# Research Papers — 2026-07 · bundle page 172 of 222 > Full-text markdown of papers #8551–8600 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/172 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/171.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/173.md) ### Dynamic-in-Few-Step: Unifying Dynamic Computation and Few-Step Distillation for Efficient Video Generation Authors: Yu Cheng, Siyue Yao, Zhongang Qi, Shanyan Guan, Wei Li, Fajie Yuan Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06631v1 Video Diffusion Models (VDMs) have demonstrated superior generation quality but suffer from prohibitive computational costs. While recent few-step distillation techniques significantly accelerate inference, they typically enforce a static model architecture across all denoising stages, ignoring the varying computational demands inherent to different noise levels. In this work, we propose a novel post-training acceleration framework that exploits this redundancy by integrating dynamic structural sparsification directly into the distillation process. Unlike conventional post-hoc compression applied to a fixed diffusion pipeline, our approach jointly optimizes the denoising steps and structured model sparsity, transforming a pre-trained VDM into a compact, step-specific Mixture-of-Models (MoM). To address the training instability arising from this joint optimization, we introduce a Progressive Training Strategy coupled with an Output Rollout Mechanism, which ensures the coherent learning of structural decisions across timesteps. Furthermore, we develop a specialized inference engine to deploy the resulting MoM efficiently. Our method is orthogonal to existing acceleration techniques and highly effective: On Wan-14B, it removes 24% of the per-step FLOPs on top of 4-step distillation, adding a 1.2x wall-clock gain and reaching a 30x speedup over the 50-step teacher while preserving competitive generation quality. --- ### When Certificates Fail: A Unified Safety Framework for Embedded Neural Interface Models Authors: Jasmeet Singh Bindra Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.LG, eess.SP arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06630v1 Formal robustness certificates for embedded neural-interface models can pass while task accuracy collapses: at perturbation budget e=0.25, EEGNet classification accuracy drops by 25.7% under projected-gradient attack while the Lipschitz-style certificate remains valid for all 9 tested subjects. We argue that this gap between mathematical certification and operational safety is one instance of a broader alignment failure in neural interfaces, where training objectives diverge from user welfare. We propose a unified empirical audit framework organized around three such failures: verification insufficiency, in which certificates pass while task behavior degrades; proxy-fidelity divergence, in which task-optimized representations damage neural signal structure (a time-domain auxiliary objective reduces reconstruction MSE by 0.1132 while worsening spectral log-MSE); and latent information exfiltration, in which public-task embeddings retain private attributes (subject identity recoverable at 48.1% versus 6.7% chance). We instantiate the framework on BCI Competition IV 2a and SEED-IV using multiple deep and classical EEG decoders, official session-level validation, null controls, and paired statistical tests. The verification gap persists across EEGNet, CSP+LDA, and FBCSP+LDA, and is therefore architecture-independent. Our results establish that operational safety auditing, not certificate verification alone, is necessary for responsible neural-interface deployment. --- ### STST-JEPA: Shallow-Target Spatio-Temporal Joint Embedding Prediction Architecture For EEG Self-Supervised Learning Authors: Roy Segal, Yoni Svechinsky, Tomer Fekete Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.LG, q-bio.NC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06629v2 Brain age - the age inferred from a physiological recording - is an emerging biomarker whose deviation from chronological age tracks neurological and psychiatric burden, and EEG is an attractive substrate for it because it is cheap, portable, and temporally rich. Yet EEG brain-age models must contend with cross-site montage heterogeneity, small labelled cohorts, and dominant subject-level non-stationarity, and few EEG foundation models have been shown to deliver competitive age regression across the full pediatric to older adult range in which such a biomarker would actually be deployed. We introduce STST-JEPA, a self-supervised transformer for resting-state and task EEG, pretrained on 47,703 sessions spanning ages 5-81 from the brain.space and Healthy Brain Network (HBN) corpora. The model combines a latent-prediction objective - predicting masked-token representations against an EMA-of-tokenizer target - with an auxiliary signal-reconstruction term, applied to 30-second multi-channel windows under spatiotemporal block masks. A lightweight attentive probe trained on frozen pretrained embeddings achieves a best held-out-validation mean absolute error of 3.06 years (r = 0.924) for age regression on 3,367 sessions, against a predict-the-mean baseline of approximately 10 years MAE. With light task-specific finetuning of the model's final layers, the same pretrained encoder achieves rank-1 placements - with the model's native 30-second windows - on the public NeuralBench x brain.space EEG leaderboard for sex classification (balanced accuracy 0.911), age prediction (r = 0.749), and psychopathology composite regression (r = 0.215). We further show that the model's age-prediction residual is negatively correlated with cognitive efficiency over several tasks we examined. --- ### Cross-Trajectory Chimera Interventions Reveal Dissociable Roles of Weight Magnitude and Direction in Grokking Authors: Truong Xuan Khanh Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06628v1 Which properties of a partially trained network are causally portable to a different, independently trained network? Single-trajectory interventions show necessity within one run, not portability across runs. We introduce cross-trajectory chimera interventions: given two runs from different seeds, we split each weight vector into a norm and a unit direction, recombine one run's norm with the other's direction, and continue training. On two modular-arithmetic tasks that grok, the components dissociate. Direction carries a transferable, donor-specific circuit identity: implanting a donor's direction at the recipient's norm drives the run to the donor's circuit in 40/40 cases, while an angle-matched random control yields no shift. The transfer is threshold-like, and its location is predicted by the recipient's norm, separating perfectly by norm class over all 20 pairs (joint permutation probability 1.9e-4). Norm carries only a modest, distributed delay effect and no identity signal. An adaptive bisection procedure localizes the threshold to +/-1/64. Direction indexes which solution a trajectory approaches; norm governs how susceptible that identity is to being overwritten. --- ### Reward Valuation in Vision Language Models: Causal Mechanisms Underlying Anhedonia Authors: Melika Honarmand, Samin Mahdipour Aghabagher, Martin Schrimpf Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.LG, q-bio.NC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06626v1 Recent Vision-Language Models capture increasingly complex aspects of human cognition. Here we ask whether this alignment extends to reward valuation, which we assess in a mechanistic framework built on clinical tests that were developed to evaluate anhedonia and motivational deficits in major depressive disorder. In the brain, anhedonia is frequently linked to dysregulation in the Nucleus Accumbens (NAc) and the broader dopaminergic reward system. While neuroimaging has localized these deficits, establishing a causal link between NAc activity and specific behavioral symptoms remains a challenge. We use these ideas from neuroscience to functionally identify reward-anticipatory units in vision language models, and test their causal role via targeted perturbations. Perturbing NAc-selective units induces behavioral effects that mirror human anhedonia: the model shifts toward low-effort, low-reward options in effort-based decision-making tasks. Crucially, our results reflect a specific deficit in reward valuation and anticipation rather than a loss of task capability: the perturbed model maintains baseline performance when reward-based choice is removed. This induced vulnerability further aligns with clinical anhedonia and motivation scales, including DARS and MAP-SR. Taken together, these results reveal reward valuation circuits in AI models that parallel those in humans. --- ### Open-Ended Scenario Reasoning for Specialist Model Adaptation Authors: Youcheng Zong, Runda Jia, Ranmeng Lin, Mingxuan Ren, Dakuo He Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, eess.SY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06625v1 Process industries have accumulated validated specialist models, yet sensor drift, feedstock variation, and regime switching cause these models to degrade systematically in new scenarios. Collecting new labeled data and retraining is costly, while continuing with the original model incurs persistent bias. Existing adaptation methods require modifying model parameters with sufficient labeled data, making rapid response on deployed systems difficult. Using LLMs as direct predictors risks hallucinations and uncontrollable outputs. Such predictors also cannot incorporate unstructured scenario knowledge from the field. To address these limitations, this article proposes Reasoning-Driven Open Adaptation for Specialist Models (ROAM), a framework that uses LLM world knowledge and reasoning to adapt frozen specialist models to unseen scenarios without retraining. ROAM confines all corrections to a low-dimensional, semantically interpretable latent space. LLM-generated scenario judgments and online observations are fused under a unified probabilistic framework. A risk-constrained mechanism suppresses corrections under unreliable LLM evidence or abrupt scenario shifts and falls back to the original frozen model when evidence is insufficient. Experiments on a mineral thickening process and the public IndPenSim penicillin fermentation dataset show that ROAM reduces MAE by over 20\% in major shift settings such as hidden shifts with only 839 additional parameters and under 0.02\,ms per-step overhead. These results indicate that LLM reasoning can be turned into a conservative adaptation signal for industrial models already in service. --- ### AgentLens: Production-Assessed Trajectory Reviews for Coding Agent Evaluation Authors: Andrey Podivilov, Vadim Lomshakov, Sergey Savin, Matvei Startsev, Roman Pozharskiy, Maksim Parshin, Sergey Nikolenko Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06624v2 We present AgentLens, a production-assessed benchmark for interactive code agents. Most code-agent benchmarks reduce a run to a single bit -- did the task pass? -- but the people who actually use these agents experience the entire trajectory: how the agent follows instructions, uses its tools, verifies its own work, recovers from mistakes, and talks to them along the way. AgentLens evaluates that whole trajectory. It pairs formal verification, where an objective check exists, with LLM-written trajectory reviews and side-by-side comparisons, so that each run yields a readable explanation of why the score is what it is. This makes AgentLens useful for more than ranking models: we use it to diagnose model behavior, compare successive versions of our own agent, and catch product regressions in a nightly evaluation pipeline. We release the benchmark as open source at https://github.com/agent-lens/agent-lens-bench. --- ### LLM-Guided Task-Semantic Field Factorization for Industrial Process Forecasting Authors: Youcheng Zong, Runda Jia, Mingxuan Ren, Dakuo He Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, eess.SY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06623v2 Process industries rely on time-series forecasting and soft sensing to estimate quality variables that are hard to measure online. Labeled data are scarce, operating regimes change frequently, and retraining models or rebuilding alignment pipelines for each scenario is costly. Such settings often provide variable tables and process documents that record variable names, units, physical meanings, and process roles. However, standard time-series backbones usually treat inputs as anonymous numerical columns. Existing text-enhanced methods also rarely make the semantic-logical relations between input variables and the prediction target available to the model within each numerical window. To address this problem, this article proposes Task-Semantic Field Factorization (TSF), a large language model (LLM)-guided framework. TSF builds a task-semantic field from task protocols and variable documents before training and uses the LLM only for offline semantic construction. Online training and inference are handled by conventional time-series backbones. During training and inference, the current numerical window activates variable semantics, so semantic information participates in each prediction and supports adaptation to different prediction targets and operating shifts. Across multiple complex industrial forecasting and delayed soft-sensing tasks, TSF reduces MAE by 3.6\% on average. Across all dataset--backbone pairs, the macro-average reduction is 2.9\%, with a maximum reduction of 24.9\%. It adds only about 0.7--4.3k parameters, with less than 8\,$μ$s/sample of additional online inference overhead. These results show that TSF turns existing process documents into measurable forecasting gains across backbones and semantic generators while remaining lightweight for deployment. --- ### Creating Power Distribution Network Layouts Using Generative Adversarial Networks and Image-Based Representations Authors: Juan Manuel Garcia-Perez, Carlos Mateo Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: eess.SY, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06622v1 Utilities increasingly rely on planning and operational tools to cope with the increased penetrations of distributed energy resources, yet the lack of realistic, openly available datasets remains a major barrier for benchmarking and comparison. Traditional test feeders, and recently proposed large-scale synthetic networks alleviate this issue but are typically based on heuristic rules and do not learn directly from data. This paper proposes a generative framework based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to create power distribution network layouts using image-based representations. The model is trained on rasterised views of distribution systems and can operate in two modes: an unconditional configuration that learns layout patterns from the training dataset, and conditional configurations that incorporate geographical context such as street maps and the spatial distribution of consumers. The methodology includes dataset preparation from Geographic Information System (GIS) sources, GAN architecture design, and the analysis of training stability and image resolution. Results from three representative cases show that the proposed approach can reproduce the topologies of low (LV), medium (MV) and high voltage (HV) feeders and align generated layouts with underlying geographical structures. At the same time, the study reveals limitations related to training stability, resolution-dependent artefacts and limits, and the absence of explicit electrical constraints. The proposed framework constitutes a data-driven complement to existing synthetic network generation methods, and could be applied to propose distribution network layouts for the electrification of new areas. This would require future extensions towards power flow, electrically validated models. --- ### Fingerprint, Not Blueprint: How Positional Schemes Set the Default Spectral Algebra of Attention Authors: Li Hengyu Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.LG, cond-mat.dis-nn arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06621v1 The pre-softmax score of an attention head is a bilinear form $score(i,j) = x_i^T M x_j$ in a learned operator $M = W_q^T W_k$. Because M is generally non-symmetric, hence non-normal, it has a complex eigenspectrum and non-orthogonal eigenvectors, the regime where non-Hermitian and random-matrix tools apply. We ask what this spectrum encodes, at three levels for previous-token and induction circuits. Statically, across seven pretrained models spanning three positional schemes, the strongest previous-token heads are spectrally rotational under RoPE and non-rotational, or content-like, where position enters outside QK (learned-absolute and ALiBi); the model-level separation is perfect at every top-k examined (exact permutation $p=0.029$), and zeroing the per-frequency RoPE phase $Im(M_t)$ eliminates induction on a pre-identified previous-token head in all three RoPE models. Dynamically, over public Pythia checkpoints every head originates at the random-matrix (Ginibre) null; the rotational signature emerges with the behavior, not before it, and the population-median suppression that yields the final profile follows circuit formation, so the profile is a consolidated fingerprint, not a precursor. Causally, and at toy scale, no spectral channel is necessary: constrained two-layer training reroutes around every ban with capability intact, albeit at a significant formation delay (four pre-registered contrasts, $q_BH <= 0.016$). The cost structure exposes each scheme's default: imposing symmetry slows learned-absolute models by a factor of 2.9, whereas a RoPE head with a fully symmetric static M still routes directionally via the phase channel, impossible under absolute positions. Within the settings examined, the positional scheme sets the default spectral algebra of an attention head's solution: a fingerprint sculpted after function, not a hard constraint upon it. --- ### SpaR3D-MoE: Adaptive 3D Spatial Reasoning from Sparse Views Meets Geometry-Inductive Mixture-of-Experts Authors: Haida Feng, Hao Wei, Haolin Wang, Shiwei Li, Chade Li, Yihong Wu Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06620v1 Recent Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle to bridge the representational gap between 2D semantic understanding and 3D spatial geometry. Existing 3D-aware models either rely on costly 3D-specific data or utilize RGB-only inputs with heuristic sampling and monolithic, shallow fusion, which respectively disrupt essential spatiotemporal connectivity and induce modality contention across diverse spatial tasks. To overcome these bottlenecks, we introduce SpaR3D-MoE, an end-to-end framework that enables adaptive spatial reasoning by equipping MLLMs with geometry-aware capabilities from only sparse RGB inputs. First, we propose an adaptive spatiotemporal manifold sampling mechanism that constructs a geometry-aware spatiotemporal graph to extract informative keyframes, effectively mitigating sequence redundancy while preserving the scene's topological connectivity. Second, we introduce the heterogeneous geometry-inductive Mixture-of-Experts driven by an instruction-pose aware router, which adaptively routes multimodal tokens to specialized experts, resolving the cross-modal contention inherent in monolithic fusion. Extensive experiments on VSI-Bench, ScanQA, and SQA3D demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance. Notably, SpaR3D-MoE achieves the highest average score of 63.5 on VSI-Bench, outperforming the strongest baseline by 7.8 absolute points, alongside relative improvements of 35.4% and 51.4% in Route Plan and Relative Direction tasks, respectively. --- ### HiFuzz: Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Semantic-Aware and Adaptive CPU Fuzzing Authors: Ya Wang, Hanwei Fan, Zhenguo Liu, Xiaofeng Zhou, Yangdi Lyu, Jiang Xu, Wei Zhang Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.AR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06619v1 Modern processor verification struggles to reach deep architectural states due to the inefficiencies of traditional mutation-based fuzzing. We propose HiFuzz, a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning framework that replaces mutation with a structured, two-layer generation process: a Program Agent for global layout and a Basic Block Agent for precise instruction filling. To overcome reward sparsity, HiFuzz integrates an adaptive coverage reward mechanism and a semantic-aware basic block encoder providing intrinsic feedback. Extensive evaluations on three real-world RISC-V cores demonstrate that HiFuzz significantly outperforms state-of-the-art fuzzers in coverage and bug detection. --- ### Overview of the NLPCC 2026 Shared Task 1: Difficulty-Aware Multilingual and Multimodal Medical Instructional Video Understanding Evaluation Authors: Shenxi Liu, Kan Li, Mingyang Zhao, Yuhang Tian, Bin Li Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06618v2 Following the CMIVQA, MMI-VQA, and M4IVQA challenges in NLPCC 2023--2025, we introduce the Difficulty-Aware Medical Instructional Video Question Answering (DA-MIVQA) shared task for NLPCC 2026. DA-MIVQA extends previous multilingual and multimodal medical video benchmarks by explicitly distinguishing questions according to the type and complexity of evidence required for answering. Specifically, simple questions can often be answered from subtitle-based textual cues, whereas complex questions require visual grounding, procedural understanding, and cross-modal evidence integration. The challenge contains three tracks: Difficulty-Aware Temporal Answer Grounding in Single Video (DA-TAGSV), Difficulty-Aware Video Corpus Retrieval (DA-VCR), and Difficulty-Aware Temporal Answer Grounding in Video Corpus (DA-TAGVC). The dataset is collected from public medical instructional channels, covers diverse scenarios such as first aid, emergency response, rehabilitation, nursing, and general medical education, and is manually verified with difficulty annotations. This paper presents the task motivation, dataset construction, evaluation protocol, participation overview, competition results, and representative systems of DA-MIVQA. DA-MIVQA provides a practical benchmark for evaluating medical instructional video question answering systems under varying textual, visual, temporal, and procedural reasoning requirements. --- ### Inertia-1: An Open Exploration of Wearable Motion Foundation Models Authors: Zongzhe Xu, Aakarsh Anand, Sarah Jiang, Chuntung Zhuang, Zitao Shuai, Sriram Sankararaman, Yuzhe Yang Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06617v1 Wearable motion sensing provides a continuous and scalable window into human behavior and health, making it a natural fit for foundation models, yet its pretraining and scaling principles remain poorly understood. Prior work studies isolated design choices, such as sensor placement or sampling frequency, often under fixed settings and narrow downstream tasks that fail to capture real-world sensing diversity. We introduce Inertia-1, a fully open exploration of wearable motion foundation models. Using massive corpora of accelerometer data from global sources spanning more than 18.2M hours, we build a controlled framework for studying the full lifecycle of wearable motion foundation models, covering data choices such as sensor modality, device placement, sampling rate, window length; model choices such as architectures and model size; and training choices such as pretraining objective and data scale. Extensive evaluations across 15 datasets spanning human activity recognition, freezing-of-gait detection, and disease prediction reveal intriguing findings for building motion foundation models that generalize across tasks and sensing conditions. Collectively, Inertia-1 not only presents state-of-the-art recipes for diverse downstream tasks, but also serves as a comprehensive, practical, and open cookbook for wearable motion representation learning. --- ### WHERE to Generate Matters: Budget-Aware Synthetic Augmentation for Label Skewed Federated Learning Authors: Sangwoo Lee, Sunghwan Park, Jaewoo Lee Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06616v1 Label skew in federated learning (FL) causes client drift and degrades global accuracy. Synthetic data augmentation can reduce this imbalance; however, full class balancing requires substantial computation cost. We propose FedEAS, a policy that assigns each client an entropy-adaptive per-class generation budget computed from its local label distribution. The budget jointly decides \emph{how much} each client generates and \emph{WHERE} the samples go. Accordingly, the total generation budget follows from the per-client budgets rather than being fixed in advance. FedEAS recovers most of the accuracy gain of full class balancing while reducing the generation budget by 94.1\%. At the same total generation budget, it outperforms Uniform allocation by up to 18.82\% across CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100. --- ### Format-Controlled Multi-Scale JPEG Compression Response Analysis for Image-Level Forgery Screening Authors: Sujith K Mandala Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06615v2 Image forgery detection is a critical task in digital forensics, yet many deep-learning localization approaches are typically GPU-accelerated and computationally heavier than handcrafted screening methods. We propose a lightweight, interpretable feature engineering pipeline for image-level forgery screening using only CPU computation and gradient boosted trees. Our method introduces \emph{multi-scale Error Level Analysis} (ELA) computed at seven JPEG quality levels, combined with novel \emph{cross-quality ELA ratio} features that capture double-compression artifacts characteristic of spliced regions, augmented by spatial entropy, FFT energy bands, edge density, SRM residuals, and DCT blockiness, yielding a 405-dimensional feature vector. CASIA v2.0 contains a format confound (60\% of tampered images are TIFF while authentic images are JPEG/BMP and contain no TIFF samples), enabling a trivial \texttt{is\_tiff} classifier to reach 0.80 AUC. We address this through rigorous format-controlled evaluation: on the JPEG-only subset (9,501 images, eliminating the TIFF/JPEG container confound), our method achieves AUC~=~0.990 (95\% CI: 0.988--0.991) and F1~=~0.905 using 5-fold stratified cross-validation. Under a conservative source-aware group split (preventing related images from appearing in both train and test), AUC remains 0.976. An ablation study reveals that multi-scale ELA provides the dominant gain (+0.180 AUC over single-quality on the format-controlled subset), while cross-quality ratios provide complementary double-compression detection. These results support that the method detects compression-history inconsistencies rather than file-format shortcuts -- while offering feature-level interpretability, CPU-only deployment, and sub-second inference. --- ### STAGformer: A Spatio-temporal Agent Graph Transformer for Micro Mobility Demand Forecasting Authors: Ye Zihao Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06614v1 Accurate station-level demand forecasting is essential for the efficient operation of bike-sharing systems, yet it remains challenging due to complex spatio-temporal dependencies and the large scale of urban networks. This paper presents STAGformer, a Spatio-Temporal Agent Graph Transformer that achieves efficient global modeling with linear computational complexity. The model introduces a two-step agent attention mechanism, where a small set of learnable spatial and temporal agent tokens first aggregate global information and then broadcast it back to individual stations and time steps, effectively capturing long-range interactions while reducing the quadratic cost of standard self-attention to O(NT). STAGformer integrates four core modules: a spatio-temporal encoder that fuses dynamic node features with external contextual factors (weather, time, points of interest), a graph propagation module for spatial neighbor aggregation, a temporal convolution module for local pattern extraction, and the agent attention module for global dependency modeling. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets -- NYC Citi-Bike and Chicago Divvy-Bike -- demonstrate that STAGformer consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across multiple prediction horizons, achieving significant improvements in both RMSE and MAE. Ablation studies validate the contribution of each component, with the agent attention mechanism proving critical for modeling global spatio-temporal dependencies. --- ### PRoVeFL: Private Robust and Verifiable Aggregation in Federated Learning Authors: Harsh Kasyap, Anil Kumar Pradhan, Ugur Ilker Atmaca, Graham Cormode, Carsten Maple Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06612v1 Federated Learning (FL) enables multiple clients to collaboratively train machine learning models while retaining data locality, thereby enhancing user privacy. However, traditional FL frameworks rely on a centralized aggregation server and assume honest-but-curious clients, making them susceptible to both server-side inference and client-side poisoning attacks. Although recent work has explored secure and Byzantine-resilient FL protocols, they face a fundamental trade-off among privacy, integrity, and verifiability, and incur substantial computational and communication overhead due to the heavy use of cryptographic primitives. In this work, we propose PRoVeFL-a novel, modular FL framework that is Privacy-preserving, Byzantine-Robust, and ensures Verifiable aggregation. PRoVeFL employs multiple servers leveraging multi-key fully homomorphic encryption. Each client encrypts its local model updates and distributes encrypted shares to all servers. This design enables a hybrid computation model in which ciphertext operations are carefully offloaded to the plaintext domain under strict privacy constraints to efficiently evaluate complex statistical aggregation rules. PRoVeFL is compatible with a wide range of state-of-the-art Byzantine-robust aggregation algorithms (e.g., Krum, Trimmed Mean, FLTrust, norm clipping, MESAS, and more) and further enhances them with verifiability mechanisms that require minimal trust in at least one honest server. We evaluate it across different settings and demonstrate its scalability with varying numbers of parameters and participants. PRoVeFL improves runtime over the prior works, Prio and ELSA, based on distributed trust with comparable security guarantees, up to 100x and 10x, respectively. --- ### Audio Sentiment Analysis via Distillation and Cross-Modal Integration of Generated Multilingual Transcripts Authors: Andrei-George Durdun, Victor Constantinescu, Radu Tudor Ionescu Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG, cs.SD arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06611v1 Automatically recognizing the sentiment, positive or negative, from speech is a challenging task, requiring both the analysis of vocal inflections and the interpretation of uttered words. Recent solutions rely on audio foundation models to solve the task, but it remains unclear if such models can take all aspects into account. To this end, we propose a multimodal solution that integrates audio and text information via cross-modal transformers, where text transcripts are automatically generated via an automatic speech recognition (ASR) tool. Moreover, we create multiple text modalities by automatically translating the transcripts into multiple languages via machine translation tools. Audio and multilingual text features are combined via a cascaded architecture comprising cross-modal transformer blocks that integrate modalities one by one. We further distill knowledge from the multimodal model, called teacher, into a unimodal (audio only) model, called student. We conduct experiments on a large-scale dataset, demonstrating that the automatically generated textual information can bring significant performance boosts in multimodal sentiment polarity classification. Our ablation study confirms that both automatic transcripts and automatic translations are helpful. Moreover, we show that the audio-only model can be enhanced via distillation, boosting performance without any computational overhead during inference. To reproduce the reported results, we publicly release our code at https://github.com/andreidurdun/cross-modal-audio-sentiment. --- ### Deep Reinforcement Learning for Reliability Based Bi-Objective Portfolio Optimization Authors: Sounaq Das, Tanmay Sen, Raghu Nandan Sengupta, Aditya Gupta Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06610v1 Portfolio optimization under uncertainty is inherently a multi-objective decision problem involving complex interactions among return, risk, market dynamics, and practical investment constraints. Existing reliability based portfolio optimization approaches primarily rely on static optimization frameworks and often fail to capture sequential decision making, tail risk, and market frictions such as transaction costs. To address these limitations, we propose a deep reinforcement learning framework for multi-objective reliability based portfolio optimization (MORP-DRL). The proposed framework jointly optimizes expected return and downside risk using three complementary risk measures: variance, Conditional Value-at-Risk (CVaR), and Entropic Value-at-Risk (EVaR). To model uncertainty and heavy-tailed market behavior, asset returns are represented using GARCH(1,1), Extreme Value Theory, and a t-copula dependence structure, while realistic scenarios are generated through quasi-Monte Carlo simulation. A Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) based strategy is developed under practical constraints including transaction costs and portfolio bounds, and is benchmarked against NSGA-II. Experiments on ten global equity indices across pre-COVID, COVID, and post-COVID market regimes demonstrate that MORP-DRL achieves competitive risk-return performance, reduced downside risk during periods of market stress, and scalability to high-dimensional portfolio settings. --- ### D2PO: Optimizing Diffusion Samplers via Dynamic Preference Authors: Jinkyu Kim, Jinyoung Choi, Bohyung Han Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06609v1 We propose D2PO (Dynamic Direct Preference Optimization), a principled framework for optimizing diffusion sampling policies with respect to timestep schedules and classifier-free guidance (CFG) weights. Our work is motivated by a fundamental limitation of existing student-teacher regression frameworks; low-NFE student samplers are trained to mimic high-NFEteachers, often sacrificing high-frequency texture fidelity while preserving coarse global structures, thereby misaligning the sampler with perceptual quality. D2PO addresses this challenge by reformulating sampler optimization as a preference-based alignment problem, leveraging the Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) framework. To make DPO applicable to diffusion samplers, we model the sampling policy as an energy-based model (EBM), transforming preference comparisons into tractable energy differences. We further introduce a novel energy formulation derived directly from the pretrained score network, enabling preference evaluation in perturbed spaces that jointly capture structural consistency and fine-grained details. Moreover, we introduce dynamic preferences, where the preferred samples used for alignment progressively improve as the sampling policies are learned. This self-improving mechanism replaces rigid static teacher supervision with an iterative, preference-guided refinement process, providing progressively stronger alignment signals. Extensive experiments demonstrate that D2PO aligns diffusion samplers with perceptual quality more faithfully, unlocking the full potential of high-quality teachers and consistently outperforming conventional regression-based schedulers under low-NFE constraints. --- ### Security and Privacy in Agentic AI: Grand Challenges and Future Directions Authors: Adam Jenkins, Agnieszka Kitkowska, Caterina Maidhof, Diego Paracuellos, Francesco Sovrano, Gonzalo Gabriel Mendez, Guillermo Suarez-Tangil, Hana Kopecka, Isabel Wagner, Isabel Barbera, Javier Carnerero-Cano, Jide Edu et al. Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06608v2 We present key challenges and future research directions in the security and privacy of agentic AI, based on a horizon-scanning exercise that brought together thirty leading international experts from academia, industry, and government to engage in focused discussions and collaborative exercises on the emerging risks associated with the growing agency of AI. --- ### NEST: Tackling Dataset-Level Distribution Shifts via Regime-Oriented Mixture-of-Experts Authors: Lanhao Li, Bingshu Xie, Lijun Sun, Xin Xue, Haoyi Zhou, Jianxin Li Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06607v1 Accurate long-term forecasting in complex systems is frequently compromised by dataset-level distribution shifts, where diverse underlying behavioral modes and evolving system states drive the dynamic multivariate time-series. While existing methods predominantly focus on local temporal shifts, they fail to explicitly model the global structural challenge where datasets are composites of distinct operational regimes. In this paper, we propose NEST, a specialized framework designed to model and recompose these evolving structures through a two-phase dense MoE architecture. NEST first facilitates structural specialization by partitioning the dataset into distinct operational regimes through unsupervised clustering in a principled moment-entropy space. We introduce a regime-oriented router mechanism that generates initial expert weights based on temporal content, subsequently refined through geometric modulation to regime centroids. Crucially, rather than acting as monolithic predictors, individual experts function as specialized kernels that capture regime-specific dynamics by evolving unique variate-attention patterns. Extensive evaluations on diverse benchmarks, including heterogeneous network traffic and physical phenomena, demonstrate that NEST consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/Aaralshin/NEST --- ### A Quiet Failure in Calibrated Virtual Screening: Marginal Conformal Prediction Under-Covers the Minority Class, and a Class-Conditional Fix Recovers It Authors: Muhammadjon Tursunbadalov, Mustafojon Tursunbadalov Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06605v1 Conformal prediction is being adopted in drug discovery to put an honest number on model reliability: pick an error rate alpha, and the method returns prediction sets containing the true label with probability at least 1 - alpha. We show this guarantee can be dangerous on imbalanced datasets. Across four datasets, standard (marginal) conformal prediction hits its global 90% coverage target while leaving the minority class badly exposed: realized minority coverage falls to 64.8% on blood-brain-barrier penetration and to 4.2% on clinical-trial toxicity, where the rare class is nearly abandoned. The failure is not tied to one model: a random forest, a graph network, and a frozen chemical language model all reproduce it (p < 0.001 in every case), with severity tracking baseline calibration on rare labels rather than architecture. A conservation identity explains the effect: the minority's shortfall equals the majority's surplus amplified by the imbalance ratio, predicting the measured gap to within one point and ordering severity across datasets. The failure survives realistic scaffold splits and a second conformal score, while aggregate accuracy and overall coverage stay reassuringly high, which is exactly why it is easy to miss. Class-conditional (Mondrian) conformal prediction closes the gap on every dataset, restoring minority coverage to target for a modest increase in prediction-set size. We localize the failures to generic molecular scaffolds - plain benzene and pyridine cores occurring in both classes - propose a one-number diagnostic, and show with a cost model that abstaining on affected compounds flips a screening campaign from net-negative to net-positive utility. Our contribution is demonstrating on real chemistry how severe and invisible this known conformal-theory gap becomes under imbalance, and laying out a practical protocol restoring per-class reliability. --- ### Do Counterfactually Fair Image Classifiers Satisfy Group Fairness? -- A Theoretical and Empirical Study Authors: Sangwon Jung, Sumin Yu, Sanghyuk Chun, Taesup Moon Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06603v1 The notion of algorithmic fairness has been actively explored from various aspects of fairness, such as counterfactual fairness (CF) and group fairness (GF). However, the exact relationship between CF and GF remains to be unclear, especially in image classification tasks; the reason is because we often cannot collect counterfactual samples regarding a sensitive attribute, essential for evaluating CF, from the existing images (\eg, a photo of the same person but with different secondary sex characteristics). In this paper, we construct new image datasets for evaluating CF by using a high-quality image editing method and carefully labeling with human annotators. Our datasets, \oursceleb and \ourslfw, build upon the popular image GF benchmarks; hence, we can evaluate CF and GF simultaneously. We empirically observe that CF does not imply GF in image classification, whereas previous studies on tabular datasets observed the opposite. We theoretically show that it could be due to the existence of a latent attribute $G$ that is correlated with, but not caused by, the sensitive attribute (\eg, secondary sex characteristics are highly correlated with hair length). From this observation, we propose a simple baseline, Counterfactual Knowledge Distillation (CKD), to mitigate such correlation with the sensitive attributes. Extensive experimental results on \oursceleb and \ourslfw demonstrate that CF-achieving models satisfy GF if we successfully reduce the reliance on $G$ (\eg, using CKD). --- ### TriRoute: Unified Learned Routing for Joint Adaptive Attention, Experts, and KV-Cache Allocation Authors: Andrii Balashov, Olena Ponomarova Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06601v1 Conditional computation can decouple language model quality from per-token inference cost, yet leading techniques act on a single axis in isolation: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) sparsifies the FFN, Mixture-of-Depths (MoD) skips whole transformer blocks, and KV-cache quantization compresses attention memory. We argue these three decisions (attention resolution, expert selection, and cache bit-width) are strongly coupled and should be made jointly: a token rare enough to warrant full attention may also need high-precision caching regardless of which expert processes it. We introduce TriRoute, a single lightweight controller shared across all three axes that, for every token at every layer, emits a coordinated policy: (i) an attention mode (skip/local/full), (ii) a sparse set of FFN experts (with a null expert recovering MoD), and (iii) a KV-cache bit-width. The controller trains end-to-end via a heterogeneous relaxation (Gumbel-Softmax with straight-through estimation for categorical decisions and load-balanced top-k gating for experts) under a Lagrangian budget constraint that turns the average compute and memory cost into a controllable knob. We identify a cross-axis routing-collapse cascade in naive joint training, where collapse on one axis propagates to the others, and address it with per-axis normalization and a coupling-aware balancing loss. On decoder-only models from 160M to 1.3B parameters at compute-optimal token counts, TriRoute Pareto-dominates the best independent MoD+MoE+KV-quantization combination at matched inference FLOPs and memory, while better preserving tail-case robustness on rare entities, code, and arithmetic that pure perplexity optimization erodes. Post-hoc analysis reveals interpretable structure: the controller allocates full attention and high-precision cache to sentence-initial positions, rare subwords, and named entities, while cheaply routing function words. --- ### MiLSD: A Micro Line-Segment Detector for Resource-Constrained Devices Authors: Parsa Hassani Shariat Panahi, Amir Hossein Jalilvand, M. Hassan Najafi Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06600v1 Line segment detection is a key building block in visual SLAM, 3D reconstruction, and industrial inspection. Recent deep learning methods have greatly improved accuracy, yet even the smallest models require several megabytes of memory, exceeding low-cost MCU capacity. This work investigates the maximum achievable accuracy under a sub-megabyte budget. We propose MiLSD, a detector tailored for MCU-level constraints, and systematically compare three output representations within a compact fully-convolutional backbone. Our study shows that the proposed F-Clip center-with-length-and-angle formulation learns most effectively at small model sizes. We find that 8-bit quantization preserves full-precision performance, while 4-bit quantization causes significant degradation, particularly in angle regression, with quantization-aware training recovering only part of the loss. With a one-megabyte activation budget and inference enhancements including sub-pixel decoding, test-time augmentation, and a lightweight verifier, MiLSD improves sAP10 on ShanghaiTech Wireframe from 10.6 (25k parameters, 0.25 MB) to 24.1 within 1 MB. Rather than competing with GPU-scale parsers, we map the accuracy memory trade-off across representations, bit-widths, capacities, and post-processing strategies for embedded vision systems. --- ### ELSA3D: Elastic Semantic Anchoring for Unified 3D Understanding and Generation Authors: Tianjiao Yu, Xinzhuo Li, Yifan Shen, Onkar Susladkar, Yuanzhe Liu, Xiaona Zhou, Ismini Lourentzou Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06565v1 Unified 3D foundation models aspire to generate 3D assets and reason about them in language within a single backbone, but their text-3D interaction remains largely implicit. Existing methods concatenate text and 3D tokens into a flat sequence and rely on self-attention, collapsing coarse structural cues and fine geometric details into one undifferentiated representation. We introduce ELSA3D, a unified 3D model that addresses this with elastic semantic anchoring, structuring language and geometric reasoning jointly along matched abstraction scales. ELSA3D represents geometry with a scale-aware octree tokenizer and introduces Anchor Tokens, sparse cross-modal units that select semantic cues, route them to the most relevant 3D scale, retrieve scale-specific geometric evidence, and write the fused signal back into the unified representation, keeping interaction sparse yet precise. A lightweight per-block router makes both computation and reasoning elastic, choosing which text tokens instantiate anchors at which geometric scale so that cross-modal capacity concentrates where alignment is most needed. ELSA3D achieves state-of-the-art performance across image-to-3D generation, text-to-3D generation, and 3D captioning, outperforming the strongest unified baseline while roughly halving FLOPs and inference latency relative to the non-elastic version of the same model. --- ### Lift3D-VLA: Lifting VLA Models to 3D Geometry and Dynamics-Aware Manipulation Authors: Jiaming Liu, Qingpo Wuwu, Nuowei Han, Hao Chen, Zhuoyang Liu, Fan Fei, Yueru Jia, Chenyang Gu, Yandong Guo, Boxin Shi, Shanghang Zhang Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06564v1 Recently, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong generalization across diverse tasks. However, effective robotic manipulation in physical environments fundamentally requires geometric understanding and spatial reasoning. While some VLA approaches attempt to incorporate 3D information, they are constrained by limited data availability and geometric information loss in current 3D encoding pipelines, and fail to jointly capture 3D geometry and temporally structured actions in dynamic environments. To address these limitations, we introduce Lift3D-VLA, a unified VLA framework that equips models with explicit 3D point cloud reasoning and enables temporally coherent action generation. First, building upon our previous work Lift3D, an enhanced 2D model-lifting strategy is proposed to geometrically align 3D points with pretrained 2D positional embeddings. This design enables direct point-cloud encoding within the VLA vision encoder while minimizing spatial information loss. Based on explicit 3D inputs, we propose Geometry-Centric Masked Autoencoding (GC-MAE), a dual-objective self-supervised framework that reconstructs the current point cloud while predicting its future geometric evolution. This formulation allows the 2D vision encoder to internalize both 3D structure and physical dynamics. To fully exploit 3D representations, we further design layer-wise temporal action modeling, which leverages multiple layers of the LLM to collaboratively predict action chunks, enabling temporally consistent predictions. Across 22 simulated tasks and 8 real-world manipulation tasks, Lift3D-VLA achieves 10.8% and 11.1% higher mean success rates on MetaWorld and RLBench than the best-performing prior VLA methods, and outperforms the strongest real-world baseline by 4 percentage points, while exhibiting stronger generalization to out-of-distribution perturbations. --- ### Vision as Unified Multimodal Generation Authors: Xiaoyang Han, Jianhua Li, Kewang Deng, Zukai Chen, Xuanke Shi, Sihan Wang, Boxuan Li, Linyan Wang, Siyi Xie, Xin You, Jinsheng Quan, Zhongang Cai et al. Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06560v1 We formulate computer vision as unified multimodal generation, where heterogeneous visual tasks are expressed in the native text and image generation spaces of a unified multimodal model, without task-specific architectures. Under this formulation, SenseNova-Vision uses natural-language instructions and optional visual prompts to specify tasks, target regions or views, and decoding conventions, and generates responses as text for symbolic outputs, images for dense spatial predictions, or mixed text-and-image outputs for compositional tasks. To support large-scale training, we convert diverse computer vision annotations into instruction-response examples compatible with these generation spaces, resulting in the SenseNova-Vision Corpus, a computer-vision instruction-response corpus spanning text, image, and mixed targets. Starting from an off-the-shelf pretrained unified multimodal model, SenseNova-Vision is trained primarily on this corpus, with auxiliary multimodal data used as a capability-preserving mixture, and requires no task-specific prediction heads or architectural modifications. The resulting model covers a broad range of vision tasks, including detection, OCR, keypoint estimation, segmentation, depth estimation, surface normal prediction, point maps, and camera pose estimation, while supporting language-defined variants that combine category, color, region, and other visual cues. Experiments show that a single unified model can match leading task-specialized systems across structured visual understanding, dense geometric prediction, segmentation, and multi-view visual geometry. These results suggest unified multimodal generation as a scalable route for integrating computer vision capabilities into general-purpose foundation models. The model and corpus are publicly available. --- ### ProxyPose: 6-DoF Pose Tracking via Video-to-Video Translation Authors: Ruihang Zhang, Felix Taubner, Pooja Ravi, Kiriakos N. Kutulakos, David B. Lindell Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06555v1 Tracking the six-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) pose of objects and surfaces from monocular video is a long-standing problem in computer vision. To tackle this problem, existing methods require inputs beyond the video itself-such as 3D models, depth maps, object masks, or task-specific learned features-and they struggle with textureless, transparent, reflective, or deformable surfaces. Here, we introduce ProxyPose, which recasts 6-DoF pose tracking as video-to-video translation. Given only a video and a single marked pixel in the first frame, a fine-tuned video diffusion model translates the input into a proxy video-a synthetic video depicting a colored polyhedron undergoing the same local rigid-body motion as the surface region at the marked pixel. Because the proxy's geometry and appearance are known by construction, recovering its full 6-DoF trajectory reduces to classical pose estimation with off-the-shelf solvers. This formulation leverages large-scale video pre-training to absorb the hardest aspects of pose tracking-handling challenging materials, occlusions, and deformations-into the translation step, while operating at the pixel level with no assumptions about object identity, boundaries, or global rigidity. ProxyPose achieves state-of-the-art 6-DoF pose tracking accuracy without the additional inputs required by competing methods and after fine-tuning the video model only on synthetic data. We further demonstrate that ProxyPose extends to face tracking, camera pose estimation, and challenging in-the-wild scenes that are beyond the reach of existing approaches. Project page: https://ruihangzhang97.github.io/proxypose/. --- ### From RGB Generation to Dense Field Readout: Pixel-Space Dense Prediction with Text-to-Image Models Authors: Zanyi Wang, Xin Lin, Haodong Li, Dengyang Jiang, Yijiang Li Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06553v2 Large-scale text-to-image models are attractive backbones for dense prediction because RGB generation pretraining learns rich semantic, structural, and geometric priors. Existing generative and editing approaches reuse these priors by casting dense prediction as target generation: annotations such as depth, normals, alpha mattes, masks, and heatmaps are encoded into an RGB-trained VAE latent space and decoded back as image-like targets. We argue this inherits more of the generative output interface than dense prediction requires: unlike RGB synthesis, dense prediction asks for pixel-correct, task-native fields on the same image plane, not new RGB content to be rendered. Our key observation is that a pretrained DiT already organizes RGB inputs through a patch-to-token-to-patch lattice on the image plane, so each token indexes a fixed output patch whose channels can carry task-native quantities instead of RGB appearance. We instantiate this as ReChannel: we keep the VAE encoder for the DiT's input distribution but drop the target-side decoder, adapt the frozen DiT with task LoRA, and map each token to its p x p x K_t pixel-space patch through a shared token-local linear head--about 33K parameters, no spatial mixing. Using FLUX-Klein, we evaluate on six dense prediction tasks and over a dozen benchmarks. This minimal interface sets new state-of-the-art on trimap-free matting, KITTI depth, and referring segmentation, and stays competitive on normals, saliency, and pose. In a matched 4B setting it is more accurate and 2.48x faster than an edit-plus-latent-decode counterpart--dense perception can benefit from generative pretraining without inheriting its output interface. --- ### MonoIR-RS: Infrared Remote Sensing Vision-Language Learning with CLIP and VLM Adaptation Authors: Jiaju Han, Ma Yaqi, Yahui Chai, Xuemeng Sun, Xin Li, Qike Zhang, Yingying Zhao, Xiang Chen, Luwei Yang, Chengyin Hu, Jiahuan Long Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06552v1 Infrared remote-sensing imagery captures intensity structure, object-background contrast, and illumination-invariant cues often invisible in RGB imagery. Yet, most remote-sensing vision-language resources and models focus on visible-band semantics, leaving infrared vision-language understanding underexplored. We introduce MonoIR-RS, a large-scale infrared remote-sensing vision-language dataset and benchmark that couples IR-aware data construction with CLIP-style contrastive adaptation and VLM instruction tuning. Built from the same source pool and split as FusionRS, MonoIR-RS retains the infrared image as the model-facing modality, yielding 600,000 synthesized infrared images and 59,032 retained IR-aware caption records. The model experiments use this retained language-supervision subset, whose captions rewrite supervision around grayscale structure and infrared-style contrast instead of RGB appearance. We show that the synthesized infrared imagery is markedly closer to real thermal imagery than a grayscale conversion on the AVIID benchmark. We fine-tune five CLIP backbones and six VLM backbones, and calibrate them against zero-shot behavior: IR-aware adaptation lifts CLIP mean recall by up to 12.8 points and drives VLM captioning IR-cue coverage to 100% while reducing residual RGB-color leakage to near zero. By isolating the infrared modality from RGB-IR dual-modal learning, MonoIR-RS offers a controlled, reproducible testbed for aligning infrared remote-sensing evidence with language. --- ### Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Calcification Classification in Mammography Across Multi-Site Datasets Authors: Xuan Liu, Derek L. Nguyen, Emily C. Barre, Jennifer Thomas, Thomas Lynch, Jeffrey R. Marks, E. Shelley Hwang, Marc D. Ryser, Joseph Y. Lo, Lars J. Grimm Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06549v1 Deep learning-based computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems have shown strong performance in breast cancer diagnosis, particularly for classification tasks in mammography. However, domain shifts across multi-site datasets remain a challenge, especially when models are applied to unseen domains. In this work, we proposed a calcification classification framework to improve malignant versus benign breast disease classification across multi-site mammography datasets. The framework consisted of two components: (1) an unsupervised domain adaptation module based on style transfer models (AdaIN and CycleGAN) to generate vendor-specific and technique-specific training samples without additional annotations, and (2) a supervised classification module using Swin Transformer V2 as the backbone. We evaluated the proposed method on three datasets: cross-validation on OPTIMAM (National Health Service, United Kingdom; n=2994), followed by external validation on EMBED (Emory University; n=125), and Duke Calcification Dataset v1 (n=788). These datasets cover multiple vendors and include both full-field digital mammography and synthetic 2D images derived from digital breast tomosynthesis. The proposed framework improved cross-site performance for both EMBED (AUC 0.68 to 0.72) and the Duke Calcification Dataset (AUC 0.68 to 0.73). These findings indicate that domain adaptation can reduce domain shifts and improve the generalization for calcification classification across multi-site datasets. --- ### Graph Convolutional Attention: A Spectral Perspective on Graph Denoising and Diffusion Authors: Shervin Khalafi, Igor Krawczuk, Sergio Rozada, Charilaos Kanatsoulis, Antonio G Marques, Alejandro Ribeiro Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06546v1 Denoising graphs is a fundamental problem in graph learning and the core operation of graph diffusion models. Attention-based architectures like graph transformers have recently shown promise in denoising graphs. However, our principled understanding of attention-based graph denoising remains limited, making it unclear whether standard attention is the right mechanism for this task. Here we show that, under a denoising objective, linear attention is suboptimal and can only learn an average spectral denoising filter over the training distribution. This creates a fundamental limitation as graphs often vary spectrally across the distribution. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Spectral Attention, which directly utilizes the input graph spectrum and provably outperforms linear attention by a margin governed by the spectral diversity of the distribution. We then derive Graph Convolutional Attention (GCA), a practical and permutation-equivariant realization of this idea that implements spectral denoising through graph-filtered queries and keys. For stochastic block models, GCA provably matches the idealized Spectral Attention mechanism. We further show that the softmax operation, that follows the attention, provides additional denoising by approximately projecting noisy eigenvectors onto the clean eigenspace. Empirically, replacing linear attention with GCA consistently improves graph denoising and diffusion on synthetic and real datasets, with gains strongly correlated with spectral diversity. In DiGress, GCA matches standard graph-transformer performance without computing expensive structural features, and when combined with the recently proposed PEARL positional encodings, avoids explicit eigendecomposition computations resulting in faster inference without degrading quality. The code can be found here: github.com/shervinkhalafi/graph_conv_att --- ### Rethinking Indic AI from a Lens of Cultural Heritage Preservation Authors: Aparna Madva, Sharath Srivatsa, Srinath Srinivasa, Tulika Saha Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06544v1 As Artificial Intelligence (AI) makes inroads into different parts of the Indian subcontinent, there is significant interest in studying how AI impacts the linguistic and cultural foundations of this civilization. AI is seen as a ''double-edged sword'' where on the one hand, it can enable access and inclusion for a large population, on the other, it can homogenize worldviews and exclude underrepresented languages and worldviews. In this paper, we try to characterize this problem by addressing the extensive characteristic nature of Indian linguistics and the way they closely connect to cultural practices and worldview. We then perform a longitudinal survey of how Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques have evolved in this space, tracing the historical development of Indic NLP, covering key milestones, methodological shifts, and resource creation efforts. In addition, the paper also examines the structural and sociolinguistic characteristics of Indian languages, such as rich morphology, complex scripts and grammar rules, diglossia, and large dialectal variation, and explains how these create unique challenges for building AI foundation models. We then discuss the growing role of Indic foundation models and analyze how these models address these long-standing resource and representation gaps. Finally, we propose a research direction called 'Culture Sensing', which re-imagines AI based on hermeneutic reasoning. Culture Sensing aims to address open problems such as ensuring equitable performance across low-resource languages and producing outputs that are culturally meaningful. By bringing together past work, current techniques, and emerging trends, this paper outlines research directions that can guide the next phase of Indic NLP and contribute to the development of more robust and inclusive Indic foundation models. --- ### On the feasibility of dependency parsing of non-human sequences without a gold standard. Is evaluation possible in other species? Authors: Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho, Catherine Hobaiter, Thore Bergman, Morgan Gustison Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06542v2 Dependency parsing consists of finding a tree representation for a sequence. Unsupervised dependency parsing aims to develop parsing methods without a gold standard during model training. In human languages, an unsupervised parser can be evaluated because some gold standard is usually available or can be created. For other species, a gold standard is unknown. Thus one may conclude that it is impossible to determine the accuracy of an unsupervised parser and, consequently, dependency parsing is unfeasible in other species. However, here we apply recent advances in network science to demonstrate that the proportion of correct edges retrieved by a parser must be high for the sequences of vocalizations or gestures that non-human primates produce due to the fast decay of the sequence length distribution. In contrast, human language sequences lack that property. Therefore, evaluation without a gold standard is feasible in non-human primates but a hard problem in humans. --- ### Hierarchical Acoustic-Semantic Modeling: Modality Separation and Semantic Coherence for Full-Duplex SLMs Authors: Zhenyu Liu, Xuanyu Zhang, Yunxin Li, Qixun Teng, Shenyuan Jiang, Haolan Chen, Minjun Zhao, Fanbo Meng, Yu Xu, Yancheng He, Baotian Hu, Haizhou Li et al. Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06540v4 Developing seamless, high-performance, native intelligent full-duplex Spoken Language Models (SLMs) remains a critical challenge and long-standing goal for the speech and NLP community. Despite notable progress, recent endeavors are fundamentally constrained by severe modality interference, which causes substantial knowledge degradation and compromises semantic integrity -- ultimately making full-duplex SLMs feel unnatural and unintelligent. In this paper, through an exhaustive fine-grained analysis of model optimization dynamics, we uncover the root cause of such performance degradation, revealing that modality interference arises from inherent gradient conflicts between acoustic and semantic modeling when the two modalities are forced to share a deep parameter space. Guided by this key insight, we introduce Lychee-FD, a native end-to-end full-duplex framework designed to mitigate modality interference. Importantly, we propose a hierarchical parameter separation strategy that decouples conflicting modalities in deep layers while preserving cross-modality coherence via a dedicated semantic alignment channel. Extensive experiments on multiple full-duplex benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly advances the state of the art, yielding substantial improvements in both speech intelligence (+7.4% on Spoken QA) and full-duplex interaction fluidity (+28.5% on FullDuplexBench 1.5) without compromising inference efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to achieve two key advances: 1) uncovering and elucidating the root cause of modality interference in full-duplex SLMs, and 2) designing an elegant hierarchical model together with a practical solution for seamless, high-performance, native intelligent full-duplex SLMs. --- ### Hierarchical Acoustic-Semantic Modeling: Modality Separation and Semantic Coherence for Full-Duplex SLMs Authors: Zhenyu Liu, Xuanyu Zhang, Yunxin Li, Qixun Teng, Shenyuan Jiang, Haolan Chen, Minjun Zhao, Fanbo Meng, Yu Xu, Yancheng He, Baotian Hu, Haizhou Li et al. Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06540v3 Developing seamless, high-performance, native intelligent full-duplex Spoken Language Models (SLMs) remains a critical challenge and long-standing goal for the speech and NLP community. Despite notable progress, recent endeavors are fundamentally constrained by severe modality interference, which causes substantial knowledge degradation and compromises semantic integrity -- ultimately making full-duplex SLMs feel unnatural and unintelligent. In this paper, through an exhaustive fine-grained analysis of model optimization dynamics, we uncover the root cause of such performance degradation, revealing that modality interference arises from inherent gradient conflicts between acoustic and semantic modeling when the two modalities are forced to share a deep parameter space. Guided by this key insight, we introduce Lychee-FD, a native end-to-end full-duplex framework designed to mitigate modality interference. Importantly, we propose a hierarchical parameter separation strategy that decouples conflicting modalities in deep layers while preserving cross-modality coherence via a dedicated semantic alignment channel. Extensive experiments on multiple full-duplex benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly advances the state of the art, yielding substantial improvements in both speech intelligence (+7.4% on Spoken QA) and full-duplex interaction fluidity (+28.5% on FullDuplexBench 1.5) without compromising inference efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to achieve two key advances: 1) uncovering and elucidating the root cause of modality interference in full-duplex SLMs, and 2) designing an elegant hierarchical model together with a practical solution for seamless, high-performance, native intelligent full-duplex SLMs. --- ### CAIRN: Cross-Room 3D Scene Understanding with Topology-Aware Large Multimodal Models Authors: He Liang, Chenyang Ma, Yiming Zhang, Sangyun Shin, Andrew Markham, Niki Trigoni, Yuhang He Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06534v2 Existing 3D scene-grounded Large Language Models (3D-LLMs) focus on answering questions grounded in simplified single-room 3D scenes, lacking the ability to reason over real-world household environments containing multiple interconnected rooms and diverse object categories. We introduce CAIRN, a topology-aware 3D-LLM for multi-room 3D scene understanding. CAIRN aligns transformer attention with scene hierarchy, giving the model explicit awareness of object-level relations and room-level connectivity. It enriches object tokens with room-local relational context via a graph neural network, introduces learned room tokens for room-level abstraction, and applies a hierarchical attention mask with geometric bias to route information according to scene topology. CAIRN is developed on CAIRN-MR, a benchmark we introduce on HM3D for multi-room 3D scene understanding, covering grounding, captioning, and four question-answering tasks that progressively evaluate from intra-room perception to cross-room reasoning. Experiments show that CAIRN outperforms prior 3D-LLMs by a large margin across all CAIRN-MR tasks while remaining competitive on five single-room benchmarks. --- ### GraphBU: MILP Instance Generation with Graph-Native Block Units Authors: Xiaolei Guo, Chenyu Zhou, Jianghao Lin, Dongdong Ge Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.LG, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06532v1 Mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) instances used for solver development are hard to obtain when models come from private or application-specific pipelines. A generator must keep the structure that solvers and learned policies rely on. Existing general generators usually choose their generation unit from a formulation template, summary statistics, local graph edits, or blocks found after recombination. These units do not explicitly record how a local part of the MILP is coupled to the rest of the instance. We propose GraphBU, a graph-native generator whose basic unit is a local subproblem plus its interface. The method promotes coupling nodes into master constraints or boundary variables and uses the resulting block units for compatibility-checked replacement. The analysis focuses on the properties needed by this construction: promotion separates interfaces, replacement can preserve feasibility under an interface-slack condition, and the graph construction is invariant to row-column permutations. On MILP instances generation, this unit keeps graph statistics close to the source family, preserves feasibility on most datasets, and improves downstream Predict-and-Search training. Genrated by GraphBU, The average graph-statistical similarity was approximately 0.934, the average feasibility was approximately 96.7%, and the average increase in the main index of downstream PS was approximately 8.0%. --- ### The Large Cancer Assistant (LCA): A Model-Agnostic Orchestration Framework for Scalable Clinical Decision Support in Oncology Authors: Ghassen Marrakchi, Basarab Matei Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06531v1 - Objective: Multimodal deep learning models in oncology are currently limited by monolithic designs that rigidly couple data ingestion, clinical routing, and artificial intelligence (AI) inference. To address this inflexibility, we propose the Large Cancer Assistant (LCA), a model-agnostic, post-hoc orchestration framework designed for scalable clinical decision support. - Methods: The LCA is mathematically formalized as a 7-tuple architecture grounded in the principle of Algorithmic Impermeability, ensuring the orchestration logic remains strictly independent of underlying black-box AI models. We introduce the Entry Theory, leveraging Geometric Deep Learning (GDL) to standardize multimodal patient data along distinct structural and medical axes. The system dynamically orchestrates data via a Cancer Switching Module and intentionally isolates the core AI execution from volatile hospital IT infrastructures by outputting a Standardized Intermediate Payload (SIP). - Results: A Proof of Concept (PoC) validated the orchestration logic across four technical scenarios. The framework executed a nominal flow with negligible orchestration overhead. It empirically demonstrated algorithmic impermeability by maintaining an invariant routing projection during AI model swaps, and it validated strict failure-safety by achieving a 100\% recall rate in generating targeted Supplementary Data Requests (SDR) under injected data anomalies. Multi-protocol execution capability was also successfully verified. - Conclusion: By structurally decoupling multimodal ingestion from feature inference, the LCA provides a highly adaptable and modular orchestration foundation. The SIP establishes a clear architectural boundary, natively setting the stage for downstream Electronic Medical Record (EMR) interoperability as an independent future paradigm. --- ### Life Style Levels: Neighborhood Delineation using Geospatial Data Authors: Srivatsa Kulkarni, Debarag Banerjee Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06529v1 Fine-scale socioeconomic information is often unavailable across rapidly ur-banizing regions of the developing world, like India, limiting the ability to delineate intra-urban variations in affluence and deprivation. This study pro-poses a scalable, grid-based urban delineation framework using building morphology derived from open-source satellite imagery. Urban areas across 59 Indian cities and towns are partitioned into high-resolution spatial grids and characterized using interpretable morphological indicators, which are combined into a transparent, rule-based scoring framework to delineate areas with contrasting levels of urban affluence. The resulting classifications are validated through ground-level Google Street View observations, revealing a sharp contrast between the grid classes which are consistent with the ex-pected effects of the lifestyle affluence indicators. We further investigate density-based clustering of building footprints in Mumbai to identify dense urban settlements, demonstrating that the resulting clusters exhibit substan-tial spatial overlap with known informal settlements across the city. Finally, we conduct an exploratory analysis mapping consumer loan delinquency across the derived affluence classes. By relying entirely on publicly available geospatial data, the proposed framework provides a scalable, interpretable, and cost-effective approach for granular urban affluence mapping across In-dian cities. --- ### RSF-GLLM: Bridging the Semantic Gap in Multi-Hop Knowledge Graph QA via Recurrent Soft-Flow and Decoupled LLM Generation Authors: Sambaran Bandyopadhyay, Ananth Muppidi Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06527v1 Multi-hop Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs faces a critical challenge: traditional retrieve-then-read pipelines break differentiability, preventing the retriever from learning to bridge the semantic gap where intermediate nodes lack lexical overlap with the query. To address this, we propose RSF-GLLM, a framework decoupling differentiable graph reasoning from answer generation. Our Recurrent Soft-Flow (RSF) module employs a GRU-guided query updater to propagate continuous relevance scores, utilizing a dynamic gating mechanism to traverse semantically dissimilar bridge nodes via structural cues. We introduce flow sparsity regularization to theoretically guarantee convergence from soft probabilities to discrete reasoning paths. These paths are extracted and textualized to fine-tune a Large Language Model (LLM), ensuring generation is grounded in factual topology. Experiments on WebQSP and CWQ demonstrate that RSF-GLLM achieves competitive performance with superior inference efficiency compared to LLM based computationally expensive approaches. --- ### DepthWeave-KV: Token-Adaptive Cross-Layer Residual Factorization for Long-Context KV Cache Compression Authors: Anna Cordoba, Adam Puente Tercero, Nerea Angulo Hijo, Mar Linares Tercero, Julia Barrientos, Ainhoa Miranda, Jesus Olivera Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06523v1 Long-context language model inference is increasingly limited by the memory bandwidth and capacity required to store key-value caches, yet existing compression methods often apply uniform budgets across layers or tokens and degrade retrieval when lexical cues and semantic states require different preservation. We introduce DepthWeave-KV, a token-adaptive cache compression method that factorizes key and value states across neighboring transformer layers using shared low-rank channel bases while retaining lightweight token-specific residuals where attention behavior is sensitive. DepthWeave-KV combines cross-depth residual factorization with a token-conditional depth router that allocates higher reconstruction rank to instruction-bearing and retrieval-critical tokens, and uses calibration-free online error tracking from attention-output probes to adapt compression during generation without retraining the base model. A fused CUDA implementation jointly performs basis lookup, residual dequantization, and attention projection to reduce decode-time memory traffic. Across LongBench, Needle-in-a-Haystack, L-Eval, and long-form QA and summarization benchmarks, DepthWeave-KV achieves near-full-cache task quality with substantially lower memory use, improving average score and retrieval accuracy over prior compressed caches while reaching 8.3x KV memory reduction and 72.8 tokens per second at 64K context. --- ### Bridging Physical Reasoning and Task Generalization via Visual Action Outcome Reasoning Alignment Authors: Han-Jun Ko, Jr-Jen Chen, Haobo Yuan, Hsin-Ying Lee, Tiancheng Shen, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Yu-Chiang Frank Wang Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06522v1 Vision-language models (VLMs) struggle to generalize in interactive physical reasoning, particularly under unseen tasks and environments. Two key failure modes are prominent: hallucinated chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning that contradicts physical reality, and misalignment between the model's reasoning and actions. We present VAORA (Visual Action Outcome Reasoning Alignment), a novel reward design that directly addresses both issues. VAORA introduces two complementary rewards: Visual Alignment Reward, which anchors VLM reasoning to the visual context independent of the agent action itself, and Visual-Action Alignment Reward, which grounds reasoning in the visual outcome induced by the model's action. Together, these rewards suppress hallucinated CoT and reduce the gap between reasoning and behavior. To improve training stability, we further employ smooth, dense rewards by estimating success probabilities using a pre-trained in-domain expert agent. Experiments on PHYRE and Virtual Tool support our performances across novel-task and unseen-environment settings, confirming that grounded and generalizable physical intelligence can be induced through VAORA. --- ### FreqDepthKV: Frequency-Guided Depth Sharing for Robust KV Cache Compression in Long-Context LLM Inference Authors: Anna Córdoba, Adam Puente Tercero, Nerea Angulo Hijo, Mar Linares Tercero, Julia Barrientos, Ainhoa Miranda, Jesús Olivera Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06519v1 Long-context LLM inference is increasingly limited by the memory and bandwidth cost of KV caches, yet aggressive compression can remove the layer-specific evidence needed for retrieval and multi-step reasoning. We introduce FreqDepthKV, an inference-time cache compression method that factorizes adjacent-layer KV states into shared low-frequency depth components and sparse high-frequency residuals. A lightweight online probe assigns attention heads to shared-depth, residual-depth, or exact cache modes according to their contribution to reconstruction-sensitive attention logits, allowing the compression policy to adapt to prompt structure without retraining. Across long-context question answering, needle retrieval, summarization, and code generation benchmarks, FreqDepthKV preserves task accuracy under substantially smaller cache budgets. With a 32k-token prefill window, FreqDepthKV reaches 58.3 Exact Match, 63.0 F1, 32.5 ROUGE-L, and 48.1 pass@1, closely matching full KV while outperforming prior compressed-cache methods. It also improves decoding throughput to 70.4 tokens/s, reduces TTFT to 2.06 seconds, and lowers peak KV memory to 6.2 GB, achieving a 3.9x effective compression ratio. --- ### Point as Skeleton: Accumulated Point Cloud Enhanced Autoregressive Generation for Closed-Loop Autonomous Driving Simulation Authors: Songbur Wong, Xiaosong Jia, Junqi You, Bo Zhang, Pei Xu, Renqiu Xia, Yuping Qiu, Shaofeng Zhang, Zelin Zhao, Xuechao Yan, Yuchen Zhou, Yurui Chen et al. Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06516v1 Evaluating end-to-end autonomous driving (E2E-AD) remains challenging, as existing driving simulation methods often trade off closed-loop interactivity (e.g., CARLA) and real-world visual fidelity (e.g., nuScenes). We present \textbf{\emph{Point as Skeleton}}, a generative sensor simulation framework for state-updated autoregressive driving video generation, in which an autoregressive generator synthesizes visual observations from step-wise updated ego states, actor states, scene maps, and point-cloud skeleton conditions. To support closed-loop rollout, we introduce Reset-and-Roll, which adapts rolling diffusion inference to simulation by preventing future-conditioned latent states from being committed across simulation steps. To stabilize error accumulation during step-wise autoregressive rollout, we introduce point-cloud skeletons that decouple foreground and background assets and project them into camera-view painted-point and template-depth conditions, providing appearance and geometric cues. We further implement a nuPlan-based renderer-level closed-loop generative interface for evaluating generation under ego deviations from the original log. Experiments on nuScenes and nuPlan show that \textit{Point as Skeleton} improves autoregressive generation quality during closed-loop rollout, demonstrating its potential for visually faithful closed-loop driving simulation. The code is available at https://github.com/krauwu/point-as-skeleton. --- ### FootsiesGym: A Fighting Game Benchmark for Two-Player Zero-Sum Imperfect-Information Games Authors: Chase McDonald, Nathan Tsang, Wesley N. Kerr Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.AI, cs.GT arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06514v1 We present FootsiesGym, an open-source environment for learning in a non-trivial two-player, zero-sum, imperfect-information game. Built on HiFight's minimalist 2D fighting game Footsies, it isolates the cyclic, non-transitive strategic interactions of fighting game neutral play while remaining simple enough for efficient analysis. We provide a vectorized simulator that enables high-throughput training on standard hardware, making the environment accessible and reproducible. We describe the design of the environment, benchmark several reinforcement learning algorithms, and discuss open research directions it enables. The code is available at https://github.com/como-research/FootsiesGym. --- ### DynaKRAG: A Unified Framework for Learnable Evidence Control in Multi-Hop Retrieval-Augmented Generation Authors: Chenyu Zhou, Yaqi Wu, Xiaolei Guo, Jiaqi Huang, Xianfa Zhang, Junxu Zhang, Zhuo Yu, Zhubo Shi, Jianghao Lin, Dongdong Ge Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CL, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06507v2 Multi-hop retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) acquires evidence sequentially, with each document contributing supporting facts, bridge entities, query refinements, or sufficient evidence for answering. Evidence acquisition can involve iterative retrieval, query reformulation, evidence assessment, and sufficiency checking. We introduce DynaKRAG, a unified evidence-action framework that learns a shared state-conditioned policy for coordinating these operations. At each step, a deterministic validity layer constructs the executable action set, a learned continuation gate selects between answer generation and further evidence acquisition, and a learned advantage scorer ranks feasible evidence operations by their predicted gain relative to immediate answer generation. The selected operation updates the shared state and may enable additional operations. Across HotpotQA, 2Wiki, and MuSiQue with Qwen2.5-7B, GPT-4o-mini, and Llama-3.1-8B, DynaKRAG ranks first among the compared methods in both EM and F1 for all nine dataset--backbone pairs. Relative to matched-backbone baseline method, DynaKRAG improves F1 in every pair while achieving total-token efficiency gains of 10.1--34.3\% and retrieval-call efficiency gains of 15.1--43.4\%, establishing Pareto dominance under these measures. With Qwen2.5-7B, terminal evidence compression further improves answer quality across all three datasets while reducing the context passed to final answer generation by 54.4\%--71.5\%. These results demonstrate that unified, state-conditioned evidence control supports strong answer quality, efficient retrieval, and compact answer-generation contexts. ---