# Research Papers — 2026-07 · bundle page 173 of 222 > Full-text markdown of papers #8601–8650 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/173 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/172.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/174.md) ### DynaKRAG: A Unified Framework for Learnable Evidence Control in Multi-Hop Retrieval-Augmented Generation Authors: Yaqi Wu, Xiaolei Guo, Chenyu Zhou, 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/2607.06507v1 Multi-hop retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) acquires evidence sequentially, with each new document potentially revealing missing facts, bridge entities, query defects, or sufficient support for answering. Existing methods provide useful operations such as iterative retrieval, query reformulation, evidence critique, and sufficiency judging, but typically organize them within method-specific pipelines or predefined control topologies. This leaves underexplored how to learn a shared state-conditioned policy that chooses among currently valid evidence operations. We introduce DynaKRAG, which formulates multi-hop evidence acquisition as state-conditioned control over atomic evidence operations. At each step, a validity layer constructs the executable action set, and a learned controller selects the next operation. The resulting transition updates the evidence state and may enable new operations at subsequent steps. With Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, DynaKRAG achieves F1 scores of 0.5998 on HotpotQA, 0.5340 on 2Wiki, and 0.3061 on MuSiQue, outperforming the strongest controlled baseline on all three benchmarks. Replacing the learned controller with a uniform-valid policy reduces F1 by 3.96--5.78 points, while removing sufficiency feedback hurts all three datasets. Controlled retrieval-cap experiments further show that additional retrieval is not uniformly beneficial. Together, these results demonstrate the benefit of coordinating retrieval, diagnosis, and gap-directed acquisition under an evolving evidence state. --- ### Industry Classification of GitHub Repositories Using the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) Authors: Kevin Xu, Alexander Quispe Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.DB arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06505v1 GitHub hosts hundreds of millions of public repositories, but the platform exposes no native mapping from repositories to standardized industry sectors. This gap limits empirical work on the geography of innovation, the industrial composition of open-source production, and the diffusion of new technologies across economic sectors. We present NAICS-GH, a publicly released corpus of 6,588 GitHub repositories drawn from source pools covering the United States, the European Union, and Australia, each labeled with a 2-digit sector from the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS 2022). Labels are produced by a retrieve-and-verify pipeline that combines BAAI/bge-large-en embeddings, FAISS retrieval, and GPT-4.1 rubric scoring. The pipeline narrows about 1.37 million source repositories to 31,178 candidate repository-sector pairs and retains 6,588 high-confidence labels with score at least 8. Re-running the retrieval pipeline end to end reproduces the candidate set to within 0.03 percent. On a 2,421-repository human-validated random sample, the released labels attain 96.98 percent precision, with Wilson 95 percent confidence interval (96.23, 97.59). We benchmark six pretrained encoders on the released corpus; RoBERTa-large reaches 86.45 percent F1 and 86.35 percent accuracy on a held-out 20 percent test set. The dataset, Croissant metadata, pipeline code, prompts, and fine-tuned checkpoint are released under CC-BY-4.0 and MIT licenses. --- ### RMISC: A Large-scale Real-world Multivariate Corpus for Time Series Foundation Models Authors: Qian Sun, Yong-Ming Tian, Jia-Wei Huang, Cheng Feng, Shao-Qun Zhang Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06504v1 Recent years have witnessed the emergence of multivariate modeling using time series foundation models (TSFMs), which achieve advanced zero-shot generalization. Modern multivariate TSFMs are predominantly pretrained on multivariate synthetic data, which is easier to scale but may fail to capture the complex temporal dynamics and cross-variable relationships present in real-world time series. This raises a key question: Whether and to what extent the leading TSFMs trained with the real-world corpus perform better than those trained with synthetic data? To answer this, we establish the RMISC corpus, a considerably large-scale, high-quality, openly accessible, real-world, and multivariate time series archive that contains around 200 datasets and 142 billion time points across diverse domains. Furthermore, we pretrain four advanced TSFMs on univariate, synthetic multivariate, and real-world multivariate data and evaluate their zero-shot generalization capabilities on standard in-distribution and out-of-distribution benchmarks. Experimental results show that incorporating real-world multivariate data predominantly improves the generalization performance for both univariate and multivariate TSFMs. These results provide a deeper understanding of how real-world multivariate data contributes to the development of stronger TSFMs. --- ### Doomed from the Start: Early Abort of LLM Agent Episodes via a Recall-Controlled Probe Cascade Authors: Kai Ruan, Zihe Huang, Ziqi Zhou, Qianshan Wei, Jinghao Lin, Xuan Wang, Hao Sun Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06503v2 Large language model (LLM) agents often waste inference compute by continuing multi-step trajectories that are already doomed to fail. We study early failure prediction and inference-time early stopping for LLM agents using hidden-state probes. Lightweight linear probes on internal activations predict eventual task failure from the first interaction round, substantially earlier than agent-monitoring methods based only on observable behavior. We turn this signal into a recall-controlled abort cascade for reducing LLM agent inference costs. The cascade applies a distribution-free calibrated failure detector at each early interaction round and jointly optimizes per-round recall budgets. This design ensures that eventually successful episodes survive all early-stopping gates at a user-specified global recall rate. After selection, the cascade is frozen and certified on independent data, providing an exact post-selection recall guarantee. We evaluate the method on TextCraft and WebShop with Qwen-2.5-7B, Llama-3.2-3B, and Qwen3-1.7B. The proposed LLM agent early-stopping cascade outperforms the best single-gate baseline in every model-environment pair, saving 1.5-8.8 times more compute at a 90% recall target. Achieved recall remains within one standard deviation of its target in all 24 configurations. The strongest settings reduce generated tokens by 60.2% on TextCraft and 54.9% on WebShop at 90% recall, while retaining savings of 45.0% and 41.5% at 95% recall. Behavior-only monitoring is consistently weaker, and adding behavioral features to hidden-state probes provides no further gain. We also characterize the sample complexity required to certify high-recall early-stopping policies. The code will be released soon. --- ### EntroPath: Maximum Entropy Path Ensemble Embedding for Manifold Learning Authors: Przemysław Rola Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.LG, q-bio.QM, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06497v1 We introduce EntroPath, a manifold learning method that recovers geodesic geometry from data graphs through ensembles of diffusion paths. Many existing graph-based embeddings rely either on locally normalised random walks or on shortest-path distances. The former can concentrate diffusion in densely sampled regions, while the latter are sensitive to spurious shortcut edges in the graph. EntroPath instead builds its dissimilarities from the maximum entropy random walk (MERW), which aggregates the full ensemble of k-step paths between points rather than relying on any single trajectory. We show that the resulting free-energy dissimilarity converges to squared geodesic distance in the short-time limit, via Varadhan's heat-kernel formula. The diffusion depth k interpolates smoothly between local neighbourhood structure and global manifold geometry, and the symmetrised kernel admits an exact Gram factorisation connecting EntroPath to kernel methods. We further provide scalable extensions via landmark projection and diffusion-potential pseudotime. Across synthetic manifolds and single-cell benchmarks, EntroPath consistently matches or outperforms diffusion- and shortest-path-based methods, while remaining competitive with neighbourhood-preserving embeddings (UMAP, t-SNE) on local-structure metrics. Its gains are most pronounced on manifolds with non-uniform sampling density and well-separated branching trajectories, where path-ensemble diffusion more faithfully preserves the underlying geodesic geometry. --- ### Pitwall: Faithful Natural-Language Race-Strategy Briefings from a Calibrated Real-Time Monte Carlo Engine Authors: Juan S. Santillana Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG, stat.AP arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06495v1 Live sports commentary is grounded generation under a deadline: statements concern real, named athletes, the grounding state changes every few seconds, and no reference text exists at generation time. We present Pitwall, a production system that generates natural-language Formula 1 strategy briefings in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, treating faithfulness as an architectural property rather than an aspiration: every published sentence is decomposed into typed factual claims (positions, gaps, tyres, pace, overtakes, race control) and each claim is verified against the probabilistic race state that prompted it. The same verifier gates the fine-tuning data: of 3,045 model-written targets, only the 81.9% whose every claim is state-supported are retained, the rest falling back to a provably faithful template, so the generator never sees an ungrounded target. Verification is meaningful because of the grounding substrate: a vectorized Monte Carlo engine (N=2,000 per-lap race continuations) calibrated on 126 races (2018-2024) and validated on fully held-out 2025-2026 seasons (winner-in-top-3 90.3% over 155 backtests; held-out Brier 0.0745). A recurring finding spans both halves of the system: virtues trade off and must be gated separately. In simulation, calibration-optimal is not decision-optimal; in generation, fine-tuning on richer targets buys vividness that collapses into hallucination when the grounding state is sparse -- a failure a four-base replication traces to base-model instruction adherence, not scale, and that sparse-context auditing removes from the production model. End-to-end operation -- live timing to verified trilingual briefings -- was confirmed at two consecutive live Grands Prix (Austria and Britain, 2026); at Silverstone a timestamped probability trace, committed to disk before the outcome was known, locked onto the eventual winner ten laps before the flag. --- ### Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning for Multi Objective Battery Management in Dairy Farms Authors: Marcos Eduardo Cruz Victorio, Karl Mason Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06489v1 The dairy industry in Ireland has a large potential for the integration of renewable energy and the reduction of carbon emissions. However, researchers of distributed generation control are mainly focused on residential and commercial applications. To contribute to the effective integration of renewable energy in the dairy sector, this paper presents a multi-objective optimisation control system based on differential evolution and multi agent Deep Reinforcement Learning. The proposed control is organised in two layers: the upper layer uses dynamic pricing, and the lower layer is based on multi-agent reinforcement learning for battery management. This paper also simulates the electrical response of the proposed control system in a rural distribution circuit. The simulation results show that the proposed control framework can improve profits from energy arbitrage up to 18% compared to using Rule-based models, increase the use of distributed generation without significantly increasing cost, and comply with the Irish grid code in terms of voltage variation. --- ### AirflowAttack: Thermal-Airflow Adversarial Perturbations against Infrared Remote-Sensing Vision-Language Models Authors: Cong Su, Jiaju Han, Xuemeng Sun, Chengyin Hu, Qike Zhang, Jiujiang Guo, Yiwei Wei, Jiahuan Long Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06485v1 Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed on infrared (IR) remote sensing imagery in security-critical settings, yet their adversarial robustness remains unexamined. We present AirflowAttack, to our knowledge the first adversarial attack for IR remote-sensing VLMs and the first to weaponize thermal-airflow turbulence as the perturbation prior. A lightweight generator synthesizes a single input-agnostic perturbation regularized toward physically plausible airflow patterns. Optimized on one surrogate CLIP model, it attains a mean zero-shot scene-classification attack success rate (ASR, the fraction of samples whose top-1 class changes) of 48.5% across five diverse CLIP backbones, far exceeding four IR-specific physical baselines (27.7--37.0%). Applied to six state-of-the-art VLMs, it cuts scene-classification accuracy by up to 38.2% relative, yet paradoxically makes some models more confident in their IR analysis, confabulating the perturbation as genuine thermal evidence such as temperature gradients and convection. Ablations show the airflow prior raises physical plausibility at no measurable cost to attack success. Together with a benchmark spanning eleven models and four tasks, these findings expose critical vulnerabilities in the rapidly expanding IR VLM ecosystem. --- ### Assessing the Operational Impact of Poisoning Attacks over Augmented 3D Point Cloud Public Datasets for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles Authors: Marwan Lazrag, Badis Hammi, Lorena Gonzalez-Manzano, Joaquin Garcia-Alfaro Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CR, cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06484v1 Poisoning attacks against public datasets lead to major concerns, such as (i) misclassification of perceived objects when the poisoned data is used for training and (ii) embedding of backdoors that may eventually be triggered later on, when specific conditions in the system apply over the learned models. Its impact over data augmentation models is unclear. While data augmentation reduces the likelihood of poisoning attack success, some valid questions remain. Is data augmentation affecting the impact of poisoning attacks? can it increase the number of poisoned samples or injected backdoors? We explore in this paper some of these questions. We assess the effects of augmenting poisoned 3D point cloud datasets and validate that poisoning is able to evade the sanitizing nature of augmentation techniques when using the concrete case of Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) techniques to exemplify the case of data augmentation processing. We also validate that poisoning propagates over the augmented datasets and perturbs the decision made by general-purpose classifiers, in the end. All the experimental material (including tools, datasets, and classifiers) is publicly available, to facilitate reproducibility and to foster further research in the topic. --- ### Mitigating Domain Shift in Conditioned Floor Plan Generation: Synthetic Pre-training for Data-Efficient Adaptation Authors: Matthieu Ospici, Arnaud Gueze, Luc Bourrat, Adrien Bernhardt Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06483v2 Robustness to domain shift is a key requirement for floor plan generative models to be applicable beyond the single dataset they were trained on, as floor plans vary widely across regions due to distinct architectural cultures, spatial constraints, and construction practices, while acquiring new annotated datasets remains costly and domain-specific. Yet, no prior work has studied this robustness in the context of conditioned floor plan generation. In this paper, we evaluate state-of-the-art models from two fundamentally different generative paradigms across three public datasets (RPLAN, MagicPlan and Swiss Dwellings) and show that they are highly sensitive to domain shift, with up to an order of magnitude performance degradation when transferred across domains. To mitigate this with minimal target-domain supervision, we introduce a procedural method to generate a large-scale synthetic training dataset that enforces strict physical constraints (non-overlapping rooms, valid door placement, graph consistency) while intentionally sacrificing architectural realism through highly irregular spatial arrangements and aggressive geometric perturbation of room shapes. We show that pre-training on this synthetic data considerably improves zero-shot cross-domain performance, outperforming in-domain training on MagicPlan. Furthermore, it provides a highly effective initialization for fine-tuning, accelerating target domain adaptation and outperforming real-world initialization baselines by up to 40% in a low-data regime. --- ### Mitigating Domain Shift in Conditioned Floor Plan Generation: Synthetic Pre-training for Data-Efficient Adaptation Authors: Matthieu Ospici, Arnaud Gueze, Luc Bourrat, Adrien Bernhardt Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06483v1 Robustness to domain shift is a key requirement for floor plan generative models to be applicable beyond the single dataset they were trained on, as floor plans vary widely across regions due to distinct architectural cultures, spatial constraints, and construction practices, while acquiring new annotated datasets remains costly and domain-specific. Yet, no prior work has studied this robustness in the context of conditioned floor plan generation. In this paper, we evaluate state-of-the-art models from two fundamentally different generative paradigms across three public datasets (RPLAN, MagicPlan and Swiss Dwellings) and show that they are highly sensitive to domain shift, with up to an order of magnitude performance degradation when transferred across domains. To mitigate this with minimal target-domain supervision, we introduce a procedural method to generate a large-scale synthetic training dataset that enforces strict physical constraints (non-overlapping rooms, valid door placement, graph consistency) while intentionally sacrificing architectural realism through highly irregular spatial arrangements and aggressive geometric perturbation of room shapes. We show that pre-training on this synthetic data considerably improves zero-shot cross-domain performance, outperforming in-domain training on MagicPlan. Furthermore, it provides a highly effective initialization for fine-tuning, accelerating target domain adaptation and outperforming real-world initialization baselines by up to 40% in a low-data regime. --- ### Data Analysis in the Wild: Benchmarking Large Language Models Against Real-World Data Complexities Authors: So Hasegawa, Shailaja Keyur Sampat, Lei Liu, Wei-Peng Chen Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06482v1 Current benchmarks for evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) in data analysis often fail to reflect real-world settings. They typically focus on fact retrieval from small tables and overlook the challenges of large multi-tabular datasets, external knowledge integration, and exploratory insight discovery. We introduce DataGovBench, a benchmark derived from governmental open data designed to evaluate LLMs in practical scenarios. The benchmark includes two tasks: Table QA that requires solving complex decomposable questions and producing textual answers or visualizations, and Table Insight that evaluates the ability of models to generate expert-level findings through exploratory data analysis. Comprehensive experiments with state-of-the-art LLMs, both with and without agentic frameworks, reveal significant performance gaps across both tasks. These results suggest that current LLM-based systems remain far from satisfying the demands of real-world data analytics. DataGovBench provides a challenging benchmark for advancing research on LLMs capable of both answering analytical queries and discovering insights from data. Code and sample data are available at https://github.com/SoHasegawa/datagovbench. --- ### Prompt-Adapter Context Routing for Parameter-Efficient Multi-Shot Long Video Extrapolation Authors: Anna Córdoba, Adam Puente Tercero, Nerea Angulo Hijo, Mar Linares Tercero, Julia Barrientos, Ainhoa Miranda, Jesús Olivera Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06481v1 We present PACR-Video, a parameter-efficient framework for multi-shot long video extrapolation that preserves recurring entities, scene structure, visual style, and causal progression without full generator fine-tuning. PACR-Video keeps a text-to-video diffusion transformer frozen and augments it with low-rank temporal adapters conditioned by learned shot-role prompt tokens. To maintain long-horizon coherence, it builds a recursive prompt bank that stores compact entity, location, action, and style prompts from previous shots, then routes them through adapter gates according to predicted narrative dependencies. A Shot-Local/Story-Global tuning objective combines next-shot reconstruction, cross-shot identity contrast, and prompt sparsity regularization, while an adapter composition schedule balances early-shot visual consistency with later-shot event progression and viewpoint change. Across six multi-shot and long-video benchmarks, PACR-Video outperforms text-to-video, tuning-based, memory-augmented, streaming, and recursive-context baselines on distributional quality, semantic alignment, identity consistency, temporal smoothness, motion stability, transition coherence, and human preference. These results show that compact prompt routing and lightweight temporal adaptation provide sufficient controllable capacity for stable long video extrapolation. --- ### A Physics-Informed Neural Network Framework for Elastodynamic Wave Propagation in Bimaterial Systems Authors: Sonal Ankush Chibire, Jenn-Terng Gau, Bo Zhang Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.AI, math-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06479v1 Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) provide a promising framework for solving partial differential equations while embedding the underlying physical laws directly into the learning process. This study presents a PINN-based framework for modeling transient elastodynamic wave propagation in bimaterial systems governed by the axisymmetric equations of linear elasticity. A steel-aluminum specimen representative of a Split Hopkinson Pressure Bar configuration is considered, and the governing elastodynamic equations, together with the corresponding initial, boundary, and interface conditions, are incorporated directly into the network through a physics-informed loss function. High-fidelity finite-element simulations performed using ANSYS Workbench Explicit Dynamics are used for validation and as supplementary data constraints during training. The proposed framework accurately predicts wave transmission and reflection across the bimaterial interface and reproduces axial and radial displacement histories, face-averaged responses, and the dominant stress and strain evolution with close agreement to the finite-element solutions. The trained network further demonstrates the ability to predict wave responses at previously unseen time instants and for modified material properties without requiring additional finite-element simulations, providing a continuous surrogate model for elastodynamic analysis. Mesh-sensitivity studies confirm numerical robustness, while additional material combinations demonstrate the generality of the proposed methodology. The results show that integrating physics-informed neural networks with explicit finite-element analysis provides an accurate and computationally efficient framework for elastodynamic wave propagation in heterogeneous solids, offering an effective surrogate modeling approach for high-rate solid mechanics and impact engineering applications. --- ### A VLM-Enhanced Framework for Comprehensive Traffic Sign Condition Assessment Integrating Daytime Visual Performance and Nighttime Retroreflectivity Evaluation Authors: Linlin Zhang, Neema Jakisa Owor, Xiang Yu, Abby Watts, Yaw Adu-Gyamfi Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06478v1 Traffic signs are crucial components of road safety, serving as visual tools under all lighting conditions. The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) specifies daytime visual factors such as legibility and color contrast, and nighttime retroreflectivity requirements. Traditional assessment methods rely on manual inspections, which the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) notes are subjective, labor-intensive and pose safety concerns, while retroreflectometers are expensive and unaffordable for smaller agencies. Most existing studies focus on either daytime factors or nighttime retroreflectivity but rarely integrate both aspects comprehensively. This study develops a novel framework that systematically evaluates traffic signs through integrated daytime-nighttime assessment. The methodology employs three fine-tuned Vision Language Models (VLMs) for daytime visual performance assessment across four key factors: legibility, color, surface and shape integrity, and surrounding environment conditions. VLM predictions are converted to numerical scores through sentiment analysis and Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training (CLIP) scoring, while nighttime performance is assessed using LiDAR-derived retroreflectivity following established calibration procedures. The framework integrates these components into a comprehensive Sign Condition Index (SCI) for maintenance guidance. Evaluation results demonstrated that LLaVA and Qwen outperformed InternVL, achieving bidirectional cosine similarity scores of 0.67-0.76 across all factors. Among 462 validated traffic signs, 68 were flagged by the proposed framework as requiring immediate replacement due to inadequate retroreflectivity performance. This research provides a cost-effective alternative to traditional manual inspections for comprehensive traffic sign condition assessment. --- ### Provable learning separation for predicting time-evolution of quantum many-body systems Authors: Rahul Bandyopadhyay, Riccardo Molteni, Jens Eisert, Vedran Dunjko, Sofiene Jerbi Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: quant-ph, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06472v1 Given that quantum computers are naturally suited to simulate the behavior of quantum many-body systems, an immediate question arises: can one formulate physically motivated quantum machine learning (QML) tasks that exhibit learning separations? We address this problem by studying the learnability of quantum many-body dynamics from the perspective of probably approximately correct (PAC)-learning. Concretely, we devise a supervised learning problem where the training set consists of specifications of randomized stabilizer probe states, evolution times sampled uniformly from a polynomially large time interval $(0,T)$, coupled with expectation values of certain observables evaluated on the resulting time-evolved state under an unknown Hamiltonian. For this learning task, we provide an efficient quantum procedure whose training phase learns the underlying Hamiltonian from short-time training samples, and whose deployment phase combines Hamiltonian simulation with the classical shadows protocol to perform inference on a newly given data point. By contrast, the existence of $O(\mathsf{poly}(n))$-time instances ensures classical hardness: by embedding a $\mathsf{BQP}$-complete computation into the polynomially long time-dynamics of a low-intersection variant of the Feynman-Kitaev clock Hamiltonian construction, we show that, for a certain family of input distributions, no randomized classical polynomial-time algorithm can fulfill our learning condition, unless $\mathsf{BQP}\subseteq\mathsf{P/poly}$. Furthermore, we show that the classically hard instance maintains quantum learnability. We also give an interpretation of our results in learning-assisted certified quantum simulation. Taken together, our results demonstrate a rigorous learning separation for a natural ML task based on Hamiltonian evolution, while building connections between quantum learning theory, quantum simulation, and QML. --- ### EgoPolice: A Benchmark for Egocentric Video Understanding in High-Stakes Police Body-Worn Camera Footage Authors: Max Gonzalez Saez-Diez, Jihoon Chung, Adam D. Wolsky, Gregory Lanzalotto, Dean Knox, Jonathan Mummolo, Brandon M. Stewart, Olga Russakovsky Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06468v1 We introduce EgoPolice, a carefully curated dataset of real, egocentric police-civilian interactions, sourced from publicly available body-worn camera videos. We select police-civilian action labels that are critical for police behavioral research and annotate them at a second-by-second granularity. The videos feature rapid and irregular camera motion, dense human interactions, and rare high-stakes events, making the dataset a challenging benchmark for motion-robust and context-aware egocentric perception. We provide two different tasks, classification and multiple-choice question-answering, and benchmark both open-source and closed-source models. We find that even the best video models like Gemini 2.5 Pro still struggle to accurately predict high-risk actions such as "Weapon Out". Beyond serving as a benchmark, EgoPolice provides a foundation for developing models capable of identifying events of interest in large-scale body-worn camera video repositories, enabling more efficient downstream human review. --- ### Verification of Dynamic Holographic Behavior in Identity Documents Authors: Glen Pouliquen, Joseph Chazalon, Guillaume Chiron, Thierry Géraud, Ahmad Montaser Awal Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06466v1 This paper addresses the remote verification of the authenticity of Optically Variable Devices (commonly known as holograms) on identity documents. Typically placed over the cardholder's photo, these devices provide strong and easily verifiable security for human inspection but pose challenges for automated verification. Existing approaches easily cover static frauds (e.g. paper photocopy) and can be evaluated for such, but their capacity to detect real, dynamic fraud cases (e.g. handcrafted hologram) has not been evaluated to date because of the lack of public datasets. Furthermore, they are usually trained to detect known attack types, and few of them can generalize to new, unseen attacks. This work features three contributions to address these limitations: 1) a new public dataset, MIDV-DynAttack, which extends the existing MIDV-Holo dataset with realistic, static and dynamic attacks against identity document specimens, tripling the number of attack samples compared to the original dataset, 2) a novel verification method which can assess the authenticity of a specific hologram thanks to the analysis of its dynamic behavior and appearance, can be trained without dynamic attack samples, and exhibits new state-of-the-art performance, 3) a benchmark of existing approaches which follows a clear evaluation protocol and emphasizes the inability of other approaches to deal with dynamic attacks, as well as new challenging attacks to deal with. Code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/EPITAResearchLab/pouliquen.25.icdar. --- ### WordVoice: Explicit and Decoupled Multi-Dimensional Word-Level Control for LLM-Based TTS Authors: Sihang Nie, Jinxin Ji, Xiaofen Xing, Deyi Tuo, Chengbin Jin, Jialong Mai, Xiangmin Xu Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: eess.AS, cs.CL, cs.SD arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06461v1 While recent Large Language Model (LLM)-based Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems have achieved remarkable naturalness, they predominantly rely on implicit end-to-end generation paradigms, resulting in coarse-grained control. In scenarios demanding precise stylistic interventions and strict temporal alignment, such as audiobook narration and video dubbing, the inability to explicitly manipulate word-level acoustic attributes remains a critical bottleneck. This limitation is primarily amplified by the severe scarcity of fine-grained annotated datasets and the architectural challenge of integrating multi-dimensional control signals into discrete autoregressive generation. To address this, we propose a unified framework for highly precise word-level control. First, we construct WordVoice-5A, a massive 4.7k-hour bilingual dataset featuring five-dimensional word-level annotations (duration, boundary, energy, pitch and tone) developed through a rigorous linguistically-guided pipeline. Second, we introduce WordVoice to transform the implicit generation process into an explicit, highly controllable paradigm. Specifically, we introduce a bound-token mechanism within the LLM to formulate an explicit ``acoustic planning'' process, enabling adaptive multi-task prosodic planning and flexible manual intervention. Furthermore, we augment the token-to-waveform stage with a fine-grained acoustic modulation module, bridging the resolution gap to strictly align word-level attributes between highly compressed discrete tokens and continuous waveforms. Extensive experiments demonstrate that WordVoice achieves superior, decoupled control over multiple acoustic dimensions while maintaining competitive zero-shot synthesis stability. The code and audio samples are publicly available at https://xxh333.github.io/wordvoice-demo/. --- ### Andha-Dhun: A First Look at Audio Descriptions in Hindi Authors: Ritabrata Chakraborty, Divy Kala, Nisheeth Bhooshan Gupta, Ganji Sreeram, Pailla Balakrishna Reddy, Makarand Tapaswi Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06457v1 Audio Descriptions (ADs) narrate visual content for Blind and Low Vision (BLV) audiences during gaps in audiovisual media. There is growing momentum around ADs in movies and TV shows, and with mandates from India's Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), there is a need to expand ADs beyond English. Yet, there is no work that generates ADs for any Indian language. To address this gap, we present the first systematic study of ADs in Hindi, contributing to aspects such as data, generation, and evaluation. We introduce Andha-Dhun, the first dataset of human-authored Hindi ADs collected from 8 full-length movies. We explore two approaches for generating ADs in Hindi: (i) directly from English dense video descriptions, and (ii) translating English ADs into Hindi. We evaluate these approaches using perplexity and LLM-as-a-judge metrics to assess fluency and quality respectively. We also analyze movies that have both English and Hindi human-authored ADs and find that naive translation introduces artifacts and narrows diversity compared to original Hindi ADs. Direct machine translation fails to adapt cultural references, while human-translated ADs do better but still fall short. Our findings emphasize that the purpose of Hindi ADs is accessibility for Indian BLV audiences, and that this requires adapting content for the audience more than strict fidelity to the source. --- ### A Hardware-Aware Open-Source Framework for Design Space Exploration of Mixed-Signal Spiking Neural Networks Authors: Sayma Nowshin Chowdhury, Vineeta Nair, Taseen Forhad, Aishwarya Natarajan, Corey Hart, Sahil Shah Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: eess.SP, cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06456v2 Energy-efficient neuromorphic computing at the edge requires simulation tools that can capture the non-ideal behavior of mixed-signal spiking neural network (SNN) hardware while supporting system-level design exploration. This work presents an open-source hardware-aware simulation framework for mixed-signal SNNs that enables comparative analysis across neuron, synapse and architecture choices. The framework supports multiple neuron models, including Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF), Hodgkin-Huxley (HH) and Axon-Hillock (AH), together with non-volatile analog synapses based on floating-gate transistors and ReRAM devices. By incorporating device-level nonlinearities directly into PyTorch-based training and inference, the tool enables optimization of physical synaptic parameters rather than idealized abstract weights. The framework is evaluated on standard neuromorphic benchmarks, including N-MNIST, DVS Gesture and Spiking Heidelberg Digits (SHD). For each model dataset configuration, it reports classification accuracy together with hardware-oriented metrics such as silicon area, power consumption and quantization sensitivity. These capabilities enable cross-layer design space exploration and help identify neuron-synapse configurations that best satisfy application-specific constraints on accuracy, energy efficiency, area and hardware fidelity. --- ### From Voting to Agent Collaboration: Answer-Type-Aware LLM Pipelines for BioASQ 14b Authors: Taeyun Roh, Eunha Lee, Wonjune Jang, Sohyun Chung, Junha Jung, Jaewoo Kang Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06452v1 Biomedical question answering requires not only accurate extraction of information from scientific literature but also reliable integration of evidence across multiple documents. This study presents a question-type-specific large language model (LLM) framework for BioASQ 14b Task B, designed to improve answer robustness and evidence grounding in biomedical question answering. Rather than applying a single prompting strategy to all questions, the framework selects different inference procedures for yes/no, factoid, and list questions according to their distinct reasoning and evaluation requirements. For yes/no questions, snippet shuffling and self-reflection are used to reduce sensitivity to evidence ordering and improve decision stability. For factoid questions, full-snippet input is combined with chain-of-thought-based in-context learning to support accurate biomedical entity identification. For list questions, a multi-agent architecture is employed, in which evidence extraction, candidate generation, answer verification, and final aggregation are handled collaboratively. Preliminary experiments on BioASQ 13b were used to identify effective inference strategies for each question type, and the resulting framework was subsequently evaluated in the official BioASQ 14b Task B challenge. In the official evaluation, our framework showed competitive performance across multiple batches and achieved first place in the factoid subtask of Batch 4. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of combining question-type-specific inference, ensemble prediction, and agent-based verification for reliable biomedical question answering. --- ### Danus: Orchestrating Mathematical Reasoning Agents with Fact-Graph Memory Authors: Jihao Liu, Guoxiong Gao, Zeming Sun, Bin Wu, Shurui Liu, Jiedong Jiang, Haocheng Ju, Leheng Chen, Ronnie Cheng, Xiping Zhang, Bin Dong Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06447v2 Recent LLM-based mathematical reasoning agents have begun to tackle research-level problems and, in several cases, have contributed to the resolution of open problems. However, scaling and orchestrating such agents effectively remains challenging, due to the difficulty of coordinating parallel proof search while keeping intermediate claims organized and reliable. In this paper, we propose Danus, an orchestration system for research-level mathematical reasoning centered on a shared fact graph as a global memory-management mechanism. Danus consists of a main agent that performs planning and coordination, multiple worker agents that carry out proof search in parallel, and a stateless verifier that checks proposed mathematical claims before they are admitted into the fact graph. Each verified fact is stored together with its proof and logical dependencies, allowing the system to build long arguments incrementally while keeping the shared proof state organized. The main agent periodically summarizes the evolving proof state, redirects workers across promising directions, and supports interaction with human mathematicians through progress reports. We evaluate Danus through six research-level case studies in algebraic geometry, singularity theory, and combinatorics, illustrating how the fact-graph memory mechanism enables Danus to construct long, detailed mathematical proofs. Our results suggest that fact-graph-based orchestration provides an effective route toward scaling mathematical reasoning agents for long-horizon research problems. Danus is open source at https://github.com/frenzymath/Danus. --- ### Analysis-by-Proxy: Localization Signals in VLMs Operating as Condition Encoders Authors: Yoav Baron, Sara Dorfman, Roni Paiss, Daniel Cohen-Or, Or Patashnik Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06445v1 Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly utilized as the conditioning backbone for diffusion-based image editing due to their remarkable multimodal reasoning capabilities. While standalone VLMs demonstrate strong localization capabilities, editing pipelines frequently struggle to maintain this accuracy, particularly in complex, multi-entity scenes. In this work, we investigate this performance gap, hypothesizing that it stems from treating the VLM as a condition encoder. In this role, the model is restricted to a single forward pass, preventing the autoregressive generation process for which it was optimized, thereby failing to fully expose its capabilities. To investigate whether this spatial understanding persists when the VLM is used as a condition encoder, we introduce Analysis-by-Proxy. In this framework, we train a lightweight, interpretable proxy model on the VLM's intermediate representations using an auxiliary localization task. By analyzing the VLM through this proxy, we uncover the specific VLM representations that encode localization information. Our findings expose a fundamental mismatch between how spatial knowledge is represented within a VLM condition encoder and how it is extracted by current editing pipelines. We reveal that under single-pass constraints, the localization signal does not reliably propagate to the predefined layer configurations commonly used for conditioning. Instead, this crucial signal remains hidden within intermediate representations, at locations that vary depending on the input prompt. Using our introduced Analysis-by-Proxy framework, we reveal the fundamental failures of existing condition extraction strategies in editing pipelines, opening the door to more principled design of conditioning architectures. --- ### PIPBench: A Profile-Inclusive Framework for Personalized Image Generation Evaluation Authors: Yuhang Wu, Shuxiang Zhang, Wee Hian Ching, Chi Zhang, Miao Liu Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06440v1 Recent text-to-image models such as DALLE-3 excel at following diverse prompts yet remain blind to individual aesthetic preferences. We study personalized image generation, where models must align outputs with a user's implicit visual preferences based on a few historically preferred images and a short prompt. To this end, we introduce PIPBench, the first profile-inclusive benchmark for evaluating personalized image generation. We further propose a novel data construction pipeline that leverages psychological and demographic profiling dimensions for both real-user data collection and scalable agent-based data generation. Using PIPBench, we conduct a thorough evaluation of representative line of methods. Our experiments reveal key limitations in existing methods, suggesting new challenges and opportunities for personalized text-to-image synthesis. Project page: https://wuyuhang05.github.io/PIPBench/ --- ### WristMimic: Full-Body Humanoid Control with Wrist-Guided Manipulation Authors: Wongyun Yu, Youngwoon Kim, Minsu Cho Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV, cs.GR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06438v2 Retargeting human object interaction demonstrations to physics based simulation requires reproducing not only body motion but also the object motion and contacts that make manipulation succeed. However, position only hand trajectories do not specify the contact forces needed to manipulate objects, and directly tracking them can overconstrain contact rich finger behavior. We introduce WristMimic, a wrist guided whole body control framework that explicitly separates contact free body motion from contact rich hand manipulation. The contact free body and wrist are guided by kinematic pose targets, whereas the fingers are not directly supervised by human hand pose. Instead, they learn grasping and manipulation behaviors from object tracking and contact outcomes. Our key insight is that the wrist is the natural gate between these two regimes. It is largely free from contact and can be tracked kinematically, yet it determines the global hand configuration and places the fingers within reachable grasp affordances. To ensure reliable wrist placement during interaction, we introduce wrist specific reset constraints and reward prioritization. Experiments show that WristMimic matches or surpasses methods using full finger pose supervision while enabling finger agnostic retargeting across diverse hand embodiments. --- ### Trust but Verify:Evidence-Linked Multi-Agent Clinical Information Extraction in Pathology Authors: Yufan Wang, Anit Kumar Sahu, Yan Fei Ng, Daniel Kang, Shayan Vassef, Soorya Ram Shimgekar, Koustuv Saha, Piyum Zonooz, Navin Kumar, Chee Leong Cheng, Li Yan Khor Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06435v2 Clinical feature extraction from pathology reports is challenging because relevant evidence may be distributed across coded and narrative fields and depend on specimen attribution, negation, ancillary findings, and diagnostic context. We retrospectively evaluated the NimbleMind Multi-Agent System (nMAS), a configurable workflow that separates clinician-defined field specifications from extraction models and returns report-level predictions with source-linked evidence. The study included 54 dummy gastric biopsy pathology reports from Singapore and four binary target fields, yielding 216 feature-case decisions. nMAS correctly classified 213 of 216 decisions (98.61\%), and all evidence spans associated with correct predictions occurred verbatim in the corresponding source reports. All three errors occurred in the two context-dependent \textit{H. pylori}-related fields requiring negation handling or diagnostic attribution. A single-model UMA-style comparator produced the similar label-level performance and error pattern. These findings do not demonstrate predictive superiority for the multi-agent architecture.Rather, the contribution of nMAS lies in workflow integration and traceability through configurable field specifications, complexity-based routing, report-level aggregation, and source-text validation within a clinician-reviewable workflow. Larger multi-institutional studies should assess generalizability, semantic evidence quality, adaptation effort, and clinician verification time. --- ### TILDE: TILt-based Distributional Erasure for Concept Unlearning Authors: Naveen George, Naoki Murata, Yuhta Takida, Konda Reddy Mopuri, Yuki Mitsufuji Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06432v1 Concept unlearning in text-to-image diffusion models is critical for safe and practical deployment: with rising privacy concerns, copyright disputes, trademark constraints, and safety regulations, deployed systems must be able to suppress unwanted concepts after training. Existing methods often remove the target concept effectively, but practical unlearning also requires an equally fundamental property: the unlearned model should retain quality, diversity, and semantic coverage on benign generation. The gold standard is a retain-only model trained from scratch without the unwanted data. However, common erasure objectives do not specify which post-unlearning distribution should approximate this reference, leaving retention as an implicit consequence of the update rule. We propose TILDE, TILt-based Distributional Erasure, which formulates concept unlearning as a distributional alignment problem: the desired target is the minimum-deviation conditional distribution from the pretrained model under a forgetting constraint. This energy-tilted, anchor-free target suppresses concept-expressing images while preserving benign relative mass for each prompt. We instantiate this principle with residual $\nabla$-GFlowNet training, which learns the score correction induced by the forget energy relative to the pretrained diffusion model. Across objects, artistic styles, and characters, TILDE achieves strong forgetting while improving retention and distributional fidelity over prior baselines. --- ### XRFormer: Multiscale Tokenization for XRF Representation Learning Authors: Sofiane Daimellah, Sylvie Le Hégarat-Mascle, Clotilde Boust Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06424v1 X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy is a key modality for material analysis in cultural heritage. However, automated learning from XRF spectra remains challenging: XRF spectra are complex one-dimensional signals composed of sharp elemental peaks, broader structures, and background variations that are not taken into account by existing learning-based models. This paper introduces XRFormer, a transformer architecture tailored to XRF spectra through a multiscale convolutional tokenizer that injects locality and multi-resolution inductive biases before global self-attention. The tokenizer progressively reduces spectral resolution while increasing embedding dimensionality, and the resulting token sequence is processed by a standard transformer encoder. We further investigate self-supervised pretraining for XRF representation learning using Masked Spectral modeling (MSM) and a physics-informed Peak Presence Prediction (PPP) objective. Experiments on the Pigments Checker STANDARD v.5 dataset for pigment identification and unmixing show that XRFormer consistently outperforms ViT, SpectralFormer (with and without CAF), and a 1D-CNN baseline for pigment identification. For pigment unmixing, XRFormer achieves robust abundance estimation while maintaining significantly higher parameter efficiency than SpectralFormer, operating at a lower token resolution (128 vs. 512 tokens) and with less than half the number of parameters (1.5M vs. 3.37M). MSM yields consistent gains across both tasks, while PPP further enhances performance for both identification and unmixing when tuned with an appropriate peak prominence. These results highlight multiscale, modality-aware tokenization as an effective and parameter efficient foundation for transformer-based XRF modeling under data-limited conditions. A GitHub repository is provided at https://github.com/sofiane1010/XRFormer. --- ### HoloCount: A Holistic Visual Counting Benchmark for MLLMs Authors: Jinhong Deng, Limeng Qiao, Guanglu Wan Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06420v1 Visual counting is a fundamental pillar of multimodal intelligence, requiring a seamless integration of fine-grained grounding and spatial reasoning. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success in qualitative scene understanding, their quantitative precision remains a significant bottleneck, often characterized by persistent numerical hallucinations. Existing counting benchmarks primarily focus on basic perception in simplified contexts, failing to capture the complex failure modes that emerge under logical constraints or adversarial conditions. To address these limitations, we introduce HoloCount, a holistic and diagnostically rich benchmark structured around a three-level hierarchical taxonomy. HoloCount evaluates MLLMs across: (1) Semantic Counting, focusing on atomic and property-based enumeration; (2) Analytical Counting, assessing logical composition through spatial and set-based reasoning; and (3) Robustness Testing, probing model integrity against adverse scenarios and grounded counter-priors, such as high-density scenes and linguistic biases. Through an exhaustive evaluation of over 20 state-of-the-art MLLMs, we reveal a critical performance gap: even top-tier models degrade significantly as tasks transition from perception to complex analytical reasoning and adverse scenarios. Our findings provide a systematic landscape of current MLLM counting capabilities and offer a roadmap for developing more grounded and reliable multimodal systems. The dataset is available at https://mm-mvr.github.io/HoloCount/. --- ### An Experimental Design Approach to Evaluating Agentic AI's Autonomous Model Discovery Authors: Hao He, Xueying Liu, Chris J. Kuhlman, Xinwei Deng Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: stat.ME, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06413v1 Large language model coding agents increasingly perform open-ended data modeling and analysis. These agents are stochastic and adaptive, and therefore their autonomous model discovery behavior cannot be adequately characterized by a single benchmark run. In this work, we propose an experimental design and analysis framework for systematically evaluating this discovery process, quantifying its variability, and identifying important factors. The proposed framework treats these agents as stochastic model-discovery operators, which map task-specific discovery data and an optimization target to a fitted model. Specifically, we investigate two such operators, Codex and Claude Code, under controlled experimental factors including agent's reasoning effort, task, optimization metric, and composition of training data. For each agent-task-metric combination, regression models and inference are conducted for multiple responses such as output quality, dollar cost, wall-clock time, and process complexity. Furthermore, we develop a utility-aligned canonical decomposition to characterize the dominant direction of the reasoning-effort effect and to assess whether that direction aligns with a performance-cost utility direction. The proposed framework is demonstrated on a testbed of networked word-forming games with insightful findings on reasoning effort with respect to cost and process complexity. --- ### RuBench: A Repository-Level Agentic Coding Benchmark with Natively Authored Russian Task Specifications Authors: Evgeny Shilov Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06411v2 Developers increasingly delegate real maintenance work to product-grade coding agents, and many state tasks in their native language, in the style of a customer request rather than a curated English issue. We introduce RuBench 1.0, a benchmark of 25 tasks mined from recent fix commits in five live open-source repositories (aiohttp, aiogram, Laravel, NestJS, Fastify), each specified natively in Russian -- written from scratch, not translated -- and judged by the upstream maintainer's regression tests, which we withhold from release. All fix commits postdate the training-data cutoffs of every evaluated model. Round 1 evaluates Claude Code with Opus 4.8, Sonnet 5, and Haiku 4.5, and Codex CLI with GPT-5.5 (3 independent runs each; pass@1 with task-level uncertainty); the best configuration resolves 78.7% of tasks. Auditing full trajectories of an hors-concours configuration (Claude Code + Fable 5), we caught the product silently substituting the model on 20% of tasks via an official safeguard fallback -- evidence that the deployed product, not the model, is the unit actually measured. Version 2 adds Round 2: seven further configurations on the same frozen set under a per-configuration freshness gate -- the Russian-market agents SourceCraft CLI (ds, legacy) and Koda CLI (koda-pro), Antigravity with Gemini 3.1 Pro and 3.5 Flash, and Codex CLI with GPT-5.6 Sol and Luna. SourceCraft's flagship resolves 68.1% (N=23), above GPT-5.5 and both Gemini rows. A tool-call contamination re-audit of all 437 Round-2 trajectories finds the Russian and Gemini columns clean (0/293 cells) while flagging systematic oracle-hunting in the GPT-5.6 family (8/69 and 13/75 cells), including one case of mining a prior round's artifacts from the run machine's disk; honest scores are published alongside raw ones. We release statements, metadata, trajectories, and diffs; oracles are withheld with a SHA-256 manifest. --- ### Temporal Modeling of Optically Variable Devices in Identity Documents Authors: Glen Pouliquen, Joseph Chazalon, Guillaume Chiron, Oriol Ramos Terrades, Thierry Géraud, Ahmad Montaser Awal Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06408v1 Robust remote verification of identity documents relies on analyzing faint, transparent security features like Optically Variable Devices (OVDs), or "holograms", within user-captured videos under uncontrolled conditions. Current systems, however, face critical limitations: existing methods often treat video frames in isolation, neglecting the intrinsic dynamic nature of OVDs and leaving systems vulnerable to swapping attacks, or focus on general holographic presence and lack the ability to verify specific OVD types. Moreover, the economic infeasibility of frame-by-frame video annotation makes supervised training impractical. In this work, we introduce two novel approaches for verifying the dynamic behavior of transparent OVDs protecting the holder's portrait, specifically designed for open-set scenarios where attack types are unknown during training. We demonstrate that these approaches can be trained without any attack samples in a self-supervised setting, surpassing previous state-of-the-art methods on public datasets while adhering strictly to industrial constraints. Our results confirm that modeling temporal dynamics is essential for defeating sophisticated attacks under realistic conditions, and underscores the promise of sequence modeling and anomaly detection for OVD verification. Code is available at https://github.com/EPITAResearchLab/pouliquen.26.icdar. --- ### ExplAIner: A Declarative Query Language for Explaining Classification Models Authors: Marcelo Arenas, Pablo Barceló, Diego Bustamante, Jose Caraball, María Alejandra Schild, Bernardo Subercaseaux Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06407v1 The XAI community has studied a wide range of queries and scores for explaining predictions of ML models. From a data management perspective, this proliferation of explanation notions calls for declarative query languages in which such notions can be specified, combined, and analyzed uniformly. In this paper, we develop such a framework for Boolean models. We first revisit FOIL, an interpretability query language for black-box models, and show that it has two fundamental limitations: it cannot express central optimality-based explanation queries, and its evaluation problem over decision trees is hard for every level of the polynomial hierarchy. We then introduce ExplAIner, a query language based on FOIL with an extended vocabulary and a layered structure. We show that ExplAIner can express a broad family of explanation notions, including abductive, contrastive, feature-based, and distance-based queries. We also prove that the evaluation problem for each query in ExplAIner belongs to the Boolean hierarchy over every class of Boolean models for which some basic predicates can be evaluated in polynomial time. In particular, that property holds for deterministic and decomposable Boolean circuits. Finally, we introduce Opt-FOIL, an optimization-oriented fragment of ExplAIner for computing explanations that are minimal with respect to strict partial orders, and prove that its evaluation problem is in $\mathrm{FP}^{\mathrm{NP}}$ under the same tractability assumptions. These complexity results have a direct algorithmic consequence: a fixed ExplAIner query can be evaluated with a fixed number of calls to a SAT solver, while a notion of explanation specified in Opt-FOIL can be computed with a polynomial number of such calls. This is particularly relevant in formal XAI, where SAT solvers have been successfully used to compute explanations for several classes of ML models. --- ### What Images Cannot Say: Language-Guided Olfactory Representation Learning Authors: Eleftherios Tsonis, Xi Wang, Vicky Kalogeiton Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06402v1 Images tell us what a scene looks like, but rarely what it would feel like to be there. While recent datasets pair visual scenes with electronic-nose measurements, aligning smell signals with images remains challenging because many olfactory cues arise from contextual environmental factors that are not directly visible in pixels. We introduce SCENT, a multimodal framework that uses language guidance as a semantic bridge between vision and olfaction. Our approach leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to generate scene descriptors capturing objects, environmental context, and plausible ambient smell cues suggested by the visual scene. These descriptors provide semantic guidance for learning olfactory representations. We train a smell encoder that maps electronic-nose signals into a shared embedding space aligned with both visual and textual representations, and introduce a languageguided latent decomposition that separates object-specific odors from contextual environmental contributions. Experiments on the New York Smells dataset demonstrate that SCENT significantly improves crossmodal retrieval compared to vision-only baselines, achieving state-of-theart performance on smell-to-image and smell-to-text retrieval tasks. In addition, our framework produces interpretable olfactory representations that enable the disentanglement of complex smell mixtures. Our results reveal the importance of contextual semantic information for grounding olfactory perception in multimodal learning and pave the way for future research in this area. --- ### A Definition and Roadmap for World Models Authors: Xinyuan Chen, Haoyu Guo, Shi Guo, Bingqi Jiang, Chunhua Shen, Xing Shen, Tianfan Xue, Yufei Xue, Mulin Yu, Weinan Zhang, Bin Zhao, Bowen Zhou et al. Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06401v1 World models -- internal simulators that learn the structure and dynamics of an environment -- have become one of the most actively debated concepts in AI. From model-based reinforcement learning and video generation to embodied robotics and ultimately, physical AI, researchers across AI subfields are building systems that they call "world models", yet there is no consensus on what a world model fundamentally is, what it should predict, or how it should be built. This perspective article provides a scientific definition of world models, discussions of their key technical aspects, and a staged roadmap for developing effective world models. --- ### FADRA: Frequency-Aware Diffusion with Residual Adaptation for Video Face Restoration Authors: Jin Jiang, Jia Wang, Panwen Hu, Weiran Zhao, Shengcai Liao Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06389v1 Video face restoration (VFR) aims to recover high-quality and temporally consistent facial details from severely degraded video sequences; however, existing methods still struggle to balance spatial fidelity and temporal coherence under complex degradations. To address this, we propose FADRA, a frequency-aware diffusion framework with iterative residual adaptation specifically tailored for robust VFR. We first leverage the strong temporal consistency of a pre-trained text-to-video diffusion model and introduce lightweight LoRA adapters together with a Low-Quality (LQ) Pixel-Alignment Feature Fusion module to efficiently adapt the frozen generative prior to the VFR task. To further adapt the frozen diffusion backbone to the downstream VFR task beyond LoRA-based adaptation, we introduce a Repeated Residual Adaptation Head (RRAH) for step-wise residual refinement after the diffusion backbone. To make this refinement explicitly guided by the degraded observation, RRAH further takes the LQ latent together with the current velocity prediction as input, allowing the model to repeatedly revisit LQ cues and predict residual updates at each flow-matching step. This LQ-guided repeated residual adaptation helps recover fine facial details while preserving the inherent temporal priors of the pre-trained model. Furthermore, to ensure the structural integrity of perceptually important details, we introduce a Frequency-Aware Loss that provides explicit supervision across multiple spectral bands, emphasizing visually sensitive frequency components that are crucial for perceptual quality and prone to temporal jittering. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FADRA recovers better facial structures and produces more temporally consistent videos than state-of-the-art methods, leading to clear gains in both quantitative metrics and visual perception. --- ### Learning to Throw Objects Safely in Multi-Obstacle Environments Authors: Mohammadreza Kasaei, Klemen Voncina, Hamidreza Kasaei Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06388v1 Robotic throwing enables fast and efficient object placement beyond the robot's immediate workspace, but reliable throwing in cluttered environments remains underexplored. Existing approaches, such as TossingBot, learn throwing strategies from visual input but assume obstacle-free settings. In this paper, we address the problem of throwing objects into a target basket while avoiding obstacles placed randomly in the scene. We introduce a potential field state representation that compactly encodes both basket attraction and obstacle repulsion on a fixed-size grid, enabling reinforcement learning (RL) policies to generalize across arbitrary numbers and configurations of obstacles. The policy is initialized from kinesthetic demonstrations and optimized in simulation using three state-of-the-art RL algorithms (SAC, DDPG, TD3). Among these, SAC achieves the most consistent performance across scenarios. We compare the potential field representation against explicit state encodings and demonstrate that it achieves higher success rates and better scalability to unseen obstacle configurations. Real-robot experiments with unseen throwable objects confirm robust sim-to-real transfer, achieving up to $90\%$ success in cluttered scenes. These results demonstrate that PFR provides a practical and robust representation for safe and efficient robotic throwing in unstructured environments. A video showcasing our experiments is available at: https://youtu.be/ZZnJf8ua2dE --- ### A Function-Space Dichotomy for Compositional Learning: Exponential Sub-Optimality of the Neural Tangent Kernel Authors: Arkaprabha Ganguli, Emil Constantinescu Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06382v1 A persistent empirical observation is that trained neural networks outperform their neural tangent kernel (NTK) limit on tasks with compositional structure, yet a quantitative account of $\textbf{when}$ and $\textbf{by how much}$ has been lacking. Working on the unit circle, we give such an account through a dichotomy between two complexity measures of the target: its $\textbf{Fourier complexity}$, which controls NTK kernel regression, and its $\textbf{architectural complexity}$, which controls learning over depth-$L$, width-$w$ ReLU networks with the variation norm of the weights bounded by $R$. We first characterize the minimax rate of the architecture class $\mathcal{C}_{L,w,R}$, pinning it down up to a single factor of $L$: between $Ω(Lw^2R^2/n)$ and $\tilde{O}(L^2w^2R^2/n)$. We then show the NTK estimator sits $\textbf{exponentially}$ above this floor whenever the two complexities decouple: for the depth-$L$ iterated sawtooth, NTK regression needs $Ω(4^L)$ samples while the minimax floor is polynomial in $L$. Numerical experiments confirm the theoretical claims: on bandlimited smooth targets, the NTK is competitive or better, while on the hypercube sparse-parity model, a standard two-layer network beats the NTK by four to six orders of magnitude in test error. The gap is thus a function-space property, a mismatch between the kernel's smoothness bias and the target's compositional structure, rather than a generic kernel-versus-network phenomenon. --- ### VaseMuseum: Digital Intelligent Museum for Ancient Greek Pottery Authors: Jiazi Wang, Nonghai Zhang, Qiushi Xie, Zeyu Zhang, Yufeng Chen, Yang Zhao, Ling Shao, Hao Tang Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06374v1 Vision-language models (VLMs) have made interactive digital museums increasingly feasible by connecting 3D digitization with natural-language artifact exploration. However, in cultural heritage domains such as ancient Greek pottery, reliable VLM assistance is limited by two challenges. First, open-ended interpretation requires grounding fine-grained 2D/3D visual evidence in specialized curatorial knowledge, yet the retrieval process may introduce weak sources and unverifiable references. Second, when the available evidence is incomplete, noisy, or ambiguous, VLMs often produce confident but unsupported answers instead of calibrated uncertainty. To address these challenges, we propose VaseMuseum, a lightweight and modular multimodal agent framework for intelligent digital museums of ancient Greek pottery. VaseMuseum combines an interactive virtual museum with VaseAgent, which supports both 2D images and 3D artifacts through multimodal perception, 3D-aware reasoning, external knowledge retrieval, and inference-time reliability control. Specifically, VaseAgent retrieves evidence from authoritative web and museum knowledge sources, and source-level control selects diverse and verifiable evidence before generation. Meanwhile, response-level control checks generated claims against the evidence pool and encourages neutral, evidence-bounded answers when support is insufficient or conflicting. Moreover, a training-free GRPO-style selection mechanism favors responses with valid references and calibrated confidence without updating the VLM backbone. Experiments in a realistic digital museum simulation show that VaseMuseum improves citation validity, reduces hallucinations on knowledge-intensive queries, and produces more neutral answers under ambiguity compared with search-enabled VLM baselines. --- ### ActionCache: Training-Free Acceleration for Vision-Language-Action Models with Action Caching and Refinement Authors: Ryuji Oi, Hikari Otsuka, Kosuke Matsushima, Yuki Ichikawa, Masato Motomura, Tatsuya Kaneko, Daichi Fujiki Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06370v2 Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising approach for generalizable robotic manipulations. In particular, flow-matching-based VLA models have shown remarkable success due to their capability to generate precise and smooth action sequences and capture multimodal distributions. However, the iterative denoising process in the action head acts as a major computational bottleneck, posing a critical challenge for real-time deployment. To address this challenge, we propose ActionCache, a plug-and-play external cache that opportunistically reuses past intermediate actions to warm-start generations from the vicinity of target actions, drastically reducing the inference latency. Specifically, ActionCache stores the intermediate actions with compact multimodal keys, which enables retrieval from similar past contexts across different episodes or even different tasks. Experimental results in simulation and real-world environments demonstrate that ActionCache maintains high task success rates in a low-latency regime, achieving action head inference acceleration of up to $10.44\times$ and $40.17\times$ for representative flow-based VLA, $π_{0.5}$ and GR00T-N1.6, respectively. --- ### Feature Learning for the High Dimensional Stationary Schödinger Equation with Deep Ritz Method Authors: Yao Yao, Yulong Lu, Gilad Lerman Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: math.OC, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06369v2 This paper investigates feature learning within the framework of the deep Ritz method for solving the stationary Schrödinger equation with Neumann boundary conditions. We first analyze the convergence of Riemannian gradient descent in an agnostic setting, where the hypothesis function is restricted to a single-index model while the PDE solution is arbitrary. We prove that gradient descent reaches an approximate global minimum: after T = O(log(1/ε)) iterations, the loss is within εof a constant multiple of the optimal loss. We then examine the loss landscape when the source term of the PDE itself follows a single-index model, considering hypothesis functions given by either a single-index model or a two-neuron multi-index model. In the single-index case, we show that the minimum Ritz energy is attained at the feature vector aligned with that of the source term. In the two-neuron case, we study the landscape of regularized Ritz losses and characterize how a second feature emerges, given that the first feature is aligned with the source, as the regularization parameter varies. Finally, numerical experiments are presented to validate the feature emergence theory in the two-neuron setting. --- ### Factor-Augmented Machine Learning Panel Regressions Authors: Andrii Babii, Luca Barbaglia, Eric Ghysels, Jonas Striaukas Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: econ.EM, math.ST, stat.ME, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06368v1 This paper develops the asymptotic theory for high-dimensional panel data regressions in settings with cross-sectionally dependent errors driven by common shocks. We consider a factor-augmented sparse-group LASSO estimator that combines MIDAS aggregation with latent factors. The estimator can take advantage of the mixed-frequency group structure in the time-series dimension. Theory shows that it can outperform the standard LASSO estimator both for prediction and estimation while allowing for cross-sectional dependence. --- ### Approximate Risk Minimization Over Shrinking-Thresholding Rules in Normal Mean Estimation Authors: Wei Jiang Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: math.ST, stat.AP, stat.ME, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06367v1 We develop an approximate risk minimization framework for shrinkage-thresholding estimation in normal mean problems. In the canonical multivariate normal mean model, we introduce a general functional class of estimators that contains classical shrinkage and thresholding behavior, including James-Stein-type and lasso-type rules. We express quadratic risk as a functional over this class, derive optimality conditions for both oracle risk and data-driven approximate risk minimization, and construct a feasible approximate risk criterion from the observed data when the oracle risk is unavailable. The resulting estimator, NOMAD, is obtained by minimizing this approximate risk over the proposed class. For the canonical model, we develop an approximate risk minimization theory that includes optimizer characterization, sieve-based consistency under regularity conditions, and approximate-risk inequalities relative to benchmark procedures in the admissible class. We then extend the framework to multivariate normal mean estimation with correlated observations, develop both MLE-based and conditional MLE-based constructions, and establish consistency results under regularity conditions. We further apply the framework to linear regression and derive an equivalent penalized regression representation in which the shrinkage-thresholding map induces a data-adaptive penalty, recovering ridge-type and lasso-type behavior as special cases or limiting forms. The results provide a unified risk-based framework for shrinkage, thresholding, and regularization across canonical and correlated normal mean estimation and linear regression. --- ### Automated Compliance Mapping in Cloud Security with Domain-Adapted Sentence Transformers Authors: John Bianchi, Luca Petrillo, Fabio Martinelli, Marinella Petrocchi Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CL, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06364v1 Mapping cloud security controls to technical metrics is currently a manual process. This paper proposes domain adaptation of Sentence Transformer models to automate it. We build a training corpus of 3,499 semantic pairs from five European security standards and a set of technical metrics, then expand it via back-translation and LLM-based paraphrasing to up to 13,996 samples across four scenarios. We fine-tune five architectures and evaluate their performance on two independent tasks: control-to-metric and cross-standard controls association. All fine-tuned models outperform their zero-shot baselines. On the control-to-metric task, the best model gains up to 23 nDCG@10 points, while on the cross-standard control task, \textit{multi-qa-mpnet-dot-v1} under back-translation reaches 0.870 nDCG@10. The results show that in-domain training data is a primary driver of performance for the considered case studies. --- ### TMF-RSE: Tri-Modal Fusion with Regional Semantics and Evidential Uncertainty for Lung Severity Scoring Authors: Fadi Abdeladhim Zidi, Salah Eddine Bekhouche, Abdellah Zakaria Sellam, Gaby Maroun, Fadi Dornaika, Cosimo Distante Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: eess.IV, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06356v1 Accurate quantification of lung disease severity from chest imaging is critical for clinical decision-making and resource allocation. We propose a tri-modal deep learning framework, TMF-RSE (Tri-Modal Fusion with Regional Semantics and Evidential Uncertainty), that combines appearance features from two-dimensional chest inputs, structural features from lung segmentation masks, and semantic features from vision-language models (VLMs) for severity quantification. Our approach employs complementary fusion mechanisms that integrate semantic guidance, structural priors, and hierarchical interactions across modalities. The model employs evidential regression to provide both severity predictions and uncertainty estimates. Experiments on the Per-COVID-19 CT and RALO datasets show that TMF-RSE outperforms recent transformer-based baselines, achieving MAE of 4.02 and Pearson correlation of 0.9629 on Per-COVID-19 validation, and 0.339 MAE / 0.973 PC on RALO geographic extent. --- ### Generalized Synthetic Image Detection with Enhanced RGB-Noise Representation Learning Authors: Zhen Li, Gang Cao, Tian Zhang, Lifang Yu, Shaowei Weng Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06354v1 The rapid advancement of large-scale generative models has accelerated the spread of highly deceptive AI-generated images, making generalized synthetic image detection a critical imperative. Existing forensic networks often struggle with cross-model generalization and realworld degradations due to their reliance on single-domain representations and conventional binary classification optimization. To overcome these limitations, we propose RNSIDNet, a novel forensic framework that achieves robust detection through enhanced RGB-Noise representation learning. Specifically, our method employs a dual-branch architecture where global RGB semantics, extracted by an attention-refined CLIP backbone, dynamically modulate highfrequency noise artifacts captured by Bayar convolutions via a Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) module. To further enhance the learned representations, we design a Hard Sample-aware Contrastive Learning (HSCL) strategy. By explicitly penalizing challenging training samples, HSCL reshapes the latent feature space to maximize the discriminative margin between pristine and synthetic domains. Extensive experiments across eight public benchmark datasets verify that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance, delivering superior generalization ability, robustness, and computational efficiency. Code and dataset will be publicly available on https://github.com/multimediaFor/RNSIDNet. --- ### TopoBrick: Agentic Topology Sampling of Exogenous Variables for Zero-Shot Building IoT Forecasting Authors: Xiachong Lin, Du Yin, Arian Prabowo, Hao Xue, Wen Hu, Imran Razzak, Matthew Amos, Sam Behrens, Flora D. Salim Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06349v2 Building sensors are embedded in physical topology, spatial hierarchy, and operational context, yet existing forecasters often treat them as isolated time series or rely on fixed covariate sets. We present TopoBrick, a training-free framework for zero-shot building IoT (Internet-of-Things) forecasting. TopoBrick uses building knowledge graphs to construct a compact structural skeleton and employs an agentic topology sampler to select target-specific exogenous variables. The selected variables are organized by deployment-time availability, separating past-known sensor states from future-known calendar, schedule, and meteorological exogenous variables. Across three real-world buildings, TopoBrick outperforms strong zero-shot foundation-model baselines and remains competitive with fully trained building-specific models. Ablations show that topology-aware sampling is more reliable than random, ontology-only, or fixed-hop selection, especially for physically coupled HVAC and weather-driven sensing variables. --- ### TopoBrick: Agentic Topology Sampling of Exogenous Variables for Zero-Shot Building IoT Forecasting Authors: Xiachong Lin, Du Yin, Arian Prabowo, Hao Xue, Wen Hu, Imran Razzak, Matthew Amos, Sam Behrens, Flora D. Salim Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06349v1 Building sensors are embedded in physical topology, spatial hierarchy, and operational context, yet existing forecasters often treat them as isolated time series or rely on fixed covariate sets. We present TopoBrick, a training-free framework for zero-shot building IoT (Internet-of-Things) forecasting. TopoBrick uses building knowledge graphs to construct a compact structural skeleton and employs an agentic topology sampler to select target-specific exogenous variables. The selected variables are organized by deployment-time availability, separating past-known sensor states from future-known calendar, schedule, and meteorological exogenous variables. Across three real-world buildings, TopoBrick outperforms strong zero-shot foundation-model baselines and remains competitive with fully trained building-specific models. Ablations show that topology-aware sampling is more reliable than random, ontology-only, or fixed-hop selection, especially for physically coupled HVAC and weather-driven sensing variables. --- ### Physics-Informed Neural Embeddings of PDE Solution Families Authors: Raul Jimenez, Svitlana Mayboroda, Pavlos Protopapas, Leonid Sarieddine, David N. Spergel, Pedro Tarancón-Álvarez Published: 2026-07-07 Categories: cs.LG, math.NA, physics.comp-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.06348v1 We introduce a physics-informed framework for learning finite-dimensional embeddings of solution families of partial differential equations. The method uses a multihead Physics-Informed Neural Network in which a shared body learns a latent manifold representing the solution space, while linear heads reconstruct individual solutions associated with different initial conditions. A head-orthogonalization penalty removes degeneracies in the latent representation and stabilizes the principal-component spectrum across training realizations. Because the initial condition is built into the network output by construction, these principal components measure the additional variability the network learns on top of the initial profile, not the full solution itself. We apply the method to the one-dimensional viscous Burgers equation, with the heat and wave equations as robustness checks. For a latent dimension $n_b=20$, the learned manifolds exhibit pronounced effective dimensional reduction: for Burgers dynamics, only $2$-$4$ principal components capture about $95\%$ of the latent-space variance, while $4$-$7$ capture about $99\%$, depending on the initial-condition family; the same qualitative compression holds for the heat and wave equations. We also split the wavenumber axis into bands (``Fourier shells'') and measure how much each band contributes to every principal component. The resulting frequency profile is invariant under the change-of-basis freedom that the orthogonalization penalty leaves in the latent space, and is therefore reproducible across independent training runs. More broadly, this establishes the learned spectral profiles and principal components as robust observables of solution-manifold geometry. ---