# Research Papers — 2026-07 · bundle page 138 of 222

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### Slot-RAE: Streamlining Object-Centric Learning via Direct Representation Auto-Encoders

Authors: Alexandre Chapin, Emmanuel Dellandrea, Liming Chen
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11196v2

Deploying object-centric models for real-world scene understanding typically requires complex pipelines to achieve both robust scene decomposition and high-fidelity generation. Recent diffusion-based approaches have improved visual quality, but they almost universally rely on heavy, pretrained generative priors (e.g., Stable Diffusion) and external VAE latent spaces. In this paper, we propose Slot-RAE, a much simpler, fully integrated framework that operates directly within the continuous semantic feature space of visual foundation models (e.g., DINOv3). Slot-RAE employs a feature-space diffusion process using a Diffusion Transformer (DiT) decoder and a Representation Alignment (REPA) head. Unlike existing diffusion-based objectcentric methods that rely heavily on subsidized text-toimage priors, the generative core of Slot-RAE (Slot Attention and the DiT) is trained from scratch within the frozen VFM feature space. This eliminates the need for VAE bottlenecks and task-agnostic generative pre-training. Experiments on the COCO dataset demonstrate that despite its architectural simplicity, Slot-RAE achieves state-of-the-art results. It delivers comparable unsupervised object discovery, higher-fidelity image reconstruction, and robust zero-shot compositionality, all while being significantly faster and more computationally efficient than existing object-centric latent diffusion models.

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### Slot-RAE: Streamlining Object-Centric Learning via Direct Representation Auto-Encoders

Authors: Alexandre Chapin, Emmanuel Dellandrea, Liming Chen
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11196v1

Deploying object-centric models for real-world scene understanding typically requires complex pipelines to achieve both robust scene decomposition and high-fidelity generation. Recent diffusion-based approaches have improved visual quality, but they almost universally rely on heavy, pretrained generative priors (e.g., Stable Diffusion) and external VAE latent spaces. In this paper, we propose Slot-RAE, a much simpler, fully integrated framework that operates directly within the continuous semantic feature space of visual foundation models (e.g., DINOv3). Slot-RAE employs a feature-space diffusion process using a Diffusion Transformer (DiT) decoder and a Representation Alignment (REPA) head. Unlike existing diffusion-based objectcentric methods that rely heavily on subsidized text-toimage priors, the generative core of Slot-RAE (Slot Attention and the DiT) is trained from scratch within the frozen VFM feature space. This eliminates the need for VAE bottlenecks and task-agnostic generative pre-training. Experiments on the COCO dataset demonstrate that despite its architectural simplicity, Slot-RAE achieves state-of-the-art results. It delivers comparable unsupervised object discovery, higher-fidelity image reconstruction, and robust zero-shot compositionality, all while being significantly faster and more computationally efficient than existing object-centric latent diffusion models.

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### RepTran: Search-Based Repair of Transformer Models

Authors: Yuta Ishimoto, Paolo Arcaini, Fuyuki Ishikawa, Masanari Kondo, Naoyasu Ubayashi, Yasutaka Kamei
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11193v2

To ensure the overall quality of AI-enabled software, not only traditional software components but also AI components need to be tested and repaired. Among AI components, Transformer models are increasingly integrated into software systems, which makes their misbehaviors critical. Although prior work in the software engineering community has proposed deep neural network (DNN) repair methods, most overlook Transformer-specific structures. We propose RepTran, a search-based repair method for Transformer models. It targets their feed-forward networks (FFNs), which play a central role in the architecture. RepTran identifies suspicious weights by combining two types of scores: a variance-based neuron score and an existing bidirectional score. It then iteratively optimizes these weights using differential evolution. Our evaluation includes 18 fault benchmarks constructed from CIFAR-100 and Tiny-ImageNet. We compare RepTran against three baselines: random weight selection, Arachne (a state-of-the-art DNN repair method), and ArachneW, which enables Arachne to control the number of selected weights. RepTran achieved an average repair rate of 74.7%, statistically outperforming random selection and Arachne across all benchmarks. Effect size analysis revealed that RepTran achieved higher repair rates than ArachneW regardless of the number of selected weights. These results suggest that RepTran is effective for enhancing the reliability of AI-enabled software.

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### GDP.pdf: Benchmarking Grounded Multimodal Reasoning over Professional PDF Documents

Authors: Suhaas Garre, Emily Ritchie, Sushant Mehta, Edwin Chen
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11192v3

A large share of day-to-day work in professional domains happens inside PDF files: benefits packets, leases, datasheets, clinical guidelines, construction plans. Benchmarks for document AI have generally measured the required capabilities in isolation: OCR, layout analysis, chart reasoning, table QA, document VQA. A high score on any one of them does not necessarily reveal whether a model can answer a realistic question that someone in the field would actually ask about a specific PDF. GDP_pdf is a benchmark built to measure this directly. It consists of question-document pairs authored by working professionals in ten fields, and a candidate question was kept only when at least two frontier multimodal models failed it in a way that mattered: a wrong answer, missed decisive evidence, or a fabricated claim, rather than a superficial difference such as style. Each item comes with a rubric of atomic criteria, so we can report a graded rubric score as well as a strict task-level pass rate, and each item is tagged against a taxonomy of eleven capabilities in three tiers, spanning text extraction and grounding, table and chart comprehension, cross-referencing, spatial reasoning, and abstention on unsupported queries. We report results for seventeen frontier models on the 100-item benchmark: the best model passes only 30.7% of the items and the worst passes 2%. Most errors trace back to a small set of recurring loss patterns: misaligned tables, misread charts, skipped footnotes and exclusions, miscounted floor-plan symbols, scan noise, and amendments that supersede earlier text.

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### SCALECUA: Scaling Computer Use Agents with Verifiable Task Synthesis and Efficient Online RL

Authors: Bowen Lv, Xiao Liu, Yanyu Ren, Hanyu Lai, Bohao Jing, Hanchen Zhang, Yanxiao Zhao, Shuntian Yao, Jie Tang, Yuxiao Dong
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11185v1

Computer use agents (CUAs) are emerging as a powerful interface for automating complex digital workflows through visual perception and GUI execution. Online reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a key direction for scaling their capabilities. However, this paradigm is bottlenecked by verifiable data scarcity and online RL inefficiency. To break these barriers, we introduce ScaleCUA, a unified framework that scales online RL for CUAs via verifiable task synthesis and efficient training. At the data level, we design VeriGen, an end-to-end framework for generating verifiable RL tasks through iterative docker interactions and a multi-agent feedback loop. Scaled to 100+ concurrent agent workers via a shared docker interaction probe, this pipeline produces 24K+ verifiable tasks and nearly 3K high-quality RL tasks. To maximize sample efficiency, we propose Frontier Sampling, which tracks per-task capability and allocates rollouts to the current learning frontier. On the training side, we further design Visual Context Segmentation, a sliding window over recent visual context that balances rollout and training-engine pressure, yielding a 2.83x training speedup over step-wise decomposition. Together, ScaleCUA achieves 68.7% on OSWorld and 54.0% on ScienceBoard, establishing new state-of-the-art performance among open-source computer use agents. Code, models, and datasets are available at https://github.com/THUDM/SCALE-CUA.

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### Amplitude-Only FFN Intervention for Tool-Structured LLM Inference Method: Gated Evaluation Protocol, and Cross-Model Empirical Results

Authors: Sheng Xu, Zhen Chen, Junhua Wang, Boyuan Huang, Ke Jia, Jiadun Zhu, Yiming Xu
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11183v3

Large language models increasingly operate as tool-using agents, where small format, argument, or function-call errors can invalidate otherwise plausible responses. We study inference-time feed-forward network (FFN) intervention as a way to improve structured outputs without retraining model weights. An earlier project-specific approach, Orthogonal Residual Projection (ORP), exposed sensitive SwiGLU FFN sites and non-monotonic energy effects, but its direction-changing operation produced more regressions than repairs in a key diagnostic. We therefore propose Amplitude Gating (AG), which preserves pretrained FFN weight directions and modulates activation magnitudes during decoding. AG separates candidate generation, ranking, and a prospective acceptance/fallback decision. We also introduce Per-Sample Fix-Harm Evaluation (PFHE), a paired reporting protocol that complements native task metrics with fixes, harms, preserved-correct cases, and preserved-wrong cases. On the only cross-position union that passes source-alignment audit, an exploratory offline mixed selector raises the descriptive heterogeneous-scorer Qwen3.5-9B tool-route micro-average from 38.66% to 42.92% (+4.27 percentage points); two Hermes function-call endpoints improve by +7.64 and +7.62 points. The same-output PFHE-format view records 48 fixes, 26 harms, 294 preserved-correct cases, and 2,188 preserved-wrong cases over 2,556 units, with positive paired bootstrap intervals for native and strict effects. Protocol-separated Qwen3-8B and Qwen2.5-7B analyses retain oracle headroom but no positive train-selected fixed tool route. A grouped five-fold RF diagnostic suggests weak nonlinear ranking signal but forces intervention, lacks baseline fallback and paired uncertainty, and is not deployment evidence. The results support model- and task-specific selection with strict fallback, not a universal AG switch.

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### NeuroMem-FHP: A Likelihood-Free Deep Learning Framework for Parameter Estimation of Fractional Hawkes Process

Authors: Neha Gupta, Aditya Maheshwari
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11177v1

In this paper, we propose deep learning based NeuroMem-FHP framework for estimating the parameters of the fractional Hawkes process (FHP), a self-exciting point process that captures long-range dependence through a fractional Mittag-Leffler excitation kernel. Two neural architectures, namely a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network and a Transformer, are developed to estimate the model parameters $(μ,γ,α,β)$ directly from sequences of inter-arrival times without requiring computationally intensive likelihood optimization. Experiments on synthetic data that both neural models significantly outperform the classical Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE) method, with the Transformer achieving the highest estimation accuracy (MSE = $0.1634$), followed by the LSTM (MSE = $0.1752$), compared to MLE (MSE = $2.8032$). An ablation study further examines the effects of key hyperparameters on model performance. The proposed framework is also on two real-world high-frequency datasets, namely AAPL NBBO transaction data and Montgomery County 911 emergency call records. Using a predictive validation approach, event sequences simulated from the estimated parameters closely reproduce the empirical distribution, tail behavior, and temporal dependence structure of the observed data. These results demonstrate that Transformer-based parameter estimation provides an accurate and efficient alternative to conventional estimation techniques for FHP and offers a promising framework for modeling event-driven systems with long-memory dynamics.

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### The Path to Self-Evolving Clinical Systems: Scaling Medical Agents from Assistance to Autonomy

Authors: Chunzheng Zhu, Lei Tian, Bohan Tan, Ziqi Zhou, Yuxuan Sun, Yijun Wang, Chengchao Lv, Yilin Wen, Yijun He, Jinghao Lin, Yihang Chen, Chee Wei Tan et al.
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11175v2

The growing ability of large language models and vision-language models to jointly interpret and reason over images and text is reshaping medical imaging AI, moving it from task-specific predictors toward autonomous agents that perceive, reason, plan, remember, and act in clinical environments. This survey departs from the capability-first perspective of existing literature and instead begins from clinical deployment, asking what tasks, contamination-resistant benchmarks, and interactive training environments are required before medical agents can be trusted in practice. Medical agents are formalized as sequential decision-making systems under partial observability, together with a three-level autonomy taxonomy spanning assisted, cooperative, and fully autonomous operation. The field is organized along a unified scaling spine consisting of framework scaling, capability scaling, and environment scaling. Within this framework, clinical environment scaling, the integration of tools, data, and clinical gyms, is identified as the most actionable yet underexplored direction for agents operating in PACS, EHR, and FHIR ecosystems. Clinical self-evolution, where agents improve through interaction with their environments rather than parameter scaling alone, is further positioned as a key research frontier, drawing insights from self-improving agents, agent gyms, and test-time compute scaling. Applications across radiology, pathology, ophthalmology, and hospital workflows are examined together with deployment challenges including hallucination, cascading failures, and fairness. By consolidating more than 300 references, with particular emphasis on advances from 2025 to 2026, this survey provides a roadmap toward trustworthy, self-improving medical imaging systems for real clinical practice.

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### The Path to Self-Evolving Clinical Systems: Scaling Medical Agents from Assistance to Autonomy

Authors: Chunzheng Zhu, Lei Tian, Bohan Tan, Ziqi Zhou, Yuxuan Sun, Yijun Wang, Chengchao Lv, Yilin Wen, Yijun He, Jinghao Lin, Yihang Chen, Cheewei Tan et al.
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11175v1

The growing ability of large language models and vision language models to jointly interpret and reason over images and text is reshaping medical agents, moving them from task specific predictors toward autonomous systems that perceive, reason, plan, remember, and act in clinical environments. This work departs from the capability first perspective of existing literature and instead begins from clinical deployment, asking what tasks, contamination resistant benchmarks, and interactive training environments are required before medical agents can be trusted in practice. Medical agents are formalized as sequential decision making systems under partial observability, together with a three level autonomy taxonomy spanning assisted, cooperative, and fully autonomous operation. The field is organized along a unified scaling spine consisting of framework scaling, capability scaling, and environment scaling. Within this framework, clinical environment scaling, the integration of tools, data, and clinical gyms, is identified as the most actionable yet underexplored direction for agents operating in PACS, EHR, and FHIR ecosystems. Clinical self evolution, where agents improve through interaction with their environments rather than parameter scaling alone, is further positioned as a key research frontier, drawing insights from self improving agents, agent gyms, and test time compute scaling. Applications across radiology, pathology, ophthalmology, and hospital workflows are examined together with deployment challenges including hallucination, cascading failures, and fairness. By consolidating more than 300 references, with particular emphasis on advances from 2025 to 2026, this work provides a roadmap toward trustworthy, self improving medical imaging systems for real clinical practice.

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### When Depth Is Better Told Than Shown: Depth-Ordinal Prompting for Vision-Language Spatial Reasoning

Authors: Quynh Vo, Phuc Dao, Cong-Duy Nguyen, Thong Nguyen
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11173v1

Vision-language models (VLMs) are expected to reason about physical space -- which object is closer, what lies behind what, and how objects are arranged in 3D -- yet they still struggle with such spatial judgments. A natural remedy is to show the model a depth map, but we find that this can make performance worse. We show that depth is not absent: it reaches the language model, but becomes difficult to access for downstream reasoning, while rendered pseudo-depth maps act as noisy auxiliary images that frozen VLMs cannot easily regulate. We propose Depth-Ordinal Prompting (DOP), a training-free method that converts monocular depth into a single question-targeted ordinal text cue at the queried objects, without adding a depth image, training a module, injecting features, or using labels. Our key finding is form dependence: the same depth signal can hurt when shown as an image but help when told as text.Across benchmarks, models, and depth estimators, DOP improves spatial reasoning when pseudo-depth provides reliable object-level ordering and remains largely neutral in strong original-image regimes. It is also competitive with the strongest training-free depth-prompting alternative while being simpler and more targeted.

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### STAMP: Provenance-Guided Credit Assignment for Deep Search Agents

Authors: Ke Xu, Han Xu, Xinran Chen, Yuqian Wang, Zhixuan Li, Xiaojian Liu, Changwo Wu, Jianqiang Xia, Yuchen Li
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11172v1

Reinforcement learning for deep-search agents has largely focused on trajectory-level scoring -- outcome correctness, citation-aware rewards, and evidence coverage. Yet the actions that expose supporting documents receive no targeted credit, a gap we call the reward-credit mismatch. We propose STAMP, in which a reference-based verifier judges whether each cited document supports an entity or relation in a training-time evidence graph, and first-exposure attribution traces each supported citation back to the action that first surfaced it. This step credit is injected through sign-preserving advantage modulation, which redistributes advantage across steps without changing the trajectory-level reward or the relative ranking of trajectories within each group. On BrowseComp, BrowseComp-ZH, and xbench-DS, STAMP improves the GRPO baseline by +2.0/+5.5/+3.0 points under matched SFT initialization, training data, and search tools, and composes with both outcome-only and citation-rubric base rewards. Component ablations confirm that the provenance-based credit signal and the sign-preserving advantage modulation each contribute to the gains.

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### TC-MAF: Train-Calibrated Bounded Multi-Evidence Fusion for Multimodal Industrial Anomaly Detection

Authors: Ming Deng, Sijin Sun, Xiaochuan Hu, Xing Wu
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11170v1

Multimodal anomaly detection benefits from complementary RGB and 3D evidence, yet auxiliary RGB reconstruction is not equally reliable across product categories and class-wise test-time policy selection is usually unavailable. We propose TC-MAF, a base-anchored multi-evidence fusion design that combines a multimodal detector, complementary Dinomaly evidence, and a small cross-modal consistency cue under one fixed pixel-level fusion formula. A lightweight training-dispersion confidence (TDC) term scales auxiliary participation using only normal training statistics. On MVTec-3D, TC-MAF reaches 0.979 image-level AUROC and 0.990 pixel-level AUPRO, achieving the best mean results on both detection and localization among the compared multimodal methods. Systematic ablations show that the fusion structure itself is the dominant factor, while TDC provides a smaller but reproducible calibration gain over no calibration or arbitrary calibration. Additional experiments show that the same design remains effective under a pooled-statistics variant, auxiliary-branch and backbone substitutions, few-shot settings, a missing-3D setting, and cross-dataset evaluation on Eyecandies. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TC_MAF-C3BB.

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### SISA-Rec: A Semantically Integrated Sequential Recommender with Contrastive Alignment

Authors: Soohan Abbasi, Shahid Munir Shah, Rafia Shaikh, Mahmoud Aljawarneh
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11168v1

Recommendation systems help users recommend relevant items from a large collection of choices. Present work on transformer-based sequential recommendation learns user preferences from interaction logs, but it mostly focuses on item identifiers and doesn't fully use the semantic meaning of items. This limitation becomes a major challenge in sparse and cold-start scenarios where historical interaction data is limited. To solve this problem, we introduce SISA-Rec (Semantically Integrated Sequential Recommendation), a transformer-based framework that embeds semantic context directly into sequential modeling. Our approach fuses item ID embeddings with BERT-based text embeddings via a gated fusion module, injects semantic similarity into the self-attention mechanism, and leverages an attention-based aggregation module to construct comprehensive user representations. Finally, a joint learning objective which combines Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR) and contrastive alignment loss, aligns the underlying behavioral and semantic spaces. Experiments were conducted on the two highly sparse Amazon Beauty and Amazon Toys \&amp; Games datasets, both having 99.93\% sparsity. The results show that SISA-Rec outperforms state-of-the-art baseline models across all evaluation metrics. Compared with the BERT4Rec \cite{petrov2022systematic}, SISA-Rec improves HR@10 by 16.6\% and NDCG@10 by 10.3\% on Amazon Beauty, and HR@10 by 23.1\% and NDCG@10 by 17.9\% on Amazon Toys \&amp; Games. Cold-start analysis further shows that the proposed model achieves the largest improvements for users with limited interaction historical records. This showcases the value of semantic information when user behavior data is scarce. Overall, the results demonstrate that integrating semantic information into the attention mechanism leads to more accurate and reliable recommendations.

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### Pix2Act: Image-Space Manipulation Policies with Equivariant Augmentation

Authors: Haojie Huang, Linfeng Zhao, Haotian Liu, Zhang Ye, Si-Yuan Huang, Mingxi Jia, Boce Hu, Fangzhou Lin, Yu Qi, Dian Wang, Robin Walters, Robert Platt
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11167v1

Representing manipulation actions as 2D trajectories in the camera plane provides a compact and interpretable basis for learning complex 3D manipulation policies. However, it also creates challenges from out-of-frame trajectories and limited precision. We propose Pix2Act, an imitation learning method that addresses these challenges by generating continuous image-space keypoint trajectories in each camera plane and losslessly recovering end-effector poses via triangulation. This reformulates high-dimensional 3D control as a simpler, more learnable 2D prediction problem. Crucially, it aligns observations and actions in the same coordinate space, enabling equivariant transformations to jointly rotate individual camera images together with their image-space actions. We analyze the symmetry properties of this augmentation and design a network architecture that can fuse multiple camera views while respecting their per-view rotations. As a result, Pix2Act implicitly enlarges the support of the data distribution and learns invariant action structures across transformations, yielding improved generalization and overall performance. Across diverse simulated and real-world manipulation tasks, Pix2Act outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and remains robust under camera perturbations.

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### Query-Focused Event Summarization: A Dataset and Benchmark

Authors: Chenyu Hu, Bang Wang
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11166v1

A thematic corpus is a collection of semantically coherent documents that collectively describe different aspects of a shared thematic event. Such a corpus typically contains hundreds or even thousands of documents. While users' interests in a thematic event often span multiple dimensions, Query-Focused Summarization (QFS) aims to generate summaries tailored to users' queries. However, existing QFS datasets lack event-oriented summarization, and most QFS methods struggle with large-scale corpora. To address these challenges, we propose the Query-Focused Event Summarization (QFES) task and construct the QFESum dataset, which contains 8 thematic events, 16,684 documents, and 104 queries. Furthermore, we introduce a two-stage QFES framework consisting of Query-Focused Retrieval with Adaptive Thresholding (RAT) and Query-Focused Summarization based on Hierarchical Clustering (SHC). Experimental results on QFESum show that RAT and SHC consistently outperform the baselines, demonstrating their effectiveness for QFES. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://github.com/sarcasm-hcy02/QFES-QFESum.

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### Unified Gradient Projection: Language-Balanced Continual Learning for Multilingual Low-Resource ASR

Authors: Ziang Ren, Guodong Lin, Yuchen Ai, Kaize Tan, Wei-Qiang Zhang
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.CL, cs.SD, eess.AS
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11163v1

Large-scale pretrained ASR models such as Whisper exhibit strong multilingual capabilities. However, fine-tuning on low-resource languages often causes catastrophic forgetting. Although continual learning mitigates this issue, existing methods struggle to regulate cross-task interference in multilingual settings, where dominant languages bias optimization. We propose Unified Gradient Projection (UGP), which constrains parameter updates using reference gradients from language-balanced replay in a unified projection space. By equalizing per-language contributions in the projection, UGP reduces dominant-language bias and improves cross-lingual stability. We further show that combining gradient-level projection with data-level replay yields complementary gains in stability and plasticity. Across diverse low-resource language groups and model scales, UGP enables effective adaptation while substantially mitigating forgetting. On Whisper-large-v3, it achieves near-zero average forgetting.

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### AMT-X: Phase-Structured Multi-Turn Red-Teaming with Checklist-Gated Evaluation

Authors: Yi Ting Shen, Kentaroh Toyoda, Alex Leung
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11151v1

Safety evaluation of large language models (LLMs) relies largely on single-turn attack datasets and single-judge scoring, underestimating risk from adaptive multi-turn adversaries and reporting a single success rate that does not separate partially actionable outputs from those carrying complete operational detail. We propose AMT-X (Adaptive Multi-Turn Exploitation), a phase-structured multi-turn red-teaming framework. Unlike prior multi-turn attacks that rely on ad hoc escalation or free-form per-goal plans, AMT-X casts the attack as an explicit, reproducible multi-phase state machine driven by semantic signals from the victim, and replaces single-judge scoring with a multi-role jury whose phase-conditioned checklists gate success on actionable harm. Across six frontier victim models (queried under their default safety alignment, without added moderation layers) and seven Moderation sub-categories, AMT-X attains overall attack success rates of 97.6-100% under a lenient score threshold, but 66.7-78.6% under a stricter gate requiring complete, real, and operational detail: a gap of up to 33 percentage points between partially and fully actionable harm.

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### The Hidden Footprint: Making Storage a First-Class Metric for LLM Agent Evaluation

Authors: Chenglin Yu, Hongquan Gui, Ying Yu, Tao Zeng, Ming Li
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11149v3

LLM agent benchmarks measure task completion, reliability, and inference cost, but not the persistent data an agent run leaves on disk, including logs, context snapshots, checkpoints, and debug traces. We introduce AgentFootprint, a cross-framework benchmark of post-run agent storage footprint. Its serialization-aware metric suite measures total retention, channel composition, duplication, growth, compressibility, and conversation-history reconstructability. It addresses a measurement trap: naive byte-level measurement understates duplication by an order of magnitude because database paging and JSON escaping obscure repeated content. A fixed-trace control separates agent-generated logical volume from persistence-layer amplification: replaying the same trajectory through seven persisting frameworks yields a 6.7x spread. Under identical models, tools, and tasks, configurations with 100% accuracy differ by 15.7x in retained bytes, although their defaults support different recovery and audit capabilities. Three full-history configurations grow superlinearly on a repeated-observation stress task. Exported trajectories from 108 instance-normalized SWE-bench Verified submissions span three orders of magnitude per instance, with no detectable correlation with resolve rate. A content-addressed store reduces retention by 4.8x-32.7x while preserving every reconstructability score. These results establish persistent storage as a resource metric to report jointly with accuracy and reconstructability.

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### Rank-Conditioned Sample Reuse for the Plackett--Luce Best-of-$K$ Objective

Authors: Melveena Jolly, Midhun Xavier
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.LG, stat.ME, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11146v1

We study the coupled objective J_K^WOR = E_{S ~ PL-WOR_K}(max_{i in S} R_i): the expected maximum reward of a size-K Plackett-Luce draw without replacement, the law of Gumbel-Top-K / Stochastic Beam Search decoding. This estimand differs from the conventional i.i.d. objective J_K^iid = E(max_{i&lt;=K} R_i) targeted by existing sample-reuse Max@K estimators, and reusing their i.i.d. weights under the coupled sampler is provably biased (a closed-form three-item instance gives E(g_iid) = (4/5) grad J_K^WOR exactly; pass@K under the coupled sampler is the binary-reward special case). Generic joint-score REINFORCE is already unbiased for J_K^WOR; what it lacks is sample reuse. Our contribution is to instantiate standard rank-conditioned Horvitz-Thompson estimation for the J_K^WOR subset total: from one Gumbel-Top-n pool (n&gt;K) and its observed priority threshold we build an estimator that reuses all C(n,K) embedded K-subsets, unbiased with an unbiased exact score-function surrogate gradient, plus a reward-sorted Max-specific dynamic program that collapses the C(n,K)-term subset sum (with K!-cost set probabilities) exactly to a one-dimensional integral. A fixed-Q quadrature evaluation costs O(n log n + nKQ) arithmetic and is numerically, not algebraically, exact; no epsilon-approximation rate is certified. Each nonzero degree-K Horvitz-Thompson term has finite second moment exactly when n &gt;= 2K; under the same assumptions the full surrogate gradient has finite second moment whenever n &gt;= 2K (sharpness there is open). At K=1 the construction recovers classical priority sampling. All quantities require only the values and differentiable computation graphs of the n+1 drawn items' probabilities, so finite structured sequence policies sampled by exact SBS are covered. A certified finite-Q quadrature bound and countably infinite support remain open. Validation code is included as ancillary files.

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### NextFund: A Unified Performance Tracking Platform for Agentic Portfolio Management

Authors: Changlun Li, Peixian Ma, Qiqi Duan, Zhenyu Lin, Peineng Wu
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11141v1

Large language models (LLMs) based agents are beginning to participate in portfolio construction and market analysis, where decisions must be justified under evolving information and risk constraints. Current assessment practice, however, remains poorly aligned with this setting: many studies rely on static examinations or report only terminal portfolio returns, while the intermediate evidence, analyst judgments, and execution steps that produced those returns stay largely invisible. We introduce NextFund, an evaluation platform that makes financial-agent behavior observable under live market conditions. The platform couples time-consistent market access, coordinated multi-agent analysis, and persistent logging of the full decision path from observation to trade. Through an interactive Trading Arena, users can compare models across markets, inspect equity curves, and drill from leaderboard outcomes down to individual justifications. We present NextFund on Hong Kong, U.S., and China A-share equities, illustrating how inspectable decision histories enable fairer benchmarking and more actionable diagnosis. Our demo is available at https://paradoox.cn/nextfund/.

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### Learning Subgroup Relations Using Siamese Graph Neural Networks

Authors: Tal Weissblat
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.LG, math.GR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11140v2

Determining whether one finite group is isomorphic to a subgroup of another is a fundamental problem in computational group theory. In this work, we propose a Siamese Graph Neural Network (Siamese GNN) for subgroup prediction using Cayley graph representations of finite groups. Each input group is represented by its undirected Cayley graph and encoded by one branch of a Siamese GNN to produce a graph embedding. The resulting graph embeddings are combined with algebraic features derived directly from the input groups to construct a joint feature vector, which is processed by a fully connected classifier to predict subgroup relations between finite groups. By integrating graph-based structural representations with algebraic features, the proposed framework provides a unified approach for learning subgroup relations from finite groups. Experimental results on an expanded and more diverse dataset of 308 finite-group pairs drawn from 11 group families demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture, achieving a test BA of 91.67% on an independent test set. Additional experiments evaluate generalization to unseen groups, robustness to different Cayley graph generating sets, the contribution of GNN message passing, performance relative to non-neural baselines, and comparison with exact computational methods. These results illustrate the potential of geometric deep learning for subgroup prediction.

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### Learning Subgroup Relations Using Siamese Graph Neural Networks

Authors: Tal Weissblat
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.LG, math.GR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11140v1

Determining whether one finite group is isomorphic to a subgroup of another is a fundamental problem in computational group theory. In this work, we propose a Siamese Graph Neural Network (Siamese GNN) for subgroup prediction using Cayley graph representations of finite groups. Each input group is represented by its undirected Cayley graph and encoded by one branch of a Siamese GNN to produce a graph embedding. The resulting graph embeddings are combined with algebraic features derived directly from the input groups to construct a joint feature vector, which is processed by a fully connected classifier to predict subgroup relations between finite groups. By integrating graph-based structural representations with algebraic features, the proposed framework provides a unified approach for learning subgroup relations from finite groups. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed architecture, achieving a test accuracy of 95.9% (47/49) on an independent test set and illustrating the potential of geometric deep learning for subgroup prediction.

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### A Formal Hierarchical Architecture for Agentic Orchestration with Stack-Based Execution and Lazy Discovery

Authors: Prashant Devadiga, Abhishek, Adithya Mishra, Alok Singh, Amisha Sinha, Asit Desai, Gaurang Dahad, Harshit Bhushan, Mandati Pramod Reddy, Prakhar Gupta, Rupesh Patil, Siddhi Behere
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11138v1

The rapid expansion of capabilities in Large Language Model (LLM) agents has exposed a critical architectural bottleneck: when agents are given access to a flat, monolithic registry of tools, the model must evaluate hundreds or thousands of options simultaneously. This leads to decision-space explosion, context window saturation, and degraded routing accuracy. To address these limitations, this paper presents a hierarchical, skill-based architecture for agentic orchestration. Capabilities are organized as a rooted tree where internal nodes make routing decisions and leaf nodes execute deterministic tasks. The runtime enforces a single-step execution loop governed by a Last-In-First-Out (LIFO) stack, giving the agent a form of memory akin to a Pushdown Automaton, therefore enabling it to track nested execution contexts and resume deterministically from any depth. Capability discovery follows a manifest-driven, lazy-loading protocol: only the immediate children of the active node are loaded, so memory and prompt costs scale with the explored path rather than the global registry. By replacing global memory with localized stack frames, the architecture prevents outputs from one execution branch from leaking into another, establishing the isolation guarantees required for deployment in regulated enterprise environments. We also discuss UPI Help, an AI-powered digital payments support product, as a motivating production deployment context. We provide a mathematical formalization of the orchestration state, detailed algorithmic analysis of the execution loop, and controlled benchmarks comparing flat and hierarchical routing under increasing tool catalogs, multi-step workflow pressure, and visible schema-token exposure per LLM call.

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### TIGER: Text-Conditioned Visual Gated Routing with Acceptance Alignment for Multimodal Speculative Decoding

Authors: Quynh Vo, Cong-Duy Nguyen, Ponhvoan Srey, Luu Anh Tuan, Thong Nguyen
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11131v1

Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive generation by letting a lightweight drafter propose multiple tokens that are verified by a larger target model. Although effective for text-only LLMs, speculative decoding yields limited gains in VLMs because drafters often diverge on vision-critical content, while existing multimodal acceleration methods do not directly address irrelevant visual evidence or optimize the verifier-accepted prefix length that governs speedup. We propose TIGER, a Text-conditioned vIsual GatEd Routing framework for multimodal speculative decoding. TIGER dynamically selects a sparse set of context-relevant visual tokens based on the drafter's current textual state, rather than expose the full visual token set or a fixed compressed interface. To better align training with inference-time efficiency, we optimize the drafter with acceptance-aligned group-based policy training using verifier-derived rewards based on accepted prefix length, built on top of distillation warm start with KL anchoring. This encourages the drafter not only to imitate the target model, but also to produce speculative continuations that survive verification for longer prefixes. Experiments show that TIGER yields consistent gains in accepted prefix length and speculative speedup under exact verifier-side speculative decoding, while achieving favorable quality-latency trade-offs with comparable downstream accuracy in visual-routing analyses.

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### Comparison-Based Ordinal Learning for Proactive Driving Risk Assessment

Authors: Zhuoren Li, Yi Zhong, Weiqi Zhang, Xinrui Zhang, Lu Xiong, Chongfeng Wei, Bo Leng
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.RO, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11128v1

Real-time driving risk assessment provides an essential basis for proactive safety by identifying and quantifying the danger of ongoing road interactions before adverse outcomes occur. However, due to the scarcity of collision data and frame-level risk labels, existing driving risk assessment methods often rely on surrogate objectives, which may imperfectly align with true collision risk and not faithfully reflect the relative danger of driving interaction. This paper proposes a comparison-based ordinal risk learning framework that learns collision-relevant risk scores from pairwise supervision in driving data, directly modeling relative risk ordering without requiring numerical frame-level risk labels. We derive pairwise comparisons from three sources of event-structured driving data for such ordinal risk learning: temporal progression within safety-critical sequences, event-level contrast between dangerous and normal interactions, and physics-based counterfactual perturbations. On this basis, instantiations with three risk-scoring function parameterizations are implemented, including directly learning risk scores from comparison data, and aligning existing single or multiple surrogate-based risk models. The proposed framework is evaluated on the 100-Car and SHRP2 naturalistic driving datasets using a proactive collision warning task. Results show that the proposed framework improves high-recall risk discrimination, warning precision, and warning lead time over representative surrogate-based baselines across both in-distribution and out-of-distribution evaluations. These results suggest that the proposed framework can contribute to proactive safety research by providing more reliable risk assessment for automated driving systems and safety-critical driving interactions.

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### Do LLMs Fabricate Legal Citations? A Bilingual Benchmark on Saudi Data Protection Law and the GDPR

Authors: Noura Suliman Alrajeh
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.CL, cs.CY
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11127v1

Organizations and regulators increasingly consult large language models (LLMs) for regulatory-compliance questions, yet a wrong statutory citation can silently propagate into legal advice, compliance documentation, and policy decisions. We introduce a bilingual benchmark of 120 questions probing whether freely accessible LLMs fabricate article citations for two data-protection instruments: the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Saudi Personal Data Protection Law (PDPL). The benchmark pairs direct citation retrieval questions with false premise verification probes and deliberately unanswerable "trap" questions -- including questions about a repealed article and about deadlines that exist only in implementing regulations, not in the law itself. Every question is posed in both Arabic and English, and all scoring is fully automatic against a manually verified gold reference. Evaluating three freely accessible models (Gemini 2.5 Flash, GPT-OSS-120B, Nemotron-3-Super-120B), we find a dramatic jurisdiction gap: near-ceiling citation accuracy on the GDPR (94-100% on direct retrieval) against majority fabrication on the Saudi PDPL (60-77%), invariant to query language; the highest fabrication rates (67%) arise from statute-vs-regulations confusion, and 91% of fabricated citations are asserted with confidence &gt;= 0.8. Fabrication tracks the jurisdiction of the law, not the language of the query, and model confidence provides no protection -- indicating that verbatim-verification safeguards, rather than model self confidence, must gate any institutional reliance on LLMs for compliance screening.

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### ToolAtlas: Learning Once, Reusing Everywhere with Tool-Side Memory

Authors: Yue Fang, Zhibang Yang, Fangkai Yang, Xiaoting Qin, Liqun Li, Qingwei Lin, Saravan Rajmohan, Dongmei Zhang
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11126v1

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external tools served by shared providers and accessed by heterogeneous downstream agents. Existing approaches improve tool use on the agent side through parameter updates, prompt refinement, or agent-side memory, making tool knowledge difficult to share and limited to behaviors observed in past tasks. We argue that reusable tool knowledge should instead be maintained by the tool provider. We introduce ToolAtlas, a graph-based framework that builds a persistent provider-side tool memory of tool capabilities, failure boundaries, and cross-tool compositions through execution-verified probing. At inference time, agents query the tool memory via adaptive graph traversal. Across two MCP-based benchmarks spanning eight services, ToolAtlas outperforms existing tool-side optimization and agent-side memory baselines by up to 21.61% in pass@1 and 18.61% in pass@4. The same tool memory also transfers across environment instances and agent frameworks without retraining or task-time exploration, yielding up to 24.16%/16.22% and 17.49%/14.27% relative gains in pass@1/pass@4, respectively. Ablation studies show that these gains arise from combining tool-centered memory organization with capability-guided execution probing. These results establish provider-side tool memory as an effective and reusable paradigm for tool servers. Our code is in: https://github.com/PuppyKnightUniversity/ToolAtlas.

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### BeatEdit: Symbolic Music Generation as Explicit Editing

Authors: Haoyu Gu, Lekai Qian, Haowu Zhou, Qi Liu, Shuai Wang
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11124v2

Music creation is fundamentally a process of revision. Yet symbolic music generation remains dominated by paradigms that produce complete sequences from scratch, with limited support for selective modification. Edit-based methods have proven effective for text transformation tasks, but remain largely unexplored for symbolic music. We trace this absence to the representational level: conventional event-based music encodings lack the structural properties required by explicit music editing. In contrast, the BEAT encoding, a beat-grid-anchored representation originally designed for autoregressive generation, possesses structural properties amenable to editing. We propose BeatEdit, the first framework for symbolic music generation based on explicit edit operations, recasting generation as producing new content by editing a draft rather than synthesizing from scratch. BeatEdit comprises three complementary mechanisms along an axis of increasing edit density: per-token sequence tagging for error correction, iterative refinement for accompaniment editing, and tag-then-fill for segment completion. All these mechanisms share a single encoding and pre-trained backbone, achieving higher precision and perceptual quality than autoregressive and diffusion methods across all three tasks, while remaining efficient, with single-pass inference completing in under 100 ms. Cross-encoding evaluation further reveals that encoding design substantially influences editing effectiveness, with notable encoding-method interaction effects. Code is available at https://github.com/Haoyu-Gu/BeatEdit-code

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### Implicit Neural Networks as Static Controllers: Certificates and Performance Separation

Authors: Giuseppe C. Calafiore, Laurent El Ghaoui
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: eess.SY, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11122v1

Implicit neural controllers (INCs) are static feedback laws that are evaluated through an algebraic fixed point {equation}; they include as special cases neural network controllers. We propose a so-called implicit representation of neural networks as a key enabling device that exposes the controller as a trainable linear interconnection closed through a known static activation map, thereby making well-posedness and Lyapunov/IQC analysis mathematically easy to handle. For finite-dimensional LTI plants, we first develop a rigorous analysis theory for a given INC, including Perron--Frobenius and norm conditions for well posedness, LMI/IQC certificates for exponential stability, and LMIs for discounted infinite-horizon quadratic performance. We then formulate synthesis as a certification-compatible heuristic search: training is carried out under explicit well-posedness constraints, implicit-differentiation formulas provide gradients, and the resulting controller is accepted only after independent post-training LMIs or regional admissibility checks are feasible. Finally, we establish constrained-control separation results: for a specific scalar unstable plant with hard actuator bounds, an INC achieves a strictly smaller discounted infinite-horizon cost than any admissible finite-order dynamic linear controller. Additional results cover quadratic state-input costs, comparison with linear static output feedback, and computable upper/lower-bound certificates. Numerical examples illustrate the mechanism and the resulting certified performance.

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### Simple Features and Honest Calibration for Ambivalence and Hesitancy Recognition in Video

Authors: Vikas Kumar, Aditya Mishra, Haroon R. Lone
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL, eess.AS
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11120v1

We address ambivalence and hesitancy (A/H) recognition in the ABAW 2026 BAH Challenge: given a short interview video, predict whether the person shows signs of A/H. Our system combines affect-specialised text, audio, and visual representations with a small set of readable linguistic hesitation cues, fused by a reliability gate we call Affective Marker Fusion (AMF), and finished with a simple AP-weighted ensemble at a fixed decision threshold. We also introduce \emph{ASR-erased time}: speech recognisers delete fillers and hesitation pauses from the transcript, but the chunk timestamps keep the time those events took, and sixteen features built from these gaps form the strongest and most independent non-verbal channel we measured (AP $0.718$, correlation $0.11$--$0.36$ with all other members). Across controlled experiments we find three things: cross-modal conflict design does not reliably help on BAH; language is by far the strongest channel while affect-specialised audio is a useful second; and calibration matters more than architecture. Fitting ensemble weights and a threshold on the small validation split overfits: it scores $0.741$ macro-F1 on validation but only $0.690$ on the untouched test set. AP-weighting at a fixed threshold instead reaches $\mathbf{0.731}$ on test.

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### VIA: Visual Interface Agent for Robot Control

Authors: Hengyuan Hu, Priya Sundaresan, Jensen Gao, Dorsa Sadigh
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11119v1

Robot manipulation is a complex task that requires visual understanding, physical reasoning, planning, and closed-loop control. General-purpose foundation models (FMs) have grown remarkably capable of some of these, especially vision and reasoning. To leverage this for generalist robot policies, current methods typically involve converting existing FMs into vision-language-action (VLA) models by fine-tuning on robot data to output low-level actions. However, VLAs are often orders of magnitude smaller than frontier FMs given the limited data and compute available for fine-tuning, which in turn limits their general capability. Inspired by the growing ability of FMs to operate software through visual interfaces, we ask whether that same competence suffices to control a robot. We present VIA (Visual Interface Agent for robot control), a framework that recasts robot control as an agentic task: an off-the-shelf FM-powered agent drives a manipulator through a browser-based 3D interface by taking screenshots, issuing intuitive commands, observing the outcome, and adjusting. The agent receives no robot-specific fine-tuning and no access to privileged state information: it perceives visual input and acts through a small set of general tools. VIA inherits the agent's general reasoning, closed-loop error recovery, and ability to plan and re-plan from what it observes. It solves a diverse suite of tabletop manipulation tasks zero-shot with both Claude Code and Codex. With the strongest model (Fable 5) it achieves 96.7% success on three LIBERO-Goal tasks and 100% on a long-horizon rainbow assembly task. Performance improves with the scale and strength of the underlying model. These results suggest that frontier agents already possess skills that transfer directly to robot control given the right interface: your coding or computer-use agent is, in a sense, secretly a robot-control agent.

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### GHOST: Geometry-Guided Hallucination of Opaque Surface Textures

Authors: Langxu Zhao, Zuan Gu, Tianhan Gao
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11118v1

Transparent objects pose a fundamental challenge for depth estimation and 3D reconstruction due to their violation of Lambertian assumptions, leading to severe geometry degradation in downstream tasks. To address this, we propose a novel geometry-guided preprocessing framework \textbf{GHOST} that leverages visual foundation models to transform transparent regions into opaque, structurally consistent representations without requiring downstream model retraining. Specifically, our pipeline utilizes (1) \textbf{TransDINO} and (2) \textbf{TransDecomp} to disentangle masks and transparency physical properties, while (3) \textbf{DAF-Net} recovers surface normal priors to encode geometric curvature. Subsequently, (4) \textbf{GeoSemTransNet} integrates these multi-modal cues to synthesize a texture-rich opaque RGB image that preserves the transparent object's 3D structure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method significantly enhances the accuracy of state-of-the-art depth estimation and reconstruction models on transparent objects by restoring essential photometric cues.

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### MusicMark: A Robust Generative Watermarking Framework for Music Generation

Authors: Seohwan Yun, Jeeyoung Yun, Yongjin Kim, Juyeon Lee, Sungwoong Kim
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI, cs.CR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11117v1

AI music generation has rapidly advanced alongside commercial platforms, raising the need for reliable watermarking for provenance and attribution. However, existing audio watermarking research has largely focused on speech, and applying speech-oriented methods to music is challenging due to music's complex structure and rich acoustic texture. Most existing methods are post-hoc, adding imperceptible perturbations after generation rather than embedding watermarks as part of the content. This makes them fragile under transformations and especially vulnerable to neural codec re-synthesis, which can discard imperceptible residual signals. Moreover, since generation and watermarking are decoupled, the watermarking step can be bypassed or omitted, weakening provenance guarantees. To address these issues, we propose MusicMark, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first generative watermarking framework for music. Specifically, MusicMark embeds watermark messages into the semantic latent space during generation, incorporating the watermark as part of the musical content and ensuring robustness against diverse attacks, particularly neural codec re-synthesis. To this end, we introduce a watermark adapter into a diffusion-based generation model to embed watermark messages across denoising steps. The adapter and detector are trained with a joint objective that preserves fidelity by constraining watermarked latents close to their unwatermarked reference latents, while improving robustness through attack augmentations. Experiments demonstrate that MusicMark substantially outperforms post-hoc baselines across diverse attacks including neural codec re-synthesis, while maintaining comparable generation quality. We further introduce a cover-song attack, converting the singing voice while preserving musical content, and show that MusicMark remains more robust than post-hoc methods.

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### The Equilibrium Is the Initialization: Lazy Identity Collapse in Physics-Structured Deep Equilibrium Reasoning

Authors: Joyjeet Singh
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11116v1

Deep equilibrium models promise input-adaptive implicit computation: harder problems should demand more solver iterations, and the solved equilibrium should encode the result of genuine iterative inference. We report a cautionary study of a port-Hamiltonian DEQ with a learned initialization on two reasoning tasks -- ProofWriter entailment over frozen DeBERTa embeddings and a BFS-verified graph-reachability benchmark -- in which the implicit computation is a silent no-op. Across tasks, seeds, and controlled ablation arms, the solved equilibrium equals the solver's start point to numerical precision, and bypassing the solver entirely changes test accuracy by +0.00 percentage points in 18 of 19 training runs. Controlled interventions falsify the tempting explanation: removing the anchoring term reproduces every result, and retraining with noise-decoupled starts yields a solver that converges to the noisy start while the decoder learns to ignore it. The single escaping run diverges instead ($\|h^{*}-z_0\|=171$), producing a co-adapted noise channel whose removal improves accuracy. Iteration counts are uncorrelated with ground-truth difficulty ($r=0.009$), and the full apparatus never outperforms a two-layer MLP on either task. We trace the mechanism to gradient starvation along two distinct routes, show that the standard zeroing ablation is confounded and gives wildly seed-dependent answers where the correct substitution test gives a stable zero, and distill a four-test diagnostic protocol for auditing claimed implicit computation. All experiments run on a single free Colab GPU; code, raw logs, and analysis scripts are released.

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### CA-DGCL: Dynamic Graph Continual Learning via Condensation and Attachment

Authors: Tingxu Yan Ye Yuan
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11112v1

Dynamic graph continual learning (DGCL) is an effective manner for handling catastrophic forgetting in dynamic graphs. However, existing DGCL methods underutilize temporal information across graph snapshots. To address this critical issue, we propose a novel framework for Dynamic Graph Continual Learning via Condensation and Attachment (CA-DGCL). Specifically, CA-DGCL first condenses historical graph snapshots into compact semantic representations efficiently. Further, a cross-timestamp node chains is built to construct a third-order tensor and Tucker decomposition is applied to this tensor for obtaining stable node features, which encapsulate historical knowledge. Finally, these node features are used to generate new nodes and attached to the current graph for replaying of past information without compromising the new patterns. In addtion, a refined forgetting measure is introduced to make it more suitable for dynamic graph settings. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CA-DGCL outperforms baselines in forgetting suppression as well as maintain competitive accuracy, proving its efficacy for dynamic graph continual learning.

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### Neural Discovery of Memory and Nonlocal Kernels in Integro-Differential Equations with Constrained Kolmogorov--Arnold Networks

Authors: Aruzhan Tleubek, Salah A Faroughi
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.LG, math.NA
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11110v1

Discovering the memory or nonlocal kernel governing an integro-differential equation (IDE) from sparse and noisy observations is an ill-posed inverse problem. Existing identification methods often rely on problem-specific analytical derivations, specialized observation requirements, or restrictive assumptions about the kernel, limiting their applicability across different classes of IDEs. In this work, we propose a differentiable-solver-based framework for discovering memory and nonlocal kernels directly from spatiotemporal observations. Within the solver, the unknown kernel is represented using a constrained Kolmogorov--Arnold Network (KAN) parameterization, with the physical constraints imposed through two different approaches: a Bernstein-polynomial-based Monotone--Convex KAN (MC-KAN), whose coefficient constraints enforce positivity, monotonic decrease, and convexity by construction, and a Chebyshev-based KAN (Cheb-KAN), in which the same properties are encouraged through soft penalty terms. After training, symbolic regression is applied to the learned kernels to obtain interpretable closed-form representations. We evaluate both methods on benchmarks spanning a one-dimensional Volterra equation, a one-dimensional viscoelastic wave partial integro-differential equation, and a two-dimensional nonlocal reaction-diffusion equation with an anisotropic coupled kernel. For the 1D problems, both methods recover the correct kernel functional form and achieve comparable solution-reconstruction accuracy. In contrast, for the sparse and noisy 2D nonlocal problem, the hard-constrained MC-KAN consistently achieves lower kernel reconstruction errors than the soft-constrained Cheb-KAN. Our results demonstrate that enforcing physically motivated shape constraints by construction provides greater robustness than soft penalties for multidimensional kernel discovery from sparse and noisy observations.

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### Generative Chinese Statute Retrieval

Authors: Yiteng Tu, Zitao Su, Weihang Su, Xuanyi Chen, Yueyue Wu, Yiqun Liu, Min Zhang, Qingyao Ai
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.IR, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11109v1

Statute retrieval is a fundamental task in legal information retrieval, yet existing approaches struggle to bridge the gap between colloquial legal queries and formal statutory language. In this paper, we propose GCSR, a generative statute retrieval framework that reformulates statute retrieval as a sequence generation problem and internalizes statutory knowledge into a generative model. Specifically, we propose a multi-granularity structured docid that encodes legal hierarchy and semantic information, together with a multi-task training strategy. Experiments show that GCSR consistently outperforms strong sparse, dense, and legal-domain baselines. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of generative retrieval for statute retrieval and highlight its potential for broader legal information access and downstream legal reasoning tasks.

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### A Novel Graph Fraud Detector via Grouped Attribute Completion and Confidence-Aware Contrastive Learning

Authors: Junpeng Wu, Ye Yuan
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11107v1

Graph fraud detection plays a pivotal role in safeguarding the security and integrity of modern digital ecosystems. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are commonly adopted for graph fraud detection. However, the practical performance of existing GNN-based detectors is severely hindered by incomplete node attributes and extreme class imbalance within graphs. To mitigate these limitations, this paper proposes a novel framework for Graph Fraud Detection with Grouped attribute completion and Confidence-aware Contrastive learning, named GFD-GC. Specifically, it first imitates heterogeneous neighborhood structures to implement group-wise aggregation, which obtains informative complete node features by capturing fine-grained graph contextual patterns. Further, it introduces a confidence-aware supervised contrastive learning strategy to augment scarce labeled fraud nodes with high confidence pseudo-fraud nodes, which enhances the compactness of fraud representations and their separability from non-fraud nodes. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed GFD-GC over state-of-the-art baselines on the graph fraud detection task, thereby providing an effective solution for real-world fraud scenarios.

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### Beyond the Eye: Efficient Multimodal Reasoning via Self-Regulated Implicit Visual Tools

Authors: Xiuwei Chen, Quanlin Chen, Wentao Hu, Zisheng Chen, Kun Xiang, Zehua Ma, Mingyang Zhang, Jianhua Han, Hanhui Li, Hang Xu, Xiaodan Liang
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11106v1

Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made remarkable progress on fine-grained perception tasks under the "Thinking with Images" (TwI) paradigm by iteratively performing various visual tool operations. However, this paradigm relies heavily on frequent external tool calls and repeated image re-encoding, which leads to substantial computational overhead and inference latency. To address these issues, we propose Beyond the Eye (BEE), a novel implicit visual tool paradigm centered on self-regulated capability. BEE directly incorporates visual tool invocation behaviors into the training objective and encourages the model to develop a self-regulated invocation mechanism. This design enables the model to adaptively balance internal knowledge and implicit tools, avoiding redundant tool usage while substantially reducing inference latency. Specifically, BEE involves a two-stage training process: (1) Formalized Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT). We construct CoT trajectories with structured tool slots and mixed invocation states. This stage activates the model's implicit tool representations and adaptive switching capability. (2) Self-regulated Reward-Driven Alignment. To address redundant tool usage caused by ambiguous cognitive boundaries, we first introduce the Net Tool Gain (NTG) metric to quantify this phenomenon. Based on this observation, we further propose a self-regulated reward mechanism. This mechanism penalizes ineffective tool dependency and encourages the model to perform knowledge routing, ensuring that implicit tools are invoked only when the model's internal knowledge is insufficient. BEE achieves state-of-the-art performance in fine-grained visual perception while remaining competitive in general reasoning tasks and achieving substantial gains in inference efficiency.

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### FlowPET: Physics-Informed Symplectic Flow Matching for Low-Count PET Reconstruction

Authors: Zheng Zhang, Hao Tang, Yingying Hu, Zhanli Hu, Jing Qin
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11104v1

Low-count Positron Emission Tomography (PET) reconstruction is severely hindered by the dissipative nature of prevailing generative models, where the inherent phase-space contraction leads to the numerical extinction (``wash-out'') of weak but diagnostically critical lesion signals. To overcome this geometric limitation, we propose \textbf{FlowPET}, a physics-informed framework that reformulates reconstruction as volume-preserving transport in a symplectic phase space. By parameterizing the posterior dynamics via a Separable Hamiltonian System, our approach guarantees a divergence-free vector field by construction, theoretically immunizing weak signals against probability mass collapse. To steer this conservative flow, we introduce conjugate boundary conditions based on the Range-Null space decomposition of the PET operator; this strictly enforces data consistency in the range space while confining stochastic uncertainty injection to the unobserved null space. We train the model via symplectic flow matching and perform inference using a symplectic leapfrog integrator. Extensive experiments on BrainWeb, clinical pediatric, and UDPET datasets demonstrate that \textbf{FlowPET} not only surpasses state-of-the-art deterministic and stochastic baselines in SSIM and PSNR but, more crucially, exhibits superior recovery of low-contrast lesions. The results confirm that imposing Hamiltonian structural constraints offers a robust geometric safeguard for medical inverse problems in high-noise regimes.

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### Desc++: Efficient Descriptor Enhancement for Data Association in Existing Visual SLAM Systems

Authors: Ting-Wei Ou, Huang-Ting Lin, Kuu-Young Young
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11099v2

Reliable visual data association is fundamental to visual SLAM (V-SLAM), as it directly determines the quality of the camera pose estimation and map consistency. However, the handcrafted descriptors used by most mature real-time systems degrade under illumination and viewpoint changes, while learning-based front-ends that address this weakness typically require replacing the extraction-and-matching pipeline and introduce substantial computational overhead. Descriptor enhancement offers a compromise by refining existing descriptors within their original format, yet current methods rely on simplified attention mechanisms whose limited contextual modeling constrains the achievable matching quality. To resolve this trade-off between contextual expressiveness and efficiency, we propose Desc++, a lightweight enhancement module that jointly encodes descriptor representations and keypoint geometry and aggregates spatial context through a hybrid architecture that combines order-agnostic global attention with geometry-aware sequential modeling in linear time. The enhanced descriptors retain their original dimensionality and matching interface, enabling integration into deployed V-SLAM systems without modifying the pipeline. Experiments across descriptor matching, correspondence analysis, and system-level benchmarks with four different V-SLAM systems demonstrate that Desc++ improves matching accuracy over the state-of-the-art enhancement method, translates these gains into more accurate and stable trajectory estimation, and achieves a favorable balance between accuracy and efficiency for practical integration into existing real-time V-SLAM pipelines.

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### Desc++: Efficient Descriptor Enhancement for Data Association in Existing Visual SLAM Systems

Authors: Ting-Wei Ou, Huang-Ting Lin, Kuu-Young Young
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11099v1

Reliable visual data association is fundamental to visual SLAM (V-SLAM), as it directly determines the quality of the camera pose estimation and map consistency. However, the handcrafted descriptors used by most mature real-time systems degrade under illumination and viewpoint changes, while learning-based front-ends that address this weakness typically require replacing the extraction-and-matching pipeline and introduce substantial computational overhead. Descriptor enhancement offers a compromise by refining existing descriptors within their original format, yet current methods rely on simplified attention mechanisms whose limited contextual modeling constrains the achievable matching quality. To resolve this trade-off between contextual expressiveness and efficiency, we propose Desc++, a lightweight enhancement module that jointly encodes descriptor representations and keypoint geometry and aggregates spatial context through a hybrid architecture that combines order-agnostic global attention with geometry-aware sequential modeling in linear time. The enhanced descriptors retain their original dimensionality and matching interface, enabling integration into deployed V-SLAM systems without modifying the pipeline. Experiments across descriptor matching, correspondence analysis, and system-level benchmarks with four different V-SLAM systems demonstrate that Desc++ improves matching accuracy over the state-of-the-art enhancement method, translates these gains into more accurate and stable trajectory estimation, and achieves a favorable balance between accuracy and efficiency for practical integration into existing real-time V-SLAM pipelines.

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### AgentCheck: A Reproduce-Intervene-Mitigate Workbench for LLM Agents over MCP

Authors: Aritra Mazumder, Nusrat jahan Lia
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11098v3

Tool-using LLM agents are mostly evaluated assuming all tools work. When a tool times out, returns a week-stale value, or has its description poisoned in deployment, the developer needs a controlled way to reproduce the failure, test a fix, and confirm the fix worked before deployment. We present AgentCheck, an open-source web workbench that turns an MCP server into an intervention surface. AgentCheck runs an agent against its real tools and records every tool response, then re-runs the agent with the response perturbed by a fault (12 types) injector. Matching tool calls are replayed from cache, and later tool calls go live after the agent diverges. This yields a reproduce-intervene-confirm loop: the developer toggles a mitigation, re-runs against the identical fault, and sees if the failure goes away. Scoring has two parts: deterministic pass/fail rules, plus an LLM judge for interpretive labels, validated against human annotations. Across five agents, the best passes 105/120 scenarios and the weakest only 77. The failures are usually silent, confident use of incorrect tool outputs rather than crashes. On the weakest agent, a retry mitigation raises success on timeout error faults from as few as 30% of cases to 100%, whereas stale-data faults remain near 3-4 of 10 regardless of the mitigation. AgentCheck makes these failure modes reproducible, comparable, and verifiable before deployment.

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### Revisiting Matching Response and Swept Feature Volumes for Wide-baseline Omnidirectional Stereo

Authors: Seungjin Jeon, Jongwoo Lim, Changhee Won
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11097v1

In this paper, we propose a training strategy for confidence estimation in omnidirectional stereo, targeting the ambiguous matches that frequently occur in wide-baseline setups. Reinterpreting the matching responses produced by the 3D encoder decoder block, we show that their expectation values provide intrinsic confidence signals. Building on this, our method directly penalizes ambiguous responses without auxiliary heads, multi-pass inference, or additional modules, resulting in more efficient and generalized predictions. Beyond confidence, we introduce swept feature volume resampling, where response features produced by 3D CNNs are resampled using regressed positive matching indices and then processed by 2D CNNs to predict meta-information such as surface normals. This joint learning introduces auxiliary geometric regularization and improves depth coherence by leveraging additional contextual cues during response aggregation stage. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach enhances both confidence estimation and surface normal prediction while maintaining deployment practicality for autonomous mobility applications.

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### Difference-Driven Gating: Adaptive Feature Fusion for U-Net Decoder

Authors: Kai Li, Xuechao Zou, Jiashen Fu, Zijun Yan, Xintong Wang, Xiaolin Hu
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.CV, cs.SD, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11096v1

The U-Net style models have been widely used in many applications. A critical step in these models is to reconstruct the lower-level features using a top-down decoder. This reconstruction requires precise fusion of high-level semantics and low-level details. Existing attention-based fusion methods typically derive attention weights from the top-down decoder features (global) alone or the correlation between the top-down decoder features and the bottom-up encoder features (local), then modulate the encoder features using these weights. In this work, we explore a different paradigm: deriving attention weights from the difference between the two feature streams. To this end, we propose two difference-based gating approaches: Feature-difference gating (FDG), which directly uses the absolute difference between global and local features to generate adaptive gating maps, and Entropy-difference gating (EDG), which measures the representational certainty of each stream via information entropy and uses their signed entropy difference to derive the attention weights. Both methods produce coupled gating maps that simultaneously modulate the global and local features. Experiments on different tasks including medical image segmentation, remote sensing image cloud removal and speech separation showed that both methods outperformed existing attention-based fusion methods, and EDG performed better. The results suggested a new paradigm for multi-scale feature fusion in the U-Net style structures.

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### When cheap gradients fail: the measurement cost of attacking quantum classifiers

Authors: Bacui Li, Chandra Thapa, Tansu Alpcan, Udaya Parampalli
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: quant-ph, cs.CR, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11095v1

Adversarial perturbations threaten machine learning classifiers, including variational quantum classifiers. We show that finite quantum measurement statistics (shot noise) act as a built-in defense against gradient-based test-time attacks whose cost scales unfavorably for the attacker. Because every gradient component must be inferred from repeated circuit executions under any unbiased gradient-estimation rule, white-box extraction consumes a dimension-dependent measurement budget that measurement grouping cannot remove in expressive circuits. Under stated assumptions, single-step attacks need at least quadratically many shots in the input dimension $d$, growing as $d^{5/2}$ under norm-concentration scaling, with a sufficient-budget analysis for iterative attacks via stochastic gradient Langevin dynamics. Simulations up to 784 input dimensions validate the law: the realized total budget is the $d^{5/2}$ geometric floor for plateau-mitigated models and grows as $d^{3.00}$ for the tested deep circuits, whose gradient norms decay with dimension absent barren-plateau mitigation; folding the measured gradient norm back in recovers the parameter-free $d^{3/2}$ shot-noise geometry. Against a matched classical baseline whose attack overhead is dimension-independent (the cheap-gradient principle of automatic differentiation), the quantum gradient cost ratio grows empirically as $d^{3.00}$, so the attacker's relative cost diverges as the model scales. Experiments on a 156-qubit IBM processor (ibm_boston, 4-qubit circuits, $d=12$) reproduce the effect: at matched budgets the device attack tracks the ideal within a few percent, with the high-shot gradient faithful to the exact one. The defense operates precisely when the forward map is classically hard to simulate: only then is a white-box attacker denied the simulate-and-backpropagate shortcut and must pay the measurement cost we quantify.

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### Multi-dimensional training-priority weighting based on physical information propagation paths: a unified residual-weighting framework for physics-informed neural networks

Authors: Zhangyi Lian, Xinda Dong, Wenxuan Huo, Weifeng Huang, Greg Zhu, Qiang He
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11094v2

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have shown promise for solving partial differential equations (PDEs); however, their synchronous optimization treats residuals of different regions and constraints equally, which is inconsistent with the progressive "from source to response" physical information propagation path, degrading training stability and accuracy. Existing causal training methods focus mainly on the temporal dimension, lacking a unified characterization of spatial and boundary dimensions. To address this, we define a unified class of training priorities according to the physical information propagation path: premise regions should be learned before dependent regions; temporal, spatial, and boundary priorities are instances of this principle. Using neural tangent kernel (NTK) dynamics, we theoretically analyze why standard PINNs do not obey this priority: their residual convergence order is governed by the NTK spectrum and is independent of the propagation path. Accordingly, we propose a unified multi-dimensional priority-constraint framework that partitions the domain along the propagation path and constructs negative-exponential residual weights, converting the physical propagation order into a training priority. For cases with coexisting priorities, we introduce a directional compatibility coefficient to clarify that "orthogonal directions can be coupled multiplicatively in synergy, whereas coaxial opposite directions cannot." Benchmark cases show that this method consistently improves the convergence behavior and prediction accuracy of PINNs on problems with clear propagation paths or constraint-dominated structures, without modifying the network architecture and with controllable additional computational cost.

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### Adapting Evidential Neural Networks to Test-Time Neighbor Fusion Improves Molecular Property Prediction

Authors: Cameron Gruich, Weichi Yao, Yixin Wang, Bryan Goldsmith
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.LG, q-bio.BM, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11091v1

A trained molecular property model can be refined at test time by correcting each prediction with the measured labels of the most similar training molecules, a retraining-free procedure we call neighbor fusion; evidential neural networks make it principled by using their aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty to parameterize a Bayesian update. Our main contribution, PG-EVIKAL, learns a property-distance metric to re-rank structurally similar neighbors by their property relevance before fusion, building on EVIKAL (scalar Kalman filter) and GP-EVIKAL (Gaussian process variant handling correlated neighbors). Evaluated on 16 molecular datasets, PG-EVIKAL reduces RMSE relative to the evidential model baseline on 14 of them, with a median reduction of 19.4%, and improves calibration; in sequential-assay scenarios it further incorporates newly measured molecules, refining predictions as they arrive without retraining. This work demonstrates that evidential uncertainty decomposition is not merely a calibration objective but an actionable inference resource that enables test-time refinement of molecular property predictions.

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### Why Low-Light Cameras Go Color Blind: Removing Color Bias in Raw Denoising

Authors: Mohammad Mohammadi, Sina Honari, Stavros Tsogkas, Tristan Aumentado-Armstrong, Michael S. Brown, Iqbal Mohomed, Konstantinos G. Derpanis, Alex Levinshtein, Igor Gilitschenski
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11090v1

Raw images inherently suffer from noise due to the stochastic nature of light and sensor hardware imperfections. As real photon counts fall, the ratio of this noise to the signal degrades; consequently, for low-light conditions, robust denoising is especially vital for high-quality results. While recent data-driven methods achieve strong performance, they typically rely on large-scale noisy-clean image pairs that are costly and difficult to collect. Alternatively, parametric noise models can generate synthetic training data, but this necessitates precise camera calibration, which is often impractical for unknown devices. In this work, we propose a camera-agnostic, calibration-free paradigm for low-light raw denoising. We identify that color bias from black-level error is a primary source of performance degradation and causes severe color shifts. To mitigate this, we introduce a bias estimator network that predicts the black-level error as a global feature of the noisy input. We evaluate our approach across the ELD, SID, and LRID datasets, demonstrating superior performance among blind denoisers, particularly in terms of color correction. In many cases, we are competitive with-or can even surpass-methods with stronger supervision. Furthermore, we reveal that the widely used SIDD dataset contains significant color bias in its ground-truth images, which yields unrealistic color reproduction in trained models. We introduce a new ground-truth extraction framework to resolve this issue and provide a benchmark of existing methods on the corrected dataset.

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### OS-Pruner: Pruning Chains-of-Thought of Reasoning Models via Optimal Stopping

Authors: Mohammed Ehab, Aymane El Gadarri, Vivek F. Farias, Adam Jozefiak, Ciamac C. Moallemi
Published: 2026-07-13
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11089v1

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in complex reasoning tasks through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting. However, these models often exhibit "computational overthinking," generating redundant reasoning steps that increase latency and cost without improving accuracy. Recent studies suggest that CoT trajectories can be significantly pruned, yet existing methods often rely on forcing a static thinking budget, heuristic filtering, sub-optimal early exit via classification, or expensive re-training. In this paper, we introduce OS-Pruner, a lightweight plug-in framework that formulates chain-of-thought pruning as an optimal stopping problem. Given a reasoning prefix, OS-Pruner learns whether further reasoning is worth its token cost by optimizing an explicit utility that trades off final-answer accuracy against generated length. Our novel formulation enables the model to dynamically assess the sufficient point of termination for a reasoning chain. OS-Pruner is designed to be lightweight during both training and inference, and to provide users with fine-grained control over the reasoning-effort vs. accuracy trade-off. On diverse reasoning benchmarks and base models, OS-Pruner achieves 20-60\% reduction in generation length with minimal accuracy sacrifice.

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