# Research Papers — 2026-07 · bundle page 133 of 222 > Full-text markdown of papers #6601–6650 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/133 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/132.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/134.md) ### Institutional Equity Holdings Prediction Using Node Affinities of Dynamic Graphs Authors: Emad Izadifar, Zahed Rahmati Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.12067v1 Institutional equity holdings disclosed in SEC Form 13F filings provide a rich temporal record of portfolio decisions by large investment managers. However, forecasting future allocations and modeling future demand remains challenging due to disclosure lags, reporting noise, and strong persistence in institutional behavior. We introduce the first benchmark for these tasks using temporal graph machine learning, framing holdings prediction as node affinity prediction -- i.e., forecasting portfolio weights -- on a discrete-time temporal bipartite graph of managers and securities extracted from preprocessed filings. On a sampled dataset comprising 99 managers and the S\&P 500 index (503 securities, 209,351 temporal edges across 48 quarters from 2013--2025), Node Affinity prediction model using Virtual State (NAVIS) achieves a state-of-the-art test Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain (NDCG) of 0.9127 with features (0.9121 without), outperforming all dynamic graph representation learning competitors by a substantial margin, and outperforming all heuristic methods. Remarkably, a simple Exponential Moving Average baseline achieves 0.8882, surpassing all dynamic graph models except NAVIS and all heuristics except Persistent Forecast (0.8891), highlighting the strong smoothness and persistence of institutional portfolios. Domain-specific node features provide only marginal gains (<1.2\%), indicating that temporal and structural signals in the 13F ownership graph already capture most of the predictable information. By benchmarking a suite of Temporal Graph Benchmark (TGB) models under the node affinity prediction setting, both with and without features, on real-world 13F data, this work provides a reproducible foundation for temporal graph machine learning in holdings prediction and portfolio allocation. --- ### Enabling 24-hour Agricultural Robotics: Unsupervised Day-to-Night Cross-Modal Image Translation for Nighttime Visual Navigation Authors: Robel Mamo, Rajitha de Silva, Grzegorz Cielniak, Taeyeong Choi Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.12065v1 While visual navigation has been extensively studied in agricultural robotics, most existing systems assume daytime conditions. In fact, deploying autonomous robots at night offers significant advantages, including 24-hour crop and soil monitoring, fruit harvesting, and nocturnal pest detection. Modern vision-based systems, however, rely heavily on large-scale well-annotated image datasets, which remains challenging to obtain for nighttime operation scenarios. To address this, we propose an unsupervised image translation framework that converts daytime plant-row RGB images into near-infrared (NIR) nighttime counterparts without requiring pixel-to-pixel supervision. This enables the direct reuse of daytime semantic labels for training nighttime perception models. In particular, by incorporating a pre-trained Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) model, the proposed framework is designed to preserve semantic consistency during day-to-night translation. Additionally, a visibility mask is introduced to account for the limited effective range of NIR illumination in nighttime scenes. We conduct comparative evaluations with state-of-the-art image translation baselines and demonstrate higher image qualities, as supported by improved performance in downstream semantic segmentation for nighttime visual navigation. For evaluation, we utilize AgriNight--a novel dataset comprising 428 daytime and 549 nighttime images collected using night-vision-equipped mobile robots in agricultural fields and manually annotated with pixel-wise semantic labels--and introduce it as the first benchmark for nighttime agricultural visual navigation. We also perform real-time autonomous navigation experiments with a physical robot operating at night. The data and code are available at: https://github.com/mamorobel/AgriNight. --- ### Learning from Complementary Ultrasound Representations for Liver Disease Classification Authors: Sabahattin Mert Daloglu, Gokce Bekar, Ceren Coskun, Senanur Sahin, Harvey Castro, Soner Hacihaliloglu, Halley P. Letter, Ilker Hacihaliloglu Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.12062v2 Differentiating non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) from non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) using ultrasound remains challenging due to subtle tissue alterations and the limited information available in conventional B-mode imaging. In this work, we investigate whether complementary ultrasound representations derived from the same acquisition can improve NASH versus NAFLD classification. Specifically, we combine conventional B-mode ultrasound with physics-guided and local phase-based image representations and evaluate their effectiveness using self-supervised masked autoencoders (MAEs) and graph convolutional networks (GCNs). Experiments were conducted on a multi-site Mayo Clinic cohort consisting of 2,547 liver ultrasound scans from 125 patients. Compared with conventional B-mode ultrasound alone, complementary ultrasound representations consistently improved classification performance, yielding gains of up to 32.4% in accuracy and 91.2% in F1-score. Furthermore, performance improvements were consistently observed across age groups, sex, race, ethnicity,and acquisition sites. --- ### AutoTrace: From Patches to Triggers via Agentic Interprocedural Exploration Authors: Arastoo Zibaeirad, Marco Vieira, Thomas Zimmermann Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.12058v1 Given a vulnerability-fixing commit, trigger localization asks which specific statement turns the vulnerable program state into a concrete unsafe operation. This question is harder than binary vulnerability detection because the answer demands interprocedural, causal reasoning: in a substantial fraction of real-world CVEs the triggering statement lies several call layers outside the patched function, beyond the reach of static rule sets and pattern-matching language models alike. We present AutoTrace, an agentic pipeline that localizes vulnerability triggers by exploring a code property graph layer by layer, with LLM agents deciding where to look next and deterministic admissibility gates deciding what evidence is required before a trigger can be reported. Agents never accept a trigger on their own authority; every reported trigger is backed by explicit evidence drawn from the graph, so the pipeline covers both intra- and interprocedural vulnerabilities without relying on ungrounded model judgment. On the full InterPVD benchmark, AutoTrace reaches 75.0% VulnHit and 80.8% FuncHit, surpassing the prior state of the art on the same corpus. Building on the same machinery, we construct SinkTrace-Bench, a dataset that exposes each vulnerability as a source-to-sink (S2S) causal chain from attacker-controlled input through propagation to the dangerous operation, drawn from matched vulnerable and patched program states. It comprises 1,542 verifier-confirmed, perfectly balanced vulnerable/safe samples whose label fidelity we audit against expert annotations. Benchmarking frontier LLMs on it, we find that even the strongest struggle to separate the matched pairs, exposing the causal-reasoning gap that trigger localization targets. Artifact available at https://github.com/Erroristotle/AutoTrace. --- ### Designing Agent-Ready Websites for AI Web Agents: A Framework for Machine Readability, Actionability, and Decision Reliability Authors: Said Elnaffar, Farzad Rashidi Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.AI, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.12056v1 Online shopping is increasingly shifting toward a model in which AI agents independently search for products, compare options, evaluate constraints, and carry out parts of the purchasing process for users. Website design must now support both human and agent-mediated interaction. This paper introduces the agent-ready website, a design framework for enhancing the readability, interpretability, verifiability, and actionability of e-commerce platforms for AI agents. Existing web design, SEO, and generative engine optimization (GEO) metrics do not fully assess a website's capacity for agent-mediated interaction. The proposed framework is structured around three dimensions agent interpretability, agent executability, and agent decision reliability supported by features such as machine readability, semantic clarity, agent actionability, and contextual decision-reliability signals. The framework is evaluated through a controlled experiment comparing a human-oriented baseline and an agent-ready version of an identical website prototype, with identical catalogs, pricing, stock, and shopping workflows. The evaluation involved five tasks, three browser-agent models (GPT-4.1, Gemini-2.5 Flash, and Grok-4 Fast), and 300 runs, measuring PASS,PARTIAL,FAIL outcomes, strict and functional success rates, error patterns, step counts, and token consumption. The agent-ready website achieved 134 PASS runs out of 150 versus 74 out of 150 for the baseline (strict success rates of 89.3% vs. 49.3%), with the largest gains in product detail extraction, comparison, and multi-constraint selection. It also reduced PARTIAL outcomes from 43 to 3 and lowered the average step count from 9.31 to 6.49. These results provide preliminary evidence that enhanced structural clarity, action cues, evidence signals, and temporal validity indicators can substantially improve the reliability and efficiency of AI browser agents. --- ### Analyzing Image Encoder Choices and Graph Homophily in GCN Frameworks for Breast Ultrasound Classification Authors: Sabahattin Mert Daloglu, Ceren Coskun, Harvey Castro, Soner Hacihaliloglu, Ilker Hacihaliloglu Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.12054v3 Breast ultrasound is widely used for screening, yet automated analysis remains challenging due to speckle noise, acquisition variability, and weak separation of benign and malignant cases in standard ultrasound imaging. Graph convolutional networks (GCNs) have recently emerged as a promising approach by leveraging relationships among similar patient samples. However, it remains unclear how the choice of image encoder influences graph construction and downstream classification performance. In this work, we systematically evaluate five image encoders spanning convolutional and transformer-based architectures for GCN-based breast ultrasound classification. Image embeddings are used to construct cosine similarity k-nearest-neighbor graphs, which are classified using a single-layer GCN with a linear classification head. Across three patientwise cross-validation folds, higher-capacity encoders consistently improve graph homophily and downstream classification performance, yielding gains in accuracy, AUC, sensitivity, specificity, and F1-score. Moreover, test-set graph homophily exhibits a strong linear correlation with classification accuracy, with higher-capacity encoders consistently occupying the high-homophily, high-accuracy region suggesting that encoder-driven improvements in graph structure are a key mechanism underlying the observed performance gains. These findings establish encoder selection as a critical factor in graph-based breast ultrasound classification and identify graph homophily as a key indicator linking representation quality to downstream classification performance. --- ### Representation and Reference Selection in Training-Free Synthetic Image Attribution Authors: Meiling Li, Pietro Bongini, Benedetta Tondi, Mauro Barni Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.12052v1 Synthetic image attribution aims at identifying the generator responsible for a given AI-generated image. Training-free reference-based attribution methods are easily scalable, since newly emerging generators can be incorporated by adding source-specific references rather than retraining a task-specific classifier. Their performance depends on two coupled factors: the representation space used for comparison and the way source-specific references are constructed. However, the interaction between these two factors remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we provide a controlled analysis of this interaction using references and off-the-shelf pretrained representations. We study representations extracted from different layers of CLIP and DINOv2, along with three reference selection methods with varying semantic constraints: arbitrary, semantically aligned, and resynthesis-based references. Our results show that attribution accuracy consistently peaks at intermediate representation levels, indicating that source-discriminative cues are more accessible before strong semantic abstraction dominates. We further show that intermediate representations are not completely semantically neutral, making reference selection critical: semantically constrained references reduce query-reference mismatch and improve attribution, especially under limited reference budgets. Resynthesis is most useful in low-reference regimes, while semantically aligned references provide a better accuracy-cost trade-off when a moderate-sized reference pool is available. Our findings show that training-free reference-based attribution should be understood as the interaction between where images are compared, how the reference set is constructed, and how many references are available. --- ### Agentic systems for breast cancer treatment recommendations Authors: Vinicius Anjos de Almeida, Nícolas Henrique Borges, Leonardo Vicenzi, Helena Kociolek, Sarah Miriã de Castro Rocha, Frederico Nassif Gomes, Júlia Cristina Ferreira Ribeiro, Lucas Emanuel Silva e Oliveira Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.12051v1 Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being explored for clinical decision support, but their reliability in complex oncology treatment planning remains unclear. We evaluated agentic LLM systems for breast cancer treatment recommendation generation using 72 real clinical cases across stages I to IV and 1,147 case-specific rubrics generated through Asymmetric Information Rubric Generation (AIRG), in which the rubric generator had access to real clinical decisions unavailable to the evaluated models. Seven pipelines were compared, including single-LLM baselines, tool-augmented systems, and multi-agent architectures with fact checking and autonomous subagent spawning. The best-performing configuration, Claude Opus 4.8 with the D&C+SA pipeline, achieved a global score of 0.594 $\pm$ 0.025. Tool use and increased agent autonomy had mixed effects, improving performance in some settings but degrading it in others. Performance varied by clinical domain and disease stage, and oncologist-led error analysis revealed persistent clinically relevant failures, including incorrect or missing recommendations, flawed justifications, citation errors, outdated claims, and overconfidence. These findings suggest that agentic LLM systems can generate clinically relevant breast cancer recommendations, but remain insufficient for unsupervised clinical use. --- ### An Empirical Analysis of Continual Learning for Heterogeneous Medical Visual Question Answering Authors: Mai A. Shaaban, Tausifa Jan Saleem, Alaa Mohamed, Dilnaz Utemissova, Ufaq Khan, Mohammad Yaqub Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.12048v1 Deploying medical visual question answering (MedVQA) systems in real-world clinical settings requires models that adapt to new clinical tasks without forgetting previously acquired knowledge. Continual learning (CL) provides a practical framework for this setting. Despite rapid progress in medical vision-language models, the behavior of CL methods when training these models across heterogeneous MedVQA tasks remains underexplored. This work presents a systematic evaluation of CL for MedVQA across diverse clinical objectives, including classification, multi-label classification, detection, cell counting, and report generation. Specifically, we explore (1) the ability of existing CL methods to mitigate catastrophic forgetting; (2) their sensitivity to task ordering, analyzing how different task sequences influence performance retention and forgetting; and (3) the evolution of low-rank adaptation parameters as new tasks are learned, revealing patterns of weight drift under different CL methods. Our findings suggest that existing CL methods struggle to maintain stability-plasticity balance when tasks with different objectives and supervision formats are interleaved. Code and full experimental setup will be publicly available. --- ### SymbOmni: Evolving Agentic Omni Models via Symbolic Concept Learning Authors: Jinxiu Liu, Jianru Li, Tanqing Kuang, Xuanming Liu, Kangfu Mei, Yandong Wen, Weiyang Liu Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.12042v1 Visual generation is increasingly ubiquitous in diverse domains, from text-to-image/video synthesis to multimodal interactive creation. Yet prevailing monolithic models remain fundamentally constrained by their inability to learn cumulatively and evolve autonomously, which is a limitation we term the "perpetual novice" problem. They lack mechanisms for structuring experience into reusable knowledge and therefore rely on brittle, "from-scratch" reasoning for each task, resulting in poor compositional generalization and inefficient knowledge retention. Motivated by these limitations, we propose SymbOmni, an agentic omni-model designed for cumulative evolution through Symbolic Concept Learning. At its core is the Symbolic Concept Box, an optimizable memory module that abstracts low-level operations into reusable Symbolic Workflow Instructions. SymbOmni operates through an induction-transduction cycle: experiences are abstracted into symbolic concepts (induction), which are then adaptively composed to solve novel tasks (transduction). The training is done by verbalized backpropagation with language-based feedback to enable continuous self-improvement without gradient-based model fine-tuning. Comprehensive experiments validate that (I) SymbOmni significantly outperforms existing agent-based systems for iterative creation and also surpasses closed-source models (e.g., Nano Banana, GPT-Image-1) in both image quality and task success rates; (II) SymbOmni effectively reduces token consumption by over 40% while maintaining competitive generation quality; and (III) SymbOmni enables effective continual learning by achieving cumulative gains across multiple online-learning benchmarks and setting a new state of the art. --- ### Learning the Graphical Nature of Symmetries Authors: Rashid Barket, Enrico Grimaldi, Yacoub Hendi, Edward Hirst, Adam Onus, Harmeet Singh Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, math.CO, math.GR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.12026v1 Finite groups are rigid algebraic objects, whose Cayley graphs expose a rich network geometry through which group-theoretic structure can be measured, compared, and learned. In this paper, a dataset of $131{,}406$ Cayley graphs is constructed, covering all groups of order at most $767$ except order $512$, recording exact algebraic labels for group properties together with a broad collection of graph, cycle, distance, and spectral statistics. This census aims to provide novel benchmarks for studying how finite-group properties are reflected in Cayley graph observables. It also yields new enumerative contributions: alongside recovering known OEIS sequences for standard group classes, new sequences for monolithic groups and for groups generated by at most three, four, and five elements are contributed to the OEIS. The accompanying network analysis identifies several empirical regularities and formulates testable conjectures, including relationships involving square clustering, Cayley graph diameter, average graph disorder, and spectral eigengaps of nilpotent groups. Finally, a comparison between classical models, an MLP, and graph neural network architectures is performed for predicting algebraic group properties directly from Cayley graph data. The results show that engineered graph statistics are highly informative, while GNNs, especially GIN and in some fixed-order settings GCN, can recover substantial structural signal directly from the graph. Such that graph-aware architectures show phases of optimality on these group-theoretic graph representations. --- ### MetaView: Monocular Novel View Synthesis with Scale-Aware Implicit Geometry Priors Authors: Yufei Cai, Xuesong Niu, Hao Lu, Kun Gai, Kai Wu, Guosheng Lin Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.12000v2 Current visual generation models are capable of producing high-quality content, yet they lack a coherent perception of the spatial structure. Existing generative novel view synthesis methods typically introduce explicit geometry priors, which enforce spatial consistency but inherently restrict generalization in large view changes. In contrast, recent interactive generative methods favor implicit scene modeling, offering greater flexibility at the cost of precise camera control and geometry consistency. In this paper, we propose MetaView, a diffusion-based monocular novel view synthesis framework that enables rendering under large view changes from a single image. Our key insight is to combine implicit geometry modeling with minimal yet essential explicit 3D cues: we incorporate implicit geometry priors from a feed-forward geometry perception network to regularize structure without imposing restrictive reconstruction pipelines, while leveraging metric depth to anchor the generation to a metric scale. This design allows MetaView to achieve both geometry consistency and precise controllability. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, under challenging monocular large viewpoint changes, MetaView significantly outperforms existing methods and exhibits superior generalization. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/KlingAIResearch/MetaView. --- ### HPC-Enabled Video-based Coastal Wave Parameter Estimation Using V-JEPA and Deep Spatiotemporal Learning Authors: Abubakar Hamisu Kamagata, Dharm Singh Jat, Attlee Munyaradzi Gamundani, Saravanakumar Paramasivam, Babangida Sani, Aliyu Zakariyya Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: eess.IV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11998v1 High deployment cost, poor spatial coverage and susceptibility to storm conditions are all challenges faced by traditional in-situ methods. This paper presents a video-based and high performance computing (HPC) enabled deep learning framework for joint sensor free estimation of five coastal wave parameters, namely significant wave height (Hs), maximum wave height (Hmax), peak period (Tp), zero upcrossing period (Tz) and wave direction (theta) from monocular coastal video. The proposed architecture comprises of a V-JEPA (self supervised) ViT Small backbone for robust spatiotemporal feature extraction in visually challenging scenarios, a dual-stream SlowFast temporal encoder for broad bandwidth representation of wave motion in both hydrodynamic breaking and swell regimes, an optical flow stream based on Farneback optical flow algorithm for adding saliency information to the structure with emphasis on hydrodynamically active wavelength bands of waves, and a multi-task regression layer with dispersion constraints (Airy wave dispersion lambda_p = 0.1). The model was trained on an NVIDIA DGX A100 cluster and was early stopped at epoch 31 and achieved Pearson correlation coefficients of 0.451, 0.578, 0.643, 0.680 and 0.832 for Hs, Hmax, Tp, Tz and wave direction respectively, with generalization ability to geographically diverse held out test data sites. While operating in a data-limited regime (6 annotated training scenes), the framework demonstrates statistically significant temporal correlations (PCC of 0.451 to 0.832), confirming proof of concept feasibility; R2 values (max 0.246) indicate that variance capture will improve with larger annotated datasets. --- ### Are we Merging the Right Models? Impact of Expert Training Duration on Model Merging for LLMs Authors: Nikita Kozodoi, Zainab Afolabi, Jack Butler Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11997v2 Multi-task model merging combines separately trained expert models into a single model that handles all tasks without co-training. Standard practice merges experts at their optimal validation loss. We challenge this convention by systematically studying how training duration of domain experts affects the quality of the merged model. We fine-tune experts on five domains (Math, Code, Instruction Following, Multilingual, and Safety) across three model sizes (Qwen 3.5 0.8B, 2B, and 4B), saving checkpoints from 25% to 500% of the optimal training steps and evaluating five merging methods at each duration. Our findings reveal a striking method-dependent pattern: simple averaging degrades sharply with overfitting, while sparsification-based methods achieve their best performance well past the validation optimum. We formalize this through bias-variance decomposition analysis, drawing a parallel to random forests where averaging benefits from high-variance individual learners. These results suggest that training duration and merging method should be chosen jointly rather than independently. --- ### Mitigating The Effect of Class Imbalance in Data with Hierarchical and Dependable Structure Authors: Bipin Chhetri, Deepika Giri, Avishek Kadel, Rabin Kumar Karki, Akbar Siami Namin Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11994v1 Classifying cybersecurity vulnerabilities using the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) taxonomy is challenging due to extreme class imbalance and strong hierarchical dependencies among weakness categories. Although oversampling techniques such as Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) and Adaptive Synthetic Sampling (ADASYN) are widely adopted to mitigate class imbalance, their effectiveness for hierarchical CWE text classification remains largely unexplored. This paper proposes a Hierarchy-Aware RoBERTa framework that explicitly incorporates CWE structural information through learnable parent-class embeddings, preserving taxonomic consistency. Our experiments demonstrate that synthetic interpolation in high-dimensional embedding spaces violates the inherent parent-child constraints of the CWE hierarchy, offering only marginal benefits for classical ML models while consistently degrading deep learning architectures. Evaluated on a CWE Research Concept dataset, the proposed model achieves a weighted F1-score of 0.76 without data augmentation, outperforming all baselines with notable gains on minority classes, including the Class category whose F1-score improved from 0.40 to 0.60 over the BERT baseline. Our results suggest that hierarchy-aware representation learning is a more principled alternative to oversampling for structured vulnerability classification. --- ### Sparse Inter-Layer Dependencies of Transformer FFN Neurons Authors: Johannes Knittel, Hanspeter Pfister Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11990v1 Feedforward network (FFN) blocks account for a large fraction of the parameters and computation in Transformer architectures, yet their internal structure remains difficult to interpret due to the additive superposition induced by the residual stream. We examine whether the activation of an FFN neuron can be explained by a sparse set of preceding neuron activations and attention outputs. We introduce a training-free attribution method that estimates the relative influence of upstream neurons and attention outputs on a target neuron's activation. Empirically, across models and layers, we find that small subsets of preceding activations and attention outputs suffice to preserve neuron activations with high fidelity when all remaining inputs are masked with their average values. Effective sparsity is even greater when accounting for the inherent activation sparsity of upstream layers. Moreover, applying the neuron-specific masks in all layers simultaneously, such that the induced deviations propagate through the network, leaves model perplexity largely unchanged at moderate sparsity levels. These results demonstrate that, despite dense parameterization, FFNs exhibit sparse and structured inter-layer dependencies at the neuron level. Our method provides a practical, scalable tool for circuit-level interpretability and identifies candidate sparse pathways with potential implications for efficient inference. --- ### Anatomy-Privileged Distillation with Token Routing for MRI-Based Prediction of Perineural Invasion Authors: Hyunsu Go, Youngung Han, Kyeonghun Kim, Junga Kim, Dohyun Kweon, Jinyong Jun, Sungha Park, Anna Jung, Induk Um, Yului Jeong, Suah Park, Jina Jeong et al. Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11987v1 Perineural invasion (PNI) is associated with poor postoperative outcomes in intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma, but it is confirmed by surgical pathology. Existing preoperative imaging models often rely on radiologist-defined variables, contrast-enhanced imaging, or manual annotations. We propose an anatomy-privileged teacher--student framework for patient-level PNI prediction from T2-weighted MRI. During training, the teacher uses MRI with tumor and liver masks to learn dense token routing, and the student distills this guidance to retain and aggregate informative tokens under a fixed budget. Anatomical supervision is restricted to training, and the deployed model does not require masks at inference. In 155 patients, the proposed method achieved the highest mean AUROC of 0.750 among matched MRI-only baselines evaluated under the same protocol, with 1.43 GFLOPs and 8.02 ms per case on a Jetson Orin Nano Super Developer Kit. --- ### SpikeDS: Dual Sparsity Spikformer for Perineural Invasion Prediction in 3D MRI Authors: Induk Um, Youngung Han, Kyeonghun Kim, Yului Jeong, Jina Jeong, Hyunsu Go, Dohyun Kweon, Sungha Park, Junga Kim, Anna Jung, Suah Park, Hyuk-Jae Lee et al. Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11986v1 Perineural invasion (PNI) is associated with poor prognosis in cholangiocarcinoma (CCA). However, its detection from 3D MRI remains challenging due to the subtle and spatially heterogeneous imaging signatures at the tumor periphery. Capturing such spatially sparse cues necessitates volumetric analysis of 3D MRI, but existing deep learning approaches incur prohibitive computational costs on volumetric medical images, limiting their clinical deployment. We propose Dual Sparsity Spikformer (SpikeDS), a spiking neural network architecture that jointly exploits activation sparsity from binary spike communication and spatial sparsity from window pruning based on firing rates. SpikeDS introduces Dual Sparsity Spiking Attention (DSSA), which combines two complementary mechanisms. The first is Window-based Expert Mixture Spiking Attention (W-EMSA), which selectively applies attention only to salient windows identified by their firing rates. The second is Cross-Window Spiking Self-Attention (CW-SSA), which enables global context exchange through an asymmetric scheme in which pruned windows still contribute as key-value sources. Evaluated on a clinical cohort of 139 CCA patients via 5-fold cross-validation, SpikeDS achieves an AUC of 0.753 while consuming only 14.4 mJ, surpassing the best baseline in both AUC and energy efficiency. These results suggest that dual sparsity provides an effective hardware-aware strategy for improving the efficiency of 3D spiking transformers without compromising diagnostic performance. --- ### VQCSim: When Does Compile-Once Statevector Simulation Beat Generic Quantum Frameworks? Authors: Anton Firc, Martin Perešíni, Vojtěch Mrázek, Kamil Malinka, Vojtěch Staněk, Zbyněk Lička, Nouhaila Innan, Walid El Maouaki, Alberto Marchisio, Muhammad Shafique Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: quant-ph, cs.ET, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11985v2 Hybrid quantum-classical machine learning workflows repeatedly evaluate many small parametrized circuits during training and model exploration. In this regime, framework dispatch and orchestration overhead often dominate runtime. Prior simulators accelerate execution but leave open the question of when compile-once specialization is the right choice for static variational circuits. We answer this question with VQCSim, a compile-once, PyTorch-native statevector execution path with native autograd. In a systematic MQT Bench study, VQCSim compiles all tested static circuits and provides 87.7% end-to-end semantic validation. Across a five-GPU evaluation set, VQCSim delivers pooled median speedups of 4.49x for native inference and 26.78x for native training, while retaining a 3.31x advantage under matched finite-difference training. Ablation identifies native autograd as the dominant source of acceleration (27.6x), with compile-once caching and batch vectorization contributing additional gains. The speedup trades higher GPU memory (VQCSim is memory-limited at the high end) for lower runtime. We derive a hardware-aware regime map and release vqcsim-oracle, an open-source backend selector with 91.1%-97.7% top-1 agreement (including cross-GPU transfers), enabling automatic simulator selection in QML design loops. --- ### Removable Defects: The Economics and Limits of Deliberate Deficiency Authors: Cheng Qian Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: econ.EM, cs.AI, cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11983v2 A specialist tolerates blind spots that a generalist does not. Usually this is treated as a cost to be minimized. We treat it as a design variable: a deficiency can be kept because it pays and removed on demand in the rare situation where it would be fatal, by routing to a compensation channel. We give three results. First, an advantage condition under which keeping the deficiency is a computable economic position; structurally it is the Ehrlich-Becker market-vs-self-insurance margin applied to a competence gap, with the detector as a Townsend costly-state-verification technology. Second, a two-sided characterization of removability. A coupling lemma shows that when the deficiency is a coarsening of perception, no switch can separate benefit from harm, yielding a converse (a confounded detector earns zero premium, and any within-defect policy insisting on positive premium is driven, under multiplicative dynamics, to negative long-run growth) and an achievability result (a detector outside the deficiency earns a positive premium). Together, over structured uncertainty classes with severity capped or miss rate O(1/L): a defect is profitably removable iff the detector-relevant distinction survives the restriction and the advantage condition holds; the premium is the support function of the class's ROC set at an economic price vector. Third, observation defects and capacity defects differ exactly on whether access to the deployment distribution rescues them; the gap decomposes as cross-leak plus a closure deficit, and per-task randomization buys back the latter, never the former. The detector can be learned from declared fatal categories at a training bill linear in loss severity (up to a log factor). The results synthesize Chow's reject option, Kelly growth under ruin, and selective prediction. --- ### Evaluating Nonuniform Dependability Across Response Conditions: A Conditional Generalizability Framework Illustrated in Automated Essay Scoring Authors: Yi Gui Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11981v1 Aggregate reliability estimates can obscure heterogeneity in measurement-design burden across response conditions, so a single G- or D-study may mischaracterize a design's adequacy for particular strata. This study introduces a conditional generalizability framework with three components. First, automated scoring configurations -- the encoder architectures and scoring-head families admissible within a fixed pipeline -- are treated as a universe of admissible measurement conditions rather than incidental modeling choices. Second, analytical D-study projections are compared with empirical configuration sweeps over a finite scoring pool, yielding two estimands of design adequacy whose agreement or divergence diagnoses the realized configuration universe. Third, evidence is conditioned on entropy-defined response strata, treating entropy as an operational stratification variable, not a construct claim about writing quality. Whereas recent generalizability-theory extensions address AI-generated item variants on the response side, this framework addresses the analogous scoring-side problem: AI-mediated scoring configurations. Demonstrated with automated essay scoring of timed L2 writing, the realized design was dependable in aggregate (Phi approx 0.76). Re-estimated within entropy strata, dependability stayed high but declined modestly and robustly (Phi = 0.88, 0.87, 0.84) -- a gradient implying different decision-study requirements, the highest-entropy stratum requiring the most crossed conditions. The framework offers a portable workflow for evaluating nonuniform dependability. --- ### LP Mining with LP2Graph: A Use Case for Railway Rescheduling Authors: Jörn Maurischat, Nikola Bešinović, Michael Färber Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11980v1 Like many optimization-driven domains, railway rescheduling relies on Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP), yet the field's modeling knowledge is scattered across hundreds of papers in incompatible notations, and narrative surveys organize it subjectively: they classify models by vocabulary rather than by structure, and reproduce neither. We present LP Mining with LP2Graph, a method that mines the structure of published LP and MILP formulations into a reproducible dataset and an induced taxonomy. Its core, LP2Graph, represents each formulation admitted by its canonical grammar as a typed variable--equation graph derived from a single canonical model; once a source is extracted into that model, everything downstream is deterministic. Each source is parsed into this model, homologized, and clustered bottom-up (over variables, then constraints and the objective, then whole-model structure) and, separately, by application domain and solution approach; the resulting groups are labeled by a rule-seeded, self-updating classifier. We validate the representation rather than assume it: per-cluster representatives are regenerated as independent LaTeX and re-solved across CBC, HiGHS and Gurobi against the optimum reported in the source paper. The outcome is an objective, repeatable taxonomy of variables, constraints and model types: the principled foundation on which our raiLPminer line of automated railway-rescheduling model development builds. --- ### Gene Expression-Informed Jointly Controlled Generative Modeling for Precision Molecular Design Authors: Hang Yuan, Chen Li, Wenjun Ma, Tadahiko Murata, Yuncheng Jiang Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11978v1 Precision molecular design aims to discover personalized drug candidates through joint control of multiple conditions, such as biological relevance and molecular design strategies. Biological relevance reflects cellular functional states under disease or perturbation conditions, while molecular design strategies provide complementary guidance in terms of structural intentions and property optimization. In this study, we propose JoPMol, a jointly controlled precision molecular generative model that integrates biological states encoded by gene expression profiles with molecular structure information expressed in text, and chemical properties quantified by numerical values within a unified modeling framework. This formulation enables coordinated generation and optimization of candidate molecules under joint condition control. Experimental results show that JoPMol outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple evaluation metrics. Moreover, JoPMol demonstrates strong generalization ability in both transfer tasks and biologically grounded simulation scenarios, validating its effectiveness for precision molecular design. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/hala-yh/JoPMol. --- ### Optimization Is Not All You Need Authors: Minh Hua, Rita Raley Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11977v2 In 2019, OpenAI released two million GPT-2 outputs-ungrammatical, half broken-to aid the detection of machine-generated text. The alignment that produced their more fluent successors is usually regarded as an engineering achievement; we read it instead as the newest expression of optimization culture: the conviction, older than the technology, that measurable improvement along predefined axes exhausts the question of value. Tracing that conviction through the stack-pretraining, decoding, preference tuning, benchmarking, interface-and back through its genealogy in the audit society, we arrive at the limit: an optimization procedure can measure how improbable a piece of generated text is; it cannot tell whether that unlikelihood is error or invention. A procedure that cannot make that distinction has nonetheless, within half a decade, assumed the authority to set the protocols of legitimate language. Held for centuries by academies and schoolrooms, grammars and examiners, this authority has been given over to loss functions, reward models, benchmarks, and system prompts: an apparatus that executes the office of judgment with no capacity for judging. --- ### LiteTopK: Exploiting the Curse of Dimensionality for a Fused Indexer-TopK Kernel in Long-Context Sparse Attention Authors: Ziqi Yin, Jianyang Gao, Peiqi Yin, Jiangneng Li, Gao Cong Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11976v3 Indexer-TopK, the operation to compute the scores and select the top-k candidates, is widely used by sparse attention algorithms in large language models and vector retrieval in recommendation systems and vector databases. However, existing GPU-based Indexer-TopK kernels like DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA) remain inefficient due to excessive global memory traffic, costly synchronization, and prohibitive memory overhead. In this study, inspired by the curse of dimensionality phenomenon, we first observe that sparse attention scores exhibit a score concentration phenomenon, where scores tend to fall within a narrow range. Based on this observation, we propose LITETOPK, an efficient fused Indexer-TopK kernel. LITETOPK first samples a small subset of data to estimate query-data score ranges, then partitions candidates into bins accordingly. This organization allows the LITETOPK kernel to maintain a tight approximate threshold online, write back only promising candidates, reduce unnecessary I/O and memory overhead while preserving exact Top-k correctness. Building on LITETOPK, we further propose LITEDSA, which exploits the similarity of top-k candidate sets among neighboring tokens. LITEDSA packs neighboring tokens' candidates for joint computation and masks out extra scores for each query, thereby reducing memory traffic while preserving correctness. Experimental results in a real-world deployment environ ment with eight B200 GPUs show that LITETOPK+LITEDSA accelerates the prefill stage of GLM 5.2 by 1.35x, with no performance loss and lower memory overhead. --- ### Signal-Guided Optimization for Machine Unlearning Authors: Xujia Li, Dan Li, Jian Lou, Wenjie Feng Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11975v1 Current machine unlearning methods predominantly rely on global, coarse-grained intervention strategies. They lack precise pilot signals to guide the unlearning process and fail to provide differentiable guidance across different unlearning tasks. Due to the varying memorization strengths of samples during original training, such a uniform strategy leads to two problems: some samples are over-unlearned, which harms model utility; while others are under-unlearned, leaving residual information that can be exploited by privacy attacks. In this paper, we propose GSUO, a guidance-signal-aware unlearning optimization framework that designs task-specific fine-grained guidance signals to steer the unlearning process and is applicable to both random-subset and class-wise forgetting tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GSUO outperforms 14 baselines in terms of both unlearning effectiveness and generalization, while achieving high efficiency and significant speedups, validating its effectiveness for reliable machine unlearning. --- ### Learning to Discretize: Diffusion-Based Adaptive Mesh with Spectral Guidance Authors: Zixuan Shen, Bingchuan Wang, Zhi Wang, Yong Wang Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11974v1 Most neural partial differential equation (PDE) surrogates learn how fields evolve after a grid has already been chosen. However, before any operator is applied, the grid has already determined how modeling capacity is allocated across space, resolution, and spectral bandwidth. We argue that this hidden design choice should itself be learnable, leading to a question different from standard operator learning: can a surrogate learn where resolution should exist before predicting field evolution? We formulate adaptive discretization as a physics-constrained conditional generation problem over valid mesh displacements. The success of diffusion models in PDE field prediction suggests their potential for learning adaptive discretizations under similar structured constraints. This leads to a two-stage diffusion framework: Stage 1 learns an r-adaptive displacement mesh conditioned on the observed dynamics, while Stage 2 predicts the solution evolution from the mesh-informed representation. The mesh generator is regularized by physics-aware proxy channels, geometric validity constraints, and local spectral concentration so that adaptation remains physically interpretable and numerically legal. Across five PDE regimes, the results show that diffusion-based learned discretization is competitive with adaptive-mesh and reduced-order baselines, with particularly strong gains in regimes where fixed or handcrafted allocation is insufficient. The main conclusion is not that there exists a universal optimal mesh rule, but that discretization should be learned in a regime-dependent manner: different spatial and spectral structures favor different allocation behaviors. This reframes adaptive meshing for neural PDE solvers from a solver-specific heuristic into a generative representation-learning problem. --- ### Self-Evolving In-Context Learning for Direct Pilot-to-Beamformer Design in MU-MISO Systems Authors: Yubo Zhang, Xiaodong Wang Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.IT arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11970v1 We develop an enhanced in-context learning (ICL) framework to improve the performance of pilot-based beamforming in multi-user multiple-input single-output (MU-MISO) systems. The proposed scheme integrates the ICL-Transformer backbone with the pilot encoder-decoder network (EDN) and the beamformer EDN. A crucial feature of our ICL network is that it can handle multiple channel models without retraining, enabled by the construction of model-specific context datasets. To improve convergence and robustness, we introduce three key innovations: (a) a curriculum learning (CL) strategy that smoothly transitions from supervised LMMSE-labeled imitation to unsupervised sum-rate maximization, (b) a self-evolving mechanism that dynamically expands and refines the context datasets for all channel models during CL-based training, and (c) a mismatch-aware extension that incorporates several mismatches into the general ICL framework and bypasses explicit channel calibrations. Ablation studies validate the effectiveness of the in-context architecture and enhanced training strategies. Simulation results over diverse communication environments show that the proposed scheme is able to rapidly adapt to both seen and unseen channel models without gradient-based parameter updates, and can mitigate the mismatch issues via intelligent context constructions. Furthermore, our scheme consistently outperforms the existing beamforming schemes under pilot-based settings, including the WMMSE benchmark and the recent Transformer-based methods. --- ### Read It Back: Pretrained MLLMs Are Zero-Shot Reward Models for Text-to-Image Generation Authors: Runhui Huang, Qihui Zhang, Zhe Liu, Yu Gao, Jie Wu, Hengshuang Zhao Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11886v1 In this paper, we propose SpectraReward, a training-free reward function that turns pretrained MLLMs into off-the-shelf reward models for image-generation reinforcement learning. Instead of asking the MLLM to judge a generated image or answer decomposed verification questions, SpectraReward measures how well the original prompt can be recovered from the generated image through a single image-conditioned, teacher-forced forward pass. We use the average image-conditioned prompt log-likelihood as the reward, directly reusing the MLLM's pretrained image-text alignment ability without preference labels, reward-model fine-tuning. We further introduce Self-SpectraReward, a special case for unified multimodal models where the policy's own understanding branch serves as the reward model for its generation branch, forming a closed-loop self-improving framework without external reward models or external knowledge. Extensive experiments validate SpectraReward through a broad image-generation RL study covering two diffusion models, three RL algorithms, nine reward MLLM backbones from four MLLM families spanning 4B to 235B parameters, and five out-of-distribution text-to-image benchmarks. Results show that both SpectraReward and Self-SpectraReward significantly and consistently improve generation performance and outperform prior MLLM-derived reward training methods. Further analysis reveals that larger reward MLLMs are not always better, while Self-SpectraReward can match or surpass much larger external reward models, suggesting that reward-policy alignment is a key factor for effective image-generation RL. Project Page: https://huangrh99.github.io/SpectraReward/ --- ### Latent-Identity Tuning in Text-to-Image Personalization Models Authors: Daniel Garibi, Ronen Kamenetsky, Hadar Averbuch-Elor, Daniel Cohen-Or, Or Patashnik Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CV, cs.GR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11885v1 Generating and editing a person's face demands high precision, as even minor modifications can significantly alter a subject's perceived identity. Current personalization and editing methods built on general-purpose text-to-image models, however, often lack the precision required for fine-grained facial edits. We present a method for fine-grained identity tuning in text-to-image personalization models. Unlike standard image editing, which operates on a given image, identity tuning modifies the latent representation of a specific identity, enabling the generation of diverse images that consistently depict the same edited identity. To enable fine-grained latent identity tuning, we explore the latent space of a pre-trained, frozen encoder for text-to-image personalization. Our approach requires no additional training. Instead, it leverages the existing architecture of a frozen encoder to uncover latent semantic directions. This space consists of a set of latent tokens that play distinct roles in capturing different aspects of an identity and often correspond to specific spatial or semantic facial regions. We show that meaningful directions can be identified within this space and within subspaces defined by selected tokens, enabling localized, fine-grained, and semantically coherent edits. We validate our approach through qualitative and quantitative experiments that demonstrate diverse localized facial edits while preserving cross-image identity consistency. Project page at: https://garibida.github.io/IdentityTuning/ --- ### Requential Coding: Pushing the Limits of Model Compression with Self-Generated Training Data Authors: Shikai Qiu, Marc Finzi, Yujia Zheng, Kun Zhang, Andrew Gordon Wilson Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11883v1 Compression is fundamental to intelligence. A model that can represent its training data as a short code has discovered regularities that enable generalization. Large neural networks may learn functions far simpler than their parameter counts suggest, but it is challenging to construct codes that realize this simplicity. Parameter-based methods such as quantization produce code lengths that scale with model size, insensitive to how much information the parameters store. Prequential coding bypasses this issue by compressing the training trajectory, but codes the exact data sequence regardless of how much the model learns, yielding large codes when the data has high entropy. We introduce requential coding, where a teacher model selects training samples drawn from the student's own distribution. The student's code records only these selections, which cost bits only where teacher and student disagree. The resulting code length is independent of parameter count and data entropy, and often orders of magnitude shorter than the prequential counterpart, with an advantage that grows with scale. This compression sheds light on phenomena inaccessible to prior compressors. Holding loss fixed, larger models and ensembles compress to much smaller sizes despite more parameters. Plugged into a PAC-Bayes bound, the requential code yields state-of-the-art generalization guarantees for billion-parameter LLMs, outperforming bounds built on aggressive post-training quantization even granted zero error. The bound tightens with scale in the compute-optimal regime, as models become increasingly compressible relative to dataset size. The same code predicts that models gradually overfit when trained for multiple epochs. It also isolates the learnable information in a dataset from its unpredictable, random content, revealing that lower-entropy text holds far more learnable structure than higher-entropy image data. --- ### Metacognition in LLMs: Foundations, Progress, and Opportunities Authors: Gabrielle Kaili-May Liu, Areeb Gani, Jacqueline Lu, Jordan Thomas, Mark Steyvers, Arman Cohan Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11881v1 Metacognition is a foundational component of intelligence critical to effective learning, problem solving, decision-making, communication, and more. In recent years, it has become increasingly recognized as a cornerstone of capable, transparent AI systems. Yet while LLMs have made significant progress across diverse real-world tasks, it is not yet clear when, how, or to what extent they can exhibit or be endowed with effective metacognitive abilities, nor how such abilities can be adapted to advance the fundamental capabilities, reliability, and intelligence of AI systems. This paper bridges this gap by presenting the first comprehensive overview of the current state of knowledge on metacognition for LLMs. We analyze and taxonomize the landscape of this emerging field and summarize recent technical advancements, including methods and benchmarks to measure and evaluate LLMs' metacognitive abilities, techniques to elicit, improve, and apply metacognition in LLMs, and findings and implications of ongoing research. We also discuss applications, open questions and challenges, and promising directions for future work. Our aim is to provide a detailed and up-to-date review of this topic and stimulate meaningful research and discussion. An organized list of papers can be found at https://github.com/yale-nlp/LLM-Metacognition. --- ### Invariant Learning Dynamics of Transformers in Inductive Reasoning Tasks Authors: Tiberiu Musat, Tiago Pimentel, Nicolas Zucchet, Thomas Hofmann Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11875v2 We present a theoretical framework to explain the emergence of inductive reasoning abilities in Transformer language models. While previous works on Transformer learning dynamics have so far been mostly tied to specific tasks, we study a generalized class of inductive tasks that unifies several synthetic tasks known in the literature, including in-context n-grams and multi-hop reasoning. In this class, we theoretically prove that the training dynamics of attention models can be confined to a highly interpretable, low-dimensional invariant manifold. On this manifold, the learning dynamics are captured by a handful of interpretable coordinates rather than millions of parameters, making both theoretical and empirical analysis more tractable. Using this framework, we characterize how data statistics govern the competition between in-context and in-weights learning, we study how random initializations determine the `winning' circuit when multiple solutions are possible, and we demonstrate that the coordinate frame associated with the manifold can be used to automatically detect which circuits have been learned in trained models. By casting circuit formation as a low-dimensional dynamical phenomenon, we take a step toward a predictive theory of how Transformers learn. --- ### A Minimalist Retargeting-Guided Reinforcement Learning Recipe for Dexterous Manipulation Authors: Yunhai Feng, Natalie Leung, Jiaxuan Wang, Lujie Yang, Haozhi Qi, Preston Culbertson Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11874v1 Recent work in humanoid whole-body control has found success with a simple recipe: retarget human motion to robot kinematic references, then train policies via reinforcement learning (RL) to track them. But how does this recipe transfer to dexterous manipulation? The answer is not obvious, as manipulation involves complex, contact-rich dynamics and requires delicate regulation of contact modes and forces. We present REGRIND, a minimalist retargeting-guided RL pipeline that learns dexterous manipulation policies from a single human demonstration. REGRIND retargets human hand-object motion to a robot reference that preserves hand-object spatial and contact relationships, trains a residual RL policy in simulation to track object-centric keypoints along that reference, and transfers the resulting policy zero-shot to hardware with careful system identification. The resulting policies produce fluid, human-like behavior on two different multi-fingered hands across contact-rich tool-use tasks, including operating a pair of scissors and turning a screwdriver. Through systematic hardware experiments, we identify and analyze the key factors that govern sim-to-real transfer in dexterous manipulation, offering practical guidance for retargeting-based learning in contact-rich settings. Videos and code are available at https://yunhaifeng.com/REGRIND. --- ### A Durability and Cross-Language Transfer Benchmark for a Validated Teaching-Feedback Classification Protocol Authors: Esteban U. Vega Barajas Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11873v1 Institutions collect far more open-ended teaching-evaluation feedback than they read. A prior study introduced a validated protocol for classifying such comments by thematic category and sentiment, built from a documented annotation guide, an intra-annotator reliability measurement, stratified cross-validation, and a held-out evaluation on a Spanish institutional corpus with a frozen-encoder design. Two questions limit its reuse: whether a protocol fixed to 2019-era frozen embeddings stays competitive as representation methods advance, and whether it transfers to a second language. We re-run it on the original Spanish data across three representation generations, sparse lexical features, frozen transformer embeddings, and prompted large language models, and transfer its sentiment task to English with a balanced 45,000-comment corpus checked against an aspect-labeled education dataset. Treating paired comparisons as descriptive, we find the protocol durable: a 2026 frontier model posts the highest thematic F1 on the hardest Spanish task, yet shows no sentiment advantage over a cheap model and no descriptive separation from it on English, so model choice is a deployment decision, not a property of the method. --- ### Inside the Unfair Judge: A Mechanistic Interpretability Account of LLM-as-Judge Bias Authors: Zixiang Xu, Sixian Li, Huaxing Liu, Xiang Wang, Shuai Li, Zirui Song, Xiuying Chen Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11871v1 Existing studies of LLM-as-judge scoring bias work predominantly at the input-output level: they perturb inputs, measure score deltas, and propose prompt-level mitigations. We argue that the same biases admit a representation-level account in the judge's hidden state, complementary to the input-output view and operationally useful in ways it does not afford. We report three findings, across seven judges, seven bias types, and nine benchmarks. Geometry: baseline judging inputs occupy a tight activation manifold while biased inputs are displaced along a low-dimensional, type-specific subspace that sharpens with depth and is recovered consistently by three families of estimators. Causal control: steering hidden states along this subspace drives scoring in both directions, forward shifts reproducing biased scoring on clean inputs and reverse shifts restoring baseline scoring on biased ones, while matched-norm random directions produce shifts an order of magnitude smaller. Operational: a simple linear projection onto the same bias-direction features anticipates judge failures on three entirely unseen benchmarks, substantially outperforming text-based alternatives. Reading bias as activation geometry, rather than as input-output noise, unifies geometric structure, causal control, and operational prediction within a single framework. The project page is available at https://xzx34.github.io/unfair-judge/ --- ### Evidence-Backed Video Question Answering Authors: Shijie Wang, Honglu Zhou, Ziyang Wang, Ran Xu, Caiming Xiong, Silvio Savarese, Chen Sun, Juan Carlos Niebles Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11862v1 Current Video Large Language Models (Video LLMs) excel in question answering (QA) but largely operate as black boxes, providing textual answers without verifiable visual grounding. Existing explainability efforts rely on textual rationales or sparse bounding boxes, which struggle to capture complex video dynamics such as occlusions and non-rigid deformations. We propose Evidence-Backed Video Question Answering (E-VQA), a novel task requiring models to jointly output a semantic answer and precise spatio-temporal evidence: temporal segments and dense, tracked object segmentation masklets. To support this, we introduce ST-Evidence, the first human-verified benchmark for both discriminative and generative pixel-level grounding. Evaluations of state-of-the-art models reveal a critical decoupling between QA accuracy and true visual perception that scaling alone fails to bridge. To address this, we develop scalable, automated generation pipelines to create ST-Evidence-Instruct, a 160k-scale dataset bridging high-level reasoning with fine-grained grounding. Fine-tuning grounded Video LLMs on this data yields substantial gains over the corresponding size-matched UniPixel baselines (e.g., +27.2 t-mean and +13.8 J&F on a 7B model), establishing a robust baseline for explainable, evidence-backed video understanding. Code and data are available at https://github.com/SalesforceAIResearch/EVQA. --- ### AdvancedMathBench: A Benchmark Suite for Advanced Mathematical Proof Generation and Verification Authors: Lingkai Kong, Zijian Wu, Yuzhe Gu, Haiteng Zhao, Wenyong Huang, Shuang Sun, Zhicheng Xiong, Xiaotian Zhang, Shuya Zhao, Yan Wang, Disheng Xu, Wenwei Zhang et al. Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11849v1 Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on high-school and olympiad-style mathematics, yet their capabilities on advanced mathematics remain poorly understood. Existing benchmarks, however, fall short in both scope and evaluation granularity: they provide limited disciplinary coverage and often rely on final-answer correctness or coarse judgments, leaving the validity of the reasoning process inadequately assessed. To bridge this gap, we introduce AdvancedMathBench, a benchmark suite designed to evaluate advanced mathematical reasoning capabilities. Its core proof-generation benchmark, ProverBench, contains 296 problems spanning undergraduate and doctoral qualifying-exam levels. To provide reliable evaluation of the proofs, we develop a dedicated automatic verification pipeline trained on large-scale expert annotations to produce both correctness verdicts and fine-grained assessments of proof errors, which exhibits strong agreement with human experts on held-out proof trajectories. We further introduce VerifierBench, consisting of 888 model-generated proof trajectories paired with expert ground truth, to evaluate whether models can correctly judge proof validity and provide sound verification rationales. Experiments show that AdvancedMathBench remains challenging for frontier models. On proof generation, the best-performing model, GPT-5.5-xhigh, achieves only 75.8 and 66.1 on the UGD and QE splits, respectively, indicating substantial room for improvement on advanced mathematical proof construction. On proof verification, the best model attains a Balanced F1 of only 65.1, and models generally exhibit low true negative rates, suggesting that critical error detection remains a major bottleneck. --- ### Beyond the Single Camera: Agentic Multi-View Reasoning in Sports Video Understanding Authors: Kerui Chen, Jinglu Wang, Xiaoyi Zhang, Yan Lu Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11844v2 Recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) achieve strong performance on single-view video understanding benchmarks. However, sports videos involve dense occlusion, rapid motion, and complex interactions that are difficult to resolve from a single viewpoint. In practice, sports events are recorded from multiple camera angles, providing complementary evidence used by referees. Yet, no existing benchmark evaluates MLLMs on multi-view sports video understanding. To address this gap, we introduce SportMV-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark built from official match recordings, through a dedicated pipeline combining LLM-based generation, MLLM-based verification, and human filtering to ensure quality and consistency. SportMV-Bench containing 1022 multi-view video bundles and 3015 question-answer pairs spanning 10 sports across three categories: Perception-Aware Recognition (PAR), Rule-aware Event Interpretation (REI), and Adjudicative Decision Reasoning (ADR). Our analysis shows that current MLLMs fail to effectively exploit multi-view information, with the bottlenecks lying in fine-grained visual perception and view selection rather than logical reasoning or domain knowledge. We propose SportMV-Agent, an agentic framework that orchestrates an iterative loop of active view selection, perception tool execution, and evidence-grounded reasoning, achieving a significant 15.61% relative improvement over the strongest MLLM baseline. --- ### Input-Aware Dynamic Backdoor Attack Against Quantum Neural Networks Authors: Junrui Zhang, Zemin Chen, Lusi Li, Mohammad Ghasemigol, Daniel Takabi, Rui Ning Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: quant-ph, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11843v2 Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs) are a promising framework for quantum machine learning on near-term quantum devices, but their security risks remain insufficiently understood. Studies have shown that QNNs are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, yet existing quantum backdoors mostly rely on a fixed trigger shared by all poisoned inputs. This fixed-trigger design is a major weakness because many defenses detect or weaken the repeated patterns such triggers leave in data representations. Although input-aware dynamic backdoors have been studied in classical neural networks, transferring them to QNNs is difficult because quantum learning introduces new obstacles. In particular, measurement compresses the post-ansatz quantum state into a limited classical output, weakening supervision for a trigger generator, while individual density matrices fluctuate with the input and make per-sample contrastive learning unstable. To address these challenges, we propose Q-DIBA, the first input-aware dynamic backdoor attack for QNNs. Q-DIBA jointly trains a classical trigger generator and a victim QNN through a three-mode mini-batch strategy that supports clean behavior, attack activation, and trigger specificity. To provide stable quantum-level supervision, Q-DIBA introduces an ensemble density contrastive loss that operates on post-ansatz quantum states before measurement and contrasts mode-averaged density matrices rather than individual samples. Experiments on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST across multiple QNN architectures show that Q-DIBA achieves high clean accuracy, strong attack success, and high cross-trigger accuracy, demonstrating effectiveness, stealthiness, and input specificity. The attack also remains resilient against defenses including visual inspection, spectral-signature detection, and fine-tuning, suggesting that input-aware quantum backdoors are an important threat to secure QNN deployment. --- ### LoRA-Based Cascaded Multimodal Fusion for Action Recognition in Medical Training Environments Authors: Divya Mereddy, Jeevan Beedareddy Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11839v1 This paper presents a cascaded Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA)-based multimodal fusion framework for action and activity recognition in healthcare-oriented training environments. The proposed architecture combines parameter-efficient modality-specific adaptation with sequential fusion, enabling modalities to be integrated in stages without retraining previously learned components. Rather than assuming a fixed fusion structure, the framework first integrates more closely related modalities and then incorporates additional heterogeneous modalities, supporting scalable adaptation across datasets with different modality sets.We evaluate the framework on two healthcare-oriented training environment datasets: NurViD and the Nurse Training dataset. Across these datasets, preliminary results suggest that the proposed cascaded fusion strategy improves over individual modality models and provides competitive performance relative to previously reported dataset-specific baselines. Overall, these findings indicate that cascaded LoRA-based fusion is a promising parameter-efficient approach for integrating heterogeneous modalities in medical training action and activity recognition tasks. github: https://github.com/anonymous0-ai/LoRA-Based-Cascaded-Multimodal-Fusion-.git. --- ### HASTE: A Platform for Rapid Post-Disaster Building Damage Assessment Authors: Caleb Robinson, Anthony Ortiz, Simone Fobi Nsutezo, Cameron Birge, Meygha Machado, Marcelo Duarte, Joaquin Rivero Rodriguez, Anthony Cintron Roman, Kevin White, Inbal Becker-Reshef, Juan M. Lavista Ferres Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11838v1 When a large disaster strikes, responders need a map of which buildings are damaged within hours. The models that do well on public benchmarks assume matched before-and-after imagery and a training set drawn from similar past events, and neither is usually available for a new disaster in its first day. We present HASTE (High-speed Assessment and Satellite Tracking for Emergencies), a no-code web platform that lets analysts who are not machine learning engineers produce per-building damage maps from post-disaster satellite imagery. HASTE implements two methods that share one interface. The first requires the user to label polygons over the post-disaster scene, trains a small semantic segmentation model on that single scene, runs it over the whole image, and joins the per-pixel output to existing building footprints. The second embeds every footprint with a pretrained vision model, requires the user to label a handful of buildings, and fits a logistic regression in the browser that scores the rest of the scene in seconds. We describe the platform, both methods, and the engineering that supports them. We also report preliminary experiments on xBD showing that foundation-model embeddings pooled over footprints separate damaged from intact buildings using post-disaster imagery alone, matching a fully supervised ResNet-50 baseline with a twentieth of its labels. HASTE and its predecessors have supported more than thirty real-world disaster responses since 2023, spanning earthquakes, hurricanes, cyclones, floods, wildfires, and tornadoes, delivering results to humanitarian partners within hours to days of imagery becoming available. We close with the directions we think are most promising, including vision-language assessment, active learning, and damage models for roads and other infrastructure. HASTE is open source at https://github.com/microsoft/haste. --- ### Cycle-World: Mitigating Error Accumulation in Long-term Video World Models via Reverse-Prediction Cycle Consistency Authors: Zihan Su, Teng Hu, Jiangning Zhang, Ruiyan Wang, Ran Yi, Lizhuang Ma, Dacheng Tao Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11836v1 Autoregressive diffusion models have enabled high-quality video generation, yet their sequential nature inherently suffers from error accumulation. In long-horizon video synthesis, minor prediction deviations compound over time, inevitably leading to unconstrained generative drift, structural collapse, and severe visual degradation. To address this, we propose Cycle-World, a novel framework designed for stable and temporally consistent long-video generation. Our approach tackles error drift by enforcing strict temporal reversibility across both the training and inference phases. Theoretically, we demonstrate that forward generative drift can be strictly bottlenecked by a cycle-consistency objective. During training, we integrate an efficient reverse-prediction model to implicitly embed causal constraints into the forward generator, compelling it to produce reversible sequences that tightly adhere to the natural video manifold. At inference time, we repurpose this frozen reverse model as a runtime corrector. Through gradient-based cycle guidance, it iteratively refines the generated latent representations, actively suppressing accumulated errors before they are committed to the historical context. Extensive experiments on the VBench benchmark demonstrate that Cycle-World's dual-phase synergy significantly mitigates error drift, achieving state-of-the-art overall generation quality and long-horizon temporal consistency in 60-second synthesis. --- ### MicroCharNet: Less is More for License Plate Character Detection Authors: Huy Che, Dinh-Duy Phan, Duc-Lung Vu Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11830v1 License plate character detection is a crucial component of intelligent transportation systems, where high accuracy and computational efficiency are required for real-time deployment. Although recent deep learning-based methods have substantially improved detection performance, many high-accuracy models rely on large-scale architectures that incur substantial computational overhead, limiting their applicability to resource-constrained devices. In this paper, we propose MicroCharNet, an ultra-lightweight model specifically designed for license plate character detection. The proposed architecture employs a compact backbone composed of C2f blocks, integrated with CoordAtt module to enhance feature extraction while preserving spatial information. A lightweight C3k2-based neck fuses multi-level features, followed by a single-level anchor-free detection head that enables end-to-end prediction. Experiments conducted on the UFPR-ALPR dataset demonstrate that MicroCharNet achieves competitive detection accuracy with only 0.08M parameters and 0.096 GFLOPs, while outperforming several recent YOLO-based baselines. Hardware-level evaluations further confirm its efficiency for real-time deployment on edge devices. These results indicate that carefully designed ultra-lightweight architectures can effectively balance accuracy and efficiency in license plate character detection. The source code is available at https://github.com/chequanghuy/MicroCharNet. --- ### Transformer-Guided Swarm Intelligence for Frugal Neural Architecture Search Authors: Romain Amigon Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11826v1 Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has automated the design of deep learning models but traditionally requires massive computational resources, often measured in thousands of GPU-days. In this paper, we propose a frugal and memetic NAS framework designed to democratize architecture design on consumer-grade hardware. Our approach combines the global macro-search capabilities of an autoregressive Transformer controller, trained via Reinforcement Learning (RL), with the local micro-exploitation of an Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm. To prevent premature convergence during the RL phase, we introduce a dynamic entropy mechanism that forces topological exploration upon detection of performance stagnation. Evaluated on a standard GPU (NVIDIA RTX 3060), our hybrid method effectively resolves the "cold-start" problem inherent in metaheuristics. By algorithmically penalizing network depth, our framework actively mitigates model bloat: on the CIFAR-10 dataset, it discovers an efficient architecture reaching 84.85% accuracy with only $\sim$174,000 parameters (significantly smaller than standard baselines like ResNet-20) in 3 hours of search time. Furthermore, we demonstrate the framework's flexibility by applying it to credit card fraud detection, directly optimizing the F1-Score on highly imbalanced tabular data to reach a F1-Score of 0.71 with a compact network of $\sim$4,600 parameters. These results suggest that our approach can yield tailored, accessible, and highly parameter-efficient deep learning models suitable for edge deployment. --- ### Representing the Non-dominated Set of Multi-objective Network Problems by Supported Non-dominated Points Authors: David Könen, Lara Löhken, Michael Stiglmayr Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.DM, cs.NE, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11821v1 In multi-objective combinatorial optimization, unsupported non-dominated points typically outnumber supported points and are often significantly more challenging to compute. Recent studies show that extreme supported non-dominated points provide high-quality representations of the non-dominated set for certain binary problems. We demonstrate that this observation does not generalize to capacitated network optimization problems: representation quality decreases with increasing arc capacities, whereas supported non-dominated points consistently provide high-quality representations with respect to several quality indicators. However, supported point sets may still be too large in practical applications, where only a small, fixed number of alternatives is typically desired. Selecting fixed-size representations from the non-dominated set requires its computationally expensive generation and thus diminishes the computational advantages that representations are intended to provide. We therefore suggest the (extreme) supported points as alternative candidate sets in subset selection problems. Our numerical results show that restricting the candidate set to supported non-dominated points yields fixed-size representations of nearly the same quality as those selected from the complete non-dominated set. Overall, supported non-dominated points serve both as high-quality representations and as reasonable candidate sets for subset selection. --- ### MM-ToolSandBox: A Unified Framework for Evaluating Visual Tool-Calling Agents Authors: Kaixin Ma, Di Feng, Alexander Metz, Jiarui Lu, Eshan Verma, Afshin Dehghan Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11818v2 We introduce MM-ToolSandBox, a benchmark and evaluation framework for visually grounded tool-calling agents. The framework provides a stateful execution environment spanning 500+ tools across 16 application domains, supporting multi-image, multi-turn tasks where agents must ground progressively arriving visual inputs into executable tool calls while handling realistic conversational phenomena (goal revisions, error corrections, state mutations). An automated scenario generation pipeline produces diverse, visually grounded scenarios through information-flow-guided planning and multi-stage quality filtering, yielding 258 human-verified nominal scenarios and 50 variants targeting interactive UI applications. Evaluating 12 state-of-the-art models, from 4B open-weight to frontier proprietary systems, shows that current models still lack robust visual tool-calling capability: even the best model achieves below 50% success rate. Our failure analysis further reveals that visual precision, not only planning, is a primary bottleneck for capable models: 53% of failures stem from incorrect information extraction from images despite otherwise correct task workflows. A planning-to-precision crossover emerges with scale: smaller models fail at deciding what to do, while larger models fail at perceiving what they see, suggesting fundamentally different research directions for improving models at different capability levels. The framework and the benchmark are publicly available at https://github.com/apple/ml-mmtoolsandbox --- ### MM-ToolSandBox: A Unified Framework for Evaluating Visual Tool-Calling Agents Authors: Kaixin Ma, Di Feng, Alexander Metz, Jiarui Lu, Eshan Verma, Afshin Dehghan Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11818v1 We introduce MM-ToolSandBox, a benchmark and evaluation framework for visually grounded tool-calling agents. The framework provides a stateful execution environment spanning 500+ tools across 16 application domains, supporting multi-image, multi-turn tasks where agents must ground progressively arriving visual inputs into executable tool calls while handling realistic conversational phenomena (goal revisions, error corrections, state mutations). An automated scenario generation pipeline produces diverse, visually grounded scenarios through information-flow-guided planning and multi-stage quality filtering, yielding 258 human-verified nominal scenarios and 50 variants targeting interactive UI applications. Evaluating 12 state-of-the-art models, from 4B open-weight to frontier proprietary systems, shows that current models still lack robust visual tool-calling capability: even the best model achieves below 50% success rate. Our failure analysis further reveals that visual precision, not only planning, is a primary bottleneck for capable models: 53% of failures stem from incorrect information extraction from images despite otherwise correct task workflows. A planning-to-precision crossover emerges with scale: smaller models fail at deciding what to do, while larger models fail at perceiving what they see, suggesting fundamentally different research directions for improving models at different capability levels. The framework and the benchmark are publicly available at https://github.com/apple/ml-mmtoolsandbox --- ### Relaxing Faithfulness with Intervention-Only Causal Discovery Authors: Bijan Mazaheri, Jiaqi Zhang, Caroline Uhler Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11816v1 Causal discovery algorithms learn a network that describes the causal dependencies among random variables. A common workflow involves first utilizing conditional independence properties on observational data to determine partially directed causal relationships, then applying interventions to orient the unknown causal directions. A critical assumption for the first step is faithfulness: a requirement that causally linked variables exhibit statistical dependence. Many natural systems include buffering and stabilizing pathways that cancel out to achieve systemic robustness. This cancellation of pathways violates faithfulness, leading causal discovery algorithms to incorrectly remove causal dependencies. In this paper, we argue that hard interventions contain information about the presence/absence of causal linkage that is overlooked in the first stage of structure discovery. We show that a mild assumption -- called intervention-immediacy faithfulness -- that allows cancellations, is sufficient to nonparametrically identify causal structures with hard interventions. These results position interventions as the primary carriers of information about causal structure, which should take precedence over conditional independence testing. To flip the paradigm, we also specify equivalence classes when the identification criteria are not met due to limitations in the scope of interventions. --- ### Introducing Human-Centeredness in AI-Assisted Lexicography Authors: Antonio San Martin, Catherine Trekker Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11808v3 This paper proposes a human-centered artificial intelligence (HCAI) framework for AI-assisted lexicography. While generative AI offers significant opportunities to enhance lexicographic work, it also raises concerns regarding the future role of lexicographers and the preservation of linguistic and cultural diversity. Drawing on HCAI principles and previous applications in other language professions, the paper identifies four interrelated dimensions through which AI integration in lexicography can be understood and critically examined: the augmented lexicographer, the sociotechnical context of AI integration, bias, and the design of AI-powered lexicographic tools. The framework argues that AI should augment rather than replace lexicographers, combining automation with meaningful human control. It further emphasizes the importance of preserving professional agency, mitigating AI-generated biases, and designing tools around the needs of lexicographers. By doing so, the paper provides a foundation for future research and the beneficial integration of AI into lexicographic workflows. ---