# Research Papers — 2026-07 · bundle page 137 of 222 > Full-text markdown of papers #6801–6850 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/137 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/136.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/138.md) ### Fail-Aware and Explainable Test Oracle Prediction Authors: Yue Zhao, Binish Tanveer, Jelena Zdravkovic Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11342v1 Despite their central role in fault detection, test oracles remain challenging to construct effectively. Recent learning based methods address this challenge by automatically generating test assertions, yet even if syntactically correct, they are often ineffective in revealing bugs. Rather than generating assertions, this study explores a different approach by training a model to directly predict whether a given test prefix passes or fails. We present FOCAL, an emerging code LLM-based discriminative oracle predictor. It learns from labeled pairs of test prefixes and methods under test, employs losses that emphasize failing cases during training, and grounds its predictions in statement level behavioral evidence. Compared with the baseline method SEER, we substantially improve performance on failing cases for unseen projects and provide richer explanations. A preliminary evaluation on fault-detection benchmarks and automated test-generation artifacts shows that our approach is highly accurate within its training distribution and substantially improves failure detection on previously unseen projects where prior discriminative oracles collapse. Moreover, the highlighted statements are supported by behavioral explanation checks. These early results suggest that fail-aware discriminative oracle prediction can complement existing approaches such as fuzzing, search-based testing, and LLM-based test generation. These techniques produce test prefixes at scale but often lack fault oriented oracles. In future work, FOCAL could take generated test prefixes and attach fault-aware predicted oracles to them, turning high-volume input generation into executable tests that are more likely to expose semantic failures. --- ### The In-Car Sign Language Corpus (ICSL): A Multi-Modal Resource for Constrained-Space Sign Language Recognition Authors: Raviteja Boddu, Guilherme Vieira Leite, Joed Lopes da Silva, Ângelo Benetti, Isabela Barbieri, Natália de Melo Afonso, Thyago Santos, Helio Pedrini, Felipe Venâncio Barbosa, José Mario De Martino, Munir Georges, Alessandro Zimmer Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11341v1 This paper addresses the challenges of using sign language within shared mobility services, such as taxis, carpools, or ride-sharing platforms. The use of sign language recognition (SLR) in real-world, confined environments, specifically vehicle interiors remains largely unexplored. To motivate research in this area, we present the In-Car Sign Language (ICSL) dataset for Brazilian Sign Language (Libras), with the long-term goal of improving public transport accessibility for the Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing community. The dataset consists of: (1) high-precision laboratory motion capture (MoCap) data to establish an idealized linguistic baseline and (2) real-world multi-modal in-car recordings captured using a 2D camera and 3D Time-of-Flight sensors. The dataset provides a basis for comparative analyses between synthesized signing avatar animations and recorded real signing interpreter videos, which enable future research into robust "in-the-wild" SLR models and domain adaptation. We describe in detail the use cases, the setup, the data collection protocol, and the metadata structure of the corpus. In total, we recorded a multimodal dataset exceeding 1.5 million frames, comprising the synchronized multimodal streams described above featuring Libras users across various in-car scenarios. The corpus is provided with gloss annotation of lexical signs and non-lexical sign language elements specially designed to support the training and evaluation of deep neural networks for constrained space recognition. In-vehicle signing offers a technically significant example of a constrained, occluded, and non-frontal environment. While recognizing the diverse communication strategies already employed by the Deaf community, identifying automotive-specific limitations provides a useful stepping stone for research into enhancing in-car accessibility and passenger quality of life. --- ### HierCAD: Hierarchical Text-to-CAD Design via Structure Alignment and Parameter Grounding Authors: Jimin Xu, Tianbao Wang, Tao Jin, Zhou Zhao Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11339v1 Recent text-to-CAD approaches have shown promising results by leveraging large language models, but they often struggle with maintaining structural consistency in complex designs and accurately grounding geometric parameters. To address these issues, we propose HierCAD, a hierarchical text-to-CAD framework that improves both structural reasoning and parameter prediction. HierCAD reformulates CAD generation as progressive reasoning by decomposing CAD construction trees into object-level procedural reasoning and part-level topology reasoning trajectories. To further improve generation fidelity, we introduce a unified Structure Alignment and Parameter Grounding (SAPG) learning strategy. Structure alignment aligns topology reasoning trajectories with their corresponding parametric CAD spans, while parameter grounding mitigates shortcut learning through structure-preserving parameter perturbations and ranking-based supervision. Experiments demonstrate that HierCAD outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods on both CAD sequence generation and reconstructed CAD model evaluation. Our code is available at https://github.com/Collab-Gen/HierCAD. --- ### AutoVSR: Automatic Visual-to-Symbolic Reasoning for Symbolic Expression Generation from Circuit Schematic Authors: Zhe Xiao, Longfei Li, Xu He, Haoying Wu, Zixing Zhang, Mingyu Liu Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11338v2 Symbolic expressions can effectively characterize and predict circuit behavior, but deriving them directly from circuit schematics is challenging. This process requires accurate visual-to-symbolic construction of circuit structure from images and correct multi-step symbolic derivation, both of which impose strict correctness requirements. This work proposes AutoVSR, an automated framework for visual-to-symbolic generation of circuit expressions using Vision Language Models (VLMs). By reconstructing circuit diagrams into an executable intermediate representation (Executable IR) and leveraging a symbolic solver for reasoning, AutoVSR significantly improves the accuracy of symbolic expression generation. AutoVSR introduces two key innovations: an IR construction method guided by component rule retrieval and verification-based feedback, and a symbolic solver implemented as a planning agent equipped with a symbolic tool library for reliable multi-step derivation. Compared with end-to-end VLM approaches and specialized methods on the main symbolic expression generation task, AutoVSR achieves accuracy improvements of 30.01--59.45% and 41.96--51.84%, respectively. Moreover, AutoVSR surpasses closed-source state-of-the-art VLMs in inference cost and computational efficiency. Code is available at https://github.com/LongfeiLi1/AutoVSR. --- ### Verifier-Guided Twelve-Tone Composition: A Generate-Verify-Repair Harness for Symbolic Music Generation Authors: Congren Dai, Danni Zhao, Enyang Liu, Michael Ching Yam, Zhancheng Guo, Siyi Gu, Wentao Yang, Bo Dai, Xiaobing Li, Maosong Sun Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11334v2 Large language models can produce superficially legal twelve-tone scores that collapse into degenerate textures. We introduce a neuro-symbolic harness that wraps a language-model proposer in a generate-verify-repair-trace loop with symbolic verification. The complete pipeline improves event-local consistency without claiming whole-piece legality. Across 40 controlled tasks and four paired models, constraint-checked delivery rises from 13.3% under raw generation to 48.1% with the harness; it abstains on the remaining 51.9% of runs. The pass rate of a narrower collision and serialisation-consistency check rises from 33.5% to 58.3%, while degeneracy remains near 0.05, including under adversarial prompting. A blinded evaluation by five experts also shows a descriptive aggregate preference for harness candidates over raw generation in adherence, perceived legality, coherence, and overall quality. --- ### PRISM Edit: One Vector for All Temporal Answers Authors: Chen Huang, Qi Zheng, Ruiqin Zheng, Long Zeng, Yuantong Xu Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11327v3 Model editing keeps large language models (LLMs) up to date without retraining, but temporal facts expose a limitation of the prevailing locate-and-edit paradigm: an update is not always a replacement. When a fact changes, the new answer should become current while the old answer may remain correct in historical time contexts. Building on this insight, we use causal tracing to show that LLMs already support this distinction via a two-stage internal computation: early MLP layers retrieve a time-agnostic subject representation, and later layers modulate it with temporal context to yield the time-correct answer. Motivated by this finding, we introduce PRISM Edit, which optimizes a single polysemous representation across temporal contexts and leverages the model's inherent modulation pathway to route it to temporally correct predictions without requiring any architectural modification. We evaluate on TimeConflict, a newly introduced temporal editing benchmark, and on temporally augmented CounterFact. PRISM Edit improves multiple core metrics over the best baseline, most notably +23.3 Temporal Consistency (TC) and +33.7 Current Relative-time Score (CRS) on LLaMA-3, while being more than 2x faster. Code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/CheerCHuang/PRISM-Edit. --- ### PRISM Edit: One Vector for All Temporal Answers Authors: Chen Huang, Qi Zheng, Ruiqin Zheng, Long Zeng, Yuantong Xu Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11327v2 Model editing keeps large language models (LLMs) up to date without retraining, but temporal facts expose a limitation of the prevailing locate-and-edit paradigm: an update is not always a replacement. When a fact changes, the new answer should become current while the old answer may remain correct in historical time contexts. Building on this insight, we use causal tracing to show that LLMs already support this distinction via a two-stage internal computation: early MLP layers retrieve a time-agnostic subject representation, and later layers modulate it with temporal context to yield the time-correct answer. Motivated by this finding, we introduce PRISM Edit, which optimizes a single polysemous representation across temporal contexts and leverages the model's inherent modulation pathway to route it to temporally correct predictions, without any architectural modification. We evaluate on TimeConflict, a new temporal editing benchmark we introduce, and on temporally augmented CounterFact. PRISM Edit improves over the best baseline by +23.3 Temporal Consistency (TC) and +33.7 Current Relative-time Score (CRS) on average while being more than 2x faster. Code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/AnonymousStudy972/PRISM-Edit. --- ### Calibrated e-CUSUM Decoding for Quantized Reasoning Models: Why Token Log-Probability Is the Wrong Observable for Decoding Monitors Authors: El Hassane Ettifouri, Ayoub Belfatmi, Mahaman Sanoussi Yahaya Alassan, Walid Dahhane Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.AI, cs.IT arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11317v1 Low-bit quantization makes small reasoning models inexpensive to deploy but can degrade their chains of thought. This motivates decoder-side monitors that intervene when generation becomes unreliable. We show that a natural candidate, the centered token log-probability increment $\log p(w_t)+H_t$, is the wrong observable for this purpose. Under the model's own sampling law it is a mean-zero martingale by construction, so it measures sampling self-consistency rather than trajectory health and is nearly silent during confident repetition, where both $\log p(w_t)$ and entropy are close to zero. We introduce a training-free decoding controller that combines (i) a degeneration-aware alarm score fusing token uncertainty with explicit verbatim repetition and (ii) a calibrated e-process-inspired sequential detector. The raw product process is Ville-valid under a conditional-mean null, while the deployed CUSUM-floored statistic is treated as an empirical change detector because the score is history-dependent and autocorrelated. On GSM8K with DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B in FP16 and INT4, calibration turns a monitor that fires on 93--95% of generations into a selective detector of failing traces ($φ\approx 0.3$, precision $\approx 0.6$ against a 0.38 base rate). In this pilot, the controller reduces measured verbatim-degeneration signals and yields a positive but statistically inconclusive INT4 accuracy change from 63% to 69% (paired McNemar $p=0.18$, $n=100$), at a 28% token-budget cost. We also find that non-termination, rather than looping, is the dominant failure mode on GSM8K. The main contribution is methodological: an explanation of why centered token log-probability is inadequate for decoder monitoring and a calibrated, cautiously evaluated replacement. --- ### Programming Language Policy as an AI Literacy Equity Problem: A 15-Nation Comparative Analysis Authors: Adrian-Marius Dumitran, Iulia-Maria Popescu Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11314v1 The promise of AI literacy ``for all'' confronts a structural challenge embedded in how nations organise secondary computer science education. In most systems, a general-track subject -- Digital Literacy, ICT, TIC, or SNT -- bears the weight of universal AI literacy, while a specialist Informatics course serves STEM pathways separately. Yet the content and depth of the general track are shaped by governance decisions made largely with reference to the specialist one. This paper presents a comparative analysis of curricula and examination frameworks across fifteen countries, identifying two structural challenges. First, in several systems a significant portion of students completes secondary education without any formal programming exposure. Second, among those who do receive CS education, a \emph{Syntax Ceiling} emerges: Python-based instruction reaches most students, while the algorithmic depth associated with C++ remains concentrated in elite STEM tracks. Drawing on reform cases spanning centralised mandates (France, China, Japan), assessment-driven systems (Poland, Romania, South Korea), and recent universal reforms (Switzerland, Kazakhstan), we show that governance structures and high-stakes examinations are the primary drivers of both challenges -- and that specialist and general-track language choices are rarely independent, linked through shared teacher pipelines that curriculum policy seldom acknowledges. Achieving genuine AI literacy for all requires confronting not just curriculum content, but the access architectures and resource constraints that determine who receives it -- and at what depth. --- ### SLVMBench: Skill Learning from Video Memory Authors: Yudong Yang, Guangzhi Sun, Yixuan Li, Chao Zhang Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11312v1 We introduce Skill Learning from Video Memory (SLVMBench), the first benchmark that jointly evaluates whether video large language models (video-LLMs) can learn skills from long video memory and apply them to real-time tasks. SLVMBench presents models with 2-3 hour video streams that contain a tutorial video embedded in a stream of arbitrary irrelevant videos, resembling real-world human learning practices. Video-LLMs are asked to apply the acquired skill to answer real-time questions about an ongoing video. Unlike long-video understanding benchmarks that emphasize passive comprehension and skill-learning benchmarks that rely on short, immediate demonstrations, SLVMBench tests the full pipeline of memorizing and extracting procedural knowledge, as well as transferring it to real-time tasks. Moreover, rigorous human annotations feature sub-second-level temporal calibration, manually engineered questions eliminating common-sense guessing, and collated tutorials to ensure coverage of the required skills. Evaluations on state-of-the-art proprietary and open-source video LLMs show that video-LLMs struggle substantially with learning and applying skill knowledge from videos. Moreover, performance degrades markedly when the skill knowledge is placed within a long video memory. These results reveal a key limitation of existing video LLMs and position SLVMBench as the first benchmark for studying real-time skill acquisition and application from long-context video memory. --- ### SPARC-Net: A Spectral, Causality-Aware, and Hard-Constrained Physics-Informed Architecture for Stiff and Shock-Dominated Partial Differential Equations Authors: Divyavardhan Singh, Dimple Sonone, Hammad Mohammad, Kishor Upla Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.LG, cs.DM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11310v1 Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) provide a meshless approach for solving partial differential equations (PDEs), but suffer severe degradation in stiff and shock-dominated problems, where small PDE residuals can correspond to globally inaccurate solutions. We show these failures are multi-causal, arising from the concurrent interplay of (i) spectral bias against sharp features, (ii) imbalanced multi-term optimization and loss-weight collapse, (iii) violation of temporal causality, and (iv) under-resolved collocation. We present SPARC-Net, a unified architecture and training framework that jointly addresses all four pathologies. SPARC-Net leverages an adaptive multi-scale spectral encoder with a learnable spectral gate, a gated residual backbone, adaptive activations, and a hard-constraint output ansatz that exactly enforces initial and boundary conditions, structurally eliminating loss-weight collapse. Training employs stabilized gradient-norm loss balancing, floored causality-respecting residual weighting, and residual-based adaptive collocation (RAD). Validated against exact analytic and high-order spectral reference solutions across four canonical benchmarks -- viscous Burgers', Allen-Cahn, convection (beta=30), and reaction -- SPARC-Net yields substantial improvements over vanilla PINNs: relative L2 error drops from 1.47e-1 to 1.14e-1 on Burgers' (22% reduction), 9.93e-1 to 5.78e-2 on Allen-Cahn (94% reduction), and 9.82e-1 to 3.54e-3 on reaction (100% reduction). A characteristic-coordinate encoder for hyperbolic transport further reduces convection error from 5.14e-1 to 9.88e-5 (100% reduction). We report five-seed mean +/- standard deviation errors, Wilcoxon significance tests, full ablation studies, hyperparameter sensitivities, an extension to the 2D heat equation, and comparisons against parameter-matched baselines. --- ### Efficient Test-Time Optimization for Multi-Agent Proof Autoformalization Authors: Tian-Shuo Liu, Shiyuan Zhang, Zijie Geng, Haoyu Liu, Runjie Xu, Pengyuan Wang, Lei Yuan, Yang Yu Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11307v1 Full-proof autoformalization bridges extensive mathematical proofs in natural language with formally validated reasoning, offering a pathway to elevate the ceiling of verifiable mathematical reasoning. Unlike statement-level formalization, proof autoformalization is a long-horizon challenge requiring coordination of claims, contexts, and dependencies across many proof steps, yet has only recently come under focused study. Current approaches either rely on costly model training or apply excessive, unguided repair at inference time. To this end, we introduce ToMap, a multi-agent framework that structures proof autoformalization as a Decomposer-Formalizer-Prover pipeline with efficient test-time optimization guided by formal verification and semantic rubrics for proof quality. Rather than distributing test-time compute across all agents, we perform bottleneck analysis and identify the Decomposer as the critical bottleneck: the quality of its atomic, self-contained proof units directly determines whether downstream agents can successfully formalize and prove each step. ToMap therefore treats the Formalizer and Prover as downstream executors and efficiently focuses test-time compute on Decomposer refinement. This refinement follows a loop inspired by GEPA, evolving prompts over candidate decompositions and using formal verification progress together with semantic proof rubrics to define a Pareto frontier that guides the next decomposition update. Experiments on ProofFlowBench show that ToMap improves over the best previous method by 19.0% when evaluated by both syntactic correctness and semantic faithfulness, while requiring lower test-time cost. Scaling analysis shows that most gains emerge within a few iterations of decomposition evolution, guiding test-time budget selection. --- ### ASUMOT: Motion-Consistency-Based Asynchronous UAV Detection and Tracking with Event Cameras Authors: Baofeng Jia, Xiaoyu Chen, Jingyuan Zhang, Zongze Wu, Haochen li, Jing Han, Lianfa Bai Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11303v1 Event cameras offer microsecond-level temporal resolution and high dynamic range for low-altitude UAV perception. However, long-range UAVs often produce sparse, fragmented, and noise-contaminated event responses, where one semantic target may appear as multiple spatially separated blobs. Direct blob-level asynchronous tracking therefore suffers from duplicate trajectories and unstable identities. We propose ASUMOT, a motion-consistency-based asynchronous UAV detection and tracking framework operating directly on raw events. ASUMOT models each UAV as a set of motion-consistent event blobs. A local motion-consistency estimator triggers reliable candidates, a lightweight multi-task verifier provides UAV confidence and motion-direction cues, and motion-consistency clustering aggregates fragmented blobs into identity-consistent UAV tracks. We also introduce ES-UAV, a high-definition event-level UAV benchmark with dense semantic annotations. Experiments on public UAV tracking data and ES-UAV show that ASUMOT improves the accuracy--efficiency trade-off while preserving asynchronous event processing. Code and Dataset will be released. --- ### Metadata Supervised Imaging Representations for Modelling and Controlling Acquisition Variability Authors: Mehmet Yigit Avci, Pedro Borges, Virginia Fernandez, Natalia Glazman, Paul Wright, Mehmet Yigitsoy, Sebastien Ourselin, Jorge Cardoso Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11295v2 Biomedical imaging data exhibit substantial acquisition variability, where identical biological structures can appear markedly different due to differences in imaging devices, acquisition protocols, sites, and reconstruction settings. Consequently, learned representations often entangle underlying biological information with acquisition-dependent appearance, limiting interpretability, generalisation, and clinical deployment. We show that these sources of variation can be disentangled by jointly modelling medical images and acquisition metadata. Using large-scale clinical brain MRI data as a case study, we learn representations that disentangle anatomical structure from contrast-dependent appearance. The resulting framework enables the organisation of heterogeneous imaging protocols, sequence understanding, the detection of image-metadata inconsistencies and imaging artifacts, while preserving biologically relevant anatomical features across diverse acquisitions. Building on these disentangled representations, it further supports generative and translational capabilities, performing both metadata-conditioned synthesis of realistic 3D brain MRIs and anatomy-preserving harmonisation for cross-modality and cross-site adaptation. Our findings demonstrate that acquisition variability is a structured component of the imaging process that can be modeled, audited, synthesised, and controlled, establishing a foundation for acquisition-aware representation learning in large-scale biomedical imaging. --- ### Metadata Supervised MRI Representations for Modelling and Controlling Acquisition Variability Authors: Mehmet Yigit Avci, Pedro Borges, Virginia Fernandez, Natalia Glazman, Paul Wright, Mehmet Yigitsoy, Sebastien Ourselin, Jorge Cardoso Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11295v1 Magnetic resonance imaging exhibits substantial acquisition variability, where identical anatomy can appear markedly different across scanners and imaging protocols. Consequently, learned representations entangle biological structure with acquisition-dependent appearance, limiting interpretability, generalisation, and clinical deployment. We show that these sources of variation can be separated by jointly modelling MRI images and DICOM metadata. Using large-scale clinical brain MRI data, we learn representations that separate anatomical structure from contrast-dependent appearance. Resulting contrast representations organise heterogeneous acquisitions, support sequence understanding, and detect image--metadata inconsistencies, whereas anatomical representations suppress acquisition-specific variation while preserving biologically relevant information. Building on these disentangled representations, we introduce a unified anatomy-preserving harmonisation model for cross-modality and cross-site adaptation, conditioned on image or acquisition metadata. Our findings suggest that acquisition variability is a structured component of the imaging process that can be modelled, audited, and controlled, providing a foundation for acquisition-aware representation learning in large-scale medical imaging. --- ### The Paternalistic Filter: Epistemic Injustice and Differential Refusal in LLM-Mediated History Education for Marginalized Romanian Students Authors: Alexis Popovici, Andrei Ionascu, Adrian-Marius Dumitran Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11292v1 As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as conversational tutors, they risk institutionalizing systemic inequalities. This study presents a systematic API audit of four LLMs acting as history tutors, evaluating 1,800 responses regarding the 1989 Romanian Revolution across five student personas varying by ethnicity and socio-economic tier. We uncover four interconnected patterns of \emph{epistemic paternalism}: (1)~\textbf{Differential Refusal}, where safety-aligned models block 76.7\% of educational requests from low-tier students; (2)~\textbf{Epistemic Gatekeeping}, evidenced by a 3$\times$ reduction in access to geopolitical complexity (e.g., the contested ``coup theory'') for marginalized learners; (3)~\textbf{Agency Theft}, a lexical shift where models like LLaMA produce a 5$\times$ higher victimization-to-politics vocabulary ratio for Roma students compared to elite peers; and (4)~\textbf{Elite Hermeneutics}, where AI tutors disproportionately withhold epistemic confidence and justification scores from low-resource demographic profiles. We argue that current safety alignment acts as a paternalistic filter, transforming conversational AI into agents of narrative segregation -- a manifestation of \emph{hermeneutical injustice} in Fricker's~\cite{fricker2007} sense that demands urgent pedagogical auditing. --- ### Backpropagation as a Nilpotent Linear System Authors: Ahmed Boughammoura Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.NE, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11289v1 Backpropagation is the computational engine of deep learning, yet its mathematical structure is typically treated as a procedural traversal of computational graphs. We present a global operator theory of the \emph{F-adjoint} framework, which reformulates the layerwise backward recursion of an $L$-depth feedforward network into a single linear system $(I-\cB)\Xs=\bG$, where $\bG$ is a source vector. We prove that the global backward operator $\cB$ is strictly block upper-triangular and nilpotent of index at most $L$. This nilpotency guarantees the exact termination of the Neumann series solution after at most $L$ terms, revealing classical backpropagation to be mathematically equivalent to block back-substitution on an upper bidiagonal system. We formalise \emph{F-symmetry} -- the condition in which the backward pass perfectly mirrors the forward pass -- identifying orthogonal weight matrices as canonical examples. Through worked numerical examples, we demonstrate how this operator perspective exposes the single-path collapse of strictly feedforward networks and its breakdown in residual architectures. Finally, we leverage this compositional structure to rigorously derive the mechanics of residual networks (gradient highways) and transfer learning (gradient truncation). This framework elevates backpropagation from an algorithmic recipe to a global nilpotent-operator formulation. --- ### Mako: A Self-Evolving Agentic Operating System (SE-AOS) for Autonomous Web Exploitation Authors: Praneeth Narisetty, Shiva Nagendra Babu Kore Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11288v1 We introduce the Self-Evolving Agentic Operating System (SE-AOS): a new class of AI agent that treats exploit capability as a mutable, versioned kernel it extends at runtime, observing its own failures, synthesising new capabilities, proving them against a live target, and hot-loading them back into itself. Mako is the first SE-AOS instance for security research and the autonomous web exploitation engine developed within LaunchSafe. LaunchSafe builds autonomous security agents for continuous offensive testing and agent-driven security research; Mako is the core engine behind that platform. On the public XBOW validation-benchmarks, 104 containerised, CTF-style web applications spanning 26 vulnerability classes across three difficulty tiers, Mako achieves full-suite coverage: it drives every one of the 104 targets to emit a cryptographically fresh, per-build flag, under a verification regime that makes fabricated or memorised results impossible. Our central result is a law of autonomous exploitation: once a capability exists and is discoverable, difficulty collapses; capability, not reasoning, is what is scarce, together with an architecture and formalism that turn that law into a self-improving system. Mako further runs a gated self-evolution loop that proposes, sandboxes, and commits improvements to its own agents and rules when fitness does not regress. We deliberately withhold the operational results, payloads, exploit chains, and tool source, because a system that reduces full-spectrum web exploitation to a repeatable, machine-speed pipeline is dual-use research of concern. We publish the science; we withhold the weapon. --- ### A Unified Framework for Comprehensive Cardiac CT Segmentation and Phenotyping: Human-in-the-Loop Data Annotation, Vision Foundation Model Development, Multicenter Evaluation and Clinical Validation Authors: Pooya Mohammadi Kazaj, Leo Fridolin Weber, Wen Xie, Seyed Amir Ahmad Safavi-Naini, Anselm Stark, Giovanni Baj, Ali Mokhtari, Toshiya Yoshida, Christoph Ryffel, Taishi Okuno, Yoshihiro Akashi, Ronny R. Buechel et al. Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11287v1 Comprehensive quantification of cardiac structures from computed tomography (CT) remains limited not by data availability but by the scalability of measurements, which makes routine use impractical. Here we present a unified framework for comprehensive cardiac CT segmentation and phenotyping that combines a human-in-the-loop annotation pipeline, a cardiac CT augmentation technique, and a self-supervised foundation model pre-trained on 60,000 unlabeled cardiac CT scans. Using this approach, we assembled the largest and most comprehensive expert-annotated cardiac CT segmentation dataset to date, comprising 1598 cases and 14 distinct cardiac structures (1000 for training, 598 for the external test set). Across five external datasets, the framework segmented all structures more accurately and comprehensively than existing open-source tools. Self-supervised pre-training improved labeling efficiency, with the most significant gains observed during external evaluation in the low-data regime. Benchmarking across convolutional, transformer, and state-space architectures showed comparable performance, indicating that data quality and pre-training, rather than architecture, drove accuracy. The framework was scaled to population-level phenotyping, with segmented anatomy that carries functionally relevant information about ventricular function and disease severity beyond demographic variables. By openly releasing the largest dataset with human labels, code, model weights, a CT augmentation library, and software, this work provides a reproducible foundation for opportunistic cardiac phenotyping from routinely acquired CT scans. --- ### SalientGS: Unified SfM-to-3DGS with Importance-Guided MCMC Gaussian Allocation Authors: Tianyu Xiong, Rui Li, Suning Ge, Jiaqi Yang Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11285v2 Reconstructing 3D scenes from unordered images remains bottlenecked by expensive Structure-from-Motion (SfM) preprocessing and frozen pose interfaces. We present SalientGS, a unified SfM-to-3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) pipeline. Its central contribution is importance-guided Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) Gaussian allocation, which aggregates multi-view residuals into per-Gaussian underfit and redundancy signals. These signals define a smooth importance-weighted sampling distribution that biases both birth and relocation toward underfit regions. This reallocates capacity from well-fit areas without altering the underlying stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics (SGLD). SalientGS achieves end-to-end reconstruction in 15 minutes with state-of-the-art perceptual quality. The supplementary material provides dedicated sections for Per-Scene Qualitative Comparisons and Per-Image Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity (LPIPS) Analysis, including failure cases. Code and evaluation scripts are available at https://github.com/Six-Bit-TX/SalientGS. --- ### The Devil Is in the Leakage: A Disentangled Dual-Purification Framework for High-Fidelity Hairstyle Transfer Authors: Jijie Li, Jiankuo Zhao, Xiangyu Zhu, Zhen Lei Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11281v1 Hairstyle transfer aims to synthesize a photorealistic portrait by transplanting the hairstyle from a reference image onto a source subject while preserving the source identity. Recent foundation models show strong generative capability, but they struggle with the zero-shot disentanglement required for precise local editing, often entangling the reference hairstyle with its original identity and pose. Existing diffusion-based pipelines typically decompose the task by first generating a "bald" image from the source and then injecting hairstyle features from the reference. However, we show that this paradigm suffers from a fundamental leakage problem. Identity Leakage in Hairstyle occurs when hairstyle features retain reference identity or pose information, while Flaw Leakage in Bald arises when residual artifacts in the bald image are propagated into the final synthesis. To address both issues, we propose the Dual-Purification Framework (DPF), which introduces two complementary training-time regularizers. Adversarial Hairstyle Purification (AHP) purifies hairstyle features by suppressing identity predictability under a mutual-information-inspired adversarial objective. Contrastive Geometric Purification (CGP) regularizes the ControlNet pathway with a contrastive objective, reducing the model's reliance on geometric artifacts in the bald condition. By jointly purifying the hairstyle representation and geometric pathway, DPF achieves high-fidelity, identity-preserving hairstyle transfer and state-of-the-art performance on diverse benchmarks. --- ### FAD-SA-GRU: Enhancing Hate Speech Detection in Algerian Dialect Through Feature-Augmented Self-Attention GRU Networks Authors: Sara Yakoubi, Ikram Khalfallah, Kenza Khelkhal, Dihia Lanasri Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11279v1 The widespread adoption of social media platforms has transformed online communication by enabling users to exchange information and opinions instantly. However, these platforms have also facilitated the dissemination of abusive and hateful content, posing major social, psychological, and ethical challenges. Hate speech can incite discrimination, harassment, and violence against individuals or communities based on attributes such as ethnicity, religion, gender, nationality, or political affiliation. Consequently, automatic hate speech detection has become a major research topic in natural language processing (NLP) and an essential component of content moderation systems. This paper investigates automatic hate speech detection in the Algerian Arabic dialect (Darija) on social media. This task remains challenging because of the dialect's linguistic diversity, characterized by the coexistence of Arabic, French, and Arabizi (Arabic written using the Latin alphabet). We compare four categories of text classification approaches: (1) traditional machine learning models using TF-IDF features, (2) deep learning models based on recurrent neural networks, (3) Transformer-based language models, including DziriBERT and multilingual BERT, and (4) a novel hybrid architecture, FAD-SA-GRU, which combines semantic representations from DZ FastText, DZ AraVec, and DziriBERT through multi-embedding fusion, followed by a self-attention-enhanced GRU encoder. Experiments on an annotated dataset of Algerian Darija social media comments for binary hate speech classification show that FAD-SA-GRU outperforms all baselines, achieving 93.2% accuracy, 93.4% precision, 91.0% recall, 92.1% F1-score, and 97.0% ROC-AUC. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of combining complementary embedding representations with attention-based sequence modeling for robust hate speech detection in low-resource dialectal Arabic. --- ### Automated Textbook Auditing with Multi-Agent LLM Systems Authors: Ciprian Cristescu, Adrian-Marius Dumitran, Angela-Liliana Dumitran, Gabriel Stefan Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CY, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11276v1 Ensuring the quality of educational materials requires more than standard proofreading: textbooks must be audited for factual accuracy, domain-specific technical correctness, and linguistic quality simultaneously -- a task that general-purpose grammar checkers cannot address. We present \textbf{AI Textbook Auditor}, a modular multi-agent pipeline for automated quality assurance of educational materials across subject domains. The system accepts a textbook PDF and produces a structured, human-reviewable report via two analysis tracks: a \textbf{Factual and Technical Track} in which an ensemble of specialized LLM agents detects factual inaccuracies, code errors, incorrect definitions, and conceptual inconsistencies, augmented with web search for humanities domains; and a \textbf{Grammar Track} operating PDF-natively to preserve diacritical encoding. A \textbf{Judge Agent} filters false positives using domain-specific rules before presenting findings to a human reviewer. The pipeline supports two ingestion modes -- vision-native page rendering and PyMuPDF text extraction -- and is domain-adaptable via custom prompts encoding subject-specific error taxonomies. We demonstrate the system on two Romanian upper-secondary textbooks: a CS textbook (56 technical findings across seven categories, with an expert-validated precision of 62.5\%) and a history and social sciences textbook (72 findings spanning factual errors, ideological bias, and grammar). The system is designed as a triage tool that reduces the manual effort of locating candidate issues, with human expert validation required before any editorial action. --- ### Fixed-Protocol Amortized MPS Tomography with Conformalized Predictive Uncertainty Authors: Jian Xu, Delu Zeng, John Paisley, Qibin Zhao Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: quant-ph, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11273v1 Quantum state tomography is sample-starved, and the states one prepares live on a narrow, learnable manifold. A $k{=}0$ prior-only control shows that on concentrated families a prior estimate is already near-optimal, so ``high fidelity at few measurements'' can be family memorization rather than tomography; genuine measurement-efficiency needs a model that conditions on the measurements and demonstrably uses them. On a shared matrix-product-state (MPS) core parameterization we study two routes. Approach~A learns a generative prior over MPS cores with measurement-guided posterior inference (gold-standard-validated, but whose few-measurement accuracy the control shows is largely the prior). Approach~B, our main proposal, is a \emph{fixed-protocol amortized} MPS estimator trained once with a gauge-invariant fidelity loss; we deliberately do not rest it on a permutation-invariant set encoder (a plain MLP matches it). The decisive lever is the measurement design: motivated by the fact that local reduced density matrices determine a $χ$-MPS, conditioning on an \emph{informative local} Pauli set rather than random strings turns a modest, memorization-prone estimator into a high-fidelity one ($\approx\!0.95$, up to $+0.59$ over prior-only, decisively passing a shuffled-measurement control). A dropout ensemble, conformally recalibrated, gives $\approx\!90\%$-coverage intervals -- including for observables never measured, where a shot-based interval does not exist. Quality holds as the system grows (fidelity $0.90$ at $n{=}10$, gain \emph{growing} in $n$; $0.88$ at bond dimension $χ{=}4$), the parameterization is polynomial (native contraction to $20$ qubits), and we close the loop on IBM hardware ($5$ states at $0.97$ from hardware-measured Paulis). --- ### Long-Memory Reservoir Computing for Data-Scarce Dengue Forecasting Authors: Rahul Goswami, Shinjini Paul, Palash Ghosh, Tanujit Chakraborty Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11272v1 Accurate dengue forecasting is crucial for public health planning, but remains challenging because incidence series are often short, noisy, non-stationary, nonlinear, and often affected by long-range temporal dependence. Fractional differencing in Autoregressive Fractionally Integrated Moving Average (ARFIMA) helps balance non-stationarity and persistence, but its linear structure limits its ability to capture nonlinear dynamics. Deep neural networks can model nonlinear patterns, but usually require large training samples and do not explicitly encode statistical long memory. Echo State Networks (ESNs), a widely used reservoir computing framework, are attractive in this setting because they retain nonlinear recurrent dynamics while training only a simple readout, making them suitable for data-scarce scenarios. However, standard ESNs lack long-term memory from a time-series perspective. This study proposes a long-memory reservoir computing framework that integrates dedicated long-memory and short-memory ESN reservoirs with a ridge-regression readout. We introduce two variants: Fractional ESN (fESN), which incorporates fractional-differencing dynamics into the reservoir to encode long-range dependence directly, and Wavelet ESN (wESN), which extracts stable low-frequency components through wavelet smoothing before modeling them with a memory-aware reservoir. We establish theoretical guarantees for closed-loop reservoir dynamics, showing that standard ESNs induce short-memory processes under mild conditions, whereas the proposed long-memory reservoirs generate polynomially decaying dependence consistent with statistical long memory. Across multiple dengue datasets and forecasting horizons, fESN and wESN outperform statistical and deep learning baselines. Combining conformal prediction with fESN and wESN provides distribution-free calibrated uncertainty intervals. --- ### Towards Predictive, Aligned, and Scalable Robot Learning Authors: Peijun Tang, Shangjin Xie, Baifu Huang, Binyan Sun, Haotian Yang, Kuncheng Luo, Weiqi Jin, Shilin Fang, Jianan Wang Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11270v1 Learning, at its core, extends beyond memorization to the ability to reason and solve novel problems by navigating a space of possibilities. We introduce Lumo-2, a latent world-action model that generates actions by reasoning over world dynamics in latent space. The learned latent world dynamics capture physically grounded visual transitions, naturally encoding future possibilities and providing a unified substrate for cross-modal alignment. This formulation enables predictive reasoning akin to world modelling while remaining lightweight and focused on physical dynamics relevant to control. Central to our approach is the hypothesis that action generation quality is governed by the geometry of the latent space. We observe that standard reconstruction-based action tokenization objectives induce representations biased toward low-level signal fidelity, leading to misalignment between reconstruction quality and downstream control performance. To address this limitation, we propose a multi-stage modality pre-alignment strategy in which action representations are progressively aligned with latent world dynamics, vision, and language. This process enforces cross-modal consistency, promotes abstraction, and induces a structured latent space for predictive reasoning. We provide a systematic empirical study of latent world modelling and modality alignment, analyzing their roles in scaling laws and out-of-distribution generalization. Results show that Lumo-2 consistently outperforms strong vision-language-action (VLA) and world-action model (WAM) baselines, with gains on challenging real-world tasks requiring temporal reasoning, physical understanding, or high control complexity, including long-horizon and dexterous manipulation. These findings suggest that structured multimodal alignment and predictive reasoning are fundamental principles for advancing embodied intelligence. --- ### Trustworthy synthetic data for campaign decision support: strategy simulation fidelity and the PolicySynth framework Authors: Tung Dang, The Hung Phung, Son Lam Nguyen, Tu Nguyen Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11269v1 Decision support systems (DSS) increasingly run retention what-if analysis on synthetic customer populations, because privacy constraints preclude unrestricted use of real data. Such a system is trustworthy only if the synthetic data lead managers to the same decisions as the real data would; yet prevailing criteria certify distributional similarity, not decision alignment, so a synthetic population can match every marginal distribution while still steering a marketing team toward the wrong campaigns. We close this decision-alignment gap with three contributions: strategy simulation fidelity (SSF), a criterion measuring how often the synthetic population yields the same go/no-go campaign decision as the real population; PolicySynth, a DSS framework whose generator is conditioned on the production churn scorer to align decision-relevant structure; and a three-axis reporting standard of decision alignment, membership-inference resistance, and novel-record rate as the minimum deployment quality gate. On a telecommunications churn corpus and a banking acquisition corpus, PolicySynth attains a mean SSF of 0.923 and 0.960, with seed-to-seed variance roughly ten times tighter than CTGAN on telecommunications and 2.5 times on banking. This stability is the deployable property: go/no-go recommendations shift by at most 1.2 percentage points between monthly retraining cycles, against 11.5 for CTGAN, a reversed recommendation on one campaign in nine. A bootstrap baseline matches PolicySynth on SSF yet copies real records verbatim and fails membership inference, evidence that no single axis suffices. PolicySynth reliably supports directional go/no-go screening; its ROI estimates diverge from real outcomes by 70 to 78% and require the volume correction we document. --- ### Enhancing LLMs through human feedback: a journey towards self-improvement Authors: Tatiana Pelc, Gila Kamhi, Asaf Avrahamy, Adi Fledel-Alon Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11267v1 In the rapidly evolving landscape of information retrieval systems, the ability to adapt and improve through user feedback is paramount. This study introduces a novel methodology for refining the performance of a primary Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) system by strategically integrating an auxiliary feedback RAG system. By systematically harnessing human-generated feedback, the approach aims to enhance the accuracy, relevance, and overall quality of responses, driving the system towards self-improvement. Central to this methodology is a human-in-the-loop implementation, where user feedback is continuously collected, classified, and integrated into the inference workflow, enabling the system to learn and evolve iteratively. To validate the effectiveness of this approach, the study employs rigorous testing against three diverse benchmark datasets focused on general and custom domain knowledge, utilizing a LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation strategy. This comprehensive framework not only underscores the transformative potential of feedback-driven enhancements in RAG systems but also sets a precedent for future research in adaptive information retrieval technologies, marking a significant step in the journey towards autonomous refinement and optimization through user engagement. --- ### Valid $\ne$ Necessary: Diagnosing Latent Inefficiency in Chain-of-Thought Authors: Daeyeop Lee, Hwanjo Yu Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11266v1 Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has significantly advanced the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet it often incurs substantial computational costs due to over-reasoning: the generation of redundant, verbose, or irrelevant steps. While existing reasoning step evaluators effectively detect logical fallacies and factual errors, our analysis reveals a critical blind spot: they fail to penalize valid but inefficient reasoning steps that inflate token usage without contributing to the solution. To systematically diagnose this limitation, we introduce RIV-GSM8K, a diagnostic benchmark injected with five distinct types of inefficiencies, including circular reasoning and excessive decomposition. Diagnostic experiments reveal that state-of-the-art evaluators struggle to distinguish these inefficiencies from necessary reasoning. To address this gap, we propose CAID (Context-Aware Information Density), a training-free metric grounded in information theory that identifies low-utility steps. To validate the metric's practical utility, we apply it within PACE, a post-hoc compression strategy. Additional control experiments show that the gains of PACE are not explained by trivial pruning: compared with random step removal and PRM-based compression baselines, it preserves accuracy at substantially higher compression rates. Empirical results on GSM8K, StrategyQA, and ARC-Challenge demonstrate that PACE reduces token consumption by 31-53% while maintaining accuracy, confirming that CAID successfully distills informational froth from reasoning chains without compromising deductive validity. --- ### Bringing Back Rule Induction to Fluid Intelligence Research? An Initial Validation of the ARC-AGI Benchmark in Humans Authors: Jasmin Thelen, Oliver Wilhelm Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11263v3 Two competing perspectives on fluid intelligence (gf) measures propose that performance is primarily constrained either by working memory capacity or by the ability to induce novel relations. The first perspective is currently dominant in measurement, as evident from the use of a limited set of recurring rules, whereas the second perspective is reflected in many definitions but rarely present in measurement. The ARC-AGI benchmark predominantly requires rule induction and was proposed as a measure of gf for both humans and artificial systems. However, its psychometric properties have not yet been examined in human samples. We therefore investigated the psychometric characteristics and nomological network of ARC-AGI in a first study with 100 participants. A compilation of ARC-AGI items showed good psychometric properties and correlated substantially with figural fluid intelligence as measured by a figural reasoning test ($ρ$ = .63). Associations with figural originality were weak. These findings provide initial support for the validity of ARC-AGI as a measure of human fluid intelligence. Future research should include more rule induction tasks as well as additional multivariate covariates. This study is unusual by studying a task in humans that was initially designed for machines. We suggest systematically embedding AI benchmarks into the nomological network of human cognitive abilities to enable more systematic evaluation and interdisciplinary cooperation. --- ### TreeThink: A Modular Tree Search Library for Mathematical Reasoning with LLMs Authors: Burak S. Akbudak, Zeynel A. Uluşan, Can S. Erer, Gözde Gül Şahin Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11258v2 Tree search algorithms enable systematic exploration of the proof space in neural theorem proving. Existing LLM tree search libraries primarily target natural language reasoning and do not provide native integration with formal verifiers, while theorem proving systems often rely on task-specific search implementations. We introduce TreeThink, an open-source Python library for modular, fully asynchronous tree search in neural theorem proving. It integrates established tree search methods with vLLM-based inference pipelines and diverse node evaluation techniques, ranging from lightweight heuristics to neural evaluators. We support Lean~4, Rocq, and Isabelle/HOL alongside natural language. It connects directly to each language's Read-Eval-Print Loop (REPL) server for real-time verification and proof state extraction. We evaluate TreeThink on miniF2F and MATH500, demonstrating cross-language formal proof search, natural language reasoning support, and up to 8.0$\times$ wall-clock speedup from asynchronous execution. Source code is released under the MIT license at https://github.com/GGLAB-KU/treethink , and the library is accessible as a downloadable package at https://pypi.org/project/treethink/ . --- ### TreeThink: A Modular Tree Search Library for Mathematical Reasoning with LLMs Authors: Burak S. Akbudak, Zeynel A. Uluşan, Can S. Erer, Gözde Gül Şahin Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11258v1 Tree search algorithms enable systematic exploration of the proof space in neural theorem proving. Existing LLM tree search libraries primarily target natural language reasoning and do not provide native integration with formal verifiers, while theorem proving systems often rely on task-specific search implementations. We introduce TreeThink, an open-source Python library for modular, fully asynchronous tree search in neural theorem proving. It integrates established tree search methods with vLLM-based inference pipelines and diverse node evaluation techniques, ranging from lightweight heuristics to neural evaluators. We support Lean~4, Rocq, and Isabelle/HOL alongside natural language. It connects directly to each language's Read-Eval-Print Loop (REPL) server for real-time verification and proof state extraction. We evaluate TreeThink on miniF2F and MATH500, demonstrating cross-language formal proof search, natural language reasoning support, and up to 6.3$\times$ wall-clock speedup from asynchronous execution. Source code is released under the MIT license at https://github.com/GGLAB-KU/treethink , and the library is accessible as a downloadable package at https://pypi.org/project/treethink/ . --- ### LaGuadia: Language-Guided Adaptive Distillation from Pathology Foundation Models Authors: Gangsu Kim, Won-Ki Jeong Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11257v1 Pathology Foundation Models (PFMs) offer powerful Whole Slide Image (WSI) representations but suffer from massive computational costs. While Knowledge Distillation (KD) can create efficient student models, existing multi-teacher methods often use suboptimal uniform weighting that ignores tissue heterogeneity. We propose LaGuadia (Language-Guided Adaptive DistillAtion), a framework that develops a compact pathology image encoder by dynamically integrating expertise from multiple PFMs under clinical linguistic guidance. Our approach utilizes a multi-stage pipeline: first, extracting visually observable clinical keywords from pathology reports; second, aligning visual features with these keywords via a Vision-Language meta-teacher (MedSigLIP) to provide dense semantic guidance; and finally, performing adaptive KD where teacher contributions are weighted based on their semantic alignment with the clinical narrative. Experiments on WSI captioning, visual question answering, and slide-level classification tasks demonstrate that an 87M parameter LaGuadia student model matches or exceeds foundation-scale models such as GigaPath and UNI, achieving strong factual consistency and robust generalization. These results highlight clinical language as an effective semantic anchor for building efficient and reliable digital pathology systems. Code is available at https://github.com/hvcl/LaGuadia. --- ### A Nearable Soft Mat Based on Distributed Optical Fiber Sensing for Physiological Monitoring Authors: Vincenzo Lavorgna, Martina Pulcinelli, Andrea Polimadei, Rosaria D Amato, Carlo Massaroni, Michele Arturo Caponero, Emiliano Schena, Daniela Lo Presti Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CV, physics.app-ph, physics.optics arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11255v1 Distributed optical fiber sensing (DOFS) combines the advantages of fiber optic sensors, including flexibility, small size, immunity to electromagnetic interference, and high metrological performance, with the capability to transform a single optical fiber into a continuous sensing element for spatially resolved mechanical measurements. Optical frequency domain reflectometry (OFDR), based on Rayleigh backscattering, enables high spatial resolution DOFS measurements, broadening the range of potential sensing applications. However, OFDR based DOFS remains largely unexplored for biomedical applications, despite the need for sensitive, spatially resolved, and conformable sensing interfaces. This study presents a soft DOFS based mat as a large-area interface for physiological monitoring. A single-mode optical fiber was embedded in a flexible silicone matrix and arranged in a serpentine layout to distribute sensing over the mat surface. With a gage pitch of 2.6 mm, the system provided 2250 sensing sites across the active area at a sampling frequency of 50 Hz. The mat was assessed on six healthy volunteers in a seated nearable configuration on the backrest of a standard office chair. The distributed output enabled two dimensional mapping of the mat response, reflecting back mat mechanical coupling and cardiorespiratory induced perturbations. Respiratory rate and heart rate were therefore estimated and compared with a reference wearable system. The maps revealed physiologically coherent spatial and temporal patterns, while the estimated rates showed good agreement with the reference measurements. These results demonstrate the feasibility of combining large area distributed sensing, spatial mapping, and quantitative cardiorespiratory monitoring within a DOFS based soft nearable interface. --- ### Multi-Agent LLMs Fail to Explore Each Other Authors: Hyeong Kyu Choi, Jiatong Li, Wendi Li, Xin Eric Wang, Sharon Li Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.MA, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11250v1 Exploration is essential for reliable autonomy in multi-agent systems, yet it remains unclear whether large language model (LLM) agents can explore effectively when interacting with one another. We show that modern LLM agents fail to do so, often exhibiting myopic and polarized interaction patterns that lead to suboptimal coordination and increased regret. We formalize this challenge as the Multi-Agent Exploration problem, modeling it as a partially observable stochastic game (POSG) problem in which agents must probe peers to infer their capabilities and identify effective interaction strategies. To address this, we introduce Multi- Agent Contextual Exploration (MACE), a lightweight framework that explicitly promotes exploration through structured peer selection. Across both contextual and parametric diversity settings, MACE substantially improves exploration behavior and downstream task performance. We further show theoretically that the value of exploration increases with agent diversity. Overall, our results highlight a fundamental limitation of current LLM agents and underscore the importance of explicitly guided exploration for reliable multi-agent autonomy. Code will be released in https://github.com/deeplearning-wisc/mace --- ### An Empirical Study for Android-to-OpenHarmony GUI Test Migration Authors: Yakun Zhang, Xinjia Chen, Yiyun Chen, Yuxia Zhang, Mingyi Zhou, Xiang Gao, Shaokun Zhang, Li Li, Yunming Ye Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11245v2 To reduce the substantial engineering effort required to test the corresponding applications from Android to OpenHarmony, migrating existing GUI test cases has become a critical problem. However, current research neither proposes solutions tailored for OpenHarmony nor provides a systematic evaluation of migration approaches on this system, leaving developers with limited empirical guidance in practice. In this paper, we present the first systematic empirical study of test migration from Android to OpenHarmony. Specifically, we first construct a dataset referred to as the ATH Benchmark, comprising 36 commercial applications with an average of over 9 billion downloads, along with 108 manually designed test cases. Second, we select two state-of-the-art test migration approaches (i.e., ReSPlay and ITeM) and adapt these two approaches to enable their execution on OpenHarmony. Third, we use the preceding infrastructure to evaluate these two approaches from three perspectives, including testing performance, root causes of failures, and the impact of OpenHarmony characteristics. Our results reveal that existing test migration approaches are less effective (15% success-rate on ReSPlay and 26% success-rate on ITeM) in Android-to-OpenHarmony scenarios. Through an in-depth analysis of failed cases, we identify that test performance is primarily hindered by OpenHarmony-specific characteristics, including technical architecture differences and unique ecosystem traits. Utilizing these findings, we propose an enhanced approach based on ITeM, referred as ITeM-HM, which incorporates specific OpenHarmony system features. As a result, ITeM-HM successfully achieves a 214% success-rate relative improvement over the original ITeM (from 26% to 81%). --- ### Structure-Detail Decoupled Autoregressive Generation for Fast and High-Fidelity Virtual Try-On Authors: Lu Yang, Xiaonan Hu, Yanan Li, Daqi Liu, Hao Lu, Xiang Bai Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11233v2 Virtual try-on (VTON) is a bi-conditional image generation problem that requires not only accurate person preservation but also faithful garment deformation and detail synthesis. Diffusion-based VTON methods can jointly model these factors in a compressed latent space, but suffer from high-frequency detail loss due to inherent latent compression, even with costly multi-step denoising. Recent visual autoregressive (VAR) models offer a promising alternative for high-quality generation with faster inference, yet remain unexplored for VTON due to the lack of effective bi-conditioning mechanisms. To bridge this gap, we first introduce VAR-VTON, a VAR-based VTON model that incorporates garment conditioning and structural guidance for efficient latent-space VTON. Despite its efficacy, latent-space generation still struggles to preserve fine-grained garment details. We argue that different VTON sub-tasks should be addressed in different representation spaces: structural synthesis such as garment warping and person layout is suited to the latent space, whereas fine-grained detail recovery should be tackled in the pixel space. Motivated by this insight, we further propose STAR-VTON, a Two-Stage AutoRegressive framework that builds upon VAR-VTON by decoupling latent-space structural synthesis from pixel-space detail recovery. Our idea is to resort to a matching-informed refiner to establish dense correspondences between the stage-one generation and the source garment to directly map fine-grained pixel-space details. Extensive experiments show that STAR-VTON achieves an impressive efficiency-fidelity trade-off: VAR-VTON runs at least $4\times$ faster than diffusion-based counterparts without degrading quality, and the pixel-space refiner effectively restores fine details and acts as a plug-and-play module that can benefit existing VTON approaches. --- ### Structure-Detail Decoupled Autoregressive Generation for Fast and High-Fidelity Virtual Try-On Authors: Lu Yang, Xiaonan Hu, Yanan Li, Daqi Liu, Xiang Bai, Hao Lu Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11233v1 Virtual try-on (VTON) is a bi-conditional image generation problem that requires not only accurate person preservation but also faithful garment deformation and detail synthesis. Diffusion-based VTON methods can jointly model these factors in a compressed latent space, but suffer from high-frequency detail loss due to inherent latent compression, even with costly multi-step denoising. Recent visual autoregressive (VAR) models offer a promising alternative for high-quality generation with faster inference, yet remain unexplored for VTON due to the lack of effective bi-conditioning mechanisms. To bridge this gap, we first introduce VAR-VTON, a VAR-based VTON model that incorporates garment conditioning and structural guidance for efficient latent-space VTON. Despite its efficacy, latent-space generation still struggles to preserve fine-grained garment details. We argue that different VTON sub-tasks should be addressed in different representation spaces: structural synthesis such as garment warping and person layout is suited to the latent space, whereas fine-grained detail recovery should be tackled in the pixel space. Motivated by this insight, we further propose STAR-VTON, a Two-Stage AutoRegressive framework that builds upon VAR-VTON by decoupling latent-space structural synthesis from pixel-space detail recovery. Our idea is to resort to a matching-informed refiner to establish dense correspondences between the stage-one generation and the source garment to directly map fine-grained pixel-space details. Extensive experiments show that STAR-VTON achieves an impressive efficiency-fidelity trade-off: VAR-VTON runs at least $4\times$ faster than diffusion-based counterparts without degrading quality, and the pixel-space refiner effectively restores fine details and acts as a plug-and-play module that can benefit existing VTON approaches. --- ### DeepBias: Adaptive In-depth Probing of Social Biases in LVLMs Authors: Anqi Li, Jie Zhang, Zhongqi Wang, Songkai Xue, Jiahao Wang, Shiguang Shan, Xilin Chen Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11228v1 While Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities, they remain highly susceptible to embedded social biases. Existing bias evaluation protocols predominantly rely on static datasets, which provide only a superficial assessment, as their fixed test cases cannot adaptively evolve to measure the true depth and limits of model vulnerabilities. We introduce DeepBias, an adaptive framework for the in-depth probing of social biases in LVLMs with carefully designed agents. Our approach operates through a dynamic ''generation-evolution-probing'' loop. First, a generative ProposerAgent synthesizes test data and is iteratively updated via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) based on the target LVLM's responses, exploring model-specific failure modes. Second, an autonomous skill-driven DiggerAgent rewrites each test data across multiple probing turns, adaptively selecting from a curated skill library of deepening and rewriting strategies. At each turn, this process is conditioned on the model's previous response, enabling progressively deeper biases to be exposed. Furthermore, we build a benchmark named DeepBiasBench using our framework. By employing an ensemble of five diverse state-of-the-art LVLMs as anchors, the benchmark captures vulnerabilities shared across architectures. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework and show that DeepBias provides a challenging benchmark for in-depth bias evaluation, establishing an evolutionary paradigm for LVLM safety assessment. --- ### Heterogeneous Agent Cohorts for Safe Open-Ended Exploration with Runtime Constraint Memory Authors: Tengjiao Liu Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11226v1 LLM agents today are caught in an awkward bind. Lock them down with static safety instructions and they rarely venture beyond the obvious; give them free reign with tools and multi-agent debate, and safety violations quickly follow. Rather than forcing a single model to juggle both creativity and caution, we separate the concerns across specialized roles. A Disrupter generates unconventional proposals, a Validator enforces hard runtime checks at the tool gateway, and a Broker pulls in distant but relevant analogies. Failures are not discarded -- they are compiled, via MCTS, into compact, signed constraint patches we call Scars. These patches are cached locally and inherited by future cohorts, turning repeated failures into reusable, low-cost runtime constraints. In a spatial-semantic sandbox (N=20 runs, p<0.01), our cohort reaches remote targets where debate fails, the Validator prevents all executed breaches, and Scars reduce token consumption by 15.1% by avoiding redundant validator checks. Furthermore, credit-based Communication Allocation Scores (CAS) restrict outbound bandwidth, reducing overall token costs by 55.9% under resource constraints. --- ### HandFlow: Fully Generative 4D Hand Recovery with Flow Matching Authors: Mingxi Xu, Bowen Duan, Yi Gu, Zhengyang Shen, Renjing Xu, Yutao Yue Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11221v1 Accurate monocular 4D hand reconstruction remains challenging. Per-frame discriminative regressors lack temporal context and often produce jittery predictions. Temporal models improve consistency by aggregating information across frames, but they are typically deterministic regressors, making them vulnerable to ambiguous observations caused by occlusion and motion blur. Generative modeling offers a natural alternative by learning a prior over plausible hand motion sequences, enabling coherent hand-state recovery when visual evidence is incomplete or unreliable. Motivated by this observation, we present HandFlow, a fully generative flow-matching framework for temporally coherent 3D hand pose and shape estimation from monocular video. Given visual and skeletal observations, HandFlow denoises an entire temporal window of MANO parameters through a single ODE integration. To support this, we use a Flux-style dual-stream transformer that attends across the full sequence to capture long-range dependencies without autoregressive decoding, and a confidence-aware continuous masking mechanism that blends observed features with learnable mask tokens to handle noisy or missing observations. Experiments on DexYCB and HOT3D show that HandFlow achieves state-of-the-art performance, with particularly large gains in world-space accuracy and temporal smoothness. It reduces world-space pose error by over 30% compared with the strongest baseline and achieves the lowest acceleration error among all evaluated methods, while remaining competitive in per-frame pose accuracy. Moreover, on a single GPU HandFlow reconstructs a 150-frame sequence at 47 fps, about 12x faster than the fastest prior video-based method, with reconstruction itself accounting for only a small fraction of the end-to-end latency. --- ### Q-BridgeNet: A Quantization Network for Cross-Lingual Sign Language Translation Authors: Liqian Feng, Lintao Wang, Xiaochen Liu, Anusha Withana, Ken-Tye Yong, Dehui Kong, Zhiyong Wang, Kun Hu Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CL, cs.MM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11215v1 Most sign language translation (SLT) methods focus on isolated native sign-spoken pairs (e.g., American Sign Language - English). Extending language-specific SLT models to multilingual translation would improve accessibility by enabling communication across diverse sign and spoken language communities. However, existing multilingual SLT approaches still struggle to learn a unified model that minimizes cross-lingual conflicts while capturing shared cross-lingual semantics and preserving language-specific variations across different sign languages. Therefore, we propose Q-BridgeNet, a unified framework for multilingual SLT that jointly mitigates cross-lingual conflicts across both the sign language and spoken language sides. On the sign language side, Q-BridgeNet learns discrete Q-units via adaptive segmentation and residual vector quantization: a shared base codebook provides language-agnostic semantic primitives, while language-specific residual codebooks refine heterogeneous signing semantics. On the spoken language side, a multilingual LLM is fine-tuned to operate in the Q-unit space, leveraging cross-lingual priors to enable a unified SLT model. Experiments on PHOENIX14T, How2Sign, and CSL-Daily show that Q-BridgeNet effectively mitigates cross-lingual conflicts, achieving state-of-the-art performance on native sign-spoken pairs while also demonstrating strong generalization to non-native pairs. Our source code is publicly available at: https://github.com/FengLiQ/Q-BridgeNet --- ### A Novel Method to Evaluate Models on Unreliable, Noisy and Inconsistent Labels: Adaptive Resolution Label Aggregation (ARLA) Authors: Natasha Randall, Gernot Heisenberg Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11214v1 Labels are critical for both training and evaluating deep learning segmentation models, but are often inconsistent, noisy, or ambiguous at class boundaries. Many approaches have been developed to support training models on weak labels, but few to none currently exist to facilitate evaluating models on unreliable labels. We therefore introduce a method called "Adaptive Resolution Label Aggregation", or "ARLA", which dynamically adapts the resolution of both the label and the model prediction at inference time before the evaluation metrics are computed. We demonstrate how ARLA can be used to better analyse model behaviour with a practical application to a real flood prediction model, where ARLA was able to overcome issues with inconsistent labelling of forested areas and errors in labels within regions of heavy cloud cover. Our work presents a new approach to evaluating segmentation models, with adjustable parameters to adapt the aggregated resolution to the precision of the label or the level of label noise. Fundamentally, ARLA exploits the information encapsulated by a label but minimises the label error, extracting from the noise a clearer signal of a model's true performance. --- ### When the Target Domain Changes: AI-Mediated Construct Drift in High-Stakes English Language AssessmenW Authors: Yi Gui Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11213v1 High-stakes English proficiency tests treat standardized, unaided performance as evidence for score interpretations about academic English proficiency. This interpretation remains meaningful, but as target language use domains increasingly involve generative AI, the extrapolation from unaided test performance to academic communicative readiness becomes less self-evident. This conceptual validity argument reframes AI as a score-interpretation problem in high-stakes language testing, not only an operational issue of scoring, feedback, security, or misconduct. Synthesizing current literature in three uneven layers, the paper shows that most work treats AI as assessment infrastructure, while far less theorizes its implications for construct validity and extrapolation warrants. It defines AI-mediated construct drift as the misalignment that arises when communicative abilities required in the target domain change through AI mediation while test constructs remain anchored to an unaided-performance model. It proposes bounded AI mediation as a validity-oriented design principle: a standardized condition in which all test takers access the same institutionally controlled AI assistant, with predefined assistance boundaries, logged interactions, and tasks that distinguish comprehension support from answer generation. The paper argues that score interpretations should be narrowed and supplemented when used to support claims about AI-mediated academic communication. --- ### PREF-Gate: Provenance-Constrained Relational Evidence Fusion with Validation-Gated Selection for Graph Fraud Detection Authors: Liming Liu, Chao Hu, Mingfei Lu, Yiwei Ge, Xingle Li, Heyuan Shi Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11212v1 Relational fraud detection can exploit both label-free graph context and label-derived neighborhood evidence, but these two information sources obey different validity conditions. In particular, neighborhood risk becomes invalid when a queried node's own label, or any validation or test label, enters its construction. We formulate this issue as provenance-constrained relational evidence use and present PREF-Gate, an auditable decision framework with two fixed experts and a finite validation gate. The context expert uses attributes, one-hop means, feature residuals, and degree descriptors without labels. The evidence expert adds self-excluded, training-label-only neighborhood risk and empirical-Bayes summaries that expose support, uncertainty, availability, and shrinkage. Before test inference, the gate selects either expert or one of three pre-specified probability mixtures and fixes the decision threshold. On Amazon, YelpChi, and TFinance, using five identical stratified splits and 14 same-protocol methods, PREF-Gate obtains mean AUPRC values of 0.9085, 0.8104, and 0.8913. It selects the label-free expert on all Amazon and YelpChi splits and an evidence mixture on all TFinance splits. Thus, the main result is conditional rather than universal: label-derived relational evidence is useful only where held-out validation supports it. The framework couples competitive ranking performance with an explicit label-provenance contract, finite selection policy, failure accounting, and review-budget evaluation, providing an auditable knowledge-based decision pipeline for graph fraud detection. --- ### FastTPS: An Optimized Method for LLM Token Phase for AI accelerators Authors: Wenzong Yang, Danyang Zhang, Kun Cao, Tejus Siddagangaiah, Rajeev Patwari, Zhanxing Pu, Siyin Kong, Zijiang Yang, Hao Zhu, Varun Sharma, Yue Gao, Tianping Li et al. Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11211v1 The popularity of large language models (LLMs) escalates an ongoing demand for effective inference. However, due to the sequential processing of tokens during the token phase in decoder-only LLMs inference, the inherent low parallelism leads to reduced throughput and suboptimal utilization of the computing units on artificial intelligence (AI) accelerators, particularly when handling long-sequence inputs that impose significant memory overhead. Recently, many reported methods have been developed as potential solutions, since they emerge with numeric deviation. This paper presents FastTPS, a high performance and low-precision loss method for accelerating the token-phase in LLM inference on general AI accelerators which includes three key components: (1) AI accelerator-enabled reloading-free KV Cache concatenation which decreases memory access overhead as well as enables full fusion of Attention, (2) high-efficiency and high-accuracy 'RoPE' attention based on the tiling optimized FLAT, and (3) highly-fused MLP with fine-grain pipeline scheduling. Our results confirm that FastTPS significantly alleviates memory bottlenecks in the token phase, delivering a 6x speed improvement (compared to none-fusion) on an AMD Ryzen AI 300 series NPU with BF16 precision while sustaining 93% peak memory bandwidth utilization during Phi3-mini-4k-instruct inference. --- ### ProgramTab: Boosting Table Reasoning of LLMs via Programmatic Paradigm Authors: Pei Guo, Enjie Liu, Yunzhi Tan, Mochi Gao, Jianxin Zhang, Ruichao Zhong, Juntao Li, Bo Hu, Zang Li Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11207v1 Table-based reasoning with large language models (LLMs), which requires reasoning based on natural language questions and structured tabular data, has gained widespread attention. However, a series of issues still constrain the application of this task. The previous approaches suffered from significant performance degradation when faced with large tables due to the difficulty of long text modeling and the limitation of input length for LLMs. The text-to-SQL approach is used to efficiently extract key information from tables and generate smaller sub-tables. However, tabular data, especially web tables, often lack the necessary structure and consistency, making them unsuitable for performing mathematical logic operations using SQL queries. We propose the ProgramTab framework, which guides LLMs employing in-context learning to perform tabular data preprocessing with Python code, as well as the momentous contents extraction with row and column extraction and SQL generation. The experiment results on table reasoning datasets demonstrate that the ProgramTab framework effectively deals with table-based reasoning tasks and outperforms all LLM-based baselines. --- ### Parallax Portrait Matting Authors: Xin Cai, Jiawen Chen, Lars Jebe, Tianfan Xue, Zhoutong Zhang Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11205v1 Image matting is highly ill-posed, especially when both the foreground and background are richly textured. While single-image matting methods learn strong priors from data, they often struggle on these challenging cases. Existing approaches improve results by requiring additional signals such as green screens, polarized lighting, or clean background images, but these typically rely on specialized capture setups. We present Parallax Portrait Matting, a practical two-frame matting method that uses a second image captured with slight viewpoint change. Such a setting arises naturally in burst photography, where small camera motion induces foreground-background parallax and provides complementary observations for matting. Our pipeline estimates trimaps and foreground/background motion, then constructs aligned views for prediction. To handle imperfect motion estimation, the network uses the background-aligned pair for direct fusion and the foreground-aligned cue through cross-attention for error compensation. Experiments show that our method recovers finer details and more accurate foreground colors than strong single-image matting baselines on challenging portrait cases. --- ### DynEval: Holistic Evaluations of T2I Generative Models in the Wild Authors: Shyam Marjit, Dheeraj Baiju, Anuj Shikarkhane, Akhil Sakthieswaran, Sayak Paul, Anirban Chakraborty Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11199v1 Recent advances in text-to-image (T2I) generation have led to models capable of producing highly realistic images. Yet, reliably evaluating their outputs remains challenging, especially at scale. Existing automatic evaluators, often relying on a static prompt set, struggle to capture subtle failure modes such as partial prompt misalignment, compositional errors, or visually plausible but semantically incorrect generations. In this work, we introduce DynEval, a Dynamic Evaluation framework designed to jointly assess text-to-image alignment and image quality of T2I models. To support scalable training beyond limited human-annotated data, we construct two large datasets. First, we build GenDB, a collection of 500K prompt-image pairs generated from human-written prompts drawn from DiffusionDB using a tiered prompt-model generation strategy. Second, building upon GenDB, we construct DynEvalInstruct, a 250K instruction dataset comprising prompt-image-response triplets distilled from a structured evaluation pipeline that decomposes evaluation into text-image alignment and visual quality reasoning. Using this dataset, we perform full fine-tuning of a compact evaluator through a curriculum learning strategy to effectively distill the superior evaluation capabilities of a larger teacher vision-language model, resulting in DynEval-2B and DynEval-4B. In extensive comparisons against existing evaluators across 11 benchmarks, our evaluator achieves a higher overall correlation with human judgments. Furthermore, it provides fine-grained analysis of the capabilities and failure modes of 36 T2I models across 42 subcategories and 9 semantic dimensions. --- ### What We Talk About When We Talk About LLM Planning: Evidence for Two Distinct Planning Abilities Authors: Sukai Huang, Chenyuan Zhang, Fucai Ke, Zhixi Cai, Naim Rastgoo, Gholamreza Haffari, Hamid Rezatofighi Published: 2026-07-13 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11197v1 When LLMs exhibit uneven performance across planning tasks, these gaps are often attributed to task difficulty. We argue that this explanation is incomplete, as task-level variation may reflect distinct latent planning competencies rather than differences along a single ability spectrum. We study this question on ACPBench-Hard by evaluating multiple LLM families under varying test-time reasoning budgets and applying a multidimensional item response theory model to uncover the latent competency structure underlying LLM planning. The analysis reveals two principal dimensions that shape planning performance: operational reasoning, the ability to evaluate local action applicability and immediate state transitions, and structural enumeration, the ability to reason about goal reachability and landmark structure. Operational reasoning improving under model scaling and longer reasoning traces, while structural enumeration remains comparatively insensitive. Our findings motivate competency-level evaluation of LLM planning, shifting the focus from whether models improve overall to which planning competencies improve, under what conditions, and why. ---