# Research Papers — 2026-07 · bundle page 191 of 222 > Full-text markdown of papers #9501–9550 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/191 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/190.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/192.md) ### Perceiving Better Moments: Cover Frame Reselection and Enhancement for Live Photos with the Live2K Dataset Authors: Junyu Lou, Kai Chen, Weiyi You, Hui Zeng, Lei Zhang, Shuhang Gu Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04151v1 Modern smartphones capture Live Photos, short video bursts surrounding a still image, offering a dynamic and engaging photographic experience. However, the cover photo and video components are generated by two distinct imaging pipelines: the photo stream undergoes full computational photography processing, while the video stream is constrained by real-time efficiency and heavy compression. This intrinsic separation produces a substantial quality gap in resolution, color fidelity, and dynamic range between the cover photo and video frames. When users reselect an alternative frame from the video to replace an imperfect cover, the chosen frame often suffers from severe degradation, making direct replacement visually unsatisfactory. Restoring such frames requires simultaneous enhancement of spatial detail and color appearance, a task considerably more challenging than ordinary super-resolution or color enhancement. To address this, we define the Live Photo Cover Frame Reselection and Enhancement (LPRE) task, which leverages the intrinsic cues available within each Live Photo: the high-quality cover image as a structural and color reference, the user-reselected low-quality frame as the reconstruction target and several adjacent video frames providing temporal cues. Building upon this formulation, we construct Live2K, a real-world dataset of 2,042 Live Photos, and develop a unified one-stage baseline that integrates multi-frame fusion, guided color enhancement and super-resolution, establishing the first benchmark for Live Photo enhancement research. --- ### Beyond Scene Priors: Fine-Grained Traffic Scene Reasoning with Benchmarking and Query-Guided Small-Object Focus Authors: Waikit Xiu, Qiang Lu, Zian Wang, Xinjie Yang, Zhiwei Chen, Chen Sun, Xiying Li Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04149v1 In safety-critical traffic scenarios, answering complex questions relies on minute, localized visual cues. However, standard Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) tend to over-attend to backgrounds, overwhelming crucial small objects during visual-language alignment, a failure mode we term 'critical evidence dilution.' Furthermore, existing visual question answering (VQA) datasets rarely expose this flaw, as they lack large-scale, distractor-heavy evaluations that require pinpointing local evidence. To bridge this evaluation and architecture gap, we introduce the Fine-Grained Traffic Reasoning Benchmark (FGTR-Bench) and the Text-Guided Small-Object Reasoning MLLM (TSR-MLLM). FGTR-Bench comprises 40,236 single-image Multiple-Choice Questions (MCQs) created via multi-agent generation, consistency checks, and expert audits, alongside a disjoint 4,947-sample blind test split. To resolve evidence dilution, TSR-MLLM, built on Qwen3-VL-4B, uses a query-conditioned Text-Guided Small-Object Focus (TG-SOF) map. Applied once at the decoder boundary, the map adds sparse Top-K gated residuals to the most question-relevant vision slots while leaving text tokens unchanged. Together with lightweight decoder adaptation, TSR-MLLM preserves single-pass inference without external detectors or image re-encoding. Under matched settings, TSR-MLLM outperforms the strongest 4B baseline by 2.1 points on FGTR-Bench (74.1% overall), with larger gains on evidence-local tracks. Furthermore, it remains competitive on DriveQA-V (CARLA Signs) under greedy decoding without task-specific fine-tuning. --- ### HCSU: A Dataset and Benchmark for Fine-Grained Historical Calligraphy Style Understanding Authors: Yinsheng Yao, Yan Liu, Chen Ye Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04147v1 Automated fine-grained perception of calligraphy styles--a task vital to cultural heritage preservation--remains a critical challenge for Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), largely constrained by existing datasets that suffer from modal mixture and flattened labels. To bridge this gap, we introduce HCSU, the first comprehensive dataset tailored for fine-grained Historical Calligraphy Style Understanding. HCSU comprises 39,307 meticulously curated character images from 49 historically prominent calligraphers across 10 dynasties, systematically decoupling authentic ink manuscripts (Tie) from stone rubbings (Bei) to resolve the long-standing modal mixture problem. Moving beyond conventional flattened labels, HCSU provides hierarchical expert-written aesthetic descriptions, enabling two rigorous evaluation protocols: fine-grained style discrimination and interpretable aesthetic reasoning. Extensive evaluations reveal a persistent gap between calligraphy-related knowledge and visually grounded style perception: state-of-the-art LVLMs show non-trivial performance but remain sensitive to script-level, textual, and source-specific cues, and often struggle to ground aesthetic judgments in fine-grained brushwork evidence. Ultimately, the HCSU benchmark exposes fundamental limitations in current multimodal architectures, aiming to inspire the evolution of expert-level visual reasoning for cultural heritage preservation. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Tongji209/HCSU. --- ### !Imperio, smolVLA: The Implications of Data Poisoning on Open Source Robotics Authors: Stefan Bühler, Mark Schutera Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04146v1 This work establishes that trigger-word data poisoning of vision language action models is practical, while at the same time the open-source robotics ecosystem holds trust assumptions about community contributions. A few poisoned samples can silently embed a backdoor that disables a robot on command. We evaluate this threat against smolVLA on a real-world pick-and-place task, training on three poison ratios and evaluating across different prompts on the LeRobot platform. Three poisoned episodes in 320 clean episodes suffice for a complete denial of service. Success rate drops to 0.0 plus minus 0.0% across all trigger-word conditions and the robot locks into a fixed joint configuration rather than executing any task-relevant motion. Clean-prompt behaviour holds at approx. 50% success rate across all poison ratios, confirming the attack is stealthy under normal operation. A single poisoned episode already reduces success rate to 6.7 plus minus 6.7%. The robot still moves, but no longer completes the task. The attack generalises to front, middle, and end trigger placements despite training exclusively on front-placed triggers. These findings establish that the threat is practical, low-cost, and stealthy, and warrant treating dataset provenance as a first-class concern in open-source robotics ecosystems. --- ### Binary Iterative Method for Non-targeted Adversarial Attack Authors: Naman Goyal, Milan Chaudhari Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04145v1 Adversarial attacks guide and provide additional training and test data for both adversarial training and adversarial robustness validation, and expose the 'piecewise linearity' of deep learning based models. Since adversarial attacks and adversarial robustness are mathematically defined problems that can be optimised directly with end-to-end differentiable search, adversarial robustness is more widely applicable than other robustness metrics such as corruption and perturbation robustness, and new kinds of adversarial attacks are beneficial for robustness testing. Attacks are targeted or non-targeted depending on whether the image is modified to misclassify to a particular class or to any incorrect class; we focus on the non-targeted setting. Finding the optimal input data points and hyper-parameters for generating non-targeted adversarial attacks remains a challenge for current methods like the Fast Gradient Method, Basic Iterative Method and Virtual Adversarial Method. We propose a new method, the "Binary Iterative Method" (BinIM), which uses a divide-and-conquer paradigm to optimise parameters and hyper-parameters for the generation of non-targeted attacks. We compare our method to other gradient-based adversarial attacks evaluated over pre-trained networks (InceptionV3, InceptionV2, ResNet V2 152) on classification tasks. On 1000 randomly-sampled images from the standard ImageNet dataset, the Binary Iterative Method outperforms all other gradient-based methods, qualitatively making the classifier misclassify with confidence up to 0.995 while reducing the probability of the true label to 2.21e-09 (approximately 0). --- ### CSB: A Counting and Sampling tool for Bit-vectors Authors: Arijit Shaw, Kuldeep S. Meel Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: cs.LO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04142v1 Satisfiability modulo theory (SMT) solvers have significantly advanced automated reasoning due to their effectiveness in solving problems across various fields. With the advancement in SMT solvers, there is growing interest in exploring capabilities beyond mere satisfiability, similar to the progression observed in Boolean satisfiability solvers that expanded into counting and sampling. In this study, we investigate the following question: Can we rely on modern CNF model counters and CNF samplers to extend modern SMT solvers to handle the problems of counting and sampling over bit-vectors? The main contribution of this work is the development of an efficient and user-friendly tool, csb, that solves a bunch of problems around model counting and sampling on the theory of bit-vectors, namely exact and approximate projected and non-projected model counting, along with the almost-uniform and uniform-like sampling. In the case of exact counting, projected counting, and uniform sampling. Our tool csb converts the bit-vector formula into a CNF formula using bit-blasting techniques before applying CNF model counters or samplers to perform counting or sampling. Our experiments demonstrate significant performance improvements over existing methods. --- ### DELTA-TTS: Adapting Autoregressive Model into Diffusion Language Model for Text-to-Speech Authors: Junwon Moon, Yejin Lee, Seungbeom Kim, Hoseong Ahn, Sewoong Park, Heeseung Kim, Kyuhong Shim Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: eess.AS, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04140v2 Autoregressive (AR) text-to-speech (TTS) models generate discrete speech tokens sequentially, which makes inference slow and can degrade robustness, since local errors propagate to later positions and can escalate into hallucination. This limitation stems from their left-to-right AR commitment: each token must be determined before future speech-token context is available. However, such ordering is not an inherent requirement for TTS, since the model receives the full input text before synthesis. In this paper, we introduce DELTA-TTS, a lightweight LoRA-based adaptation framework that converts a pretrained AR TTS model into a discrete diffusion language model (dLLM) for confidence-ordered speech-token decoding. To better capture the local structure of speech, DELTA-TTS incorporates a convolution module that injects local acoustic context, together with a 1/t-weighted training objective and a time-shifted inference schedule that together defer low-confidence positions to later steps. Trained on only 585 hours of LibriTTS, DELTA-TTS achieves a 1.75% WER on Seed-TTS test-en, outperforming its AR backbone while generating tokens 3.3x faster. Further analysis shows that DELTA-TTS produces sharper text--speech alignment, increases overall decoding confidence, and mitigates the hallucinations observed in AR generation. --- ### Masked Generative-Contrastive Representation Learning for Cross-Dataset EEG-Based Emotion Recognition Authors: Huqin Weng, Jiayang Huang, Yimin Wen, Jie Du, Chi-Man Vong, Chuangquan Chen Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04139v2 Self-supervised learning (SSL) shows strong potential for cross-dataset transfer by improving feature representation and generalization. However, its application to EEG-based emotion recognition remains largely unexplored. Existing SSL methods struggle to capture the intricate spatiotemporal dependencies of EEG signals under varying channel configurations, extract fine-grained representations resilient to noise, and derive global features that generalize well across subjects. To address these challenges, we propose Masked Generative-Contrastive Representation Learning (MGCRL), a novel SSL framework specifically designed for EEG-based emotion recognition. Built upon a region-aware spatiotemporal encoder, MGCRL integrates generative and contrastive learning to achieve both fine-grained and global discriminative representations for cross-dataset generalization. MGCRL introduces three key designs: 1) a spatiotemporal encoder that incorporates region-based graph convolution to capture localized spatial and functional relationships, enhancing region-specific feature learning and mitigating the impact of varying EEG channel configurations across datasets; 2) a generative learning mechanism based on the joint embedding predictive architecture (JEPA) that utilizes masked features to capture noise robustness fine-grained representations, improving the model's capability to characterize subtle emotional states; and 3) a contrastive learning strategy that leverages masked and original features to learn temporally stable and cross-subject-invariant representations across the same stimuli, boosting emotion discrimination and cross-subject generalization. Under these designs, MGCRL exhibits remarkable ability to learn universal representation. Extensive experiments involving pretraining on the large FACED dataset and fine-tuning on multiple SEED-series datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of MGCRL. --- ### Masked Generative-Contrastive Representation Learning for Cross-Dataset EEG-Based Emotion Recognition Authors: Huqin Weng, Jiayang Huang, Yimin Wen, Jie Du, Chi-Man Vong, Chuangquan Chen Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04139v1 Self-supervised learning (SSL) shows strong potential for cross-dataset transfer by improving feature representation and generalization. However, its application to EEG-based emotion recognition remains largely unexplored. Existing SSL methods struggle to capture the intricate spatiotemporal dependencies of EEG signals under varying channel configurations, extract fine-grained representations resilient to noise, and derive global features that generalize well across subjects. To address these challenges, we propose Masked Generative-Contrastive Representation Learning (MGCRL), a novel SSL framework specifically designed for EEG-based emotion recognition. Built upon a region-aware spatiotemporal encoder, MGCRL integrates generative and contrastive learning to achieve both fine-grained and global discriminative representations for cross-dataset generalization. MGCRL introduces three key designs: 1) a spatiotemporal encoder that incorporates region-based graph convolution to capture localized spatial and functional relationships, enhancing region-specific feature learning and mitigating the impact of varying EEG channel configurations across datasets; 2) a generative learning mechanism based on the joint embedding predictive architecture (JEPA) that utilizes masked features to capture noise robustness fine-grained representations, improving the model's capability to characterize subtle emotional states; and 3) a contrastive learning strategy that leverages masked and original features to learn temporally stable and cross-subject-invariant representations across the same stimuli, boosting emotion discrimination and cross-subject generalization. Under these designs, MGCRL exhibits remarkable ability to learn universal representation. Extensive experiments involving pretraining on the large FACED dataset and fine-tuning on multiple SEED-series datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of MGCRL. --- ### Broken Ergodicity and the Violation of the Fluctuation-Dissipation Theorem Lead to Generalization Beyond Overfitting in Machine Learning Authors: Chan Li, Nigel Goldenfeld Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: cond-mat.dis-nn, cond-mat.stat-mech, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04135v1 The remarkable ability of modern neural networks to generalize improves with increasing network capacity, even when the number of model parameters or effective degrees of freedom exceeds the number of training data points. This phenomenon is all the more surprising given that generalization error diverges when the number of model parameters approaches a critical value from below. Here we use dynamical mean field theory to show that this so-called "double descent" behavior is the outcome of a phase transition in the stochastic field theory describing the training process. We calculate the critical exponents and scaling function of the double descent phase transition, and show that it is marked by a breakdown of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem associated with broken ergodicity. The corresponding response function has the same functional form as the simple London model of the superconducting transition, with the rigidity of the wave function corresponding to the neural network's ability to generalize accurately. --- ### MDL Meets Latent Confounders: LNML-based Causal Discovery Authors: Zhongyi Que, Shin Matsushima, Kenji Yamanishi Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04133v1 Causal discovery with nonlinear mechanisms and latent confounders remains challenging. Existing methods often rely on either linear assumptions or causal sufficiency, limiting their applicability. We propose an MDL-based causal discovery framework that explicitly accounts for latent confounders while allowing flexible nonlinear mechanisms by minimizing the luckiness normalized maximum likelihood (LNML) code-length. The causal relationship between each variable pair is determined by selecting the shortest code-length of the causal model, and we introduce the notion of $Δ$-pseudo-collinearity to identify dependencies induced by latent confounders. Based on these ideas, we develop a greedy algorithm, termed Pseudo-Collinearity Guided Causal Discovery (PCG-CD). Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method accurately recovers directed causal relationships and effectively detects latent confounders. --- ### Real-Time LiDAR Gaussian Splatting SLAM Authors: Seungjun Tak, Yewon Jeon, Jaeik Hwang, SukMin Hwang, Seongbo Ha, Hyeonwoo Yu Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: cs.CV, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04127v1 We present a real-time LiDAR-based framework for Gaussian Splatting SLAM that tightly couples fast G-ICP registration with spherical rasterization-based dense mapping for large-scale sequences. Leveraging LiDAR geometry rather than appearance, we reuse tracking-estimated local covariances to initialize Gaussians with range-aware scales and to derive surface normals for geometry-aware map optimization. We further introduce a covariance-derived geometry score that measures local complexity and drives pruning in planar regions and selective densification in structurally rich areas, while optimized Gaussians and LiDAR-specific confidence cues are fed back to improve tracking robustness. On the Newer College dataset, our method achieves an F-score of 86.78\% using purely online trajectories at real-time speed ($>$20 FPS), and additional experiments on other datasets confirm its stability and scalability. --- ### FRFDet: Efficient UAV Small Object Detection with Symmetric Sampling and Scalable Fusion Authors: Yunzhong Si, Huiying Xu, Xinzhong Zhu, Yang Liu, Yao Dong, Wenhao Zhang, Hongbo Li Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04125v1 Small object detection in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) imagery remains challenging under adverse conditions, including complex weather, low illumination, and sensor noise. These challenges mainly stem from severe background clutter, fine-grained detail degradation, and suboptimal semantic-spatial feature fusion, which jointly hinder robust small-object representation. To this end, we propose FRFDet, a lightweight yet effective single-stage detector tailored for UAV-based small object detection. FRFDet proposes two plug-and-play modules: Inverse Bidirectional Sampling (IBS) and Scale-Feature Relationship Cross-Fusion (SFRCF). IBS preserves critical spatial details via channel expansion-compression and bidirectional pattern reconstruction, improving feature alignment. SFRCF explicitly models scale-dependent fusion behaviors, revealing that inter-group element-wise multiplication favors compact models, while inter-group additive fusion benefits larger architectures. Extensive experiments on VisDrone, UAVDT, HazyDet, and MS COCO demonstrate that FRFDet achieves state-of-the-art performance among lightweight detectors with low computational cost, compact parameters, and fast inference, making it well suited for resource-constrained UAV platforms. --- ### Conflict-Based Lazy Search for Fast Multi-Manipulator Planning Authors: Dongliang Zheng, Zhipeng Wang, Siqi Wang, Yuxi Lu, Bin He, Hesheng Wang, Panagiotis Tsiotras Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04124v1 Employing multiple manipulators can boost efficiency and accomplish tasks that a single manipulator cannot do. However, real-time planning for multiple manipulators in a cluttered workspace still poses significant challenges for planning algorithms. This article proposes a new planning algorithm called Conflict-Based Lazy Search (CBLS) for multimanipulator planning. CBLS is built on Conflict-Based Search (CBS), an efficient multiagent pathfinding (MAPF) algorithm that has shown an order of magnitude speedup over previous approaches (1), (2). CBS addresses MAPF by solving many single-agent pathfinding (SAPF) problems. Thus, its planning time directly depends on the efficiency of the SAPF algorithm adopted. Our CBLS algorithm enhances CBS with precomputation and lazy search. First, a lazily evaluated graph with controlled sparsity is precomputed for a single manipulator. Second, we propose the Lazy Edged-based A* (LEA*) for efficient SAPF. Since edge evaluation is the computational bottleneck of manipulator planning, LEA* uses lazy search and an edge queue to reduce the number of edge evaluations. We show that LEA* is optimally vertex efficient and has improved edge efficiency compared to A*. We apply the proposed CBLS to multi-manipulator planning problems and show its superior performance by comparing it with CBS and a sampling-based algorithm, namely, RRT-Connect. --- ### CertMix: Certified, Data-Efficient Metamaterial Design by Affine Mixing of Aligned Neural-Implicit Weight Spaces Authors: Yifan Wang Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04123v1 Inverse design of mechanical metamaterials seeks a periodic unit cell whose homogenized elastic properties meet a prescribed target, but current learning-based methods are data-hungry, mostly interpolative, and provide no guarantee that the generated design satisfies the specification. We introduce CertMix, a data-efficient framework that represents each exemplar unit cell as a small periodic neural implicit field, specifically a SIREN signed-distance decoder overfit from a shared anchor, so that exemplar weight vectors become aligned and directly comparable. The key observation is that, in this aligned weight space, the homogenized elasticity tensor is approximately linear in the mixing coefficients. Targeted design therefore reduces to a small constrained affine-mixing problem solved with a differentiable periodic homogenizer in the loop. Negative coefficients enable extrapolation beyond the exemplar range, a linearity-mismatch trust region keeps blends valid, and split-conformal calibration converts the mismatch signal into a distribution-free certificate on achieved-property error. From as few as 50 exemplars, CertMix attains a scaled property error of $10^{-4}$, roughly two to three orders of magnitude below conditional generative baselines trained on 1000 cells. It remains accurate far outside the exemplar range, is $57\times$ faster than per-target topology optimization while avoiding checkerboards and enclosed voids, and extends to spatially graded fields, 3D triply periodic surfaces, and a certified running-shoe midsole application. --- ### SOV-CAD: Stepwise Orthographic Views Guided CAD Modeling Sequence Reconstruction Authors: Zhaopeng Feng, Chen Zhi, Xuhong Zhang, Zhengwen Feng, Xinkui Zhao Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04119v2 Reconstructing Computer-Aided Design (CAD) modeling sequences from images is crucial for preserving design intent and supporting parametric editing. However, existing methods typically generate full CAD sequences holistically, overlooking the iterative, feedback-driven nature of human design workflows. We address this limitation by introducing the rich stepwise visual supervision: at each modeling step, the system observes the target's orthographic projections, the projections of the incrementally constructed model, and the active sketch, enabling informed action selection. To effectively leverage this on-the-fly feedback, we propose SOV-CAD, a framework that formulates CAD reconstruction as a sequential decision-making task and employs offline reinforcement learning with a Decision Transformer architecture. This design incorporates continuous visual feedback guided by geometric alignment rewards, resulting in a more accurate and human-like modeling process. Extensive experiments show that SOV-CAD surpasses state-of-the-art methods in CAD sequence reconstruction while exhibiting strong data efficiency. Code of SOV-CAD is available at: https://github.com/LukePhong/SOV-CAD --- ### SOV-CAD: Stepwise Orthographic Views Guided CAD Modeling Sequence Reconstruction Authors: Zhaopeng Feng, Chen Zhi, Xuhong Zhang, Zhengwen Feng, Xinkui Zhao Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04119v1 Reconstructing Computer-Aided Design (CAD) modeling sequences from images is crucial for preserving design intent and supporting parametric editing. However, existing methods typically generate full CAD sequences holistically, overlooking the iterative, feedback-driven nature of human design workflows. We address this limitation by introducing the rich stepwise visual supervision: at each modeling step, the system observes the target's orthographic projections, the projections of the incrementally constructed model, and the active sketch, enabling informed action selection. To effectively leverage this on-the-fly feedback, we propose SOV-CAD, a framework that formulates CAD reconstruction as a sequential decision-making task and employs offline reinforcement learning with a Decision Transformer architecture. This design incorporates continuous visual feedback guided by geometric alignment rewards, resulting in a more accurate and human-like modeling process. Extensive experiments show that SOV-CAD surpasses state-of-the-art methods in CAD sequence reconstruction while exhibiting strong data efficiency. Code of SOV-CAD is available at: https://github.com/LukePhong/SOV-CAD --- ### Parametric Memory Decoding for Zero-Shot Routing in LoRA-Based External Parametric Memory Authors: Fengxian Ji, Zhuohan Xie, Jingpu Yang, Fan Zhang, Zirui Song, Xiuying Chen Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04118v1 With the rise of parametric memory, LoRA-based External Parametric Memory (EPM) has emerged as a modular solution, but existing routing methods often introduce additional training, deployment, and maintenance overhead. This raises a natural question: can a LoRA-based EPM bank be routed without maintaining an additional routing component? However, existing zero-shot LoRA routing methods still face two problems under the EPM setting: (1) their evaluations are scattered across different task settings rather than organized around EPM access, and (2) their routing signals lack a unified perspective to guide systematic improvement. To address these problems, we organize PMD-Bench, covering document-level, domain-level knowledge, and task-skill, and propose Parametric Memory Decoding (PMD), the first framework designed to systematically improve zero-shot LoRA routing by reframing it as decoding activations over external parametric memory. Based on PMD, we further instantiate PMDRouter, which scores each LoRA by its response magnitude from a single base-model prefill. Experiments on PMD-Bench show that PMDRouter achieves the strongest internal-signal performance across multiple zero-shot routing settings. These results demonstrate the feasibility of zero-shot LoRA routing and suggest that PMD can serve as a general framework for improving zero-shot routing methods. Sources: Github (https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Parametric-Memory-Decoding-872A/) --- ### GlacierCastAI: Predicting Glacier Retreat from Multi-Modal Satellite Imagery and Climate Signals Authors: Arunkumar Ramachandran Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04117v1 ERA5 seasonal climate variables contain predictive information about future glacier retreat beyond what satellite imagery alone provides, yet existing deep learning methods focus on mapping current boundaries rather than forecasting future ones. This paper presents GlacierCastAI, which reframes glacier boundary prediction as a multi-modal spatiotemporal forecasting problem, fusing multi-temporal Landsat imagery with ERA5 reanalysis climate variables and Copernicus DEM terrain features to forecast glacier boundaries across five glaciers spanning four climate regimes. The architecture couples a ResNet50 spatial encoder with a ConvLSTM temporal model and a cross-attention climate fusion module. Because forecasting is inherently more uncertain than mapping current boundaries, the reported IoU values (0.320-0.337) are not directly comparable to state-of-the-art mapping models. Comparisons are against traditional baselines and experimental conditions. Through a pre-registered ablation study, adding ERA5 climate signals improves image-only IoU from 0.326 to 0.337 (+3.4%), suggesting that atmospheric forcing carries predictive information beyond imagery alone. All deep learning models substantially outperform persistence and linear trend baselines (IoU 0.160 and 0.169 respectively), with improvements of 89-99% relative IoU. A lightweight climate-only MLP baseline (661K parameters) achieves an IoU of 0.320 (98% of image-only performance) using 85x fewer parameters, suggesting that ERA5 variables encode substantial predictive signal independently of satellite imagery. SHAP attribution analysis suggests that spring solar radiation (MAM) is the dominant climate driver, consistent with the known role of spring insolation in setting melt season trajectories. --- ### Asymptotic Preservation and Uniform Accuracy of Diffusion and Flow-Matching Samplers Authors: Shiheng Zhang Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: cs.LG, math.NA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04113v2 Diffusion and Gaussian-interpolant flow-matching samplers approach data through a terminal noise floor $\varepsilon$, a singular limit for manifold-supported or rank-deficient data. We study two properties of a complete sampler specification, comprising its update rule, time grid, and terminal rule. Asymptotic preservation (AP) means a stable and consistent zero-noise discretization with a step count bounded independently of $\varepsilon$. Uniform accuracy (UA) of order $p$ means that, at numerical resolution $h$, the endpoint $W_2$ error is $O(h^p)$ with a floor-independent constant. Bounded log-noise stepping fails AP because its step count diverges. Stopping a stable base solver at a positive switching scale $a$ and appending one map fitted to the analytic normal mode restores AP. On smooth compact boundaryless manifolds, the standard map has exact-input error $O(a^2-\varepsilon^2)$ and sharp zero-floor error $Θ(a^2)$. A base solver with a floor-uniform order-$p$ estimate on the resolved interval retains that order when $a=O(h^{p/2})$, provided the terminal transfer factor remains bounded. Along exact trajectories, the posterior-mean identity $D(x(σ),σ)=x(σ)-σx'(σ)$ cancels the linear terminal defect and enables higher-order fitted maps. A three-evaluation Hermite construction is uniformly third order for exact switching-scale input over $0\le\varepsilon\le a$, and a seven-evaluation construction is fourth order at zero. We classify representative diffusion and flow-matching specifications by AP and UA. On EDM and Rectified Flow checkpoints, a paired decomposition separates base-integration from terminal-completion error and predicts held-out same-seed endpoint errors. --- ### DynaVieW: Schema-Guided World Modeling for Understanding Hierarchical Visual Dynamics Authors: Silin Gao, Hao Zhao, Zeming Chen, Sepideh Mamooler, Antara Raaghavi Bhattacharya, Qiyu Wu, Hiromi Wakaki, Yuki Mitsufuji, Li Mi, Syrielle Montariol, Antoine Bosselut Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04112v1 Multimodal LLMs struggle to systematically model the temporal evolution of visual scenes in videos or multi-image sequences. Such inputs require models to predict or simulate multiple levels of dynamic constituents, such as actions taken in the visual sequence, and the associated changes to the visual environment that result. To address this challenge, we propose a dynamic schema-guided world model, DynaVieW, optimized for visual dynamic prediction and simulation. DynaVieW achieves an in-depth understanding of visual dynamics by learning interleaved state-transition sequences, where states cover broad visual scenes from video keyframes, and transitions capture comprehensive dynamic constituents within a hierarchical schema. DynaVieW jointly models transition prediction and state simulation under a mixture-of-experts architecture, with a cross-expert selective attention and a schema token re-weighted loss, to ensure effective and robust learning. DynaVieW's understanding of visual dynamics boosts its downstream performance in visual narrative creation and world simulation, showing improved consistency, controllability, and instruction-following. --- ### Dictionaries, Not Darwin: Set-Level Selection Beats LLM Evolution in Scientific Equation Discovery Authors: Pan Li Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04108v1 Large language models are increasingly used as evolutionary engines for scientific discovery: generate candidates, select winners, feed them back as parents, and repeat. We audit whether this loop actually compounds discovery in scientific equation discovery, a setting where finite samples make structure underdetermined and interpolation easy. Under matched LLM-call budgets, parent-conditioned evolution is indistinguishable from fresh independent sampling: median OOD NMSE is 0.045 vs. 0.049, instructed multi-parent crossover is worse, final success is predicted by initial proposal quality, and multiple iteration schemes fail to add solved problems. Operationally, the loop reduces to what it produces: a dictionary of candidate terms. We turn that diagnosis into PTB-Search, a one-generation method for componentized scientific discovery. PTB-Search samples independent LLM proposals once, extracts reusable terms into a per-problem dictionary, and performs train-only set-level sparse selection with least-squares coefficients. Its central principle is that underdetermined data identifies the joint behavior of term sets, not reliable per-term credit. On identical dictionaries and zero additional LLM calls, set-level selectors solve 165--169 of 717 cells, while single-term reductions solve only 74--78. On the official 239-problem LLM-SRBench split, PTB-Search reaches 73.2% Acc0.1 with Llama-3.1-8B and 77.0% with a single-seed DeepSeek-V4 anchor, versus 49.2% for the best reported baseline, using one tenth of the standardized call budget. A program-domain stress test gives a scoped boundary: generation count remains unreliable, while retained external state can help in harder non-linear spaces. Across these results, LLMs are best understood as material suppliers; discovery is carried by external set-level selection over reusable components. --- ### Contextual Semantic Relevance and Word Surprisal Predict N400 and P600 Dynamics During Naturalistic Reading Authors: Kun Sun, Rong Wang Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04107v2 Word surprisal is a well-established computational predictor of human neural responses during language comprehension, but it remains less clear whether local semantic fit explains neural response variation beyond lexical expectation during naturalistic reading. Using the Dublin EEG-based Reading Experiment Corpus (DERCo), this study examined whether contextual semantic relevance predicts word-locked EEG activity in the N400 and P600 windows. Contextual semantic relevance was computed as an attention-aware measure of how strongly a target word is semantically connected to its recent discourse context, and it was compared with GPT-based word surprisal. Across 22 participants and 32 EEG channels, we tested both predictors using regression-based ERP analyses and generalized additive mixed models while controlling for lexical variables and repeated observations. Both predictors were reliably associated with EEG responses, but they showed partly different temporal and scalp-level patterns. Surprisal captured expectancy-related variation, whereas contextual semantic relevance showed robust effects across N400- and P600-window mean voltages, with particularly strong explanatory support in the P600 window. Model comparisons indicated that contextual semantic relevance contributed explanatory value beyond lexical controls and surprisal. These findings suggest that naturalistic reading depends on both lexical expectation and local semantic integration, and that contextual semantic relevance offers an interpretable computational link between discourse semantic fit and ERP dynamics. --- ### Governing Generative AI Across Financial Institutions: A Framework for Generative AI Risk Control Authors: Dennis Mao, Alessandra Lin, Yixin Kang, Yiqing Wang Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: q-fin.RM, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04103v3 Generative artificial intelligence is moving from general-purpose experimentation toward specialized applications across banking, capital markets, insurance, payments, and wealth management. Its main contribution is not limited to conversational interfaces. Modern generative systems can synthesize large document collections, extract information from unstructured data, generate software and analytical code, create scenario narratives, support research workflows, and coordinate multi-step tasks. These capabilities make generative AI especially relevant to finance, where decisions often depend on combining quantitative data with contracts, policies,filings, news, customer communications, and expert judgment. This paper presents an application-oriented view of generative AI in finance. It organizes potential uses around five capability patterns, including knowledge synthesis, content generation, analytical assistance, interaction, and workflow orchestration, and maps them to major financia functions. Representative applications include investment research, customer service, lending support, fraud investigation, financial reporting, operations automation, software development, and personalized financial guidance. The paper also discusses common technical architectures, such as retrieval-augmented generation, tool-using assistants, multimodal models, and agentic workflows, and identifies practical factors that shape business value. The resulting landscape provides a foundation for researchers and practitioners seeking to understand where generative AI may produce the greatest operational and analytical impact in financial services --- ### The Multipath Blind Spot: $K$-Agnostic Robust Calibration for Sparse-Anchor Metric Depth from Frozen Foundations Authors: Sohag Roy, Rajesh Misra, Swami Shastravidyananda, Tamal Maharaj Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04101v1 Monocular depth foundations predict domain-general relative depth but lack absolute scale; a handful of sparse metric anchors from a range sensor can calibrate them to metric depth, an attractive alternative to metric-supervised training. Existing sparse-anchor calibration methods, however, assume the anchors are clean, whereas real sensors produce outliers that are present with the wrong value -- time-of-flight multipath, mixed pixels -- not merely missing. We show that the established residual-on-CFA calibration recipe collapses under such outliers, and that the strongest publicly deployed method, VI-Depth, has a structural multipath blind spot: robust to missing anchors, it falls behind an unprotected baseline on three of four datasets when anchors are present but wrong. We propose Multipath-Robust Anchor Calibration (MRAC), a parameter-free, inference-time wrapper that gates anchors by foundation consistency -- a Theil--Sen fit and a median-absolute-deviation test against the foundation's own relative-depth ordering -- before a single call to the calibration head. MRAC adds no learned parameters, runs its selection in $\approx 50\,μ$s on CPU, and serves anchor budgets $K \in (5,200)$ from one checkpoint. On a $320$-cell benchmark with a same-backbone, same-architecture control, MRAC strictly wins $84\%$ of same-backbone cells across all four outlier families and, against VI-Depth, wins all twelve corrupted multipath cells and all sixteen KITTI cells, reducing KITTI multipath AbsRel by $3.2\times$ ($0.489$ to $0.151$) at zero retraining. --- ### Sparse4D-Radar: An Efficient and Robust Framework for Surround-View 3D Object Detection via 4D Radar-Camera Fusion Authors: Fuyuan Ai, Yuchen Tan, Jiehui Chen, Zhiwei Xu, Chunyi Song Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04098v1 In recent years, 4D imaging radar has gained wide attention in autonomous driving for its robustness against harsh weather and ability to output target velocity. Nevertheless, mainstream 4D radar-camera fusion methods only support front-view perception, lacking mature solutions for surround-view sensing. Directly expanding these pipelines to full 360° coverage introduces excessive computation cost and limits real-world deployment. To tackle these limitations, this work proposes Sparse4D-Radar, an efficient robust surround-view multi-modal fusion framework. We first design a Deformable Fusion module to embed radar-camera features into sparse queries, constructing the lightweight base version Sparse4D-Radar-Base. Two dedicated modules are further introduced to boost localization accuracy and modality stability: Velocity-Consistency Sampling (VCS) refines features via radar velocity cues for motion awareness, and Adaptive Modality Gating (AMG) dynamically adjusts cross-modal fusion weights according to feature confidence. Combining all components, we build Sparse4D-Radar-Acc for high-precision detection demands. Comprehensive experiments on OmniHD-Scenes verify that our approach achieves state-of-the-art surround-view 3D detection performance. Compared with prior arts, our method obtains over 7% mAP and 10% ODS improvements under complex driving scenes while running at nearly 10 FPS, striking a favorable trade-off among detection accuracy, environmental robustness and inference efficiency. Our open-source code is available at https://github.com/Aiuan/Sparse4D-Radar. --- ### Forethought: Verifiable Reasoning from Neurosymbolic Primitive Programming Authors: Vishvesh Bhat, Jay Vaghasiya, Emmanuel Anaya Gonzalez Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04096v1 Current agentic workflows usually involve decomposing user requests into sequences of tool calls with correctly resolved parameters, the results of which are processed through reasoning traces in the language model's context window. The prevailing route to improve such reasoning is test-time scaling, which trains models to search over long chains of thought; but the resulting capability is entangled in model weights, is not verifiable step-by-step, and is costly at inference. We present Forethought, a neurosymbolic reasoning system that instead treats reasoning as an explicit, verifiable program, that builds from a library of symbolic and neural primitives which are composed through a domain-specific language. The result are reasoning programs, which are concrete representations of the model's work, and as such can be inspected and modified before deployment. Instantiated as a tool-calling execution kernel and evaluated across five benchmarks, Forethought improves base-model accuracy by about 30% relative and outperforms vanilla prompting, reinforcement learning scaffolds, and prompt-evolution methods, enabling small models to match or exceed frontier models capabilities. In a direct comparison, a non-reasoning model augmented with Forethought competes with a dedicated reasoning model while requiring roughly three orders of magnitude less post-training investment, and remains model-agnostic and auditable. --- ### Target-Aware Interaction-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Black-Box Node Injection Attacks on Graph Neural Networks Authors: Yi Lan, Ye Yuan Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04091v1 Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have achieved remarkable performance in graph representation learning, yet their inherent vulnerability to adversarial attacks poses severe security risks. Especially, black-box node injection attacks have become a major threat to GNNs since they inject malicious nodes without altering the original graph topology. However, they typically decouple the generation of malicious node features and edge connections, thereby resulting in suboptimal attack efficacy under stringent budgets. To address this critical issue, this study proposes a novel Target-aware Interaction-guided Reinforcement learning for Black-box node injection Attacks on GNNs (TIRBA), which formulates the attack as a Markov Decision Process and jointly optimizes node feature generation and edge construction in a heterogeneous action space. Firstly, TIRBA designs a target-aware interaction encoder to fuse information of node features and edges. Further, it introduces a class-center guidance mechanism to utilize prior class distribution information, thereby guiding efficient exploration of the high-dimensional feature space. Finally, a topology difference-aware state value evaluation is adopted to explicitly capture local structural anomalies caused by injected nodes, thereby stabilizing the reinforcement learning training process. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed TIRBA significantly outperforms state-of-the-art black-box node injection attack methods. --- ### PLACEMEM: Toward a Compute-Aware Memory Plane for Lifelong Agents Authors: Sukanta Ganguly Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04089v1 Lifelong agents need more than larger context windows and better retrieval. They need memories that can persist, evolve, and be corrected without forcing the serving stack to recompute the same history on every turn or silently reuse stale runtime state. We present PLACEMEM as a systems position on lifelong-agent memory, instantiated by an executable control-plane prototype. The central claim is that agent memory should be represented as versioned capsules that unify semantics, provenance, validity, and reusable runtime state under one correction-aware identity. In the current prototype, capsules drive prompt-level text retrieval, KV-aware routing, and cascading invalidation over live streamed backends; prospective layer-frontier replay is intentionally framed as a deeper integration agenda rather than a claimed engine feature. We describe a vLLM-first prototype with persistent capsule state, concurrency-safe invalidation, an OpenAI-compatible routing sidecar, a typed metadata contract, and a benchmark harness that measures live first-token latency, reuse, and post-correction behavior. The result is both an executable artifact that demonstrates correction-aware control-plane behavior today and a concrete roadmap for replay-aware serving integration in future lifelong-agent systems. --- ### Submitted and Diagnostic Analysis of Full-Text Temporal Retrieval for LongEval-Sci Authors: Yingdong Yang, Haijian Wu Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04088v1 LongEval-Sci evaluates scientific retrieval under collection change, where a system should be effective on the current corpus and remain usable as documents accumulate over time. This paper reports both official Task 1 results and development diagnostics for LongEval-Sci 2026. We compare the official PyTerrier BM25 and Qwen3 dense baselines with full-text BM25, additive and router variants, temporal full-text retrieval, temporal+citation retrieval, RM3 query expansion, cross-encoder reranking, and reciprocal rank fusion (RRF). In the official DCTR evaluation, the temporalized full-text runs are our strongest submissions: FT BM25+temporal and FT BM25+temporal+citation obtain the best ARP on all three snapshots (0.285, 0.267, and 0.180 nDCG@10) and reduce snapshot-3 relative change from 0.481 for the BM25 pivot to 0.368. Citation features match the temporal-only variant but do not provide a measurable additional gain in the official summary. Our internal snapshot-1 diagnostics show a complementary pattern: full-text BM25 is the strongest single development retriever (DCTR nDCG@10 = 0.3302, MAP = 0.2853), RRF gives the best deep recall (Recall@1000 = 0.9667), and some uncalibrated overlays can sharply degrade top-rank quality. We therefore conclude that full-text retrieval is the strongest foundation, temporal integration can improve official longitudinal effectiveness when applied to that foundation, and citation evidence still requires cleaner ablation and calibration. Beyond ranking, we also report a qualitative weekly IR-system update-monitoring analysis based on ingestion velocity and stale-coverage drift. --- ### FedSPM: Routing-Enabled Federated Learning under Dual Heterogeneity via Semiparametric Mixture Authors: Zijian Wang, Pengfei Li, Guangyu Yang, Qiong Zhang Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.DC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04085v1 Routing-prediction federated learning has emerged as a new paradigm that reframes inter-client heterogeneity as a resource for system-level intelligence: at inference time, the server routes each external query to the best-matched client for prediction. Existing approaches, however, typically treat each client as internally homogeneous, overlooking latent subpopulations within local data. For example, patients with the same diagnosis at one hospital may exhibit morphologically distinct disease subtypes. The coexistence of inter-client and intra-client heterogeneity, which we call dual heterogeneity, can impair both routing and prediction. To address this challenge, we propose FedSPM, a routing-enabled semiparametric mixture framework that represents each client using client-specific latent components. Each component combines a predictive distribution for classification with a feature distribution for routing. To flexibly model feature distributions while effectively sharing information across clients, FedSPM models their density ratios relative to a common nonparametric measure estimated via empirical likelihood. We develop a federated expectation-maximization algorithm that optimizes a tractable surrogate and prove convergence of the exact profiled objective at the standard $\mathcal{O}(1/\sqrt{T})$ rate when the surrogate errors are properly controlled. Experiments on controlled benchmarks and real-world medical data demonstrate consistent improvements in routing and prediction under dual heterogeneity. Code is available at https://github.com/zijianwang0510/FedSPM. --- ### A Unified Framework for In-Context Learning with Causal and Masked Language Models Authors: Chenrui Liu, Chuanlong Xie, Falong Tan, Yicheng Zeng, Lixing Zhu Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04081v1 In-context learning (ICL) has emerged as a central capability of pretrained language models, yet its theoretical analysis has focused primarily on causal language models trained by left-to-right autoregressive prediction, such as GPT-style models. Masked language models instead recover masked tokens from bidirectional context, and their role in ICL remains less understood. We develop a statistical learning framework that represents the context examples by their empirical measure and models prediction as a function of the context and the query. This formulation places autoregressive and masked pretraining objectives within a common excess-risk analysis. Under Wasserstein-type regularity conditions, we relate pretraining with T tasks and N samples per task to k-shot excess risk at inference, obtaining same-order upper bounds for masked and autoregressive objectives. We also study task-distribution shift, where pretraining tasks are sampled from P and inference tasks from Q; the resulting bound contains an additional term controlled by the lifted Wasserstein distance between P and Q. The bounds further imply an order-optimal allocation under a fixed pretraining data budget and refined rates under intrinsic low-dimensional structure. Experiments on controlled function-learning tasks show that the Masked Pair Encoder (MPE) can achieve performance comparable to GPT-2-style causal Transformers, suggesting that ICL behavior is not specific to causal language models. --- ### Seeing Once is Enough? Online Geometry-Aware Token Pruning for 3D Question Answering Authors: Ruei-Chi Lai, Bolivar Solarte, Chin-Hsuan Wu, Yi-Hsuan Tsai, Min Sun Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04079v1 Recent Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on 2D question answering tasks. However, extending these models to the 3D question answering remains challenging, as they typically require multiple views of the scene, which incurs substantial computational cost at inference. To mitigate this issue, existing solutions rely on strategic frame selection or token-merging algorithms that require preprocessing in advance all frames of the scene, i.e., an offline fashion. In contrast, we propose the first online token-pruning method that can be integrated seamlessly with current MLLM models for 3D question answering tasks, without additional training and with lower memory usage.Our key insight is to project each input frame into a shared voxel space using depth information and camera pose, identifying spatially-overlapped regions across frames and selectively pruning redundant image tokens before they enter the language model. Our method enables efficient online processing while reducing up to 50% of token usage. We apply this approach to Qwen2.5-VL-7B and Qwen3-VL-8B, demonstrating improved performance on the ScanQA, SQA3D, and OpenEQA-HM3D benchmarks. --- ### Benchmarking API Drift in LLM-Generated Quantum Code Across Successive SDK Versions Authors: Mohammad Arif Rasyidi, Syahirul Faiz Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI, quant-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04072v1 Large language models can generate plausible quantum code, but it is unclear whether they can reliably target the specific software development kit (SDK) version requested by the user. We study this problem as API drift and introduce quantum-api-drift, a benchmark for measuring version fidelity, defined here as execution success on the requested SDK version, cross-version compatibility, failure modes, and documentation-guided repair in LLM-generated quantum SDK code. We instantiate the benchmark with Qiskit, a representative quantum SDK that underwent substantial interface changes across v0.43, v1.3, and v2.0. We evaluate 17 models on 50 tasks with 3 samples per prompt, yielding 450 generated samples and 1,350 executions per model. Sixteen models are tested in a matched REST API setting with a 1024-token output cap, while GPT-5.4 (Codex CLI) is reported separately as a reference configuration. Across the 16 matched REST models, diagonal Pass@1 ranges from 0.02 to 0.85. Claude Opus 4.7 is strongest on v0.43 and v2.0, while Grok 4.20 is strongest on v1.3 at 0.513. Error profiles differ systematically by model strength: weaker models fail mainly with broken imports, while stronger models more often reach deprecation-level failures. Documentation-guided repair succeeds for 0.19 to 0.59 of repair attempts overall and is consistently much more effective for migration to v2.0 than to v1.3. The benchmark artifacts are publicly available at https://github.com/arasyi/quantum-api-drift. These results show that version alignment is a distinct evaluation axis for quantum code generation and that API drift remains only partly recoverable even with migration guidance. --- ### Beyond Multilingual Averages: MTEB-PT, a Benchmark for Portuguese Sentence Encoders Authors: Lucas Hideki Takeuchi Okamura, Alexandre Alcoforado, Anna Helena Reali Costa Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04071v2 Portuguese remains underrepresented in text embedding evaluation, despite being one of the most widely spoken languages in the world. As a result, embedding models are often selected based on English or multilingual metrics, while their effectiveness in Portuguese remains unclear. We present MTEB-PT, a Portuguese benchmark constructed from a subset of MMTEB, comprising 14 existing datasets across Semantic Textual Similarity (STS), classification, retrieval, and reranking. We use this benchmark to evaluate 17 open- and closed-source embedding models under a unified protocol. Our results show that Portuguese performance is strongly task-dependent: multilingual rankings do not reliably predict Portuguese-specific performance across task families, no single model dominates all settings, and models with stronger long-context capacity are particularly advantageous on longer-input tasks such as retrieval and reranking. The benchmark also shows that language-specific fine-tuning still improves model performance in Portuguese, especially on task types that match the adaptation data most closely. To examine this effect, we fine-tune three representative backbone models with Portuguese contrastive supervision and Matryoshka Representation Learning (MRL). These benchmark-informed baselines yield their strongest gains on STS, consistent with the predominantly symmetric supervision used during training, while also improving retrieval and remaining competitive under dimensional truncation. We release the MTEB-PT benchmark, the fine-tuned models, and the training and evaluation code. --- ### Enhancing Implicit Neural Representations with Image Feature Embedding for Unsupervised Cardiac Cine MRI Reconstruction Authors: Donghang Lyu, Marius Staring, Yiming Dong, Keupp Jochen, Hildo J. Lamb, Mariya Doneva Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04069v1 Cardiac cine Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a critical diagnostic tool that provides dynamic insights for radiologists. To accelerate acquisition, under-sampled k-space data is often used, requiring reconstruction methods that combine coil sensitivity encoding with prior information to recover missing data. Deep learning approaches have gained more attention for leveraging data-adaptive priors. While supervised learning approaches are a common choice, they depend on fully sampled reference data, which is not always available. Unsupervised methods eliminate the need for fully sampled reference data, which can be advantageous in cardiac cine MRI reconstruction. Among them, implicit neural representations (INRs) have shown great potential due to their simple architecture and good quality reconstructions. In this work, we propose an image-domain dual-branch INR framework, termed I-FP-INR, which extends the original INR design by introducing an additional feature-processing branch. This design aims to extract complementary feature embeddings to enhance the overall representation, thereby benefiting reconstruction. Extensive evaluations on both public datasets and in-house data show consistent improvements over baseline methods in reconstruction quality, with strong robustness across varied scenarios. --- ### Speaker-Disentangled Chunk-Wise Regression for Syllabic Tokenization Authors: Ryota Komatsu, Kota Kawakita, Takuma Okamoto, Takahiro Shinozaki Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.SD, eess.AS arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04064v1 Unsupervised syllabic tokenization aims to learn discrete syllabic tokens that capture latent linguistic content-related structure from raw speech. Recent syllabic tokenization methods employ teacher-student distillation of the pretrained HuBERT to organize latent speech frame representations into syllabic segments. However, when trained with an utterance-level cross-entropy objective, the model predicts speaker identity rather than linguistic content, thereby compromising the purity of syllabic tokens. To address this problem, we propose a speaker-disentangled syllabic tokenizer that regresses speaker-perturbed student representations toward clean teacher targets within fixed-length chunks. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance in syllable boundary detection and syllabic segment clustering. Moreover, a speech language model trained on our syllabic tokens achieves a 7% relative improvement in syntactic and semantic understanding over the phone-level SpiRit-LM. --- ### Fast, Parallel, Query-Efficient Binary Classification Authors: Ishani Karmarkar, Liam O'Carroll, Aaron Sidford Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: math.OC, cs.DS, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04062v1 We study the fundamental classification problem of computing a separating hyperplane for a binary-labeled dataset of size $n$ with normalized $d$-dimensional features. Letting $Φ\in \mathbb{R}^{n \times d}$ denote the feature matrix and $γ$ the margin of the maximum-margin separating hyperplane, we present a randomized algorithm that solves this problem in $\tilde{O}(γ^{-2/3}\, \operatorname{nnz}(Φ) + γ^{-2(ω+1)/3})$-sequential running time (work), $\tilde{O}(γ^{-2/3})$-parallel (computational) depth, and accesses $Φ$ only through $\tilde{O}(γ^{-2/3})$-matrix-vector queries (matvecs). We also present a second, faster randomized algorithm with a $\tilde{O}(γ^{-2/3}\, \operatorname{nnz}(Φ) + γ^{-2})$-sequential running time that uses $\tilde{O}(γ^{-2/3})$-matvecs to $Φ$, but achieves only $\tilde{O}(γ^{-4/3})$-parallel depth. Both algorithms match the near-optimal deterministic matvec complexity recently established by Kornowski and Shamir (2025), Karmarkar et al. (2026) and achieve improved sequential runtime and parallel depth, albeit at the expense of using randomness. --- ### Telescope: Improving Zero Shot Detection of LLM Generated Content By Measuring Token Repetition Probability Authors: Christopher Nassif, Josh F. Cooper Published: 2026-07-05 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.04061v1 Distinguishing Large Language Model (LLM) generated text from human writing is a critical and difficult challenge. While LLMs are trained to write like humans, we hypothesize that this training leaves an indelible mark. LLMs develop a particularly strong aversion to token repetition very early in training. This bias persists as a ''Vestigial Heuristic'' (a developmental artifact) that is activated in LLM-generated text, separating LLM from human writing. To probe this phenomenon, we introduce Telescope Perplexity, a metric that evaluates the token repetition of the model, $P(s_i | s_{1:i})$ . Our empirical investigation reveals that the Telescope Perplexity signature emerges early in pre-training, and Telescope Perplexity empirically enables highly effective zero-shot LLM detection. We show state-of-the-art or competitive performance across diverse datasets (including modern evaluation sets we introduce), reference models, and perturbation schemes with greater efficiency than other methods. --- ### GEPARD - Generative, Prosody-aware, Autoregressive text-to-speech model for Realtime Dialogue Authors: Denis Pavlov, Ulanbek Abdurazakov, Nursultan Bakashov Published: 2026-07-04 Categories: eess.AS, cs.CL, cs.LG, cs.SD arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.04222v1 We present GEPARD (Generative, Prosody-aware, Autoregressive text-to-speech model for Realtime Dialogue), a streaming text-to-speech model for real-time spoken dialogue. GEPARD generates speech autoregressively with an LLM backbone - text and audio embeddings are trained together in a single decoder-only model - and decodes it to a waveform with an FSQ-based neural codec, streaming audio chunk-by-chunk as text arrives. Our central goal is a TTS architecture served by a standard LLM engine (vLLM) without modifying its compute kernels. This defines the overarching design principle: the backbone is a standard full-attention transformer, while all non-trivial auxiliary mechanisms - zero-shot voice cloning, text augmentation, and classifier-free guidance - are moved out of the autoregressive decode loop into prefill, or distilled directly into the weights. On streaming end-to-end inference, a single stream reaches a Real-Time Factor of about 0.067 (roughly 15x faster than real-time); under 256 concurrent streams the system reaches an aggregate speedup of about 204x on a single server-class GPU. We detail: (1) system-level solutions for vLLM-native serving; (2) the "short register" (1-2 word) failure mode of autoregressive speech decoders, with diagnostic probes and a mitigation; and (3) distillation of two-pass classifier-free guidance over text into single-pass weights via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). --- ### Distilled Rapid Embedding Transfer (DRET): Parameter-Efficient Biomedical Domain Adaptation via Priority-Based Embedding Transfer Authors: Girish Sundaram, Daniel Berleant Published: 2026-07-04 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.02898v1 Large domain-specific language models such as BioBERT and ClinicalBERT achieve strong performance on biomedical NLP tasks, but their computational demands make them impractical for many real-world deployments. General-purpose, parameter-efficient models such as DistilBERT are lightweight yet lack the domain knowledge required for specialized tasks such as PICO (Population, Intervention, Comparison, Outcome) classification. We introduce Distilled Rapid Embedding Transfer (DRET), a knowledge-transfer paradigm that injects biomedical domain knowledge from large specialized models into a smaller general-purpose model without retraining on the original specialized corpora. DRET is developed as an iterative family of strategies: a unified tokenizer-merge strategy (DRET 1.x), hybrid embedding averaging (DRET 2.0), and a priority-based embedding-transfer mechanism (DRET 3.x) that hierarchically selects embeddings from the most authoritative source models, further combined with embedding-layer freezing, differential learning rates, label propagation, and imbalance-aware loss functions (DRET 4.x). We evaluate DRET on token-level PICO classification using the EBM-NLP corpus under severe class imbalance, across a twelve-metric battery. DRET-enhanced DistilBERT (66M parameters) attains balanced accuracy, recall, and ROC-AUC competitive with, and on several class-wise metrics exceeding, models an order of magnitude larger, while retaining DistilBERT's efficiency. We further show that transfer occurs at the embedding level through cosine-similarity, semantic-shift, and t-SNE analyses. DRET offers a scalable, resource-efficient route to near-domain-expert performance for biomedical text mining, with direct application to automated systematic literature reviews and clinical decision support. --- ### C3-UniMM: Causal Cycle-Consistent Unified Multimodal Modeling via Super Alignment and Shared Decoding Space Authors: Yujie Shen, Lianlei Shan Published: 2026-07-04 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.28603v1 Unified Multimodal Models aim to achieve any-to-any understanding and generation across arbitrary modalities. However, existing methods primarily rely on modeling implicit statistical correlations and lack cross-modal structural consistency constraints. This deficiency leads to profound issues, including semantic drift, poor compositional generalization, and instability under interventions. In this paper, we propose C3-UniMM, a unified multimodal modeling framework based on Causal Cycle Consistency and Super Alignment. Specifically, we introduce a Structured Latent Causal Graph (SLCG) as a shared cross-modal semantic space and design unified multimodal encoding blocks, enabling understanding and generation to be synergistically optimized within the identical causal semantic structure. Furthermore, we propose a Unified Decoding Space to enforce structural preservation and semantic invertibility during the cross-modal generation process. Theoretical analyses demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances both the invertibility and mechanism invariance of cross-modal mappings. Extensive experimental results across multiple understanding, generation, and compositional generalization tasks indicate that C3-UniMM substantially outperforms existing unified multimodal baselines. --- ### Selection Bias Correction in Retail Intelligence Authors: Spandan Ghose Chowdhury Published: 2026-07-04 Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26156v1 Retail intelligence often relies on monitoring popular, high-velocity products, potentially biasing economic indicators by ignoring the "long tail" of niche items. This simulation study investigates selection bias in inflation estimation and compares correction methods across diverse data-generating processes. Through 400 Monte Carlo replications spanning four scenarios--aligned step functions, smooth gradients, misaligned breaks, and polynomial relationships--we test the robustness of Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW) with five specifications against stratification with varying strata counts. Our findings reveal fundamental limits of weighting methods in retail long-tail contexts: stratification achieves superior performance in three of four scenarios, maintaining sub-0.04pp median error even when boundaries deliberately misalign with population breaks (116x advantage over IPW). However, IPW with spline propensity models wins under smooth polynomial relationships (median error 0.007pp vs. 0.013pp), demonstrating context-dependency. Critically, even an oracle IPW specification with perfect structural knowledge achieves 6.06pp error compared to stratification's 0.008pp in step-function scenarios. This reflects violation of the Positivity Assumption--a fundamental causal inference requirement--rather than IPW methodological inferiority. When selection probabilities differ dramatically (90% vs. 1%), weighting methods operate outside their theoretical design envelope. These results demonstrate that stratification provides a safer engineering choice in retail long-tail distributions with severe positivity violations. --- ### VFA: Empowering Multilingual MLLMs via Vision-Free Adaptation Authors: Yixia Li, Yaqing Shi, Zhiwen Ruan, Dongdong Zhang, Lingjie Jiang, Shaohan Huang, Yun Chen, Guanhua Chen, Furu Wei Published: 2026-07-04 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26155v1 Multimodal large language models have advanced rapidly, yet most remain English-centric, as scaling multilingual multimodal instruction tuning is limited by the scarcity and high cost of high-quality non-English image-text supervision. Although multilingual text data is abundant, naive textual fine-tuning can disrupt vision-language alignment and induce catastrophic forgetting. We propose Vision-Free Adaptation (VFA), a framework that decouples multilingual language enhancement from visual alignment by composing complementary task vectors over a shared LLM backbone. Specifically, we fine-tune a base LLM on multilingual text data to derive a multilingual task vector, which is then merged with the vision-aligned task vector of an MLLM. Experiments on five MLLMs across six multilingual multimodal benchmarks show consistent improvements while preserving both general multimodal and text-only capabilities. Moreover, using less than 2% of the text data, VFA narrows the gap to the fully multimodal-trained model, demonstrating its data efficiency. --- ### Position: AI Leaderboards Are Underserving the Global South: A Case Study from India Authors: Sourav Banerjee, Saikat Saha Published: 2026-07-04 Categories: cs.AI, econ.GN arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18117v1 This position paper argues that AI leaderboards are structurally ill-suited to serving the Global South because they lack independent governance, conflict-of-interest policies, and mechanisms for metric evolution. The barrier is not missing data; high-quality regional benchmarks already exist: IndicSUPERB, MILU, and LAHAJA for India; IrokoBench for Africa; AlGhafa for Arabic. The barrier is institutional design. Global leaderboards do not include these benchmarks, and no governance mechanism compels them to do so. Commercial pressure corrects leaderboard failures when paying customers in the Global North are affected. The Global South lacks equivalent leverage. Without governance, failures affecting Hindi, Swahili, or Arabic speakers persist indefinitely as documented but unaddressed gaps. Using India as a case study (1.4 billion people, 22 scheduled languages, high-quality benchmarks, but no trusted aggregation), we report findings from a consultation with 58 AI practitioners showing consistent preference for formal governance and disclosure-based conflict management. The solution is not more data but better institutions: regional leaderboards with independent governance from the start. --- ### Agentao: A Policy-Governed Runtime Harness for Embeddable Tool-Using LLM Agents Authors: Bo Jin, Qiang Jiao, Xin Tong Published: 2026-07-04 Categories: cs.AI, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13574v2 LLM agents increasingly operate as execution systems that invoke tools, modify local state, use persistent memory, and interact with external protocols. These capabilities make agents useful, but they also introduce risks related to over-privileged actions, weak auditability, prompt injection, tool poisoning, and uncontrolled side effects. This paper presents Agentao, a governed local-first runtime for tool-using LLM agents. Agentao separates model-generated action proposals from host-authorized execution through a layered architecture consisting of host-facing surfaces, a host contract, a runtime core, a permission-mediated tool system, and supporting subsystems for memory, replay, plugins, skills, sub-agents, and protocol integration. We describe the motivation, threat model, design goals, governance model, execution pipeline, and structured event interface of the system. Agentao does not provide formal safety guarantees; rather, it demonstrates how permissions, state, protocol boundaries, and execution traces can be made explicit runtime abstractions for building agents that are more governable, inspectable, and suitable for host-controlled local environments. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/jin-bo/agentao . --- ### Regulatory Approval Is Not Enough: Gaps in Trustworthy AI Reporting in FDA-Cleared Medical Devices Authors: Ahmed M Salih, Oliver Díaz, Alejandro Guzman, Noah Marquez Vara, Fotios Avgoustidis, Rituraj Singh, Saman Barakat, Zahra Raisi-Estabragh, Karim Lekadir Published: 2026-07-04 Categories: cs.CY, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12360v1 Background: AI/ML-enabled medical devices are increasingly deployed in healthcare under evolving regulatory frameworks. As these systems become more integrated into clinical decision-making, there is growing expectation that they demonstrate key dimensions of trustworthy AI to support clinician, patient, and public trust. Whether publicly available regulatory documentation provides sufficient evidence to independently assess the trustworthiness of cleared AI systems remains unclear. Methods: We analysed FDA AI/ML-enabled medical device summary reports published between 2021 and 2025. Reports underwent automated keyword screening followed by multi-stage manual consensus review to identify documented evidence for the six FUTURE-AI principles: Fairness, Universality, Traceability, Usability, Robustness, and Explainability. Descriptive, temporal, and clinical-domain analyses were performed. Multivariable logistic regression assessed whether year of clearance or clinical domain predicted higher reporting transparency, defined as evidence reported for three or more principles. Results: Of 1,105 FDA summary reports screened, 519 were included. Trustworthy AI reporting was limited and uneven. Nearly one quarter (24.7%) provided no evidence for any principle, and none documented evidence across all six. Robustness was most frequently reported (57.6%), while Traceability (8.3%) and Explainability (3.5%) were the most pronounced gaps. Neither year of clearance (OR 1.02, 95% CI 0.88-1.19) nor clinical domain (OR 0.73, 95% CI 0.46-1.15) predicted higher reporting transparency. Interpretation: Substantial, persistent trustworthy AI reporting gaps exist in FDA documentation. Regulatory approval alone should not be considered a proxy for trustworthiness. Standardised, audit-ready reporting across the AI lifecycle is needed to support independent assessment and responsible adoption of healthcare AI. --- ### Interaction Readiness: A Framework for Building and Evaluating AI Agents in Human Roles Authors: Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh Published: 2026-07-04 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12358v1 Product and engineering teams building role-bearing AI agents face an evaluation gap: an agent can produce accurate, safe, and fluent content while still failing the behavioral requirements of its assigned role. This paper introduces Interaction Readiness as a framework for specifying and evaluating that missing layer of performance. The framework separates content specifications, which govern what an agent knows and says, from interaction specifications, which define how an agent should conduct itself in a role-governed exchange. Interaction specifications require teams to define role purpose, authority boundaries, recurring situations, boundary cases, repair behaviors, and audit criteria before deployment. We operationalize interaction readiness through four agent operations: understanding purpose, calibrating authority, managing tone, and repairing breakdowns. Using StudyChat, a public dataset of student interactions with an AI tutoring agent, we show that content accuracy and interaction quality are independent dimensions: an agent may be factually correct while failing as a tutor, or interactionally sound while technically wrong. The most persistent failure is authority miscalibration: the agent often knows how to answer, but not whether, when, or how the tutor role permits it to answer. The paper translates these findings into a specification template and audit procedures that product and engineering teams can apply before and after deployment --- ### Measuring Curriculum-Labor Market Alignment at the Scale of a Program Portfolio Authors: Sherzod Turaev, Saja Aldabet, Mary John, Namya Musthafa, Mamoun Awad, Nazar Zaki, Khaled Shuaib Published: 2026-07-04 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12356v1 A college offering several overlapping computing degrees implicitly assumes that its programs are differentiated in line with how the labor market segments computing work and that, together, they prepare graduates for that market. Testing this is difficult, because the instruments available to curriculum committees, namely advisory boards, tracer studies, and employer surveys, are slow, narrow, and hard to reproduce. We apply one uniform, taxonomy-anchored alignment analysis across all five undergraduate programs of a College of Information Technology, comparing 1,922 course learning outcomes against 103,349 competencies extracted from a unified corpus of 5,186 deduplicated job openings from four boards. Every competency is obtained by a grounded single-language-model procedure that copies it verbatim from the source and verifies it against the source, then assigns it to one of eleven ESCO-aligned domains and a Bloom cognitive level; the curricular supply is read not as a catalog but on a realized-attainment basis that respects the credit-hour and elective constraints under which a student completes a degree. The extraction is validated blind by two independent faculty raters (domain kappa 0.91, Bloom level kappa 0.86) and the ESCO matching against a human-adjudicated gold set (kappa 0.72). Four findings emerge. The content gaps are systemic rather than program-specific, concentrated in systems, software engineering, security, and web development; the shared college core satisfies only about a third of the demanded competencies; the programs are well differentiated in disciplinary content yet homogeneous in where they fall short; and the curriculum is pitched roughly a full Bloom level below the market across the portfolio, most acutely in systems. We discuss the implications for program design, curriculum governance, and the practice of curriculum analytics. --- ### Humans are Missing from AI Coding Agent Research Authors: Zora Z. Wang, John Yang, Kilian Lieret, Alexa Tartaglini, Valerie Chen, Yuxiang Wei, Zijian Wang, Lingming Zhang, Karthik Narasimhan, Ludwig Schmidt, Graham Neubig, Daniel Fried et al. Published: 2026-07-04 Categories: cs.HC, cs.AI, cs.SE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.12355v1 Recent progress in AI coding agent research has led to rapid improvements in agents' ability to autonomously perform complex software engineering tasks, from editing large codebases to executing long-horizon development workflows. As these systems make strides, however, the primary bottleneck to practical usefulness increasingly shifts away from pure task-solving capability, and toward challenges in how users communicate with, supervise, and trust agents. In this position paper, we argue for a reorientation from autonomous to human-centered coding agents: systems designed not only to complete tasks, but to collaborate effectively with people. We identify four core interaction-level dimensions that characterize the human-agent task-solving loop: task alignment, verifiability, steerability, and adaptability. Finally, we outline concrete research directions to advance these dimensions, including user-involved coding environments, comprehensive verification mechanisms, and principled measures of human-agent interaction quality. ---