# Research Papers — 2026-07 · bundle page 221 of 222 > Full-text markdown of papers #11001–11050 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/221 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/220.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/222.md) ### Neural Network-Based Estimation of Time-Dependent Parameters in AR(p) Processes Authors: Agnieszka Kopeć, Paweł Przybyłowicz, Martyna Wiącek Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00470v1 We investigate a forecasting framework based on a simple discrete-time dynamic model with coefficients varying in time. The parameters of the model are recovered within a deep learning framework, which makes it possible to retain a transparent parametric structure while simultaneously accounting for complex and nonstationary patterns in the observed phenomenon. Our analysis covers two specifications of the noise process. Besides the standard Gaussian setting, we also consider Laplace-distributed noise, which can offer a more adequate description in the presence of heavier tails and sharper local fluctuations. For both cases, we formulate the predictive scheme of the model and analyze the associated uncertainty quantification, including the construction of prediction intervals. The results illustrate that a relatively simple model, when combined with time-dependent parameter estimation, can serve as a mathematically tractable and practically flexible tool for forecasting complex dynamics under different noise assumptions. The general model is stated for TVAR($p$), while the prediction-interval formulas and the numerical experiments are developed for the TVAR(1) case. --- ### StochasT: Learning with Stochastic Turn Depth for Visual Instruction Tuning Authors: Yuan Qing, Chengzhi Mao, Boqing Gong Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.CV, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00465v1 Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) rely extensively on Visual Instruction Tuning (VIT) to elicit their multimodal reasoning capabilities. However, we find a discrepancy: VIT often packs multiple language tasks about the same image for conversational, multi-turn training, whereas existing benchmarks evaluate LVLMs in isolated, single-turn scenarios. The models can suffer from visual attention decay and contextual overfitting during multi-turn training, making it hard for them to realize their full potential in the mismatched test phase. To close the gap, we propose learning with Stochastic Turn Depth (StochasT), which stochastically groups language tasks for the same image into clusters of varying sizes (turn depth) while preserving their organic order. Hence, while StochasT draws on Dropout and stochastic depth for ResNets, it does not actually drop anything to maximize the utility of the training data. Furthermore, we introduce a challenging, benchmark-agnostic evaluation mechanism based on the Balanced Latin Square to measure LVLMs' robustness under varying contextual dependencies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that StochasT effectively grants LVLMs strong, harmonized capabilities for both single-turn and multi-turn use cases. --- ### MolSafeEval: A Benchmark for Uncovering Safety Risks in AI-Generated Molecules Authors: Tong Xu, Xinzhe Cao, Zhihui Zhu, Keyan Ding, Huajun Chen Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00464v1 Current molecular generation benchmarks emphasize task complexity, molecule novelty, and property alignment; they largely overlook a critical concern: the potential safety risks of AI-generated molecules. In practice, many generative models may produce molecules with toxic, reactive, or otherwise hazardous characteristics - posing hidden dangers that remain insufficiently addressed. To address this gap, we introduce MolSafeEval, a benchmark dedicated to evaluating and analyzing the safety risks of molecular generation. Unlike prior approaches that rely on narrow toxicity predictors, MolSafeEval integrates heterogeneous safety knowledge - ranging from toxicological databases to hazard rules - into a structured molecular safety knowledge graph. This graph serves as a foundation for large language model-based reasoning, enabling systematic detection and explanation of unsafe features in generated compounds. We further categorize molecular generative models into four representative task types - unconditional generation, property optimization, target protein-based design, and text-based generation - and provide standardized datasets and safety evaluation protocols for each. By systematically revealing the safety vulnerabilities of current generative approaches, MolSafeEval offers a new lens for benchmarking molecular models and provides essential guidance toward safer, more trustworthy molecular design. --- ### Multimodal Continuous Reasoning via Asymmetric Mutual Variational Learning Authors: Shijie Li, Yilin Gao, Siyuan Yang, Tieyuan Chen, Chaofan Gan, Zhihao He, Zicheng Zhao, Yuyu Guo, Weiyao Lin, Hang Yu Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00461v1 Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are often constrained by a language-space bottleneck, forcing complex visual reasoning into discrete tokens which can lose perceptual nuance. A promising alternative is continuous latent reasoning, where the goal is to discover implicit reasoning pathways that bridge the multimodal query and the final answer. However, this introduces a severe train-inference mismatch: a training-time posterior, conditioned on the ground-truth answer, can exploit answer-dependent shortcuts. Standard variational training then forces the inference-time prior to mimic a posterior that has access to information unavailable at test time, leading to poor performance. To address this, we propose Asymmetric Mutual Variational Learning (AMVL), a framework that resolves this mismatch via a bidirectional calibration objective. A forward KL divergence trains the target-agnostic prior to match the posterior, while a novel reverse KL divergence simultaneously regularizes the posterior, preventing it from collapsing into inference-incompatible regions and mitigating this ``answer leakage''. We provide theoretical analysis formalizing this leakage as prior contamination and prove that our dual-KL objective reduces it. We instantiate AMVL in a latent-integrated MLLM and show that it consistently outperforms strong discrete and latent-reasoning baselines, improving the average score on the complex BLINK benchmark by +10.83 and achieving gains of up to +32.00 on individual reasoning tasks, with analyses confirming improved latent-space stability. --- ### A Multi-Resolution Finite-Volume Inspired Deep Learning Framework for Spatiotemporal Dynamics Prediction Authors: Xin-Yang Liu, Xiantao Fan, Jian-Xun Wang Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.CE, cs.AI, physics.comp-ph arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00460v1 Predicting complex spatiotemporal dynamics in physical processes often demands computationally expensive numerical methods or data-driven neural networks that suffer from high training costs, error accumulation, and limited generalizability to unseen parameters. An effective approach to address these challenges is leveraging physics priors in training neural networks, known as physics-informed deep learning (PiDL). In this work, we introduce the Multi-Resolution Finite-Volume-inspired network, MuRFiV, designed to capitalize on the conservative property of finite volume on the global scale and the expressive power of deep learning on the local scale. We demonstrate the effectiveness of MuRFiV on several spatio-temporal systems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs), including Burgers' equation, shallow water equations, and incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. By embedding PDE information into the deep learning architecture, MuRFiV achieves strong long-term prediction accuracy and remains stable over very long autoregressive rollouts, significantly outperforming data-driven neural network baselines. This result highlights the promise of combining multiresolution learning with finite-volume-inspired inductive bias for accurate and robust long-term prediction of complex dynamics. --- ### Multi-scale Mixture of World Models for Embodied Agents in Evolving Environments Authors: Jinwoo Jang, Daniel J. Rho, Sihyung Yoon, Hyunsuk Cho, Honguk Woo Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00457v1 Embodied agents operating in the real world require multi-scale reasoning and knowledge adaptation as conditions change. We identify two challenges in applying Mixture of Experts (MoE) to this setting: routing lacks an explicit notion of scale, preventing targeted updates at specific scales, and a uniform update policy cannot accommodate the different rates at which knowledge at each scale becomes outdated. We present MuSix, a framework that addresses both challenges through scale-aware world model mixture and evolution. A two-stage routing mechanism grounds scale selection in experiential distance, a measure of situational novelty inspired by Construal Level Theory: a meta-router first maps this quantity to a weight over continuous scale space, then per-scale base routers select world models within the identified scale. For adaptation, scale-dependent forgetting rates allow low-scale knowledge to refresh rapidly while high-scale abstractions persist, and gated inter-scale transfer maintains coherence across the hierarchy. Experiments on EmbodiedBench and HAZARD show that MuSix improves over state-of-the-art baselines on multi-scale reasoning and dynamic adaptation. --- ### Agri-SAGE: Simulation-Grounded Multi-Agent LLM for Context-Aware Agricultural Advisory Generation Authors: Vedant Balasubramaniam, Geetha Charan, Manojkumar Patil, Rohit P Suresh, V Priyanka, Kodur Sai Vinay Sathvik, Y. Narahari Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.AI, cs.MA arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00454v1 Agricultural advisory systems face a fundamental tension: static agronomic guidelines offer consistent, evidence-based recommendations, yet remain blind to in-season variability and dynamic uncertainties. Recent advisory systems powered by LLMs are liable for a different risk of generating recommendations that are agronomically credible but physiologically unconvincing. Agri-SAGE is a closed-loop framework designed to resolve the above two limitations by integrating retrieval-grounded multi-agent LLM reasoning with APSIM-based biophysical simulation, to generate and validate agronomic advisories. To assess this framework, we evaluate three reasoning approaches, namely Plan-and-Solve, Tree of Thoughts, and Reflexion, over a 10-year retrospective analysis. All three significantly outperform static PoP (Package-of-Practice) baselines, with Tree of Thoughts achieving impressive peak yields. At the same time, Reflexion achieves comparable agronomic outcomes at substantially lower computational cost by leveraging cross-seasonal episodic memory. --- ### Gauging, Measuring, and Controlling Critic Complexity in Actor-Critic Reinforcement Learning Authors: Konstantin Garbers Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00452v1 Actor-critic methods depend on learned critics, but critic quality is often evaluated only indirectly through return, temporal-difference error, or value loss. Critic complexity is introduced as an additional diagnostic and intervention dimension for actor-critic reinforcement learning. The analysis uses spectral effective-rank entropy, a rank-like summary of the singular-value distributions of critic weight matrices, to assess critic model complexity. Across TD3 and PPO experiments, critic complexity is tracked together with return and Monte Carlo value-estimation bias. The results show that critic complexity is measurable throughout training and is systematically associated with training behavior, while also making clear that the relationship is heterogeneous across algorithms, tasks, and hyperparameters. A direct complexity-control intervention is then evaluated by adding a spectral-entropy penalty to the critic loss. This intervention reliably changes the targeted spectral quantity, demonstrating that critic complexity can be controlled rather than only observed. Return effects are treated as task-dependent evidence rather than as a general performance claim, because overall complexity-control results vary. --- ### Real-Time Hard Negative Sampling via LLM-based Clustering for Large-Scale Two-Tower Retrieval Authors: Ivan Ji, Liuyi Hu, Harrison, Zhao, Lei Huang, Qunshu Zhang, Max, Fan, Aameek Singh Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00448v3 The two-tower model is widely used in the retrieval stage of large-scale recommendation systems, where training typically relies on in-batch and/or out-of-batch negative sampling. These methods, however, tend to produce easy negatives that the model learns quickly and that provide little training signal. This paper proposes a self-supervised, cluster-based hard negative sampling technique that draws negatives from the same semantic cluster as the positive item; in our production deployment the clusters are derived from large language model (LLM) based multimodal content representations, so that intra-cluster items are genuinely similar and yield informative negatives. To make this deployable at industrial scale, we realize the technique in a real-time, end-to-end framework that maintains a live in-memory item pool and draws cluster-based negatives from it on the fly via global out-of-batch sampling (GOOBS). The framework integrates directly into production two-tower training and serving and scales to billions of training examples with minimal computational overhead. Experiments on four public datasets and a 14-day online A/B test in a large-scale production system show that the proposed technique outperforms widely used industry methods, while also helping to break recommendation feedback loops and substantially reducing popularity bias. --- ### Real-Time Hard Negative Sampling via LLM-based Clustering for Large-Scale Two-Tower Retrieval Authors: Ivan Ji, Liuyi Hu, Harrison, Zhao, Lei Huang, Qunshu Zhang, Max, Fan, Aameek Singh Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00448v2 The two-tower model has been widely used for large-scale recommendation systems, particularly in the retrieval stage. Industry standards for training two-tower models typically involve in-batch and/or out-of-batch negative sampling. However, these methods often produce easy negatives that models can quickly learn, failing to sufficiently challenge the model. To address this issue, a novel self-supervised hard negative sampling technique is proposed that leverages a large language model (LLM) to generate hard negatives from the same cluster during model training. By utilizing the LLM to learn media representations, the proposed approach ensures that the generated negatives are more challenging and informative. This real-time sampling framework is designed for seamless integration into production models, capable of handling billions of training data points with minimal computational complexity. Experiments on public datasets, along with deployment to a large-scale online system, demonstrate that the proposed negative sampling technique outperforms widely used industry methods. Furthermore, analysis in industrial applications reveals that this sampling method can help break inherent feedback loops in recommendations and significantly reduce popularity bias. --- ### Understanding Why Language Models Hallucinate: Testing Reasoning Against Priors Authors: Yangfan Hu, Xuhan Tong, Haoyue Bai, Xi Ding, Shashank Muralidhar Bharadwaj, Siyang Cao, Robert Nowak, Jiawei Zhang Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00447v1 Large language models often produce hallucinated answers that violate prompt-level constraints. A key diagnostic question is whether these failures reflect missing knowledge, or whether the model has the relevant information but follows the wrong inference path. We study this phenomenon as inference misalignment: a mismatch between the answer supported by the prompt and the answer favored by statistically salient latent associations. We formalize this view with a latent key-task model, in which pretraining-frequency imbalance can cause a shortcut path to dominate the constraint-sensitive path and induce positive inference loss. The framework predicts two failure modes: task-retrieval bias in entity disambiguation and key-selection bias in action choice. We introduce TrapQA, a controlled diagnostic testbed with two components. ScientistQA tests disambiguation among similar scientists with supplementary factual probes, while Real-Life Constrained QA tests everyday constraint following under salient shortcuts. Our results show that hallucination can arise from biased latent inference rather than absent knowledge alone. --- ### VideoSearch-R1: Iterative Video Retrieval and Reasoning via Soft Query Refinement Authors: Seohyun Lee, Seoung Choi, Dohwan Ko, Jongha Kim, Hyunwoo J. Kim Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00446v1 As video corpora continue to expand in both scale and task complexity, there is increasing demand for approaches that retrieve relevant videos from large-scale corpora (inter-video reasoning) and subsequently perform fine-grained, query-conditioned tasks (intra-video reasoning) within the retrieved content, such as temporal grounding. However, existing approaches typically treat retrieval as a preprocessing step, and consequently, when the initial retrieval fails, there is no mechanism to refine the search, leading to the failure of subsequent fine-grained intra-video reasoning. Moreover, while recent agentic frameworks have advanced video understanding, they typically assume that the query-relevant video is already given, focusing exclusively on intra-video reasoning tasks. To address these limitations, we propose VideoSearch-R1, an agentic framework for iterative video retrieval and reasoning through multi-turn interaction with a video search engine. Specifically, we introduce Soft Query Refinement (SQR) to refine search query tokens in a continuous latent space rather than rewriting queries in the discrete text space, enabling more efficient and fine-grained adjustments. SQR and its reasoning process are trained using Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), guided by task-level reward signals derived from retrieval and downstream tasks. Building upon this, VideoSearch-R1 achieves state-of-the-art performance across three datasets on Video Corpus Moment Retrieval (VCMR), iteratively retrieving videos from large-scale corpora, refining search queries, and performing precise query-conditioned temporal grounding within the retrieved content. Our analyses show that SQR effectively refines the original query, requiring significantly fewer generated tokens than explicit text-level query refinement. Code and model checkpoints are publicly available at mlvlab.github.io/VideoSearch-R1. --- ### Search-Based Spatiotemporal and Multi-Robot Motion Planning on Graphs of Space-Time Convex Sets Authors: Jingtao Tang, Zining Mao, Lufan Yang, Hang Ma Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00444v1 Spatiotemporal motion planning, especially in multi-robot settings, requires robots to reason about collision-free regions that change over time, which is challenging in continuous spaces when feasible regions are transient and geometrically constrained. We present an algorithmic framework based on graphs of space-time convex sets (ST-GCSs), where collision-free regions are represented as convex sets in space-time and trajectories correspond to paths on the graph together with continuous motions within the selected sets. We formulate time-optimal planning on ST-GCSs as a graph-search problem over path-indexed states and develop a best-first search solver that evaluates partial paths via continuous trajectory optimization, guided by admissible heuristics and dominance checks. We further present an Exact Convex Decomposition (ECD) scheme to reserve trajectory occupancies in space-time, enabling unified handling of dynamic obstacles and multi-robot interactions. For multi-robot motion planning, we integrate ST-GCS planning and ECD into prioritized planning methods and introduce a windowed coordination scheme to improve efficiency. Extensive experiments on single-robot and multi-robot problems demonstrate substantial speedups over various planners while maintaining high solution quality, particularly in environments with narrow and transient feasible regions. Large-scale demonstrations further show that the proposed multi-robot motion planner can solve instances with up to $100$ robots within only a few minutes. Project homepage: https://sites.google.com/view/stgcs --- ### Learning Gait-Aware Quadruped Locomotion with Temporal Logic Specifications Authors: Merve Atasever, Keyan Azbijari, Cagan Bakirci, Alfredo Reina Corona, Tolga Izdas, Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00442v2 Reinforcement learning (RL) for quadruped locomotion commonly depends on fixed, hand-crafted, and Markovian reward functions that may limit interpretability of learned policies and may lack explicit control over gait behaviors. We introduce a framework where distinct gaits are specified using parameterized constraints expressed in Signal Temporal Logic (STL). These include safety bounds, gait synchronization constraints, command tracking, and actuation bounds. From these specifications, we develop a reward shaping mechanism that provides learning agents a dense, continuous reward landscape that encodes desired behavior. We define parametric STL templates for three speed regimes (walking-trot, trot, bound), calibrate their parameters from reference rollouts, and compute rewards from using smooth approximations of STL robustness over the rollouts. The generated rewards can be used to provide shaped gradients compatible with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). We instantiate the approach on Google's Barkour quadruped robot in MuJoCo XLA (MJX). We use parallelization within the simulator to improve training speeds and use domain randomization to robustify learned policies. Compared with hand-crafted rewards, an expert-switching oracle, and Text2Reward, Human-STL maintains high command-tracking success across the evaluated speed range while exhibiting substantially higher consistency with the intended speed-dependent gait structures. Videos can be found on our project website: https://stl-locomotion.github.io/. --- ### Learning Gait-Aware Quadruped Locomotion with Temporal Logic Specifications Authors: Merve Atasever, Cagan Bakirci, Alfredo Reina Corona, Keyan Azbijari, Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00442v1 Reinforcement learning (RL) for quadruped locomotion commonly depends on fixed, hand-crafted, and Markovian reward functions that limit both interpretability of learned policies and lack explicit control over gait behaviors. We introduce a framework where distinct gaits are specified using parameterized constraints expressed in Signal Temporal Logic (STL). These include safety bounds, gait synchronization constraints, command tracking, and actuation bounds. From these specifications, we develop a reward shaping mechanism that provides learning agents a dense, continuous reward landscape that encodes desired behavior. We define parametric STL templates for three speed regimes (walking-trot, trot, bound), calibrate their parameters from reference rollouts, and compute rewards from using smooth approximations of STL robustness over the rollouts. The generated rewards can be used to provide shaped gradients compatible with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). We instantiate the approach on Google's Barkour quadruped robot in MuJoCo XLA (MJX). We use parallelization within the simulator to improve training speeds and use domain randomization to robustify learned policies. We show that compared to a baseline of hand-crafted rewards, the STL-shaped rewards yield tighter velocity tracking and more stable training. Videos can be found on our project website: https://stl-locomotion.github.io/. --- ### PHREEQC-MCQ-200: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Tool-Augmented Scientific Simulator Agents Authors: Ke Zhang, Sahchit Chundur, Mohammad Javad Qomi, Maziar Raissi Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00436v1 Large language model agents are increasingly connected to scientific software, yet it remains unclear when tool access makes scientific computation more reliable rather than merely more complex. We introduce PHREEQC-MCQ-200, a benchmark for evaluating tool-augmented agents on deterministic aqueous-geochemistry simulations. The benchmark contains 200 multiple-choice questions derived from 21 validated PHREEQC scenarios, requiring agents to construct simulator inputs, execute PHREEQC, inspect structured outputs, and commit to final answers. Across multiple frontier and mid-tier model families, simulator access substantially improves aggregate accuracy, confirming that grounded execution is necessary for many scientific-computation tasks. However, the gains are not monotonic: tool-augmented agents also lose items they answered correctly without tools, revealing regressions that average accuracy alone hides. We further show that output-access protocol matters. A table-of-contents interface can reduce token cost while preserving or improving accuracy for stronger models, but it degrades performance for mid-tier models that cannot reliably navigate structured simulator outputs. PHREEQC-MCQ-200 therefore frames scientific tool use as an end-to-end diagnostic problem rather than a simple tool-calling capability. We argue that evaluations of scientific agents should report not only accuracy, but also item-level retention, output-access sensitivity, trajectory failures, and where the computation chain breaks. --- ### Information-Regularized Attention for Visual-Centric Reasoning Authors: Guohao Sun, Xiaofang Wang, Yash Patel, Mengchen Liu, Zhiqiang Tao, Praveen Krishnan Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00434v1 Vision-language models (VLMs) have become a paradigm for multimodal learning, yet remain unstable due to object hallucination, weak visual grounding, and catastrophic forgetting after full-parameter instruction tuning. We claim these failures result from a lack of explicit control over visual representation learning during the standard next-token prediction objective. As a result, visual embeddings thus become passively optimized and prone to injecting redundant or spurious signals. To counter this, we introduce Information-Regularized Attention (IRA), a stochastic attention mechanism that explicitly regulates the amount of visual information injected into the hidden states of intermediate transformer layers. This local reparameterization translates uncertainty about visual representations into local noise that is independent across data points. Beyond evaluating model performance, we also quantify embedding properties, where IRA produces smoother curvature trajectories and suppresses attention-sink across all layers, indicating a more stable transformation of the visual signal. Our results suggest that stochastic attention is not merely a regularizer but a key contributor to representation learning in a generative architecture, offering a new direction for building more reliable VLMs. --- ### Timesynth: A Temporal Fidelity Framework for Health Signal Digital Twins Authors: Md Rakibul Haque, Shireen Elhabian, Warren Woodrich Pettine Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00431v1 Forecasting models for health-signal digital twins must preserve the oscillatory, frequency, phase, and state-transition dynamics of physiological signals, yet the pointwise metrics used to benchmark them cannot detect when these fundamental properties are lost. We show that this blind spot misranks models: across 11 architectures, models with comparable pointwise error diverge by up to 53° in phase accuracy, equivalent to roughly 123 ms for a 1.2 Hz cardiac rhythm and invisible to standard metrics. To enable development of models that escape such failures, we introduce TimeSynth, a controlled benchmarking framework with two reusable components: a physiologically grounded generator producing signals with analytically known ground-truth dynamics from parametric models fitted to real electroencephalography, electrocardiography and photoplethysmogram signals, along with diagnostics quantifying amplitude, frequency, phase, and state-transition fidelity. Linear and full-sequence attention models systematically lose frequency and phase information despite acceptable amplitude error, whereas architectures with localized temporal structure better preserve dynamical fidelity and adapt to observable state transitions; none, however, reliably preserves stochastic switching. Because the dominant determinant of fidelity is architectural, model choice becomes a principled, use-case-driven decision rather than a search for a single winner. TimeSynth thus supplies the controlled preclinical stress test missing before models are coupled to patient data, with a reusable generator and diagnostics for fidelity-aware development. --- ### HyFL-CLIP: Hyperbolic Fine-Tuning of CLIP for Robust Long-Context Understanding Authors: Ji Ha Jang, Hayeon Kim, Chulwon Lee, Junghun James Kim, Se Young Chun Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00428v1 CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) has become a de facto paradigm for image-text alignment, but it struggles with long-context descriptions (>77 tokens) due to absolute positional encoding and pretraining on short captions. In long contexts, sentences are often reordered, summarized, or partially omitted. Although prior works extend CLIP with longer positional encodings, they often suffer from degraded image-text alignment under such text perturbations. We attribute this limitation to the Euclidean contrastive objective, which enforces strict one-to-one matching and lacks explicit mechanisms for modeling hierarchical relationships between global context and its constituent elements. To address this issue, we propose HyFL-CLIP, a hyperbolic fine-tuning framework that distills the well-established text-image alignment learned in Euclidean CLIP into hyperbolic space via cross-manifold similarity distillation, leveraging its geometry to capture hierarchical and entailment relations. Our method models hierarchical semantics by linking summarized token-wise features, long-context descriptions, constituent short textual components, and images, capturing part-whole relationships via hyperbolic entailment with Einstein midpoint aggregation. Experiments on diverse benchmarks, including long-context cross-modal retrieval, cross-modal retrieval with caption perturbations, intra-modality retrieval, and short-text cross-modal retrieval, show that HyFL-CLIP achieves more robust long-context understanding. In particular, it yields up to 19.5% improvement in long-text cross-modal retrieval under textual perturbations over the best prior method. We also show HyFL-CLIP can be seamlessly integrated into other model frameworks by applying it to Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL). --- ### Selective Test-Time Debiasing for CLIP via Reward Gating Authors: Jaeho Han, Jisoo Yang, Hyeondong Woo, Mingyu Jeon, Sunjae Yoon, Junyeong Kim Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00423v1 Vision language models (VLMs) demonstrate strong zero-shot performance, but often perpetuate social stereotypes in person-centric queries, yielding skewed demographic distributions. Current debiasing methods apply uniform bias corrections across all input queries regardless of their bias sensitivity, creating a fundamental fairness--utility trade-off. Strong debiasing distorts semantically meaningful information in bias-insensitive queries, while weak debiasing fails to mitigate stereotypes in bias-sensitive ones. This one-size-fits-all approach hampers simultaneously achieving high utility on bias-insensitive queries and fairness on bias-sensitive queries. We introduce Reward-Gated Test-Time Adaptation (RG-TTA), a reinforcement learning-based test-time adaptation framework that selectively applies debiasing based on input sensitivity. RG-TTA adaptively triggers fairness regularization based on the bias sensitivity of each input during test-time policy adaptation, while focusing exclusively on optimizing cross-modal alignment for bias-insensitive inputs. Experiments on fairness benchmarks (e.g., FairFace, UTKFace) demonstrate substantial bias reduction while simultaneously improving zero-shot utility, resolving the trade-off of uniform debiasing. --- ### Speech Playground: An Interactive Tool for Speech Analysis and Comparison Authors: Stephen McIntosh, Daisuke Saito, Nobuaki Minematsu Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.CL, cs.SD, eess.AS arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00418v1 This paper presents Speech Playground, an interactive speech visualization and comparison tool. While existing tools such as Praat are excellent, it can be cumbersome to integrate them with modern deep learning representations and use them for comparison. Speech Playground addresses this by combining a Python backend with a web-based frontend for interactive exploration of multiple feature types, including continuous, discrete, and variable-length representations. It includes TextGrid and forced alignment support together with configurable distance and alignment settings for visual and auditory comparison. Speech Playground is intended for use in speech research, representation validation, and computer-aided pronunciation training (CAPT)-oriented experimentation. --- ### EO-VGGT: Orbital Ray-Conditioned 3D Foundation Models for Satellite Multi-View Reconstruction Authors: Qiyan Luo, Yingdong Pi, Lekang Wen, Jie Yang, Xiaoyu Wang, Haiming Zhang, Mi Wang Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00417v1 In the era of satellite constellations, multi-view optical satellite imagery is pivotal for Earth Observation (EO) and high-quality Digital Surface Model (DSM) reconstruction. Although feed-forward 3D foundation models have transformed computer vision, their deployment in satellite remote sensing is inherently constrained by the structural discrepancy between implicit perspective assumptions and explicit orbital pushbroom geometry. This geometric incongruity is further compounded by pronounced view-set heterogeneity. We present EO-VGGT, a framework that adapts a frozen perspective-driven model to orbital observations via explicit physical geometry embedding.First, the Geometry-Correlation Constrained Selection (GCCS) strategy prunes sub-optimal observations by balancing geometric diversity and radiometric consistency to optimize the input sequence. Second, a Sensor-Ray Encoder (SRE) parameterizes pixel-level pushbroom lines of sight derived from the Rational Function Model (RFM) into high-dimensional space-geometric tokens, reconciling the mathematical discrepancy between central projection and orbital kinematics. Third, a lightweight Ray-Pointing-Aware Adapter (RPAA) employs gated residual blocks to integrate these tokens directly into the frozen transformer backbone. Our findings underscore that integrating explicit physical geometry with optimized view selection is essential for robust feed-forward satellite 3D reconstruction. --- ### DroneIQA-VLE: Multi-Task Drone Image Quality Assessment via Vision-Language Ensemble Authors: Wei Sun, Weixia Zhang, Hongjian Zhan, Mingkai Lu, Yixuan Gao, Guangtao Zhai Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00416v1 We present DroneIQA-VLE, our solution to the ICME 2026 Drone-IQA Grand Challenge on Target-aware Image Quality Assessment for Low-altitude UAV Images. The framework jointly predicts global, target, and background quality scores by ensembling two complementary pipelines: (1) SigLIP2 vision encoders with multi-task regression heads, and (2) a LoRA-adapted Qwen3.5-9B multimodal large language model for quality score regression. The final global quality prediction is obtained by arithmetically averaging the outputs of both pipelines. Our method achieves 2nd place in the challenge, demonstrating its effectiveness. The code is available at https://github.com/sunwei925/DroneIQA-VLE. --- ### A Mechanistic View of Authority Hierarchy in LLM Sycophancy Authors: Emil Joswin, Srujananjali Medicherla, Priyanka Mary Mammen Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00415v1 Authority bias poses a critical safety concern in language models: models systematically prioritize social cues from authority figures over factual consistency, swaying their answers based on source credibility rather than evidence. We mechanistically investigate this phenomenon using a controlled medical QA setting, where hints suggesting incorrect answers are attributed to personas of varying expertise. Across Llama-3.1-8B, Qwen3-8B, and Gemma-2-9B, we find that models respond in a graded manner proportional to perceived authority, a hierarchy that is never explicitly prompted but emerges from training. Logit lens analysis and linear/non-linear probing localize this effect to a critical late layer where correct answer representations are actively erased, an erasure that scales with authority level, resists mean vector intervention, and is only partially reversible through chain-of-thought reasoning. Our findings suggest that authority-induced sycophancy is not a surface-level output bias but mechanistic knowledge erasure, a precise, layer-localized overwriting of correct internal representations by high-status authority signals. --- ### MindAU: EEG-Conditioned Facial Action Unit Editing via Dual-Stream Manifold Alignment Authors: Zhenhang Li, Xin Zhou, Hao Deng, Lijun Yin Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00410v1 Recent brain decoding studies have made substantial progress in reconstructing externally perceived visual content from neural signals. However, using electroencephalography (EEG) recordings to guide facial expression editing remains largely unexplored and poses a distinct challenge: rather than recovering what a subject sees, it requires identifying facial-action related patterns from noisy EEG signals and grounding them in localized, identity-preserving expression edits. In this paper, we investigate EEG-conditioned facial image editing for fine-grained facial action unit (AU) control and propose MindAU, a unified framework for controlling facial AU edits from EEG signals. MindAU first learns noise-robust and AU-discriminative EEG representations through temporal masked reconstruction and AU classification supervision. It then bridges the modality gap via Dual-Stream Manifold Alignment, aligning EEG features with AU-level text semantics and identity-reduced visual displacement trajectories in the multimodal space of Qwen2.5-VL. Finally, MindAU incorporates EEG-aware Multimodal Rotary Positional Embeddings, landmark-guided reference masking, and AU-aware region supervision into a multimodal diffusion-based editor for high-fidelity identity-preserving editing. We also introduce E-CAFE, a curated benchmark for EEG-Conditioned Action-Unit Facial Editing with paired EEG-face editing samples and standardized evaluation protocols. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of MindAU and suggest its potential as a step towards future assistive expression technologies for individuals with facial neuromuscular disorders. --- ### MedCAGD: Context-Aware Gated Decoder for Efficient Medical Image Segmentation Authors: Saad Wazir, Patrick Dominique Vibild, Dinh Phu Tran, Seongah Kim, Daeyoung Kim Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00409v1 Medical image segmentation relies on the ability of encoder-decoder architectures to translate rich feature representations into accurate pixel-level predictions under challenging conditions such as low contrast, structural ambiguity, and scale variability. While recent advances in large-scale pretraining and transformer-based encoders have substantially improved feature extraction, segmentation accuracy remains constrained by decoder design, particularly in terms of cross-scale alignment, contextual integration, and boundary preservation. In this work, we revisit medical image segmentation from a decoder-centric perspective and propose a context-aware gated decoder that systematically regulates feature fusion and contextual aggregation throughout the decoding process. The proposed decoder integrates lightweight multi-scale channel recalibration, gated skip fusion with spatial competition and a global context aggregation mechanism that injects encoder-wide information into intermediate decoding stages. This design enables effective translation of strong pretrained encoder representations into spatially consistent predictions. Extensive experiments across 11 medical image segmentation benchmarks validate the effectiveness and demonstrate that the proposed approach consistently outperforms strong baselines while remaining computationally practical. Code: https://github.com/saadwazir/MedCAGD --- ### Personalization as Inverse Planning: Learning Latent Design Intents for Agentic Slide Generation via Structural Denoising Authors: Tianci Liu, Zihan Dong, Linjun Zhang, Haoyu Wang, Jing Gao, Emre Kiciman, Ranveer Chandra, Wei-Ting Chen Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00407v2 Slide design requires personalizing both deck themes and page layouts. Yet, current AI agent-based methods struggle with fine-grained, page-level design. Solely relying on prespecified templates or user verbose instructions, they fail to capture latent design intents, leaving Page-level Slide Personalization (PSP) unresolved. To close this gap, this work formulates PSP as an inverse planning problem. We propose to learn a design intent without assuming any knowledge of the specific executing tools (e.g., PowerPoint, Beamer) being used. However, relinquishing control over these tools makes the problem intractable to optimize end-to-end. To overcome this, we propose SPIRE, a principled framework to solve PSP approximately. By intentionally corrupting the visual structures of clean slides, SPIRE creates a verifiable task to denoise the corruption, whereby two agents learn to collaboratively refine executable designs via reinforcement learning (RL). We present a proof that structural denoising is a consistent surrogate for PSP, and that the multi-agent formulation strictly reduces policy gradient variance in RL. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of SPIRE. --- ### Personalization as Inverse Planning: Learning Latent Design Intents for Agentic Slide Generation via Structural Denoising Authors: Tianci Liu, Zihan Dong, Linjun Zhang, Haoyu Wang, jing Gao, Emre Kiciman, Ranveer Chandra, Wei-Ting Chen Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00407v1 Slide design requires personalizing both deck themes and page layouts. Yet, current AI agent-based methods struggle with fine-grained, page-level design. Solely relying on prespecified templates or user verbose instructions, they fail to capture latent design intents, leaving Page-level Slide Personalization (PSP) unresolved. To close this gap, this work formulates PSP as an inverse planning problem. We propose to learn a design intent without assuming any knowledge of the specific executing tools (e.g., PowerPoint, Beamer) being used. However, relinquishing control over these tools makes the problem intractable to optimize end-to-end. To overcome this, we propose SPIRE, a principled framework to solve PSP approximately. By intentionally corrupting the visual structures of clean slides, SPIRE creates a verifiable task to denoise the corruption, whereby two agents learn to collaboratively refine executable designs via reinforcement learning (RL). We present a proof that structural denoising is a consistent surrogate for PSP, and that the multi-agent formulation strictly reduces policy gradient variance in RL. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of SPIRE. --- ### The Illusion of High Utility in Safety Alignment of Text-to-Image Diffusion Models Authors: Adeel Yousaf, Soumik Ghosh, James Beetham, Amrit Singh Bedi, Mubarak Shah Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00402v1 Safety alignment of text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models aims to suppress harmful generations while preserving utility on benign prompts. Recent methods often appear to deliver high safety with high utility, but this conclusion rests largely on coarse global utility metrics (e.g., FID, CLIPScore) that are insensitive to fine-grained semantic correctness, creating an illusion of high utility. We show that when utility is measured with structured evaluation, this illusion breaks: on TIFA (Text-to-Image Faithfulness evaluation with Question Answering), safety-aligned models suffer substantial drops in semantic fidelity, including failures in object counts, attributes, and relationships. To diagnose the source of this gap, we analyze the text-encoder prompt embedding space and uncover semantic collapse, a contraction of embedding spread coupled with distortion of inter-prompt similarity structure, which strongly correlates with structured utility loss. Guided by this insight, we propose StructureAware Geometric Regularization (SAGE), a safety alignment objective that explicitly preserves embedding spread and inter-prompt relational structure during adaptation. Our method restores structured utility (TIFA +5.0% over prior state-of-the-art) while maintaining strong safety performance and competitive coarse-grained utility scores. Our source code and trained models are available at https://adeelyousaf.github.io/SAGE_ECCV26_Project_Page/. --- ### DriveVer: Lightweight Trajectory Evaluator as Test-Time Verifier for Autonomous Driving Authors: Chong He, Yuechen Luo, Fang Li, Shaoqing Xu, Fuxi Wen Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00399v1 End-to-end autonomous driving models often encounter performance bottlenecks, as training-time scaling leads to high computational costs and diminishing marginal returns. Existing planners typically adopt a one-shot generation paradigm, lacking secondary validation and active correction mechanisms to detect and revise suboptimal or unsafe trajectories during inference. To address this issue, we propose DriveVer, a lightweight, plug-and-play Test-Time Verifier that leverages the test-time scaling paradigm to enable autonomous driving systems to validate and refine trajectories without costly and heavy training. We construct a dedicated trajectory dataset based on the NAVSIM benchmark through condition-driven clustering and balanced sampling according to ego-vehicle states and navigation commands. Employing a dual-head architecture, DriveVer efficiently fuses candidate trajectories with multi-view visual representations and ego-vehicle kinematic features to simultaneously predict a safety confidence score and an absolute geometric refinement vector. Extensive experiments on the NAVSIM benchmark show that DriveVer significantly improves the performance of base planning models. Notably, as an extremely compact model with only 34M parameters, DriveVer introduces minimal computational overhead, achieving competitive results while maintaining real-time inference efficiency. --- ### Holographic Quantum Transformer: A Generalist Neuro-Symbolic Architecture for Solving Frustrated Systems via Generative Attention Authors: Xingran Guo, Tiaojie Xiao, Jie Liu, Keqin Li Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cond-mat.str-el, cs.AI, cs.ET arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00398v1 Simulating two-dimensional frustrated quantum matter is a grand challenge due to the sign problem and exponential Hilbert space complexity. In this work, we introduce the Holographic Quantum Transformer (HQT), a physics-inspired generative architecture that leverages global self-attention to resolve non-local entanglement patterns. We validate HQT on the square lattice $J_1-J_2$ Heisenberg model. On the heavily frustrated $8 \times 8$ lattice at the quantum critical point ($J_2=0.5$), HQT reaches a ground-state energy per site ($E/N$) of $\mathbf{-0.5001(1)}$, consistent with the expected finite-size scaling trend. Beyond numerical accuracy, HQT exhibits intrinsic physical awareness, autonomously recovering the underlying $J_2$ interaction geometry through interpretable attention maps. Our central contribution is ``Holographic Transfer", a zero-shot size-extrapolation protocol with rapid alignment: a model trained on $8 \times 8$ systems is directly projected onto larger $10 \times 10$ lattices via continuous positional-embedding interpolation and head re-initialization, achieving high-fidelity initialization and rapid convergence. This zero-shot protocol yields an energy of $E/N = \mathbf{-0.49782(3)}$, statistically consistent with the variational state of the art while requiring no from-scratch training on the target lattice. Our results establish generative attention as a scalable paradigm for transferable quantum simulation. --- ### NeuroCogMap Reveals Cognitive Organization of Large Language Models Authors: Zhongxiang Sun, Haolang Lu, Qiang Ma, Qi Li, Qipeng Wang, Liang Pang, Chenyu Liu, Qiankun Li, Hao Sun, Kun Wang, Yi Zeng, Jun Xu et al. Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: q-bio.NC, cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00397v1 Understanding how complex cognitive functions are organized within artificial systems is central to interpreting large language models (LLMs) and relating them to biological cognition. Yet although LLMs exhibit broad cognitive-like behaviours, it remains unclear whether their internal representations form reproducible functional systems that explain behaviour, failure and links to human cognition. Here we present NeuroCogMap, a cognitive neuroscience-inspired framework that organizes internal features of LLMs into functional parcels and links them to interpretable functions, cognitive capabilities and a cognitive hierarchy. These parcels form a stable and semantically coherent organization that is partly conserved across models and functionally linked to model outputs. Within this organization, major LLM failures, including hallucination, bias, refusal failure and sycophancy, correspond to distinct disruptions in representational and behavioural-control systems, yielding internal signatures for mechanism-guided detection and targeted intervention. Beyond model behaviour, NeuroCogMap improves prediction of human cortical responses during naturalistic language comprehension, with the strongest correspondence in higher-order association cortex. At the cognitive level, its internal signatures expose latent strategies that guide refinements of classical models of human decision-making. Together, these findings establish NeuroCogMap as a system-level framework for mapping functional organization in artificial systems and for relating this organization to human cortical function and cognitive behaviour. --- ### When Classic Cache Policies Fail: Learning-Augmented Replacement for Semantic Retrieval Buffers Authors: Yushi Sun, Bowen Cao, Wai Lam Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.DB, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00394v1 LLM agents increasingly rely on retrieval buffers to store and reuse past experience, yet the cache management policies governing these buffers remain largely ad-hoc. We formalize this as an online semantic cache replacement problem with switching costs, where items are matched by embedding similarity and hit quality is continuous rather than binary. Through experiments on two datasets from MemoryBench-Full (LoCoMo, DialSim) with 8 replacement policies, we reveal a surprising finding: classic heuristics (LRU, LFU) \emph{consistently underperform} the naive FIFO baseline on semantic workloads, due to the absence of temporal locality and frequency concentration. We propose SOLAR, a learning-augmented framework that derives modification timing from regret accumulation (achieving $\sim$17\% modification rate) and content selection from Bayesian online learning over implicit retrieval feedback. We prove SOLAR achieves a constant competitive ratio $\leq 3$, independent of cache size and horizon (vs.\ $Ω(K)$ for FIFO), and eviction regret $O(\sqrt{KT\log T})$, matching the $Ω(\sqrt{KT})$ lower bound up to logarithmic factors. Experiments demonstrate 5--75\% relative improvement over FIFO at tight cache sizes, with a clearly characterized phase transition at the working set boundary. Synthetic experiments with 5000-item pools further reveal an inverted-U relationship between pool size and retrieval quality, justifying capacity constraints as a retrieval noise phenomenon rather than a storage limitation. --- ### Learning Generalizable Skill Policy with Data-Efficient Unsupervised RL Authors: Jongchan Park, Seungjun Oh, Seungho Baek, Yusung Kim Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00392v1 Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning (URL) aims to pre-train scalable, skill-conditioned policies without extrinsic rewards, serving as a foundation for downstream control tasks. Despite recent progress, we argue that current off-policy URL methods are limited by two critical, overlooked bottlenecks: (1) non-stationary skill semantics and (2) brittle generalization. To address these challenges, we propose GenDa (Generalizable Data-efficient Agent), a unified framework for robust unsupervised reinforcement learning. First, we introduce a skill relabeling mechanism to mitigate non-stationarity and significantly improve data efficiency for pre-training. Second, we propose a Complementary Information Bottleneck (CIB), encouraging the learned skill policy to focus on ego-centric features and become robust to distribution shifts for downstream tasks. Through various experiments, we demonstrate that GenDa significantly enhances the scalability of URL with superior generalizability and data efficiency. Our code and videos are available at https://ihatebroccoli.github.io/official-GenDa. --- ### MalariAI: A Label-Resilient Decoupled Framework for Annotation-Agnostic Cell Segmentation and Explainable Stage Classification in Dense Malaria Blood Smears Authors: Kaysarul Anas Apurba, Md Hasibul Hasan, Mohammed Ali, Tanzilur Rahman Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: eess.IV, cs.AI, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00385v2 Automated malaria diagnosis from blood smear microscopy is a critical global health AI challenge; expert scarcity remains the primary diagnostic bottleneck. Existing deep learning systems face three compounding failures: end-to-end detectors treat unannotated cells as background, skewing recall by annotation completeness rather than true cell recovery; Non-Maximum Suppression suppresses valid detections in dense smears; and pipelines lack per-cell spatial evidence for clinical audit. We present MalariAI, a two-stage decoupled framework addressing all three. Stage 1 applies an annotation-agnostic watershed algorithm to isolate every cell in a full 1600x1200 image, recovering 75.95% of ground-truth cells without any ground-truth input. End-to-end, the pipeline reaches a binary parasitized AP@0.5 of 29.10% - the clinically relevant metric for flagging any infected cell - while the stricter multi-class mAP@0.5 of 8.67% mainly reflects watershed's organic region boundaries being penalized against axis-aligned ground-truth boxes, not a localisation failure. Stage 2 fine-tunes EfficientNet-B0 with Focal Loss on ground-truth crops, achieving 98.36% classification accuracy - an oracle upper bound once a cell is correctly localised - with 87.5% and 75.0% accuracy on the rare schizont and gametocyte stages, versus 38.45% and 57.27% AP for a modern YOLOv8s detector evaluated end-to-end on the same classes. Grad-CAM++ heatmaps generated per detected cell provide instance-level spatial evidence for clinical audit; a quantitative energy-in-box analysis confirms this activation is concentrated on the annotated cell body significantly above a geometric chance baseline (+0.0485, paired p = 1.4 x 10^-33), letting microscopists verify predictions at the individual parasite level without sacrificing classification performance. --- ### Vitality-Aware Compression for Efficient Image-to-Shape Diffusion Transformers Authors: Jaeah Lee, Hyunjin Kim, Jaewoong Cho, Gihyun Kwon Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00382v2 We propose the first compression approach for image-to-shape Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) that substantially reduces model size while preserving geometric fidelity. Despite remarkable progress in 3D shape generation, large DiT-based models remain computationally prohibitive in resource-constrained settings. Furthermore, it is difficult to directly transfer existing diffusion model compression strategies developed for different domains to 3D generation, and prior 3D efficiency approaches focus primarily on inference speed rather than backbone compression. To address this limitation, we build a geometry-aware compression framework tailored to image-to-shape DiTs. Guided by the observation that 3D DiT layers exhibit non-uniform importance for geometry synthesis, we introduce a vitality-guided framework integrating structured pruning, adaptive quantization, and targeted fine-tuning. Our method achieves up to 66% model-size reduction across state-of-the-art image-to-3D models while maintaining synthesis fidelity comparable to full-sized counterparts. This highlights the potential of our framework as a plug-and-play solution for efficient 3D shape generation across diverse models. --- ### Vitality-Aware Compression for Efficient Image-to-Shape Diffusion Transformers Authors: Jaeah Lee, Hyunjin Kim, Jaewoong Cho, Gihyun Kwon Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00382v1 We propose the first compression approach for image-to-shape Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) that substantially reduces model size while preserving geometric fidelity. Despite remarkable progress in 3D shape generation, large DiT-based models remain computationally prohibitive in resource-constrained settings. Furthermore, it is difficult to directly transfer existing diffusion model compression strategies developed for different domains to 3D generation, and prior 3D efficiency approaches focus primarily on inference speed rather than backbone compression. To address this limitation, we build a geometry-aware compression framework tailored to image-to-shape DiTs. Guided by the observation that 3D DiT layers exhibit non-uniform importance for geometry synthesis, we introduce a vitality-guided framework integrating structured pruning, adaptive quantization, and targeted fine-tuning. Our method achieves up to 66% model-size reduction across state-of-the-art image-to-3D models while maintaining synthesis fidelity comparable to full-sized counterparts. This highlights the potential of our framework as a plug-and-play solution for efficient 3D shape generation across diverse models. --- ### Attribute-Prompted Kernel Hashing for Unsupervised Data-Efficient Cross-Modal Retrieval Authors: Runhao Li, Xiaoxu Ma, Zhenyu Weng, Yue Zhang, Guibo Luo, Huiping Zhuang, Zhiping Lin, Yap-Peng Tan Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.IR, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00379v1 Unsupervised cross-modal hashing enables efficient retrieval of semantically related instances across different modalities without requiring manual semantic annotation. However, existing unsupervised methods rely heavily on large-scale image-text pairs. Collecting such data can be costly, particularly in scenarios where well-aligned pairs are scarce due to privacy and specialized constraints. More critically, existing methods tend to overfit to seen training data, restricting their generalization performance on unseen categories that the constrained training data cannot cover. To address these limitations, we propose Attribute-Prompted Kernel Hashing (APKH), a novel data-efficient approach that constructs a compact, modality-aligned Hamming space driven by the generalized attribute priors of vision-language foundation models. Specifically, APKH introduces two core modules: Context-optimized Attribute Kernel Mapping (CAKM) and Kernel-Smoothed Contrastive Alignment (KSCA). CAKM formulates cross-modal alignment through hyperspherical Radial Basis Function kernel mapping, optimizing dynamic attribute kernels via prompt learning to capture modality-invariant semantics. Furthermore, KSCA extends conventional point-to-point contrastive learning by modeling limited paired data as continuous kernel distributions. This explicit smoothing of the modality gap alleviates overfitting to sparse pairwise correlations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that APKH outperforms state-of-the-art hashing methods in the challenging cross-modal retrieval tasks from seen to unseen categories under data-constrained scenarios. --- ### Radial Interaction Tomography: Recognizing Non-Transitive Evolutionary Games from One Range-Expansion Image Authors: Faruk Alpay, Baris Basaran Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.CV, q-bio.PE arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00378v1 Colored sectors in a microbial range expansion encode more than lineage survival counts. We formulate a computer-vision inverse problem: from one endpoint image of an accretive multi-type expansion, recover the radius-indexed pairwise boundary-flow field and test whether the visual pattern is compatible with a transitive scalar fitness hierarchy. The observable is a geometric signal extracted from sector-boundary curves in log-polar coordinates. We prove endpoint observability and stability for frozen fronts, weighted transitive/cyclic decomposition, contact-complete circular design, physical-clock and mechanism non-identifiability, exact Gaussian cyclicity testing, and Bonferroni-valid interval scanning. The benchmark is deterministic: analytic endpoint images, blurred/noisy pixel round trips, scalar-null stress tests, public-image tracing, multi-resolution mechanistic endpoints, and a non-learning frozen-front simulator. The implementation recovers pairwise edge-flow histories from endpoint images, detects cyclic residuals in a mechanistic four-type expansion, and uses those residuals as forcing signals for a dimensionless active design-control layer covering reaction-diffusion control, phenotype-frontier optimization, protocol synthesis, Monte Carlo robustness, and a downstream population-state bridge. --- ### SAOT: Self-Supervised Continual Graph Learning with Structure-Aware Optimal Transport Authors: Yuting Zhang, Yanbei Liu, Zhitao Xiao, Lei Geng, Yanwei Pang, Xiao Wang Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.LG, cs.SI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00377v1 Self-supervised Continual Graph Learning (CGL) aims to successively learn from a graph sequence with different tasks without label supervision - a paradigm that has attracted widespread attention. Most existing self-supervised CGL methods rely on instance-level consistency objectives that enforce stability of individual node (or node-pair) embeddings. Due to optimizing nodes in isolation, these methods fail to maintain global relational structure, causing inter-node correspondences to progressively distort under continual learning. To this end, we propose a novel Structure-Aware Optimal Transport (SAOT) framework that explicitly captures and preserves relational structure within graph representations across sequential tasks. Specifically, SAOT leverages optimal transport theory to capture global inter-node correspondences, thereby facilitating and enhancing graph representation learning. Simultaneously, SAOT incorporates a cross-task knowledge distillation mechanism to preserve the previous structural knowledge. Extensive experiments on four CGL benchmark datasets demonstrate that SAOT outperforms existing self-supervised baselines. In particular, SAOT achieves significant performance gains, improving average accuracy by up to 5% on CoraFull-CL and over 15% on Products-CL compared with state-of-the-art methods in the Class-IL setting. --- ### LIST3R: Long-sequence Instance-aware 3D Reconstruction Authors: Jing Gao, Wei Wang, Feiran Wang, Yan Yan Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00375v1 We present LIST3R, an instance-aware framework for long-sequence 3D reconstruction inspired by the way humans organize spatial memory around stable and recognizable objects. LIST3R organizes long-sequence reconstruction around instance anchors, using them to reconnect fragmented subsequences and consolidate local observations into a coherent global 3D scene. Given a long video, our approach partitions it into overlapping subsequences and builds a structured local instance library for each partial reconstruction, maintaining persistent trackable anchors with semantic and geometric evidence. These anchors are matched across subsequences to recover revisited regions and provide object-aware constraints for fragment alignment, producing a consistent global reconstruction. During this process, the evolving geometric evidence updates the local instance libraries and progressively organizes them into a unified global 3D instance library. Experiments on long-sequence benchmarks show that our method produces more accurate trajectories and higher-quality 3D reconstructions, highlighting the effectiveness of persistent instance anchors for organizing long-horizon 3D reconstruction. Our code is available on the project page: https://yixn965.github.io/LIST3R/. --- ### Learning to Compose: Revisiting Proxy Task Design for Zero-Shot Composed Image Retrieval Authors: Jingjing Zhang, Lei Zhang, Zheren Fu, Zhendong Mao Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.IR, cs.MM arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00374v1 Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) retrieves a target image from a reference image and a textual modification. While supervised CIR relies on costly triplets, Zero-Shot CIR (ZS-CIR) alleviates this reliance through proxy tasks trained on image-text pairs. However, existing proxy tasks primarily enhance visual and textual representations to accommodate a predefined composition mechanism such as pseudo-word injection into a frozen text encoder or linear feature arithmetic. As a result, the composition function itself remains unlearned, limiting the model's ability to express diverse and fine-grained semantic modifications. To address this, we propose FoCo, which models composition as two coordinated stages: focusing on modification-relevant visual content, and then completing the target semantics. We realize these through two proxy tasks: text-anchored visual aggregation to selectively gather visual content guided by localized textual semantics, and context-conditioned semantic completion to transform these aggregated visuals with the remaining scene context into a coherent composed representation. The tasks are trained jointly with a cross-instance contrastive objective, encouraging semantic diversity and discouraging shortcut composition strategies. Extensive experiments on four ZS-CIR benchmarks show FoCo's state-of-the-art performance and improved generalization. --- ### MEPA: Multi-Scale Representation Alignment for Visual Autoregressive Modeling with Mixture of Experts Authors: Nuoyan Zhou, Zhijun Tu, Lei Yu, Kun Cheng, Jie Hu, Nannan Wang, Xinghao Chen Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00371v1 Visual AutoRegressive modeling (VAR) has pioneered a coarse-to-fine multi-scale autoregressive generative paradigm, demonstrating strong capabilities in image generation. However, VAR still suffers from inherent deficiencies in multi-scale representation learning. Specifically, lower scales primarily capture global semantics, while higher scales focus on fine-grained details. Employing a shared architecture across scales induces optimization conflicts. Moreover, due to the causal autoregressive process, inaccurate semantics at early scales can propagate and significantly degrade the final output. To address these issues, we introduce a scale-aware token-routed Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture, allowing scale-adaptive expert selection, thereby facilitating decoupled representation learning across scales. In addition, we enhance semantic modeling at early scales by incorporating external self-supervised features. Unlike naive alignment, we analyse and design a residual feature aggregation scheme tailored to the VAR paradigm. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly improves both training efficiency and generation quality. On the ImageNet 256*256 benchmark, our model achieves a superior FID compared to the dense baseline while requiring only half of the default training epochs and a smaller parameter budget, with a merely marginal increase in training cost. Moreover, the performance gap further widens with larger training epochs. --- ### SFDATrack: Generalized Source-Free Domain Adaptive Tracking Under Adverse Weather Conditions Authors: Siyuan Yao, Ziqi Wang, Ruiqi Yu, Junqi Huang, Wenqi Ren, Xiaochun Cao Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00369v2 Domain adaptive visual object tracking under adverse weather conditions has garnered significant attention in recent years. Despite the impressive performance, existing methods heavily rely on the large-scale video frames from both source and target domains, which is impractical under rigid resource constraints where source data is unavailable. To overcome this limitation, we propose SFDATrack, a generalized source-free domain adaptive tracker that merely leverages adverse weather samples from the target domain for robust state estimation. Specifically, SFDATrack first employs a mean-teacher backbone with Dual Interactive Mamba (DIM) blocks to distill the candidate target tokens that are resilient to weather variations from classified, augmented samples. Afterwards, we introduce a hyperspherical prototype projection (HPP) module to project these tokens onto multi-domain prototypes within a latent hyperspherical space. By enforcing both domain-specific and domain-invariant properties of the multi-domain prototypes, SFDATrack can be seamlessly adapted to diverse weather conditions with powerful generalizability. Extensive experiments evaluated on various benchmarks demonstrate that SFDATrack achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/watcherBR0/sfdatrack. --- ### SFDATrack: Generalized Source-Free Domain Adaptive Tracking Under Adverse Weather Conditions Authors: Siyuan Yao, Ziqi Wang, Ruiqi Yu, Junqi Huang, Wenqi Ren, Xiaochun Cao Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00369v1 Domain adaptive visual object tracking under adverse weather conditions has garnered significant attention in recent years. Despite the impressive performance, existing methods heavily rely on the large-scale video frames from both source and target domains, which is impractical under rigid resource constraints where source data is unavailable. To overcome this limitation, we propose SFDATrack, a generalized source-free domain adaptive tracker that merely leverages adverse weather samples from the target domain for robust state estimation. Specifically, SFDATrack first employs a mean-teacher backbone with Dual Interactive Mamba (DIM) blocks to distill the candidate target tokens that are resilient to weather variations from classified, augmented samples. Afterwards, we introduce a hyperspherical prototype projection (HPP) module to project these tokens onto multi-domain prototypes within a latent hyperspherical space. By enforcing both domain-specific and domain-invariant properties of the multi-domain prototypes, SFDATrack can be seamlessly adapted to diverse weather conditions with powerful generalizability. Extensive experiments evaluated on various benchmarks demonstrate that SFDATrack achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/watcherBR0/sfdatrack. --- ### Beyond Perplexity: A Behavioral Evaluation Framework for Deployment-Memory Claims in LLM Test-Time Training Authors: Xiangchen Song, Zhenhao Chen, Lingjing Kong, Shaoan Xie, Xinshuai Dong, Guangyi Chen, Kun Zhang Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00368v1 Large language model test-time training (TTT) is often evaluated through local proxy metrics: models are updated on recent tokens, retrieved context, target-domain data, or verifiable task attempts, and then judged by perplexity, future-token loss, long-context performance, or reward. These metrics are well matched to claims about stream adaptation, domain adaptation, context compression, and reward-backed test-time improvement. They are weaker evidence, however, for a capability that TTT results are increasingly used to motivate: deployed assistant memory, personalization, or sparse post-deployment learning, which instead requires behavioral evidence such as later recall, paraphrase robustness, retention, locality, conflict handling, and use in downstream actions after the original support context is removed. We introduce a behavioral evaluation framework that calibrates TTT memory claims to the evidence that supports them. It has two components: a claim-calibrated evidence ladder that separates stream/domain adaptation, bridge internalization, and deployment-time behavioral learning; and an evaluation protocol with matched explicit-memory baselines and mutually exclusive failure categories. We validate the framework by auditing recent TTT and memory-adjacent work and by instantiating it as a controlled diagnostic in which, in a sparse nonce-fact setting, one-step LoRA updates lower support and answer loss across three Qwen3 model scales while generated free-form recall stays at zero, exposing a measurable gap between proxy improvement and deployment behavior. The framework gives authors and evaluators a concrete standard for aligning TTT memory claims with the evidence actually reported. --- ### When AI meets quantum information: A comprehensive review Authors: Min Chen, Yu Gan, Xin Jin, Yuqing Li, Junqi Wang, Zeguan Wu, Yunfei Wang, Bingzhi Zhang, Priyam Srivastava, Tianlong Chen, Ankit Kulshrestha, Yuan Liu et al. Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: quant-ph, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00365v1 Artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum information (QI) are rapidly co-evolving. AI is becoming a practical tool for learning, designing, controlling, and verifying quantum systems, while QI offers new computational models, representational structures, and learning-theoretic questions for AI. This survey reviews the interface from both directions. In the AI for QI direction, we organize recent progress around the central tasks of extracting information from limited measurements, training and discovering quantum algorithms, stabilizing noisy hardware, automating experimental and programming workflows, and extending learning-based methods to sensing and networking. In the QI for AI direction, we examine how quantum computation and quantum-inspired structures affect learning through algorithmic speedups, expressivity, trainability, generalization, neural-network design, and tensor-network representations. We close by identifying cross-cutting challenges in reproducibility, scalability, hardware realism, and co-design, arguing that progress will depend on tighter integration of theory, experiment, and hybrid quantum--classical systems. --- ### Enhancing Flow Matching with A Unified Guidance Framework for Efficient and Robust Speech Synthesis Authors: Zuda Yu, Qianhui Xu, Ting Chen, Junhui Zhang, Tao Fu, Hongjiang Yu, Qiangqing Wang, Yang Song Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00363v1 Flow Matching (FM) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for speech generation but remains constrained by high inference latency and timbre leakage. To address these bottlenecks, we propose a unified guidance framework that enhances generation efficiency and robustness through two complementary strategies. On the data front, we introduce Data-guidance via heterogeneous augmentation, encouraging the model to disentangle linguistic content from acoustic residue. In parallel, we propose an enhanced Model-guidance mechanism that synergizes trajectory rectification with a novel intrinsic guidance objective. This approach distills conditional knowledge into network weights and straightens inference trajectory path, thereby eliminating Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) overhead. Experiments demonstrate that our framework accelerates inference by nearly three times while effectively improving speaker similarity compared to state-of-the-art baselines. --- ### SoK: Attack and Defense Landscape of Mobile On-device AI Systems Authors: Yujin Huang, Xin Zheng, Xingliang Yuan, Kwok-Yan Lam Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00362v1 Mobile on-device AI (MoAI) systems that integrate locally deployed AI models with conventional mobile software components are emerging as a key paradigm for delivering intelligent functionality directly on end-user devices. By moving inference from remote cloud services to the local mobile environment, such systems enable privacy-preserving, low-latency, and offline-capable AI functionality, yet introduce new security risks arising from the local storage of AI models. This paper presents the first comprehensive systematization of knowledge on MoAI security, covering security pillars, attack landscape, and defense landscape of MoAI systems. We further identify unresolved gaps in current attack and defense research and point to promising directions for future research in this emerging area. Our work establishes the first systematic framework for understanding the attack and defense landscapes of MoAI systems, serving as a foundation for building secure MoAI systems and advancing research in this critical domain. Companion resources are available at https://github.com/Jinxhy/Awesome-MoAI-Security. --- ### PRISM: Prioritized Channel Importance with Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation for Cross-Subject EEG Emotion Recognition Authors: Xin Zhou, Xiang Zhang, Hao Deng, Lijun Yin Published: 2026-07-01 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.00358v1 Electroencephalogram (EEG) captures endogenous brain activity with high temporal fidelity and holds substantial promise for precise emotion decoding. However, channel redundancy and pronounced inter-subject variability remain key obstacles to scalable generalization. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework termed PRioritized channel Importance with Semi-supervised doMain adaptation (PRISM), enabling label-efficient cross-subject emotion decoding. On the channel side, PRISM assigns differentiable, data-dependent channel weights via a lightweight expert ensemble, amplifying reliable electrodes while suppressing distractors. On the domain side, PRISM leverages unlabeled data through confidence-filtered pseudo-labels to drive consistency regularization and domain alignment, mitigating subject-specific heterogeneity. Extensive experiments show that PRISM surpasses state-of-the-art methods on DEAP, DREAMER, and SEED datasets, achieving robust cross-subject generalization given limited annotations. ---