# Research Papers — 2026-07 · bundle page 201 of 222 > Full-text markdown of papers #10001–10050 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/201 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/200.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/202.md) ### Where Knowledge and Authority Sit Changes What an Agent Benchmark Can Resolve Authors: Dan C. Hsu, Luke Lu Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02975v2 Most agent benchmarks put facts, tools and permissions behind one interface. Real organizations spread them across people. Incognita asks what happens when the task and success criterion stay fixed but access does not. We transform eighteen customer-service tasks into three settings: direct access, one known intermediary, and six role-isolated participants whose capabilities must be discovered. Across 864 trials with four models, social access reduced success for every model; the pre-specified intervals excluded zero for two. The latest tested model, gpt-5.6-sol, achieved the highest social-access success at 0.65, a 0.11 decrease from centralized indirect access with an interval that included zero. Exploratory comparisons separated five of six model pairs under social access, while neither centralized setting separated any at this sample size. In post-hoc task-blocked tests, three pairwise interaction $p$-values remained significant after multiplicity adjustment. A reference-relative reader associates the wider gaps with failures to obtain needed information. Because the data cannot distinguish ineffective requests by the evaluated agent from inaccurate replies by simulated participants, the reader's labels describe where trajectories stopped, not why models differed. --- ### Evaluating Generative Agents with Actions Grounded in Socially Distributed Task Environments using Incognita Authors: Dan C. Hsu, Luke Lu Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02975v1 Effective agency in social environments depends on when an agent seeks knowledge, when it acts, and whether its actions are justified by acquired information. Existing grounded benchmarks provide executable actions, persistent state, and verifiable outcomes, while social simulation environments provide rich interaction among language agents. We study an evaluation setting that combines these requirements. We define socially distributed task environments as interactive environments where task-relevant knowledge is partitioned across role-isolated participants and consequential actions are accessible only through them. Communication serves as exploration over role-partitioned knowledge, while grounded action serves as exploitation over environment state. We introduce Incognita, a Concordia-based framework that separates social interaction from grounded execution. The evaluated agent routes messages to a user or specialist entities; specialists mediate admissible operations; a deterministic sub-environment executes accepted operations over a canonical state; and an offline evaluator scores outcomes with inherited rewards. Incognita-Retail transforms tau-bench retail into a multi-entity environment while preserving final-state reward semantics. We evaluate three generative agent models on 18 tasks stratified by social breadth, with 540 trials. Progress appears in reward and behavior: success rises from 0 percent to 8.9 percent and 17.2 percent, while premature finalization falls from 100 percent to 87 percent and 58 percent. Stronger models elicit more hidden knowledge, contact more entities, and attempt more grounded writes, yet reliability remains low. These findings show that socially distributed task environments expose behavior before reliable success, including knowledge elicitation, source selection, grounded action attempts, and premature completion belief. --- ### Awakening Diffusion Transformers: Eliciting Stronger Generation and Understanding via Massive Activation Modulation Authors: Chaofan Gan, Zicheng Zhao, Yuanpeng Tu, Xi Chen, Ziran Qin, Tieyuan Chen, Supavadee Aramvith, Mehrtash Harandi, Weiyao Lin Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02968v1 Massive Activations (MAs) have been widely observed in Transformer-based models, yet their structure and functional roles in Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) remain insufficiently understood. In this work, we systematically analyze MAs in representative DiTs and find that they are spatially distributed across image tokens while concentrated in a small set of fixed feature dimensions. We further show that these dimensions are closely aligned with AdaLN residual scaling factors and are primarily modulated by the denoising timestep rather than text conditions. This structure leads to two task-dependent effects: for generation, MAs are critical for fine-grained detail synthesis while having limited influence on global semantics; for understanding, their shared high-magnitude directions make raw DiT features overly similar across spatial tokens and weaken dense feature discrimination. Based on these findings, we introduce Eliciting Massive Activation (EMA), a training-free framework that leverages Massive Activations (MAs) as a unified modulation signal to improve both generative and representational capabilities of DiTs. For generation, EMA proposes MA-driven Detail G}uidance (DG), which suppresses MA dimensions to construct a detail-deficient counterfactual prediction and guides sampling toward finer visual details. DG further supports efficient partial-forward inference, integration with classifier-free guidance, and token-level Local DG for refining selected image regions. For understanding, EMA introduces MA-modulated REPresentation extraction (MREP), which uses pretrained AdaLN channel-wise modulation to reduce MA directional dominance and concatenates spatially normalized MA maps to preserve useful spatial structure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EMA consistently improves both the generation quality and representation capability of DiTs. --- ### Rank-Order N-of-M Codes for Sparse Distributed Memory: Disentangling Representation and Learning Effects in Noise Robustness Against Contemporary Neuromorphic Architectures Authors: Joy Bose Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.LG, cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02967v2 Large language models remain limited as continual learning systems, motivating renewed interest in Sparse Distributed Memory (SDM) as an explicit online episodic memory. CALM (Nechesov and Ruponen, 2025) identifies its threshold-binary encoder as an open design question. This paper evaluates rank-order N-of-M encoding (Furber et al., 2007) as an alternative. We make three contributions. First, a faithful reimplementation validates the published architecture by confirming exact equivalence between WheelSDM and RankOrderSDM (cosine similarity 1.0000 across 10 seeds) and reproducing the documented divergence of RDLIF neurons under interference. Second, multi-seed capacity experiments show RankOrderSDM outperforming StandardSDM by 13.4 percentage points at saturation in the scaled configuration and by 0.8 percentage points at the published architecture scale. Third, BER robustness experiments disentangle representation and learning effects, showing that the large robustness gain arises primarily from the interaction of rank-order encoding with MAX-Hebbian learning, while the encoder alone provides only a small advantage under matched learning conditions. Experiments on GloVe-100 embeddings confirm this small but consistent encoding benefit on real structured data, whereas sentence embeddings exhibit a ceiling effect at low memory load. A secondary analysis shows that idealized rank-order encoding requires half the component-level encoding energy of SpikingMamba's SI-LIF neurons at four-bit precision, although decoder costs dominate overall system energy. These results identify which components of the original rank-order SDM architecture provide measurable benefits for contemporary memory-augmented AI systems, offering practical guidance for architectures such as CALM. --- ### Distill Where the Student Goes: Teacher-Regularized RL for English-Evidence Cross-Lingual RAG Authors: Haotian Zhou, Weiran Huang, Siqi Liu, Xiting Wang, Xin Zhang, Zhihao Wen Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02966v2 Cross-lingual retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is often deployed in an English-evidence regime, where users query in diverse languages but retrieved passages remain English. In this setting, generation can fail despite strong base models: English evidence induces language drift (English or code-switching outputs) and models use evidence unreliably when producing non-English answers. We attribute these failures to two post-training challenges: (i) errors are prefix-dependent, so fixed-trajectory supervision suffers from prefix mismatch; and (ii) sequence-level (partly discrete / judge-based) rewards yield noisy credit assignment and high-variance updates. We propose TR-RAG, a teacher-regularized RL recipe that couples reward optimization with on-policy distillation on student-visited prefixes. A compact student samples on-policy answers, while a stronger frozen teacher is queried only on those prefixes and provides a prefix-wise student-to-teacher reverse-KL anchor. We further introduce a reward decomposition for English-evidence multilingual generation, combining language consistency, character 3-gram recall, and an LLM-judge score for evidence-grounded correctness. Across three benchmarks (BioASQ-ENKB5, Hotpot-ENKB5, and naturally multilingual MKQA) and two backbones, TR-RAG improves the composite of language adherence and evidence-grounded correctness over strong baselines. Crucially, the teacher anchor acts as a safety net: on in-domain languages it prevents the large language-consistency collapses (up to ~27 percentage points) that reward-only RL can suffer by drifting below even the base model, while on distant out-of-distribution languages, where reward-only RL stalls at the base model's ceiling, it still improves evidence grounding; and on character 3-gram recall the compact student sometimes surpasses its 70B teacher. --- ### Individual Parameters in Weight-Sparse Transformers Appear Interpretable Authors: Arnau Marin-Llobet, Stefan Heimersheim Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02964v1 A central goal of mechanistic interpretability is to understand how neural networks work and what each individual component does. Dominant circuit-finding approaches focus on a specific behavior and reverse-engineer the role of components on the associated sub-distribution. However, past work has shown that components can have different functions that are active on different subsets of the input distribution. In this work we ask whether a single weight can be understood globally across the full training distribution by characterizing when it matters (the inputs on which ablating it changes the model's predictions). We introduce an automated LLM pipeline that writes a short, human-readable description of when a weight matters and verifies it on held-out text, crediting a weight only if its description generalizes. Across two sparse and two dense transformers, the fraction of weights that are interpretable (in this sense) is higher in sparse transformers than in dense ones, a gap that widens once unreliable descriptions are discarded. Our results show that a meaningful fraction of a sparse transformer model's weights can be interpreted: 12 to 31% of weights have a single short description that identifies what the weight is used for. --- ### Parallelized Autoregressive Decoding for Omni-Modal Dense Video Captioning Authors: Wenzheng Zeng, Siyi Jiao, Chen Gao, Hwee Tou Ng, Mike Zheng Shou Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.MM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02963v1 Dense video captioning aims to generate temporally grounded descriptions of video events, benefiting both event-level video understanding and generation. In this domain, autoregressive video large language models have emerged as a prevalent paradigm due to their strong generative and cross-modal modeling capacity. However, generating dense captions under the token-by-token paradigm severely limits inference efficiency and hinders scalability as video length and event density increase. In this work, we propose a parallelized autoregressive framework that not only improves generation efficiency but also enhances temporally grounded captioning performance. Our key insight is to exploit the weak local dependencies across temporally distinct events to restructure the causal dependency graph, thereby enabling lossless parallel generation. Specifically, tokens with weak cross-event dependencies can be decoded in parallel, while tightly coupled tokens within each event retain sequential decoding to preserve local semantic coherence. To realize this insight, we introduce two key components for lossless parallel decoding: (1) a latent global planning mechanism that automatically learns the event-level structure and produces compact tokens encoding global inter-event causality while adaptively aggregating event-level audio-visual semantics, guiding subsequent dependency restructuring and parallel decoding; and (2) an event-factorized parallel decoding mechanism that effectively balances local focus with global inter-event awareness. Experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate the clear advantage of our approach in both efficiency and performance in omni-modal event grounding and captioning. Project website: https://github.com/showlab/PadCaptioner. --- ### Overloading Large Vision-Language Models for Jailbreaking Authors: Haoyu Zhang, Yangyang Guo, Mohan Kankanhalli Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02961v1 Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) exhibit remarkable vision-language capabilities and are increasingly deployed in real-world applications such as personal assistants, document analysis systems, and embodied agents. However, their dual-modal attack surfaces make them vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. Existing LVLM jailbreaks rely on simple designs, e.g., short text and out-of-distribution images. Nevertheless, recent advancements in both large language model backbones and multimodal mechanisms undermine these attacks, particularly their transferability among model architectures. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel information overloading method that is equipped with both extensive text and multi-dimensional image attacks. These components are arranged in recursion-based image-typography layouts to exponentially increase multimodal information complexity. This overloading approach amplifies the cross-modal processing required, which undermines the safety alignment in LVLMs. Extensive experiments on both open-sourced and commercial LVLMs establish our method as a new state-of-the-art LVLM jailbreak attack. On open-source models, our method achieves an average ASR of 88.6%; on commercial LVLMs, it reaches an average ASR of 84.0%, exceeding the best baseline by 48.7%. Moreover, our prompts optimized on open-source surrogate models transfer effectively across model families. Beyond empirical results, we probe the safety-critical information flows within victim LVLMs. Our observations reveal that complex image-typography compositions induce intensified cross-modal processing and reduce the model's certainty in generating refusal responses. Together, these findings highlight information overloading as a practical and emerging safety risk for real-world LVLM deployments, underscoring the need for stronger defenses against complex multimodal jailbreak inputs. --- ### Incentivizing Vision Language Models to Search for Long Video Question Answering Authors: Harsh Goel, S P Sharan, Sahil Shah, Minkyu Choi, Joungbin An, Kristen Grauman, Sandeep P. Chinchali Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02959v1 We introduce VSeek, an agentic framework that transforms long-video question answering (LVQA) from a passive, single-pass perception task into a multi-turn retrieval process. VSeek utilizes a natural language-driven search to identify relevant context within long videos and is post-trained with reinforcement learning (RL) to jointly formulate targeted search queries and reason over retrieved clips for LVQA. While RL post-training has revolutionized reasoning in symbolic domains such as mathematics and code, its application to long-video understanding remains hindered by a lack of verified rewards. To ensure that the retrieved context is relevant, we propose a novel neuro-symbolic approach that bridges open-ended natural language with discrete visual verification. Specifically, complex user queries are compiled into formal temporal logic specifications for systematically decomposing natural language questions into a definitive checklist of required atomic visual primitives, such as key objects and activities, along with their temporal ordering. These systematically derived grounding events provide the critical feedback signal for RL post-training, enabling dense, verifiable rewards based on the successful retrieval of these specific visual elements rather than relying entirely on outcome-only answer accuracy. By explicitly optimizing for this verifiable evidence-seeking behavior, VSeek improves Pass@1 scores by up to 8% and Pass@4 scores by 15% on long-video understanding benchmarks compared to base models. We open-source our code at https://utaustin-swarmlab.github.io/VSeek. --- ### ReLo-IRR: Reflection-Guided LoRA Framework for Image Reflection Removal Authors: Chaoqun Wang, Yuehuan Wei, Haoxiang Cao, Shaobo Min Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02957v1 Single-image reflection removal (SIRR) aims to recover the clean transmission layer from a reflection-contaminated image. Although recent methods achieve promising results with large diffusion models, they rely on image-agnostic adaptation strategies, e.g., fine-tuning or ControlNet, that enforce uniform suppression regardless of reflection severity. As a result, heavy reflections often leave residuals, while weak ones suffer from detail loss. To this end, we propose ReLo-IRR, a reflection-guided LoRA framework built upon the rectified flow model. First, a lightweight estimator is designed to predict the reflection strength descriptor, providing an explicit prior of reflection dominance for each image and enabling image-dependent LoRA modulation. Second, we introduce a time-conditioned mechanism that fuses this reflection descriptor with timestep embeddings, enabling LoRA modulation to evolve consistently with the coarse-to-fine denoising process. By jointly modeling reflection strength and denoising dynamics, our ReLo-IRR achieves robust suppression of diverse reflection conditions. Extensive experiments on challenging benchmarks validate the effectiveness of ReLo-IRR, demonstrating superior dereflection performance and robust generalization. The code is released at https://github.com/KONGBAI-8080/ReLo-IRR. --- ### MORE: A Multilingual Document Parsing Benchmark and Evaluation Authors: Long Xu, Binghong Wu, Tinghao Yu, Hao Feng, Zhenyu Huang, Haoqing Jiang, Yunhao Wang, Shuo Huang, Feng Zhang Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02956v1 Multilingual documents encapsulate rich regional cultures, scientific discoveries, and historical records. Parsing this content into structured, machine-readable formats is critical for unlocking global knowledge. However, existing benchmarks predominantly focus on high-resource languages like English and Chinese, creating an evaluation blind spot concerning model performance on other languages. While recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) claim support for hundreds of languages, the lack of ground truth makes it impossible to empirically verify these capabilities. To bridge this gap, we introduce MORE, a large-scale benchmark designed for multilingual document parsing evaluation. MORE distinguishes itself through three key dimensions: (1) Unprecedented Scale: It covers 149 languages, making it the most linguistically diverse benchmark to date; (2) Structural Complexity: Unlike previous works, it extends evaluation beyond plain text to include structural elements such as code blocks, tables, and catalogs; and (3) Data Authenticity: All samples are curated from real-world documents via a model-assisted, human-refined annotation pipeline. We evaluate state-of-the-art models using MORE, establishing new performance baselines for long-tail languages and validating the benchmark's effectiveness in diagnosing model capabilities in realistic, diverse scenarios. The MORE dataset will be available at https://github.com/zimoqingfeng/MORE. --- ### The Foreign Policy AI Evaluation Gap Authors: Charles Pozniak, Jeba Sania Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.CY, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02955v1 We argue that AI systems used in conducting foreign policy tasks - broadly enacting 'statecraft' - should be a priority test case for technical AI governance research. In enacting foreign policy, we refer to the formulation and implementation of external objectives by political actors. Statecraft is a high-consequence deployment domain, with extreme downside risks and structural properties that standard evaluation practices handle poorly. These features include partial observability, unbounded action spaces, contested ground truth, and multidimensional objectives. This paper advocates for a literature-grounded research agenda. Our contribution is threefold: (i) a claim about the structural conditions of foreign policy that combine catastrophic tail risk with technical evaluation complexities, (ii) an ECOSYSTEM review that highlights the asymmetric focus on ASSESSMENT features over ACCESS, VERIFICATION, SECURITY, and OPERATIONALIZATION, and (iii) a demand-side evaluation framework that decomposes foreign-policy workflows into bounded, evaluable sub-tasks with human recombination. As AI systems are already being deployed in the conduct of war and peace, amid limited public evaluation infrastructure from the technical AI governance community, this agenda is an urgent priority. --- ### Microcosmos: Reimagining Artificial Life for the GPU Era Authors: Mark Tensen, Ciaran Regan, Bert Wang-Chak Chan, Mizuki Oka, Kenneth O. Stanley, Grisha Szep Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.NE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02954v1 Most artificial life simulators either operate on abstract substrates disconnected from physical reality, or simulate physically grounded worlds that do not scale to the population sizes required for open-ended evolution. We present Microcosmos, a simulation engine in which artificial lifeforms are modeled as elastic filament chains inhabiting a two-dimensional viscous fluid world, designed from the ground up for modern GPU hardware and end-to-end differentiable simulation. We validate the engine through four experiments. Hand-designed locomotion strategies confirm that the fluid coupling respects known physical constraints. Gradient-based optimization of filament folding demonstrates both the full differentiability of the simulator and the expressivity of the filament encodings. Neuroevolution and quality-diversity search produce a wide range of swimming and chemotaxis behaviors automatically. Linear scaling with particle count confirms the engine supports large-scale simulation. Microcosmos is released as an open platform with the long-term goal of supporting large-scale open-ended evolutionary simulations, designed to be physically plausible and computationally scalable. --- ### Pooling-Based Context Modeling for Convolution-Free Deep Image Prior Authors: Gihyun Kim, Jong-Seok Lee Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02952v1 Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) achieve strong denoising performance by exploiting spatial context from neighboring pixels. Deep Image Prior (DIP) leverages this property to restore images from a single noisy input without requiring large datasets. However, the over-parameterized architecture of DIP often leads to noise fitting during optimization. In this paper, we propose Pool-DIP, a convolution-free architecture that incorporates pooling-based contrast modeling to capture spatial context efficiently. Pool-DIP improves denoising performance while significantly reducing the number of parameters and computational complexity compared to convolution-based DIP models. Experimental results show that Pool-DIP achieves competitive performance across multiple datasets, including a real-world benchmark. Spectral analysis further reveals that Pool-DIP stabilizes the evolution of high-frequency components during optimization and suppresses erroneous high-frequency signals. The proposed architecture also generalizes well to other image restoration tasks such as super-resolution and inpainting. --- ### FOI-O: A global ontology and verification framework for Freedom of Information process modelling Authors: Dylan A Mordaunt Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: econ.GN, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02947v2 Public official-information request records contain process signals. They can support research, workflow review, and analyst-led assessment. Yet they also mix observed correspondence, platform states, inferred events, and legal outcomes. FOI-O is a reusable process-modelling method and verification infrastructure for Freedom of Information administration. It is a global model that began with the New Zealand Official Information Act and has since iterated through the Australian Commonwealth and New South Wales settings. The NZ package remains the mature reference implementation; the Australian work remains provisional pending empirical evaluation and jurisdiction-specific legal validation. FOI-O models request records, observed correspondence, controlled vocabularies, provenance, review queues, release metadata, and bounded analysis rules. Legally meaningful outcomes require certification by an authorised decision-maker. Its typed operational and semantic contracts are supported by deterministic examples, process models, fixture-only process-mining exports, quality gates, and tests. This article describes the motivation, architecture, ontology-development method, its versioned extraction and review protocol, how related repositories share data and evidence, and how the method may be adapted for Australia, validation evidence, and implementation boundaries. The project is not legal advice, is not an official government publication, and does not certify release, refusal, redaction, charging, extension, transfer, complaint, or publication outcomes. --- ### A Precedent-Guided Co-Scientist for Side-Effect-Aware Drug Redesign Authors: Yujin Kim, Charmgil Hong Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02944v1 We propose PRECEDE, a precedent-guided co-scientist for side-effect-aware drug redesign that revises a parent compound to mitigate a specified side effect while preserving therapeutic function. Rather than isolated molecular generation, PRECEDE frames redesign as evidence-grounded reasoning over drug--side-effect associations, biomedical knowledge graphs, and precedents of safety-driven optimization, coordinated by an LLM orchestrator with explicit policies and human-review checkpoints. We position PRECEDE as a human-supervised AI-for-science workflow in which hypotheses remain auditable, falsifiable, and bounded by prior pharmacology. --- ### A Sliding-Window-Based Reinforcement Learning for Dynamic Assembly Flow Shop Scheduling with Multi-Product Delivery Authors: Junhao Qiu, Jianjun Liu, Ting Liu, Rongjie Liao, Zhantao Li, Qingfu Zhang Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02941v1 Multi-product kitting delivery imposes significant challenges for real-time scheduling in hybrid manufacturing systems that integrate processing and assembly, as dynamic order arrivals simultaneously alter supply dependencies and the set of feasible job-machine assignments. This paper proposes a sliding-window-based reinforcement learning (SWRL) framework for end-to-end online scheduling in the flexible assembly flow shop scheduling problem with complex kitting constraints. The problem is formulated as a heterogeneous graph-based Markov decision process that captures the dual-layer kitting structure and the tail-product bottleneck dynamics that produce a sparse reward landscape. To address the resulting challenges, SWRL integrates a sliding-window filtering mechanism that filters inactive nodes and prioritizes kitting-critical operations, a spatiotemporal graph encoding network that tracks bottleneck shifts across consecutive decision states, and a dynamic action mapping module with a constrained waiting strategy that adapts to the changing action space under variable topologies. Experiments on real-world instances from a home appliance manufacturer demonstrate that SWRL achieves consistent tardiness reductions over classical dispatching rules and existing deep reinforcement learning methods, and exhibits robust performance across varying resource configurations, order loads, and arrival concentrations. --- ### Missingness as Signal: Channel-Independent Spectrogram Learning for Clinical Time Series Prediction Authors: Soyeon Park, Charmgil Hong Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02938v1 Clinical time series prediction in intensive care units remains challenging due to heterogeneous physiological variables and informative missingness. The presence or absence of a measurement can reflect clinical decisions and patient severity, and thus missingness can serve as a predictive signal rather than a simple data artifact. This work presents CISM, a Channel-Independent Spectrogram framework with a Missingness stream for clinical multivariate time series prediction. CISM converts each clinical variable into a variable-wise time-frequency spectrogram, preserves variable identity through variable-aligned encoding, and aligns an explicit missingness stream with the spectrogram representation. Experiments on an in-hospital mortality task derived from MIMIC-IV show that CISM achieves the highest mean AUROC (0.7225), AUPRC (0.3308), and F1 (0.3808) among the compared time series, missingness-aware, vision, and time-frequency baselines. Ablation studies further show that observation patterns provide a meaningful informative signal. Pixel-level mask injection improves performance over plain spectrogram inputs and recovers much of this predictive value. The aligned missingness stream contributes a further, complementary gain in both AUROC and AUPRC. These results highlight the importance of modeling observation patterns as structured signals in clinical time series prediction. --- ### In-context learning from self-generated trajectories for adaptive model reduction Authors: Amirpasha Hedayat, Laura Balzano, Karthik Duraisamy Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CE, math.NA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02937v3 High-fidelity simulations of complex physical systems are often too expensive for repeated prediction, design, and control. Reduced-order models address this computational cost by compressing high-dimensional dynamics into low-dimensional representations that can be evaluated rapidly, but they often lose accuracy when online dynamics drift beyond the offline training data. Adaptive methods address this limitation by updating the reduced subspace online using external, out-of-span information, such as full-order corrections or sensor snapshots. We discovered that a complementary and previously unexploited in-span adaptation channel exists within the current reduced subspace. To exploit this channel, we continually update the reduced representation using the model's own predictions through an incremental singular-value decomposition with a forgetting factor. This produces a trajectory-informed spectral preconditioner in which the reduced subspace remains unchanged, while the basis is reweighted and realigned according to the directions visited by the evolving dynamics. This internal reorganization prepares the basis to absorb future out-of-span corrections more effectively, improving adaptation without requiring additional external information. We expose the mechanism through a three-dimensional spiral example and demonstrate its benefits on nonlinear partial differential equations, including viscous Burgers and Fisher--KPP dynamics. We also discuss how in-span learning can be interpreted as a dynamical-systems analogue of in-context learning. More broadly, in-span learning suggests a new principle for computational science, revealing that model-generated trajectories contain more usable information than previously recognized. --- ### In-span learning: adapting reduced-order models using their own predictions Authors: Amirpasha Hedayat, Laura Balzano, Karthik Duraisamy Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CE, math.NA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02937v2 Reduced-order models compress high-dimensional dynamics into low-dimensional representations that can be evaluated rapidly, but they lose accuracy when online dynamics drift beyond the training data. Adaptive methods address this by updating the subspace online with external, out-of-span information, such as full-order corrections or sensor snapshots. We discovered that a complementary and previously unexploited in-span adaptation channel exists within the current reduced subspace. By streaming the model's own predictions through an incremental singular-value decomposition with forgetting, we obtain a trajectory-informed spectral preconditioner, in which the subspace is unchanged but the basis is reweighted and realigned toward the modes visited by the dynamics. This enables the model to absorb future out-of-span corrections more effectively. We expose aspects of this mechanism on a three-dimensional spiral and confirm it on viscous Burgers and Fisher-KPP dynamics. We also discuss how in-span learning can be viewed as a dynamical-systems analogue of in-context learning. More broadly, in-span learning suggests a new principle for computational science, revealing that model-generated trajectories contain more usable information than previously recognized. --- ### MatPhaseBench: A Semantics-Guided Benchmark for Materials Phase Diagrams Understanding Authors: Hanwen Wang, Sihan Liang, Zhiwei Liu, Yangang Wang, Wei Yan, Yuqin Liu, Zongguo Wang Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.CV, cond-mat.mtrl-sci, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02934v1 Materials phase diagrams are a core knowledge representation in materials science, encoding temperature,composition, phase stability, and phase transformation pathways, with their full understanding requiring thermodynamic mechanism analysis and scientific reasoning. Although VLMs have shown promise in scientific image understanding, their systematic evaluation on such logically complex images demanding deep mechanistic interpretation remains limited, and phase diagrams provide a challenging testbed for this purpose. We introduce MatPhaseBench, a high-quality, high-reliability benchmark for complex scientific image understanding, focused on materials phase diagrams. MatPhaseBench is constructed from 3681 papers in classical materials science journals, from which 200 high-quality diagram-text pairs were selected, covering 189 material systems and 70 elements. The benchmark has three key features: (1)targeting complex scientific image understanding-it moves beyond simple objective tests to open-ended tasks requiring deep comprehension; (2)comprehensive image-text alignment-semantic information associated with images is fully preserved during literature mining and matching; (3) high-quality human-supervised text acquisition-all descriptions undergo strict manual validation. Experimental results show that current VLMs remain substantially behind expert-level understanding: they are largely limited to surface visual perception, lack deep reasoning grounded in thermodynamic mechanisms, have limited domain awareness and expert analytical experience, and perform poorly in distinguishing fine-grained differences in composite or multi-diagram settings. Overall, MatPhaseBench constitutes a challenging research-grade benchmark, providing a foundational platform for complex scientific image understanding, phase diagram analysis, and trustworthy multi-modal AI in science. --- ### PromptPET: Privacy-Utility Optimized Prompt Obfuscation Authors: Ke Yang, Olivia Figueira, Umar Iqbal, Athina Markopoulou Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.HC, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02932v1 Privacy is an important challenge when users interact with AI chatbots, since users may share sensitive information, explicitly or implicitly, and AI chatbots can use this information for user profiling. In this paper, we aim to protect user privacy via a user-side mechanism that transforms sensitive information in a user prompt, while preserving enough information to elicit a useful response from the chatbot. This approach faces an inherent tradeoff between protecting privacy (i.e., avoiding profiling) and preserving utility (i.e., getting personalized and task-specific responses). To that end, we consider, evaluate, and compare four different obfuscation actions, namely redaction, abstraction, replacement, and a novel noising/denoising scheme that we introduce. Additional novel insights include: utilizing a data type taxonomy to both identify and obfuscate sensitive information and explicitly taking into account the utility of chat responses in making the obfuscation decision. First, we systematically optimize and evaluate each obfuscation action independently in terms of the privacy-utility tradeoff it achieves. Second, we propose PROMPTPET, an LLM-based agent that selects the best obfuscation action for each sensitive part of the prompt, using a reinforcement-learning inspired rule optimizer, applied for the first time in this context. Using a real-world chat dataset, we show that PROMPTPET matches the best privacy-utility tradeoff attainable by any single obfuscation action and significantly outperforms prior state-of-the-art approaches. --- ### VERITAS: Towards a General-Purpose Replication Tool for Scientific Research Authors: Haokun Liu, Filbert Aurelian Tjiaranata, Chenhao Tan Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02931v1 AI tools are accelerating scientific publication while the systems that review it struggle to keep up, and independent verification of published research has become both harder and more important. As manual replication is slow and expensive, a growing line of work uses coding agents to automate parts of the process. Existing efforts are largely packaged as benchmarks with companion agents that only run inside the benchmark's own pipeline, and no general-purpose replication tool exists. We present VERITAS, a domain-agnostic replication framework built around CLI coding agents. Given a paper, a code repository, or both, VERITAS extracts the paper's claims, runs the methodology while resolving issues as they arise, and judges each claim against the evidence from experiment runs. The pipeline returns an importance-weighted Replication Score, a severity-rated log of every fix applied, and the patched codebase. We evaluate VERITAS on CORE-Bench and ReplicationBench, 65 papers spanning computer science, social science, medicine, and astrophysics. Against two strong Claude Code baselines on the same model and host environment, VERITAS achieves state-of-the-art performance and leads on every metric on both benchmarks. --- ### CL-Anomaly: Layer-Adaptive Mixture-of-Experts with Multimodal Large Language Model for Continual Learning in Anomaly Detection Authors: Wen Dong, Zhao Wang, Shuangqing Zhang, Kai Sun, Ben Li, Guo-Sen Xie, Caifeng Shan, Fang Zhao Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02930v1 Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel in diverse vision tasks, but full-parameter retraining is computationally expensive as real-world knowledge evolves. Existing continual learning methods often suffer from semantic entanglement in parameter spaces across tasks, impeding the continuous deployment of models. This challenge is especially pronounced in Anomaly Detection (AD), which exhibits triple heterogeneity across modalities, domains, and defect scale variability, significantly complicating multi-task knowledge transfer. In this paper, we propose CL-Anomaly, a parameter-efficient fine-tuning framework based on an isolation-sharing collaboration to enable continual learning for anomaly detection with MLLMs. We introduce the task-private expert PrivLoRA, which physically isolates task-specific subspaces in the parameter space to prevent semantic entanglement of anomaly knowledge in diverse scenarios. The Layer-Adaptive Shared Experts maintain cross-task representations within a unified feature space, enabling knowledge sharing between previous and new tasks. Furthermore, we propose a Layer-Adaptive Knowledge Transfer strategy that automatically selects and dynamically updates the layer-wise key shared experts of each task via a momentum-based mechanism, promoting effective knowledge transfer across related anomaly detection tasks. Extensive experiments across three continual learning scenarios for anomaly detection, including class-incremental, cross-domain, and cross-modal, demonstrate that CL-Anomaly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/WenDongyp/CL-Anomaly. --- ### Modeling the Impact of Visual Brand Language on Attention, Object Recognition, and Memory Retrieval Authors: Rachel F. Heaton, John E. Hummel Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: q-bio.NC, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.HC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02929v1 Visual brand language is the set of visual properties that convey brand identity for a product. What is the impact of visual brand language on a person's ability to recognize and understand the functional identity of an object? Using an empirically supported modeling framework based on the JIM model of object recognition and the LISA model of analogical inference, we simulated the impact of visual brand language on object recognition, the allocation of attention, and retrieval of functional information about objects. Our simulations predict that brand information captures attention and can slow recognition of an object's functional category, with greater degrees of branding causing larger effects. These results have potential implications for the usability and experience of designed objects. --- ### CoFEND: A Cross-Modal Fusion End-to-End Network for Cold-Start Drug-Drug Interaction Prediction Authors: Di Wu, Hongyi Sun, Haichao Xu, Jia Chen, Zhong Chen, Jie Yang Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02928v1 Cold-start drug-drug interaction (DDI) prediction for new drugs is critical for minimizing unexpected adverse drug reactions. The key challenge is to capture similarity between new and known drugs. However, such similarity is closely associated with complex relationships and mechanisms among drugs, enzymes, transporters, molecular structures, and other biomedical entities. Existing methods have three limitations in capturing such similarity: (1) only partial relationships and mechanisms are considered, which overlooks cross-modal information and yields incomplete or biased similarity modeling; (2) similarity computation between new and known drugs is conducted separately across modalities and performed offline for cold-start DDI prediction, leading to misalignment between similarity computation and DDI prediction; and (3) existing interpretability analyses are typically single-modality and focus primarily on key determinants of the perpetrator drug, while the underlying causes of susceptibility for the victim drug are seldom investigated. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel Cross-Modal-Fused End-to-End Learning Network (CMF-ELN) with three components. First, diverse multimodal information is leveraged to construct four types of drug-centered knowledge graphs, enabling comprehensive similarity modeling under reconstruction-based supervision. Second, a four-channel graph autoencoder is designed to fuse cross-modal similarity within an end-to-end learning framework. Finally, a two-stage interpretability scheme is devised to precisely localize key factors for both perpetrator and victim drugs. Extensive experiments on two real datasets demonstrate that CMF-ELN achieves significantly higher prediction accuracy and more comprehensive interpretability of mechanisms than its peers. --- ### VideoSearcher: Empowering Video Deep Research with Multi-Tool Agentic Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning Authors: Zhenkun Gao, Yicheng Bao, Jinlong Peng, Xueheng Li, Theo Huang, Bangwei Liu, Kunquan Li, Zhenye Gan, Tao Hu, Chengjun Xie, Mingqian Yang, Xuanhua He et al. Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02927v1 Video understanding is moving beyond closed-context perception toward open-world evidence exploration, a paradigm formalized as Video Deep Research (VDR). However, existing multimodal search agents primarily target static images, and the current VDR benchmark relies on text-centric retrieval that discards crucial visual information. To address these limitations, we propose VideoSearcher, a closed-loop agentic framework that empowers Vision-Language Models with multi-tool reasoning for VDR. VideoSearcher unifies temporal localization, spatial focusing, and multimodal search within a single reasoning trajectory, enabling agents to progressively ground visual clues, retrieve relevant evidence, and synthesize answers. To optimize knowledge-intensive reasoning trajectories, we propose Bi-branch Sequence Policy Optimization (BiSPO), a reinforcement learning algorithm that decouples tool-invocation optimization from answer-accuracy optimization. This design provides stable learning signals for both evidence-grounded reasoning and purposeful tool use. Furthermore, we construct VideoSearch-QA, the first benchmark designed to evaluate open-world video information grounding and multimodal search-based reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VideoSearcher significantly outperforms prior open-source agentic baselines across various search-oriented and multimodal understanding benchmarks. --- ### STAC: Selective Spatiotemporal Aggregation and Compression for Video Reasoning Segmentation Authors: Syed Ariff Syed Hesham, Yun Liu, Guolei Sun, Jing Yang, Henghui Ding, Xue Geng, Xudong Jiang Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02922v1 Video reasoning segmentation demands pixel-accurate object tracking across hundreds of frames under complex natural language queries, producing dense spatiotemporal tokens whose quadratic self-attention cost makes long-video processing prohibitive. Existing methods address this through token compression, yet typically operate on encoder features lacking temporal context, constraining selection before content redundancy can be reliably assessed. Informed compression requires contextual awareness, but acquiring that awareness at full resolution incurs the same quadratic cost compression aims to reduce. State-space models resolve this constraint, as their linear recurrence selectively conditions each token on temporal context at $\mathcal{O}(T)$ cost, producing representations where content redundancy becomes assessable. Building on this, Selective SpatioTemporal Aggregation and Compression (STAC) enriches features via decoupled bidirectional spatial and causal temporal scanning, leveraging recurrence-derived redundancy for hierarchical compression with adaptive thresholds optimised with segmentation objective. STAC achieves 85% token reduction and 1.8$\times$ speedup while surpassing compression-free baselines on reasoning segmentation benchmarks in a zero-shot streaming-compatible setting. Code is available \href{https://github.com/MCG-NKU/nku-video}{here}. --- ### R3D: Quantitative 3D Spatial Reasoning for Egocentric Wearables Authors: Maxwell Horton, Wei Lu, Quan Tran, Yury Astashonok, Kirmani Ahmed, Babak Damavandi, Anuj Kumar, Xiao Zhang, Seungwhan Moon Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02921v1 Quantitative 3D spatial reasoning from egocentric RGB-D video is a critical capability for next-generation wearable assistants. Yet existing benchmarks do not reflect the challenges of handling (1) natural egocentric video, (2) posed RGB-D video inputs, and (3) challenging quantitative 3D spatial reasoning Q&A. To fill this gap, we introduce R3D-Bench (Reasoning in 3D), a benchmark of 3,033 quantitative spatial reasoning questions across 15 types -- spanning multiple-choice, distance-based, and volumetric reasoning questions -- built on top of 57 egocentric video sequences from Aria Digital Twin. To set a strong baseline on this dataset, we introduce R3D, a model-agnostic spatial tool-calling framework. In contrast to existing approaches that directly embed 3D information into the model's input representation, R3D constructs a 3D scene from video using segmentation and depth-lifted object representations. It provides this information to an LLM through eight composable spatial tools. On R3D-Bench, R3D with Qwen3-VL 235B achieves 73.5% mean relative accuracy, substantially outperforming the best depth-enabled baseline (CuTR+Tools, 61.9%) and the best RGB-only baseline (Gemini 3 Flash, 46.5%). --- ### Harmonic-Aware Transformer for Real-Time Catheter Localization in Interventional Procedures of Magnetic Particle Imaging Authors: Abuobaida M. Khair, Wenjing Jiang, Xiaoli Yang, Moritz Wildgruber, Xiaopeng Ma Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: physics.med-ph, cs.AI, cs.CV, eess.IV, eess.SP arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02919v1 Magnetic particle imaging (MPI) enables real-time, radiation-free tracking of magnetic nanoparticle-coated instruments, making it highly suitable for interventional procedures. This study proposes a harmonic-aware transformer framework that directly predicts catheter tip positions from raw MPI voltage signals, eliminating the need for image reconstruction and reducing computational latency. The framework incorporates frequency-domain preprocessing to isolate the 2nd to 8th drive-field harmonics, enhancing the signal-to-noise ratio while preserving motion-relevant features. A transformer architecture with six encoder layers and eight attention heads is employed to learn spatio-temporal dependencies across the three receive axes (x, y, z) for accurate three-dimensional position estimation. The model is trained on simulated MPI signals and evaluated on real in vitro datasets under standard, bending, and heartbeat-like motion conditions. The proposed method achieves sub-millimeter localization accuracy, with a minimum L2 error of 0.103 +/- 0.092 mm and mean absolute errors (MAEs) of 0.039 +/- 0.046 mm, 0.054 +/- 0.049 mm, and 0.060 +/- 0.044 mm along the (x, y, z) axes, respectively, for the bending dataset. Across all datasets, the MAE ranges from 0.165 mm to 0.655 mm, demonstrating consistent performance. The optimized inference achieves a latency of 0.55 ms per frame and a throughput of approximately 1800 frames per second, confirming real-time capability. Compared with conventional MPI-guided approaches relying on image reconstruction, the proposed framework provides improved accuracy, reduced latency, and enhanced robustness under complex motion conditions. These results highlight the potential of harmonic-aware transformer models as efficient and scalable solutions for real-time catheter localization in interventional MPI. --- ### BFMT: Enhancing Search Capabilities of Tree Sampler via Bootstrap Flow-Map Tree Authors: Binglin Ji, Anindya Sarkar, Hengchang Lu, Kunyu Wang, Alessandro Tibo, Jens Sjölund, Yevgeniy Vorobeychik Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02915v2 The ability to efficiently navigate high-dimensional spaces to identify optimal candidates-whether designing targeted molecular structures or generating images with preferred attributes-stands as a central pillar of modern scientific progress. Recent tree-based samplers enable highly scalable inference-time search by eliminating the reward-gradient bottleneck inherent to particle-based methods. Despite their potential, existing tree-based samplers are fundamentally constrained by the massive number of function evaluations (NFEs) required for node valuation, crippling their utility in exploration-heavy tasks. Furthermore, their reliance on small, uniform transitions at each depth precludes dynamic, adaptive search capabilities. To address this, we introduce Bootstrap Flow-Map-Tree (a.k.a BFMT), a computationally efficient sampling framework that enables full tree-path construction from any tree depth using a single function evaluation, drastically reducing computational overhead while providing critical foresight for sequential sampling. By enabling dynamic transition time-step scheduling, BFMT efficiently allocates its sampling budget, smoothly transitioning from broad global exploration to fine-grained local refinement of high-utility modes discovered through exploration. Extensive experiments and ablation studies across diverse domains-from high-dimensional images to large-scale molecules-demonstrate BFMT's superiority over baseline approaches in both search and alignment tasks. --- ### Bootstrap Flow-Map Tree Sampling Enables Online Feedback Driven Search Authors: Binglin Ji, Anindya Sarkar, Hengchang Lu, Jens Sjölund, Yevgeniy Vorobeychik Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02915v1 In many scientific and engineering domains, maximizing discovery within a limited sampling budget demands strategic, observation-guided exploration. While generative models have enabled training-free reward alignment, current methods typically excel in local searches within narrow regions of the underlying distribution. These approaches struggle when preferences are unknown a priori and only revealed through sequential feedback-a scenario demanding broad exploration to uncover high-utility regions. To address this, we introduce Bootstrap Flow-Map-Tree (a.k.a BFMT), a novel computationally efficient sampling framework designed for history-aware global search and alignment under sampling budget constraints. BFMT enables full tree-path construction from any tree depth using a single function evaluation, drastically reducing computational overhead while providing critical foresight for sequential sampling. By enabling dynamic transition time steps scheduling, BFMT efficiently allocates its sampling budget, smoothly transitioning from broad global exploration to fine-grained local refinement of high-utility modes discovered through exploration. Extensive experiments and ablations across diverse search and alignment tasks demonstrate that BFMT substantially outperforms baseline approaches. --- ### Oyster-II: Reinforcement Learning for Constructive Safety Alignment in Large Language Models Authors: Jiyang Guan, Yong Xie, Jun Chen, Jiexi Liu, Zipeng Ye, Defeng Li, Jiayu Shen, Jialing Tao, Hui Xue Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02914v1 Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse applications, yet ensuring their simultaneous safety, helpfulness, and trustworthiness remains a persistent challenge. Conventional refusal-oriented alignment strategies mitigate harmful content generation but systematically fail to serve legitimate user needs, often withholding information that could safely and constructively address the underlying intent of sensitive queries. Building upon the constructive safety paradigm pioneered by Oyster-I, which moves beyond blanket refusal toward thoughtful, response-oriented safety alignment, we identify two critical limitations of its Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT)-based scheme: insufficient safety generalization to out-of-distribution scenarios and a phenomenon we term safety chain-of-thought (CoT) over-generalization, wherein safety-oriented reasoning patterns are excessively applied to benign queries, degrading helpfulness and user experience. To address these limitations, we propose Oyster-II, a reinforcement learning (RL)-based constructive safety alignment framework that adopts a Zero-RL paradigm combined with a multi-stage reinforcement learning strategy.Evaluated across extensive benchmarks, Oyster-II comprehensively surpasses both Qwen3-14B and its predecessor Oyster-I on safety dimensions, achieving cross-scale performance comparable to Qwen3-Max and Qwen3.5-397B. --- ### See the Emotion: A Facial Emoji Proxy Modeling for EEG Emotion Recognition Authors: Jingjing Hu, Guo Dan, Haofan Cheng, Ying Zeng, Zhan Si, Jinxing Zhou, Meng Wang Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.CV, cs.HC, cs.MM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02912v1 Despite the high accuracy of EEG-based emotion recognition, existing models remain opaque "black boxes", lacking semantic grounding between abstract neural features and human-interpretable states. In this paper, we reframe EEG explainability as a cross-modal generation task, shifting the paradigm from feature attribution to behavioral visualization. We introduce Facial Emoji Proxy Modeling, a novel framework that translates high-dimensional EEG signals into identity-anonymized facial emojis. Guided by the neuroscientific inspiration of neural-facial association, this approach grounds neural representations in the manifold of observable facial dynamics. Technically, our framework integrates FMENet, a specialized backbone modeling expression-relevant spatial synergies, and the Facial Emoji Learning Branch (FELB), which treats emoji reconstruction as a structured semantic regularizer. Extensive experiments on EAV and MMER benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art accuracy among EEG-only models. Crucially, it generates semantically faithful facial animations that provide a transparent, privacy-preserving window into the brain's emotional evolution, effectively allowing users to "see the emotion" directly from neural signals. Code is available at https://github.com/xian-sh/SeeEmotion --- ### CoACT: Action-Preserving Observation Compression for Coding Agents Authors: Haorui Chen, Yuancheng Zhu, Yitong Zhang, Jia Li Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.SE, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02911v1 LLM-based coding agents solve software-engineering tasks through iterative interactions with development environments, where returned observations accumulate in the context and become a major source of inference cost. Observation compression reduces this cost by shortening observations before they are appended to the context. However, existing methods still exhibit an unsatisfactory efficiency-effectiveness trade-off, as they do not explicitly model how compression affects the agent's subsequent behavior. This paper proposes CoACT, an action-preserving observation compression method for coding agents. CoACT is built on next-action preservation (NAP), which requires a compressed observation to induce the same next action as the raw observation. By checking the agent's immediate next action, NAP provides a practical signal for whether a compression preserves the information needed for continued task solving. During training, a teacher model first generates multiple compressed candidates of each observation. CoACT then uses an action-preservation reward based on NAP to filter out candidates that would change the agent's next action, and uses a length-reduction reward to choose compact candidates as supervision for a lightweight compressor. Experiments on SWE-bench Verified with three agentic models show that CoACT reduces average total token consumption by 33.0% while maintaining task-solving effectiveness close to the uncompressed agent. --- ### Learning Taxonomic Trees with Hierarchical Representation Regularization for Large Multimodal Models Authors: Hulingxiao He, Zhi Tan, Yuxin Peng Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02909v1 Taxonomies provide key information about the semantic relationships between concepts and the inherent organization of vision and language. Despite their impressive capabilities, large multimodal models (LMMs) often lack taxonomic knowledge, leading to low hierarchical visual recognition (HVR) consistency. These models typically only rely on language modeling objectives during fine-tuning and lack explicit taxonomy-aware regularization. To address this, we propose Hierarchical Representation Regularization ($HiR^2$), a simple plug-and-play regularizer that improves hierarchical consistency in LMMs. Specifically, we introduce a semantic-aware visual tree construction framework that extracts coarse-to-fine visual features from intermediate LLM layers guided by textual cues. The regularizer combines two complementary objectives: a taxonomic entailment loss that enforces hierarchy via hyperbolic entailment cones in the Lorentz model, and a discriminative dispersive loss that promotes angular separation of semantically similar embeddings on the unit sphere without disturbing the radial hierarchical structure. Extensive experiments demonstrate that $HiR^2$ effectively captures taxonomic structures across diverse LMMs and fine-tuning methods. Code is available at https://github.com/PKU-ICST-MIPL/HiR2_ICML2026. --- ### Holo-Captioning: Toward the Text Equivalent of 3D Scenes Authors: Kun-Yu Lin, Chengke Bu, Zhenguo Li, Kai Han Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02908v1 This work introduces holo-captioning, a novel task that strives to seek the text equivalent of 3D scenes. As the initial step, we formulate holo-captioning as generating a structured textual description that comprehensively depicts all entities within a 3D scene -- including their semantic tags, spatial locations, attributes, and inter-entity relations. To tackle this challenging task, we first develop an effective captioning engine to produce detailed descriptions of individual entity instances and instance pairs, and contribute a large-scale benchmark comprising over 15K scenes for training and evaluation. Building upon this foundation, we propose HoloScribe, a novel model that features an instance-aware decoupled pipeline for generating structured holo-captions, and further incorporates anchor-aware instance linking to identify relational instance pairs. Additionally, we propose a comprehensive evaluation metric named HoloScore, and provide a human-curated test set to ensure reliable model assessment. Experimental results demonstrate that HoloScribe significantly outperforms state-of-the-art 3D dense captioners and 3D LLM generalists, underscoring the effectiveness of our approach. Project page: https://visual-ai.github.io/holocap/ --- ### ProLaViT: Learning Progressive Latent Visual Thoughts in Structured Latent Space Authors: Peiming Li, Yifan Wang, Xiaotian Zhang, Zhiyuan Hu, Shiyu Li, Zheng Wei, Yang Tang Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02907v1 Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress but still struggle with complex visual reasoning tasks requiring multi-step perception and logical deduction. While explicit visual generation incurs prohibitive computational costs, existing latent approaches often rely on external experts or lack rigorous cognitive logic. In this paper, we introduce ProLaViT (Progressive Latent Visual Thought), a framework empowering MLLMs to perform structured visual derivation in the continuous latent space. Unlike works dependent on heterogeneous external models, ProLaViT leverages an endogenous self-distillation mechanism, utilizing the model's own visual encoder to supervise latent thoughts. To facilitate this, we construct a scalable programmatic synthesis pipeline enabling the model to internalize algorithmic precision without inference time tools. We design two reasoning paradigms: (1) Coarse-to-Fine Causal Chain for spatial tasks, guiding attention from global context to local targets. (2) Dialectical Reasoning Chain for logical tasks, incorporating counter-factual thinking for verification. Furthermore, we propose a Distance-Weighted Diversity Loss to impose topology-aware constraints, preventing feature degeneration by enforcing semantic distinctiveness. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ProLaViT outperforms baselines on vision-centric benchmarks, achieving superior accuracy and interpretability with high efficiency. --- ### TIER: Trajectory-Invariant Explanation Regularization for Membership Privacy Authors: Varun Sharma, Kar Wai Fok, Vrizlynn L. L. Thing Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02903v1 Explainability is central to building trustworthy AI, yet explanation interfaces can inadvertently provide adversaries with an expanded privacy-related attack surfaces. Recent studies show that advanced membership-inference attacks succeed by exploiting confidence-drop trajectories, induced through attribution-guided perturbations, as discriminative features, rather than directly using confidence scores or explanation vectors. Existing defenses against membership inference fail to directly mitigate such explanation-driven attacks. In this work, we investigate whether, during training, a model's own gradients can be leveraged as defense signals against such attacks, thereby aligning explanation profiles between members and non-members. To this end, we propose a Trajectory-Invariant Explanation Regularization (TIER) defense that penalizes erratic fluctuations in confidence drops simulated through gradient-guided perturbations and simultaneously minimizes the distributional shifts via KL-divergence. Unlike conventional adversarial training, which emphasizes label robustness, our approach targets explanation robustness by enforcing self-consistency through KL-divergence and reducing the variance of confidence drops between members and non-members. Extensive experiments confirm that our method effectively mitigates these attacks, delivering privacy protection while maintaining model utility and explanation fidelity. --- ### Angry but Accurate: Detecting and Profiling the Counter-Misinformation Ecosystem on Twitter Authors: Eun Cheol Choi, Emilio Ferrara Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.SI, cs.CL, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02900v2 On social media, many users actively push back against false claims. Understanding who pushes back and how they do so matters, as this corrective activity is central to how misinformation is contested. We study this counter-misinformation ecosystem at scale: applying a domain-specific NLI model from our prior work to a large corpus of COVID-19 tweets, we classify 264,737 posts as supporting or opposing false claims and compare 23 user- and text-level features across the two groups. Contrary to the dominant assumption that negative emotion is a signature of falsehood, we find that misinformation-opposing posts are more emotionally negative than misinformation-supporting posts, with higher levels of anger, disgust, and sadness. These differences are modest in magnitude but consistent in direction across the negative emotions. We also find that posts opposing misinformation tend to come from more established users, i.e., older accounts, more followers, and higher listed counts. --- ### Angry but Accurate: Detecting and Profiling the Counter-Misinformation Ecosystem on Twitter Authors: Eun Cheol Choi, Emilio Ferrara Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.SI, cs.CL, cs.CY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02900v1 On social media, many users actively push back against false claims. Understanding who pushes back and how they do so matters, as this corrective activity is central to how misinformation is contested. We study this counter-misinformation ecosystem at scale: applying a domain-specific NLI model from our prior work to a large corpus of COVID-19 tweets, we classify 264,737 posts as supporting or opposing false claims and compare 23 user- and text-level features across the two groups. Contrary to the dominant assumption that negative emotion is a signature of falsehood, we find that anti-misinformation posts are more emotionally negative than pro-misinformation posts, with higher levels of anger, disgust, and sadness. These differences are modest in magnitude but consistent in direction across the negative emotions. We also find that posts opposing misinformation tend to come from more established users, i.e., older accounts, more followers, and higher listed counts. --- ### PPE-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating MLLM Unlearning under Private-Public Entanglement Authors: Xianren Zhang, Delvin Ce Zhang, Dongwon Lee, Suhang Wang Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02897v2 Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown strong capabilities, but they may memorize private information from web data, raising privacy concerns. Machine unlearning offers a way to remove such private knowledge without retraining from scratch. However, existing MLLM unlearning benchmarks have two major limitations. First, they rely on simplified images that contain only the single target individual, failing to reflect the visual complexity of real-world photos. Second, they typically assume that the forget set and retain set are fully separated, ignoring the fact that private information is often visually entangled with benign public information. For example, a private individual may appear with a public figure or in front of a well-known landmark, where unlearning the private target should not damage the public context. To address these limitations, we propose PPE-Bench, a new benchmark for evaluating MLLM unlearning under private-public entanglement. Each image contains a target individual to be forgotten and public information to be preserved, including public figure and landmark. We further introduce two simple but effective methods to better preserve public information during unlearning. Through experiments, we find that existing unlearning methods can reduce private information leakage, but often substantially harm adjacent public information. --- ### PPE-Bench: A Benchmark for Evaluating MLLM Unlearning under Private-Public Entanglement Authors: Xianren Zhang, Delvin Ce Zhang, Dongwon Lee, Suhang Wang Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02897v1 Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown strong capabilities, but they may memorize private information from web data, raising privacy concerns. Machine unlearning offers a way to remove such private knowledge without retraining from scratch. However, existing MLLM unlearning benchmarks have two major limitations. First, they rely on simplified images that contain only the single target individual, failing to reflect the visual complexity of real-world photos. Second, they typically assume that the forget set and retain set are fully separated, ignoring the fact that private information is often visually entangled with benign public information. For example, a private individual may appear with a public figure or in front of a well-known landmark, where unlearning the private target should not damage the public context. To address these limitations, we propose PPE-Bench, a new benchmark for evaluating MLLM unlearning under private-public entanglement. Each image contains a target individual to be forgotten and public information to be preserved, including public figure and landmark. We further introduce two simple but effective methods to better preserve public information during unlearning. Through experiments, we find that existing unlearning methods can reduce private information leakage, but often substantially harm adjacent public information. --- ### Open Problem: Is Interaction Necessary for Order-Optimal 1-bit Mean Estimation? Authors: Ivan Lau, Jonathan Scarlett Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.IT, cs.LG, math.ST, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02896v1 We ask whether interaction is necessary for order-optimal 1-bit mean estimation over nonparametric finite-moment classes. Adaptive threshold-query protocols achieve the order-optimal 1-bit minimax rate, and the same rate is attainable with general 1-bit queries using only one adaptive transition (i.e., two stages of querying). In the non-adaptive setting, threshold and interval queries are known to be highly suboptimal, but the case of arbitrary non-adaptive quantizers remains unresolved. Can such quantizers match the adaptive rate, yielding an optimal one-shot protocol? Or is the known two-stage estimator stage-optimal, with a single adaptive transition being necessary and sufficient? --- ### Selectivity Estimation for Linear Queries via Online Learning Authors: Fangzhu Shen, Debmalya Panigrahi, Sudeepa Roy Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.DB, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02895v1 Learning-based approaches for selectivity estimation in databases have gained significant traction in recent years. However, theoretical studies of these learning-based approaches are essentially limited to fixed query distributions on static databases. In practice, both the underlying database and the query workload can dynamically change over time. In this work, we propose an algorithmic framework for learning selectivity of queries in this more general dynamic setup. Inspired by online learning, we measure the performance of the learning algorithm in this setting by its regret, which compares the cumulative loss incurred by the learning algorithm to that of the best fixed strategy. We establish upper and lower bounds on regret for histogram-based linear queries, such as point, range, and subset selection queries, under standard loss functions, in both static and dynamic database settings. --- ### Variable Bit-width Quantization: Learning Per-Group Precision for "Bigger-but-Smaller" Language Models Authors: Hamish Ogilvy Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02893v1 Low-bit quantization shrinks language models but treats precision as a single global hyper-parameter: every weight uses the same bit-width. We introduce Variable Bit-width Quantization (VBQ), a training-time method in which each contiguous group of 64 weights learns its own resolution from {1,2,4,8} bits via a Gumbel-Softmax relaxation, trained jointly by an alternating optimization that gives the precision logits a clean, task-aligned signal. VBQ discovers a consistent, strongly heterogeneous allocation within individual projection types, not merely across layers, impossible to express with per-layer methods: 69% of groups collapse to 1 bit, the LM head averages 1.09 bits, while the first MLP block keeps ~2.5 bits. This pattern is stable enough to freeze into a fixed recipe and reuse without further search. The recipe yields a "bigger-but-smaller" regime: a 131M model at 1.82 mean bits reaches perplexity 4.2 on TinyStories, beating a 55M FP16 model (PPL 4.4) at 3.8x less storage, and lets a 1.46B model on FineWeb-Edu match a 593M FP16 control at ~3.7x less storage with 2.5x more parameters. As quality-per-byte, VBQ is 3.9-8.4x more efficient than FP16. The recipe maps directly to packed low-bit storage, so it also accelerates inference: with custom fused dequantize-and-multiply kernels, memory-bandwidth-bound autoregressive decode is faster at equal output, and the speedup grows with scale (parity at 131M, 1.9x at 1.0B, 4.7x at 9B on Apple silicon). A distributional analysis (KL divergence and argmax-flip rate) reveals a striking mechanism: deeper layers progressively self-heal the quantization error injected by early layers. The win is a from-scratch, train-time phenomenon; scaling the search economically beyond 1.5B parameters remains open. VBQ reframes precision as a learnable, non-uniform resource and shows that spending a fixed bit budget unevenly beats spending it uniformly. --- ### Dynamic Regret for Non-Stationary Linear Bandits via Misspecification Reductions Authors: Zihao Hu, Yuan Yao, Jiheng Zhang, Zhengyuan Zhou Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02891v1 Many online decision-making problems involve both round-specific feasible actions and drifting reward models: eligible ad impressions, feasible prices, and available treatments can change over time, while user preferences, demand curves, and patient responses may evolve. Motivated by these applications, we study non-stationary linear bandits with round-specific feasible decision sets. Existing methods that obtain the optimal \(\widetilde O(T^{2/3}P_T^{1/3})\) dependence, where \(P_T\) is the path length of the reward-parameter sequence, impose an orthogonal-structure assumption on round-specific decision sets, which can be restrictive in contextual applications. We address this gap through a unified misspecification-reduction viewpoint: after partitioning the horizon into blocks, we relate each block's dynamic regret to regret against a fixed-parameter linear bandit benchmark, with the within-block parameter drift entering as bounded misspecification. Restarting algorithms with misspecification-dependent regret guarantees then yields the optimal \(T^{2/3}P_T^{1/3}\) dynamic-regret dependence for both linear bandits with general compact decision sets and \(K\)-armed contextual linear bandits. --- ### SPLIT: Training-Free AI-Generated and Partially Edited Video Detection via Spatial Patch-Level Incoherence and Temporal Roughness Authors: Jongyeop Hyun, Hyounghun Kim Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02886v1 Deploying AI-generated video detectors in real-world services demands an ultra-low false positive rate (FPR) on real videos to avoid falsely rejecting authentic content, a regime where standard metrics such as AUROC fail to reflect actual operating behavior. We introduce Spatial Patch-Level Incoherence and Temporal Roughness (SPLIT), a training-free detector that operates on patch tokens from a frozen vision encoder to detect both fully generated and partially edited videos. SPLIT computes two complementary signals: Two-step Temporal Roughness (TTR), capturing non-smooth patch trajectories via one-step and two-step feature variation contrast, and Local Spatial Motion Incoherence (LSMI), measuring spatially inconsistent temporal changes through gradients of a feature-space motion field. The two are fused multiplicatively with gamma correction to sharpen real-fake separation at strict thresholds. We further propose a service-aligned evaluation protocol based on Fake Recall at fixed FPR with real-only threshold calibration and cross-real threshold transfer. Across three benchmarks (FakeParts, GenVideo, and ViF-Bench), SPLIT achieves the highest Fake Recall at FPR = $0.1\%$, substantially outperforming supervised and training-free baselines while remaining robust to post-processing with negligible overhead. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/mldljyh/SPLIT . --- ### Where do LLMs Fall Short in CBT-Guided Affective Reasoning? Authors: Vaishnavi Sinha, Pooja Guttal, Pranay Deep Reddy Katike, Vishal Sinha, Gerald Ndawula, Lira Yoon, Andrea Kleinsmith, Manas Gaur Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.HC, cs.IR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02885v2 Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) provides a structured framework for understanding a user's mental state by examining the interaction between cognitive and behavioral factors. However, out-of-the-box LLMs respond fluently and empathetically, yet collapse into validation & reflection, regardless of what the user actually needs. They know theoretical CBT (scoring up to 96% accuracy on licensing exam questions) but fail to apply it effectively. We explore this gap with a knowledge-guided framework that treats CBT dialogue as controlled affective reasoning: user narratives are decomposed into Beck's Cognitive Conceptualization structure, grounded in clinical SNOMED CT concepts validated via Natural Language Inference, and a Multiple Chain-of-Thought (MCoT) strategy selection between Validation & Reflection, Socratic Questioning, or Alternative Perspectives. To measure whether such guidance actually changes behavior, we introduce the Protocol Leverage Force (F), a behavior-level metric that captures how far an intervention shifts a model away from its default response. Across three open-weight LLMs and 14 RealCBT-derived case studies, evaluated with human experts, valence-arousal trajectories, and linguistic entrainment, F shows that simply introducing protocol definitions via single chain-of-thought prompting fails to change LLM behavior, while MCoT on these definitions guides strategy selection better. Still, the effect stays within 1% (approx. 1.2-1.3%), and all models remain biased toward Validation & Reflection. These results show CBT knowledge alone does not ensure effective application, giving the affective-computing community instrumentation to measure where LLMs fall short. --- ### PraMem: Practice-derived Experiential Memory for Long-horizon Behavior Prediction Authors: Zhuoqun Li, Boxi Cao, Jiawei Chen, Hanshu Zhou, Ruoxi Xu, Guiping Jiang, Ruotong Pan, Tingting Gao, Han Li, Xiangyu Wu, Hongyu Lin, Yaojie Lu et al. Published: 2026-07-03 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02881v1 Long-horizon behavior prediction aims to infer a user's next action based on a lengthy historical sequence, playing a crucial role in artificial intelligence field. The rise of large language models (LLMs) offers a promising direction for sequential behavior prediction, yet LLMs struggle with latent behavioral pattern induction and model-intrinsic cognitive biases when tackling long-horizon behavior prediction. Prior memory management methods follow a context-compression paradigm that attempts to address this task by alleviating the historical sequence burden, yet fail to resolve the core challenges. In this paper, we advocate a paradigm shift that reframes the lengthy historical sequence from a burden into a valuable resource to be exploited, and accordingly propose PraMem, which conducts beforehand practice over the lengthy historical sequence to build an experiential memory, thereby serving as the assisted input for accurate long-horizon behavior prediction. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks demonstrate that PraMem achieves superior performance than prior methods, and more in-depth analyses provide valuable insights into the mechanism and evolution of the experiential memory. Code: https://github.com/icip-cas/PraMem. ---