# Research Papers — 2026-07 · bundle page 163 of 222 > Full-text markdown of papers #8101–8150 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/163 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/162.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/164.md) ### Agentic Neural Architecture Search Authors: Seokhoon Jeong, Mijung Kim, Taehwan Kim Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07984v1 Neural architecture search (NAS) methods have grown increasingly efficient, yet they remain bounded by manually engineered search spaces that require substantial domain expertise and must be rebuilt for every new task. Large language models (LLMs) can generate architectures in an open-ended space, but how to optimally divide the labor between LLM-driven design and NAS-driven search remains unexplored. We propose a mechanism that bridges these two paradigms: an LLM produces a high-quality seed architecture, then decomposes it into a "slotted architecture", a scaffold with named, interchangeable module slots that automatically defines a bounded, task-specific search space for conventional NAS to explore, without manual engineering. We instantiate this mechanism in AgentNAS, a modular three-phase pipeline in which each component's contribution can be measured independently. On 17 tasks spanning classification, dense regression, segmentation, and multi-label tagging across diverse modalities (NAS-Bench-360 and Unseen NAS), AgentNAS establishes a new state of the art on 11 tasks, outperforming published baselines including task-specific expert designs. Ablation studies show that the two search mechanisms are broadly complementary: the LLM-generated seed already surpasses published baselines on the majority of tasks, and NAS delivers additional gains in most cases through combinatorial recombination across slots, a mode of search that independent LLM samples cannot replicate. These patterns hold across three LLMs of different capability levels, confirming that the division of labor is robust. Our code is available at https://github.com/alroimfebruary/AgentNAS. --- ### 3100 Opinions on Code Review in an AI World: Building Causal Theory from Practitioner Discourse Authors: Shyam Agarwal, Courtney Miller, Christian Kästner, Bogdan Vasilescu Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07980v1 Coding agents now author entire pull requests, and practitioners sharply disagree about what this does to code review: whether it becomes the bottleneck, whether human review is still necessary, and whether it quietly erodes the understanding that it once built. Repository-mining studies measure surface trends but seldom explain the mechanisms beneath them, and the trends themselves prove unstable. A motivating observational analysis of public GITHUB activity finds that agent-authored pull requests are reviewed less often, merged several times faster, and discussed less than human-authored ones, yet the direction of these trends flips under different but equally defensible analysis choices, so the traces establish what is changing without explaining why. To recover the mechanisms, we synthesize practitioner discourse at scale into an explanatory theory: we collect 38,709 grey-literature documents (engineering blogs and Reddit threads), filter to those substantively about code review, and code a stratified random sample of 3,100 with an LLM-assisted pipeline, from which we build a causal model of 26 constructs and 67 relationships (64 directed, 3 contested). Its organizing claim is that review is the control point through which a coding agent's effect on software is decided, and that AI does not fix the sign of that effect: the team sets it, through the expertise its humans bring and how it structures the review process. The theory makes the competing positions explicit and turns "AI is changing code review" into falsifiable propositions with named constructs and moderators. As a secondary contribution, we offer the underlying LLM-assisted, grey-literature theory-building method as a scalable template for software-engineering research, with a public implementation. --- ### A Quantum Reservoir Architecture for Chaotic Forecasting and a Test of Whether Its High Dimension Helps Authors: Tushar Pandey Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: quant-ph, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07978v1 Quantum reservoir computing uses a fixed quantum circuit as a feature generator and trains only a simple linear readout on top of it. This makes it cheap to train and free of the optimisation problems that affect many quantum machine-learning models. A natural worry is that the very large feature space the circuit produces might inflate apparent performance without adding anything real. This paper provides two things. First, it gives a complete, reproducible recipe for one such reservoir applied to forecasting chaotic systems, including how data is fed in, how the circuit is built, and how the readout is trained. Second, it gives a way to tell whether the reservoir's high dimension is actually doing useful work. We grow the size of the prediction problem and the size of the quantum reservoir together, so that extra capacity cannot be the explanation for any improvement, and we track a single stability number that measures how well behaved the readout fit is. On two chaotic test systems, a spatiotemporal chain and a shallow-water fluid model, the quantum reservoir keeps a flat, stable error as both sizes grow, while a matched classical reservoir does not. We report where the classical baseline is in fact stronger, so the comparison is honest. The result is a clean specification plus a diagnostic that other groups can apply to any reservoir whose features have a known scale. --- ### When Implausible Tokens Get Reinforced: Tail-Aware Credit Calibration for LLM Reinforcement Learning Authors: Xiuyi Lou, Zicheng Xu, Yu-Neng Chuang, Hoang Anh Duy Le, Zhaozhuo Xu, Guanchu Wang, Vladimir Braverman Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07976v1 Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, widely used critic-free RL methods rely on uniform credit assignment, broadcasting the same advantage to all tokens regardless of their differences. We identify a critical failure mode of this design, which we refer to as Positive-Credit Contamination: low-probability tail tokens that are contextually erroneous receive identical positive credit to plausible ones within the same trajectory, resulting in the indiscriminate reinforcement of flawed reasoning behavior. To mitigate this issue, we propose Tail-Aware Credit calibratiOn (TACO), a method that calibrates uniform credit assignment to suppress undesirable positive updates. TACO first computes a tail-risk score that incorporates the local generation context to assess each token's risk of falling into the unreliable tail, distinguishing unexpected rarity from uncertainty-driven exploration. TACO then uses this score to tune positive credit for risky tokens without removing their gradients entirely, so that recurring useful rare patterns can accumulate reinforcement while incidental noise is progressively dampened. Experimental results across three LLMs and eight benchmarks show that TACO consistently outperforms GRPO-style baselines. Notably, TACO improves training stability, supporting sustained performance gains in long-horizon RL. The source code is available at: https://github.com/xiuyilou/TACO. --- ### A Multi-cluster Boundary Learning Method for Out-of-Scope Intent Detection via MiniLM Embedding Authors: Yihong Xu, Mingyu Kang, Linyuan Lü Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07974v1 Intent detection is a critical task that bridges human intents and system actions in human-machine interaction systems. However, there still exist challenges for detecting out-of-scope (OOS) intents. (i) The traditional methods view the OOS intent detection as a multi-class classification, then the detection accuracy decreases as the class number of the known intents increases; (ii) LLM-embedding methods require large parameters, that makes them difficult to train and practically deploy. Thus, this work proposes a multi-cluster boundary learning method to detect OOS intents via MiniLM embedding (i.e., all-MiniLM-L6-v2) in an one-class classification workflow. The method learns the boundaries of multi-cluster embeddings generated by MiniLM from the training utterances, and then rejects the out-of-domain utterances as OOS intents. Experiments are conducted on public CLINC150, StackOverflow and Banking77 datasets. The results show that the method achieves the state-of-the-art OOS intent detection performance compared the other baselines. Ablation studies are also conducted and the results show that the used MiniLM can better adapt to the workflow and utterance embedding requirements. The code is available at supplementary materials. --- ### Expressivity and Statistical Trade-offs in Diffusion Policy Learning Authors: Viet Vu, Renyuan Xu, Jiacheng Zhang, Yufei Zhang Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07967v1 Diffusion-based policies have recently emerged as powerful policy parameterizations for reinforcement learning, representing state-conditioned action distributions as terminal laws of diffusion processes with parameterized drifts. This terminal-law representation has shown substantial expressive flexibility in practice, enabling diffusion policies to model complex, multimodal, and highly non-Gaussian action distributions; however, it remains unclear what mathematically drives this expressivity and how to fully exploit it when the policy is learned from finite data. In this paper, we identify the drift Lipschitz budget $K$ as a central quantity governing the expressivity and statistical behavior of diffusion policies. We quantify expressivity through approximation: diffusion policies with $K$-Lipschitz drifts can concentrate near optimal deterministic policies and achieve value approximation error of order $1/K$; moreover, we prove a matching lower bound under nondegenerate diffusion noise. This increased expressivity comes with a statistical cost. When the drift is parameterized by neural networks, increasing $K$ improves approximation but increases statistical complexity. Balancing these two terms yields a finite-sample performance gap of order $\tilde{O}(n^{-2/(m+6)})$ for generic neural-network drifts, and a sharper rate $\tilde{O}(n^{-2/(m+4)})$ for one-sided dissipative drift classes, where $n$ is the sample size and $m$ is the dimension of the state space. Numerical experiments provide empirical evidence for the sample-dependent trade-off in $K$, supporting both theoretical regimes. Our framework also suggests a practical implementation principle: choose the diffusion budget $K$ according to the available sample size, and then select a neural-network architecture with the corresponding fixed Lipschitz coefficient. --- ### KronQ: LLM Quantization via Kronecker-Factored Hessian Authors: Donghyun Lee, Yuhang Li, Ruokai Yin, Priyadarshini Panda Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07964v2 Post-training quantization (PTQ) is a widely adopted technique for compressing large language models (LLMs) without retraining. Most existing second-order PTQ methods, including GPTQ, construct quantization objectives from input activation statistics, effectively assuming that all output channels contribute equally to the layer-wise reconstruction objective. We propose KronQ, a PTQ framework that challenges this assumption by introducing the gradient covariance into the quantization pipeline. Under the Kronecker-factored Hessian approximation, the quantization loss depends jointly on both the activation and gradient covariances, and KronQ exploits this at two complementary levels. (1) KronQ introduces bidirectional incoherence processing, extending the existing input-side random rotation to the output dimension using the gradient covariance, reducing weight magnitude variance across both input and output dimensions. (2) KronQ derives a new sensitivity metric for inter-layer mixed-precision allocation, driven by the gradient and activation Hessian traces. Notably, in the case of 2-bit weight-only quantization on LLaMA-3-70B, while GPTQ and GPTAQ diverge or produce degenerate quantizations (>2000 perplexity on WikiText-2), \KronQ{} achieves 7.93 perplexity. --- ### KronQ: LLM Quantization via Kronecker-Factored Hessian Authors: Donghyun Lee, Yuhang Li, Ruokai Yin, Priyadarshini Panda Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07964v1 Post-training quantization (PTQ) is a widely adopted technique for compressing large language models (LLMs) without retraining. Existing second-order PTQ methods, including GPTQ, construct quantization objectives exclusively from input activation statistics, effectively assuming that all output channels contribute equally to the layer-wise reconstruction objective. We propose KronQ, a PTQ framework that challenges this assumption by introducing the gradient covariance into the quantization pipeline. Under the Kronecker-factored Hessian approximation, the quantization loss depends jointly on both the activation and gradient covariances, and KronQ exploits this at two complementary levels. (1) KronQ introduces bidirectional incoherence processing, extending the existing input-side random rotation to the output dimension using the gradient covariance, reducing weight magnitude variance across both input and output dimensions. (2) KronQ derives a new sensitivity metric for inter-layer mixed-precision allocation, driven by the gradient and activation Hessian traces. Notably, in the case of 2-bit weight-only quantization on LLaMA-3-70B, while GPTQ and GPTAQ diverge or produce degenerate quantizations (>2000 perplexity on WikiText-2), KronQ achieves 7.93 perplexity. --- ### Beyond Thermal Imaging: Inferring Thermophysical Properties from Time-Resolved Thermal Observations Authors: Chenghao Xu, Malcolm Mielle, Olga Fink Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07962v1 Inferring latent physical properties from sensory observations is a fundamental challenge in machine perception. Among available sensing modalities, thermal imaging is particularly promising because temperature evolution is directly governed by heat-transfer physics and therefore encodes information about underlying thermophysical properties of a scene. Recovering spatially resolved thermophysical properties from thermal observations could transform applications ranging from digital twins and infrastructure monitoring to robotics and scientific imaging. However, existing thermal scene reconstruction methods can recover temperature fields in complex 3D environments without identifying the thermophyiscal properties that govern thermal evolution, whereas inverse methods provide physically interpretable parameter estimation but typically rely on simplified geometries and controlled experimental conditions. Here we introduce ThermoField, a framework that unifies thermal scene reconstruction and thermophysical parameter estimation through differentiable heat-transfer simulation. The proposed framework represents these quantities as spatially varying neural fields and constrains them through scene geometry, governing heat-transfer physics, and temporal thermal observations. We demonstrate that ThermoField jointly reconstructs geometry, estimates spatially varying thermal diffusivity, and predicts thermal evolution under previously unseen environmental conditions. By integrating neural scene representations with differentiable heat-transfer solver, the framework enables physically interpretable parameter inference in complex 3D scenes. Our results establish a bridge between thermal scene reconstruction and inverse heat-transfer analysis, providing a unified approach for geometry reconstruction, thermophysical property estimation, and predictive thermal simulation from thermal observations. --- ### Evaluating the Effect of Frame Rate in Sequence-Based Classification of Autism-Related Self-Stimulatory Hand Idiosyncrasies Authors: Raunak Mondal, Peter Washington Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07957v1 Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) affects over 75 million individuals worldwide, yet scalable computational methods for remote behavioral screening remain limited. This study addresses two complementary challenges in automated detection of autism-related self-stimulatory behaviors from video: (1) identifying the optimal sequence-based neural network architecture and temporal sampling rate, and (2) characterizing data augmentation strategies for training on small behavioral datasets. For the first objective, long short-term memory (LSTM) and gated recurrent unit (GRU) models were trained on pose-derived features from the Self-Stimulatory Behavior Diagnosis (SSBD) dataset at frame sampling intervals of 1, 5, 15, 30, 45, and 90 frames. Both architectures exceeded prior convolutional neural network (CNN) baselines (62-76% accuracy), with peak accuracies of 97.5% (LSTM) and 98.75% (GRU) at a sampling interval of every 15 frames. For the second objective, ten data augmentation strategies were applied to an I3D transfer learning pipeline, with an ablation study quantifying the marginal contribution of each technique. Horizontal flip achieved the highest standalone accuracy (48.78%), while exclusion of upsampling from the augmentation pipeline produced the largest performance degradation, indicating its necessity for complex behavioral video augmentation. A personalized machine learning approach, in which per-subject models were trained and tested on temporally split segments of each video, produced consistent predictions (mean loss 1.84, SD 0.79). These results provide practitioners with concrete guidance on architecture selection, sampling rate, and augmentation strategy for video-based behavioral classification in data-scarce clinical domains. --- ### Linear Attention Architectures: Mechanisms, Trade-offs, and Cross-Layer Routing Authors: Tommaso Cerruti, Tim Rieder, George Rowlands, Lingfeng Jin, Imanol Schlag Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07953v1 Self-attention lets each token retrieve information from the full context, but its quadratic cost in sequence length limits training and inference at long context. This paper presents a comparative study of softmax attention and four recent recurrent linear-attention architectures: DeltaNet, Gated DeltaNet, Kimi Delta Attention, and Gated DeltaNet-2. We express these mechanisms in a common recurrent-memory notation, making explicit how they differ in expressivity, memory decay, erase and write control, training throughput, and implementation complexity. Our experiments center on 350M-parameter models trained for 15B tokens, and include optimizer and learning-rate comparisons, hybrid-versus-pure stack comparisons, sequence-length runtime measurements, larger DeltaNet runs at 1.3B and 3B parameters, and a small set of downstream evaluations. The reported speed results measure training throughput and iteration time; we do not provide an empirical inference-speed benchmark. Within the reported 350M-parameter, 15B-token sweep, Kimi Delta Attention with Muon reaches the lowest final validation loss, a pure Gated DeltaNet stack trained with AdamW has the highest normalized training throughput, hybrid stacks generally improve loss at a throughput cost, and Muon consistently lowers final validation loss relative to AdamW in the matched architecture settings we evaluate. We introduce and evaluate lightweight cross-layer routing mechanisms for DeltaNet-style memories. The most natural DeltaNet-inspired formulation, forwarding a lower layer's delta-rule write error into the next layer's value target, does not improve over matched baselines. Routing into the aligned hidden stream and forwarding the write value instead yields a modest improvement in the matched runs we report: Cross-Layer Value Routing (CLVR) lowers final validation loss for both DeltaNet and Gated DeltaNet. --- ### fog: Expressing Motion and Emotion through Function Composition of AI-Generated Code Authors: Vivian Liu, Lydia Chilton Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.HC, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07952v1 Motion and emotion are core parts of intelligent, expressive behavior. In this paper, we introduce fog, a function composition framework for implementing and compose motion functions. We demonstrate how fog can be used to express motion and emotion in Heider-Simmel style animations. This code generation framework can help users generate functions for verbs, adverbs, gestures, and emotions to create an open-ended motion vocabulary. It is complemented by an animation editor that helps users refine motion through direct manipulation and dynamically generated UI. We evaluate our approach with a perceptual evaluation, where we test 452 fog-generated animations to see if people can recognize the semantic meaning of the motion. We find that fog's motion functions can be recognized at 68% accuracy, a 2.68x improvement over a chance baseline. In a mixed-methods user study with professionals and novices, we show that fog in interface form can support users with more rapid iteration, exploration, and control. --- ### Evaluating the Generalizability of Foundation Models for Extreme Environmental Events: Case Study of California Wildfire PM2.5 Authors: Yongcan Huang, Li Jiang, Ze Yu Liu Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.LG, physics.ao-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07951v1 Wildfire smoke events produce extreme PM$_{2.5}$ concentrations that pose severe public health risks, yet forecasting rare, hazardous-level spikes remains a fundamental challenge. Time series foundation models (TSFMs), pretrained models offering zero-shot inference and efficient adaptation, perform strongly on general benchmarks, but their behavior under extreme out-of-distribution conditions is poorly understood. We present the first systematic benchmark comparing six TSFM configurations (zero-shot TimesFM, Chronos-2, Moirai-2, and Time-MoE, plus LoRA fine-tuned Chronos-2 and Time-MoE) against fully-trained baselines (LSTM, BiLSTM, Transformer) and naive persistence on a 12-year (2013--2025) hourly PM$_{2.5}$ dataset covering 1,375 wildfire incidents across 79 California monitoring sites. A leave-one-incident-out (LOIO) protocol evaluates generalization to unseen fires, using MAE, RMSE, and exceedance F1 at EPA AQI thresholds across 6-, 12-, and 24-hour horizons. Results reveal a consistent hierarchy. The BiLSTM achieves the lowest MAE ($5.16\,μg/m^3$) and the highest exceedance F1 at every threshold, including the Hazardous band ($>225.5\,μg/m^3$), reaching 0.63 versus at most 0.54 for any foundation model. Zero-shot TSFMs improve on persistence only modestly, and zero-shot Chronos-2 exhibits severe RMSE tail instability ($23.4\,μg/m^3$, negative $R^2$) from sporadic large errors. LoRA fine-tuning substantially improves both adapted families and largely repairs this instability, yet no foundation model surpasses the trained recurrent baselines on any metric. These findings challenge the assumption that larger pretrained models universally dominate environmental forecasting and provide actionable deployment guidance for wildfire air quality prediction. --- ### DeepSWE: Measuring Frontier Coding Agents on Original, Long-Horizon Engineering Tasks Authors: Wenqi Huang, Charley Lee, Leonard Tng, Serena Ge Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.SE, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07946v1 DeepSWE is a benchmark of 113 original, long-horizon software engineering tasks for evaluating coding agents. Most public agentic coding benchmarks follow SWE-bench in mining merged fixes from public GitHub repositories, which creates two problems: the fixes and their discussion were likely seen during pretraining, so a high score can reflect recall rather than problem-solving; and each task is graded by the tests that shipped with its merged fix, which were written to confirm one specific fix rather than grade an arbitrary solution, so they can fail a correct alternative or pass an incomplete one. DeepSWE avoids both. Its tasks are written from scratch across 91 active open-source repositories and five languages and are never contributed back upstream, so their reference solutions stay out of the public record that model training scrapes; and each task is graded by a hand-written verifier that checks the requested functionality and accepts any implementation that provides it. When an independent LLM judge re-reviews graded runs, it disagrees with DeepSWE's verifier about an order of magnitude less often than with SWE-Bench Pro's inherited tests (1.4% versus 32.4%). Despite being about half the length of SWE-Bench Pro's prompts, DeepSWE's prompts describe tasks whose reference solutions touch 5.5x more code, and the benchmark separates frontier agents across a wider score band than the leaderboards on which they otherwise cluster. We release the benchmark, its verifiers, and the full record of evaluation trajectories. --- ### The Memory Wall of Green Software: Empirical Energy Evaluation of Memento Design Pattern Authors: Imane Jriri, Tarik Houichime, Younes El Amrani Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.SE, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07944v1 As Green Software Engineering matures, energy efficiency has transitioned into a mission-critical non-functional requirement. While software design patterns ensure structural integrity, their inherent abstraction layers impose an implicit "metabolic cost" that often remains obscured during the design phase. This paper empirically investigates the energy dynamics of the Memento design pattern, contrasting a direct, unabstracted baseline against Classic full-snapshot and Differential delta-encoding strategies. Leveraging the RAPL interface for high-fidelity hardware telemetry, we quantify energy dissipation across state volumes scaling from 10 MB to 200 MB. Our empirical results expose a critical architectural trade-off: the Differential strategy minimizes memory traffic, yielding a maximum energy reduction of 65.8% for mid-scale states, but collides with a catastrophic "memory wall" at 200 MB. At this saturation point, algorithmic optimizations are completely neutralized by severe GC thrashing and non-linear power spikes. We synthesize these findings into evidence-based heuristics, providing architects with a robust framework to reconcile structural design quality with sustainable Green IT imperatives. --- ### When Debiasing Backfires: Counterintuitive Side Effects of Preprocessing-Based Stereotype Mitigation Authors: Yahan Zheng, John Guerrerio, Soroush Vosoughi, Weicheng Ma Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07937v1 Preprocessing-based methods for stereotype mitigation, such as pre-/post-training on debiased corpora, are widely used in NLP. While these approaches reduce measurable stereotypes for targeted groups, we find they often induce unintended shifts-side effects, where stereotyping or counter-stereotyping can increase relative to neutral baselines for other demographics, including across unrelated demographic categories. We demonstrate these side effects across two model families (encoder-only and decoder-only), multiple preprocessing strategies (removing stereotypical sentences, removing group mentions, and swapping group references), and both pre- and post-training at different data scales on Wikipedia. Standard benchmarks frequently miss these shifts. Using attention-rollout analysis, we observe that such side effects are not accompanied by large changes in attention flow, complicating mechanistic explanations. We discuss implications for evaluation, provide actionable diagnostics, and argue for side-effect-aware, transparent mitigation practices. --- ### path_boost: A Python Package for Interpretable Graph-Level Prediction using Path-Based Gradient Boosting Authors: Claudio Meggio, Johan Pensar, Riccardo De Bin Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07935v1 We present path_boost, a Python package for interpretable supervised learning on graph-structured input data. The package implements PathBoost, a gradient boosting algorithm that automatically discovers predictive labeled paths within graphs during the learning process. Unlike graph neural networks, which are generally difficult to interpret, PathBoost produces an additive prediction model over path-based features that explicitly reveals which substructures drive predictions. To avoid an exhaustive enumeration of all possible paths, the algorithm iteratively selects and extends paths during learning based on their predictive power, using boosting to combine weak learners into a strong ensemble. The package supports both regression and binary classification. Key features include compatibility with scikit-learn workflows, support for custom base learners and selectors, automatic starting node selection, parallel training across anchor nodes, and built-in variable importance computation. We demonstrate PathBoost on molecular property prediction of transition metal compounds, where atoms serve as nodes and bonds as edges, and further benchmark PathBoost against an established graph neural network and a graph kernel method across six molecular datasets. The package is available on PyPI and GitHub under an open-source license. --- ### Adversarial Decoys: Misdirecting Attention-Based Defenses in ViT Authors: Giulia Marchiori Pietrosanti, Giulio Rossolini, Giorgio Buttazzo Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07922v1 Vision Transformers (ViTs) remain vulnerable to localized adversarial attacks, e.g., adversarial patches, while recent test-time defenses mitigate them by suppressing image tokens with abnormally high attention scores. These defenses exploit a strong coupling between attention and adversarial effectiveness: adversarial tokens often need to attract substantial attention to influence the prediction. We introduce adversarial decoys, independently optimized image patches that redirect the attention, and therefore related defenses, toward selected target tokens. Rather than jointly optimizing misclassifications and defense evasion, our approach decouples the two objectives: the original adversarial region induces the incorrect prediction, while a separate decoy manipulates the attention ranking used by the defense. A layer-wise objective increases target-token attention and promotes these tokens above competing non-target ones. Since the decoy is optimized independently of the underlying attack, the method is attack-agnostic and can be easily integrated with any existing adversarial patch attack. Experiments on ImageNet across multiple ViT architectures and attacks show that decoys can redirect high attention scores away from the true adversarial region while preserving much of the attack effectiveness. These results reveal a fundamental limitation of using attention magnitude as an indicator of adversarial relevance. --- ### Efficient Safety Alignment of Language Models via Latent Personality Traits Authors: Mohamed Amine Merzouk, Nolan Smyth, Damiano Fornasiere, Linh Le, David Williams-King, Adam Oberman Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07918v2 Current safety methods for large language models are known to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks, motivating research into robust alternatives. Latent Adversarial Training (LAT) is among the most effective defenses, but can degrade utility and requires training on large datasets of harmful prompts. We introduce Latent Personality Alignment (LPA), which replaces explicit harm refusal with adversarial training on just 66 harm-agnostic statements drawn from psychometric personality literature. We hypothesize that personality-anchored representations share latent structure with harm avoidance, so adversarially stabilizing them implicitly constrains the subspace exploited by jailbreak attacks. LPA achieves near-zero attack success rates on HarmBench across direct requests and five jailbreak methods, despite never seeing harmful content during training and no loss of performance on standard benchmarks. Moreover, the training process is lightweight; the entire procedure completes in minutes on a single GPU and uses 75x fewer examples than standard LAT. Extensive ablations demonstrate the robustness, efficiency, and generalization of our method. --- ### Efficient Safety Alignment of Language Models via Latent Personality Traits Authors: Mohamed Amine Merzouk, Nolan Smyth, Damiano Fornasiere, Linh Le, David Williams-King, Adam Oberman Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07918v1 Current safety methods for large language models are known to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks, motivating research into robust alternatives. Latent Adversarial Training (LAT) is among the most effective defenses, but can degrade utility and requires training on large datasets of harmful prompts. We introduce Latent Personality Alignment (LPA), which replaces explicit harm refusal with adversarial training on just 66 harm-agnostic statements drawn from psychometric personality literature. We hypothesize that personality-anchored representations share latent structure with harm avoidance, so adversarially stabilizing them implicitly constrains the subspace exploited by jailbreak attacks. LPA achieves near-zero attack success rates on HarmBench across direct requests and five jailbreak methods, despite never seeing harmful content during training and no loss of performance on standard benchmarks. Moreover, the training process is lightweight; the entire procedure completes in minutes on a single GPU and uses 75x fewer examples than standard LAT. Extensive ablations demonstrate the robustness, efficiency, and generalization of our method. --- ### Persona Cartography: Charting Language Model Personality Traits in Weight Space Authors: Luke Baines, Anton Gonzalvez Hawthorne, Mariia Koroliuk, Irakli Shalibashvili, Clément Dumas, Konstantinos Voudouris, David Demitri Africa Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07916v1 Large language models exhibit recurring behavioural patterns -- personas -- that shape generalisation and safety, but we lack reliable tools for decomposing, measuring, and controlling them. Our central insight is to treat personas as positions in a space of behavioural traits, using the OCEAN framework to describe model personas in terms of Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. We train low-rank adapters to amplify or suppress individual traits, and evaluate their effects using an LLM-judge calibrated against a human-validated panel, trait-specific multiple-choice benchmarks, and standard capability evaluations. Across six models from three families (4B-32B), we find that each adapter moves its target trait largely monotonically with scale, combines approximately additively with other adapters to construct mixed personas, and preserves performance on capability benchmarks at moderate scales. We further show that the induced trait axes affect safety-relevant behaviour in downstream evaluations: for example, moving along neuroticism and agreeableness axes affects frustration and sycophancy respectively. We also introduce an unsupervised psychometric pipeline that recovers four interpretable behavioural factors (tone, initiative, didacticism, epistemic caution) from model rollouts. Persona control can then be considered in terms of learning, scaling, and composing traits in weight space, providing a bridge between personality measurement, model editing, and safety. --- ### Validating LLMs in social science: Epistemic threats and emerging norms Authors: Meera Desai, Dallas Card, Abigail Z. Jacobs Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.CY, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07915v1 Large language models (LLMs) are reshaping social science methodology. Researchers increasingly prompt language models to generate quantitative measurements of social concepts, for example labeling data or simulating survey responses. Yet LLMs pose methodological challenges including bias, hallucination, and brittleness across contexts, with unclear threats to validity. Standard practices and norms for addressing these challenges are still emerging. We collect and systematically analyze validation practices in a comprehensive corpus of papers from eight flagship social science journals that use LLMs as measurement instruments. We find that LLM-generated measurements frequently play a central role in empirical analyses, yet validation practices are inconsistent and limited. We outline complementary strategies for more robust validation, pointing toward better norms and standards around the use of LLMs in social science. --- ### Multimodal Unlearning Across Vision, Language, Video, and Audio: Survey of Methods, Datasets, and Benchmarks Authors: Nobin Sarwar, Shubhashis Roy Dipta, Zheyuan Liu, Vaidehi Patil Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CR, cs.MM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07907v1 With the growing adoption of VLMs, DMs, LLMs, and AFMs, these multimodal foundation models can inadvertently encode sensitive, copyrighted, biased, or unsafe cross-modal associations that originate from their training data. Retraining after deletion requests or policy updates is often impractical, and targeted forgetting remains difficult because knowledge is distributed across shared representations. Multimodal unlearning addresses this challenge by enabling selective removal across modalities while retaining overall utility. This survey offers a unified, system-oriented view of multimodal unlearning across vision, language, audio, and video, grounded in recent advances, emerging applications, and open problems. Our taxonomy enables systematic comparison across model architectures and modalities, clarifying trade-offs among deletion strength, retention, efficiency, reversibility, and robustness. This survey highlights open problems and practical considerations to support future research and deployment of multimodal unlearning. We release a curated repository: https://smsnobin77.github.io/Awesome-Multimodal-Unlearning/ --- ### 3D Reconstruction of deciduous Trees using low-cost UAV- and Crane-based Photogrammetry for Monitoring Shoot Elongation across entire Canopies Authors: Stephan Nebiker, Micha Tschanz, Nando Amport, Frederik Baumgarten Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07905v1 Tree growth determines how much CO2 is sequestered from the atmosphere and temporarily stored in woody biomass. At the same time tree growth is affected by increasing temperatures, more frequent drought periods, late frosts and other extreme events associated with climate change. While continuous measurements of radial (secondary) tree growth using dendrometers are well established, monitoring of shoot elongation (primary growth) has largely been neglected because suitable measurement techniques are lacking. As a result, the effects of climate change on primary tree growth remain insufficiently understood. This work aims at reconstructing native deciduous trees in 3D as a basis for measuring and monitoring shoot elongation over entire tree canopies. Here we explored the use of low-cost UAV photogrammetry and of a multi-camera CraneCam system under real-world conditions. Data were collected in two study areas over an entire growing season. We present sensor evaluations, photogrammetric data acquisition and processing strategies. A special focus is placed on the analysis of the resulting photogrammetric 3D point clouds in terms of accuracy, resolution and completeness. Results demonstrate 3D point accuracies of 5-6 mm for entire trees using consumer-grade UAVs weighing less than 250 g and a 3D reconstruction completeness between 92% and 98% depending on the UAV type. The paper introduces a novel 3Dprinted ground-truth branch to evaluate the capability to reconstructing fine-detail structures such as thin tree shoots. Finally, we discuss operational challenges and initial experiments towards a skeletonization of entire trees based on photogrammetric point clouds. --- ### Mechanistic Interpretability of LLM Jailbreaks via Internal Attribution Graphs Authors: Anupam Wagle, Ifrat Ikhtear Uddin, Chaowei Zhang, Longwei Wang Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07903v1 Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities but remain highly vulnerable to adversarial prompts and jailbreak attacks. Existing approaches primarily analyze these failures through input-output behaviors or attribution methods, offering limited insight into how adversarial perturbations alter the model's internal reasoning. Consequently, the mechanisms underlying unsafe or incorrect behaviors remain poorly understood. We introduce a mechanistic framework for diagnosing LLM vulnerabilities using paired internal computation graphs, which represent prompt-specific inference as structured causal interactions among latent features. By constructing and aligning computation graphs for clean and attacked prompts, we reveal that adversarial attacks induce systematic transformations of internal reasoning, including suppression of safety-relevant components, emergence of attack-specific features, and rerouting of computation paths. Building on this representation, we propose a unified framework that (i) decomposes computation into invariant, suppressed, and emergent structures, (ii) identifies recurring vulnerability motifs associated with failure modes, and (iii) performs causal interventions on nodes, paths, and subgraphs to directly evaluate their contributions to attack success. This enables a transition from descriptive attribution to causal diagnosis of model failures. Experiments across multiple open-source LLMs and diverse adversarial and jailbreak benchmarks demonstrate that structural deviations in internal computation graphs strongly correlate with unsafe behaviors. Furthermore, targeted interventions on identified vulnerability motifs improve model robustness, establishing internal computation graphs as a principled foundation for understanding, diagnosing, and mitigating LLM vulnerabilities. --- ### Closed-Loop Dynamic Validator Node Scaling in Private Substrate Blockchains Using Takagi-Sugeno Fuzzy Inference Authors: Thandile Nododile, Ayinde M. Usman, Clement N. Nyirenda Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07901v1 Private blockchain networks run with fixed node configurations that cannot adapt to changing workload conditions. Too many nodes serving a light workload waste resources; too few nodes facing heavy demand slow block production and degrade finalisation. The right validator count is hard to determine, as it depends on overlapping factors that shift over time. This paper presents a Takagi-Sugeno (TS) fuzzy inference system that reads live blockchain parameters (block production time, block size, and active node count) and outputs a continuous efficiency score alongside a scaling recommendation: Scale Up, Maintain, or Scale Down. The controller uses triangular membership functions across three linguistic variables, evaluated through a complete 27-rule base with product t-norm aggregation. A key contribution is an empirical recalibration of the membership functions, anchoring linguistic terms to the observed operating range of the testbed rather than to theoretical extremes. The system is evaluated on a 10-node Substrate blockchain network storing real smart water meter data hashes from the Queensland Government open data portal. Statistical analysis across configurations of 4, 7, and 10 active nodes confirms that the controller produces distinct operational profiles reflecting each configuration's provisioning state. In closed-loop experiments, the controller autonomously adjusts validator participation in both directions, activating validators under rising load and removing them under over-provisioning, converging to the same stable equilibrium from both directions. Compared against three threshold-based baselines, it shows fewer scaling oscillations while maintaining comparable block production times. Results show that TS fuzzy inference can support autonomous validator management in private blockchain deployments, with stable scaling behaviour threshold approaches cannot match. --- ### Scalable and Culturally Specific Stereotype Dataset Construction via Human-LLM Collaboration Authors: Weicheng Ma, John Guerrerio, Soroush Vosoughi Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07895v1 Research on stereotypes in large language models (LLMs) has largely focused on English-speaking contexts, due to the lack of datasets in other languages and the high cost of manual annotation in underrepresented cultures. To address this gap, we introduce a cost-efficient human-LLM collaborative annotation framework and apply it to construct EspanStereo, a Spanish-language stereotype dataset spanning multiple Spanish-speaking countries across Europe and Latin America. EspanStereo captures both well-documented stereotypes from prior literature and culturally specific biases absent from English-centric resources. Using LLMs to generate candidate stereotypes and in-culture annotators to validate them, we demonstrate the framework's effectiveness in identifying nuanced, region-specific biases. Our evaluation of Spanish-supporting LLMs using EspanStereo reveals significant variation in stereotypical behavior across countries, highlighting the need for more culturally grounded assessments. Beyond Spanish, our framework is adaptable to other languages and regions, offering a scalable path toward multilingual stereotype benchmarks. This work broadens the scope of stereotype analysis in LLMs and lays the groundwork for comprehensive cross-cultural bias evaluation. --- ### How Do I Know What to Say Next? Barenholtz's Autogenerative Theory as an Enrichment of Harrisean Integrationism Authors: J. Mark Bishop, Stephen J. Cowley Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07891v1 Roy Harris's Integrationist linguistics offers a compelling critique of the referentialist tradition embedded deep at the heart of computational approaches to language, arguing that language is not a code that maps onto a pre-given world but a situated, bipartite activity oriented toward prospective joint action. Yet Integrationism leaves certain explanatory gaps: it does not fully account for the structural mechanism by which signs sustain prospective openness, it undertheorises the continuity between linguistic and non-linguistic semiotic activity, and it offers no detailed account of the structural properties of the accumulated archive of past integrations. This paper argues that Elan Barenholtz's autogenerative theory of language, developed in response to the behaviour of Large Language Models (LLMs), can fill precisely these gaps, enriching Integrationism without undermining any of its core commitments. Specifically, the autogenerative account provides: a structural mechanism for the prospective openness that Harris identifies as central to bipartite communication; a computational correlate for Harris's thesis of semiotic continuity between language and other sign-making activity; and a theory of the archive: what the accumulated residue of past integrations looks like and how new participants draw upon it. The synthesis preserves Harris's ontological primacy of the situated integrative act while adding explanatory content that Integrationism itself does not supply. For practitioners and researchers in natural language processing and large language model design, the argument offers a principled account of what the statistical structure that LLMs so effectively exploit actually is, and of what it cannot, by its nature, provide. --- ### Distributed Sketching on Data Partitions for OLS Regression Authors: Luyuan Yang, Brayden Garner, Shayan Shafaei, Chao Lan Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07888v1 This paper studies distributed sketching for ordinary least squares (OLS) regression, an approach that distributes small sketches of a large data set over multiple machines to separately construct OLS estimators and average them. Unlike prior studies that consider sketching on the whole data set, we consider sketching on partitioned subsets to further reduce computational cost. Under the fixed design setting, we characterize the exact excess loss of the averaged OLS estimator. Results show that this loss is comparable to the established loss for sketching on the whole data set when the divergence among subset covariances is small. --- ### Mixtures of spatial factor analyzers for tensor-variate data Authors: Hanzhang Lu, Keiran Malott, Kirsty Milligan, Sanjeena Subedi, Edana Cassol, Vinita Chauhan, Connor McNairn, Prarthana Pasricha, Sangeeta Murugkar, Rowan Thomson, Andrew Jirasek, Jeffrey L. Andrews Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: stat.ME, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07887v1 A mixture of spatial factor analyzers (MSFA) is introduced to address the challenges of clustering high-dimensional spatial data. By leveraging the underlying coordinate system, the proposed framework incorporates a flexible, spline-based spatial decay covariance structure that prevents parameter inflation as dimensionality increases. To model non-spatial dependence, matrix variate factor analyzers are employed for further dimensionality reduction. Parameter estimation is conducted via a variant of the expectation-maximization algorithm combined with a generalized least squares estimator. The proposed models are explored in the context of tensor-variate data analysis, where simulation studies and applications to Raman spectroscopy and hyperspectral texture databases demonstrate their capacity to accurately infer and differentiate distinct spatial patterns. --- ### Time-to-Collision Based Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance Using Pretrained Vision Models for Robots in Unstructured Environments Authors: Erik Jagnandan, Mulugeta Haile, Gregory Barber, Pratik Chaudhari Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.CV, eess.IV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07885v1 Dynamic obstacle avoidance in unstructured outdoor environments remains a critical challenge for autonomous mobile robots, particularly when large-scale robot-specific training data and simulation-based policies are impractical. We present a data-efficient, interpretable method for vision-based dynamic obstacle avoidance that operates entirely on real-world data, avoiding the sim-to-real transfer problem inherent in simulation-trained policies. Our approach leverages UniDepth, a large pretrained monocular depth estimation model, to produce dense depth maps from RGB video without requiring stereo cameras or LiDAR at inference time. Dynamic obstacle avoidance is achieved by extending the SuperPoint and SuperGlue feature correspondence pipeline to track keypoints across long frame sequences, projecting their 2D pixel-space positions into 3D using camera intrinsics and predicted depth, running bundle adjustment initialized from these 3D keypoints, and computing per-keypoint time-to-collision (TTC). A 2D motion primitive in the ground plane is then selected to move the robot away from the closest point of approach of the minimum-TTC keypoint. Evaluated on real-world data from the M3ED dataset, our pipeline achieves a precision of 0.49 and a recall of 0.38 in identifying frames with a ground truth TTC below 1 second, and correctly generates the evasive motion direction in 84\% of true positive detections. Crucially, it detects at least one frame with TTC less than 1 second for 20 out of 22 unique physical obstacles present in our test sequences. Unlike end-to-end learned methods that demand thousands of hours of robot-specific training data, our approach eliminates model training entirely, requiring only 74 seconds of data for hyperparameter tuning. This demonstrates exceptional data efficiency while preserving interpretable and generalizable behavior across diverse obstacle types. --- ### Optimal Learning Rate Scaling Depends on Data in Deep Scalar Linear Networks Authors: Yedi Zhang, Peter E. Latham, Leena Chennuru Vankadara, Andrew Saxe Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07884v1 In this short note we consider the gradient descent dynamics of deep scalar linear networks, $f(x) = \prod_{l=1}^L w_l x$, which enjoy exact time-course solutions for any integer depth. We show that even in this minimal model, the optimal depth-wise learning rate scaling depends on data, whereas data-agnostic scaling rules fail to transfer across depths. Under the data-dependent optimal scaling, the learning dynamics is independent of data and weakly dependent on depth, resulting in a constant linear convergence rate across all depths including infinity. We further show similar data-dependent effects in deep scalar linear networks with residual connections. --- ### Nigeria Machinery: A Low-Resource Industrial Dataset with a Domain-Grounded Reasoning Layer Authors: Gospel Bassey, Vincent Fakiyesi Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07883v1 There is relatively little, public, and model-ready data on industrial machinery for African economies. This makes it hard to do quantitative analysis or to train language models on numeric tasks grounded in that setting. We release two things to help with part of this problem. The first is the Nigeria Machinery Usage and Failures Dataset: 89 machine-level records across 28 indicators, covering Nigeria's manufacturing and oil and gas sectors from 2006 to 2025. Every record names a public source and is decoded by a codebook. The second is a method for building chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning examples from these sparse numeric values. The result is 94 prompt, completion, and reasoning-trace rows. In every row, the prompt names the real indicator, subsector, year, and source of the record it comes from. The data adaptation work was carried out by Adaption Labs. Along the way we describe a problem that is common when language models are used to build datasets. The prompts can match the real numbers while saying nothing about the real domain. We show that fixing this raises the share of domain-grounded prompts from 1 out of 78 in an earlier release to 94 out of 94, and that every retrieval answer now matches its source value (84 out of 84). We release the data, the reasoning layer, and a per-row provenance file under CC-BY-4.0. We are clear about the limits. With 89 records and 17 indicators that have only one observation, this is a reference and seed dataset, not a large training set. Most reasoning rows are retrieval rather than multi-step computation. --- ### Functional and Secure Code Generation with Task Vectors Authors: Felix Wang, Anudeep Das, Mei Nagappan, N. Asokan Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.SE, cs.CR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07881v1 Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for code generation, but they struggle to generate functional code free of security vulnerabilities. Prior work to improve the secure code generation abilities of such coding LLMs has largely focused on evaluating code functionality and security separately using different datasets, or focused on finding vulnerabilities post-generation. At the same time, the text-generation domain has seen significant work on alignment techniques, where models are tuned such that their outputs exhibit certain qualities (e.g., helpfulness, harmlessness). Of particular interest is task-vector arithmetic, where linear operations on LLM weights can be used to arbitrarily enhance alignment while incurring only minimal computational overhead. We develop a novel method, SecVecCoder, leveraging task vectors to produce trustworthy code that is simultaneously functional and secure without the need for post-generation adjustment. Across six coding LLMs from three families on the CodeGuard+ benchmark, SecVecCoder improves the rate of trustworthy code completions by 2.1-36.0 percentage points over the base model, with improvements on unseen CWE types reaching up to 39.1 percentage points. Since the effectiveness of the coding LLM relies only on changing the model weights, SecVecCoder requires no method-specific decoding and hence achieves a decoding latency within 0.6% of the base model's, on average. --- ### GIRAF: Towards Generalizable Human Interactions with Articulated Objects Authors: Xiaohan Zhang, Sebastian Starke, Alexander Winkler, Federica Bogo, Samir Aroudj, Yuting Ye Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07880v1 Synthesizing realistic full-body human interactions with articulated objects is a fundamental challenge for embodied AI and graphics, with applications in robotics training and virtual agents. Existing models remain limited: some focus on simple activities with static objects, while others restrict attention to hand-only manipulation. This leaves open the problem of generating coordinated full-body motion that approaches, manipulates, and moves articulated objects in a realistic and generalizable way. The key difficulty lies in reasoning jointly about locomotion, fine-grained contact, and object articulation. Models must capture subtle hand-object correspondences that transfer across object geometries, while also producing seamless transitions from navigation to manipulation. At the same time, the scarcity of large-scale paired motion-scene data makes it difficult to generalize across diverse object positions and shapes. We introduce a text-conditioned diffusion model that addresses these challenges through three core ideas: an object-centric representation that unifies hand-object contact with object surfaces, a mixed-domain training strategy that balances locomotion and interaction, and a contact-based augmentation scheme that expands training diversity. Through experiments, our method demonstrated strong generalization to unseen object configurations, surpassing current state-of-the-art methods. --- ### Physics-Informed Machine Learning Under Small-Data Constraints: Lessons from Abrasive Waterjet Milling Authors: Sarah Grewe, Jörg Frochte Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07863v1 In physically dominated machining processes, experimental datasets are small, expensive, and material-specific; in this regime, data curation, evaluation design, and the form of physics integration can matter as much as the learning algorithm. Using an abrasive waterjet milling dataset ($n{=}155$, Inconel\,718), we make three methodological contributions. First, we separate physics-based data \emph{cleaning} from statistical \emph{curation} and treat the latter as competing modelling hypotheses rather than silent preprocessing. Second, we find that model rankings from a 15-point hold-out set can be unstable: the single-split winner drops from rank~1 to rank~7 under 10-fold cross-validation, while Gaussian Process (GP) variants occupy the top ranks. Third, we study a spectrum of physics integration levels and find that residual learning on a compact physics baseline is competitive for GP, yielding lower variance and an interpretable decomposition, but degrades tree-based models. Bayesian hyper parameter tuning improves parameter-sensitive baselines such as gradient boosting and SVR, yet harms multi-stage hybrid pipelines at this sample size. GP uncertainty intervals are approximately calibrated ($86\%$ empirical coverage at nominal $90\%$). The resulting picture is methodological: for small, expensive process datasets, our results suggest that, in this setting, reliable model comparison benefits from explicit curation hypotheses, robust evaluation, and careful choices about how physics enters the model. --- ### CTA-Pipelining: A Latency-Oriented Spatial Scaling Method for Multi-GPU Systems Authors: Tingkai Liu, Muralidhar Andoorveedu, Sanjoy Das, Sanjay Patel, Volodymyr Kindratenko Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.DC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07862v1 The evolution of compute infrastructure has transformed multi-GPU systems into tightly integrated shared-memory structures. However, current software still mostly treats these coherent interconnects simply as high-speed networks. Simultaneously, the demand for serving Large Language Models under latency constraints has shifted GPU workload optimization from being throughput-driven to latency-bound, necessitating latency-oriented scaling methods beyond Tensor Parallelism (TP). Thus, we introduce CTA-pipelining, an execution paradigm designed to exploit shared-memory multi-GPU systems. As a latency-oriented spatial scaling technique, CTA-pipelining leverages dependencies at the Cooperative Thread Array level, enabling concurrent execution of dependent kernels across GPUs. We demonstrate its capability using CUTLASS, cuBLAS, and NCCL libraries on 8-GPU H200 and B200 systems. Results show on 2-layer GEMM, representing the MLP operation, CTA-pipelining reduces latency by up to 31.8% compared to micro-batching, and 29.6% compared to TP. It can also be combined with TP as an orthogonal scaling dimension to further push the latency boundary. --- ### Feedback Manipulation Regularization: Enabling Offline Agent Alignment for Imitation Learning Authors: Benjamin Poole, Minwoo Lee Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.AI, cs.HC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07859v1 Reinforcement learning (RL) research has increasingly shifted focus towards alignment, ensuring agents learn behaviors adhering to human values. While human demonstrations and feedback have proven crucial for alignment, existing approaches predominantly combine these signals using multi-stage pipelines designed for the contextual bandit framing of language generation. Yet little work explores how these complementary inputs can serve as a richer, interconnected signal for single-stage offline training in fully sequential decision-making environments. We propose Feedback Manipulation Regularization (FMR), an algorithm-agnostic method that harnesses evaluative feedback as a corrective signal to improve the alignment of imitation learning policies. We adapt Safety Gymnasium environments to be a principled testbed for alignment evaluation, demonstrating improved aptitude and up to a 98\% reduction in misalignment across a range of imitation learning algorithms. FMR remains robust in limited data regimes, even when learning from scarce aligned and uninformative noisy demonstrations. --- ### Agentic AI and Retrieval-Augmented Models in Straight-Through Underwriting Authors: Robert Richardson, Josh Meyers, Brian Hartman, David Sandberg Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07858v1 Artificial intelligence (AI) is beginning to reshape actuarial practice, particularly in domains that require reasoning over unstructured documents, heterogeneous data sources, and regulated decision workflows. Actuaries now face a design space that ranges from traditional rule-based automation to large language models (LLMs), retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and multi-agent ``agentic'' systems that plan, retrieve, call tools, and reflect. This paper examines how these emerging architectures can support actuarial priorities such as transparency, auditability, and human-in-the-loop governance, with a focus on straight-through decision processes. To make these ideas concrete, we develop and analyze an agentic AI framework for straight-through underwriting of small commercial Business Owner Policies (BOPs). We construct a synthetic but realistic experimental environment and compare three underwriting pipelines: (i) a single-LLM baseline, (ii) a naive RAG system, and (iii) a multi-agent ``Agentic RAG'' pipeline that combines targeted retrieval, third-party data checks, and explicit multi-step rule evaluation. The agentic system performs best overall, with the largest gains in multi-step and missing-information scenarios, where structured retrieval and reflection help the model avoid unsupported straight-through decisions. --- ### Multi-agent Autoformalization of Tensor Network Theory Authors: Sirui Lu, Erickson Tjoa, J. Ignacio Cirac Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: quant-ph, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07857v1 We build a team of specialized large language-model agents and present an agent-driven workflow for research-level formalization in theoretical physics, with the autoformalization of the fundamental theorem of matrix-product states as a demonstration. The agents, coordinated through a structured mathematical blueprint and periodic human review, orchestrated and executed the full formalization autonomously. For some statements, the agents were able to explore new proof routes that are not part of the standard literature. Along the way the agents produced extensive tensor-network and quantum-information libraries not previously available in Mathlib, Lean's mathematical library. As a physical application, the formalization also extends towards symmetry-protected topological phases in one dimension. We find that the main bottleneck in large-scale autoformalization is enforcing mathematical intent and we provide a detailed study of the full process and various subtleties involved. We release the codebase as the library \href{https://github.com/LionSR/TNLean}{TNLean}, together with a \nChapters{}-chapter \href{https://lionsr.github.io/TNLean/blueprint/}{blueprint} of the formalization effort. --- ### NFTR: From Provable Mode-Averaging to Geodesic Subgoal Selection in Offline Goal-Conditioned RL Authors: Erdemt Bao, Xing Lei, Jun Chen Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07855v1 Hierarchical Implicit Q-Learning (HIQL), an offline goal-conditioned RL method, selects subgoals by value-function advantages alone. This rule has two coupled failure modes. Optimistic bias treats lucky stochastic outcomes as skillful choices, and mode collapse reduces a multi-modal subgoal distribution to a single Gaussian mean that often falls in unreachable regions. We propose NFTR (Normalizing Flows subgoal policies with Triangle-slack Reweighting). A conditional Normalizing Flow replaces the Gaussian policy, and a closed-form mode-averaging result identifies NFs as the minimal generative class for AWR-based subgoal selection. A triangle slack score, built on the architectural triangle inequality without relying on distance accuracy, multiplicatively corrects the AWR weight to downweight subgoals whose detour cost exceeds average reachability. Triangle-slack vanishes on geodesics in deterministic MDPs and remains a conservative upper bound on composability violation under stochastic dynamics. The RWDR objective preserves AWR's population-level monotonic improvement and admits a three-term suboptimality decomposition. Together, these two ingredients yield subgoal selection that provably avoids the Gaussian collapse described above and remains stable under stochastic dynamics. GitHub page: https://github.com/erdemtbao/NFTR --- ### Sampling on Random Subspaces under Limited Data in the Context of Exploratory Landscape Analysis Authors: Iván Olarte Rodríguez, Anja Jankovic, Thomas Bäck, Elena Raponi Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.NE, cs.CE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07854v1 Classical space-filling designs often fail to provide reliable statistical results for Exploratory Landscape Analysis (ELA) when only limited evaluation budgets are available, as commonly occurs in high-dimensional problems or other resource-constrained settings, resulting in noisy and unstable landscape descriptors. To address this challenge, we propose an alternative sampling strategy for ELA based on random linear embeddings. Rather than sampling uniformly in the full decision space, we allocate the budget to randomly oriented low-dimensional subspaces and investigate whether this improves the robustness of the resulting landscape descriptors. We compare full-space and embedding-based sampling strategies across several classical ELA feature sets on the noiseless Black-Box Optimization Benchmarking (BBOB) test suite from the COmparing Continuous Optimizers (COCO) environment, in a 20-dimensional setting. Our results suggest that random linear embeddings constitute a promising alternative for budget-constrained ELA, although their effectiveness remains dependent on the feature class and the underlying problem. --- ### False Confidence: Automated Labels Confound Fairness Audits in Cervical Spine Segmentation Authors: Linus Juni, Aasa Feragen, Aditya Parikh Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV, cs.CY, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07852v1 Automated segmentation of cervical-spine MRI is increasingly used in clinical workflows, yet no fairness audit exists for this anatomy. We show that auditing these segmentation tasks is complicated by a common property of modern segmentation datasets: expert-annotated gold labels are expensive, so abundant machine-generated (silver) labels are added to limit annotation cost. This matters because the reference used to judge a model can itself be biased. In this study, we present the first fairness audit of cervical-spine MRI segmentation across sex, age, and race using the CSpineSeg dataset. We observe that the deployed model is demographically fair, but the choice of reference label, however, is not neutral. Because a dataset's silver labels are generated by a model trained on its gold labels, any new model trained on those same gold labels agrees more with the silver labels than with expert truth: scoring identical predictions against silver rather than gold overestimates performance by ~8 Dice points and turns the fairness verdict for age from non-significant to significant - not by the gap inflation Parikh et al. report (which we term false magnitude) but by collapsing within-group variance (which we term false confidence). Reference-label provenance is thus a first-order confounder in segmentation evaluation: performance and fairness should be reported against expert labels, and any fairness claim stated together with the provenance of its reference. --- ### Kime-Representation Formulations of Three Open Problems in the Foundations of Classical Mechanics: Uncertainty, Invariant Entropy, and Directional Degrees of Freedom Authors: Ivo D. Dinov Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: math-ph, cs.AI, physics.comp-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07851v1 We give mathematically self-contained formulations, in the complex-time (kime) representation, of three open problems from the foundations of classical mechanics: (I) the extension of the classical entropic uncertainty principle to non-canonical variables and to multiple degrees of freedom; (II) the characterization of coordinate-invariant measures and entropies, i.e., the question of why continuous physical quantities must be paired for an invariant entropy to exist; and (III) the construction of a classical relativistic directional degree of freedom (a classical analogue of a spin-1/2 system). Throughout, the kime phase is interpreted {statistically as a latent circular random variable whose law Φmodels the intrinsic trial-to-trial variability of repeated, identically controlled experiments indexed by the kime magnitude. The mathematical bridge is an exact symplectic identification of the kime cone with the action-angle chart of a one-degree-of-freedom phase space, under which the kime measure is the Liouville measure and the phase law becomes the angular conditional of a Liouville density. Specifically, we (i) prove a sharp entropic uncertainty relation on the kime cylinder whose extremal family is von Mises x Gaussian, together with a sharp circular Fisher-information inequality saturated exactly by von Mises laws; (ii) prove an exact non-canonical uncertainty relation in which the correction term is the geometric mean of the Poisson bracket, clarifying the conjectured role of the expected bracket; (iii) prove aggregate multi-degree-of-freedom bounds via the Williamson normal form and Fischer's inequality, and isolate the per-degree-of-freedom refinement as a precise open problem of symplectic Schur-Horn type; (iv) prove that diffusion of the kime phase produces monotone entropy growth with the equipartitioned (Haar-uniform) phase law. --- ### A Graph Neural Network Model for Real-Time Gesture Recognition Based on sEMG Signals Authors: Pragatheeswaran Vipulanandan, Kamal Premaratne, Manohar Murthi Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07850v1 For seemless control of advanced hand prostheses and augmented reality, accurate and immediate hand gestures recognition is essential. Surface electromyography (sEMG) signals obtained from the forearm are commonly employed for this purpose. In this paper, we present a novel approach for sEMG representation that utilizes graph networks which contain information about muscle activation patterns in the forearm. Based on these graph networks, we have developed a machine learning algorithm capable of real-time hand gesture recognition using a graph neural network. The algorithm's performance was evaluated using sEMG signals acquired from myoband, which has 8 electrodes placed around the forearm, involving 8 healthy subjects. The proposed method demonstrated an average classification accuracy of 99\%, surpassing the performance of state-of-the-art techniques. The average time for both graph construction and prediction stood at 48ms utilizing a M1 pro CPU, rendering the approach well-suited for real-time applications. --- ### When Does Continual Learning Require Learning Authors: Anne Harrington, Nayan Saxena, Michael Murphy, Anastasia Borovykh, Zeyu Yun, Sridhar Kamath, Ara Eindra Kyi, Trevor Darrell, Jitendra Malik, Yutong Bai Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07847v1 As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly capable, the next question is how can we enable models to continually learn? Today, the field largely frames this as a problem of context management and mitigating forgetting. We argue this framing is incomplete: continual learning is fundamentally about increasing model competence as the world changes. We disentangle this change along two axes -- space, where the model encounters new domains, and time, where the underlying data drifts under a fixed task. This framing lets us study continual learning under realistic conditions: new domains arrive over time, facts drift past their training cutoff, and agentic interactions accumulate state across episodes. To evaluate methods under this setting, we recast widely used LLM benchmarks as sequential problems and introduce a single mechanism-agnostic protocol that compares prompt-based methods (GEPA, ACE), supervised learning (SFT, SDFT), reinforcement learning (GRPO, SDPO), and context compression (Cartridges, In-place TTT). Prompt-based methods fit each new stage quickly but degrade on future tasks. Distillation-based methods accumulate knowledge stably but struggle to update outdated facts. Context compression improves efficiency without substantially improving the ability to learn new tasks. Online reinforcement learning adapts most effectively to knowledge updates but remains sensitive to noisy reward signals. Overall, our results suggest that continual learning is not a single capability: different patterns of environmental change require fundamentally different update behaviors, determining when adaptation must be learned inside model weights and when it can be achieved through external scaffolding. We hope that understanding where each method succeeds and fails will guide the design of stronger continual learning systems. --- ### VectorizationLLM: Smart Vectorization Based AI Assistant Authors: Ryan Duke Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07846v1 VectorizationLLM is a specialized Large Language Model based on Google open-weight LLMs. The model is designed to assist students to learn smart vectorization, time/wave vector analysis, piecewise functions, Fourier analysis, and differential equations in MATLAB. The course application is CTEC 247: Applied Computational Analysis II by the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering Technology at New York Institute of Technology Old Westbury. The LLM model is designed to be an instructive assistant, providing detailed explanations of concepts with examples from in-class notes without providing direct answers to questions. The model is designed with a RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) knowledge base and system prompt architecture. Examples in both code, text, and images are provided in the LLM responses. --- ### Explaining Near-Zero Hessian Eigenvalues Through Approximate Symmetries in Neural Networks Authors: Marcel Kühn, Bernd Rosenow Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.LG, cond-mat.dis-nn arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07845v1 The Hessian of the training loss governs the local geometry of the loss landscape, yet despite existing explanations for its largest eigenvalues, the origin of the vast multitude of vanishingly small eigenvalues remains elusive. We argue that the bulk consists of the weakly lifted pseudo-Goldstone modes of the continuous symmetries of the network parametrization. In deep linear networks these symmetries are exact: they generate flat directions and hence exact zero modes, whose eigenvectors we construct explicitly. Introducing a ReLU nonlinearity as a perturbation, we show that it breaks these symmetries weakly and explicitly. Resolving the spectrum at the level of eigenvectors, we find that the high-curvature directions are orthogonal to the symmetry subspace, while the bulk lies almost entirely within it. We demonstrate the mechanism in a two-layer ReLU student--teacher model and in a network trained on CIFAR-10. A convolutional example demonstrates that the same diagnostic extends beyond fully connected layers. Together, these results link the Hessian bulk to weakly broken symmetries and clarify the origin of near-zero modes. --- ### Shift & Drift: A Zero-Shot Benchmark for Generalizable and Robust Autonomous Driving Motion Planning Authors: Alessandro Canevaro, Hang Yu, Julian Schmidt, Peizheng Li, Silvan Lindner, Wilhelm Stork, Georg Martius, Julian Jordan Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07844v1 While closed-loop motion planners trained on large-scale, object-level datasets, e.g., nuPlan, demonstrate strong in-distribution (ID) performance, their generalization to novel urban topologies and recovery mechanisms following execution perturbations remain under-explored. To address this, we present Shift & Drift, a novel dual-track benchmark designed to rigorously stress-test motion planners across two critical axes of distribution shift: (1) The Semantic Shift Track leverages a novel conversion pipeline that transforms the aerial, DeepScenario Open 3D dataset into the nuPlan simulation framework. This enables zero-shot evaluation of planners trained on North American and Singaporean data against 1,182 scenarios spanning four German cities and the US city of San Francisco featuring dense pedestrian-cyclist interactions. (2) The State-Distribution Drift Track injects stochastic perturbations into the ego vehicle's dynamics to quantify robustness against compounding execution errors. Based on this, we systematically evaluate the failure modes of diverse planning paradigms under semantic and state-distribution shifts. While imitation learning methods achieve high scores in ID benchmarks, they exhibit significant failures under semantic shift, particularly in pedestrian-dense environments, and suffer from persistent drift when subjected to temporally correlated actuation noise. In contrast, the evaluated reinforcement-learning-based planner demonstrates more graceful degradation, maintaining higher safety and progress metrics across both tracks. Our findings reveal an empirical trade-off between imitation fidelity and closed-loop resilience, providing the community with a rigorous benchmark to evaluate progress toward reliable deployment. --- ### GradInf: Gradient Estimation as Probabilistic Inference Authors: Gaurav Arya, Mathieu Huot, Moritz Schauer, Alexander K. Lew, Feras A. Saad Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.PL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07840v1 Gradient estimation -- the task of computing the gradient of the expected value of a probabilistic program -- has diverse applications in scientific computing, but is notoriously difficult because of issues such as high-dimensional integration, discrete random choices, and complex stochastic dependencies. This article introduces gradient inference, a new approach to developing sound and efficient gradient estimators for probabilistic programs. Gradient inference rests on a formal reduction from a gradient estimation problem to a closely related probabilistic inference problem, whose solution can be differentiated to obtain a gradient estimator. This inference problem is obtained by applying two powerful statistical operations -- coupling and factorization -- to the input probabilistic program. Our reduction lets us leverage the rich toolkit of probabilistic inference algorithms to design novel gradient estimators that extend and improve upon existing methods. We introduce GradInf, a probabilistic programming system that facilitates the sound and automated implementation of gradient inference. GradInf is centered around programmable source-to-source transformations for coupling and factorizing higher-order probabilistic programs, whose soundness is proven in terms of a denotational semantics. Key to our development is the use of information-flow typing to allow random choices in a probabilistic program to be factored out and partially evaluated, which improves our ability to deploy sophisticated probabilistic inference algorithms. The resulting system offers practitioners a principled framework for designing gradient estimators. We apply GradInf to several challenging case studies, showing that it can express prominent gradient estimators from the literature and enables the construction of new state-of-the-art estimators that outperform the best existing baselines. ---