# Research Papers — 2026-07 · bundle page 145 of 222 > Full-text markdown of papers #7201–7250 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/145 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/144.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/146.md) ### Not All Color Categories Are Equally Stable: A Multilingual Free Color Naming Experiment Authors: Nuray Toganas, Adilet Yerkin, Elnara Kadyrgali, Muragul Muratbekova, Aron Karatayev, Pakizar Shamoi Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10465v1 Color naming is an important part of human color perception. Its task is to allow people to describe continuous colors using discrete color categories. However, the boundaries between color categories are often unclear, and some colors may be perceived differently depending on their saturation and brightness. While certain color categories remain recognizable across a wide range of shades, others may be associated with different color names when their appearance changes. This study investigates the consistency of color naming for red, yellow, and green color categories using a free color-naming experiment. A set of 18 color samples was selected from the COLIBRI dataset to represent different shades of these colors. Participants (n = 92) were asked to freely assign color names to each sample in Kazakh, Russian, or English without being limited to predefined categories. The results show that color categories differ in their consistency. Green shades were consistently identified as green despite variations in appearance, whereas yellow shades received a wider variety of names, including gold- and brown-related descriptions. Red shades showed moderate naming consistency. Our findings suggest that some color categories occupy broader perceptual regions than others and may therefore be more robust to visual variations. The study results can be used to develop perceptually meaningful color models and color naming systems. --- ### GRASP: GRanularity-Aware Search Policy for Agentic RAG Authors: Varun Gandhi, Jaewook Lee, Shantanu Todmal, Franck Dernoncourt, Ryan Rossi, Zichao Wang, Andrew Lan Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.AI, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10463v1 Agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) extends static RAG by allowing language models to iteratively reason, generate search queries, retrieve evidence, and predict answers. However, it remains challenging for models to decide when to retrieve, whether to use lexical matching or semantic similarity, and how to control context granularity to prevent irrelevant tokens from interfering with agent reasoning. In this paper, we introduce GRASP, a reinforcement learning (RL) framework for training agents to adaptively coordinate complementary retrieval tools during multi-step reasoning. GRASP provides the agent with semantic search, keyword search, and paragraph-reading actions, enabling it to retrieve sentence-level evidence and expand further context only when needed. We train the policy with a reward that jointly accounts for answer accuracy, grounded reading, complementary search, and turn efficiency. Experiments on multi-hop reasoning benchmarks show that GRASP improves both retrieval recall and downstream question answering performance compared with single-step retrieval, prompting-based agentic RAG, and RL-based retrieval baselines. Qualitative and ablation analyses show that the learned policy develops interpretable skimming and scanning behavior: it uses semantic search for broad exploration, paragraph reading for local verification, and keyword search for entity-specific evidence. These results suggest that learning to coordinate retrieval signals and context granularity is critical for agent's correct reasoning. --- ### Annotation-Free Furniture Codes: What They Encode, and How Far They Transfer Authors: Benjamin Friedman Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10461v1 Layout-based 3D scene synthesizers place each object using two human-annotated channels: a categorical class label and a canonical-pose convention. We ask whether a single self-supervised token derived from object geometry can replace both, and study such tokens directly as a representation, decoupled from any synthesizer. A Finite Scalar Quantization (FSQ) point-cloud autoencoder is chamfer-trained on placed 3D-FUTURE furniture with no labels or pose annotations. Diagnostic probes recover fine-category (62.6 +/- 0.5%), super-category (85.6 +/- 1.3%), and yaw (52.7 +/- 0.5 deg) from the codes alone. Swapping the chamfer target from the rotated to the un-rotated point cloud collapses the yaw signal while raising class recovery, showing the codes' rotation content can be set by the training objective. Scaling across asset libraries needs codes that transfer; on an unseen dataset (ShapeNet), alignment is category-dependent: box-like furniture transfers, organically-shaped furniture does not, and a target-blind augmentation partly closes the gap. --- ### Integrating Background Knowledge for Scalable Causal Discovery Authors: Mátyás Schubert, Theofanis Aslanidis, Tom Claassen, Sara Magliacane Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10456v1 Expert background knowledge is often available in practical applications of causal discovery. Such constraints on the true causal graph can help causal discovery in terms of identifiability of causal effects and accuracy of the learned structure, but also in reducing the space of candidate causal graphs. As causal discovery can become computationally expensive for large number of variables, it is crucial to utilize background knowledge effectively during the causal discovery process. However, most current methods only use background knowledge in a postprocessing step after causal discovery to refine the learned graph. In this work, we develop a framework for utilizing background knowledge during the causal discovery process, focusing especially on scalable causal discovery methods that recover only a subset of the whole graph. We implement our framework for multiple algorithms and empirically show that utilizing background knowledge can both reduce computational requirements and increase the quality of the learned structures. --- ### ANCHOR: Automated Alignment Auditing for CLI Agents on Real-World Harm Authors: Kefan Song, Yanjun Qi Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10455v1 Autonomous CLI agents can now execute hundreds of actions across multi-hour sessions: writing code, executing shell commands, browsing the web, and managing cloud infrastructure, all with minimal human oversight. Does greater autonomy invite greater risk? We introduce ANCHOR, an automated auditing framework that stress-tests CLI agents on illegal tasks grounded in public US court cases. ANCHOR deploys an auditor agent fine-tuned on dark personality data using supervised and reinforcement fine tuning. This auditor roleplays persistent malicious users who decompose tasks, reframe requests upon refusal, and adapt strategies across multi-turn interactions. Evaluating frontier CLI agents, we find that while they often refuse illegal tasks when prompted directly, compliance reaches 100\% under persistent malicious interaction. When agents comply, they frequently exceed user requests, autonomously building infrastructure for large-scale harm, including catastrophic risk scenarios such as large-scale financial fraud and bioweapon development. These findings demonstrate that current alignment techniques are insufficient for autonomous agents and underscore the need for safety evaluations against persistent, adaptive malicious users. We release ANCHOR at https://github.com/garified/anchor --- ### Context by Distinct Information: An Auditable Dirichlet-Process Working Memory for Long, Redundant Context Streams Authors: Siddharth Pal, Viktoria Rojkova Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10441v1 Context engineering decides what information a model carries forward, and current designs meter it in tokens: compressing the past into a bounded recurrent state, keeping a key-value entry for every token, or imposing a fixed budget through a window or eviction rule. All three make the token the unit of memory even when the stream is redundant and the task depends on the distinct information it carries. Building on a companion mechanism paper that opens a cache slot only when an incoming key is novel, so memory scales with the number of distinct items rather than tokens, we develop that allocate-on-novelty cache as a working-memory component and organize context by how a task depends on the past: recall-carried information belongs in a content-addressed novelty cache, summary-carried information in a recurrent state, and locality-carried information in a recency window. The claim is empirical and bounded. On a matched character-level control, novelty-gated attention reaches full-attention performance while attending to about half the tokens, and coupling the cache with a state-space summary matches full-attention coupling at that reduced cost; the advantage grows as context lengthens, while a sliding window is preferable on short, locality-dominated spans. On next-code prediction over synthetic Medicare claims the coupled component leads full attention and every fixed-budget eviction policy at a thousand-event horizon, whereas cost forecasting over the same stream is summary-carried and the cache is neutral. The retained memory is an inspectable table of templates, codes, drugs, or places rather than an opaque state. The experiments are small-scale and use only public data; they establish the primitive that context can scale with distinct information rather than tokens, in a working memory that is content-addressable and auditable. --- ### A Physics-Inspired Classical Digital Twin of Cortical Dynamics: A Band-Stratified Metriplectic Port-Hamiltonian Neural Network Learned from Brain-Computer-Interface EEG Authors: Dibakar Sigdel Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: q-bio.NC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10439v4 We present a physics-inspired classical digital twin of brain-computer- interface (BCI) data: a graph neural network constrained to a band-stratified, metriplectic port-Hamiltonian form, with parameters learned from scalp EEG recorded during rest and motor imagery. The port-Hamiltonian structure is a modelling choice - it buys passivity, a certified steady-state power balance, and a clean separation of storage, routing and dissipation - not a claim about what the brain is. The state pairs each channel's instantaneous phase with its angular frequency, and stored energy decomposes over the five canonical frequency bands. A phase-locking prior measured from the same recordings gates the learned connectome, and a metriplectic formulation places the twin at a non- equilibrium steady state sustained by a metabolic port. Fitted to $1{,}109{,}250$ phasor samples from the PhysioNet EEG Motor Movement/Imagery database under a leakage-free split, the twin reaches a held-out reconstruction error of $1.30\times10^{-4}$. Scored free-running against invariants it did not author, the verdict is mixed: it reproduces near-critical avalanche branching ($σ\approx1$) but not the aperiodic $1/f$ slope or the long-range temporal correlations of the recordings. Skew-symmetry and non-negative dissipation hold by construction rather than by penalty, making the twin a structure-preserving substrate on which closed-loop neuromodulation can be designed and tested. --- ### Learning the Brain's Dynamics as a Port-Hamiltonian System: A GNN-Surrogate Metriplectic Twin for Non-Equilibrium Cortical Dynamics and Closed-Loop Neuromodulation Authors: Dibakar Sigdel Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: q-bio.NC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10439v2 We model human motor cortex, recorded during rest and motor-imagery BCI conditions, as a port-Hamiltonian system: a conservative interconnection (skew-symmetric coupling between band-limited neural phasors) together with a dissipative port whose state-dependent decay is set by a graph-neural-network surrogate. The Hamiltonian is resolved into five interpretable frequency sub-energies, and a phase-locking prior measured from the recordings gates the learned functional connectome so that coupling is admitted only where phase coherence is present. A metriplectic formulation places the resting cortex at a non-equilibrium steady state sustained by an explicit metabolic port, with a fluctuation-dissipation-consistent noise channel governed by a single arousal temperature. Fitting the model to 'FitTrainN' phasor samples from the PhysioNet EEG Motor Movement/Imagery database, under a leakage-free split with three subjects held out entirely, yields a held-out kinematic reconstruction error of 'FitTestMSE' that is stable across random seeds. We then score the free-running model against model-independent dynamical invariants it did not author: it reproduces near-critical avalanche branching ($σ\approx1$) but not yet the aperiodic $1/f$ spectral slope or the long-range temporal correlations of real cortex a concrete, falsifiable gap that we trace to specific, testable upgrades. The port-Hamiltonian structure supplies neuroanatomically grounded stimulation ports with stability guarantees, positioning the model as a physically principled, structure-preserving substrate for closed-loop neuromodulation. --- ### Emergent Generalization by Representation Learning in Artificial Neural Networks Authors: Hardik Rajpal, Dan Goodman Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: q-bio.NC, cs.IT, cs.LG, cs.NE, nlin.CD arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10430v1 Dimensionality reduction has proven powerful for identifying neural manifolds, which are low-dimensional structures underlying high-dimensional neural activity. These low-dimensional representations have improved the interpretability of population-level coding. Yet whether such low-dimensional representations are biologically relevant and confer functional advantages in learning systems, or merely reflect neuron-level activity, remains contested in neuroscience. We show that an explicit information bottleneck forcing a recurrent neural network to learn a low-dimensional representation is necessary for rotational and out-of-distribution generalisation in a time-series prediction task. Using information-theoretic measures of causal emergence, we characterise the dynamics of this representation across the memorisation-to-generalisation transition, finding a non-monotonic trajectory which shows an initial decrease, a minimum, and a subsequent rise to a maximum, even as prediction loss falls monotonically. This trajectory scales with task complexity, and the magnitude of emergent structure reliably predicts generalisation performance. Analysis of CA1 hippocampal activity in mice learning an alternating maze task reveals analogous non-monotonic emergence dynamics that track behavioural performance. Together, these findings indicate that the ability of neural networks to learn compact, distributed and emergent representations confers a functional advantage for generalisation, supporting a causal role for learned representations in cognition. --- ### Enjoy Your Talk: A Human-Centered Benchmark for Multi-Turn Dialogue with Decoupled User Simulation, Target Modeling, and Judging Authors: Jinglan Gong, Jiefan Lu, Hewei Guo, Kehan Li, Zhiyuan Han, Jihang Jiang, Wenwen Tong, Lewei Lu Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10428v2 Evaluating large language models (LLMs) as multi-turn conversational partners requires probing capabilities that single-turn benchmarks miss: persona consistency, evolving intent tracking, emotional dynamics, and goal completion across many turns. We introduce EYT-Bench, a human-centered benchmark whose evaluation protocol is built around a decoupled three-party design: a persona-grounded user simulator, a target model evaluated on both intent perception and response generation, and an independent, configurable ensemble of LLM judges. Across 3,400 dialogues with 17 target models, EYT-Bench reveals four findings that previous benchmarks miss: (i) state-of-the-art closed and open-source models are statistically indistinguishable on subjective dimensions, but separate by up to 9x on objective intent-tracking; (ii) reasoning is a phase transition for objective tracking on long-context personas but is essentially flat on subjective scores; (iii) persona format strongly affects trajectory spread, FICR (final-intent completion rate) saturates above 0.95 on Nemotron-USA but ranges from 0.53 to 0.88 on PersonaMem-v2; and (iv) the warm-up effect is observed in 16 of 17 models. --- ### BOCCHI: A More Realistic and Challenging Benchmark for Local Motion Blur Detection with MSDCT-UNet Authors: Kuan-Lin Chen, Yuan-Kang Lee, Cheng-Yuan Chiang, Jian-Jiun Ding Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10427v2 Local motion blur detection requires pixel-level localization of blurred regions. Existing benchmarks let models rely on gradient shortcuts that fail to transfer. We introduce BOCCHI (Blurred Objects Captured across Cameras with Human-annotated Imagery), a real-captured benchmark whose sharp regions overlap the blur gradient distribution and defeat these shortcuts, and propose MSDCT-UNet (Multi-Scale Discrete Cosine Transform UNet), a frequency-aware encoder-decoder injecting multi-scale DCT priors through DCT Attention and FiLM. MSDCT-UNet ranks first in in-domain mIoU and boundary localization on BOCCHI, and BOCCHI-trained models outperform every other training source on cross-dataset transfer with only 633 training images. Our project page is available at https://brianchen1120.github.io/project/bocchi/. --- ### BOCCHI: A More Realistic and Challenging Benchmark for Local Motion Blur Detection with MSDCT-UNet Authors: Kuan-Lin Chen, Yuan-Kang Lee, Cheng-Yuan Chiang, Jian-Jiun Ding Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10427v1 Local motion blur detection requires pixel-level localization of blurred regions. Existing benchmarks let models rely on gradient shortcuts that fail to transfer. We introduce BOCCHI (Blurred Objects Captured across Cameras with Human-annotated Imagery), a real-captured benchmark whose sharp regions overlap the blur gradient distribution and defeat these shortcuts, and propose MSDCT-UNet (Multi-Scale Discrete Cosine Transform UNet), a frequency-aware encoder-decoder injecting multi-scale DCT priors through DCT Attention and FiLM. MSDCT-UNet ranks first in in-domain mIoU and boundary localization on BOCCHI, and BOCCHI-trained models outperform every other training source on cross-dataset transfer with only 633 training images. --- ### Is Model Instability just Noise to be Tolerated or a Property that can be Managed? Authors: Amirali Rayegan, Lunxiao Li, Tim Menzies Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.SE, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10420v1 In software analytics, rerunning the same analysis twice often yields different models and conclusions. This reduces trust in the model and limits its use. We find that model instability is a major problem. Across 127 multi-objective SE optimization problems (12,700 test cases), repeated runs of a state-of-the-art optimizer agree on only 13.7% of test cases, even under improved settings. We argue that this instability is not merely noise to tolerate, but a property that can be measured and managed. By adjusting how labels are spent, how complex the models become, and how splits are scored, we obtain models that agree 4.8 times as often as the default configuration. The standard deviation of optimization error falls by 22% on average (mean std 17.4 to 13.6), while recommendation quality improves rather than degrades. In terms of quality, the refined settings are statistically top-ranked on 119 of 127 datasets, compared to 74 for the defaults. We then test causal and data-locality interventions and find that they help only partially, suggesting a residual stability floor. Our evidence suggests there are fundamental limits to stability set by the data itself (noise, scarce labels, proxy objectives, and the many near-equivalent models a dataset admits). We conclude that instability should be treated as a standard evaluation axis in SE optimization, which should be routinely measured, reported alongside performance, and used to calibrate trust in any single run. The methods in this paper provide a baseline against which future efforts to reduce SBSE instability can be judged. To support open science, we offer the following reproduction package: https://tinyurl.com/Model-Instability --- ### SPORT: Structure-Aware Prototype Disentanglement for Incomplete Multi-View Clustering Authors: Yaoyuan Guo, Zhibin Gu, Songhe Feng, Yuhui Zheng, Bing Li Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10413v1 Prototype-based Incomplete Multi-view Clustering has recently attracted increasing attention by exploiting prototypes as semantic anchors for missing-view imputation. However, existing approaches are still limited in three aspects. First, they typically focus on enforcing cross-view prototype consistency, while ignoring view-specific information embedded in prototypes, thus limiting multi-view expressiveness. Second, most methods rely on instance-level contrastive learning that only aligns paired samples across views, failing to preserve cluster-level relational structures. Third, missing-view imputation is usually performed using global prototypes alone, without considering local geometric neighborhood structures, leading to inaccurate recovery of missing representations. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework termed Structure-aware PrOtotype disentanglement foR incomplete multi-view clusTering (SPORT), which explicitly disentangles shared and view-specific components of prototypes while preserving cluster-level relational structures. Specifically, we decouple prototypes into orthogonal shared and view-specific components, aligning only shared components to capture consensus semantics while de-correlating view-specific components to preserve complementary information. Meanwhile, a structure-aware contrastive learning mechanism is incorporated to explicitly model cluster-level relationships during cross-view representation learning. Furthermore, a hybrid imputation strategy integrates global prototype matching with local neighborhood matching, enabling joint exploitation of semantic prototypes and manifold structures for missing-view recovery. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets show that SPORT achieves superior performance over state-of-the-art methods under various missing rates. --- ### Machine Learning-based Correlation of Charpy Impact Properties Between Sub-sized and Standard-sized Specimens for Nuclear Structural Materials Authors: Yugandhar Kasala Sreenivasulu, Isshu Lee, John W. Merickel, Fei Xu, Yalei Tang, Joshua E. Rittenhouse, Aleksandar Vakanski, Rongjie Song Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10412v1 Reliable correlations of Charpy impact test results between sub-sized and full-sized specimens are essential for structural integrity assessments, particularly in nuclear applications, where spatial constraints and limited material volume restrict specimen size. Although standards such as ASTM A370 and BS 7910 provide guidance on conversion methodologies, and numerous analytical correlation methods have been proposed in prior studies, these approaches generally have limited accuracy and their applicability is often constrained to specific materials, treatment conditions, and specimen geometries. In this study, a Machine Learning (ML)-based framework is proposed for correlating Charpy impact properties across specimen sizes. The proposed approach maps absorbed energy values across the full ductile-to-brittle transition region by applying a temperature shift combined with scaled residual projection, to align sub-sized test data with full-sized response. From the resulting temperature-energy profiles, the correlated values for upper shelf energy (USE) and ductile-to-brittle transition temperature (DBTT) are extracted by fitting data with a hyperbolic tangent model. The framework is validated using a dataset comprising 389 matched sub-sized and full-sized Charpy impact tests on SA533B steel. This ML-based approach demonstrates an improved correlation performance relative to conventional analytical methods, achieving R2 values of 0.942 for USE and 0.892 for DBTT. The trained ML models do not require access to full-sized Charpy data during inference, making this approach suitable for material surveillance programs, accelerated irradiation testing, and other applications involving small-size Charpy impact testing. --- ### Mitigating LLM Sycophancy in Code Smell Detection Using Evidence-Guided Reasoning Prompts Authors: Istiaq Ahmed Fahad, Kamruzzaman Asif, Md. Nurul Ahad Tawhid Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10411v1 Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for code smell detection tasks due to their ability to interpret program semantics. However, their reliability in this context remains poorly explored, particularly under varying prompt conditions where model predictions may be influenced by external cues rather than code characteristics. One such limitation is sycophancy bias, where models tend to align their outputs with user-provided assumptions instead of performing objective analysis. In this paper, we present the first systematic empirical study of sycophancy bias in LLM-based code smell detection. Using the MLCQ dataset, we evaluate how different prompt framings like confirmation bias, contradictory hints, and false premises affect model predictions. Our results show that LLMs are highly sensitive to prompt variations, with Decision Flip Rates reaching up to 72% and False Alignment Rates exceeding 90%, indicating substantial instability and agreement with misleading prompts. To address this issue, we propose Evidence-Guided Debiasing Prompting (EGDP), a structured prompting strategy that enforces evidence-first reasoning. EGDP reduces decision instability and improves robustness, lowering Decision Flip Rates to as low as 12% and False Alignment Rates to as low as 21%, while increasing reliance on structurally grounded evidence. Our findings demonstrate that sycophancy bias poses a critical threat to the reliability of LLM-based code smell detection, and that evidence-guided reasoning provides an effective and generalizable mitigation approach. --- ### TSCoNet: A Two-Stage Copula CNN-LSTM for Uncertainty-Aware Spatio-Temporal Forecasting Authors: Jongwook Kim, Jong-Min Kim Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10410v2 Reliable forecasting of several interrelated environmental variables - such as regional precipitation and temperature, or other correlated geophysical fields - across many locations calls for accurate predictions accompanied by trustworthy statements of their uncertainty. Modern deep-learning models forecast such variables accurately but usually report no uncertainty, and forcing them to output uncertainty through maximum likelihood tends to degrade their accuracy, especially when the variables are strongly correlated. Motivated by this tension, we develop TSCoNet, a two-stage convolutional-recurrent model coupled with a Gaussian copula that jointly forecasts multiple variables over space and time while quantifying predictive uncertainty. The method first learns accurate mean forecasts and then, holding the mean fixed, refines a shared representation to estimate the predictive variance, yielding calibrated prediction intervals after a standard recalibration, so that uncertainty is added without sacrificing point accuracy. We study the approach on simulated non-stationary spatial fields on the sphere and on a real dataset of monthly precipitation and temperature for fifty cities over 2000-2020. The model matches the accuracy of a strong deterministic forecaster while supplying calibrated prediction intervals that the deterministic model cannot, giving a single tool that provides both accurate point forecasts and reliable uncertainty for multivariate spatio-temporal data. --- ### TSCoNet: A Two-Stage Copula CNN-LSTM for Uncertainty-Aware Spatio-Temporal Forecasting Authors: Jongwook Kim, Jong-Min Kim Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10410v1 Reliable forecasting of several interrelated environmental variables - such as regional precipitation and temperature, or other correlated geophysical fields - across many locations calls for accurate predictions accompanied by trustworthy statements of their uncertainty. Modern deep-learning models forecast such variables accurately but usually report no uncertainty, and forcing them to output uncertainty through maximum likelihood tends to degrade their accuracy, especially when the variables are strongly correlated. Motivated by this tension, we develop TSCoNet, a two-stage convolutional-recurrent model coupled with a Gaussian copula that jointly forecasts multiple variables over space and time while quantifying predictive uncertainty. The method first learns accurate mean forecasts and then, holding the mean fixed, refines a shared representation to estimate the predictive variance, yielding calibrated prediction intervals after a standard recalibration, so that uncertainty is added without sacrificing point accuracy. We study the approach on simulated non-stationary spatial fields on the sphere and on a real dataset of monthly precipitation and temperature for fifty cities over 2000-2020. The model matches the accuracy of a strong deterministic forecaster while supplying calibrated prediction intervals that the deterministic model cannot, giving a single tool that provides both accurate point forecasts and reliable uncertainty for multivariate spatio-temporal data. --- ### GNOCHI: Generative Neural mOdel for Close Human-Human Interactions Authors: Gonzalo Gómez-Nogales, Marc Comino-Trinidad, Andrés Casado-Elvira, Dan Casas Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10408v1 Creating realistic 3D human-human interactions in virtual environments is challenging due to the high degrees of freedom in the human body and the need for physically accurate poses that do not collide with each other. Traditional methods for human-human interaction are based on motion tracking or 3D body reconstruction, but lack generative capabilities. Recent generative methods enable the synthesis of individual or interacting motions via text or image input, but generally fall short in modeling close interactions. This paper introduces a novel generative model for close 3D human-human interactions using a conditional variational autoencoder (cVAE), which generates poses for one human conditioned on the pose of another, allowing for controlled and diverse interaction synthesis. To train our model, we address two underlying long-standing challenges in the field of human-human interaction: data scarcity, for which we propose an automated supervised data augmentation strategy that generates synthetic yet realistic interaction poses; and collision awareness in generative approaches, for which we propose a self-supervised loss based on a collision resolution technique using volumetric proxies to ensure physically correct interactions. We extensively evaluate the capabilities of our model, and demonstrate a wide variety of plausible and physically correct interactions, not possible to generate with current state-of-the-art methods. --- ### TVT-PAPD: Pathology-Aware Prototype Distillation for Self-Supervised Whole Slide Image Classification Authors: Ramesh Naidu Laveti, Jaya Sreevalsan-Nair, T K Srikanth Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10406v1 Self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as an effective paradigm for learning transferable representations from large-scale unlabeled whole slide images (WSIs). However, existing SSL methods primarily learn generic visual features and often fail to explicitly capture pathology-specific morphological patterns that are critical for disease characterization. To address this limitation, we propose Tiny Vision Transformer with Pathology-Aware Prototype Distillation (TVT-PAPD). This self-supervised pathology representation learning framework integrates a Tiny Vision Transformer (TVT) with a novel Pathology-Aware Prototype Distillation (PAPD) module. PAPD employs a learnable pathology prototype bank to discover and preserve representative tissue morphology patterns, encouraging semantically similar pathological regions to learn consistent and discriminative representations. The proposed framework enhances pathology-aware feature learning while maintaining computational efficiency with 90M parameters. Experiments on the Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) low-grade glioma (LGG)/glioblastoma (GBM) dataset and the Indian Pathology Brain (IPD-Brain) dataset demonstrate that TVT-PAPD achieves weighted F1-scores of 93.02% and 90.23%, respectively, for LGG-GBM classification, while exhibiting strong cross-cohort generalization across independent glioma datasets. --- ### Spatula: Exploring On-Demand In-Situ Interfaces and Interaction for Attribute Control Authors: Boyu Li, Linjie Qiu, Lin-Ping Yuan, Duotun Wang, Yue Jiang, Zeyu Wang, Hongbo Fu Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI, cs.GR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10405v2 Controlling attributes is a critical step toward achieving the final creative outcome, yet current approaches fall short in supporting users in the iterative refinement of generative content. We propose Spatula, a proof-of-concept system that generates on-demand, in-situ attribute control interfaces and interactions for creating motion graphics. Building on a technical probe that automatically analyzes animation context and generates corresponding attributes and UI, we frame attribute control as an explorable landscape and explore the attribute control space along four key dimensions: Discoverability, Resolution, Scope, and Expandability. Findings from a user study (N=12) show that our system provides intuitive and convenient interactions while supporting diverse needs for fine-grained parameter control. Furthermore, our applications demonstrate that the plug-and-play design generalizes to other domains, such as web design and 3D modeling. --- ### Large Language Models in Misinformation Ecosystems: Misuse, Defense, and Vulnerability Authors: Lingwei Wei, Dou Hu, Wei Zhou, Songlin Hu, Philip S. Yu Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.SI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10402v1 Large language models (LLMs) have transformed misinformation from a primarily content-centric problem into a broader ecosystem-level security challenge. When misused, LLMs create risks beyond false content generation, enabling attacks on the social contexts, evidence sources, retrieval corpora, and verification workflows that misinformation defense depends on. In this paper, we introduce a role-layer framework to unify these risks and defenses. The role dimension characterizes LLMs as attackers, defenders, and vulnerable components of verification systems, while the layer dimension covers content, social contexts, evidence environments, and verification workflows. Guided by this framework, we organize LLM-enabled attacks, investigate LLM-based detection and verification methods, analyze vulnerabilities in LLM-centric detection paradigms, and discuss existing countermeasures against LLM-enabled attacks. Building on this synthesis, we identify three key open challenges: moving from static detection accuracy to budgeted ecosystem-level risk evaluation, hardening LLM-centered verification pipelines against adversarial manipulation, and deploying auditable human-in-the-loop verification systems for trustworthy real-world misinformation defense. --- ### SynthDocBench: Controlled Benchmark for Long-Context Visual Document Understanding Authors: Abhigya Verma, Khyati Mahajan, Amit Kumar Saha, Shruthan Radhakrishna, Sagar Davasam, Vikas Yadav, Sai Rajeswar Mudumba Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10400v1 Vision language models (VLMs) have achieved strong performance on visual document understanding benchmarks such as DocVQA, ChartQA, and MMLongBench-Doc. However, real-world documents combine multiple factors such as length, layout complexity, modality, and question difficulty, which makes it difficult to attribute model failures to specific causes. We introduce SynthDocBench, a fully synthetic benchmark for long-context visual document understanding that systematically controls factors including document length, layout structure, modality composition, and question type. The benchmark is constructed using a combinatorial design, each factor is varied independently across generated documents, enabling controlled analysis of model behavior. Documents are generated end to end using an LLM pipeline across six layout archetypes, with a 40 percent random override to prevent models from exploiting spurious correlations. Additionally, SynthDocBench spans long-context documents with substantially greater length and structural diversity than existing benchmarks. Evaluating seven frontier VLMs, we uncover three failure modes that existing benchmarks cannot surface: sharp degradation with document length, a systematic positional sensitivity in which the middle third of a document is hardest for five of six models and five of six models show a negative Early-to-Late trend (steepest decline: 8.3 percentage points), and breakdown of chart comprehension in long-document settings. These results suggest that current models may be overfitting to benchmark artifacts rather than achieving robust long-context visual document understanding. --- ### Self-supervised Automatic Matting Authors: Xiaonan Hu, Zhiyuan Lu, Jingdong Zhao, Hao Lu Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10395v1 High-quality alpha mattes are notoriously expensive to annotate, creating a fundamental data bottleneck for deep image matting. While prior work attempts to reduce annotation cost using coarser labels like trimaps or masks, they remain reliant on costly per-pixel supervision, limiting scalability and generalization. In this work, we push the boundary further and ask: can we train an automatic matting model using only RGB images, with no manual annotation at all? We answer this by presenting SSMatte, a self-supervised framework that for the first time achieves performance on par with fully-supervised automatic matting. Our key insight is to decompose the problem into semantic anchoring and detail matting. SSMatte first generates a semantic matting prompt from frozen self-supervised ViT features by propagating class-token seeds via a novel, training-efficient semantic anchoring loss based on a generalized Rayleigh quotient. This prompt then anchors a detail matting network, which is optimized via a fixed-point-based loss that enforces alpha-RGB consistency. Extensive experiments show SSMatte outperforms prior weakly-supervised methods, matches the performance of fully-supervised models on portrait benchmarks, and demonstrates favorable scaling and generalization behaviors with additional data. Our work pushes automatic matting to an fresh, fully annotation-free paradigm. Code will be available. --- ### Vertical Fusion: Condensing Internal Representations for Robust ViT Classification Authors: Francesco Di Salvo, Shyam Nandan Rai, Hamed Damirchi, Ignacio Meza De la Jara, Sebastian Doerrich, Marco Lents, Christian Ledig Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG, eess.IV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10391v1 Despite exposing rich intermediate representations, Vision Transformers (ViTs) are almost exclusively utilized as black-box feature extractors, where only the last layer is considered for downstream tasks. We challenge this convention by introducing the notion of recoverability: the capacity of intermediate representations to correct last-layer failures. By evaluating independent classification probes at every model depth across 16 datasets, we observe that intermediate probes correctly classify 18% to 76% of samples that the last-layer probe misclassifies. We show that these gains are not primarily driven by predictive diversity, but by a redundancy-correctness correspondence, where the internal hierarchy acts as a series of stable, redundant probes of a shared discriminative signal. While established horizontal ensemble strategies (i.e., across multiple models) can improve performance, they incur high computational cost and ignore this vertical signal within a single model. To bridge this gap, we propose VFusion, a principled vertical aggregation strategy employing a learnable mapping into a low-dimensional latent space that synthesizes features across the internal ViT hierarchy. VFusion substantially outperforms established aggregation baselines in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings, notably closing 45% of the accuracy gap between the best individual layer and a theoretical oracle performance. Our gains consistently generalize across model sizes and pre-training regimes, confirming that VFusion offers a robust and efficient alternative to horizontal ensemble methods. The code is available at https://github.com/francescodisalvo05/vit-vertical-fusion. --- ### A Stepwise Questioning Expert-Editor Multi-Agent Framework for Long-Document Summarization Authors: Lingyun Shen, Xuejia Guo Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10390v1 Although large language models (LLMs) have shown promising potential in news summarization tasks, their performance on long-document summarization remains challenging as their length often exceeds the input limits. As the agent investment, which provide possibility to improve the inherent capabilities of LLMs. To enhance the effectiveness of long-document summarization based on LLMs, this paper proposes an expert-editor stepwise questioning multi-agent method, in which the expert and the editor guide another agent to refine the summary by posing questions on different aspects of the content and providing targeted clues for revision. We conducted experiments on two representative long-document scientific datasets and evaluated the results through widely recognized automatic metrics. The results demonstrated the effectiveness of our method. --- ### Stateful Worlds, Stateless Elasticity: Exact-State Serving for Interactive World Models Authors: Jin Li, Jiawei Chen Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.DC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10389v1 A persistent interactive world model keeps its running state resident on the GPU that serves it: a multi-gigabyte attention cache, almost all of it rewritten at every generation step. That state cannot be recomputed in interactive time or approximated without changing the world, so a live session pins its device. The pin is a scheduling problem. WorldMove moves a live session under one guarantee: the destination is bit-identical to the source, or nothing is installed. It relocates the cache in 18.8 ms same-node, 101x faster than save/load. It holds a checksum-verified 92.1-94.8 Gb/s on a 100 Gb fabric. At that rate the cache fits inside one interactive block. Migrating an actively generating session, it converges at a block boundary and the destination continues the world bit for bit. An admissibility condition decides each move. The move must complete inside the readout horizon, over bandwidth that covers the state plus its dirty rate. Lifted to a fleet schedulability test, it governed a consolidation loop that executed 48 of 48 migrations bit-identical across two providers. Two constraints are structural. Bit-exactness survives only inside a controlled configuration of one GPU architecture, so moving the state is the only way to preserve it exactly in interactive time. Verification cannot hide inside the wire on this fabric. Receive-path checksums stall the transport at protocol timescales under fan-in, and unscheduled incast silently collapses a receiver while every delivered byte stays correct. An incast-aware admission controller holds zero misses to 1.4x offered load and sheds overload as rejects. A lossless GPU codec widens the admission gate to fabrics raw motion cannot use. We exercise the serving loop and the mover separately, each end to end. Their composition on one fabric is unbuilt. Exact-state elasticity is a joint scheduling problem over transport and verification. --- ### The evolution of AI from image interpretation toward scientific inference in nanoparticle electron microscopy Authors: Evropi Toulkeridou, Jiafei Li, Leonardo Lari, Panagiotis Grammatikopoulos Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cond-mat.mtrl-sci, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10388v1 Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming electron microscopy by enabling quantitative analysis of increasingly large and complex datasets for nanoparticle characterization. Recent advances in machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) have expanded microscopy from a descriptive imaging technique into a data-driven platform for structural interpretation, dynamic analysis, and scientific inference. This review examines AI methodologies for nanoparticle electron microscopy, focusing on transmission electron microscopy (TEM), high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM), scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM), and in situ TEM. The discussion is organized around the principal challenges in nanoparticle characterization, including particle detection, segmentation, morphology quantification, atomic-resolution restoration, defect identification, two-dimensional-to-three-dimensional structural inference, and analysis of dynamic processes in situ. We review computational approaches from conventional ML and convolutional neural networks to transformer architectures, self-supervised learning, foundation models, multimodal AI, and physics-informed learning. We further discuss integrating microscopy data with simulations, metadata, and autonomous experimentation to relate nanoparticle structure, dynamics, synthesis conditions, and functional properties. The advantages, limitations, benchmarking, and data requirements of current methodologies are critically assessed. Finally, emerging opportunities for foundation models, AI-guided microscopy, closed-loop experimentation, and autonomous materials discovery are discussed. By integrating advances across computer vision, materials informatics, and electron microscopy, this review highlights the role of AI in next-generation nanoparticle characterization and accelerated materials discovery. --- ### GigaChat Audio: Time-aware Large Audio Language Model Authors: Aleksandr Kutsakov, Mariia Sadovina, Georgii Gospodinov, Alexandr Maximenko, Oleg Kutuzov, Pavel Bogomolov, Fyodor Minkin Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: eess.AS, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10387v1 Temporal grounding in long recordings remains challenging for audio-conditioned LLMs. We present a time-aware audio LLM that answers questions with explicit timestamps over up to 120 minutes of input. Our approach interleaves periodic time markers with continuous audio tokens using large-scale synthetic supervision from a cascaded pipeline. Our model achieves strong temporal-grounding accuracy on short and long benchmarks and supports time-anchored fragment descriptions and summaries. Extensive ablations examine how time representation, marker frequency, tokenization, and duration-mixture design affect accuracy and computational cost. We release model weights and datasets to support further research on time-aware audio understanding, available at https://huggingface.co/ai-sage/GigaChat3.1-Audio-10B-A1.8B. --- ### Structured Thoughts For Improved Reasoning And Context Pruning Authors: Zain Sarwar, Supriyo Chakraborty, Berkcan Kapusuzoglu, Chia-Hsuan Lee, Anirban Das, Stephen Rawls, Kartik Balasubramaniam, Sambit Sahu Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10386v1 Large language models (LLMs) excel at generating long chains of thought, but long reasoning traces are often verbose and memory-inefficient. In this work, we introduce Structured Thoughts, a framework that organizes reasoning into alternating <try> and <outcome> blocks: <try> captures exploratory scratch work, while <outcome> contains the distilled conclusion of that step. We construct a dataset of structured thoughts by segmenting reasoning traces into <try> blocks and prompting an LLM to summarize each step into its corresponding <outcome>. Fine-tuning pretrained foundation models on this reformatted data produces models that adopt the structured reasoning style, leading to performance gains of up to 8.08\% on reasoning benchmarks compared to standard SFT. The explicit structure also enables context pruning: after each <try>/<outcome> pair, the <try> can be pruned, allowing the model to retain conclusions without keeping the full scratch work in the context. A proof-of-concept pruning implementation achieves an average of 85\% memory / context savings with an 8.67\% performance drop across mathematical tasks. --- ### ABot-N1: Toward a General Visual Language Navigation Foundation Model Authors: Ruiyan Gong, Yingnan Guo, Junjun Hu, Jintao Kong, Xiaoxu Leng, Tianlun Li, Weize Li, Fei Liu, Zhicheng Liu, Jia Lu, Minghua Luo, Chenlin Ming et al. Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10383v3 Visual Language Navigation foundation models aim to unify deep reasoning for grounded spatial decisions with broad versatility for diverse embodied tasks. Current approaches typically achieve this integration via monolithic policies that map observations directly to actions, yet they often suffer from coordinate drift and poor handling of long-tail semantics. Furthermore, these black-box mappings lack interpretability, hindering the simultaneous achievement of generality, robustness, and transparency. We present ABot-N1, a step toward a general Visual Language Navigation foundation model, that addresses these challenges by decoupling cognition from control via a slow-fast architecture guided by dual visual-language signals. More specifically, a slow vision-language reasoner performs explicit Chain-of-Thought reasoning while producing a pixel goal. This compact set of image-space anchor points serves as a universal interface for diverse tasks, including point-goal, object-goal, poi-goal, instruction-following, and person-following. Subsequently, a fast action expert leverages both the textual cues and the pixel guidance to generate continuous waypoints at the native control frequency. By bridging high-level intents and low-level control through pixel-grounded anchors paired with explicit linguistic traces, our approach ensures robust, generalizable, and interpretable navigation across simulation and real-world benchmarks. ABot-N1 establishes new state-of-the-art records, delivering massive gains specifically in urban-scale navigation: boosting POI arrival by 35.0% (to 77.3%) and achieving 95.4%/92.9% SR in complex indoor and outdoor scenes. It also maintains superior robustness across object-reaching, person-following, and instruction-following tasks. New Point-Goal/POI-Goal benchmarks are released as open source to advance the field of urban-scale navigation. --- ### CAFE: A Compound-AI Factorial Evaluation Framework Authors: Fabian Lukassen, Christoph Weisser, Thomas Kneib, Alexander Silbersdorff Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10380v1 We introduce CAFE (Compound-AI Factorial Evaluation), an open-source platform that brings design of experiments to the evaluation of compound AI systems (CAIS). Such systems expose many interchangeable choices - e.g. which retriever, model, or prompt - and practitioners rarely know which of them most affects answer quality. With CAFE, a practitioner registers each swappable component of a pipeline as a factor to build a factorial design over the chosen factors, run the resulting configurations, and score the answers on a shared rubric using a configurable LLM judge together with human raters. From these ratings it attributes answer-quality variance to the components and their interactions with mixed-effects models and reports effect sizes, significance, the best configuration, cost and latency trade-offs, and judge-human reliability. Whereas existing tools mostly either search for a good configuration or score outputs in isolation, CAFE also explains which component drives quality and whether an observed difference is significant. We validate CAFE on a retrieval-augmented question-answering (QA) pipeline over the HotpotQA benchmark dataset, where it recovers planted factor effects and stays calibrated under a permutation null. CAFE is released as a Python package and as a Web application. --- ### Robotic Contextual Awareness for Human-Robot Collaboration and Environmental Understanding Authors: Federico Rollo Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10372v2 The transition of autonomous mobile robots from controlled industrial settings to dynamic, human-centric environments, such as manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare, has made their safe and autonomous operation a critical area of research. These sophisticated machines must be capable of perceiving, understanding, and interacting with their surroundings to navigate freely and perform complex tasks. A significant obstacle to achieving this is the lack of comprehensive contextual awareness, which requires a robot to recognize its spatial environment and identify the objects and actors within it. Without this perceptual knowledge, robots struggle to plan adaptive behaviors or engage in meaningful interaction with humans. This thesis presents novel solutions to this challenge by exploring two distinct but complementary research directions. The first direction involves human re-identification and tracking to improve Human-Robot Collaboration. Our developed approach enables a mobile robot to recognize a specific person, facilitating targeted collaboration while ignoring other individuals. The second direction focuses on enhancing the robot's overall perceptual capabilities to understand its environment geometrically and semantically. Geometric information is vital for motion planning and collision avoidance, while semantic knowledge provides the robot with a richer understanding for more advanced interaction. Both solutions are driven by the improvement of the semantical understanding of robots that enhance their knowledge of their surroundings, allowing a smoother and more natural interaction between robots, humans, and the environment. The contributions of this work in human re-identification and environmental understanding represent a significant step toward a future where robots are more contextually aware, enabling safer coexistence and more effective collaboration. --- ### Robotic Contextual Awareness for Human-Robot Collaboration and Environmental Understanding Authors: Federico Rollo Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10372v1 The transition of autonomous mobile robots from controlled industrial settings to dynamic, human-centric environments, such as manufacturing, logistics, and healthcare, has made their safe and autonomous operation a critical area of research. These sophisticated machines must be capable of perceiving, understanding, and interacting with their surroundings to navigate freely and perform complex tasks. A significant obstacle to achieving this is the lack of comprehensive contextual awareness, which requires a robot to recognize its spatial environment and identify the objects and actors within it. Without this perceptual knowledge, robots struggle to plan adaptive behaviors or engage in meaningful interaction with humans. This thesis presents novel solutions to this challenge by exploring two distinct but complementary research directions. The first direction involves human re-identification and tracking to improve Human-Robot Collaboration. Our developed approach enables a mobile robot to recognize a specific person, facilitating targeted collaboration while ignoring other individuals. The second direction focuses on enhancing the robot's overall perceptual capabilities to understand its environment geometrically and semantically. Geometric information is vital for motion planning and collision avoidance, while semantic knowledge provides the robot with a richer understanding for more advanced interaction. Both solutions are driven by the improvement of the semantical understanding of robots that enhance their knowledge of their surroundings, allowing a smoother and more natural interaction between robots, humans, and the environment. The contributions of this work in human re-identification and environmental understanding represent a significant step toward a future where robots are more contextually aware, enabling safer coexistence and more effective collaboration. --- ### GigaAM Multilingual: Foundation Model for Underrepresented Languages Authors: Andrei Kuzmenko, Alexandr Maximenko, Aleksandr Kutsakov, Georgii Gospodinov, Dmitrii Bolotov, Oleg Kutuzov, Pavel Bogomolov, Fyodor Minkin Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: eess.AS, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10371v1 Despite recent scaling successes, multilingual ASR performance remains highly uneven, with long-tail languages suffering from severe data scarcity. This work addresses the challenge of building robust foundation models for underrepresented Central Asian languages (Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek). We present GigaAM Multilingual, a Conformer encoder pre-trained on 2M hours of audio using a HuBERT-style objective. Crucially, we introduce a cluster-level data balancing strategy during pre-training and a domain-aware sampling method during fine-tuning to mitigate head-language dominance. In controlled comparisons, our approach outperforms strong open pretrained encoders (Whisper Large v3, Omnilingual-1B) on target languages, achieving significant gains on spontaneous speech while maintaining efficiency. We release the foundation encoder and ASR model, offering a proven recipe for effective multilingual adaptation under realistic data imbalance. --- ### Neural Motion Blending Across Arbitrary Character Topologies Authors: Luca Cazzola, Giulia Martinelli, Nicola Conci Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.GR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10370v1 Motion blending in character animation enables the synthesis of new motions by interpolating between existing examples. Current methods are typically restricted to fixed skeleton topologies, requiring identical or near-identical skeletal structures across characters. We present a novel framework for motion blending across heterogeneous skeletons. The proposed architecture combines a semantic encoder, which extracts per-frame latent representations of the motion state, with a diffusion-based decoder, which reconstructs character-specific motion conditioned on this latent code. At inference, blended motions are obtained by interpolating the latent representations of two input motions. We train and evaluate the method on the Truebones Zoo dataset using motions defined on both same and distinct skeleton topologies, demonstrating the ability to achieve smooth and plausible blending in a variety of scenarios. --- ### VINE: Taming Generative Control Policies for Reinforcement Learning Authors: Rushuai Yang, Zhuo Han, Houlin Li, Hecheng Wang, Zhichao Wu, Rui Zhang, Zhaowei Zhang, Zihong Chen, Xiaohan Yan, Chiming Liu, Yi Chen, Wei Shan et al. Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10369v1 Flow-matching policies have emerged as an effective policy parameterization for robot learning. They iteratively generate actions from noise, enabling highly expressive modeling of complex and multimodal action distributions. However, prior works observed that scaling these policies with value-gradient reinforcement learning (RL) often leads to training instability. Existing methods attribute this instability to iterative generation and therefore avoid end-to-end value-gradient optimization by sacrificing iterative generation, high expressiveness, or value-gradient optimization. Contrary to prior belief, we show the instability does not stem from iterative generation itself, but from the vanilla sampling strategy originally designed for behavior cloning, which becomes brittle under value-gradient RL. Motivated by this insight, we propose VINE, an RL-oriented sampling method that enables stable end-to-end value-gradient optimization for flow-matching policies. Instead of following a single flow trajectory, VINE reconstructs a new interpolation state at every denoising step, creating a stable differentiable path for value-gradient propagation while remaining compatible with the original flow-matching denoising process. As a result, VINE preserves the expressiveness and iterative generation of flow-matching without sacrificing end-to-end value-gradient optimization. Despite performing end-to-end backpropagation through all ten denoising steps, VINE achieves stable policy improvement and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art RL methods on the OGBench offline RL benchmark and real-world robotic manipulation task. Videos are available on our website: https://agibottech.github.io/vine. --- ### Co4ICF: Co-evolving Physics-Informed Surrogate and RL-based Pulse Optimizer for Inertial Confinement Fusion Authors: Jiatong Zhao, Tengyue Zhang, Yuhan Wang, Fuyuan Wu, Junchi Yan Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10366v1 Offline-trained surrogates for Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) suffer a well-known failure mode that iterative optimizers drive inputs into out-of-distribution (OOD) regions where predictions become unreliable. Here we present Co4ICF, a co-evolving framework that couples a physics-informed surrogate with a PPO-based pulse optimizer. The surrogate is iteratively fine-tuned on policy-induced trajectories, correcting extrapolation errors as the optimizer shifts the input distribution; the optimizer queries this evolving surrogate as a fast environment. In the 1D MULTI environment, Co4ICF achieves 146.1% normalized yield based on current laser design baseline; as a post-hoc cross-fidelity check, the optimized pulse further attains 246.9% normalized yield when directly evaluated in 2D-MULTI without any 2D training or fine-tuning. Budget-matched ablations support that the gains are not explained solely by additional simulation data and are consistent with the co-evolving mechanism playing a key role. We release a large-scale MULTI-IFE simulation dataset to support future benchmarking. --- ### Gradient-Skipping Relevance Propagation for Efficient Explainability of Vision Transformers Authors: Christopher Buratti, Michele Marchetti, Federica Parlapiano, Davide Traini, Domenico Ursino, Luca Virgili Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10365v1 Vision Transformers (ViTs) are difficult to interpret because current methods of relevance propagation and attention flow do not fully consider some key architectural features, such as the uneven importance of attention heads and residual connections. Prior approaches typically assume uniform importance across attention heads; furthermore, they model skip connections as identity paths, leading to inaccurate relevance attribution. To address these issues, we introduce GradSkip, a novel relevance propagation method for ViTs based on adaptive head weighting and skip-aware propagation. GradSkip models the different importance of the attention heads and dynamically distributes relevance between the attention and residual paths. Experiments on ImageNet1K and BloodMNIST demonstrate a state-of-the-art faithfulness of GradSkip while requiring over 14 times fewer GFLOPs than the best-performing existing approaches. Additional evaluations using transformer-based segmentation confirm improved localization and alignment with ground-truth regions. --- ### A Hyperbolic Neural Closure for M1 Radiation Transfer Authors: Bongseok Kim, Jiahao Zhang, Johannes Krotz, Dinshaw Balsara, Ryan McClarren, Guang Lin Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CE, math.NA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10364v1 In radiation transfer simulations, an M1 method achieves substantial computational savings by replacing the full angular transport equation with a low-order moment system. Because this reduced system is not closed, a closure model is required to represent the unknown higher-order moments using lower-order moments. While machine learning (ML)-based closures can improve accuracy beyond classical analytic closures, unconstrained learned closures may produce non-real characteristic speeds and consequently cause numerical solver breakdown. To guarantee real eigenvalues of the Jacobian associated with ML closures, we propose a hyperbolic neural closure for the M1 radiative transfer system. Rather than directly predicting closure terms, we parameterize the Jacobian through two neural networks: (i) a symmetric matrix network and (ii) a strictly convex entropy network whose Hessian defines a positive definite symmetrizer. These components are combined to yield a Jacobian that is similar to a symmetric matrix, thereby ensuring real eigenvalues. The closure is then reconstructed by numerical integration of the learned Jacobian field along a prescribed integration path. Numerical experiments show that the proposed closure not only achieves higher closure accuracy than classical analytic closures, but also improves solution accuracy and remains stable in discontinuous Galerkin simulations for radiative transfer problems. --- ### A Control Theory of Predictability in Latent World Models Authors: Hanzhe You, Yonggang Zhang, Maohao Ran, Zhiqin Yang, Zhenyuan Zhang, Wei Xue, Jun Song, Xinmei Tian, Yike Guo Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10362v1 Latent world models are trained to predict future states in a learned representation and are then deployed inside a planner that selects actions by simulating them forward. Current practice adopts the prediction error, the single- or multi-step rollout loss on held-out data, as the training and model-selection objective, on the assumption that a lower prediction error yields better control. We show that this assumption is unreliable for a structural reason: a planner does not query the model on the training distribution but on the states that its candidate actions reach, which generally leave the data manifold, so an error averaged over the data cannot by itself govern control. We therefore reframe the objective as the discrepancy between the predicted and the true plan-cost at the plan the planner commits to, and prove that the planner's suboptimality is bounded by twice this discrepancy, whereas the data-averaged prediction error neither bounds nor tracks it. Under a linear-control premise the discrepancy separates into two terms. The first is a small on-manifold residual, on which the predicted and true dynamics agree and which a spectral tax prices through the non-normality of the latent transition operator. The second is an off-manifold divergence, on which an action carries the state off the manifold and the two dynamics diverge; this divergence is the binding term and is bounded by no data-averaged error. Synthetic operators confirm the pricing formulas, and latent model-predictive control experiments confirm the decoupling: across seeds, the single-step validation error is essentially uncorrelated with control success, whereas a fidelity score on the planner-reachable measure tracks it. --- ### Benchmarking the Robustness of Foundation Models for Mammography under Domain Shift Authors: Giang Nguyen, Raghav Mehta, Emma A. M. Stanley, Tian Xia, Thi Hao Nguyen, Hieu Pham, Ben Glocker Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10358v3 Foundation models are increasingly used as image feature extractors for mammography, but their robustness under external domain shift remains unclear. We benchmark 15 foundation-model backbones across breast density, BI-RADS severity, and cancer status using a unified frozen-backbone linear-probe protocol, training on 3 source datasets and evaluating on 12 task-compatible out-of-distribution (OOD) datasets after label harmonization. Mammography-specific vision-language models (Mammo-FM and MaMA) provide the strongest mean OOD performance, but robustness is not explained by mammography exposure alone. DINOv3 remains a competitive vision-only baseline, and mammography-adapted pretraining does not consistently improve generalization. Dataset-level analysis further shows that even leading models show heterogeneous performance across datasets. Feature-space inspection reveals that useful representations can preserve clinical signal while retaining dataset and acquisition structure. These findings highlight dataset-level OOD evaluation as a central criterion for assessing mammography representations. Our code is publicly available: https://github.com/biomedia-mira/mammo-ood. --- ### Benchmarking the Robustness of Foundation Models for Mammography under Domain Shift Authors: Giang Nguyen, Raghav Mehta, Emma A. M. Stanley, Tian Xia, Thi Hao Nguyen, Hieu Pham, Ben Glocker Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10358v1 Foundation models are increasingly used as image feature extractors for mammography, but their robustness under external domain shift remains unclear. We benchmark 15 foundation-model backbones across breast density, BI-RADS severity, and cancer status using a unified frozen-backbone linear-probe protocol, training on 3 source datasets and evaluating on 12 task-compatible out-of-distribution (OOD) datasets after label harmonization. Mammography-specific vision-language models (Mammo-FM and MaMA) provide the strongest mean OOD performance, but robustness is not explained by mammography exposure alone. DINOv3 remains a competitive vision-only baseline, and mammography-adapted pretraining does not consistently improve generalization. Dataset-level analysis further shows that even leading models show heterogeneous performance across datasets. Feature-space inspection reveals that useful representations can preserve clinical signal while retaining dataset and acquisition structure. These findings highlight dataset-level OOD evaluation as a central criterion for assessing mammography representations. Our code is publicly available: https://github.com/biomedia-mira/mammo-ood. --- ### GRC-ProbNet: Uncertainty-aware Feature Extraction for Cardiovascular Disease Classification Authors: Yash Shah, Omar Todd, Philipp Seeböck, Georg Langs, Ben Glocker, Raghav Mehta Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10357v2 The automatic detection and classification of cardiovascular disease (CVD) from computed tomography (CT) images plays an important role in clinical practice. Recently, a hybrid pipeline (GRC-Net) for CVD classification was proposed, which leverages a deep-learning-based segmentation and registration method to extract radiomic and geometric features. However, GRC-Net relies on a deterministic segmentation mask, without considering the inherent ambiguity associated with cardiac anatomy. In this paper, we propose GRC-ProbNet, which takes advantage of a deep ensemble to produce multiple segmentation masks for a given input. From these masks, we extract multiple uncertainty features. We analyze these uncertainty features for both their correlation with segmentation error and their propagation effects on downstream CVD classification performance. Our experiments on the publicly available MM-WHS and ASOCA datasets show that the uncertainty measure that best reflects segmentation quality is not necessarily the one that provides the strongest signal for downstream CVD classification. Overall, our results demonstrate that GRC-ProbNet utilizing uncertainty features substantially improves CVD classification AUROC (92.92\) compared to the baseline GRC-Net model (91.25%). Our code is publicly available: https://github.com/biomedia-mira/GRC-ProbNet. --- ### GRC-ProbNet: Uncertainty-aware Feature Extraction for Cardiovascular Disease Classification Authors: Yash Shah, Omar Todd, Philipp Seeböck, Georg Langs, Ben Glocker, Raghav Mehta Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10357v1 The automatic detection and classification of cardiovascular disease (CVD) from computed tomography (CT) images plays an important role in clinical practice. Recently, a hybrid pipeline (GRC-Net) for CVD classification was proposed, which leverages a deep-learning-based segmentation and registration method to extract radiomic and geometric features. However, GRC-Net relies on a deterministic segmentation mask, without considering the inherent ambiguity associated with cardiac anatomy. In this paper, we propose GRC-ProbNet, which takes advantage of a deep ensemble to produce multiple segmentation masks for a given input. From these masks, we extract multiple uncertainty features. We analyze these uncertainty features for both their correlation with segmentation error and their propagation effects on downstream CVD classification performance. Our experiments on the publicly available MM-WHS and ASOCA datasets show that the uncertainty measure that best reflects segmentation quality is not necessarily the one that provides the strongest signal for downstream CVD classification. Overall, our results demonstrate that GRC-ProbNet utilizing uncertainty features substantially improves CVD classification AUROC (92.92\) compared to the baseline GRC-Net model (91.25%). Our code is publicly available: https://github.com/biomedia-mira/GRC-ProbNet. --- ### ABot-AgentOS: A General Robotic Agent OS with Lifelong Multi-modal Memory Authors: Jiayi Tian, Shiao Liu, Yuting Xu, Jia Lu, Zihao Guan, Honglin Han, Di Yang, Minqi Gu, Yifei Qian, Tianlin Zhang, Yanqing Zhu, Zeqian Ye et al. Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.AI, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10350v3 Recent VLM and VLA systems have improved robotic perception and action prediction, yet long-horizon embodied agents still require a general runtime layer for reasoning, memory, tool use, verification, and cross-embodiment execution. We present ABot-AgentOS, a general robotic Agent Operating System that sits above low-level controllers and provides a deliberative agent layer for scene-conditioned planning, context-isolated skill execution, multi-stage verification, multi-modal memory, and edge-cloud collaboration. To evaluate such systems, we introduce EmbodiedWorldBench, an executable benchmark with 16 indoor, outdoor, and hybrid scenes, four difficulty levels, and over 200 tasks involving navigation, object search, NPC dialogue, dynamic events, and trace-grounded scoring. ABot-AgentOS further introduces Universal Multi-modal Graph Memory, a persistent source-grounded substrate that converts dialogue, visual observations, spatial context, temporal relations, and task traces into typed nodes and edges. A failure-driven self-evolution loop converts diagnosed memory failures into gated runtime evo-assets that are promoted only to later evaluation splits, preventing current-split ground-truth leakage while enabling continual improvement. On an initial EmbodiedWorldBench subset, ABot-AgentOS improves over a single-controller baseline in both task success and goal completion. Across memory benchmarks, ABot-AgentOS Static achieves 87.5 on LoCoMo, 59.9 on OpenEQA EM-EQA, 88.6 on Mem-Gallery, and 76.5 Acc@All on NExT-QA; self-evolution further improves LoCoMo to 88.7, OpenEQA to 60.4, and Mem-Gallery to 89.0. These results suggest that a general Agent OS layer can improve long-horizon embodied execution while providing persistent, auditable memory for continual interaction. --- ### PC-Mix: Partial-Component Audio Spoofing Detection under Mixed Speech and Environmental Sound Conditions Authors: Zhenshan Zhang, Xueping Zhang, Linxi Li, Yechen Wang, Ming Li Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.SD, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10345v1 Recent studies on partial audio spoofing mainly focus on studio-recorded speech with temporal localization of spoofed segments. However, these studies often overlook realistic conditions where spoofed and bonafide segments simultaneously coexist across speech and environmental sound components. In this paper, we present PC-Mix, the first dataset for partial-component spoofing detection, where either or both audio components may be partially spoofed. In PC-Mix, bonafide and partially spoofed environmental-sound components are first constructed and mixed with speech signals from an existing partial-spoof dataset, producing audio in which either or both components may be locally manipulated. This design addresses two major gaps in existing partial spoofing benchmarks: the lack of realistic environmental sounds in speech partial spoofing scenarios and the absence of partial spoofing detection for environmental sound components. We further establish standardized evaluation protocols and design a joint learning framework to optimize spoofing detection across speech, environmental sound, and mixed audio. Experiments highlight the increased difficulty introduced by mixed conditions. The results demonstrate that training under matched target conditions is more effective than directly transferring models trained on speech or environmental sound components. --- ### From Stochastic to Stable: Rank Stability and Structural Sufficiency in AI Visibility Measurement Authors: Ronald Sielinski Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: stat.AP, cs.AI, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10341v2 AI visibility measurement is comparative: practitioners want to know which domains generative search engines cite most often and whether observed differences are large enough to support decisions. Yet the industry lacks a principled way to determine whether enough data has been collected. Collection budgets vary widely across studies and platforms, and conclusions are often drawn from rankings whose stability and precision are unknown. We introduce a sequential convergence framework based on two complementary criteria: rank stability evaluates whether the rank-correlation trajectory has reached a structural plateau, while structural sufficiency evaluates whether the spread of citation shares among established domains -- those whose confidence intervals exclude zero -- exceeds the uncertainty of those estimates. Together, these criteria distinguish rankings that have merely stabilized from those sufficiently resolved to support inference. Both are derived from regularities in the observed citation distribution, including its rank structure, uncertainty profile, and the boundary between observed and established domains. The framework retains a small number of structural constants but requires no externally specified query count, correlation target, or confidence-interval width target; stopping is driven by observed measurement uncertainty and remains robust across a range of sufficiency thresholds. Applied across 30 platform-topic combinations spanning Gemini, SearchGPT, and Perplexity, the framework adapts to platform- and topic-specific citation distributions. Results show that no fixed collection budget can be justified across contexts and that convergence can instead be evaluated from the structure of the observed distribution. The framework provides a practical basis for determining when AI visibility measurements are ready to support comparative analysis. --- ### From Stochastic to Stable: Rank Stability and Structural Sufficiency in AI Visibility Measurement Authors: Ronald Sielinski Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: stat.AP, cs.AI, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10341v1 AI visibility measurement is comparative: practitioners want to know which domains generative search engines cite most often and whether observed differences are large enough to support decisions. Yet the industry lacks a principled way to determine whether enough data has been collected. Collection budgets vary widely across studies and platforms, and conclusions are often drawn from rankings whose stability and precision are unknown. We introduce a sequential convergence framework based on two complementary criteria: rank stability evaluates whether the rank-correlation trajectory has reached a structural plateau, while structural sufficiency evaluates whether the spread of citation shares among established domains -- those whose confidence intervals exclude zero -- exceeds the uncertainty of those estimates. Together, these criteria distinguish rankings that have merely stabilized from those sufficiently resolved to support inference. Both are derived from regularities in the observed citation distribution, including its rank structure, uncertainty profile, and the boundary between observed and established domains. The framework retains a small number of structural constants but requires no externally specified query count, correlation target, or confidence-interval width target; stopping is driven by observed measurement uncertainty and remains robust across a range of sufficiency thresholds. Applied across 30 platform-topic combinations spanning Gemini, SearchGPT, and Perplexity, the framework adapts to platform- and topic-specific citation distributions. Results show that no fixed collection budget can be justified across contexts and that convergence can instead be evaluated from the structure of the observed distribution. The framework provides a practical basis for determining when AI visibility measurements are ready to support comparative analysis. --- ### PrismAD: Decoupled Planning via Semantic Mixture-of-Planners for End-to-End Autonomous Driving Authors: Kang Ding, Zhigui Lin, Hongsong Wang, Jie Gui, Qi Liu, Zhe Wang, Luqi Tang, Lei He Published: 2026-07-11 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.10336v1 This letter presents PrismAD, a decoupled end-to-end autonomous driving framework based on a Semantic Mixture-of-Planners. Existing planners usually aggregate heterogeneous scene tokens into a coupled representation space, forcing a single planning branch to jointly model agent interaction, road geometry, and driving intention. Such coupling may weaken factor-specific reasoning and obscure the contribution of different planning cues. To address this limitation, PrismAD partitions scene tokens into interaction, geometry, and intent groups, and assigns them to independent planning experts with the same architecture but separate parameters. Each expert learns a specialized motion-planning representation, while a semantics-aware router adaptively aggregates expert predictions with separate routing weights for motion prediction and ego planning. Sparse top-$K$ activation with noisy gating is further introduced to improve routing robustness and reduce unnecessary expert computation. Extensive experiments on the nuScenes open-loop dataset and NeuroNCAP closed-loop benchmark demonstrate that PrismAD exhibits competitive performance. Our code will be released soon. ---