# Research Papers — 2026-07 · bundle page 156 of 222 > Full-text markdown of papers #7751–7800 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/156 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/155.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/157.md) ### MultiView-Bench: A Diagnostic Benchmark for World-Centric Multi-View Integration in VLMs Authors: Hantao Zhang, Jinru Sui, Ed Li, Dirk Bergemann, Zhuoran Yang Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08970v3 Recent benchmarks for VLMs largely assess single- or limited-view perception, leaving untested the core cognitive ability to integrate observations across viewpoints into a coherent, world-centric (allocentric) 3D mental model. We introduce MultiView-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark expressly designed to evaluate multi-view integration for holistic 3D scene comprehension. Unlike existing datasets that focus on pixel-level mapping or camera-relative navigation, MultiView-Bench requires models to decouple object positioning from transient perspectives and ground them in a fixed global coordinate system. This capability serves as a prerequisite for VLMs before being deployed for downstream tasks such as mechanical part assembly. Our systematic evaluation of frontier VLMs reveals consistent failure modes: strong performance on 2D planar relations from a single image, but marked difficulty with 3D spatial relations and with aggregating information across views. We further identify biases in VLMs, such as struggles with unconventional axis directions and sensitivity to object colorways and texture variations. Acknowledging these limitations, we propose ViewNavigator, which uses active viewpoint selection and evidence fusion to improve four base models by 12.3--20.0 percentage points under a six-image cap matching the fixed-view baseline; budget-extended gains are model-dependent and reach 27 percentage points for GPT-5. --- ### MultiView-Bench: A Diagnostic Benchmark for World-Centric Multi-View Integration in VLMs Authors: Hantao Zhang, Jinru Sui, Ed Li, Dirk Bergemann, Zhuoran Yang Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08970v1 Recent benchmarks for VLMs largely assess single- or limited-view perception, leaving untested the core cognitive ability to integrate observations across viewpoints into a coherent, world-centric (allocentric) 3D mental model. We introduce MultiView-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark expressly designed to evaluate multi-view integration for holistic 3D scene comprehension. Unlike existing datasets that focus on pixel-level mapping or camera-relative navigation, MultiView-Bench requires models to decouple object positioning from transient perspectives and ground them in a fixed global coordinate system. This capability serves as a prerequisite for VLMs before being deployed for downstream tasks such as mechanical part assembly. Our systematic evaluation of frontier VLMs reveals consistent failure modes: strong performance on 2D planar relations from a single image, but marked difficulty with 3D spatial relations and with aggregating information across views. We further identify biases in VLMs, such as struggles with unconventional axis directions and sensitivity to object colorways and texture variations. Acknowledging these limitations, we propose ViewNavigator, a multi-agent framework that actively selects informative viewpoints, perceives, and fuses multi-view evidence, improving diverse base models on MultiView-Bench even under a strict budget-matched comparison (and by 3-5x for the full agent). --- ### Long-Horizon-Terminal-Bench: Testing the Limits of Agents on Long-Horizon Terminal Tasks with Dense Reward-Based Grading Authors: Zongxia Li, Zhongzhi Li, Yucheng Shi, Ruhan Wang, Junyao Yang, Zhichao Liu, Xiyang Wu, Anhao Li, Yue Yu, Ninghao Liu, Lichao Sun, Haotao Mi et al. Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08964v2 AI agents have become capable of autonomously completing short, well-specified tasks. However, existing terminal benchmarks largely focus on simple problems that finish within minutes and are evaluated only by their final outcome. This setup overlooks intermediate progress and partial solutions, yielding sparse reward signals and an incomplete picture of agent capability. We introduce Long-Horizon-Terminal-Bench, a terminal benchmark of 46 long-horizon tasks spanning nine categories, including experiment reproduction, software engineering, multimodal analysis, interactive games, and scientific computing. Each task follows a Terminal-Bench-style setup with a reference solution or simulation engine, but is further decomposed into fine-grained graded subtasks. This design enables dense intermediate rewards and partial credit, allowing evaluation to capture not only whether an agent reaches the final goal, but also how far it progresses on open-ended workflows. Tasks in Long-Horizon-Terminal-Bench typically require hundreds of episodes and minutes to hours of execution, stressing long-horizon planning, long-context management, and iterative debugging rather than one-shot problem solving. We evaluate 15 frontier models and find that agents consume on average 9.9M tokens per task, with roughly 231 episodes and 85.3 minutes of execution time per run, making Long-Horizon-Terminal-Bench more demanding than prior terminal-based benchmarks. Even the strongest tested model achieves 15.2% pass@1 at a partial-reward threshold of 0.95 and 10.9% at a perfect-reward threshold of 1.0, while the mean pass rate across models is 4.3% and 1.7% under the two thresholds, respectively. These results reveal headroom for improvement. We further analyze failure modes and error patterns, and release Long-Horizon-Terminal-Bench to support future progress on long-horizon terminal agents. --- ### NL-PAC: Specification Ambiguity and Certified Minimax Risk Floors in LLM-Mediated Supervision Authors: Berkay Anahtarci Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, math.ST arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08961v1 Large language models increasingly provide labels, evaluations, and feedback for tasks specified in natural language. When a specification admits multiple readings but the supervision channel does not reveal which is operative, additional labels reduce sampling error without resolving the resulting identification problem. We introduce Natural Language PAC (NL-PAC), a framework that uses a fixed model's thresholded decoding law to define admissible labels and candidate targets. The probability that multiple labels are admissible equals the diameter of the pointwise-admissible target class, and under target-blind supervision every learner incurs worst-case risk of at least half this diameter, at every sample size; the exact randomized minimax risk over this class is attained by a data-independent strategy. Finite-sample confidence bounds make these quantities certifiable from held-out unlabeled inputs. In a frozen Qwen~2.5--3B audit, one prespecified prompt yields a positive model-relative certificate, whereas a paraphrase and exact-rule controls yield zero. A held-out bridge audit finds that supplied candidate reading clauses fail the admissibility condition needed to transfer the certificate to coherent readings. The guarantee is specific to the audited model, prompt, threshold, and input distribution; extending it to human interpretations requires external validation. --- ### Eluna: An Agentic LLM System for Automating Warehouse Operations with Reasoning and Task Execution Authors: Ning Liu, P Aditya Sreekar, Kalle Kujanpää, Zhaoxuan Zhu, Kaiwen Liu, Chuanneng Sun, Jorge Marchena Menendez, Matthew Bales, Tianyu Yang, Shahnawaz Alam, Rose Yu, Baoyuan Liu et al. Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08960v2 Warehouse operations are governed by Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) that encode complex, multi-system decision logic, which must be executed reliably under strict time constraints, yet LLM agents lack mechanisms to enforce procedural compliance and degrade under the context overload full SOP specifications introduce. We present Eluna, a production-deployed agentic system for reliable SOP execution. Eluna is a graph-guided, multi-agent framework that encodes SOPs as directed acyclic graphs with progressive disclosure and delegates independent tasks to parallel sub-agents, each with persistent code execution and live data access. To meet production latency and accuracy needs, we use asymmetric episodic distillation where a strong teacher is improved through episodic error memories, then a smaller student is fine-tuned on the corrected trajectories with memory stripped, internalizing corrections without inference-time overhead. On a 13-task benchmark and two production applications, our fine-tuned models match or exceed their teacher, beat all larger off-the-shelf baselines, and reach 94% expert agreement on the ticket processing application. --- ### Eluna: An Agentic LLM System for Automating Warehouse Operations with Reasoning and Task Execution Authors: Ning Liu, Kalle Kujanpää, Zhaoxuan Zhu, P Aditya Sreekar, Kaiwen Liu, Chuanneng Sun, Jorge Marchena Menendez, Matthew Bales, Tianyu Yang, Shahnawaz Alam, Rose Yu, Baoyuan Liu et al. Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08960v1 Warehouse operations are governed by Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) that encode complex, multi-system decision logic, which must be executed reliably under strict time constraints, yet LLM agents lack mechanisms to enforce procedural compliance and degrade under the context overload full SOP specifications introduce. We present Eluna, a production-deployed agentic system for reliable SOP execution. Eluna is a graph-guided, multi-agent framework that encodes SOPs as directed acyclic graphs with progressive disclosure and delegates independent tasks to parallel sub-agents, each with persistent code execution and live data access. To meet production latency and accuracy needs, we use asymmetric episodic distillation where a strong teacher is improved through episodic error memories, then a smaller student is fine-tuned on the corrected trajectories with memory stripped, internalizing corrections without inference-time overhead. On a 13-task benchmark and two production applications, our fine-tuned models match or exceed their teacher, beat all larger off-the-shelf baselines, and reach 94% expert agreement on the ticket processing application. --- ### Nonconvex Composite Functional Constraints via First-Order Augmented Lagrangian Methods under Local Regularity Authors: Linglingzhi Zhu, Jiajin Li Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: math.OC, cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08954v1 We study nonasymptotic convergence of primal-dual methods for a class of nonconvex constrained optimization problems with a convex-composite structure. In this class, both the objective and the functional inequality constraints are given by convex Lipschitz outer functions composed with smooth nonlinear inner mappings. The analysis is complicated by constraint violation in a nonconvex functional inequality system and by the lack of an a priori bound on the multipliers. To address these issues, we restrict the dual variable to an auxiliary compact set and analyze a smoothed prox-linear augmented Lagrangian method through a nonsmooth nonconvex-concave minimax reformulation. The main contribution is a finite-time mechanism for converting stationarity of the truncated minimax problem into a KKT certificate for the original constrained problem. We show that, for a sufficiently large penalty parameter, all but a controlled number of iterates enter a near-feasible region. On this region, a local conic regularity condition uniformly bounds the associated prox-linear multipliers and thereby makes the artificial dual truncation inactive at the selected iterates. Building on this mechanism, we establish explicit convergence rates for the proposed method in terms of the KKT residual. With dual regularization, a global dual error bound together with a bias-balancing argument gives an $O(K^{-1/3})$ rate. In the unregularized case, under additional local structural assumptions including piecewise linearity of the outer functions, a local dual error bound yields the sharper $O(K^{-1/2})$ rate. --- ### FairSelect: A Systematic Evaluation of Multi-Level and Intersectional Algorithmic Fairness Authors: Nick Souligne, Isabella Mixton-Garcia, Vignesh Subbian Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08953v1 Algorithmic fairness methods are increasingly used to identify and mitigate bias in machine learning models, yet most approaches are evaluated in isolation and along single demographic axes. This limits practical guidance for selecting fairness strategies, where disparities may arise across intersectional subgroups and across multiple stages of the modeling lifecycle. This work presents FairSelect, a toolkit for systematically evaluating fairness mitigation strategies applied individually and in combination across preprocessing, inprocessing, and postprocessing stages. FairSelect supports multiple model architectures, intersectional subgroup evaluation, and comparison of fairness utility tradeoffs across baseline, single method, and multi level configurations. The framework was validated using synthetic clinical datasets designed to represent specific bias mechanisms and a real-world replication of two-year stroke risk prediction among patients with atrial fibrillation. Synthetic experiments showed that targeted fairness methods generally reduced intended subgroup disparities, while combined strategies produced larger average fairness improvements with modest utility tradeoffs. In the clinical prediction task, mitigation effects were highly variable, with some combinations improving both fairness and predictive performance while others were ineffective or counterproductive. These findings demonstrate that fairness interventions interact in nonadditive and context dependent ways. FairSelect provides a practical framework for systematically identifying fairness strategies that improve subgroup equity while preserving model performance in clinical machine learning. --- ### A Statistical Test for the Benefits of Personalizing Interventions Authors: Zhaoqi Li, Emma Brunskill Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: stat.ME, stat.AP, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08951v1 From medicine to marketing to social sciences, the promise of tailoring interventions to individuals is undeniable. However, practical applications force weighing personalization's potential benefits with its possible increased cost and fragility. We introduce a statistical hypothesis test that evaluates, given historical data, evidence that a personalized intervention policy's performance will surpass deploying the best single intervention. The test maintains strict type-I error control while achieving asymptotic normality with the minimal possible variance under specified conditions. Results on diverse datasets from job training, depression treatment, education and recommendation systems demonstrate the test's versatility and its superior performance over alternatives. This test can support decision-makers throughout the intervention sciences by providing a simple and powerful quantification of the potential benefits of personalization. --- ### SplatCtrl: Perception-Action Coupling via Gaussian Scene Representations and Reactive Robot Control Authors: Siddarth Jain, Ho Jin Choi Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08948v1 Robotic manipulators excel in structured environments but face substantial challenges in unstructured and dynamic settings. This paper presents SplatCtrl, a unified framework for real-time scene reconstruction and reactive robot motion generation to enable collision-free robotic arm control in previously unseen and continuously changing environments. Building on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS), we introduce a hybrid voxel-based filtering and dynamic Gaussian relocation strategy that supports efficient scene reconstruction from RGB-D streams while accommodating environmental changes. For safe and reactive control, we further propose a method for deriving continuous signed distance functions from isotropic Gaussians, providing stable and differentiable collision probability estimates that bridge classical distance fields with the modern implicit representation. These continuous distance metrics are incorporated into control barrier functions, resulting in a unified perception-action coupling framework that supports smooth and reliable real-time motion generation in response to scene changes. Experimental validation in simulation, on physical robot, and within shared human-robot workspace demonstrates the framework's effectiveness, achieving integrated scene reconstruction and reactive control in uncertain, and dynamic environments. --- ### Training, Reading, and Editing Legible Transformers Authors: Mark Oskin Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08946v1 A transformer can be built from operators that are legible by construction -- bounded, named units that read as fuzzy set operations rather than dense activations -- but legibility must be pressed for during training, and the pressure has a failure mode. A crispness penalty meant to sharpen a bounded operator into a decisive detector instead collapses it into a dead constant. An identity, E(v(1-v)) = mu(1-mu) - var, shows why -- the penalty is a variance-minimizer blind to the difference between a live detector and a constant -- and names the fix: a per-channel variance floor, the target legibility metric written as a loss, which recovers both legibility and quality. A learned per-unit fraction then retires the hand-set reserved-GELU partition of prior work: given the choice the model keeps no unit as pure GELU and routes 87% of its load-bearing computation through crisp operators. The result is the most legible transformer we have built -- 78% of its feed-forward operands and 50% of its attention value channels are crisp-and-contextual detectors, and per-head legibility rises from 18% in shallow layers to 78% in deep ones. Read in the correct rotated per-layer frame, these units separate a clean detection (what a unit responds to) from a harder naming (what its output decodes to); and because the objective makes each unit crisp and sparse, edits to them are far more local -- 50-184x in the deep layers where the edit sites concentrate -- and can target explicit conjunctions a single neuron cannot express. Finally, a between-unit decorrelation pressure exposes a legibility dial: it trades a circuit's reuse for independence at no quality cost, turning concepts into single, surgically editable units and a prediction into a short explanation read off a handful of named operations. Quality holds at parity with a conventional baseline throughout. --- ### Is sub-metre resolution necessary for cocoa mapping? A landscape-stratified evaluation of very high resolution imagery, decametric Earth Observation inputs, and operational products in Cote d'Ivoire Authors: Kasimir Orlowski, Filip Sabo, Michele Meroni, Astrid Verhegghen, Mariana Belgiu, Felix Rembold Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08945v1 Accurate cocoa mapping is increasingly important for deforestation monitoring, supply-chain transparency, and regulatory applications. Spatial aggregation in conventional medium-resolution Earth observation (EO) imagery may limit cocoa detection in heterogeneous smallholder landscapes. In Cote d'Ivoire, we therefore evaluated how mapping performance varies across landscape conditions, whether very high resolution (VHR) imagery provides a meaningful advantage, and whether foundation-model embeddings improve decametric cocoa mapping. We developed models using 0.5 m Pleiades VHR imagery, a 10 m Sentinel-2 annual composite, and embeddings from TESSERA and AlphaEarth Foundations (AEF), and additionally assessed four publicly available cocoa mapping products. Performance was evaluated through a landscape-stratified accuracy assessment using 2,821 independently interpreted reference points distributed across gradients of tree cover density and landscape fragmentation. The VHR model achieved the highest performance (F1 = 0.92) and maintained F1-scores above 0.90 across all strata. Among the decametric inputs, TESSERA performed best (F1 = 0.86), followed by AEF (F1 = 0.82) and Sentinel-2 (F1 = 0.76). Of the existing cocoa products, the Kalischek product performed best (F1 = 0.83), comparable to the internally trained AEF model. Performance differences between VHR and decametric approaches increased with fragmentation and under low and high tree cover density conditions. Targeted VHR acquisition may therefore be particularly beneficial in complex cocoa landscapes, while foundation-model embeddings offer a scalable alternative for large-area mapping. --- ### TSRouter: Dynamic Modality-Model Selection for Time Series Reasoning Authors: Fangxu Yu, Tao Feng, Dehai Min, Lu Cheng, Ge Liu, Tianyi Zhou Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08940v2 Time series reasoning is essential for real-world problem-solving. While both Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can reason about time-series data, their capabilities are complementary: LLMs process time series as text sequences and thus preserve exact numerical understanding, but struggle with global patterns, whereas VLMs efficiently capture these patterns by visualizing time series but may lose fine-grained details. Moreover, models vary significantly in task-specific expertise and inference costs. Dynamically selecting the most suitable modality and model for each query is therefore crucial, yet challenging because it requires modeling the complex interactions among tasks, queries, modalities, and models, which carry rich contextual signals. To this end, we introduce TSRouter, a graph-based dynamic routing framework. TSRouter constructs a heterogeneous graph of task, query, modality, and model nodes to contextualize the interactions among query characteristics, modality attributes, and model capabilities. TSRouter formulates routing as a candidate scoring problem, where each modality-model pair is evaluated based on user-defined performance-cost preferences to select the optimal candidate. Comprehensive evaluations on 4 distinct time series reasoning tasks reveal that TSRouter substantially outperforms diverse baselines with 16\% to 46\% relative improvements. Furthermore, TSRouter demonstrates robust zero-shot plug-and-play generalization to unseen models and novel tasks and preserves high performance while reducing computational overhead through cost-aware optimization. Our code is available at https://github.com/tianyi-lab/TSRouter. --- ### Vision Transformers Learn Gestalt-Like Figure-Ground Cues from Natural Images Authors: Matthias Tangemann, Benjamin Lo, Zygmunt Pizlo, Kaleem Siddiqi, Dirk B. Walther, Sven Dickinson Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08932v1 Figure-ground organization in the human visual system relies on several shape-based cues, including surroundedness, convexity, and symmetry. While these cues have been extensively studied using abstract stimuli, little is known about how they operate under natural conditions or how they arise from the statistics of natural scenes. Deep neural networks offer a promising path forward: a model that relies on the same figure-ground cues as humans would provide tractable experimental access to the underlying mechanisms. In this study, we evaluate shape-based figure-ground organization in Vision Transformers (ViTs), for which prior work has demonstrated the emergence of object-based grouping. We test 25 ViTs spanning supervised and self-supervised training objectives, by fitting linear probes to predict figure-ground assignment from intermediate patch representations using both natural images and controlled artificial stimuli that isolate individual cues. Our results show that ViTs robustly encode surroundedness and convexity, and that probes trained on natural images generalize zero-shot to artificial stimuli across several models. For symmetry we observe mixed results: the cue is encoded for uniformly colored but not for textured regions. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that Gestalt-like figure-ground cues can be learned from natural scene statistics and position ViTs as a compelling model system for studying the computational mechanisms of perceptual organization. Code and data is available at https://github.com/mtangemann/mlvbench --- ### BlockServe: Block-Grained Continuous Batching for High-Throughput Diffusion LLM Serving Authors: Yuanjie Zhu, Liangwei Yang, Ke Xu, Weizhi Zhang, Shanghao Li, Zihe Song, Philip S. Yu Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08930v1 Efficient serving of diffusion large language models (dLLMs) is hindered by convergence heterogeneity: when batching multiple requests, different sequences converge at different rates, causing faster requests to stall behind slower stragglers and introducing compute bubbles and tail latency. We present BlockServe, a continuous batching framework that integrates block-grained scheduling -- immediately evicting completed requests at block boundaries -- with mixed-state execution that extends dual cache and parallel decoding to heterogeneous batches via gather-scatter indexing. Furthermore, a compute-aware admission controller expands effective batch capacity through token-budgeted refill. On Dream and LLaDA across five benchmarks, BlockServe achieves 1.9--10.6$\times$ throughput over Fast-dLLM with comparable generation quality, establishing block-grained scheduling as a foundation for high-throughput offline dLLM inference. --- ### A Novel Parallel QCNN Architecture with Efficient Classical Simulability Authors: Lawrence Nguyen, Hiu Yung Wong Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: quant-ph, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08928v1 This work presents a study of an implementation of a novel Quantum Convolutional Neural Network (QCNN) for binary classification of images from the Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology (MNIST) dataset. Using a novel architecture inspired by previous QCNN and classical convolutional neural network (CNN) implementations, we use a hierarchical partitioning approach to implement a QCNN circuit that can be approximated and simulated efficiently on a classical machine for a large problem. First, the original image is partitioned such that each process handles a smaller portion of the image, which is encoded into independent states. Then, these partitions merge and combine, resulting in states that contain information from both partitions while halving the number of processes. After repeating this until one process remains, we reduce the dimensionality of the state until a single qubit remains for measurement. Using this approach, we can use multiple processes in parallel to simulate a large QCNN program without the need for exponentially growing hardware requirements as the number of qubits increases. In our work, we use this scheme to train a 128-qubit model, which is impossible to run on any classical supercomputer without the novel architecture. We also explore the impact of this new model architecture on prediction accuracy by training it to perform binary classification on the MNIST dataset with a small number of qubits, and comparing it to a model without partitioning. Our initial findings show that partitioning images into smaller sub-images with this architecture does not degrade the model's performance and sometimes even improves it, likely because it reduces the Barren plateaus issue in the partitioning process. --- ### SafeExplorer: An Unbiased Policy Gradient for Reinforcement Learning with Recovery Interventions Authors: Elham Daneshmand, Majid Khadiv, Glen Berseth, Hsiu-Chin Lin Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08925v1 Training reinforcement-learning agents directly on physical robots makes every fall costly, since a fall can damage the platform and cannot be undone like a simulator reset; the goal is therefore to minimize falls during training rather than trade them off against return, as constrained Markov decision process (MDP) formulations do. A standard mitigation hands control to a separate recovery policy whenever the agent leaves a designer-specified safe region (a subset of state space it should stay within), but the resulting mixed-policy rollouts silently bias every on-policy update, and the importance-sampling correction that would remove this bias is ill-defined whenever the recovery policy is deterministic. We address this bias with a drop-in modification of proximal policy optimization (PPO). Its core is an unbiased policy-gradient estimator that uses the score function only at safe timesteps and never evaluates the recovery policy's density, so it stays valid even when the recovery policy is deterministic, exactly where importance sampling breaks, and it empirically dominates importance sampling even when the recovery policy is stochastic. Because the recovery policy still makes credit assignment slow near the safe-region boundary, two further components accelerate learning: a closed-form value for recovery-triggering states when dynamics and recovery are deterministic, and an imitation loss that copies recovery actions only when recovery succeeds. On a three-environment, five-seed benchmark, the resulting algorithm reduces training-time falls by factors of 233x, 48x, and 26x on HalfCheetah, Ant, and Unitree Go1 over standard PPO, while matching or exceeding PPO's final reward, and on Ant, where the recovery policy is unreliable, it is the only method that reaches 80% of the best final reward. --- ### A Machine Learning Surrogate for Component Criticality Ranking in Interdependent Power-Communication Networks Authors: Sohini Roy, Xheni Hylviu Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08918v2 Cyber-physical power systems are vulnerable to cascading failures caused by interdependencies between power and communication infrastructures. Because evaluating large N-k contingency sets with a high-fidelity simulator is computationally expensive, this paper develops a machine-learning surrogate using the previously published Modified Implicative Interdependency Model (MIIM) as the ground-truth cascade simulator. The surrogate predicts contingency severity from leakage-free structural features and derives an association-based component-criticality ranking for resilience screening. On the IEEE 118-bus system, Gradient Boosting achieves a held-out Spearman correlation of 0.849 for contingency-severity ranking. Using five-fold out-of-fold predictions, the resulting component ranking achieves a Spearman correlation of 0.838 with the MIIM-derived ranking and closely approaches the observed cross-sample reproducibility level. Feature-ablation results show that inter-layer dependency features drive most of the surrogate's advantage, while end-to-end screening is approximately 158x faster than direct MIIM evaluation. The results support a two-stage workflow in which the surrogate screens candidate contingencies and components, and MIIM provides selective verification rather than directly identifying optimal hardening actions. --- ### Pattern-Aware Graph Neural Networks for Handling Missing Data Authors: Minett Tran, Taehee Jeong Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08915v1 Missing data is ubiquitous in real-world datasets. Traditional methods either discard incomplete samples or apply imputation techniques that ignore potentially informative missingness patterns, implicitly assuming that missingness occurs randomly. However, missingness patterns might provide additional information. We propose pattern-aware graph neural networks that explicitly encode which features are missing alongside observed values. We used four encoding strategies -- learned embeddings, frozen random embeddings, statistical features, and hierarchical representations -- across seven UCI datasets with naturally occurring missingness. Our Pattern-aware methods achieve substantial improvements over baselines, with an average improvement of 17\% in balanced accuracy and 22\% in F1-macro across all datasets. The benefits vary significantly by dataset: annealing shows dramatic improvement (+80\% balanced accuracy), while hepatitis and soybean show minimal gains (+4--5\%). Notably, even simple random pattern embeddings perform comparably to learned embeddings (0.650 vs 0.663 balanced accuracy), suggesting that distinguishing between patterns may be more important than task-specific optimization. Our ablation study reveals that attention mechanisms, while helpful, are not critical when pattern information is available -- simple mean aggregation with pattern awareness achieves 0.640 balanced accuracy compared to 0.645 for attention-based variants. --- ### Learning-enabled Parameter Synthesis for Nonlinear Systems from Signal Temporal Logic Authors: Alex Beaudin, Hanna Krasowski, Eric Palanques-Tost, Calin Belta, Murat Arcak Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: eess.SY, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08899v2 Signal Temporal Logic (STL) is increasingly used to describe interpretable objectives and constraints for optimal control and learning methods, especially when no target time series data is available. In this work, we propose to synthesize parameters for nonlinear systems that robustly satisfy continuous-time STL specifications for uncertain initial conditions. To this end, we use gradient-based optimization along with set-based reachability verification to efficiently learn in high-dimensional parameter spaces while providing provable satisfaction guarantees for the optimized parameters. We demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of our method on three systems with up to 18 parameter dimensions. --- ### HAT Super-Resolution and a PARSeq+CLIP4STR Voting Ensemble for Extreme In-the-Wild License Plate Recognition Authors: Karthik Sivarama Krishnan, Koushik Sivarama Krishnan Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08896v1 We describe our entry to the ICIP 2026 Grand Challenge on Extreme In-the-Wild License Plate Super-Resolution (XLPSR), which scored 9.73 wECR on the public validation leaderboard. The system pairs a Hybrid Attention Transformer super-resolution (HAT) front-end with an ensemble of two scene-text recognisers (PARSeq-S and CLIP4STR-B) and a confidence-weighted character-voting scheme that abstains on uncertain positions. We treat XLPSR as a recognition task gated by image legibility: the SR step exists to lift characters out of sub-pixel territory, and the asymmetric scoring rule (+2 / -1 / 0) is exploited explicitly through abstention. Our pipeline runs in 1.7 s per sequence on RTX 3090 (max 2.7 s, p99 2.4 s), well under the 60 s/sequence Docker budget. --- ### GATS: Graph-Augmented Tree Search with Layered World Models for Efficient Agent Planning Authors: Maureese Williams, Dymitr Nowicki Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08894v1 Large Language Model (LLM) agents have shown promise in multi-step planning tasks, but existing approaches like LATS (Language Agent Tree Search) and ReAct rely heavily on LLM inference during planning, leading to high computational costs and stochastic behavior. We present \textbf{GATS} (Graph-Augmented Tree Search), a planning framework that combines systematic UCB1-based tree search with a layered world model to eliminate LLM calls during inference while achieving superior planning performance. Our three-layer world model integrates: (L1) exact symbolic action matching, (L2) statistics learned from execution logs, and (L3) LLM-based prediction for unknown actions. On synthetic planning tasks with branching paths and dead-ends, GATS achieves \textbf{100\% success rate} compared to 92 % for LATS and 64\% for ReAct. On a comprehensive stress test spanning 12 challenging scenarios -- including coding workflows, web navigation, and long-horizon tasks -- GATS maintains \textbf{100\% success} while LATS drops to 88.9 % and ReAct to 23.9%. GATS requires \textbf{zero LLM calls per task} during planning (vs. 37 per task for LATS) and produces deterministic plans with zero variance across runs. Our results demonstrate that systematic search with learned world models can substantially outperform LLM-guided exploration for agent planning. --- ### Optimizing Against Safety Representations: Activation-Guided Adversarial Suffixes and the Geometry of Refusal Authors: Ege Çakar, Hannah Guan, Kayden Kehe Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08883v1 Behavioral alignment in large language models often masks fragile internal safety representations. Recent work suggests that refusal behavior is mediated by low-dimensional directions in activation space. This raises questions about how such representations are structured, localized, and accessed by optimization. We study adversarial suffix attacks as a probe of representational alignment. We introduce Activation-Guided GCG, which replaces output-based objectives with losses that directly target a model's internal refusal direction. Across several objective variants, we find that suppressing refusal globally across all layers and positions is more effective than targeting a single layer-position pair. This suggests that safety representations are distributed across the forward pass rather than causally localized to a single site. We further introduce Soft-GCG, a continuous relaxation of discrete suffix optimization using Gumbel-Softmax. Soft-GCG achieves a 33 $\times$ speedup over standard GCG while improving attack success rates. Evaluating across model scales, we find that smaller models remain vulnerable while larger models resist both activation- and suffix-based attacks at our compute-constrained settings, consistent with larger and better safety trained models being harder to jailbreak. Together, our results clarify how safety mechanisms are encoded and can be broken in contemporary models. These insights provide concrete guidance for designing more robust and representation-aware alignment strategies. --- ### Decoupled Illumination Priors for Spatially Controllable Multi-View Indoor Scene Relighting Authors: Chenjian Gao, Linning Xu, Tianfan Xue Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08879v1 Indoor scene relighting demands photorealism, precise spatial control, and strict multi-view consistency. While diffusion-based image editing models enable semantic lighting manipulation via text prompts, enforcing exact 3D light placement often disrupts their generative priors. We propose Lume-Palette, a progressive framework that leverages semantic lighting priors for spatially controllable multi-view indoor relighting. The approach decouples relighting into two stages: (1) illumination distillation, which extracts canonical illumination palettes from a pretrained diffusion model to preserve realistic material-light interactions, and (2) illumination casting, which explicitly maps target spatial lighting conditions defined from coarse 3D geometry. To efficiently handle dense multi-view and multi-modal inputs, we introduce an asymmetric multi-view conditioning strategy that selectively injects essential spatial context. Experiments on diverse synthetic scenes and real-world scenes demonstrate that Lume-Palette produces photorealistic, spatially controllable, and multi-view consistent relighting results. Project Page: https://cjeen.github.io/lumepalette --- ### FlowDAgger: Human-in-the-Loop Adaptation of Generative Robot Policies in Latent Space Authors: Michael Murray, Daphne Chen, Simran Bagaria, Dean Fortier, Tess Hellebrekers, Galen Mullins, Harshavardhan Gajarla, Oier Mees, Maya Cakmak, Andrey Kolobov Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.RO, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08877v1 Pretrained generative robot policies based on flow matching and diffusion have achieved impressive results across a wide range of manipulation tasks. Yet real-world deployments routinely expose failure modes outside the pretraining distribution. Closing these gaps typically requires large-scale data collection or online reinforcement learning on physical hardware, which is impractical for rapid and safe adaptation. We present FlowDAgger, a sample- and compute-efficient method for adapting frozen generative robot policies from human interventions in latent space. Our key idea is action inversion: each human expert action is mapped to the noise that would have produced it under the frozen base policy, using reverse-time integration followed by local refinement. The resulting inverted noise provides supervision for a lightweight latent policy that steers the base model at deployment time, enabling rapid skill acquisition while preserving its behavioral priors. We evaluate FlowDAgger in simulation and on real-world bimanual and single-arm manipulation, adapting both action-head VLAs and world-action models from a handful of interventions. FlowDAgger outperforms supervised fine-tuning and latent-space RL baselines and preserves pretrained skills on held-out tasks, offering a practical path for adapting robot foundation models in the real world. Website: https://microsoft.github.io/FlowDAgger --- ### Secure-by-Disguise: A Systematic Evaluation of Image Disguising for Confidential Medical Image Modeling Authors: Jason Rojas, Jiajie He, Yash Patel, Yuechun Gu, Zeyun Yu, Keke Chen Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08867v1 Cloud-based deep learning enables large-scale medical image analysis but raises significant privacy concerns when sensitive patient images are outsourced for model development. Image disguising has recently emerged as a promising privacy-enhancing technology (PET) that transforms images into visually unintelligible representations while preserving information for downstream learning. We established a unified framework to evaluate representative methods, DisguisedNets and NeuraCrypt, across four datasets involving classification and semantic segmentation tasks. Our analysis assessed predictive utility, efficiency, and robustness against reconstruction attacks. Results showed that image disguising performance varies significantly between tasks; while methods preserved utility for medical image classification, they caused substantial degradation in dense semantic segmentation. Specifically, Randomized Multidimensional Transformation (RMT) offered the optimal balance of performance and security, whereas AES-based disguising severely impacted utility. Furthermore, regression-based reconstruction attacks effective on natural images proved considerably less successful on realistic medical images. These findings provide a systematic assessment of PET suitability for confidential medical AI applications. --- ### Clean2FX: Label-conditioned modeling for clean-to-effect guitar audio transformations Authors: Oliverio Bombicci Pontelli, Iran R. Roman Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.SD, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08863v1 We present Clean2FX, a study and demo of label-conditioned clean-to-effect transformation for electric guitar audio. Given a clean guitar input and a target effect label, the task is to synthesize the corresponding effected signal while preserving the musical content. Training and evaluation pairs are constructed from EGFxSet real, single tone recordings by assembling matched clean/effected chords, melodies, and mixed timelines. This allows for controlled comparison across effects. We evaluate four neural approaches under a common spectrogram-based transformation setting: two variational autoencoders and two U-Net models that differ in whether they operate on linear or log-magnitude representations. Performance is measured using linear-magnitude spectrogram MSE and Fréchet Audio Distance. The U-Net models outperform the variational autoencoder variants. Per-effect results show that distortion effects are most readily improved, whereas delay and reverb effects exhibit weaker FAD gains despite substantial spectral-error reductions. A conditioning-sensitivity diagnostic provides evidence that the best model responds to target labels rather than collapsing to a single transformation. Our demo website compares two models applied on real-world guitar performances outside training and validation data, providing audio and spectrogram examples of the practical clean-to-effect behavior. --- ### How are linear representations learned? Exact solutions to the dynamics of abstraction Authors: William W. Yang, Andrew M. Saxe, Peter E. Latham Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08843v1 In artificial and biological neural networks, concepts are often encoded as consistent linear directions in representation space. In deep learning, this idea is known as the linear representation hypothesis and underpins many interpretability and control methods based on linear probes, from concept detection to activation steering. Yet while prior work has studied whether such directions should exist $\textit{after}$ training, the dynamics of how they emerge $\textit{during}$ training remain poorly understood. Here, we develop a framework to study the alignment of concept directions during training - a process we call "abstraction". In a minimal linear network setting, we obtain exact solutions for the full trajectory of abstraction. These solutions reveal key analytic principles governing abstraction: (i) data and target geometry jointly determine abstraction at the end-of-learning, (ii) abstraction improves with network depth, and (iii) initialization scale controls the maximum abstraction reached during training. Extending our theory to nonlinear networks, we analyze how the choice of nonlinearity affects abstraction dynamics: erf networks approximate the linear theory, while abstraction in ReLU networks depends less on target geometry and more on input geometry. Across both, we prove a striking attenuation law: both nonlinearities weaken abstraction in activations relative to preactivations. We find evidence for this law in open models (DINOv3, Gemma 4) and apply our theory to improve linear probe generalization in LLMs. Together, our results provide a dynamical theory of abstraction with implications for interpretability and control. --- ### Mixture of Probes: Learning from Privileged Modalities in Multimodal LLMs Through Probing Authors: Dominick Reilly, Qiyu Wu, Hiromi Wakaki, Srijan Das, Yuki Mistufuji Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08839v1 Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are typically designed under the assumption that all modalities available during training will also be accessible at inference. However, many real-world settings violate this assumption, requiring models to operate under a privileged modality setting, where auxiliary modalities are available only during training. While these modalities contain valuable information, existing MLLMs largely fail to leverage them effectively, as they treat modalities as interchangeable inputs rather than sources of complementary supervision. We propose Mixture of Probes (MoP), a novel framework that disentangles modality-specific and modality-general signals within the MLLM, allowing the model to preserve modality-dependent structure while learning transferable representations across modalities. At its core, MoP achieves this through a structured probing mechanism that extracts and organizes information from intermediate representations of a shared modality encoder, rather than relying only on final-layer alignment as done in existing MLLMs. To support this disentanglement, we further introduce MoP Cross-modal Training (MoP-X), a training strategy for MoP centered around a probe disentanglement loss that prevents probe collapse and encourages cross-modal learning. We evaluate MoP across two domains spanning eight tasks and four modalities under a comprehensive evaluation protocol tailored to the privileged modality setting, where each modality is independently treated as the sole input at inference time. MoP consistently outperforms strong MLLM baselines, achieving up to 65% relative improvement, demonstrating that auxiliary modalities, even when unavailable at inference, can provide substantial gains when effectively leveraged during training. Code, model checkpoints, and evaluation protocols will be made available at https://github.com/Sony/MoP. --- ### Prompt-Driven Exploration: Language as an Exploration Space for VLA Reinforcement Learning Authors: Sunshine Jiang, John Marangola, David Zhang, Raghuram Kowdeed, Ruiyang Luo, Nitish Dashora, Richard Li, Pulkit Agrawal, Zhang-Wei Hong Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08837v4 Exploration is essential to RL since a policy cannot improve by repeatedly sampling the behaviors it already prefers. Standard methods inject stochasticity in the action space, but such jitter only yields rollouts close to the original. Escaping a weak policy often requires global perturbations that action noise cannot produce. Large language models (LLMs) and vision-language-action (VLA) models offer a pathway: they condition the policy on a natural language prompt, and since the rollout follows from it, modifying the prompt induces global changes. The challenge is finding prompts that induce useful global changes. With a weak policy that rarely succeeds, reward is too sparse to select on. Our idea is to refine prompts from the rollouts themselves: a vision-language model (VLM) reasons over the rollout video, diagnoses how the policy responded, and rewrites the prompt to elicit better behavior next time. This procedure resembles posterior sampling, a classical RL exploration framework, at the level of prompts: the VLM maintains an implicit distribution over useful prompts and updates it from observed rollouts. We call this strategy Prompt-Driven Exploration (PDE). Across manipulation and reasoning tasks, PDE enables RL to learn successful policies even from zero-reward starts, and improves sample efficiency more broadly. Our website is available at https://xinyunsunshine.github.io/prompt-rl. --- ### Prompt-Driven Exploration Authors: Sunshine Jiang, John Marangola, David Zhang, Raghuram Kowdeed, Ruiyang Luo, Nitish Dashora, Richard Li, Pulkit Agrawal, Zhang-Wei Hong Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08837v1 Exploration is essential to RL since a policy cannot improve by repeatedly sampling the behaviors it already prefers. Standard methods inject stochasticity in the action space, but such jitter only yields rollouts close to the original. Escaping a weak policy often requires global perturbations that action noise cannot produce. Large language models (LLMs) and vision-language-action (VLA) models offer a pathway: they condition the policy on a natural language prompt, and since the rollout follows from it, modifying the prompt induces global changes. The challenge is finding prompts that induce useful global changes. With a weak policy that rarely succeeds, reward is too sparse to select on. Our idea is to refine prompts from the rollouts themselves: a vision-language model (VLM) reasons over the rollout video, diagnoses how the policy responded, and rewrites the prompt to elicit better behavior next time. This procedure realizes posterior sampling, a classical RL exploration framework, at the level of prompts: the VLM maintains an implicit distribution over useful prompts and updates it from observed rollouts. We call this strategy Prompt-Driven Exploration (PDE). Across manipulation and reasoning tasks, PDE enables RL to learn successful policies even from zero-reward starts, and improves sample efficiency more broadly. Our website is available at https://xinyunsunshine.github.io/prompt-rl. --- ### StereoSplat+: Feed-Forward Stereo Gaussian Splatting with Diffusion-Assisted Progressive Inference Authors: Zihua Liu, Masatoshi Okutomi Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08808v1 Recent advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have enabled high-quality, render-ready scene representations for novel-view synthesis. However, most existing 3DGS pipelines rely on multi-view observations (or non-causal access to future frames) to achieve sufficient coverage, which is often unavailable in on-device robotics and AR settings where sensing is restricted to a single stereo rig. Recovering a high-quality 3DGS scene from one stereo observation, therefore, remains challenging due to occlusions, limited field of view, and missing geometry. We present StereoSplat+, a diffusion-enhanced feed-forward framework that enables causal reconstruction from a single stereo pair. Our method builds on two key components. First, we propose StereoSplat, an input-invariant feed-forward 3D Gaussian estimator that takes a variable number of posed stereo pairs as input and predicts high-quality 3D Gaussians. StereoSplat fuses complementary geometry cues via a cost-volume branch and a triplane-based 3D volume branch and leverages continuous pose encoding to generalize across view counts and camera configurations. Second, since multiple posed stereo pairs are typically unavailable at inference time, we introduce a diffusion-enhanced one-shot progressive inference scheme called StereoSplat+: starting from one stereo pair, we render novel stereo views from the predicted 3DGS, refine them with a one-step diffusion enhancer, and feed them back as additional inputs to update the 3DGS. Experiments on the KITTI-360 dataset show that StereoSplat+ improves novel-view rendering quality and geometry accuracy, especially in occluded regions and under strong view extrapolation, outperforming recent feed-forward 3DGS baselines. --- ### TheBioCollection: Unified Pre-Training Scale LLM Corpus for Biology Authors: Hyunjin Seo, Hyeon Hwang, Gyubok Lee, Jay Shin, Jimin Park, Taesoo Kim, Sanghoon Lee, Hongjoon Ahn, Sungjun Han, Sangwon Jung Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: q-bio.QM, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08803v2 The push toward large language models for biology (BioLM) has created a need for training corpora that can endow models with a genuine understanding of biology. However, existing biological resources, such as molecular databases, protein repositories, genomic annotations, single-cell atlases, and pathway databases, are scattered across heterogeneous formats and remain unorganized into a cohesive corpus for language model training. We present TheBioCollection, a 52.6B-token pre-training-scale corpus that converts these disparate resources into a unified, training-ready form spanning small molecules, proteins, genomic sequences, cells, and pathways. Beyond consolidating existing data, TheBioCollection enriches each record with tool-computed biological properties and introduces new instruction tasks for capabilities that current corpora barely cover. We pair the corpus with TheBioCollection-Eval, a matched suite probing recognition, generation, and prediction across molecular, protein, genomic, cellular, and cross-domain settings. Holding the base Gravity-16B-A3B architecture fixed, training on TheBioCollection more than doubles its overall score on TheBioCollection-Eval with gains in every domain, while leaving general linguistic ability nearly intact. --- ### Wat3R: Underwater 3D Geometry Learning without Annotations Authors: Jiangwei Ren, Xingyu Jiang, Zijie Song, Wei Xu, Hongkai Lin, Dingkang Liang, Xiang Bai Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08772v1 Estimating 3D geometry in underwater environments presents unique challenges due to light attenuation, scattering, and the absence of large-scale, high-quality 3D annotations. Pioneering methods rely on massive dense annotations that are impractical in underwater settings. In this paper, we propose Wat3R, a cross-domain semi-supervised learning framework designed to adapt feed-forward 3D reconstruction models from air to underwater scenes. Uniquely, our method eliminates the need for any annotated underwater data following a teacher-student architecture, that learns robust geometry representations merely on abundant unlabeled real underwater video footage. We also design a cross-view consistency loss that leverages geometric cues from other views to compensate for the information degradation in the current view caused by water attenuation and scattering. Furthermore, considering the lack of comprehensive evaluation benchmarks, we construct Water3D, a diverse dataset covering various water bodies and underwater scenarios, designed for geometric task evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that Wat3R outperforms current state-of-the-art methods in underwater multi-view depth estimation and point cloud reconstruction. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/LSXI7/Wat3R . --- ### ZipDepth: Bringing Lightweight Zero-Shot Monocular Depth Anywhere, on Any Device Authors: Fabio Tosi, Luca Bartolomei, Matteo Poggi, Stefano Mattoccia Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08771v1 Monocular depth estimation has seen remarkable progress through foundation models achieving robust zero-shot generalization, yet their computational demands place them far beyond the reach of embedded and mobile platforms. Lightweight alternatives exist, but have been developed almost exclusively within single-domain, self-supervised paradigms, failing silently under domain shift. We present ZipDepth, a compact monocular depth network that bridges this gap by combining an efficient reparameterizable encoder-decoder with large-scale knowledge distillation from a foundation model over a large multi-domain training set. Comprising just 6.1M parameters, ZipDepth runs at real-time rates from server GPUs to power-constrained devices, achieving the best trade-off between zero-shot accuracy and deployment efficiency among lightweight models across five benchmarks, taking a significant step towards the accuracy of foundation models with 50x more parameters. --- ### LongE2V: Long-Horizon Event-based Video Reconstruction, Prediction, and Frame Interpolation with Video Diffusion Models Authors: Cheng-De Fan, Chun-Wei Tuan Mu, Chen-Wei Chang, Chin-Yang Lin, Kun-Ru Wu, Yu-Chee Tseng, Yu-Lun Liu Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08770v1 Recovering high-quality video from sparse event streams is a challenging task. Regression methods often blur textures, while existing generative models struggle with long-term stability. We propose LongE2V, a novel approach that leverages pre-trained video diffusion priors to jointly handle event-based video reconstruction, prediction, and frame interpolation. By fine-tuning a foundational video model, our approach achieves high data efficiency and superior perceptual quality. We introduce Autoregressive Unrolling and Adaptive Context Switching to mitigate temporal drift in extremely long sequences. We also propose Reencoding Alignment with Cross Residual Correction to ensure precise bidirectional consistency during frame interpolation. Furthermore, Event Voxel Density Augmentation ensures robustness across varying sensor resolutions. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks demonstrate that LongE2V outperforms state-of-the-art methods across all three tasks, exhibiting exceptional temporal coherence and zero-shot generalization. Project page: https://cdfan0627.github.io/LongE2V-page/ --- ### Geometry and Gradient-based Partitioning for Panoramic Outdoor Reconstruction Authors: Weijian Chen, Weibo Yao, Yuhang Zhang, Xiaolin Tang, Guo Wang, Weijun Zhang, Xitong Gao, Yihao Chen, Hongde Qin, Lu Qi Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08769v1 Scaling 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) to large outdoor scenes is costly in both data acquisition and computation. Adopting panoramic images with equirectangular projection (ERP) can reduce capture effort via their full $360^{\circ}$ field of view, yet the resulting omnipresent visibility invalidates existing partitioning strategies that rely on local camera frustums, causing block-wise optimization to degenerate into global training. Thus, we propose PanoLOG, a two-stage coarse-to-fine framework equipped with a Geometry and Gradient-based Partitioning Strategy tailored for large-scale panoramic 3DGS reconstruction. In the global coarse stage, PanoLOG leverages sky-sphere modeling and panoramic monocular depth supervision for reliable geometry, while in the refinement stage, G$^2$PS builds adaptive bounding volumes via parallax-driven uncertainty and assigns cameras via gradient-based importance scoring. Furthermore, we construct Pano360, the first benchmark on large-scale panoramic dataset for outdoor scene reconstruction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that G$^2$PS achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality while maintaining scalable, block-parallel training. Our models, training code, and dataset are publicly available. --- ### UniClawBench: A Universal Benchmark for Proactive Agents on Real-World Tasks Authors: Zhekai Chen, Chengqi Duan, Kaiyue Sun, Bohao Li, Yuqing Wang, Manyuan Zhang, Xihui Liu Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08768v1 The rapid development of large language models and multimodal large language models has accelerated the emergence of proactive agents capable of operating everyday tools and assisting users in real-world environments. However, existing benchmarks struggle to evaluate such agents effectively, as they often rely on sandboxed environments and single-turn evaluation paradigms. Moreover, their scenario-based task taxonomies mix multiple model capabilities within the same task category, making it difficult to identify the root causes of agent failures. To address these limitations, we introduce UniClawBench, the first capability-driven benchmark designed to evaluate proactive agents in dynamic, real-world settings. UniClawBench is built around five foundational model capabilities: Skill Usage, Exploration, Long-Context Reasoning, Multimodal Understanding, and Cross-Platform Coordination. Based on these capabilities, we design 400 bilingual real-world tasks. Unlike previous benchmarks that rely on static, pre-recorded answers, our benchmark evaluates agents in live Docker containers using fine-grained, step-by-step completion checkpoints. Furthermore, we design a closed-loop evaluation strategy comprising an executor agent, a hidden supervisor agent, and a user agent to simulate realistic multi-turn human feedback without leaking grading criteria. To disentangle base model capabilities from framework-level design choices, we evaluate state-of-the-art models under multiple agent frameworks. Through comprehensive comparisons across both models and frameworks, we show how base model capabilities and agent framework designs jointly shape performance in real-world environments. To facilitate future research, we make our benchmark and code publicly available at https://github.com/HKU-MMLab/UniClawBench. --- ### OPSD-V: On-Policy Self-Distillation for Post-Training Few-Step Autoregressive Video Generators Authors: Hongyu Liu, Chun Wang, Feng Gao, Xuanhua He, Yue Ma, Ziyu Wan, Yong Zhang, Xiaoming Wei, Qifeng Chen Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08766v1 We propose OPSD-V, an on-policy self-distillation paradigm for post-training few-step autoregressive (AR) video diffusion models. Existing few-step AR video generators can produce long videos with low latency, but still suffer from error accumulation and weakened motion dynamics during long autoregressive rollout. OPSD-V reduces long-horizon degradation while preserving the original few-step inference path. The key idea is to introduce real long-video data as temporal context during training and use it to provide dense trajectory-level supervision. Specifically, the student follows the exact inference-time rollout, generating each chunk conditioned on its own previously generated KV cache. In parallel, the teacher is evaluated at the same student-visited denoising states, but uses a cleaner AR-consistent temporal cache in which older history can be replaced by real-video context. This provides dense denoising-level corrective targets under on-policy AR cache dynamics, without changing the sampler, number of denoising steps, or inference-time cache mechanism. We apply OPSD-V to representative few-step AR video models, including Self-Forcing and LongLive. Experiments show consistent improvements in visual quality, motion dynamics, and VBenchLong scores. A user study with 10 participants comparing 20 video pairs shows that OPSD-V is preferred over the base models in 66.0% of overall-preference judgments (82.5% excluding ties). --- ### Enhancing In-context Panoramic Generation via Geometric-aware Pretraining Authors: Haoran Feng, Ruiyang Zhang, Longyi Zhang, Dizhe Zhang, Lu Qi Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08765v2 In this work, we present Canvas360, a two-stage framework for in-context panoramic generation that combines geometry-aware pretraining with downstream task-specific fine-tuning. To address the lack of large-scale, high-quality training data tailored to in-context panoramic tasks, we propose Canvas360Dataset, a collection of 1M high-quality paired panoramic samples for style transfer, inpainting, outpainting, and editing, enabling effective supervision across diverse in-context generation scenarios. On the modeling side, Canvas360 enhances text-to-panorama generation through parallel depth generation, velocity circular padding, and similarity loss regularization, enabling the model to learn geometry-aware representations, capture object distortion details, and improve geometric consistency and global coherence. Furthermore, empowered by strong panoramic priors, Canvas360 enables a unified in-context panoramic generation framework that supports diverse downstream tasks via token-level concatenation, surpassing prior methods in both task coverage and modeling flexibility. Extensive experiments show that Canvas360 improves panoramic image fidelity, achieving particularly strong performance on the panorama-specific FAED metric and competitive or leading results across the reported quantitative evaluations. More information can be found on our project page: https://zry000.github.io/Canvas360/ --- ### OpenCoF: Learning to Reason Through Video Generation Authors: Xinyan Chen, Ziyu Guo, Renrui Zhang, Dongzhi Jiang, Hongsheng Li Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08763v1 Reasoning has become a core capability for large models, especially when reliable decisions require understanding logical consequences. Recent video generation models offer a reasoning path distinct from previous Chain-of-Thought (CoT): reasoning can unfold through temporally connected frames, known as Chain-of-Frame (CoF) reasoning. However, existing video generators are primarily trained on general video corpora, still lacking diverse supervision and dedicated designs for CoF reasoning. To address this gap, we introduce OpenCoF, a framework comprising the OpenCoF-17K dataset, a reasoning video dataset spanning 11 task families, and Wan-CoF, a fine-tuned video model for studying whether diverse temporal supervision improves CoF behavior. Across four video reasoning benchmarks, Wan-CoF achieves considerable gains over the Wan2.2-I2V-A14B baseline. Building on this, we empirically explore more advanced designs for CoF capabilities, i.e., equipping the model with visual and textual reasoning tokens. This mechanism respectively captures low-level visual cues and high-level semantic priors for spatial and temporal reasoning. Through performance comparisons and attention analysis, we examine how these tokens contribute across model depth, denoising steps, space, and time. Our results suggest that stronger video reasoning requires both broad temporal supervision and explicit mechanisms for organizing intermediate reasoning state. We open-source the dataset, model, and code to facilitate future research on reasoning-oriented video generation. --- ### Ideas Have Genomes: Benchmarking Scientific Lineage Reasoning and Lineage-Grounded Idea Generation Authors: Yifan Zhou, Qihao Yang, Yan Li, Donggang Li, Xiru Hu, Hokin Deng, Ziyang Gong, Xuanyi Zhou, Huacan Wang, Xiangchao Yan, Wanghan Xu, Wenlong Zhang et al. Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08758v1 Scientific ideas rarely start from a blank page. They inherit mechanisms, repair known limitations, and recombine pieces of earlier work, much like biological genomes. Current benchmarks still say little about whether AI systems can follow this inheritance structure. We present IdeaGene-Bench (IG-Bench), a benchmark for scientific lineage reasoning and lineage-grounded idea generation. IG-Bench is organized around the IdeaGene framework: each paper or proposal is represented as a set of minimal, typed, evidence-grounded Idea Genome objects, and a GenomeDiff aligns these objects to record inheritance, mutation, loss, external import, and novel insertion under six operational evolutionary dynamics. The benchmark contains 1,961 golden lineage traces, 1,085 curated Idea Genome objects, and 920 pairwise GenomeDiff records across 10 scientific domains. It supports two evaluations. IG-Exam (42 task types, 1,029 instances) tests closed-form lineage reasoning across Idea Genome abstraction, inheritance tracing, evolutionary reasoning, and lineage verification. IG-Arena evaluates generation with a lineage-conditioned Population-Evolution Score(PES), asking whether a proposal can be inserted as a coherent descendant of a given lineage population: it should inherit the right Idea Genome objects, vary meaningfully from nearby work, and offer selection value for future research. Experiments on 14 LLM-based scientists expose a compositional bottleneck. The strongest system reaches only 27.3% exact accuracy on lineage reasoning, and structured lineage context reshuffles system rankings rather than helping every participant uniformly. --- ### Score Accuracy Along the Forward Diffusion Does Not Certify Numerical Stability in Diffusion Sampling Authors: Yiwei Zhou Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, math.NA, math.PR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08757v1 Score matching controls average error under the forward marginals, but a discretized reverse-time sampler evaluates the learned score along its own trajectory. We show that small forward-marginal error does not guarantee numerical stability. We construct a single smooth score field with arbitrarily small forward-marginal $L^2$ error. The learned reverse-time process is nonexplosive, has moments of every order, and can be arbitrarily close to the exact reverse-time process in path-space total variation. Yet its Euler--Maruyama discretizations converge in probability while every positive moment diverges. Thus weak convergence can hold even though every Wasserstein distance $W_p$, $p\ge1$, diverges. The same failure can occur within one fixed finite neural architecture. We construct a family of bounded, globally Lipschitz denoisers for which both the forward-marginal error and the path-space total variation distance tend to zero, while their Euler--Maruyama endpoints diverge in every $W_p$. For compactly supported data, we also give a simple positive result. Projecting the learned denoiser onto a known bounded closed convex set containing the support preserves pointwise accuracy, gives grid-uniform moment bounds, and yields Wasserstein convergence under mild local regularity. Experiments with a small fixed DiT-style network show large growth along rare numerical trajectories and its suppression by denoiser projection, while overall trajectory errors remain small. --- ### MulTTiPop: A Multitrack Transcription Dataset for Pop Music Authors: Nathan Pruyne, Benjamin Stoler, William Chen, Chien-yu Huang, Shinji Watanabe, Chris Donahue Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.SD, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08756v2 We present MulTTiPop, a dataset of pop music segments and their associated multitrack MIDI recordings for the evaluation of automatic music transcription models. MulTTiPop contains 572 segments of popular music totaling 3.5 hours of audio, and contains songs from diverse genres and decades from the 1930s to 2000s. To collect this dataset, we perform metadata-based matching on song segments from the Lakh MIDI and TheoryTab datasets, manually identify an anchor beat between the audio and MIDI, then use beat tracking on the audio and warp the MIDI to match its tempo and timing. We evaluate state-of-the-art automatic music transcription models on MulTTiPop and find substantial room for improvement, with the best model achieving 29% Onset F1. More details and sound examples of MulTTiPop are available at https://gclef-cmu.org/multtipop. --- ### MulTTiPop: A Multitrack Transcription Dataset for Pop Music Authors: Nathan Pruyne, Benjamin Stoler, William Chen, Chien-yu Huang, Shinji Watanabe, Chris Donahue Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.SD, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08756v1 We present MulTTiPop, a dataset of pop music segments and their associated multitrack MIDI recordings for the evaluation of automatic music transcription models. MulTTiPop contains 572 segments of popular music totaling 3.5 hours of audio, and contains songs from diverse genres and decades from the 1930s to 2000s. To collect this dataset, we perform metadata-based matching on song segments from the Lakh MIDI and TheoryTab datasets, manually identify an anchor beat between the audio and MIDI, then use beat tracking on the audio and warp the MIDI to match its tempo and timing. We evaluate state-of-the-art automatic music transcription models on MulTTiPop and find substantial room for improvement, with the best model achieving 38% Onset F1. More details and sound examples of MulTTiPop are available at https://gclef-cmu.org/multtipop. --- ### SLORR: Simple and Efficient In-Training Low-Rank Regularization Authors: David González-Martínez, Shiwei Liu Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08754v1 Low-rank factorization is widely used to compress neural networks, but modern models are often not naturally amenable to aggressive factorization without significant accuracy loss. Existing training-time low-rank regularizers can improve compressibility, but they often require SVDs of large weight matrices, modify the model architecture (introducing additional trainable parameters), or rely on stateful cached quantities. To address these limitations, we introduce SLORR, a simple, stateless, and architecture-preserving framework for in-training low-rank regularization, instantiated with two main variants based on the Hoyer sparsity metric and the nuclear norm. SLORR directly regularizes the original weight matrices using GPU-friendly approximations for the forward and backward passes of the regularizers, for which we provide approximation guarantees. We first evaluate SLORR on ImageNet-1K across short-horizon continued training of ResNet-50, ViT-B/16, and ViT-L/16, and pretraining of ResNet-18, where SLORR induces compressibility while introducing less than 8% training overhead. We further evaluate SLORR-Hoyer in LLM pretraining at 135M and 560M scales: SLORR-trained compressed models preserve performance substantially better than unregularized models while adding less than 1% average training overhead. --- ### Using AI-based Learning Assistants in Higher Education: A Large-Scale Descriptive Analysis Authors: Kristina Schaaff, Quintus Stierstorfer, Valerie Hekkel Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.AI, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08748v2 In this study, we present a large-scale descriptive analysis of the use of an AI-based learning assistant (Syntea) in higher education. Based on objective log data from 77,543 students enrolled in distance studies, we examine usage patterns across gender, age group, study cluster, degree, and study mode. To date, existing research on educational chatbots has largely relied on comparatively small samples and self-reported survey data, while large-scale evidence on actual usage behavior remains limited. Our findings show that Syntea is already embedded in the study routines of many learners, but that usage differs across demographic and structural contexts. By identifying these patterns, our study provides an empirical basis for the further development of AI-based learning support and contributes a large-scale analysis of educational chatbot usage in higher education. --- ### Dimensionality Reduction Meets Network Science: Sensemaking on UMAP's kNN Graph Authors: Duen Horng Chau, Donghao Ren, Fred Hohman, Dominik Moritz Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.DS, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08746v3 While UMAP is widely used for exploring high-dimensional data, typical workflows focus on its lower-dimensional embedding, largely overlooking the rich k-nearest-neighbor (kNN) graph that UMAP constructs internally. This graph encodes the data manifold in its original high-dimensional space, before the distortion that UMAP's 2D projection introduces. We demonstrate the untapped potential of this internal representation, showing how standard graph algorithms applied to this graph enhance data sensemaking: (1) PageRank identifies representative data points, (2) k-core decomposition reveals dense core regions versus sparse periphery, and (3) clustering coefficient detects tight-knit neighborhoods with highly-similar data points. Through quantitative and qualitative evaluation on MNIST and Fashion MNIST, we show that these graph-based analyses are not only practical but also competitive with or complementary to purpose-built methods (e.g., k-medoids for exemplar selection, HDBSCAN for density-based clustering). --- ### AUTOPILOT VQA: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models for Incident-Centric Dashcam Understanding Authors: Siddharth Damodharan, Radhika Gupta, Ali Alshami, Ryan Rabinowitz, Jugal Kalita Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08745v1 Recent advances in Vision-Language Models, Large Language Models, and Multimodal Large Language Models have improved autonomous driving tasks such as scene understanding, decision making, trajectory prediction, and visual question answering. However, evaluating whether these models can reliably reason about safety-critical incidents remains challenging. To address this gap, we present AUTOPILOT-VQA, an incident-centric visual question answering benchmark for dashcam video understanding. The dataset evaluates different systems through structured questions designed around real-world driving incidents and near-incidents. The benchmark covers diverse safety-relevant categories, including weather and lighting conditions, traffic environment, road layout, road surface state, signage, involved entities, accident occurrence, impact location, and avoidability-related reasoning. By requiring models to answer grounded questions about both contextual scene properties and event-level incident details, AUTOPILOT-VQA moves beyond object recognition toward temporally grounded, safety-aware reasoning. The dataset is released as part of the AUTOPILOT CVPR 2026 competition and provides a standardized benchmark for assessing the reliability of autonomous driving systems in different scenarios. Our benchmark support developments for more interpretable, robust, and safety-conscious vision-language systems for real-world autonomous driving. --- ### ARDY: Autoregressive Diffusion with Hybrid Representation for Interactive Human Motion Generation Authors: Kaifeng Zhao, Mathis Petrovich, Haotian Zhang, Tingwu Wang, Siyu Tang, Davis Rempe Published: 2026-07-09 Categories: cs.GR, cs.CV, cs.LG, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.08741v1 Generating realistic 3D human motions in real-time within interactive applications is key for animation, simulation, and humanoid robotics. While recent offline motion generation approaches offer precise control via text and kinematic constraints, they lack the inference speed required for interactive settings. Conversely, existing online methods enable real-time synthesis but often sacrifice controllability or struggle with complex text semantics and long-horizon goals due to limited context windows. In this work, we introduce ARDY, a streaming generation framework that bridges this gap by enabling high-fidelity motion generation controllable via online text prompts and flexible kinematic constraints. ARDY employs a hybrid representation that combines explicit root features with a latent body embedding, balancing precise trajectory control with efficient generative learning. We propose a two-stage autoregressive transformer denoiser that features variable history context and supports conditioning on flexible, long-horizon kinematic constraints. By training on a large-scale motion capture dataset and being directly conditioned on text labels and kinematic constraints sampled from ground truth poses, ARDY natively learns controllable generation that supports online prompting and flexible long-horizon goals. Extensive evaluations on the HumanML3D benchmark and the large-scale, high-fidelity Bones Rigplay dataset demonstrate ARDY's high motion quality and constraint adherence, validating the efficacy of our key architectural decisions. Finally, we demonstrate the method's practical versatility through an interactive demo featuring dynamic text control, diverse keyframe pose constraints, path following, and interactive locomotion control via mouse and keyboard. Supplementary video results, code, and model releases can be found at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/sil/projects/ardy/. ---