# Research Papers — 2026-07 · bundle page 168 of 222 > Full-text markdown of papers #8351–8400 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/168 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/167.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/169.md) ### Is Randomness Necessary for Adaptive Data Analysis? Authors: Edith Cohen, Haim Kaplan, Yishay Mansour, Shay Sapir, Uri Stemmer Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.CR, cs.DS, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07085v2 The Adaptive Data Analysis (ADA) problem formalizes the challenge of preventing false discovery and overfitting when a dataset is repeatedly reused. Formally, our input is a dataset containing $n$ i.i.d.\ samples from an unknown distribution $P$ over a domain $X$, and our goal is to answer a sequence of $k$ adaptively chosen statistical queries with respect to $P$. The main question is how many queries we can support (i.e., how large $k$ can be), primarily as a function of the number of samples $n$. This question has been intensively studied and is relatively well-understood for randomized mechanisms: there are computationally efficient mechanisms that support $k \approx n^2$ queries, and no computationally efficient mechanism can answer $k \gg n^2$ queries. In this paper, we address a fundamental question: is randomness necessary for ADA? Despite a decade of work on ADA, this question remains open. A folklore observation dating back to the initial works on ADA is that randomness is {\em not} necessary when the analyst is computationally bounded. Yet, the necessity of randomness against computationally unbounded analysts has remained elusive. Our main contribution resolves this gap in the information-theoretic setting. Perhaps surprisingly, we show that randomness is strictly necessary to answer a non-trivial number of adaptive queries: when the analyst is unbounded, any deterministic mechanism can be forced to fail after just $k = \tilde{O}(n)$ queries. --- ### Prior-aware and Context-guided Group Sampling for Active Probabilistic Subsampling Authors: Beomgu Kang, Hyunseok Seo Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: eess.SY, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07083v1 Subsampling significantly reduces the number of measurements, thereby streamlining data processing and transfer overhead, and shortening acquisition time across diverse real-world applications. The recently introduced Active Deep Probabilistic Subsampling (A-DPS) approach jointly optimizes both the subsampling pattern and the downstream task model, enabling instance- and subject-specific sampling trajectories and effective adaptation to new data at inference time. However, this approach does not fully leverage valuable dataset priors and relies on top-1 sampling, which can impede the optimization process. Herein, we enhance A-DPS by integrating a deterministic (fixed) prior-informed sampling pattern derived from the training dataset, along with group-based sampling via top-k sampling, to achieve more robust optimization, method we call Prior-aware and context-guided Group-based Active DPS (PGA-DPS). We also provide a theoretical analysis supporting improved optimization via group sampling, and validate this with empirical results. We evaluated PGA-DPS on three tasks: classification, image reconstruction, and segmentation, using the MNIST, CIFAR-10, fastMRI knee, and hyperspectral AeroRIT datasets, respectively. In every case, PGA-DPS outperformed A-DPS, DPS, and all other sampling methods. --- ### Navigating Hierarchy: Hyperbolic Learning on Brain Graphs for Disorder Diagnosis Authors: Yapeng Li, Bo Jiang, Ziyan Zhang, Dongdong Chen, Zhengzheng Tu Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07077v1 Functional brain networks exhibit a hierarchical organization across ROI, community, and whole-brain levels, supporting local processing, inter-community coordination, and global integration. Recent studies have demonstrated that brain community-aware modeling is beneficial for both diagnosis and biomarker identification of brain networks. However, existing brain graph modeling methods often struggle to model ROI-community interactions, thereby failing to fully exploit the hierarchy across ROI, community, and whole-brain network levels. To address this issue, inspired by deep hyperbolic learning in modeling hierarchical structures, we propose a novel framework, termed Hyperbolic Learning on Brain Graphs (HLBG), for brain network analysis. The core idea of HLBG is to exploit the inherent hierarchical geometry of hyperbolic space to model the hierarchical relationships among ROIs, functional communities, and the whole-brain network, thereby learning hierarchy-aware and highly discriminative representations for brain network data. Specifically, HLBG first projects representations from ROIs, communities, and the whole-brain network into Lorentzian hyperbolic space. Then, the multi-level hierarchy is imposed via two geometric entailment constraints. In addition, we introduce a new Graph-aware Mamba (GaMamba) model, which incorporates topology-derived structural prompts into Mamba to capture long-range dependencies while preserving graph topological information. Experiments on ABIDE-I and REST-MDD demonstrate that HLBG outperforms state-of-the-art methods and identifies disorder-relevant functional biomarkers. --- ### An Hybrid Quantum-Classical Diffusion Model for Image Generation Authors: Qipeng Qian, Keli Deng, Yuntao Qian Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07072v1 Quantum diffusion models provide a physics-consistent route to generative learning by formulating noising and denoising directly on quantum states. However, applying such models to classical high-dimensional data is constrained by the qubit cost of state encoding and the computational burden of simulating large density operators. We propose a scalable hybrid generative pipeline that combines a classical autoencoder for dimensionality reduction with a mixed-state quantum denoising diffusion probabilistic model (MSQuDDPM) operating in the learned latent space. The autoencoder compresses data into compact latent codes that can be embedded into a small-qubit Hilbert space, after which the quantum diffusion model learns a generative distribution over latent density operators and decodes samples back to the original domain. Algorithmically, we simplify the reverse dynamics by predicting an estimate of the clean state $ρ_0$ at timestep $t$ and computing the one-step reverse update via an analytic backward propagation rule, rather than learning an explicit predictor for $ρ_{t-1}$. We demonstrate the proposed approach on MNIST image generation and discuss how mixed-state quantum diffusion can serve as a practical backbone for hybrid quantum--classical generative modeling under realistic qubit budgets. --- ### Multiplication Beyond Groups: Stratified Fourier Mechanisms in Transformer Circuits Authors: Zitong Andrew Chen, Junaid Hasan, Akhil Srinivasan, Hemkesh Bandi, Jarod Alper Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, math.NT, math.RT arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07066v1 Transformers have demonstrated a remarkable ability to learn algorithmic reasoning, yet mechanistic analyses have mostly focused on globally invertible operations such as cyclic addition and group composition. In this work, we investigate how small transformers learn modular integer multiplication over composite moduli, a fundamentally non-invertible operation due to the presence of zero-divisors. We propose the monoid extension: a localized generalization of Group Composition via Representation (GCR) that suggests the learned computation does not rely on a single global representation space. Instead, the model partitions the input space into local hierarchical algebraic regions, where group-like structure survives and Fourier mechanisms can be applied. In transformers trained on square-free modular multiplication, we find that embeddings organize around these regions, attention exhibits class-sensitive routing and low-rank write directions, and local character features explain a large fraction of the model's output logits. Our results suggest that representation-theoretic mechanisms previously identified for group operations can extend beyond groups to more general structures. --- ### Complexity-Budgeted, Interaction-Aware Interpretable Model for Tabular Data Authors: Srikumar Krishnamoorthy Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07060v1 Inherently interpretable classifiers for tabular data typically rely on sparse features, rules, or patterns that users can inspect directly. The marginal feature-screening step common to these methods can discard variables whose predictive value emerges only through joint configurations with other variables. We present Interaction Aware Interpretable Machine Learning (IAIML), a framework that addresses this limitation through three coordinated mechanisms: adaptive per-feature discretization, finite-grid pairwise interaction scoring, and a partitioned explanation budget. Detected interactions are routed through one of two strategies: relaxing the screening filter so that interaction-supported variables enter the pattern search, or constructing explicit pair terms for a sparse downstream classifier. On a 40-dataset panel comprising 24 real-world tabular benchmarks and 16 synthetic interaction stress tests, evaluated under nested cross-validation, IAIML achieves mean AUC within 1.4 points of tuned gradient-boosted ensembles while requiring roughly 14--28 times fewer fitted explanation components. On datasets with strong pairwise interaction structure and low marginal signal, IAIML outperforms all baselines. Among compact interpretable methods, IAIML is comparable to RuleFit in AUC and component count and is less expensive to tune. EBM obtains a small but significant AUC advantage across the full panel, with a substantially larger lookup-table footprint. Performance degrades on datasets requiring higher-order interactions beyond the pairwise scope. Component-isolated ablations confirm that adaptive discretization and interaction-aware admission each contribute incrementally. These results support IAIML as a compact, interaction-aware framework appropriate for settings where bounded explanation size and controlled treatment of feature interactions are design requirements. --- ### Progressive Crystallization: Turning Agent Exploration into Deterministic, Lower-Cost Workflows in Production Authors: Arun Malik Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.DC, cs.ET, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07052v1 AI agents deployed for IT operations are typically permanent cost centers because every execution requires full LLM inference, even for previously solved problems. This paper introduces progressive crystallization, a lifecycle that treats agent exploration as a discovery mechanism rather than a permanent execution model. It defines a three-stage execution taxonomy, from fully agent-orchestrated to hybrid to fully deterministic workflows, together with an evidence-based promotion mechanism that converts repeatedly validated agent behaviors into cheaper and more reproducible deterministic workflows, while automatically demoting workflows that regress. Evaluated on a production cloud networking AIOps system processing tens of thousands of incidents per month, the approach increased deterministic execution from 0% to 45% over eight months, reduced per-incident agent costs by more than 70% despite doubling incident volume, and improved safety through greater reproducibility and auditability. The paper also presents the execution taxonomy, promotion and demotion criteria, trace extraction methodology, economic model, safety considerations, and discusses limitations and threats to validity. --- ### Making Implicit Preservation Intent Explicit in Conversational Image Editing Authors: Soomin Han, Jihyung Ahn, Bumsoo Kim, Buru Chang Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07051v1 Conversational image editing requires preserving not only visible content, but also content that temporarily disappears across turns. When newly added or modified content occludes a previously visible region, that region should reappear if it was never semantically changed. However, existing systems often fail to recover such occluded-but-unchanged content, producing inconsistent or hallucinated results. We introduce OCCUR-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark for temporal preservation in conversational image editing. OCCUR-Bench provides diverse occlusion-and-revelation scenarios with historical restoration references, enabling evaluation of faithful restoration rather than plausible regeneration. We also propose ReSpec, a training-free framework that makes implicit preservation explicit by pairing restoration-aware instructions with historical visual references. Given an editing history, ReSpec identifies what should persist, selects the historical image state that provides missing visual evidence, and conditions an in-context editor on the resulting instruction and reference image. Experiments show that ReSpec improves restoration fidelity and temporal consistency on OCCUR-Bench, highlighting the need to ground preservation in editing history rather than only the current image. --- ### When Top-K Misses the Decision: Tool-Call Drift in Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation Authors: Jiabin Shen, Guang Chen, Chengjun Mao Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07050v6 Top-$K$ teacher logits make on-policy distillation tractable, but retained teacher mass does not certify student-relative gradient fidelity. We study routed, two-teacher tool-use distillation. In a frozen Qwen3.5-9B audit, the tool teacher ranks the entry token first on 500 tool prompts, and top-32 reinforces it in every matched pair. The response teacher's top-32 instead retains 99.99\% mass yet contains the same token on only 0.4\% of 500 response prompts; student-aware support restores the coordinate in all matched pairs and nearly matches full-vocabulary descent. On the tool route, top-32 preserves the reinforcing direction but substantially attenuates its full-vocabulary magnitude despite mass displayed as 1.000000. Matched restoration connects the response-side omission to behavior: restoring the entry coordinate at every supervised response position lowers full-generation over-calling from $14.2 \pm 2.1\%$ to $3.7 \pm 0.5\%$ across three seeds, but also lowers call recall by 12.4 points. A non-tool placebo changes over-calling by only 0.95 points. A synthetic output-logit-gradient-matched reroute also fails to reproduce exact restoration. We compare three optimization layers: student-aware support changes distilled coordinates, loss shaping changes retained-signal strength, and validation-tuned entry bias shifts inference without retraining. They expose distinct trade-offs in correction scope, system access, and required-call retention. Llama-3.1-8B reproduces the directional support asymmetry under its native JSON protocol. The results causally implicate decision-critical support omission as one contributor in the primary Qwen setting and show why both support fidelity and deployment costs must be audited. Code and aggregate artifacts are available at https://github.com/shen-jiabin/decision-support-opd. --- ### When Top-K Misses the Decision: Tool-Call Drift in Multi-Teacher On-Policy Distillation Authors: Jiabin Shen, Guang Chen, Chengjun Mao Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07050v4 Top-K teacher logits make on-policy distillation tractable, but probability mass is not decision support. In a two-teacher tool-use setting, vanilla generalized knowledge distillation raises tool-call recall but also over-calls on direct-answer examples. With Qwen3.5-9B, the response teacher's top-32 retains 99.99% of its probability mass yet contains the behavior-switch tool-call token on only 0.4% of 500 unique response prompts; even top-256 covers only 52.2%. Student logits for tokens omitted from the truncated support receive zero direct gradient, so the tool teacher reinforces entry while the response teacher usually cannot oppose it; a wrong entry then amplifies divergence along the generated trajectory. Matched restoration connects this blind spot to behavior: restoring the tool-call token at every supervised response position lowers full-generation over-calling from 14.2+/-2.1% to 3.7+/-0.5% across three seeds, but also lowers call recall by 12.4 points. A non-tool placebo changes over-calling by only 0.95 points, whereas a teacher/student top-32 support-union intervention reaches 7.4+/-0.6% over-calling with 87.0+/-2.0% call recall. The pattern recurs with Llama-3.1-8B's native JSON protocol: the response teacher omits the JSON-entry token through top-256 despite 99.977% retained mass, whereas the tool teacher ranks it first on every audited tool prompt; the matched support-union intervention lowers over-calling from 28.8+/-0.8% to 11.1+/-1.2%. These results identify decision-critical support omission as a causal mechanism in the primary Qwen setting and support it across model families. They also trace a restraint-capability trade-off among support-, loss-, and decoding-level interventions, motivating support-aware audits of compressed distillation. Code and aggregate artifacts are available at https://github.com/shen-jiabin/topk-support-opd. --- ### Riemannian Geometry for Pre-trained Language Model Embeddings Authors: Szczepan Konior, Alexandre Quemy, Przemysław Klocek, Bartłomiej Sobieski, Grégoire Cattan Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07047v3 Understanding the geometric structure of pre-trained language model embeddings matters for interpretability and safety. We ask whether sentence-level classification signal lives in the Riemannian geometry of contextual token embeddings, and probe it by extracting per-token pullback metrics from a learned encoder's analytical Jacobian and aggregating them with the Fréchet mean on the symmetric positive definite (SPD) manifold; we call this procedure Riemannian Mean Pooling (RMP). Across three datasets with non-trivial linguistic structure (CoLA, CREAK, RTE), RMP outperforms Euclidean mean pooling, while on FEVER-Symmetric, a benchmark constructed to remove annotation-driven lexical artifacts, the method correctly stays at chance. Ablations show that a randomly initialised encoder combined with Fréchet aggregation already beats Euclidean pooling on two of the three signal-bearing datasets, localising the source of the gain to the geometric aggregation rather than to learned manifold structure; the trained encoder contributes additional signal specifically on CREAK, the most knowledge-heavy of the three signal-bearing datasets. --- ### Riemannian Geometry for Pre-trained Language Model Embeddings Authors: Szczepan Konior, Alexandre Quemy, Przemysław Klocek, Bartłomiej Sobieski, Grégoire Cattan Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07047v2 Understanding the geometric structure of pre-trained language model embeddings matters for interpretability and safety. We ask whether sentence-level classification signal lives in the Riemannian geometry of contextual token embeddings, and probe it by extracting per-token pullback metrics from a learned encoder's analytical Jacobian and aggregating them with the Fréchet mean on the symmetric positive definite (SPD) manifold; we call this procedure Riemannian Mean Pooling (RMP). Across three datasets with non-trivial linguistic structure (CoLA, CREAK, RTE), RMP outperforms Euclidean mean pooling, while on FEVER-Symmetric, a benchmark constructed to remove annotation-driven lexical artifacts, the method correctly stays at chance. Ablations show that a randomly initialised encoder combined with Fréchet aggregation already beats Euclidean pooling on two of the three signal-bearing datasets, localising the source of the gain to the geometric aggregation rather than to learned manifold structure; the trained encoder contributes additional signal specifically on CREAK, the most knowledge-heavy of the three signal-bearing datasets. --- ### Measuring Intelligence Beyond Human Scale Authors: Jerry Han, Rafael Moschopoulos, Ella Colby, Vishrut Goyal, Andrew Tu, Kia Ghods, Mark Braverman, Elad Hazan Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07040v1 How can we measure intelligence beyond human capability? Human-authored benchmarks saturate, and above human capability, examiners may not know which tasks are both hard and verifiable. We argue that this difficulty is inherent to absolute-scale evaluation and propose a new paradigm based on relative measurement in which models generate public challenges that separate other systems. Aggregating these outcomes yields an adversarial psychometric rating system that can scale with the systems being measured. We describe practical protocols that reduce incentives for private-information attacks, support judge-free adjudication, and naturally scale with agent capabilities. We instantiate the framework across verifiable and open-ended, non-verifiable domains, illustrating how model-generated evaluation can continue to measure systems beyond the human frontier. --- ### From Data Completeness to Data Sufficiency: A Task-Driven Imaging Framework for Intraoperative CBCT under Quality-Time-Dose Trade-offs Authors: Yi Jia, Rongjun Ge, Yang Chen, Yan Xi, Wenjun Xia Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV, physics.med-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07039v1 Mobile C-arm cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) has been widely used for real-time intraoperative 3D imaging. However, current practice often mechanically applies the fan-beam CT criterion of "180° plus fan angle" in pursuit of "data completeness" in reconstruction. This review argues that, under the single circular trajectory of three-dimensional cone-beam geometry, complete data are mathematically unattainable; moreover, blindly increasing sampling may exacerbate the trade-off among intraoperative image quality (Q), imaging time (T), and radiation dose (D). Against this background, this review reframes the evaluation of intraoperative CBCT around "data sufficiency" rather than "data completeness." This perspective moves beyond the excessive pursuit of absolute mathematical and analytic accuracy, and instead emphasizes task-specific minimum image-quality thresholds required for clinical decision-making. By synthesizing evidence from multiple clinical scenarios, this review suggests that approximation errors can be acceptable when clinical decision-making requirements are satisfied, thereby achieving a Q-T-D balance. --- ### TRACE-Seg3D: Counterfactual Context Auditing For Robust 3D Glioma Segmentation Under Institutional Shift Authors: Nguyen Linh Dan Le, Nguyen Pham Hoang Le, Tran Dang Khoi Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07038v1 Medical image segmentation models can achieve strong benchmark performance while remaining sensitive to scanner, protocol, and institutional variation. These context shifts alter image appearance without changing the underlying lesion, allowing models to exploit nuisance cues that Dice and HD95 fail to expose. We present TRACE-Seg3D, a counterfactual context auditing framework for robust 3D medical image segmentation. TRACE-Seg3D preserves lesion-relevant evidence and systematically varies imaging context to quantify prediction stability under controlled context shifts. The framework pairs each segmentation with audit evidence for context sensitivity and anatomical plausibility, enabling case-level reliability assessment beyond overlap-based evaluation. Experiments on BraTS and UTSW glioma segmentation benchmarks demonstrate competitive in-distribution and cross-domain performance. TRACE-Seg3D also exposes context-sensitive failure modes missed by conventional metrics. These results establish counterfactual context auditing as a practical route toward transparent and reliable 3D medical image segmentation under distribution shift. Our code is available at https://github.com/danleneurocom/Counterfactual-Representation-Network. --- ### On the Principles of Deep Feedforward ReLU Networks Authors: Changcun Huang Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07035v1 The architecture of deep feedforward neural networks is ubiquitous in deep learning, either as a whole system or as a subnetwork of other architectures, and thus its mechanism is a key ingredient of the black box of neural networks. On the basis of the simplest two-layer ReLU network, this paper systematically studies the mechanism of deep feedforward ReLU networks with multiple hidden layers and successfully explains the training solution obtained by the back-propagation algorithm. The concept of a path, especially in terms of the relationships between paths, plays a central role in uncovering the mystery of the black box. It is shown that a unit of a deep ReLU network can form a piecewise linear manifold to divide the input space, instead of a hyperplane of the two-layer case. How to efficiently use the hidden-layer units to produce both linear functions and partitions of the input space is also a central problem. The principles of a two-layer ReLU network can be generalized to the deeper case to a large extent, such as multiple strict partial orders and continuity restriction. The combination of the basic and simple principles proposed can yield complicated instantiations including the training solutions, and in this sense the black box of deep feedforward ReLU networks is revealed. --- ### Intrinsic Green's Learning: Supervised Learning on Manifolds via Inverse PDE Authors: Alexandre Quemy Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07034v1 We introduce Intrinsic Green's Learning (IGL), a framework that models a target function on a manifold as the solution to a linear PDE whose source term is learned from data. Rather than approximating the target directly, IGL learns a source and integrates it against a Green's kernel. An encoder discovers a low-dimensional coordinate chart on the manifold where both the source and the kernel decompose as low-rank tensors, collapsing a high-dimensional integral into independent one-dimensional integrals with cost linear in the intrinsic dimension. A two-stage algorithm separates coordinate discovery from source fitting, a near-convex linear solve, preventing the dimensional collapse of joint training. Learnable gates on each coordinate automatically discover the intrinsic dimension of the manifold. We validate IGL on synthetic manifolds and on MNIST, where it simultaneously achieves near-optimal classification and automatic recovery of the intrinsic dimension. --- ### AnchorPrune: Relevance-Anchored Contextual Expansion for Visual Token Pruning Authors: Kyuan Oh, Bumsoo Kim Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07033v5 Large vision-language models incur substantial inference costs because high-resolution inputs introduce thousands of visual tokens, many of which are redundant for a given query. Existing pruning methods often combine query relevance and token diversity, yet these objectives can conflict under aggressive compression: relevance-driven selection may overconcentrate the budget on correlated local evidence, while diversity-driven selection may suppress indispensable tokens or retain distinct but uninformative regions. We introduce AnchorPrune, a training-free framework that first constructs a protected relevance anchor and then expands it with complementary visual context. AnchorPrune adaptively determines the anchor size from the novelty profile of relevance-ranked tokens, preserving a compact set of query-critical evidence, and allocates the remaining budget through importance-weighted novelty to recover informative, non-redundant context relative to the anchor. This ordered design prevents contextual expansion from displacing indispensable query cues while improving overall visual coverage. AnchorPrune is lightweight, architecture-aware, and requires neither retraining nor model modification. Across image and video vision-language models and benchmarks, it consistently improves the accuracy-efficiency trade-off over training-free baselines, particularly under severe compression. On LLaVA-NeXT-7B, AnchorPrune preserves 97.6% of full-token performance using only 160 of 2,880 visual tokens. These results establish relevance-anchored contextual expansion as an effective principle for efficient multimodal inference. Code is available at https://github.com/MULTI-cau/AnchorPrune. --- ### AnchorPrune: Relevance-Anchored Contextual Expansion for Visual Token Pruning Authors: Kyuan Oh, Bumsoo Kim Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07033v4 Large vision-language models incur substantial inference costs because high-resolution inputs introduce thousands of visual tokens, many of which are redundant for a given query. Existing pruning methods often combine query relevance and token diversity, yet these objectives can conflict under aggressive compression: relevance-driven selection may overconcentrate the budget on correlated local evidence, while diversity-driven selection may suppress indispensable tokens or retain distinct but uninformative regions. We introduce AnchorPrune, a training-free framework that first constructs a protected relevance anchor and then expands it with complementary visual context. AnchorPrune adaptively determines the anchor size from the novelty profile of relevance-ranked tokens, preserving a compact set of query-critical evidence, and allocates the remaining budget through importance-weighted novelty to recover informative, non-redundant context relative to the anchor. This ordered design prevents contextual expansion from displacing indispensable query cues while improving overall visual coverage. AnchorPrune is lightweight, architecture-aware, and requires neither retraining nor model modification. Across image and video vision-language models and benchmarks, it consistently improves the accuracy-efficiency trade-off over training-free baselines, particularly under severe compression. On LLaVA-NeXT-7B, AnchorPrune preserves 97.6% of full-token performance using only 160 of 2,880 visual tokens. These results establish relevance-anchored contextual expansion as an effective principle for efficient multimodal inference. Code is available at https://github.com/MULTI-cau/AnchorPrune. --- ### Eigenbasis-Independent Learnable Spectral Positional Encodings for Directed Graphs via Hermitian Block Krylov Subspaces Authors: Jiaqing Xie, Yuxin Wang Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07032v2 Spectral positional encodings (PEs) for \emph{directed} graphs face two obstacles: magnetic Laplacians require an $O(n^3)$ Hermitian eigendecomposition per potential, and their complex eigenvectors are defined only up to unitary gauge, which prior work handles with basis-invariant architectures. We propose learnable spectral PEs of the form $h_θ(A_q)\,R$, where $A_q$ is a normalized magnetic operator, $h_θ$ a learnable scalar spectral response, and $R$ a block of random probes. Because the PE is a \emph{matrix function} of the operator, it is gauge-invariant by construction. We compute it in a Hermitian block Krylov subspace from sparse matrix--vector products only, prove that $k = O(\log(1/\varepsilon))$ block steps suffice uniformly over heat--resolvent response families, and give a covering-number argument for why low-dimensional structured families generalize where free per-eigenvalue weights overfit. On a directed SBM whose symmetrization is uninformative by construction, direction-blind PEs stay at chance while magnetic Krylov PEs converge to the exact-eigendecomposition oracle as the depth grows. The same probes yield gauge-invariant pairwise features with $1/\sqrt{s}$ Monte-Carlo error, and the undirected $q{=}0$ case improves heterophilous benchmarks over no-PE and polynomial baselines. --- ### Gimitest: A Comprehensive Tool for Testing Reinforcement Learning Policies Authors: Dennis Gross, Quentin Mazouni, Helge Spieker, Arnaud Gotlieb Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07029v1 Reinforcement learning (RL) policies can be unsafe and vulnerable to attacks. Ensuring their reliability is often a pain point as existing automated testing methods target only selected environments, testing scenarios, and RL algorithms. To address this, we propose a comprehensive framework for testing single- and multi-agent RL policies under varying conditions. Our implementation of this framework, Gimitest, is an open-source tool that supports various gym frameworks and allows for modifications of their integrated components. This article describes the framework and details Gimitest's functionality and architecture. It showcases its effectiveness in testing multiple RL policies in environments such as the official Farama Gymnasium and PettingZoo. --- ### Latent graph encoding of multimodal neuroimaging features with generative AI architectures Authors: Ishaan Batta, Meenu Ajith, Vince Calhoun Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07027v1 While generative models enable encoding of complex neuroimaging data for feature generation and reconstruction, developing optimal architectural frameworks with appropriate encoding and latent space processes is crucial for studying structural and functional properties of the brain. We design a multimodal generative framework for structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) features through systematic evaluation of encoding strategies, latent multimodal fusion, and generative model selection. Using structural gray matter volume (GMV) and static functional network connectivity (sFNC) features from a large neuroimaging dataset, we analyze generative frameworks involving variational autoencoders (VAEs), transformers, generative adversarial networks (GANs), and diffusion models. Architectures that employ modality-aware graph encoding of functional connectivity into a lower-dimensional latent space outperform vectorized encoders or direct data space approaches. The proposed multimodal graph VAE (gMMVAE) surpasses alternative generative variants across multiple metrics for generation fidelity, reconstruction quality, efficiency, and latent space discriminability, highlighting its potential for robust multimodal neuroimaging analysis. --- ### Constrained Decoding for Diffusion Language Models via Efficient Inference over Finite Automata Authors: Meihua Dang, Stefano Ermon Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07026v1 Constrained decoding is essential for serving LLMs, ensuring that generated outputs follow specific structures such as JSON schema-formatted function calls. Existing systems are designed for autoregressive models and assume left-to-right generation, masking out invalid next tokens at each step. Diffusion language models, however, break this assumption: they sample multiple positions simultaneously from a fully-factorized mean-field distribution at each denoising step. In this paper, we present an exact and tractable algorithm for sampling from the constrained mean-field posterior under any constraint expressible as a finite automaton. Viewing finite automata as graphical models, we obtain tractable representations of the constrained distribution that enable efficient inference. The approach guarantees constraint satisfaction by construction, supports both greedy and sampling-based decoding, and is compatible with parallel and block-wise decoding under arbitrary remasking schedules. Applying depth-reduction techniques from arithmetic circuit theory, we further reduce sampling depth from linear to logarithmic in the sequence length. Empirical evaluations on Dream-7B and LLaDA-8B show substantial accuracy gains across various tasks including function calling (xLAM, BFCL), planning (Sudoku, Countdown), text-to-SQL (Spider), and math reasoning (GSM-Symbolic), with little inference overhead relative to unconstrained decoding. For example, on BFCL-Live, our approach improves Dream-7B's greedy decoding accuracy from 63.9% to 71.5%, and stochastic sampling accuracy from 22.3% to 69.0%, where the unconstrained baseline collapses, with under 5% wall-clock overhead. --- ### Online Data Selection Is Implicit Alignment Authors: Aoxiong Zeng, Yuxin Yang, Xiangquan Yang Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07023v1 Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is often treated as a capability-adaptation step, while alignment is attributed to later preference optimization or reinforcement learning. This separation is incomplete: when examples are scored and kept online during fine-tuning, the choice of which data to train on already changes the model's behavioral preferences. We study online data selection as an implicit alignment mechanism. Given the same base model, optimizer, and selected-token budget, we compare random, loss-based, quality-based, and diversity-based online selectors and measure the behavioral drift they induce without any preference optimization. The proposed evaluation tracks helpfulness, refusal rate, verbosity, truthfulness, sycophancy, calibration, and jailbreak robustness, together with diagnostics for which behavioral modes are over-represented in the selected data. We formalize online selection as a reweighted SFT objective whose weights define an implicit preference over response styles and safety postures, so that an online scorer plays the role usually assigned to a reward model. This view predicts that high-scoring data can systematically favor longer, more assertive, more compliant, or more refusal-prone behaviors depending on how the online score is defined. Empirically, selectors that are statistically indistinguishable in task accuracy diverge sharply in refusal rate, verbosity, and sycophancy, and we show that the direction of the shift is predictable from the attribute mixture of the selected data. We introduce Alignment Drift Auditing (ADA), a controlled protocol for quantifying selection-induced behavioral movement, and Alignment-Aware Selection (AAS), a diagnostic online selector that retains data efficiency while constraining drift along safety and style axes. --- ### Learning social norms enhances compatibility in dynamic human-AI coordination Authors: Yi Yang, Siyuan Liu, Xin Gao, Huamu Sun, Chao Liu, Qing Zhou, Bingbing Nie Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.AI, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07021v1 Humans continuously coordinate with others in dynamic interactions, often through implicit, hard-to-quantify social norms that act as shared tacit expectations among interacting agents. As AI agents, including large language models (LLMs), become embedded in daily life, they increasingly participate in such interactions and reshape social interaction structures. Yet they often fail to coordinate with humans in an effective, considerate, and natural manner. We hypothesize that this gap arises because existing approaches align model behavior with human demonstrations without explicitly quantifying the underlying norms that generate such behavior. We selected pedestrian-vehicle interaction as a representative dynamic interaction and developed a simplified experimental platform that captures its key interactive features. From 3,456 dynamic human interactions collected via this platform, we identified three principles underlying human social norms: outcome predictability, value alignment, and advantage awareness. Incorporating these principles into AI agents significantly improves human-AI coordination. In the closed-loop interaction task with humans, the social-norm-informed LLM achieved a nearly fourfold higher total score than the baseline strategy and outperformed human-human interactions by 43%. These findings indicate that formalizing tacit social norms into explicit, quantifiable principles can enable AI agents to achieve mutually beneficial coordination in dynamic interactions, supporting their more natural integration into human society. --- ### SHTA: Semantic Hard Token Correction and Center Alignment for Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation Authors: Zhuoru Zhang, Yiheng Zhong, Zimu Zhang, Xiaofeng Liu Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07019v1 Recent advances in semi-supervised medical image segmentation have achieved remarkable performance through prediction consistency, pseudo-label supervision, and hard-region supervision. However, these methods primarily improve supervision quality rather than explicitly enforcing semantic consistency in the learned representations of hard regions. Consequently, even under increasingly stronger prediction-level supervision, difficult regions exhibiting unstable semantic assignment often fail to establish semantically consistent representations during training, thereby limiting further segmentation improvement. To address this issue, we propose SHTA (Semantic Hard Token Correction and Center Alignment), a lightweight training-time semantic representation branch. Instead of introducing additional prediction supervision, SHTA refines intermediate semantic representations through Semantic Assignment, Hard Token Refinement, and Semantic Center Alignment, thereby improving semantic consistency in hard regions while preserving the original prediction pathway and introducing no additional inference cost. We integrate SHTA into representative semi-supervised segmentation frameworks, including GA-CPS, CPS, URPC, and MagicNet, and conduct evaluations on the Synapse and AMOS datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that SHTA delivers consistent paired improvements across frameworks, with especially clear gains in segmentation accuracy, weak-organ recovery, and semantic ambiguity reduction, while incurring only training-time overhead. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/release_SHTA-42D5/. --- ### Multimodal Spatiotemporal-Frequency Fusion with Peak Enhancement for Cellular Traffic Forecasting Authors: Qingzhong Li, Yue Hu, Hui Ma, Yajun Zhang, Xinjun Pei, Ming Yan, Fei Xing Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07016v1 Accurate forecasting of cellular network traffic is essential for network planning, resource allocation, and quality-of-service assurance in modern mobile communication systems. Real-world traffic often exhibits bursty endogenous dynamics and disturbances triggered by external urban events, which makes reliable prediction highly challenging. Most existing spatiotemporal traffic forecasting methods primarily focus on intrinsic traffic patterns or structural relationships within a single modality, and rarely model burst behavior together with exogenous contextual signals. To address this issue, we propose \textbf{MSPF-Net}, a multimodal cellular traffic forecasting framework that integrates external contextual information. Specifically, MSPF-Net consists of a Spatiotemporal-Frequency Traffic Encoder for capturing temporal, spatial, and spectral traffic patterns, a Peak Enhancement Module for extracting burst-aware representations of sudden spikes, a News Context Representation Module for encoding urban news streams into exogenous contextual embeddings, and a Dynamic Fusion Prediction Module for adaptively integrating these heterogeneous signals to generate forecasts. Experiments on the Milano, Trento, and LTE traffic datasets demonstrate that jointly modeling traffic dynamics, burst patterns, and news contextual signals can effectively improve forecasting performance. --- ### Local large deviations for linear-region growth in random piecewise-linear networks Authors: Recep Özkan, Christian Hirsch Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: math.PR, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07014v1 We study a random compositional model for the growth of affine regions in deep piecewise-linear networks. The model is generated by i.i.d.\ perturbations of the symmetric height-one tent map, and the main observable is the number \(N_n\) of affine pieces after \(n\) layers. We prove the existence of a submultiplicative pressure for \(N_n\), yielding exponential upper bounds for both tails of \(n^{-1}\log N_n\). The same argument applies to abstract submultiplicative complexity observables and gives higher-dimensional extensions for convex-polytopal affine-cover counts and worst-line affine-piece counts. Since the true branch count has no matching supermultiplicative inequality, lower bounds require a separate certified construction. We introduce a finite-state defect process that records branches whose future splitting can be guaranteed, and use bridge words to obtain constructive upper-tail lower bounds. In a uniformly favorable small-noise regime, this process is governed by a companion matrix whose Perron root tends to \(2\), implying eventual exclusion of lower tails below \(\log 2-ξ\). --- ### Tensorized algorithms and scalable filtering methods for hidden Markov and factorial hidden Markov models Authors: Roxana Barrios, Ioannis Sgouralis Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07008v1 A common method for the representation and analysis of time-series data is the hidden Markov model (HMM), where each observation is associated with a hidden state that evolves over time. However, many real-world systems are influenced by multiple independent factors, which are more naturally represented by factorial hidden Markov models (fHMM), where several hidden Markov chains jointly generate the observed data. Although an fHMM provides a richer and more realistic representation of many real-world systems, it can be reformulated as an equivalent HMM, but with a significantly larger state-space, leading to a severe increase in computational cost. In particular, the forward filtering algorithm, which is central to evaluation, decoding, and estimation tasks, becomes prohibitively expensive even for small systems. This work focuses on developing scalable methods for time-series analysis using tensor algebra to exploit the multidimensional structure of fHMM directly, without constructing intermediate HMM representations. Our novel filtering approach significantly improves computational performance and enables the efficient analysis of large systems and datasets, extending the scope of fHMM and providing a practical framework for data intensive applications. --- ### Dissociating the Internal Representations of Sycophancy in LLMs Authors: Anthony Baez, Sheer Karny, Pat Pataranutaporn Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07003v3 Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently exhibit sycophancy, agreeing with a user's statement even when it is incorrect. While often studied as a single, uniform behavior, sycophancy can manifest in substantially distinct ways across contexts, raising the question of whether this heterogeneity is reflected in its internal mechanisms. To address this gap, we dissociate the representations of sycophancy into factual and opinion subtypes, motivated by prior evidence of heterogeneous truth representations in LLMs. We train linear probes and construct steering vectors on one subtype's activations and evaluate their transfer to the other, measuring the extent to which representations are shared and visualizing them via Linear Discriminant Analysis. We find that different LLMs represent these subtypes differently, with either more aligned or more distinct representations, and apply this insight to improve representational interventions for reducing sycophancy. Our dissociation method offers a general framework for studying the representational structure of complex model behaviors. --- ### Dissociating the Internal Representations of Sycophancy in LLMs Authors: Anthony Baez, Sheer Karny, Pat Pataranutaporn Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07003v2 Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently exhibit sycophancy, agreeing with a user's statement even when it is incorrect. While often studied as a single, uniform behavior, sycophancy can manifest in substantially distinct ways across contexts, raising the question of whether this heterogeneity is reflected in its internal mechanisms. To address this gap, we dissociate the representations of sycophancy into factual and opinion subtypes, motivated by prior evidence of heterogeneous truth representations in LLMs. We train linear probes and construct steering vectors on one subtype's activations and evaluate their transfer to the other, measuring the extent to which representations are shared and visualizing them via Linear Discriminant Analysis. We find that different LLMs represent these subtypes differently, with either more aligned or more distinct representations, and apply this insight to improve representational interventions for reducing sycophancy. Our dissociation method offers a general framework for studying the representational structure of complex model behaviors. --- ### Ego-Human Motion Prediction with 3D-Aware LLM Authors: Yujin Bae, Jaewoo Jeong, Hyeonseong Kim, Kuk-Jin Yoon Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07001v1 Anticipating human motion from an egocentric perspective is fundamental for proactive assistance in AR/VR, human-robot collaboration, and embodied AI. While recent works incorporate language as a semantic prior to reduce the ill-posed nature of egocentric forecasting, they largely neglect the 3D spatial and semantic context that governs how motion unfolds, and treat pose and language prediction as separate inference streams. We introduce Ego3DLM, built on two core principles: accurate motion forecasting requires explicit spatial and semantic understanding of the 3D environment, and pose and language must be predicted holistically in a single pass, since motion is inherently tied to the semantic interpretation of actions being performed. Given three-point tracking, 3D scene features, and egocentric video, Ego3DLM simultaneously decodes past pose, future pose, past narration, and future narration in a single autoregressive pass, grounding predicted poses and descriptions in one another to enforce cross-modal and temporal consistency. We adopt a three-stage training scheme: (1) spatial-semantic scene awareness pretraining; (2) holistic instruction tuning over all four outputs in a single pass; and (3) GRPO-based reinforcement finetuning with intra- and inter-modal rewards that directly optimize pose-language fidelity. Experiments on the Nymeria benchmark demonstrate that Ego3DLM achieves state-of-the-art performance across future motion prediction, past motion tracking, and motion description, showing that 3D scene grounding and holistic cross-modal prediction yield physically plausible and semantically coherent motion forecasts. The project page is available at https://jaewoo97.github.io/Ego3DLM/. --- ### Physics-guided spatiotemporal neural models for fuel density prediction Authors: Tolga Caglar, Jaynil Jaiswal, Saqib Azim, Yudhir Gala, Mai H. Nguyen, Ilkay Altintas Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06999v1 This paper presents a physics-guided machine learning (PGML) framework for fuel density prediction, integrating physics constraints and domain knowledge into deep learning models to enhance model accuracy and stability. We explore three deep learning architectures -- ConvLSTM, Adaptive Fourier Neural Operator (AFNONet), and Video Vision Transformer (ViViT) -- to model the spatiotemporal evolution of fuel density. Our approach incorporates differentiable physics-informed terms in the loss function, including a mass-conserving fuel transport term and a rate-of-spread estimation. Experimental results, averaged across multiple independent trials, demonstrate that the proposed PGML framework outperforms purely data-driven baselines without physics constraints in both accuracy and stability. This framework enables computationally efficient, physically plausible fire forecasting to support adaptive prescribed burn management. --- ### Large Behavior Model: A Promptable Digital Twin of the Retail Customer Authors: Wachiravit Modecrua, Krittin Pachtrachai, Touchapon Kraisingkorn Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06993v2 Customer behavior modeling underpins recommendation, marketing, and decision support, yet existing approaches either optimize predictive accuracy without explaining decisions or simulate users without grounding them in real behavioral data. We present the Large Behavioral Model (LBM) that learns customer decision making directly from large-scale retail transactions through a unified Person-Environment formulation. Customer state is represented by a behavioral profile derived from historical purchases, while product context is incorporated through retrieval-augmented generation. The model is trained using continued pre-training on verbalized behavioral data, supervised fine-tuning for decision generation, and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards for evidence-based calibration. We evaluate the proposed framework on purchase prediction, hard-negative discrimination, basket completion, promotion response, and cross-domain voucher redemption. The model consistently outperforms frontier general-purpose language models on in-domain retail tasks while demonstrating strong zero-shot and fine-tuned transfer across retailers and decision domains. Ablation studies show that continued pre-training is the primary driver of behavioral generalization, retrieval is most effective when applied during both training and inference, and reinforcement learning improves reliance on explicit behavioral evidence over generic language-model priors. These results demonstrate that behavioral knowledge encoded in transaction histories can be effectively learned by language models, providing a scalable foundation for customer digital twins and behavior simulation. --- ### WAM-TTT: Steering World-Action Models by Watching Human Play at Test Time Authors: Yusen Feng, Bingchen Han, Jiangran Lyu, Kai Liu, Yixin Zheng, Yuxuan Wan, Weiheng Liu, Sun Han, Ruiqin Li, Yulong Zhang, Fangfu Liu, Xuesong Shi et al. Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06988v2 Steering robot foundation models (RFMs) toward new task variants or user-preferred behaviors remains challenging, often requiring additional robot demonstrations, task-specific fine-tuning, or long-context conditioning. We present WAM-TTT, a test-time training framework for steering world action models from raw human videos. Rather than treating human videos as trajectories to imitate, WAM-TTT absorbs them into a lightweight adaptive memory inside a frozen WAM through self-supervised video prediction. To make this memory useful for control, we introduce a meta-training stage that aligns human demonstrations with robot behaviors using paired human-robot data and a key--value memory reconstruction objective. At test time, only unlabeled human videos are required to adapt the memory, while the pretrained WAM remains frozen. This enables efficient and reusable steering without robot actions, human-side annotations, or task-specific fine-tuning, while preserving the generalization ability of the foundation model. Extensive experiments show that WAM-TTT consistently outperforms in-context human-video conditioning baselines across diverse manipulation tasks and generalization settings. --- ### UP: Unbounded Positive Asymmetric Optimization for Breaking the Exploration-Stability Dilemma Authors: Chongyu Fan, Pengfei Liu, Jingjia Huang, Sijia Liu, Yi Lin Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06987v1 Reinforcement learning (RL) has become the standard paradigm for enhancing the complex reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). To achieve sample efficiency, modern RL frameworks rely on importance sampling (IS). However, these algorithms suffer from an exploration-stability dilemma. Pure IS often leads to catastrophic training instability, while standard clipping mechanisms used to mitigate this instability strictly constrain the policy update budget. By formalizing the concept of Probability Capacity (Cap), we reveal that conservative clipping structurally stifles exploration by prematurely truncating the update budget for correct but low-confidence reasoning paths. To break free from these constraints, we propose Unbounded Positive Asymmetric Optimization (UP), a universal and plug-and-play objective. UP theoretically restructures the optimization process by anchoring the policy to its current state via the stop-gradient operator. This asymmetric design unleashes unclipped, stable gradients for positive advantages to maximize exploration, while maintaining standard clipping safeguards for negative advantages to prevent training instability. Furthermore, our formulation readily extends across different optimization granularities, including token-level (GRPO, DAPO) and sequence-level (GSPO) frameworks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UP enhances exploration capacity and achieves superior reasoning accuracy across diverse RL algorithms (DAPO, GSPO, and GRPO), model architectures (Dense, MoE, and vision-language), and training modalities (language and multimodal), validating UP as a truly universal plug-and-play enhancement for RL-based training. --- ### EdgeCompress: Coupling Multidimensional Model Compression and Dynamic Inference for EdgeAI Authors: Hao Kong, Di Liu, Shuo Huai, Xiangzhong Luo, Ravi Subramaniam, Christian Makaya, Qian Lin, Weichen Liu Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06982v1 Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have demonstrated encouraging results in image classification tasks. However, the prohibitive computational cost of CNNs hinders the deployment of CNNs onto resource-constrained embedded devices. To address this issue, we propose EdgeCompress, a comprehensive compression framework to reduce the computational overhead of CNNs. In EdgeCompress, we first introduce dynamic image cropping (DIC), where we design a lightweight foreground predictor to accurately crop the most informative foreground object of input images for inference, which avoids redundant computation on background regions. Subsequently, we present compound shrinking (CS) to collaboratively compress the three dimensions (depth, width, and resolution) of CNNs according to their contribution to accuracy and model computation. DIC and CS together constitute a multidimensional CNN compression framework, which is able to comprehensively reduce the computational redundancy in both input images and neural network architectures, thereby improving the inference efficiency of CNNs. Further, we present a dynamic inference framework to efficiently process input images with different recognition difficulties, where we cascade multiple models with different complexities from our compression framework and dynamically adopt different models for different input images, which further compresses the computational redundancy and improves the inference efficiency of CNNs, facilitating the deployment of advanced CNNs onto embedded hardware. Experiments on ImageNet-1K demonstrate that EdgeCompress reduces the computation of ResNet-50 by 48.8% while improving the top-1 accuracy by 0.8%. Meanwhile, we improve the accuracy by 4.1% with similar computation compared to HRank, the state-of-the-art compression framework. The source code and models are available at https://github.com/ntuliuteam/edge-compress --- ### Robust Federated Learning Under Real-World Client Churn Authors: Dhruv Garg, Neha Lakhani, Debopam Sanyal, Myungjin Lee, Alexey Tumanov, Ada Gavrilovska Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06979v1 Federated Learning (FL) enables training shared models on private, on-device data, but production deployments remain constrained to slow, multi-day refresh cycles due to the complexity of coordinating massive client populations. For applications such as feed ranking, ad targeting, and personalized recommendation, model freshness: the ability to rapidly adapt to new user-local data is critical for maximizing objectives like click-through rate. This lag leaves models stale and unresponsive to volatile data distributions driven by viral trends and shifting user intent. Bridging this gap requires addressing three challenges overlooked by existing FL systems: transient client availability, dynamic data heterogeneity, and delays between model predictions and observable outcomes. We present FeLiX, an FL orchestration framework that minimizes wall-clock time-to-target accuracy on live interaction streams. FeLiX introduces three primitives: (i) streaming-aware availability tiers that leverage lightweight telemetry to identify ready clients at scale; (ii) fresh-utility selection, a dual-tier mechanism that prioritizes statistically valuable updates from devices able to meet tight refresh deadlines; and (iii) informativeness-aware, delay-robust aggregation that incorporates late, high-value updates containing ground-truth outcomes without biasing the global model toward stale distributions. Unlike prior systems that rely on unrealistic oracular knowledge of client availability, FeLiX achieves near-oracular performance in real-world settings. Across CIFAR-10, Google Speech, and realistic low-availability traces, FeLiX reduces wall-clock time-to-target accuracy by up to 2.37X while reducing communication bandwidth by 1.30X compared to state-of-the-art synchronous and asynchronous FL baselines. --- ### Hybrid Least Squares/Gradient Descent Methods for MIONets Authors: Jun Choi, Chang-Ock Lee, Minam Moon Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, math.NA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06976v1 In this paper, we propose an efficient hybrid least squares/gradient descent (LSGD) method for MIONets to accelerate training. This method generalizes the LSGD method for DeepONets. Since MIONet is the sum of the entrywise product of multiple branch networks and a trunk network, it can be viewed as a multilinear function with respect to the last layer parameters of each branch network. These sets of parameters can be optimized using the alternating least squares method, where we solve the LS system for a single branch network in turn. To handle the large-sized system matrix, we introduce Kronecker and Khatri-Rao products and tensor permutation matrices to factor the large matrix into small ones. Our method is compatible with a general type of $L^2$ loss with regularization terms for the last layer parameters of each branch, where linear operators can be applied to the MIONet output in each loss term. --- ### MILES: Modular Instruction Memory with Learnable Selection for Self-Improving LLM Reasoning Authors: Ruilin Tong, Dong Gong Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06974v1 Large language models (LLMs) increasingly improve their reasoning at test time via additional computation, yet most existing works treat each problem in isolation. When problems arrive sequentially, accumulating reusable experience across them can further improve performance. Existing memory-based methods either store whole-solution templates that generalize poorly to novel problems or use heuristic step-level selection that is not optimized for final-answer correctness. Learning selection policies requires large-scale training data and fixed action spaces, making such approaches unsuitable for test-time settings where memory expands incrementally and only limited supervision is available. We propose MILES (Modular Instruction Memory with LEarnable Selection for self-improving LLM reasoning), a framework that dynamically expands step-wise memory and applies correctness-optimized memory composition under realistic test-time constraints. MILES maintains modular memory units consisting of asymmetric pairs of sub-goal embeddings and sub-instructions, each associated with a learnable selection head. This memory structure enables a coarse-to-fine retrieval mechanism: The coarse level enables memory expansion and collects supervision for training selection heads from confident samples, while the fine stage applies learned selection heads to rerank coarse-level candidates and guide reasoning for uncertain samples. MILES consistently matches or outperforms prior methods while achieving superior accuracy-efficiency tradeoffs. Extensive experiments demonstrate its effectiveness, robustness, and transferability. --- ### Rethinking Multimodal Time-Series Forecasting Evaluation Authors: Haoxin Liu, Yichen Zhou, Rajat Sen, B. Aditya Prakash, Abhimanyu Das Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06973v1 We introduce a new context-enriched, multimodal time series forecasting benchmark, TimesX. TimesX contains a wide selection of high-quality real-world time series with diverse domains and textual contexts obtained from an automated data generation pipeline, which helps address three main issues of existing multimodal forecasting benchmarks: (1) poor generalization due to the small scale and synthetic nature of benchmark data, (2) very limited types of textual contexts in the benchmarks, and (3) an inability to mitigate data leakage in evaluation. We conduct a thorough empirical study of zero-shot multimodal forecasting approaches on TimesX. Our results suggest that many approaches that perform well on existing benchmarks may fail on TimesX. In contrast, simple ensemble methods that leverage rich textual context accompanying time-series can outperform strong baselines on TimesX. --- ### HPR-SAM: Hierarchical Probabilistic Representation Learning for Prompt-free SAM-based Medical Image Segmentation Authors: Yingzhen Hu, Yiheng Zhong, Keying Zhu, Zimu Zhang, Zihan Ye, Sifan Song, Jionglong Su, Xiaofeng Liu Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06972v1 Prompt-free adaptation of the Segment Anything Model (SAM) has emerged as a promising paradigm for automatic medical image segmentation. Existing methods mainly focus on prompt generation, while overlooking that prompt quality is fundamentally constrained by the expressiveness of anatomical representations. However, deterministic prototypes or semantic tokens are insufficient to jointly capture global anatomical priors, intra-structure diversity, and local structural reliability. To address this limitation, we propose the Hierarchical Probabilistic Representation (HPR) framework, which learns complementary anatomical representations through Distributional Anatomical Representation (DAR), Multi-component Anatomical Representation (MAR), and Local Reliability Representation (LRR), and integrates their predictions via Hierarchical Prediction Fusion (HPF) while remaining compatible with the original SAM decoder. Experiments on the Synapse, LA, and PROMISE12 datasets demonstrate that HPR-SAM achieves state-of-the-art performance on Synapse and the best performance under few-shot settings on LA and PROMISE12, validating the effectiveness of the proposed hierarchical probabilistic representation learning framework for prompt-free medical image segmentation. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/HPR-SAM-E4AF. --- ### End-to-End LLM Flight Planning with RAG-based Memory and Multi-modal Coach Agent Authors: Amin Tabrizian, Arsyi Aziz, Aarifah Ullah, Mahyar Ghazanfari, Pouria Razzaghi, Peng Wei Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06964v1 Bridging the gap between human pilot intent and autonomous flight operation is critical for real-world electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft deployment. Flight planning traditionally relies on classic algorithms that struggle to incorporate flexible human preferences. We present FRAMe, an End-to-End Large Language Model (LLM) Flight Planning tool with RAG-based Memory and Multi-modal Coach Agent. Our system integrates a planner LLM with a multi-modal coach agent and retrieval augmented generation (RAG)-based memory to generate flight plans that satisfy mission constraints while aligning with human flight operator preferences. We demonstrate the system in a range of real-world-inspired scenarios of varying difficulty levels. Across four LLMs, the full FRAMe system (RAG and coach) yields the highest validity for every planner (up to 93.8% aggregate, 99% on Easy scenarios for the strongest planner) and shifts preference-relevant metrics in the operator-favored direction where the metric has headroom. FRAMe signifies how advanced LLMs can be deployed for human-centric mission planning, translating natural language instructions into safe, efficient, and flexible flight routes. The code is available at: github.com/amin-tabrizian/FlightPlanningLLMs --- ### Large Language Models (LLMs) and Generative AI in Cybersecurity and Privacy: A Survey of Dual-Use Risks, AI-Generated Malware, Explainability, and Defensive Strategies Authors: Kiarash Ahi, Saeed Valizadeh Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06963v1 Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative AI (GenAI) systems, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, LLaMA, Copilot, Stable Diffusion by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Stability AI, respectively, are revolutionizing cybersecurity, enabling both automated defense and sophisticated attacks. These technologies power real-time threat detection, phishing defense, secure code generation, and vulnerability exploitation at unprecedented scales. Following a rapid surge where LLM-generated malware grew to account for an estimated 50% of detected threats by 2025, up from just 2% in 2021, navigating this highly automated threat landscape in 2026 demands next-generation security frameworks. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the beneficial and malicious applications of LLMs in cybersecurity, including zero-day detection, DevSecOps, federated learning, synthetic content analysis, and explainable AI (XAI). Drawing on a review of over 70 academic papers, industry reports, and technical documents, this work synthesizes insights from real-world case studies across platforms like Google Play Protect, Microsoft Defender, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Apple App Store, OpenAI Plugin Stores, Hugging Face Spaces, and GitHub, alongside emerging initiatives like the SAFE Framework and AI-driven anomaly detection. We conclude with practical recommendations for responsible and transparent LLM deployment and trustworthy AI, including model watermarking, adversarial defense, and cross-industry collaboration, setting a new benchmark for rigorous, holistic cybersecurity research at the intersection of AI and threat defense, and offering a roadmap for secure, scalable LLM systems that serves as a critical reference for researchers, engineers, and security leaders navigating the complex challenges of AI-driven cybersecurity. --- ### Flow-ERD: Agent-type Aware Flow Matching with Entropy-Regularized Distillation for Diverse Traffic Simulation Authors: Seulbin Hwang, Kiyoung Om, Daejung Kim, Jinhan Lee Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.RO, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06957v1 Realistic and diverse traffic simulation is essential to autonomous driving development. Yet prevailing benchmarks predominantly reward realism, and recent methods have optimized accordingly, leaving diversity underexplored. We introduce \textbf{Flow-ERD}, a multi-agent simulator that pursues realism and diversity jointly. Its backbone, \textbf{Agent-Type Aware Flow Matching} (AFM), couples flow matching's multi-modal expressiveness with type-specific kinematic execution. It preserves fine-grained diversity while keeping motions consistent with each agent type. A second stage, \textbf{Entropy-Regularized Distillation} (ERD), fine-tunes the closed-loop rollout distribution with an entropy-regularized reverse-KL objective. This mitigates covariate shift while explicitly preventing collapse onto high-density modes. We evaluate Flow-ERD with a log-free diversity metric alongside standard realism scores. Flow-ERD ranks first on the WOSAC test benchmark and dominates the realism--diversity Pareto front among reproducible baselines. Our project page is available \href{https://seulbinhwang.github.io/flow-erd-project-page/}{here}. --- ### Physical activities enable scalable foundation modelling for broad-spectrum health prediction Authors: Zhenghuang Wu, Yuyao Zhu, Songlin Xu Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06954v1 Wearable and mobile sensing technologies have demonstrated strong potential for health inference; however, most sensor models are designed for specific disease types, limiting their transferability across different health risks. Wearable foundation models offer a more generalizable approach in diverse health risk types. Nevertheless, most existing methods rely on high-frequency raw sensor data, raising concerns about privacy, computational overhead, and scalability across devices and populations. In this paper, we propose StepFM, a foundation model built solely on step counter data for broad-spectrum health prediction. Leveraging the ubiquity and low-dimensional nature of step data, StepFM provides a practical, privacy-preserving, and computation-efficient alternative to traditional sensor-based models. We design a scalable pre-training framework that captures temporal dynamics and behavioral patterns from large-scale step sequences, enabling transfer across more than 20 health risk prediction tasks spanning diverse devices, new regions, and novel disease types. Extensive experiments demonstrate that StepFM achieves strong performance compared to existing methods while maintaining robustness across heterogeneous settings. Furthermore, our analysis reveals interpretable and generalizable relationships between physical activity patterns and various health risks, offering new insights into activity-based health modeling. Our work establishes step-based sensing as a viable foundation for scalable and real-world health monitoring. --- ### SpiS-GAN: Spiral-Modulated Handwriting Synthesis with Star Operation Authors: Nguyen Duy Hieu, Dang Hoai Nam, Pham Hoang Giap, Quang Huu Hieu, Vo Nguyen Le Duy Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06949v1 Training robust handwriting recognition (HTR) systems requires massive amounts of annotated data, which is often difficult to acquire. While synthetic handwriting generation offers a practical solution to expand training sets, existing models struggle with several core issues. First, previous approaches, even MLP-based models fail to effectively trace cursive handwriting due to fixed-grid spatial receptive field. Second, their CNN-relied discriminators usually lose structural details through aggressive downsampling, making broken connections difficult to detect. Third, existing architectures are either limited to linear feature interactions or too expensive for high-resolution synthesis. Finally, existing approaches lack explicit edge constraints, often resulting in blurred stroke boundaries. To address these challenges, this study proposes a Spiral-Modulated Handwriting Synthesis framework based on Generative Adversarial Networks (SpiS-GAN). Our generator employs Star-Spiral Blocks combining proposed Modulated Elliptical SpiralFC with the star operation to capture spatial relationships and efficiently follow complex handwriting stroke trajectories, while a Spiral-Modulated discriminator is introduced for multi-domain flaws detection. Additionally, we introduce a Sobel-Regularized Edge Reconstruction Loss that provides edge guidance, ensuring every character remains clear and legible. Evaluations on the English and Vietnamese datasets demonstrate that SpiS-GAN significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art models. The generated images are highly authentic, accurately preserve the original writer's style across languages, and successfully lower error rates when training downstream HTR systems. --- ### Self-Supervised Pretraining Improves Cross-Site and Cross-Scale Robustness of Point Cloud Leaf-Wood Segmentation Authors: Heeju Mun, Tackang Yang, Yunsoo Nam, Changhyun Choi Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06948v1 The accuracy of existing leaf-wood segmentation methods for tree point clouds varies across forest types and sites. Self-supervised learning (SSL) on point clouds has improved the generalization of deep learning models for forestry point cloud tasks, including biomass regression and individual tree segmentation, but its applicability to leaf-wood segmentation remains untested. In this study, we pretrained Point-M2AE, a widely used SSL architecture for point clouds, on ShapeNet-55 augmented with 2,400 individual tree point clouds. For fine-tuning and inference, we used recursive voxel subdivision to handle the wide variation in point density across inputs, allowing the same model to operate at both individual-tree and plot scales without architecture change. Compared to the model without pretraining, the pretrained model improved wood IoU from 60.5% to 70.0% for needleleaf and from 69.7% to 76.3% for broadleaf trees. On a benchmark spanning four countries across three climatic zones, the pretrained model achieved the smallest cross-site variation and highest overall performance among compared methods (LeWos, CWLS, and PointTransformer). Plot-level segmentation maintained accuracy comparable to individual-tree performance, with mIoU of 84.7% for broadleaf and 77.7% for needleleaf plots, showing that the model generalizes across scales without additional finetuning. As a downstream test in tropical forests, where dense canopies make segmentation challenging, we applied our model and a quantitative structure model to estimate wood volume for 28 trees from Guyana, Indonesia, and Peru to assess whether the segmentation improvements from SSL pretraining translate into improved downstream performance. The resulting volume estimates achieved the lowest error among all methods tested (MAE = 2.40 m$^3$), less than half that of algorithmic baselines (LeWos: 5.94 m$^3$; CWLS: 5.27 m$^3$). --- ### General Incomplete Multimodal Learning via Dynamic Quality Perception Authors: Xiangyu Meng, Shicai Wei Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06943v1 Multimodal learning robust to missing modalities is essential for real-world applications. Existing methods mainly focus on inter-modality missing, where entire modalities are absent, while overlooking intra-modality degradation, where modalities are present but severely corrupted. In practice, these two types of missing often coexist, making existing approaches ineffective. To address this limitation, we propose General Incomplete Multimodal Learning (GIML), a unified framework that simultaneously handles both inter-modality missing and intra-modality degradation through dynamic quality perception. Specifically, GIML models heterogeneous missing patterns as continuous modality information degradation, enabling degradation-aware adaptive fusion. To achieve reliable quality perception, we introduce a Noise-aware Quality Estimator that learns the mapping from corrupted features to noise intensity through controlled noise injection. Furthermore, we propose a Noise-Semantic Decoupled module that separates semantic information from noise interference. This improves robustness and generalization to unseen corruption patterns. Extensive experiments across datasets with diverse modality types demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of GIML. Code is available at: https://github.com/Yu-Five/GIML. --- ### Comprehensive Evaluation of Large Language Model Responses: A Multi-Factor Scoring System Authors: Yiming Gai, Junde Lu, Xuefei Huang Published: 2026-07-08 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06940v1 The remarkable performance of large language models (LLMs) in linguistic tasks underscores an urgent need for comprehensive evaluation of their response quality. Prevailing methods, often confined to singular dimensions, fall short of capturing the full spectrum of model capabilities. This study introduces a multifactor scoring paradigm, integrating accuracy, conciseness, factual consistency, readability, and coherence, complemented by a graphical user interface (GUI) for visualizing outcomes. Evaluations on the TruthfulQA dataset unveil mainstream LLMs' strengths in reasoning tasks (peaking at a composite score of 0.6104) alongside pervasive limitations in navigating complex facts and ambiguities. Transcending the narrow lens of traditional metrics, this framework offers a transparent, adaptable avenue to illuminate model potential and deficiencies. Though presently focused on English tasks, its horizons beckon toward multilingual domains. This work carves a novel path for knowledge engineering and model refinement. ---