal and Harco markers due to their structural and dictionary constraints. --- ### Multimodal Assessment of Pancreatic Cancer Resectability Using Deep Learning Authors: Vincent Ochs, Christoph Kuemmerli, Florentin Bieder, Julia Wolleb, Joel L. Lavanchy, Julia Ruppel, Jan Liechti, Stephanie Taha-Mehlitz, Christian Andreas Nebiker, Beat Mueller, Giuseppe Kito Fusai, Joerg-Matthias Pollok et al. Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.IR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13826v1 Accurate determination of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) resectability relies on evaluating how the tumor interacts with major peripancreatic vessels on CT imaging, yet expert assessment often shows substantial variability. We introduce a fully automated multimodal deep learning framework that jointly analyzes 3D contrast enhanced CT and structured clinical information to classify patients into the three National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) resectability categories (upfront resectable, borderline resectable, locally advanced). The approach uses a Swin-UNETR backbone to obtain anatomy aware image representations through auxiliary segmentation of pancreas, tumor, and vascular structures. These features are fused with a compact clinical embedding derived from 17 routinely collected variables and processed by a lightweight classification head. Model training is guided by a dynamic multitask objective that adapts the balance between segmentation and classification based on current tumor Dice performance, promoting feature representations that remain both anatomically informed and discriminative. --- ### TCAM-Diff: Triplane-Aware Cross-Attention Medical Diffusion Model Authors: Zhenkai Zhang, Krista A. Ehinger, Tom Drummond Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13812v1 We introduce TCAM-Diff, a novel 3D medical image generation model that reduces the memory requirements to encode and generate high-resolution 3D data. This model utilizes a decoder-only autoencoder method to learn triplane representation from dense volume and leverages generalization operations to prevent overfitting. Subsequently, it uses a triplane-aware cross-attention diffusion model to learn and integrate these features effectively. Furthermore, the features generated by the diffusion model can be rapidly transformed into 3D volumes using a pre-trained decoder module. Our experiments on three different scales of medical datasets, BrainTumour 128 x 128 x 128, Pancreas 256 x 256 x 256, and Colon 512 x 512 x 512, demonstrate outstanding results. We utilized MSE and SSIM to assess reconstruction quality and leveraged the Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network (W-GAN) critic to assess generative quality. Comparisons with existing approaches show that our method gives better reconstruction and generation results than other encoder-decoder methods with similar-sized latent spaces. --- ### Bake It Till You Make It: Ultrafast Spatial Texture-Atlas Splatting Authors: Neel Kelkar, Simon Niedermayr, Kaloian Petkov, Klaus Engel, Rüdiger Westermann Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CV, cs.GR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13808v1 Recent extensions of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) capture fine color details using hash-grid-based appearance parameterization but incur high computational cost during fragment rendering. We introduce a decoupled radiance representation that models low-frequency geometry and view dependent appearance features with 2D surfels while representing high-frequency textures via a view-independent spatial hash grid that is baked into a compact texture atlas. By including sparsity-enhancing optimizations that penalize semi-transparency and per-primitive falloff, our method aggressively prunes insignificant surfels and achieves significantly faster and sparser reconstructions than prior work. Exploiting geometric sparsity and efficient GPU texture mapping, our approach achieves up to a fivefold speedup over 3DGS while preserving state-of-the-art visual fidelity, enabling real-time 4K rendering at 60 FPS on consumer hardware. --- ### AspectCLIP: Optimizing CLIP Representation Space via Aspect-Guided Consistency Regularization Authors: Yiyang Yao, Shanglin Liu, Jianming Lv, Chengjun Wang, Jinyi Li, Yuchan Jie, Zhihua Jin Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13805v2 Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining learns a shared representation space through large-scale contrastive learning. However, existing methods that enforce global consistency regularization overlook a key challenge: the inherent information asymmetry between images and text: captions typically describe only one specific aspect of an image, thus images with similar visual content can be paired with completely divergent textual content and semantic information. Consequently, global regularizers inadvertently impose constraints between visually similar images whose captions describe divergent aspects, introducing semantic distortion into the representation space. We propose AspectCLIP, a framework that reformulates consistency regularization to respect this one-to-many structure. AspectCLIP first partitions training samples into attribute clusters based on textual similarity to identify aspect-coherent groups, then applies full cyclic consistency within each cluster while restricting cross-cluster regularization to prototype-level comparisons. This aspect-guided regularization enforces strict geometric alignment only when images and texts describe a consistent facet, while allowing flexibility across divergent aspects. Extensive experiments on downstream tasks demonstrate that AspectCLIP consistently outperforms traditional methods and achieves a more structured representation space. --- ### RainDancer: RGB-Event Video Deraining with Rain-Oriented Spiking Dynamics Authors: Kui Jiang, Runzhe Li, Zhaocheng Yu, Guanglu Sun, Junjun Jiang, Xianming Liu Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13802v1 Video deraining aims to recover clean visual content from rainy videos for reliable perception under adverse weather. Existing methods mainly rely on RGB sequences and temporal redundancy, but RGB-only restoration remains ambiguous in dynamic rainy scenes, where rain streaks, textures, boundaries, motion, and occlusions may share similar visual patterns. Event cameras provide complementary motion-sensitive cues with high temporal resolution, but event streams also contain sensor noise and background-triggered responses, so direct RGB-Event fusion may introduce cross-modal interference. To address this issue, we propose RainDancer, a progressive RGB-Event video deraining framework based on a decompose-before-interact paradigm. The core idea is to separate rain and background components within each modality before cross-modal interaction. In the RGB branch, frame features are progressively decomposed into rain and background representations. In the event branch, a rain-oriented spiking neural network module captures sparse and bursty event dynamics associated with rain motion. Component-level fusion is then performed between semantically aligned representations for structure preservation and rain suppression. We further introduce event-domain supervision to regularize sparse event reconstruction, structural consistency, and gradient orientation. Experiments on synthetic and real RGB-Event video deraining datasets demonstrate superior quantitative performance, visual quality, and downstream perception robustness. Code is available at https://github.com/AE86-plus/RainDancer. --- ### Traffic-Aware Randomized Smoothing for LLM-Based Network Intrusion Detection Authors: Zhenpeng Li Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13801v1 Large language model (LLM)-based intrusion detection systems (IDS) are increasingly studied for security monitoring, yet their robustness against feasible traffic manipulation remains largely empirical. We present Traffic-Aware Randomized Smoothing (TA-RS), a classifier-agnostic certified defense that injects Gaussian noise exclusively into the directly controllable (DC) subspace -- features a remote attacker can modify -- during both fine-tuning and certification, aligning the smoothing distribution with the attacker-controllable subspace. We identify a critical prerequisite: applying standard randomized smoothing to clean-trained LLM-IDS yields weak certified accuracy in three of four (model, dataset) pairs tested (14-33%, at or below random) and only 57% in the fourth (43 pp below the noise-augmented result); noise-augmented fine-tuning recovers to 68-100% on two of three benchmark datasets (at sigma=0.25). At the L_inf-equivalent threshold R_inf = epsilon*sqrt(|DC|) (epsilon=0.05), TA-RS achieves 55-100% certified accuracy on CIC-IDS-2018 and HIKARI-2021, with median certified radii (R approx 0.45-0.96) exceeding R_inf by 1.8-5x (across sigma=0.25-1.00). Against a fairly trained iso-trained RS baseline the residual advantage is dataset-dependent (4-19 pp on CIC-IDS-2018). The larger gap -- up to 72 pp against an isotropic RS baseline that shares the DC-noise-augmented training recipe -- primarily reflects the training-certification mismatch rather than DC alignment alone: isotropic test-time noise perturbs uncontrollable features the attacker cannot exploit, triggering abstention rates up to 68%. RT-IoT2022 probes the limits of the method: it fails under the default fine-tuning recipe but recovers to 76%/69% certified accuracy (LLaMA3-8B/Qwen3-8B) when noise augmentation is increased. --- ### Prospective clinical indication, post-hoc report leakage, and fusion design in multi-image chest radiograph classification: a patient-clustered evaluation Authors: Kamran Shahid, Muhammad Munwar Iqbal Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13800v2 Chest radiograph datasets often combine multiple images with Clinical Indication, Findings, and Impression, although these inputs are produced at different stages of care. We evaluated 15,000 ReXGradient-160K studies with two readable images and five CheXbert-derived report observations. Frozen DenseNet-121 and Bio+ClinicalBERT encoders were used to compare image-only, Indication-only, fixed-order multimodal, random-swap, DeepSets, and SectionGuard-MI models. Findings and Impression were evaluated only as post-hoc leakage controls. Models were trained with five seeds, and public-test uncertainty was estimated with 2,000 patient-cluster bootstrap replicates. Under U-Ones, macro AUROC was 0.643 for the primary image, 0.694 for two images, 0.749 for Indication, and 0.780 for ordinary two-image-plus-Indication fusion. SectionGuard-MI achieved AUROC 0.783 and AUPRC 0.260. Relative to ordinary fusion, its paired AUROC difference was 0.0031 (95% CI, -0.0042 to 0.0104; adjusted p=0.374), while its AUPRC difference was 0.0289 (95% CI, 0.0095 to 0.0413; adjusted p=0.004). DeepSets had the highest prospective AUROC point estimate (0.787), and random-swap fusion had the highest prospective AUPRC point estimate (0.265) with better calibration than SectionGuard-MI. Full report text alone reached AUROC 0.979 and AUPRC 0.836; AUROC remained above 0.973 after exact or expanded masking. These results show that prospective Indication is strongly associated with report-derived targets, permutation-aware fusion is competitive, and post-hoc report text creates substantial report-label circularity. --- ### CAS I: A Geometric Coding Theorem Authors: Romie Banerjee Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.IT, cs.AI, math.CT, math.GR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13796v1 This paper establishes a direct analogue of the classical Coding Theorem in the setting of symmetry groups. We consider computable bijections on the set of binary strings, called symmetries and define the symmetry prior of a string as the probability that a randomly chosen symmetry from a given group has the string as its unique fixed point. We show that for any fix-retractable symmetry group, a group admitting a computable section that selects an isolating symmetry for every string, the symmetry prior is a universal lower semi-computable semi-measure. In this case, the Geometric Coding Theorem holds. We also develop a Galois connection between subgroups of G and subsets of binary strings, characterizing closed points and maximal closed subgroups, and explore the join-semilattice of dense subgroups. Our results unify algorithmic information theory with group theory and provide a framework for studying symmetry-induced complexity measures. This paper is the first in a series on Computational Algorithmic Statistics (CAS). --- ### EgoProceVQA: A Novel Egocentric Procedural Understanding Task with Self-Skill-Exploration Agent Authors: Junlong Li, Junxi Li, Yuxiang Yang, Wenbin Zou, Lap-Pui Chau, Yi Wang Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13792v1 Most daily activities are inherently procedural. However, existing evaluations for egocentric video understanding seldom address procedural understanding and largely overlook complex key-step-level reasoning under the widely used video question answering (VQA) paradigm for MLLMs. Such capabilities are crucial for building procedural AI assistants deployable on wearable devices. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Egocentric Procedural Understanding VQA task (EgoProceVQA), which systematically evaluates egocentric procedural reasoning abilities of current MLLMs and agents through six types of key-step-centric questions. Furthermore, we develop EgoProceGen, a data generation platform that efficiently constructs QA data tailored to different question types. Based on this platform, we build a benchmark with 3,600 questions, four common procedural scenarios, and 31 everyday procedural tasks. Evaluations on EgoProceVQA show that existing MLLMs and agents still have substantial room for improvement in procedural understanding. Therefore, we further propose EgoProceAgent, a self-skill-exploration agentic framework. We design a generic tool library for procedural understanding and a standardized sub-skill library shared across tools and models, enabling self-exploration without ground-truth supervision. By exploring how to compose and select sub-skills, the agent discovers effective skill strategies for diverse problems, and attains state-of-the-art performance among open-source models on multiple tasks. Together, our benchmark, generation platform, and agentic framework establish a unified foundation for EgoProceVQA. Project page: https://z1oong.github.io/EgoProceVQA/. --- ### Regularity as seen by Alice and Bob Authors: Omid Yaghoubi, Mikołaj Bojańczyk, Aliaume Lopez, Rafał Stefański Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.FL, cs.CC, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13782v1 The goal of this paper is to propose a unifying model for Nerode-style characterizations of regularity across functions with different output domains. Building on Hauser's work in communication complexity, we generalize the setting by relaxing the computability assumptions and allowing non-Boolean output domains. We consider functions of type $Σ^* \to \domain$, where $Σ$ is a finite alphabet and $\domain$ is an arbitrary domain. For several domains, we show that the model coincides with known models of computation. We further conjecture that an analogous correspondence holds for other domains that currently lack a Nerode-style characterization of regularity, and we provide ample supporting evidence. In the model, an input string $w$ is split as $w = w_1 w_2$ and distributed between two cooperating parties, Alice and Bob, who exchange a constant number of messages to compute the value of the function. Each message is either an element of the output domain or a signal drawn from a finite set of signals, and the parties must produce the correct output for every admissible split $w = w_1 w_2$. We further extend the framework to infinite alphabets in the setting of nominal sets, and investigate its expressiveness on languages of words with atoms. --- ### Mono-Z Dark Matter Search with Neural Spline Flows Using CMS Run 2015D Open Data Authors: Hitesh Rasineni, Bhavishya Chebrolu Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.LG, hep-ex arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13771v1 We report a search for dark matter (DM) produced in association with a leptonically decaying \(Z\) boson at \(\sqrt{s}=13\) TeV using CMS Run 2015D open data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of \(2.32\,\mathrm{fb}^{-1}\) together with simplified-model Monte Carlo simulation. Events are selected in the mono-\(Z\rightarrow\ell^+\ell^-\) final state in both the \(μμ\) and \(ee\) channels. Forty kinematic observables are extracted from MINIAOD and MINIAODSIM, cleaned with physics-motivated selections, and reduced to a 37-dimensional feature vector. Five Neural Spline Flows are trained independently to model Standard Model background and mediator-specific DM signal densities. The per-event test statistic is constructed from the log-likelihood ratio between the signal and background density estimates, providing sensitivity across the full kinematic phase space without requiring a hard upper \(\mathrm{MET}\) threshold. A simultaneous profile-likelihood fit combining the two channels yields observed (expected) 95\% confidence level upper limits on the signal-strength parameter of \(μ<0.0177\) (\(0.0018\)) for the scalar mediator, \(μ<0.0362\) (\(0.0039\)) for the vector mediator, and \(μ<0.0498\) (\(0.0069\)) for the axial-vector mediator. The observed limits are weaker than expected because of a residual high-\(\mathrm{MET}\) background-modeling discrepancy rather than evidence for a DM signal. To our knowledge, this is the first application of Neural Spline Flow likelihood-ratio scoring to a mono-\(Z\) dark matter search using CMS Run 2015D open data simultaneously in the \(μμ\) and \(ee\) channels. --- ### Kaleido: Algorithm-Hardware Co-Design for Video Diffusion Transformers by Exploiting Latent Space Correlations Authors: Wenxuan Miao, Haosong Liu, Weiming Hu, Zihan Liu, Aiyue Chen, Jianlin Yu, Yiwu Yao, Yiming Gan, Jieru Zhao, Jingwen Leng, Minyi Guo, Yu Feng Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.AR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13770v1 Video diffusion transformers (vDiTs) generate high quality video but introduce extremely high compute cost due to the long diffusion timesteps and self attention computation. As diffusion timesteps are reduced, the computation cost of self attention becomes the dominant bottleneck. Existing acceleration approaches largely inherit sparse attention techniques from large language models, which fail to consider the unique spatiotemporal correlation of video data. This paper presents Kaleido, an algorithm hardware codesign that accelerates all operations in vDiTs by exploiting channel-wise spatiotemporal correlations in latent space. Based on this insight, we propose a lightweight channelwise reuse algorithm that skips redundant computations by reusing partial results while preserving higher generative quality than prior methods (>17 dB). To efficiently support this algorithm, we design a systolic array like accelerator with reconfigurable processing elements and a lightweight data dispatcher to mitigate irregular sparsity and data access patterns introduced by our reuse algorithm. Evaluations across three mainstream vDiT models show that Kaleido achieves up to 5.9x speedup and 16.0x energy savings over state of the art accelerators. --- ### S-CARD-CMSA: A Score-Aware Candidate Archive with Density-Filtered Reporting for Multimodal Optimization Authors: Dikshit Chauhan Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13764v1 Multimodal optimization aims to locate multiple globally optimal or near-optimal solutions in a single run. This paper presents \emph{S-CARD-CMSA}, a score-aware candidate-archive and density-filtered reporting framework built on the covariance matrix self-adaptation evolution strategy with repelling subpopulations (RS-CMSA-ESII). The method is developed for the IEEE CEC 2026 Competition on Benchmarking Niching Methods for Multimodal Optimization. Rather than modifying the core search dynamics of RS-CMSA-ESII, S-CARD-CMSA preserves its sampling, covariance adaptation, taboo-region update, restart, and termination mechanisms. Two conservative extensions are introduced. First, a passive secondary candidate archive records the restart-level best candidates without influencing the search trajectory. Second, a score-aware density-filtered reporting rule constructs the final solution set by balancing robust peak ratio and precision-driven F1-score. Development experiments show that the density-filtered rule preserves the peak coverage obtained by a medium score-aware rule while reducing redundant reports. On a broader validation subset, it maintains the same mean RPR while improving mean precision, F1-score, and the official-score-oriented average. The method does not use true global-minimum locations during optimization; such information is used only for offline development analysis and post-run scoring. The source code of S-CARD-CMSA is available at https://github.com/ChauhanDikshit. --- ### MxGPS: Multiplex Graph Transformers for a Power Grid Foundation Model Authors: Charilaos Papaioannou, Ioannis Tsantilas, Dimitris Giannakakos, Vasilis Michalakopoulos, Sotiris Pelekis, Vangelis Marinakis, Arsam Aryandoust, Antonello Monti, Ricardo J. Bessa, Perdo P. Vergara, Jochen Cremer, Elissaios Sarmas Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13763v2 Single-task fine-tuning of graph neural networks (GNNs) for power grid problems exhibits a systematic failure mode: models that achieve the lowest in-distribution error degrade the most under topology shift. We term this topology overfitting: the tendency of task-specific gradient signals to encode relational structure particular to the training topologies rather than the underlying physics, causing models to fail on unseen grids despite strong in-distribution performance. To expose and address this failure mode, we introduce MxGPS (Multiplex GPS), a multiplex graph transformer that runs K task-specialised GPS branches over a shared node encoder, jointly trained on Static State Estimation (SSE) and AC Power Flow (PF) via a self-supervised pre-training and multi-task fine-tuning protocol, with a cross-branch attention module evaluated in ablation. The joint SSE+PF objective forces the shared encoder to simultaneously satisfy complementary gradient signals, preventing it from overfitting to topology-specific relational structure. Under a 3-fold sliding-window cross-validation spanning four unseen topologies (14-, 24-, 162-, and 300-bus), MxGPS attains 0% boundary violation rate (BVR) on all four zero-shot Power Flow topologies. Critically, models with substantially lower in-distribution PF error degrade by 190% to 1400% under topology shift, whereas MxGPS degrades by only 39%, an inversion that directly implicates topology overfitting as the failure mechanism rather than insufficient model capacity. With only 1.6M parameters (12x fewer than the GridFM reference baseline), MxGPS demonstrates that multi-task joint training is a principled and parameter-efficient mechanism for topology-agnostic generalisation in power grid foundation models. --- ### Post-Training Shifts Confidence: A Three-Stage Analysis of How SFT, RL, and OPD Shape CoT Calibration Authors: Shuhao Li, Guodong Du, Anhao Zhao, Wanyu Lin, Tianyu Yuan, Xiaoyu Shen Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13753v2 Large language models have made strong reasoning gains through supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and on-policy distillation, yet these post-training methods are usually evaluated only by final-answer accuracy. We study how they reshape confidence during reasoning. We introduce a three-stage calibration framework that evaluates confidence before, during, and after chain-of-thought generation, corresponding to difficulty estimation, early termination, and answer aggregation. Through a controlled comparison on mathematical reasoning benchmarks, we find that OPD provides the most useful pre-reasoning confidence, SFT gives the strongest online signal for early stopping, and RL produces the most reliable trace-level signal for aggregation. We further show that confidence reliability is position-dependent: RL confidence becomes informative after a path-commitment phase, while OPD confidence is useful early but can become inversely calibrated later. Based on this observation, we propose PosConf, a position-aware confidence strategy that uses confidence only from reliable relative-position intervals. PosConf improves RL answer aggregation by 6.1 points over majority voting and consistently improves OPD early stopping under tight token budgets, with gains up to 4.3 points by avoiding its later inverse-calibration region, showing that \emph{confidence in reasoning models should be used both stage-wise and position-awarely}. Our code is available at https://github.com/EIT-NLP/Post-Training-Calibration. --- ### Algebraic Representability as the Limiting Regime of Grokking: An Exactly Solvable Model with Holomorphic Activations Authors: Chon-Fai Kam, Xavier Cadet, Miloud Bessafi, Frederic Cadet Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13749v1 Neural networks trained on modular arithmetic exhibit grokking, a delayed transition from memorisation to generalisation known to depend on model capacity: too little and the network memorises slowly or not at all, too much and it generalises almost immediately. What happens at the extreme of this spectrum, when the architecture's expressible function class collapses to a finite-dimensional algebraic variety? We study two-layer networks with a holomorphic monomial activation sigma(z)=z^k, trained on modular tasks encoded via roots of unity. Here the network output, regardless of hidden width, is confined to a (k+1)-dimensional subspace of characters of (Z_p)^2, an O(k/p^2) slice of the full function space. We give a complete algebraic characterisation of this subspace: a task is representable if and only if its discrete Fourier support lies on the diagonal u+v = k (mod p), which for linear-phase targets reduces to the arithmetic criterion m+n=k. This is not merely a constraint on eventual generalisation but on memorisation itself: because the outputs are algebraically confined, a non-representable target cannot be fit even on the training set, and we prove a positive lower bound on the training loss, independent of width. Across 585 runs the algebraic prediction matches the observed outcome with 99.8% accuracy, with no memorisation regime and no grokking; outcomes split cleanly into instant success and outright failure. This binary behaviour is the limiting case of the capacity-grokking relationship: when the expressible class shrinks to a fixed algebraic object, the question of when a network will grok dissolves into whether it can represent the target at all. A bottleneck ablation connects this extreme to standard networks, tracing a continuous path from representational failure, through memorisation without generalisation, to grokking with a shrinking gap as capacity grows. --- ### Ablation-Corrected Evaluation of Attribution Maps in Echocardiographic Ejection-Fraction Models Authors: Hyunkyung Han, Min Jung Kim Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13738v5 Attribution maps for echocardiographic ejection-fraction models are evaluated by their overlap with an expert left-ventricular annotation, compared against a chance level that is computed from an area ratio rather than measured. We measure it. Two architectures trained on the same task attain overlap at 3.55 and 4.20 times measured chance, an eighteen percent difference a reader would take as the size of the gap between them. It is not. Replacing the annotated ventricle with a composition-matched surrogate changes one model's prediction six times more than replacing an equal-area control region and the other's twice, a factor of three; on sixty-two percent of cases for the second, neither the ventricle nor the attributed region moves the prediction at all. The reliability of this measurement, from two independent intervention batches, is 0.90 to 0.98. Overlap does not track the difference: scored against an ablation-derived label of which cases the model depends on the ventricle for, it reaches an area under the curve of 0.52 and 0.67. The design of the ablation also determines its answer, since ablating only the two annotated frames leaves the ventricle indistinguishable from a control region while ablating across all frames does not. A pediatric cohort reproduces all of these. We give the measured chance level, the symmetric-ablation protocol, the reliability estimate, and the ablation-prediction score as things to report alongside overlap. --- ### Anatomically Faithful but Temporally Diffuse: Auditing Attribution for Left-Ventricular Ejection-Fraction Estimation from Echocardiography Authors: Hyunkyung Han, Min Jung Kim Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13738v4 Deep video models estimate left-ventricular ejection fraction (EF) from echocardiography with near-expert accuracy, and post-hoc attribution is increasingly used to certify that such models look at the right place. Because EF is defined by the end-systolic (ES) and end-diastolic (ED) frames, a faithful explanation must localize not only the left ventricle in space but also the decisive frames in time. We audit attribution faithfulness along three axes -- spatial grounding, perturbation, and temporal reliance -- for two architecturally distinct regressors fine-tuned on EchoNet-Dynamic: a self-supervised VideoMAE transformer audited with Chefer relevance propagation, and a Kinetics-pretrained R(2+1)D convolutional network audited with Grad-CAM. All statistics are reported with bootstrap 95% confidence intervals over the full 1,276-study test split, against explicit chance baselines and attention-rollout and random-attribution controls. We find a pronounced asymmetry rather than a temporal null. Both models are strongly anatomically faithful (3.04x and 3.76x chance) but only weakly localized in time: tubelet occlusion places causal reliance on ES/ED at 1.05x chance for VideoMAE (95% CI (1.037, 1.068)) and 1.15x for R(2+1)D ((1.134, 1.166)) -- a threefold weaker concentration than in space -- and the attribution faithfully mirrors this weakness. Separating convergence from architecture shows that temporal reliance is architecture-determined and convergence-invariant: R(2+1)D attains 1.14x after a single training epoch and 1.15x at convergence, while both VideoMAE variants stay at 1.05x regardless of pretraining or accuracy. Spatial faithfulness therefore does not imply temporal faithfulness, and the shortfall is not remedied by further training. --- ### Implementations of Quantum and Classical Topology-Aligned Architectures for Molecular Property Prediction Authors: James T. Pegg, Hubert Okadome Valencia, Ronin Wu Published: 2026-07-15 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.13737v2 For low-data and resource-constrained regimes typical of quantum chemistry, parameter-efficient learning is a key objective. Here, we propose a topology-aligned inductive bias in which the model architecture mirrors the molecular bond graph: atoms map to a fixed register of computational units, and bonds determine which pairs interact through shared learnable parameters. This principle is instantiated in two architectures: a variational quantum circuit (Iso-QGNN) and a parameter-matched classical message-passing network (Iso-CGNN). The models are benchmarked on HOMO-LUMO and dipole moment binary classification tasks over the QM9 benchmark. With 64 trainable parameters, the implementations achieve test AUCs of approximately 0.89 (quantum) and 0.92 (classical) on the gap task, and close to 0.78 (both) on the dipole task. The models reach 90% of asymptotic performance within about 300 training molecules and gradient norms remain stable throughout training. These results indicate that the topology-aligned inductive bias is the active ingredient driving parameter efficiency at QM9 scale, with implications for matched-baseline benchmarking in quantum machine learning. ---