# Research Papers — 2026-07 · bundle page 25 of 222 > Full-text markdown of papers #1201–1250 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/25 [← Previous bundle](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/24.md) [Next bundle →](https://aipod.dev/papers/archive/2026-07/page/26.md) ### Single-Beat Cuffless Blood Pressure Estimation Using Ear-PPG and ECG with a Lightweight Hybrid Learning Framework Authors: Kindeep K. Dhatt, Tengyue Wu, Hanbang Hua, Yayun Du Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.LG, eess.SP, eess.SY arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27076v1 Continuous cuffless blood pressure (BP) monitoring remains challenging due to motion artifacts, physiological variability, and the limited robustness of conventional pulse transit time (PTT) models under dynamic conditions. Many prior approaches rely on multi-second windows to stabilize estimation, an assumption that is frequently violated during real-world monitoring with intermittent signal corruption. Here, we show that discriminative BP-related information is preserved at the single-beat level and present a lightweight multi-modal wearable framework for continuous BP estimation. The system integrates synchronized chest electrocardiography (ECG) and ear-clip reflectance photoplethysmography, each co-located with a 6-axis inertial measurement unit to provide motion context. We introduce a hybrid learning architecture in which a one-dimensional convolutional neural network extracts a 64-dimensional embedding from individual PPG beats and fuses it with 30 physiology-grounded features, including PTT statistics and heart rate variability, followed by LightGBM regression. The method was evaluated using a multi-phase stress protocol ($n=10$) and the PulseDB public dataset with subject-disjoint validation. Across 30 independent runs, the model achieved mean absolute errors of $4.02 \pm 0.21$~mmHg for systolic BP and $1.79 \pm 0.05$~mmHg for diastolic BP, corresponding to a 28.2\% reduction in combined MAE relative to baseline models. By enabling beat-wise estimation without long temporal context, this framework supports computationally efficient cuffless BP monitoring suitable for wearable deployment under practical resource constraints. The source code for this work is available at https://github.com/SYMBIOX-Lab/BP-wireless. --- ### Parameter-Free Dynamic Regret under Heavy-Tailed Noise Authors: Vaneet Aggarwal Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27073v3 We study online convex optimization with one unbiased stochastic subgradient per round and noise having a finite $p$-th central moment, where $p\in(1,2)$ is unknown. For a bounded convex domain of diameter $D$, subgradients bounded by $G$, noise scale $σ$, and comparator path length $P_T$, let $Λ_T=1+P_T/D$. A single algorithm, using none of $G,σ,p,P_T$, attains expected dynamic regret $O_p\left(\min\{GD\sqrt{TΛ_T}+σDT^{1/p}Λ_T^{(p-1)/p},\,GDT\}\right)$ against every fixed comparator sequence. Restarted AdaGrad experts produce the noise-path exponent $(p-1)/p$, and a prior favoring longer restart intervals removes horizon-dependent logarithmic overhead. We give an explicit bound uniform in $p$; its logarithm-free form has noise coefficient $O(1+\log(p/(p-1)))$, while the static-regret constant is universal. The analysis requires only marginal noise moments and permits dependent errors. Complete pathwise proofs retain both the expert-loss range and the gradient energies preceding comparator movement. Matching lower bounds hold on every bounded convex domain of positive diameter, under the same gradient-only information model. Together with a path-budget-tuned upper bound, they characterize the minimax rate with universal constants, including its linear-regret saturation. --- ### Parameter-Free Dynamic Regret for Online Convex Optimization under Heavy-Tailed Noise Authors: Vaneet Aggarwal Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, math.OC arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27073v1 We study online convex optimization (OCO) in non-stationary environments under heavy-tailed noise, where the stochastic gradient oracle admits only a finite $p$-th central moment for some $p \in (1, 2)$. While static regret is well-understood, achieving universal dynamic regret in a parameter-free manner remains an open challenge. We resolve this by proposing \textbf{HT-PAder}, a parameter-free algorithm combining restarted AdaGrad experts over a geometric pool of block lengths with a pathwise meta-algorithm, \textbf{AdaGrad-Hedge}, which requires no moment conditions on meta-losses. For a domain of diameter $D$, Lipschitz constant $G$, noise level $σ$, and comparator path length $P_T$, HT-PAder achieves an expected universal dynamic regret of \( \widetilde O\left( GD\sqrt{T(1+P_T/D)} + σD T^{1/p}(1+P_T/D)^{(p-1)/p} \right). \) The algorithm does not require prior knowledge of any of these problem parameters. Even in the special case of finite variance ($p=2$), HT-PAder provides the first parameter-free minimax universal dynamic regret guarantee. We also prove a matching lower bound, establishing the optimality of the path-length exponent. --- ### Visual Credit Audit for Multimodal Spatial Reasoning Authors: Feixiang Liu, Qiang Qiu, Lanbo Sun, Nan Wei, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27069v2 Closed yes/no spatial benchmarks can reward a correct answer even when the image adds little support beyond no-image contexts. Under a fixed forced-choice interface, Visual Credit Audit (VCA) separates two estimands: whether the benchmark image gives the model's declared decision more support than text-only and blank controls, and whether the model responds to relation-specific visual evidence. The first audit is training- and label-free and does not require an answer flip. Applying labels yields dependence-credited correctness (D-CC); on correct items, it equals same-control gold-aligned positive gain, while prediction alignment extends the audit to errors. Across four open MLLMs and two spatial benchmarks, 12.73-26.25% of decisions are correct yet uncredited. Matched same-split image permutation reduces D-CC by 21.25-47.80 points, with every paired 95% interval above zero. Fixed-pixel relation contrasts and a 3x3 evidence-source factorial show why null controls cannot identify relation response. Among controlled correct-but-uncredited agreement decisions, response to relation reversal spans 81.57-100.00%, while 32.11% pooled change answer. Independently audited outcomes on 108 geometry-compatible edits provide a bounded natural-image correspondence check. VCA thereby decomposes benchmark success into correctness, additional image support, and relation-consistent response. --- ### SciFigAlign: Scoring Scientific Figures by Fine-tuned Alignment of Visuals with Manuscript Evidence Authors: Chuanzhi Xu, Zihan Deng, Huiqi Liang, Chengkun Yue, Zhanlin Cui, Pengfei Ye, Weidong Cai Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27066v1 Scientific figure assessment in peer review differs fundamentally from general image quality evaluation: a figure must be visually legible, faithfully support the manuscript's claims, and communicate evidence with a clear visual hierarchy. However, if we apply traditional image assessment methods to scientific figure quality assessment, limitations emerge: classic IQA models capture perceptual quality or aesthetics but cannot judge whether a figure serves the paper's scientific argument; CLIP-based methods assess generic image-text correspondence, yet lack understanding of manuscript context; and zero-shot LLM/VLM judges, when repurposed for figure scoring, often yield overly concentrated scores with limited fusion of visual and textual evidence. We introduce an annotated dataset of 3,857 scientific figures from peer-reviewed conference papers, each rated along four peer-review-oriented dimensions: Clarity, Relevance, Informativeness, and Structure. We propose SciFigAlign, a fine-tuned multimodal scorer that grounds figure quality assessment in manuscript evidence. Given a figure crop, caption, citing paragraphs, and light paper context, SciFigAlign fine-tunes CLIP and SciBERT end-to-end with per-modality cross-attention and CubeMLP fusion, jointly optimizing SmoothL1 regression with a within-paper ranking hinge loss. Under paper-level splits, SciFigAlign achieves a macro MAE of 0.3524 and a within-paper pairwise accuracy of 81.64% on the test set with n = 396, a 59% relative error reduction over the best LLM-as-judge baseline with MAE 0.864. Ablations confirm that manuscript-grounded inputs, citing-context denoising, and ranking supervision are all critical, showing that scientific figure assessment requires learned alignment between visual content and manuscript evidence rather than prompting alone, even with state-of-the-art VLMs. --- ### ScratchSim: A Procedural Synthetic Data Pipeline for Surface Scratch Detection Authors: Paul Julius Kühn, Saptarshi Neil Sinha, Tiago Kleist, Richard Hoffmann, Arjan kuijper, Michael Weinmann Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27065v3 While automated defect detection such as the detection of surface scratched is an important aspect in industrial quality control, the scarcity of annotated defect data make this task challenging. This paper presents a procedural rendering pipeline that generates large-scale annotated synthetic training data using BlenderProc, with configurable material appearance, camera modes, and domain randomization, producing automatic COCO-format annotations. To show the potential of our approach, we evaluate four training strategies, namely synthetic-only, real-only, mixed, and fine-tuning from synthetic weights, across two objects with different material properties and three lightweight edge-deployable detectors, YOLOX, YOLO26, and LW-DETR. Our evaluation show that fine-tuning from synthetic weights consistently outperforms real-only training, and that mixed training effectively recovers performance under scarce real-data conditions, with findings validated across both convolutional and transformer-based architectures. The proposed approach enables scalable defect detection without the burden of large real annotated datasets, making it practical for on-device industrial inspection. The pipeline scripts for generating synthetic scratches, 3D model, and both the synthetic and real annotated scratch datasets for a glossy toy Ferrari car are publicly available at https://github.com/saptarshineil/ScratchSim. --- ### ScratchSim: A Procedural Synthetic Data Pipeline for Surface Scratch Detection Authors: Paul Julius Kühn, Saptarshi Neil Sinha, Tiago Kleist, Richard Hoffmann, Arjan kuijper, Michael Weinmann Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27065v2 While automated defect detection such as the detection of surface scratched is an important aspect in industrial quality control, the scarcity of annotated defect data make this task challenging. This paper presents a procedural rendering pipeline that generates large-scale annotated synthetic training data using BlenderProc, with configurable material appearance, camera modes, and domain randomization, producing automatic COCO-format annotations. To show the potential of our approach, we evaluate four training strategies, namely synthetic-only, real-only, mixed, and fine-tuning from synthetic weights, across two objects with different material properties and three lightweight edge-deployable detectors, YOLOX, YOLO26, and LW-DETR. Our evaluation show that fine-tuning from synthetic weights consistently outperforms real-only training, and that mixed training effectively recovers performance under scarce real-data conditions, with findings validated across both convolutional and transformer-based architectures. The proposed approach enables scalable defect detection without the burden of large real annotated datasets, making it practical for on-device industrial inspection. The pipeline scripts, 3D model, and both synthetic and real annotated scratch datasets for a glossy toy Ferrari car will be made available through the project website upon acceptance. --- ### PIKS: Universal Physics-Informed Kernel Methods Authors: Joachim Bona-Pellissier, Giacomo Meanti, Matteo Santacesaria, Lorenzo Rosasco Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27062v1 Physics-informed machine learning incorporates physical principles --often expressed via differential operators-- into data-driven models. While physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) dominate empirical applications, the complexity of neural network architectures and optimization landscapes hinders the development of a corresponding learning theory. In turn, kernel methods offer an appealing alternative with closed-form solutions and analytical tractability, yet existing guarantees primarily cover the well-specified setting where the target belongs to the native Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS). This imposes unrealistic regularity assumptions that physical targets often fail to satisfy. In this paper, we introduce and analyze Physics-Informed Kernel methodS (PIKS). We establish the universal consistency of PIKS for linear differential constraints, proving that for universal kernels (such as Gaussian or Matérn), the estimator asymptotically learns the target while satisfying physical constraints. We further derive finite-sample bounds under suitable source conditions. Our analysis is based on extending classical operator-theoretic analysis of kernel methods to physics-informed machine learning. Numerical experiments demonstrate that PIKS can be competitive with PINNs and traditional finite element methods. --- ### Object Detection for Autonomous Driving in Chinese Rural Scenes: An Experimental Study on Real-Synthetic Data Mixing and Model Evaluation Authors: Danning Zhu, Ziyan Lin, Jing Wu Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27058v1 Currently, autonomous driving object detection models face significant data scarcity and generalization challenges when navigating complex Chinese rural traffic scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose a novel real-synthetic mixed object detection dataset tailored specifically for Chinese rural roads and systematically evaluate the performance of 13 mainstream detectors under different real-to-synthetic data ratios, thereby providing empirical evidence for model selection and data strategy design in rural autonomous driving scenarios. Our dataset combines real-world images captured in Weishi County, Henan Province, with parameterized virtual scenes generated via Unreal Engine. To accurately reflect the unique realities of rural traffic, we define a comprehensive 14-category object system encompassing region-specific elements such as electric tricycles, low-speed vehicles (LSVs), and roadside stalls. Under a unified training protocol, we systematically evaluate 13 mainstream detectors -- spanning the YOLOv5, YOLOv8, YOLO11, and YOLO26 series, as well as RT-DETR-L -- across three data configurations: an all-real baseline, a 1:0.5 real-to-virtual mix, and a 1:1 mix. Experimental results demonstrate that a moderate injection of synthetic data (1:0.5 ratio) effectively enhances detection performance, with YOLO11m achieving the highest mAP@0.5 of 0.758. However, a higher proportion of synthetic data (1:1) introduces domain shifts that offset the benefits of data scaling. While most models reliably identify distinct local vehicles, significant perceptual bottlenecks remain for long-tail, non-standard objects like stalls and railings. This research provides crucial empirical evidence and novel insights for model selection and synthetic data strategies, facilitating the practical deployment of autonomous driving perception systems in rural areas. --- ### Setoka: A Benchmark for Hierarchical User Understanding in Personalized Agents over Heterogeneous Data Authors: Lingyang Zeng, Guangze Chen, Kaichen Yu, Zhicheng Pan, Siyang Weng, Zirui Hu, Xiangyun Du, Hailin He, Rong Zhang, Chengcheng Yang, Kai Huang, Xuan Zhou Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27056v2 Personalized agents are increasingly applied to assist users across a wide range of tasks. Effective personalized assistance requires not only retrieving explicit facts from past interactions stored in agent memory, but also inferring abstract personal characteristics. However, existing memory benchmarks primarily evaluate whether an agent can retrieve information explicitly stated in conversational histories, failing to provide an effective assessment of deeper user understanding. In this work, we propose Setoka, a benchmark for evaluating memory-augmented personalized agents with hierarchical user understanding from heterogeneous data. Grounded in theories from cognitive and personality psychology, Setoka defines four levels of user understanding, i.e., semantic memory, episodic memory, behavior pattern, and personality trait. Moreover, to enable realistic yet privacy-preserving evaluation, we design a psychometrics-based pipeline that synthesizes diverse, coherent heterogeneous user data and queries at scale. Finally, we leverage Setoka to evaluate 3 language models combined with 5 memory systems for 10 synthetic users. Our comprehensive evaluation reveals that while existing systems perform well on semantic memory retrieval, their performance declines on episodic memory. Moreover, when dealing with behavior pattern and personality trait understanding tasks that require integrating heterogeneous and fragmented information dispersed over time, performance declines even further. These findings demonstrate that user understanding cannot be handled by simple fact retrieval, motivating the design of memory mechanisms for cross-source integration and abstraction over long-term user behavior. --- ### CoCaRS: Correlation Calibration-Based Redundancy Suppression for Heterogeneous Knowledge Distillation Authors: Fengming Yu, Haiwei Pan, Kejia Zhang, Chunling Chen, Jian Guan, Baoying Ma Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27054v1 Knowledge distillation (KD) enables a compact student model to learn from a powerful teacher and has become an effective paradigm for model compression. The emergence of diverse model architectures has extended KD from homogeneous to heterogeneous settings. However, differences in architectural inductive biases between the teacher and student models often result in substantial representation discrepancies, limiting the effectiveness of direct knowledge transfer. Recently, redundancy suppression has offered a new perspective on heterogeneous KD by preserving cross-architecture invariance and reducing feature redundancy through decorrelation of teacher-student feature correlations. Nevertheless, this formulation may weaken useful structural information through uniform decorrelation, while a fixed coefficient may make the effective contribution of redundancy suppression sensitive to teacher-student pairs and training stages. To address these problems, Correlation Calibration-based Redundancy Suppression (CoCaRS) is proposed to better retain structural information while suppressing redundancy and reduce sensitivity to coefficient settings across teacher-student pairs and training stages. Specifically, CoCaRS calibrates feature decorrelation through Confusion Evidence Estimation (CEE) and Strength Allocation Control (SAC), which respectively capture reliable semantic relations for correlation estimation and preserve discriminative structure during decorrelation. Adaptive Coefficient Regulation (ACR) further regulates the contribution of the calibrated redundancy suppression objective according to its relative loss scale, reducing sensitivity to coefficient settings. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-100 and ImageNet-1K validate the effectiveness of CoCaRS in improving distillation performance and reducing sensitivity to coefficient settings. Code will be released soon. --- ### GPTQ-2D: Cubic-Time Two-Sided Adaptive Rounding Authors: Jiale Chen, Torsten Hoefler, Dan Alistarh Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.DS, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27042v1 Adaptive rounding methods such as GPTQ, or equivalently Babai's nearest plane algorithm, round a real matrix to integers under a quadratic metric. They process the entries in a fixed order, one at a time, propagating each rounding error to the entries not yet processed through a triangular feedback matrix. We study the two-sided version of this task, in which fixed nonsingular basis matrices act on both the left and the right of the residual; the familiar one-sided case is the special case of an identity right basis. Vectorizing the matrix turns the two-sided objective into a quadratic metric whose Gram matrix is a Kronecker product, so the one-dimensional algorithm applies verbatim, but takes quartic time in the matrix dimension. We present GPTQ-2D, which produces the identical rounded matrix in cubic time. It rounds the entries anti-diagonal by anti-diagonal; entries on the same anti-diagonal are independent and are rounded in parallel. --- ### Mitigating Compounding Error via Video Representation Regularization Authors: Taiye Chen, Qi Zhang, Yisen Wang Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27036v1 Video diffusion-based world models enable long autoregressive video generation for robotics, autonomous driving and simulation tasks, yet sliding-window autoregressive inference suffers from severe error accumulation that degrades frame quality over time. Although this phenomenon has been widely observed, the underlying mechanism of compounding error and how to achieve stable long-horizon generation remain largely unresolved. In this paper, we investigate the internal representation dynamics of video world models and discover that compounding error is tightly coupled with dimensional collapse of hidden representations. Specifically, the effective rank of model representations sharply decreases at the onset of generation drift, revealing a strong connection between representational degradation and long-term rollout instability. Furthermore, we find that pure training data scaling fails to boost model resistance to error drift, contradicting mainstream scaling paradigms. To address this problem, we propose video representation regularization, a lightweight training constraint that stabilizes latent representations and suppresses iterative error accumulation. Compared with Diffusion Forcing, our method achieves improvements from 38.65 to 55.56 and from 44.37 to 72.08 on the Aesthetic Quality and Imaging Quality metrics of VBench. Our work establishes the first connection between autoregressive video drifting and model internal representations, adopts erank as a quantitative metric for error accumulation, reveals counterintuitive scaling limitations for video world models, and presents a simple yet effective regularization strategy to improve long video generation robustness. --- ### Lottery Tickets Are Not Deployment Tickets Authors: Bum Jun Kim Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.LG, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27031v1 Reports on how sparsification, compression, and lottery tickets change model behavior have been mixed in the prior literature, with beneficial effects observed in some studies and adverse effects in others. Moreover, prior work has not considered actual deployment conditions, where decision logic is already fixed for the incumbent. To assess these mixed findings from a practical standpoint, we study the production-replacement question at the deployment level, namely whether an accuracy-matched lottery ticket or another sparse challenger can replace an incumbent dense model without reconfiguring downstream decision logic. We therefore audit a broad, protocol-specific panel of deployment-relevant behaviors spanning calibration, OOD response, class-level reliability, representations, and downstream policy decisions, and summarize clean-accuracy-excluded deviations with a behavioral-compatibility distance. Across extensive experiments, sparse candidates repeatedly recover dense-reference accuracy yet remain behaviorally different; in several study-band-matched settings, LTs also show lower corruption accuracy. In small-gap settings with fixed-threshold policy diagnostics, lottery-ticket replacement changes 7% to 10% of accept--review decisions. This churn creates precisely the burden that drop-in replacement is meant to avoid: reconfiguring and revalidating downstream decision logic. These findings establish the limits of clean-accuracy certification: Establishing compatibility with a fixed incumbent is distinct from attributing churn uniquely to sparsity or treating every measured deviation as harmful. Our theory explains the routing result: Even exact pointwise top-1 agreement cannot bound fixed-threshold decision changes, and small confidence shifts near the operating boundary can generate first-order routing churn. --- ### HoF-Bench: Rediscovering Real AI-Discovered CVEs Without Frontier Models Authors: Petr Simecek, Elnaz Babayeva, Jiri Balhar, Michal Bida, Michal Buran, Vaclav Cadek, Luigino Camastra, Tomas Dulka, Michal Janocko, Tomas Klohna, Pavel Kohout, Ondrej Kokes et al. Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.CR, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27030v1 LLM-based analyzers have begun finding real vulnerabilities in mature open-source projects: AISLE's analyzer is credited with more than 280 CVEs across 78 projects, including OpenSSL, curl, and GnuTLS. We introduce HoF-Bench (named after AISLE's public Hall of Fame), a benchmark built from 95 of these public AI-discovered CVEs across eight repositories pinned at vulnerable commits. Analyzers receive source and target-file scope but not CVE identifiers, descriptions, fixes, or expected mechanisms; a detector-blinded frontier-model judge credits only findings that identify the same code path, root cause, attack condition, and impact. A deliberately minimal LLM-based analyzer rediscovers up to 65 of the 95 CVEs (68%) under this strict protocol. No frontier model performs detection anywhere in the study. The ten detector backbones are five open-weight models (21B--284B total parameters, 3--13B active) and five proprietary small or "flash"-tier models. All of them run in the fixed scaffold with four repeated passes, an optional generated-context stage, and a replayable multi-round triage stage (7,600 model--CVE pass records). Difficulty is strongly structured by language; the CVEs missed by every model concentrate in C infrastructure code. HoF-Bench provides a compact test bed for comparing vulnerability scanners, their reliability across repeated runs, and the candidate volume they create. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/aisleinc/HoF-Bench. --- ### TreeCCA: Canonical Correlation Analysis via Gradient-Boosted Trees Authors: James Chapman Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27027v1 Gradient-boosted trees dominate tabular machine learning, yet canonical correlation analysis has always relied on linear or neural encoders. We propose \textbf{TreeCCA}, the first method to train gradient-boosted tree ensembles end-to-end as CCA encoders, inheriting their plug-and-play reliability: no architecture design, familiar hyperparameters, and strong performance with defaults. The technical enabler is the Eckart-Young (EY) loss, which supplies closed-form per-sample gradients that slot directly into any standard GBT library (XGBoost, LightGBM) as a custom objective. TreeCCA is the first CCA method to combine nonlinear accuracy with native interpretability: every tree split selects one feature, so gain importances reveal which inputs drive cross-view correlation at no extra cost. We demonstrate these properties on synthetic benchmarks, where TreeCCA matches or exceeds Deep CCA (2.61 vs.\ 2.43 on Signed Power; 2.93 vs.\ 2.89 on Hermite), and on a sparse benchmark with zero linear cross-view covariance, where TreeCCA recovers the true support with $\text{Precision@}S = 1.00$ at $p=50$ while PMD finds no signal. On the UCI HAR sensor-fusion benchmark, TreeCCA achieves comparable accuracy to Deep CCA at $5\times$ lower cost, while XGBoost gain importances directly validate a physics-motivated hypothesis about the data --- an interpretation not readily available with neural encoders. Across five popular tabular multi-view datasets, TreeMCCA consistently matches or exceeds linear CCA in both nonlinear correlation extraction and downstream classification accuracy. --- ### BayesAME: Bayesian Active Model Evaluation Authors: Paula Cordero Encinar, Taylan Cemgil, Arnaud Doucet, Virginia Aglietti, Silvia Chiappa Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI, stat.ML arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27023v1 Evaluating large generative models across benchmarks is time-consuming and computationally expensive. This drives the need for methods that can estimate full benchmark performance by evaluating models on only a subset of items, known as a coreset. Current literature mostly requires the practitioner to input a coreset size. However, when reliable performance estimation takes priority over efficiency, an evaluation method should also be capable of automatically determining a coreset size that reflects this priority. We introduce BayesAME, a sequential Bayesian framework specifically targeting automatic determination of the coreset size. BayesAME models performance as a random variable by defining a latent ability for each group of items sharing the same historical model performances, with a joint prior distribution encoding the belief that the target model behaves similarly to these historical models. The posterior distribution over these abilities is used to derive performance estimators, quantify performance uncertainty, and select items to add to the coreset via an information-gain criterion. The coreset is iteratively augmented until the performance estimate fluctuation and the performance uncertainty fall below their respective user-defined thresholds. We propose a multi-target extension that captures performance correlations across multiple target models to further reduce the coreset size. Through extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks, we demonstrate that BayesAME consistently outperforms sequential adaptations of existing methods. Crucially, our comprehensive analysis addresses recent skepticism in the literature, establishing that non-random coreset selection is advantageous over random selection. Finally, we highlight that leveraging continuous response log-likelihoods over traditional binary scores significantly enhances estimation accuracy. --- ### Evaluating Regional Bias in LLMs From Abstract Stereotype to Concrete Social Decision-Making Authors: Jiayuan Di, Haoyi Yang, Yufei Luo, Jiahui Qu, Yiming Wang Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27022v1 Regional bias in large language models (LLMs) may shape both perceptions of regional groups and decisions about individuals from different regions. Yet existing studies often examine these manifestations separately, leaving their structure and consequences unclear. We introduce Stereotypes-to-Decisions (S2D), a systematic framework evaluating regional bias from abstract stereotypes to concrete social decisions. Covering all 34 provincial-level administrative regions of China, S2D evaluates six LLMs using stereotype ratings of Warmth (perceived friendliness and trustworthiness) and Competence (perceived capability and intelligence), along with paired-choice tasks across Education, Occupation, and Social Interaction. Results reveal substantial regional differences in regional scores, with considerable agreement across models, especially for Competence and Occupation decisions. Furthermore, these patterns are associated with regional economic and digital development indicators and display mixed human-like stereotypes, with some regions rated highly on one dimension but poorly on the other. They also remain largely stable across Chinese and English prompts. Overall, our findings show that regional bias in LLMs is prevalent, systematic, and consequential, motivating more regionally aware evaluation and mitigation. --- ### What Can Latent World Models Know? Physical Information in Multimodal Predictive Representations Authors: Kaizhen Tan, Sizhe Xu, Xin Xu, Siru Tao, Yixiao Li, Hanzhe Hong, Yang Feng, Heqing Du, Zhaonan Wang Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.LG, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27017v4 A central premise of latent world models is that predicting the future encourages representations to internalize the physics of their environment. We ask which physical quantities are accessible in learned latent states, how this depends on training, and how those quantities relate to the model's predictions. We present PokeWorld, a simulated environment in which a robot finger pushes objects whose mass, drag, and contact stiffness vary across episodes while remaining visually identical. We first measure parameter recovery from raw observation sequences, then train matched action-conditioned world models. Prediction targets can strongly shape latent content. For example, contact stiffness becomes decodable when touch is predicted, while providing touch only as an input does not. Longer-horizon prediction improves estimation of position and velocity from learned representations relative to single-step prediction. Drag is recoverable from raw observations, but has weak linear readout from the learned latent states. Yet the models' glide forecasts depend systematically on drag. Experiments on RH20T reproduce the same input-target dependence on real multimodal robot data. Together, these results show that observations, prediction targets, and prediction horizons shape both which physical quantities are accessible in latent states and how they affect future predictions. --- ### What Can Latent World Models Know? Physical Parameter Identifiability in Multimodal Predictive Representations Authors: Kaizhen Tan, Xin Xu, Siru Tao, Yixiao Li, Hanzhe Hong, Yang Feng, Heqing Du Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.LG, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27017v3 A central premise of latent world models is that predicting the future forces a representation to internalize the physics of its environment. Which physical quantities does a trained latent actually contain, and what decides this? We answer with controlled interventions in POKEWORLD, an interactive environment whose visually identical objects hide mass, drag, and contact stiffness. A certificate-gated protocol first certifies each parameter as recoverable from raw observations, then measures whether it enters the latent, so a null result can be attributed to the objective rather than to the environment. The resulting identifiability map has two organizing mechanisms and one frontier. Inputs limit what can be known, while prediction targets decide what is retained. Stiffness enters the latent only when touch is forecast ($R^2=0.50$, compared with $-0.02$ when the same signal is merely fused into the input), and under single-step prediction a vision-only latent discards even perfectly visible object state. Drag marks the frontier. It carries a recoverability certificate of 0.89 yet plateaus near 0.13 under every deterministic prediction objective we test, while a supervised head on the same trunk reaches 0.45. Parameters whose readout is slow and ratio-type under the sensed coordinates fall outside what these objectives acquire. On RH20T, an input-target factorial across scaling curves reproduces both mechanisms across two robots and 4,258 episodes. Every arm missing information or prediction pressure stays flat over a fivefold data range, and only the full multimodal objective forecasts force beyond a persistence baseline, with held-out gains that grow with scale. Objective structure determines which physical parameters a latent acquires, and additional data improves only the parameters it already acquires. --- ### On the robustness of noisy solutions in non-convex neural networks Authors: Enrico M. Malatesta, Alessandra Passalacqua, Riccardo Zecchina Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cond-mat.dis-nn, cs.LG, math.PR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27000v2 Optimization in non-convex neural network models is strongly influenced by the geometry of the solution space: sparse, isolated, point-like clusters are typically algorithmically inaccessible, whereas wide and flat regions can be found efficiently despite being relatively rare. At zero temperature this picture has been formalized in binary perceptrons through the overlap gap property (OGP), which limits algorithmic access to configurations with zero training error above a critical constraint density $α_{\rm OGP}$. Here we extend this description to finite temperature, where a positive training error is allowed and statistically penalized. We first show that the frozen one-step replica-symmetry-breaking solution, dominating the zero temperature equilibrium measure, survives at any finite temperature. We furthermore derive a general criterion, based on the smoothness of the single-pattern Gibbs weight near the decision boundary, that determines when a finite-temperature relaxation of the loss removes freezing. We then extend the OGP construction to finite temperature and show that dense, algorithmically accessible regions of finite-energy configurations persist beyond $α_{\rm OGP}$, up to a threshold $α_{\rm OGP}(ε)$ that grows with the allowed training error $ε$. Finally, in the teacher-student setting, we show that these wide, finite-energy regions still retain good generalization. Using a finite energy message-passing algorithm, we demonstrate numerically that thermal noise enables effective generalization in the regime of constraint densities where both recovering the teacher and finding a zero temperature solution are computationally hard. --- ### On the robustness of noisy solutions in non-convex neural networks Authors: Enrico M. Malatesta, Alessandra Passalacqua, Riccardo Zecchina Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cond-mat.dis-nn, cs.LG, math.PR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.27000v1 Optimization in non-convex neural network models is strongly influenced by the geometry of the solution space: sparse, isolated, point-like clusters are typically algorithmically inaccessible, whereas wide and flat regions can be found efficiently despite being relatively rare. At zero temperature this picture has been formalized in binary perceptrons through the overlap gap property (OGP), which limits algorithmic access to configurations with zero training error above a critical constraint density $α_{\rm OGP}$. Here we extend this description to finite temperature, where a positive training error is allowed and statistically penalized. We first show that the frozen one-step replica-symmetry-breaking solution, dominating the zero temperature equilibrium measure, survives at any finite temperature. We furthermore derive a general criterion, based on the smoothness of the single-pattern Gibbs weight near the decision boundary, that determines when a finite-temperature relaxation of the loss removes freezing. We then extend the OGP construction to finite temperature and show that dense, algorithmically accessible regions of finite-energy configurations persist beyond $α_{\rm OGP}$, up to a threshold $α_{\rm OGP}(ε)$ that grows with the allowed training error $ε$. Finally, in the teacher-student setting, we show that these wide, finite-energy regions still retain good generalization. Using a finite energy message-passing algorithm, we demonstrate numerically that thermal noise enables effective generalization in the regime of constraint densities where both recovering the teacher and finding a zero temperature solution are computationally hard. --- ### AgentSnare: Learning to Delay, Divert, and Defuse Autonomous Penetration Agents Authors: Ruoyu Wang, Heng Zhao, Renjie Wu, Mengnan Zhao, Zhixuan Chu, Wanyu Lin, Tianhang Zheng Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.CR, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26998v3 Large language model (LLM) agents automate penetration testing through an observation-action loop, selecting actions based on observations returned by tools. This dependence allows defenders to inject deceptive observations that can mislead the agent's decision-making process. However, existing defenses rely heavily on static, isolated artifacts planted in the environment prior to an attack. Advanced agents can progressively recognize and bypass these artifacts, ultimately refocusing their exploitation attempts on the real target. To address this issue, we introduce AgentSnare, a trajectory-adaptive deception system that dynamically unfolds a decoy environment to continually steer the penetration agent away from the real target. Specifically, AgentSnare employs an artifact-construction policy model that constructs candidate artifacts conditioned on the agent's interaction history and decoy state. AgentSnare then validates these candidates and incrementally incorporates valid artifacts into a factually consistent decoy environment, thereby delaying the attack by absorbing its tool calls, diverting its post-entry trajectory within the decoy, and defusing it by inducing completion reports grounded in decoy evidence. Across 15 CVE-Bench web applications and three attacker models, AgentSnare absorbs 46.8% of the agent's tool calls in the decoy and retains 55.9% of post-entry actions there, while 90.0% of completion attempts are grounded in decoy evidence; across all 45 attacker-CVE pairs, no real target is successfully exploited at pass@3. --- ### AgentSnare: Learning to Delay, Divert, and Defuse Autonomous Penetration Agents Authors: Ruoyu Wang, Heng Zhao, Renjie Wu, Mengnan Zhao, Zhixuan Chu, Wanyu Lin, Tianhang Zheng Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.CR, cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26998v2 Large language model (LLM) agents automate penetration testing through an observation-action loop, selecting actions based on observations returned by tools. This dependence allows defenders to inject deceptive observations that can mislead the agent's decision-making process. However, existing defenses rely heavily on static, isolated artifacts planted in the environment prior to an attack. Advanced agents can progressively recognize and bypass these artifacts, ultimately refocusing their exploitation attempts on the real target. To address this issue, we introduce AgentSnare, a trajectory-adaptive deception system that dynamically unfolds a decoy environment to continually steer the penetration agent away from the real target. Specifically, AgentSnare employs an artifact-construction policy model that constructs candidate artifacts conditioned on the agent's interaction history and decoy state. AgentSnare then validates these candidates and incrementally incorporates valid artifacts into a factually consistent decoy environment, thereby delaying the attack by absorbing its tool calls, diverting its post-entry trajectory within the decoy, and defusing it by inducing completion reports grounded in decoy evidence. Across 15 CVE-Bench web applications and three attacker models, AgentSnare absorbs 46.8% of the agent's tool calls in the decoy and retains 55.9% of post-entry actions there, while 90.0% of completion attempts are grounded in decoy evidence; across all 45 attacker-CVE pairs, no real target is successfully exploited at pass@3. --- ### Foundation Models for Face Presentation Attack Detection: A Unified Linear-Probing Benchmark Authors: Peter Lorenz, Anjith George, Sébastien Marcel Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26993v2 Face presentation attack detection (PAD) remains challenging under cross-dataset evaluation, where domain shift degrades models trained on a single dataset. The scarcity of large-scale labeled data motivates adapting pretrained vision models rather than training task-specific architectures from scratch, raising a fundamental question: do general-purpose vision foundation models encode PAD-relevant information accessible with minimal task-specific training? To investigate, we systematically evaluate 24 frozen encoders, including self-supervised vision transformers, vision-language encoders, and supervised CNNs, using a unified linear-probing protocol on the MCIO benchmark (MSU-MFSD, CASIA-FASD, Replay-Attack, OULU-NPU). The backbone remains fixed, and only a lightweight linear head is trained to isolate the PAD information already present in the pretrained representation. Results show that frozen foundation-model representations can support strong intra-dataset PAD performance with only a linear classifier, but this performance does not reliably transfer across datasets. Model scale is beneficial within several families, although the effect is not monotonic and is strongly mediated by architecture and pretraining. InternViT-6B achieves the lowest mean intra-dataset error, whereas CLIP ViT-B/32 offers the most favorable cross-dataset transfer-compute trade-off among the evaluated probes. These findings suggest that while pretrained representations contain PAD-relevant information, explicit adaptation remains necessary to address domain shift. --- ### A Compositional Theory of Causally Masked Transformers Authors: Franz Nowak, Ryan Cotterell, Reda Boumasmoud Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.FL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26988v1 What types of decision problems can a causally masked, finite-precision transformer solve for inputs of arbitrary length? Existing answers often rely on idealized arithmetic, but under finite precision, rounding and evaluation order can change what information attention retains and therefore what the model can compute. We develop an algebraic formalization that derives expressivity directly from the model's implemented dynamics. Its central object is its memory; the finite internal state computed by attention that summarizes the information from the prefix available to all future queries. Each attention head updates its own state independently within a layer, while layers compose hierarchically, providing a uniform route from model assumptions to expressivity bounds. Applying this method to transformers without positional embeddings, we obtain an expressivity hierarchy governed by the attention type under specific numerical semantics. Width-one sliding-window attention supports bounded-suffix memory, while a modified form of soft attention supports irreversible, checklist-like state, and combining the two mechanisms provides an interplay of both. Ordinary left-to-right floating-point soft attention can realize more expressive memory operations than any of the above. Algebraically, the four cases correspond to definite, R-trivial, locally R-trivial, and aperiodic semigroups. Under an explicit free-wiring assumption, all four bounds are tight. --- ### SymmGrid: Super-Scaling On-Robot Learning with Parallelized Symmetries and Egocentric-Exocentric Visual Perception Authors: Gabe Everett, Brice Gunter, Ryan Vander Stelt, Cleiver Ruiz-Martinez, Blake Hull, Juan Rojas Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26985v1 Deep reinforcement policy learning directly in physical robots (on-robot learning) remains bottlenecked by slow wall-clock training times. We present SymmGrid, a trajectory level augmentation framework inspired by parallelized symmetries that super-scales group transformations to significantly accelerate on-robot learning in both egocentric and exocentric visual setups. We model a Markov Decision Process (MDP) under a symmetry tree, in which state-action pairs have admissible parallelized invariant transformations that yield a geometric grid structure. The state is modelled with ego- or exocentric images and proprioception information. The latter require special treatment, in the form of homographies, to warp visual scenes in line with their corresponding spatial transformations. These parallelized transformations produce a large set of unique symmetric equivalences that populate the replay buffer with diverse and consistent experiences that speed up learning and improve performance. We present extensive training and evaluations performed directly on real robot manipulation contact tasks including peg-insertions, cable routing, and object relocations. Relative to SOTA, SymmGrid achieved wall-clock training convergence speed-ups of 1.37-2.17x, evaluation success rate improvements of 1.09x-1.27x, fastest training convergence times of 16.6, 10.9, and 79.3 minutes respectively. For trajectory wide assessments, we used normalized area under the curve (nAUC) ratios. SymmGrid achieved improvements of up to 2.59x. These results confirm that simple branch symmetries can have an outsized result due to super-scaling and bring us closer to sub-10 minute on-robot learning training in manipulation tasks suitable for arms and humanoids. The project page is available at symmgrid-robot.github.io --- ### Using large language models to probe the limits of atom-centered structural descriptors Authors: Michelangelo Domina, Michele Ceriotti Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: physics.chem-ph, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26984v1 Mapping an atomic structure to a compact set of geometric descriptors is an essential step in any machine-learning application to atomic-scale modeling. A powerful and widely-used approach can be understood as a discretization of the histogram of pair distances, triangles, etc., that results in a hierarchy of symmetry-invariant atom-centered descriptors. Unfortunately, the lower rungs on this hierarchy (two, three, four-neighbor clusters) were found to be incomplete, with symmetry-unrelated pairs of structures having exactly the same descriptors. However, all the ``descriptor degeneracies'' reported so far are resolved by considering larger clusters of neighbors to build the descriptors. We report examples of 3D structures that are indistinguishable even if one considers clusters of up to seven neighbors, and to arbitrary order when considering a practical level of discretization of the descriptors, discovered with the assistance of large language models. The key ingredients in their construction can be traced to results that have been known for decades in different communities; the model was able to find the references and recognize their significance for the problem at hand. We believe this experiment exposes an extremely fruitful usage pattern for AI in science: translating results between different communities and application domains, accelerating the process by which serendipitous discoveries in a field become paradigm-shifting breakthroughs in another. --- ### OptimismBench: Forecasting Bias and the Alignment Effect in Language Model Judgment Authors: Seonglae Cho, Adriano Koshiyama Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26981v1 Large language models are increasingly used as decision aids whose probability judgments shape downstream choices. Whether those judgments carry a systematic directional tilt has been hard to detect: calibration metrics aggregate unsigned errors, and naturalistic uncertainty offers no ground-truth probability. When an LLM rates a startup's success at 70% but its failure at 15%, the missing 15 points expose a distortion no aggregate score flags. We introduce OptimismBench, which detects directional bias with inverted pairs: each scenario elicits both P(success) and P(failure), and asymmetry between the two framings yields a signed bias score without ground truth. Across 16 models from 8 providers, fourteen are optimistic; pessimism appears only in Anthropic's frontier tier. Eleven matched base-versus-chat pairs across four families show post-training sets the sign of the bias, with opposite shifts in different families. The pattern survives prompt, temperature, perspective, and self-debiasing ablations. A seventeen-model six-language comparison further shows model identity dominates language, with inter-model variance at 4.7x inter-language variance. We release 3,870 items across 10 languages for per-model directional-bias auditing. When alignment makes a model more helpful, it also tilts its probabilities; downstream pipelines inherit the tilt by default. --- ### TREK: A Travel Reasoning and Evaluation Kit for LLM Agents in Complex Trip Planning Authors: Jinhu Qi, Wentao Zhang, Siu Man Ng, Feiyang Xu, Yanyu Chen, Yaoman Li, Irwin King Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26977v2 Travel planning is a demanding stress test for tool-using LLM agents: a usable itinerary is a single artifact that must be right along many axes at once - every flight, hotel, and attraction must exist and be bookable, the days must be physically traversable, the total must clear a budget, and the plan must serve a traveler whose needs are only partly stated. Existing agent benchmarks reward these properties one at a time and grade the final output with soft or LLM-judged rubrics, which cannot certify that a returned plan is executable and are neither reproducible nor auditable. We introduce TREK (Travel Reasoning and Evaluation Kit), a benchmark for feasible itinerary synthesis: producing a single plan that is jointly constraint-correct, hallucination-free, spatio-temporally executable, budget-valid, and responsive to the traveler's unstated persona needs. TREK comprises 800 multi-constraint tasks - 533 feasible and 267 provably infeasible with typed route/entity/budget causes - over a synthetic, internally consistent knowledge base of 212,530 records across 375 cities and 13 personas, served through a production-style tool sandbox of validated RESTful APIs. Every task is scored by a fully deterministic, rule-based evaluator with no LLM judge and ships a human-verified gold reference that scores a perfect 1.0 under that same evaluator, so the ceiling is demonstrably achievable and every remaining gap is an agent limitation rather than scorer strictness. Evaluating 15 LLM agents across nine constraint dimensions, we find that even the strongest (GPT-5.6) produces a fully-feasible plan on only 46.2% of solvable tasks, with a median of 6.6% and a floor of 0.0%; satisfying travelers' unstated needs emerges as the universal bottleneck, unsolved even at the frontier. We release the dataset, tool sandbox, deterministic evaluator, and agent code as a fully reproducible benchmark. --- ### TREK: A Travel Reasoning and Evaluation Kit for LLM Agents in Complex Trip Planning Authors: Jinhu Qi, Wentao Zhang, Siu Man Ng, Feiyang Xu, Yanyu Chen, Yaoman Li, Irwin King Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26977v1 Travel planning is a demanding stress test for tool-using LLM agents: a usable itinerary is a single artifact that must be right along many axes at once - every flight, hotel, and attraction must exist and be bookable, the days must be physically traversable, the total must clear a budget, and the plan must serve a traveler whose needs are only partly stated. Existing agent benchmarks reward these properties one at a time and grade the final output with soft or LLM-judged rubrics, which cannot certify that a returned plan is executable and are neither reproducible nor auditable. We introduce TREK (Travel Reasoning and Evaluation Kit), a benchmark for feasible itinerary synthesis: producing a single plan that is jointly constraint-correct, hallucination-free, spatio-temporally executable, budget-valid, and responsive to the traveler's unstated persona needs. TREK comprises 800 multi-constraint tasks - 533 feasible and 267 provably infeasible with typed route/entity/budget causes - over a synthetic, internally consistent knowledge base of 212,530 records across 375 cities and 13 personas, served through a production-style tool sandbox of validated RESTful APIs. Every task is scored by a fully deterministic, rule-based evaluator with no LLM judge and ships a human-verified gold reference that scores a perfect 1.0 under that same evaluator, so the ceiling is demonstrably achievable and every remaining gap is an agent limitation rather than scorer strictness. Evaluating 15 LLM agents across nine constraint dimensions, we find that even the strongest (GPT-5.6) produces a fully-feasible plan on only 46.2% of solvable tasks, with a median of 6.6% and a floor of 0.0%; satisfying travelers' unstated needs emerges as the universal bottleneck, unsolved even at the frontier. We release the dataset, tool sandbox, deterministic evaluator, and agent code as a fully reproducible benchmark. --- ### InkShield: Writing Style Protection Against Unauthorized Handwriting Mimicry Authors: Jian Xiong, Wenbo Jiang, Zihan Wang, Rui Zhang, Wenshu Fan, Hongwei Li, Guowen Xu Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.CR, cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26976v2 Recent handwritten text generators can reproduce a writer's style from publicly available references, posing risks of document forgery and identity misuse. An attacker may use a publicly available handwritten note or signature sample to generate forged recommendation letters or authorization forms, leading to document fraud, identity misuse, and misleading decisions. However, existing protections against unauthorized image editing or synthesis transfer poorly to handwriting style mimicry. Designed for natural images with complex backgrounds, they often optimize perturbations over the whole image. For sparse handwriting images, such global perturbations become conspicuous in blank background regions and largely degrade the visual quality. In this work, we propose InkShield, a proactive writing-style defense that protects reference images before release. InkShield selects a decoy writer to define a style-displacement direction, optimizes perturbations with a frozen handwriting-generation surrogate, and confines them to ink-stroke edges to avoid conspicuous background artifacts. On IAM, the average Top-1/Top-5 rates at which generated samples are retrieved as the target writer by two independent writer evaluators decrease from 11.94%/36.52% to 2.03%/8.79%. Meanwhile, the protected references remain visually close to the originals (LPIPS 0.0078), and the generated text remains readable. InkShield also exhibits transferability to other handwriting generators. Overall, InkShield provides practical protection against unauthorized handwriting style mimicry. --- ### Robust RPC Bundle Adjustment for Multi-Date Satellite Imagery with Season-Invariant Correspondences Authors: Roger Marí, Elías Masquil, Xavier Bou, Thibaud Ehret, Gabriele Facciolo Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26973v1 Accurate refinement of Rational Polynomial Camera (RPC) models is essential for high-quality satellite image geolocation. In ground control point (GCP)-free multi-view pipelines, this refinement is commonly performed through bundle adjustment from automatically extracted image correspondences. However, conventional RPC bundle adjustment pipelines rely on handcrafted feature matching, which becomes unreliable in multi-date collections affected by seasonal, illumination, and land-cover changes. We propose an appearance-aware RPC refinement pipeline that combines learned local feature matching for season-invariant correspondences with global image descriptors for selecting visually compatible image pairs. This reduces redundant and error-prone matching while preserving the connectivity of the matching graph. Experiments on seasonally diverse WorldView-3 images show that our pipeline improves GCP-free relative RPC refinement over open-source baselines, achieving lower geometric consistency errors while substantially reducing matching time on collections with 39-42 views. By making RPC refinement more robust to diachronic appearance variation, our approach enables more effective use of multi-date satellite imagery. --- ### Generation or Judgement? A Paradigm Perspective on LLM-Based Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction in Conversation Authors: Weijie Feng, Hongchuang Wang, Binbin Liu, Zhiyong Cheng Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26967v1 Emotion-cause pair extraction in conversation (ECPEC) identifies utterance pairs in which one utterance causes an emotion expressed in another. Recent LLM-based approaches formulate ECPEC at markedly different granularities, ranging from generating complete pair sets to judging individual candidate pairs. In this paper, we make the surprising observation that task formulation substantially affects performance, where pair-level judgement outperforms dialogue-level generation in all 18 controlled comparisons. We investigate the sources of this paradigm gap and find that many relations omitted by dialogue-level generation remain recognizable under explicit pair queries, under which the model recognizes 92.7%-98.1% of emotion-cause relations. This suggests that LLMs can recognize emotion-cause relations but struggle to discover and return complete pair sets. Pair-level judgement alleviates this burden, although its candidate rankings are more reliable than the binary decisions produced by a shared threshold. Based on this diagnosis, we introduce an auxiliary retriever that selectively re-examines ambiguous boundary cases, yielding consistent F1 improvements of 0.50-1.46 points across three datasets while maintaining an inference time of only 1.49x that of the baseline paradigm. These findings show that task decomposition and candidate scope are critical to effectively utilizing LLMs for ECPEC. --- ### Feature Bagging Provides Stability Authors: Yuheng Ma, Qiang Sun Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, math.ST arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26964v2 We study feature bagging through the lens of algorithmic stability. Feature bagging is an ensemble strategy that aggregates base learners trained on randomly subsampled feature subsets, possibly in a data-dependent manner. We introduce feature instability (FI), the feature-axis analogue of instance instability (II), which measures sensitivity to removing a single feature. Smaller values of II or FI correspond to stronger stability, and our experiments show that FI captures generalization-relevant information complementary to II. Within this framework, we analyze feature bagging in both a parametric linear model and a model-free setting inspired by recursive feature subsampling in random forests. In both settings, we establish formal guarantees showing that feature bagging improves the relevant stability relative to its non-bagged counterpart, with larger improvements under more aggressive subsampling. We further show that a modest number of bagging rounds is sufficient to approach the infinite-bagging stability level. --- ### Breaking the Curse with BAND: Nonparametric Distribution Estimation in High Dimensions Authors: Shuo-Chieh Huang, Chien-Ming Chi, Jau-er Chen Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG, stat.ME arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26955v1 Minimax-optimal rates for multivariate distribution estimation are known to suffer from the curse of dimensionality. We propose a sparse Bayesian network approach in which each conditional probability is estimated using sparsity-aware conditional mean methods. The resulting estimator, \textit{BAyesian Network Distribution regression} (BAND), handles mixed data types in high-dimensional time series and achieves polynomial total variation convergence rates while allowing the feature dimension to grow polynomially with the sample size. These rates are substantially faster than the classical optimal rates for multivariate histogram density estimators that lack sparsity. Empirical evaluations show that BAND performs competitively for data sampling and confidence region forecasting against a range of state-of-the-art benchmarks. --- ### Credit Cards, Confusion, Computation, and Consequences: What Can We Uncover About Language Model Reasoning? Authors: Arnav Hiray, Agam Shah, Caleb Lu, Meghaj Tarte, Harsit Mittal, Sudheer Chava Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26952v1 We introduce CreditCardQA, the first financial literacy benchmark for numerical reasoning derived from real credit card agreements. The dataset contains 1,800 questions, including first-person variants that reflect how consumers naturally ask about fees, interest, and payments. We evaluate a range of large language and reasoning models under Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and Program-of-Thought (PoT) prompting. Overall, PoT yields consistent performance gains, particularly for models with weaker baseline reasoning, and narrows gaps between open- and closed-source systems. Through error analysis, we show that failures arise less from arithmetic and more from misapplied financial rules, missed conditions, and misunderstandings of contractual terms. We further analyze question difficulty and find that comparisons, conditional logic, and monetary constraints are especially challenging. We also find that errors often arise in edge cases such as late-payment penalties or small-balance scenarios that are more likely to affect lower-income or financially vulnerable individuals. --- ### Progressive Multimodal Alignment for Continual Instruction Tuning Authors: Duzhen Zhang, Yahan Yu, Qiaoyi Su, Jiahua Dong, Tielin Zhang Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26947v2 Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) rely on a projector to align visual representations with the language embedding space, making it central to cross-modal understanding. In Multimodal Continual Instruction Tuning (MCIT), however, shifting visual distributions and evolving instruction semantics cause this shared projector to drift, leading to projector-level forgetting, an issue largely overlooked by methods that focus primarily on the LLM backbone. We introduce Progressive Multimodal Alignment (PMA), a framework that enables the projector to adapt continually while preserving previously learned alignment. PMA detects multimodal distribution shifts via a lightweight representation descriptor and progressively expands projector experts only when needed. An expandable router integrates expert outputs based on multimodal features, while the original pretrained projector is retained as a stable alignment anchor. This progressive mechanism balances stability and plasticity with sub-linear parameter growth and serves as a method-agnostic add-on to existing MCIT approaches. Extensive experiments on two recent MCIT benchmarks demonstrate that mitigating projector-level forgetting yields consistent gains over prior state-of-the-art methods when combined with PMA. Moreover, PMA scales across diverse MLLM backbones, demonstrating robust and broadly applicable MCIT performance. --- ### Belief-Guided Decision Making with Uncertainty Gating in the Game of Go Authors: Mehrad Yaghoubi, Azam Bastanfard, Abbas Jalilvand, Ashkan Rezaei Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26946v2 Recent advancements in Computer Go, driven by AlphaZero and MuZero, rely heavily on Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to correct the errors of the neural network policy. While effective on massive computational clusters, this dependence creates a critical bottleneck on consumer-grade hardware, where the computational cost of tree management severely limits inference rates. Furthermore, without deep search, these models suffer from hallucination, proposing moves with high confidence that are strategically fatal. This paper introduces a novel Belief-Guided architecture that disentangles the Policy head from a distinct Belief head. Unlike traditional value functions, the Belief head acts as an internal simulator and independent critic, modeling epistemic uncertainty and strategic stability. By integrating memory mechanisms (Transformer/GRU) to handle long-term dependencies and the Ko rule, and utilizing a gating mechanism to filter overconfident policy errors, our model shifts the burden of intelligence from runtime search to parametric "intuition." Experimental results demonstrate that this approach significantly improves search-free win rates and reduces hallucination, enabling professional-level play on limited hardware where massive MCTS is infeasible. --- ### Belief-Guided Decision Making with Uncertainty Gating in the Game of Go Authors: Mehrad Yaghoubi, Azam Bastanfard, Abbas Jalilvand, Ashkan Rezaei Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26946v1 Recent advancements in Computer Go, driven by AlphaZero and MuZero, rely heavily on Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to correct the errors of the neural network policy. While effective on massive computational clusters, this dependence creates a critical bottleneck on consumer-grade hardware, where the computational cost of tree management severely limits inference rates. Furthermore, without deep search, these models suffer from hallucination, proposing moves with high confidence that are strategically fatal. This paper introduces a novel Belief-Guided architecture that disentangles the Policy head from a distinct Belief head. Unlike traditional value functions, the Belief head acts as an internal simulator and independent critic, modeling epistemic uncertainty and strategic stability. By integrating memory mechanisms (Transformer/GRU) to handle long-term dependencies and the Ko rule, and utilizing a gating mechanism to filter overconfident policy errors, our model shifts the burden of intelligence from runtime search to parametric "intuition." Experimental results demonstrate that this approach significantly improves search-free win rates and reduces hallucination, enabling professional-level play on limited hardware where massive MCTS is infeasible. --- ### Surrogate assisted diversity estimation in neural ensemble search Authors: Alexandr Udeneev, Petr Babkin, Oleg Bakhteev Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26940v1 Ensembles are a standard way to improve the performance and robustness of deep neural networks, but their effectiveness crucially depends on both the quality and the diversity of individual models. Most neural architecture search (NAS) methods are computationally expensive. Extending them to neural ensemble search (NES), which requires joint optimization of individual architectures and their ensemble composition, leads to an exponential growth of the search space and makes the problem computationally intractable. To address this, we introduce a dual-objective surrogate-guided ensemble search: candidate architectures are represented as directed acyclic graphs, and two surrogate models are trained independently to estimate predictive accuracy and diversity potential. Their combined estimates guide an NES framework that efficiently identifies architectures that are both individually strong and collectively diverse. Our final ensemble achieves competitive or superior performance compared to standard baselines such as Deep Ensembles and Random Search on FashionMNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100. --- ### What Does It Take to Detect an AI Agent? Minimal Feature Sets for Behavioral Detection under Browser Automation Authors: Vishisht Choudhary, Lukas Schmidt, Anne Zoë Kenntner, Feras Skhab, Michel Osswald, Jens Ernstberger Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.AI, cs.CR arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26935v1 Bot detectors deployed at scale treat traffic as binary: human or bot. This assumption breaks when AI agents browse the web through browser automation, a traffic class that is neither and that binary classifiers structurally cannot represent. We present a three-class detection framework distinguishing humans, bots, and AI agents, and show that the binary-vs-agent confusion is architectural: a binary human-vs-bot detector misroutes agent sessions because its label space lacks an agent class. On our controlled benchmark, an MLP binary classifier misclassifies 39.1% of real AI agents as human and a SAINT binary transformer misclassifies 34.5%; adding an explicit agent class yields per-class agent F1 = 1.000 in all 30 runs (3 model families $\times$ 10 seeds). To measure evasion resistance, we construct a five-level evasion ladder spanning passive observation, GAN-generated trajectories, and replay of real human cursor data ($n = 2299$ evasion sessions). Across 10 seeds and 3 model families we observe zero agent misses in 22990 per-seed predictions. The discriminative signal is a browser-automation artifact, not evidence of agent reasoning: Playwright does not emit the raw pointer-move and wheel-delta streams a physical input device produces, and this absence signature survives trajectory manipulation. Exhaustive search over all feature subsets of size 1-5 (9401 GBMs) shows that two behavioral features (mouse_event_rate, teleport_click_ratio) give 100% observed agent recall at every evasion level with agent precision 0.994; five features lift macro-F1 to 0.991. The signal is redundantly encoded: removing teleport_click_ratio leaves agent detection at 100%. The single-feature regime is degenerate, flagging every agent only by collapsing the classifier to always predict "agent". Two features robustly isolate agents; five separate all three traffic classes at macro-F1 $\geq 0.99$. --- ### Defending Against Backdoor Attacks via Alignment Checking in Model-Contrastive Federated Learning Authors: Hongliang Zhang, Zhongyuan Yu, Guijuan Wang, Tianqing He, Wenshuo Ma, Xiaosong Zhang, Jiguo Yu Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26933v1 Federated Learning (FL) is vulnerable to backdoor attacks because of its distributed nature in edge computing scenarios. Existing defense methods show limited efficacy as they overlook the deviations among benign local updates caused by statistical heterogeneity and the stealthiness of backdoor attacks. To tackle these issues, we propose FedDAB, a two-phase method that combines local contrastive regularization with alignment checking, to defend against backdoor attacks. In the first phase, FedDAB introduces a novel model-contrastive term into the local objective to enhance direction and magnitude consistency among benign updates. In the second phase, FedDAB employs an alignment checking strategy to evaluate each local update in terms of overall-direction alignment and parameter-level alignment with historical information, excluding updates that exhibit abnormal alignment patterns from global aggregation. We theoretically prove FedDAB's robustness with a convergence rate of $\mathcal{O}(1/T)$. Extensive experiments show that FedDAB outperforms existing defense methods against backdoor attacks. --- ### Same Evidence, Different Target: Decoding How Diagnostic Evidence Bears on Causal Questions from Language-Model States Authors: Weiyi Kong, Zhuoran Li Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26929v1 The same diagnostic result can support or challenge one causal claim yet fail to address another when the claims concern different populations, outcomes, estimands, pathways, or identifying assumptions. When the evidence and target vary together, a correct answer may reflect favorable or adverse wording, lexical overlap, or a familiar diagnostic pattern rather than matching the evidence to the causal question. We introduce paired prompts that repeat the same diagnostic evidence verbatim while changing the causal target. Each prompt is labeled Favors, Challenges, Unresolved, or Wrong Target according to how the evidence bears on the causal question. A pair is recovered only when both prompts are classified correctly. Using linear readouts trained on a separate development set, we analyze the final-token hidden state from the penultimate transformer block of Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, Qwen3-8B, and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct. On the 49-pair primary benchmark spanning nine diagnostic families, balanced accuracy ranges from 0.654 to 0.659 and 18-21 pairs are recovered. Two independent human reviewers assigned the same label to 95 of the 98 prompts (96.9%). Across checkpoints, balanced accuracy and complete-pair recovery exceed permutation nulls that preserve development scenario groups. In Qwen2.5, full-prompt balanced accuracy exceeds both restricted inputs, with paired-bootstrap intervals for both differences above zero. Readouts trained without development examples from the evaluated diagnostic family recover 21 pairs, including at least one in each of the nine families. The hidden-state readout exceeds a linear classifier on answer-option logits and text baselines in balanced accuracy and recovered pairs. These results show that the hidden state contains linearly decodable information about whether diagnostic evidence favors, challenges, or fails to address the causal target. --- ### Latent-IM: Latent Interaction Management for Speech LLMs Authors: Adar Avsian, Atahan Dokme, Tony Woo, Larry Heck Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.CL arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26928v1 Classical spoken dialogue systems often separated dialogue management from response realization: a policy selected the next dialogue action, and a generation component expressed that action. As dialogue systems shift toward LLMs, this decomposition has largely disappeared into the model's hidden representations. We ask whether an LLM-internal analogue of state estimation and action control can be recovered for conversational moves such as acknowledging, checking, querying, explaining, and replying. We formulate move control as two coupled problems: selection, predicting the appropriate next move from the dialogue context, and realization, causally producing a chosen move at generation time. We introduce Latent-IM, an internal dialogue-management framework that provides a general interface for choosing and deploying conversational moves under different objectives. Here, we use this control to reproduce human move choices, improving average end-to-end move accuracy by 12.5 points over the unsteered backbone while performing comparably to fine-tuning. --- ### Temporally Centered SIGReg Improves LeWorldModel Representations for Robot Policy Learning Authors: Chang Liu, Fei Suo, Yanzhou Jin, Zeyu Ping, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo, Yaonan Zhu Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.LG, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26924v3 Recent work on LeWorldModel (LeWM) has shown that the Sketched Isotropic Gaussian Regularizer (SIGReg) enables stable end-to-end world model learning from pixels by regularizing the latent representation toward an isotropic Gaussian. While effective for latent-space planning, the representations learned by Raw LeWM are poorly suited for downstream robot policy learning. In this paper, through Monte Carlo analysis, we show that the Raw LeWM objective biases variance allocation toward the temporally persistent component, thereby suppressing the variance of the temporally centered residual. Consistent with this analysis, trained Raw LeWM representations exhibit suppressed residual variation and reduced decodability of robot state and dynamics, particularly gripper dynamics, which are crucial for robotic manipulation. To address this issue, we apply SIGReg to temporally centered residuals rather than to the whole latent representation. This simple change decouples persistent and residual variance allocation while retaining an effective anti-collapse property. On the LIBERO benchmark, our method improves downstream policy success on the Goal suite by 1.66x and raises the average success rate across all suites from 63.6% to 83.8%. Without external pretraining, it also outperforms both Diffusion Policy trained from scratch and the pretrained OpenVLA baseline. These results associate the variance-allocation bias of Raw LeWM with the downstream policy gap, and show that decoupling persistent and residual variation yields representations better suited for downstream robot policy learning. --- ### Temporally Centered SIGReg Improves Multi-Task LeWorldModel Learning: From Analysis to Method Authors: Chang Liu, Fei Suo, Yanzhou Jin, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo, Yaonan Zhu Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.LG, cs.RO arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26924v2 Recent work on LeWorldModel (LeWM) has shown that the Sketched Isotropic Gaussian Regularizer (SIGReg) enables stable end-to-end world-model learning from pixels by regularizing the latent marginal distribution toward an isotropic Gaussian, thereby preventing representation collapse. While effective and elegant in single-task settings, this recipe does not extend reliably to multi-task training, leading to substantially worse downstream behavior-cloning performance. In this paper, we show that marginal Gaussianization compresses the separation between task-dependent latent clusters relative to within-cluster variation. This compression introduces representation aliasing across tasks and states, and makes the learned representations highly sensitive to small visual perturbations. To address this problem, we apply SIGReg to temporally centered residuals rather than to the latent marginal distribution. This surrogate target places no direct regularization pressure on the separation among cluster centers, removes the requirement that the full latent follow a single isotropic Gaussian, and retains the anti-collapse effect of SIGReg. On the LIBERO benchmark, our method improves downstream success on the long-horizon suite by 1.7x and raises the average success rate across four suites from 53.2% to 73.6%. Without external pretraining, it slightly outperforms Diffusion Policy trained from scratch and approaches the performance of large-scale pretrained policy baselines. These results reveal a structural incompatibility between marginal Gaussian priors and multi-task latent structure, and provide a simple route toward stable and scalable end-to-end multi-task world-model learning. --- ### Two Calls Beat Five Agents: Evaluating Multi-Agent Pipelines Against Self-Refinement for Local Language Models Authors: Ashish Prajapati, Om Mohite Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.LG arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26922v1 Multi-agent LLM pipeline systems break down the task among multiple roles for better reasoning, but are benchmarked mainly with large-scale commercial models. In this study, we investigate Parishad, a structured multi-agent system involving five roles, by deploying it on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, a local model, on two datasets: GSM8K (500 questions) and HumanEval (164 questions), compared with prompting directly and two-call self-refinement. The multi-agent system drops GSM8K accuracy from 75.0\% to 45.0\% with JSON data format due to the error accumulation problem. With plaintext format, the accuracy is restored to 82.0\%. A two-call self-refinement strategy (V1) can achieve 86.2\% accuracy on GSM8K, with 7.4$\times$ lower token usage. However, the same V1 implementation on HumanEval---where direct accuracy is already 96.3\%---actively destroys performance (66.5\%). A task-aware gated redesign (V2) applied to HumanEval preserves accuracy at 95.1\%. Our results demonstrate that communication format and implementation details determine outcomes more than architectural complexity, and that simpler approaches match or outperform multi-agent pipelines for local 7B model deployment. All code and data are released. --- ### From Keypoints to Predictive Distributions: Post-Hoc Uncertainty for YOLO-Pose Models Authors: Alexej Klushyn, Juan Rivero Sesma, Florian Seligmann, Richard Kurle, Kinh Tieu, Jayant Sen Gupta Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.CV arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26921v1 YOLO-Pose models provide efficient keypoint localization, but do not quantify the associated spatial uncertainty. We introduce a lightweight post-hoc probabilistic extension that augments a trained YOLO-Pose model with calibrated bivariate predictive distributions over keypoint locations, centered at the model's original predictions. Concretely, we train additional probabilistic heads with an importance-weighted negative log-likelihood to predict an input-dependent $2\times2$ dispersion matrix for each keypoint, followed by Gaussian calibration for broad downstream compatibility or Student-$t$ calibration for distributional fidelity. Complementing this, we propose an evaluation protocol that combines a suite of distributional calibration diagnostics with average keypoint precision (AKP), a keypoint-level extension of the COCO AP protocol for assessing reliability rankings. Experiments on COCO show that the learned uncertainty estimates enable effective keypoint-level reliability ranking, Student-$t$ calibration best captures the empirical residual distribution, and uncertainty-based pruning removes unreliable keypoints. A central application-level demonstration is vision-based aircraft landing, where calibrated covariances for runway keypoints support uncertainty-aware aircraft position estimation and downstream sensor fusion. --- ### BioVLN: A Simulation Platform for Visual Language Navigation in Biomedical Laboratories Authors: Zhe Liu, Quan Lu, Zhaohui Du, Zhe Wang, Huanbo Jin, Jiaming Gu, Qi Wang, Ting Xiao, Minting Pan, Dongzhan Zhou Published: 2026-07-29 Categories: cs.RO, cs.AI arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26914v1 Biomedical laboratory robots must navigate to instruments before performing experimental procedures. Existing embodied navigation platforms are designed for household environments and treat a target as an object center or an arbitrary nearby position. This representation is inadequate for laboratory instruments, which must be approached from their operating side while maintaining safe clearance from surrounding equipment. We introduce BioVLN, a simulation platform for developing and evaluating visual-language navigation agents in biomedical laboratories. BioVLN represents each instrument with three regions: its physical body, a surrounding clearance region, and an operation area in front of the usable side. This model is applied consistently to scene generation, target placement, navigation evaluation, and safety analysis, so success depends on reaching a position from which the instrument can be accessed. BioVLN supports procedural scene generation and manually designed environments, producing 47 scenes and 1667 episodes. Standardized navigation and reinforcement-learning interfaces enable trajectory collection and policy training. Experiments show that geometric exploration reaches 74.4--87.5% success, while sampling multiple valid positions in the operation area improves success to 83.3--92.5% and reduces unsafe proximity. ---