# Research Papers — 2026-07 · bundle page 27 of 222

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### MediaWiki Code2Code Search: Neural Retrieval for the Semantic Discovery of Open-Source Software Entities

Authors: Francesco Tosoni
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.IR, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.SE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26766v1

Code search in large-scale ecosystems is often hindered by the lexical gap between user queries and implementation details, alongside the trade-off between the low latency of traditional Information Retrieval (IR) and the precision of Deep Learning (DL). We present MediaWiki Code2Code Search, a neural retrieval system for semantic code-to-code discovery. By indexing 1.29 million structural entities (functions, types, and templates) across 2,500+ MediaWiki repositories, our system enables retrieval based on computational intent rather than surface tokens. We employ a split-build architecture, decoupling GPU-intensive offline indexing from a CPU-only serving layer; our FAISS IVF-PQ index occupies 168.6 MB: a 96.6\% reduction compared to a flat float32 baseline, and achieves a median query latency of 1.85 seconds on commodity hardware, satisfying the 6 GiB RAM constraint of Wikimedia Toolforge. Our evaluation across a 27-query benchmark demonstrates superior performance over the BM25 baseline, achieving a P@10 of 0.87 compared to 0.64 (0.52 versus 0.34 for strict matching). Gains are most pronounced in name-obfuscated tasks where lexical methods fail. The system is available at https://code2codesearch.toolforge.org under the Apache 2.0 licence and provides an open RESTful API.

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### Searching for Robust Augmentations to Improve Out-of-Domain Generalization in Dermoscopic Skin Cancer Classification

Authors: Alexander Kozachok, Ilya Latyshev, Evgeny Karpulevich, Elena Kozachok, Egor Ushakov, Oleg Samovarov
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26765v2

Background/Objectives: Dermoscopic skin-lesion classifiers lose accuracy when images arrive from a new clinic or a new device. We asked which data augmentations reduce that loss, and measured the effect under a protocol that keeps policy selection separate from policy evaluation. Methods: A ConvNeXt-Large binary malignant-versus-non-malignant classifier was trained on six dermoscopic sources (25,903 images); HAM10000 and ISIC 2016-2020 were held out of training entirely. Single augmentations, photometric combinations and eleven composite policies were ranked on a development split of 1511 held-out images. The winning policy was then evaluated on a confirmation set of 8073 held-out images that took no part in that ranking and from which we removed every image sharing a lesion identifier with the training data and every image contributed by an institution represented in training. Both policies were retrained with four random seeds each and compared with an exact permutation test. Results: The mix policy raised confirmation-set ROC-AUC from 0.787 to 0.826 (+0.039; per-seed ranges 0.772-0.797 and 0.815-0.840, non-overlapping; exact permutation p=0.029), with the same direction on each contributing source. At matched sensitivity the gain is larger in clinical terms: specificity rose from 0.612 to 0.713 at a sensitivity of 0.80, and from 0.284 to 0.397 at a sensitivity of 0.95. In-domain ROC-AUC was preserved (0.938 to 0.941). On an independent clinical cohort acquired with a different device at a different institution (472 images, 22 malignant), performance was maintained (0.934 versus 0.930). Conclusions: Augmentations that model the physical causes of domain shift improve cross-source transfer at no cost to in-domain accuracy, and the improvement survives a selection-disjoint, contamination-free evaluation.

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### Searching for Robust Augmentations to Improve Out-of-Domain Generalization in Dermoscopic Skin Cancer Classification

Authors: Alexander Kozachok, Ilya Latyshev, Evgeny Karpulevich, Elena Kozachok, Egor Ushakov, Oleg Samovarov
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26765v1

Background/Objectives: Dermoscopic skin lesion classifiers often lose accuracy under domain shift across imaging devices, illumination, and capture artifacts. We study how data augmentation improves the robustness of a binary malignant-versus-non-malignant classifier, with emphasis on out-of-domain (OOD) generalization. Methods: Single augmentations, photometric combinations, and composite policies were searched on a multi-source ISIC Archive collection with Derm7pt, using a ConvNeXt-Large backbone and ROC-AUC. Splits were made at the lesion-ID level, and HAM10000 and ISIC 2019-2020 were held out as a predominantly source-disjoint OOD test. Results: The largest OOD gain came from the mix policy, and photometric transformations dominated the most useful OOD operations. On an expanded pool from the same held-out sources the gain was +0.053 (95% CI +0.045 to +0.061, p&lt;0.001), consistent across four training seeds (per-seed ROC-AUC: baseline 0.761-0.775, mix 0.806-0.829). On a small independent clinical collection, single-checkpoint sensitivity rose from 0.591 to 0.818, but this rested on 22 malignant cases and did not persist across seeds. Conclusions: Augmentations modelling real sources of domain shift can matter more than maximizing in-domain accuracy. Because the policy was selected on the same sources used to evaluate it, a source-disjoint selection protocol is needed before this effect size can be read as unbiased.

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### Long-Tailed 3D Point Cloud Dataset Distillation

Authors: Jiahao You, Xu Han, Jinfeng Xu, Xianzhi Li
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26763v1

Dataset distillation compresses large-scale datasets into compact synthetic sets while preserving their training utility, enabling efficient 3D point cloud training. Current point cloud dataset distillation methods only tackle geometric and representation challenges while ignoring the distributional imbalance prevalent in point cloud datasets where both training and test splits follow long-tailed class distributions. To our knowledge, we present the first study on long-tailed point cloud dataset distillation. Rather than focusing primarily on geometric and representation properties or simply constructing a class-balanced synthetic set, our framework explicitly accounts for long-tailed class distributions via two core modules. First, we design Adaptive Synthetic Budgeting to allocate class-wise synthetic budgets according to class quantity and the expected benefit of additional synthetic samples. Given the allocated budgets, we further design 3D Long-Tailed Distribution Matching to optimize synthetic point clouds through Global-Local Feature Alignment and Prior-Aware Supervision. The former preserves both global class distributions and diverse intra-class structures, while the latter provides class-dependent expert supervision to keep tail-class samples recognizable while maintaining diverse head-class patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, lifting classification accuracy by 7.0 points on ShapeNet55 against state-of-the-art methods.

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### Relation Geometry in Semantic Space of Language Models

Authors: Zhihan Cao, Hiroaki Yamada, Simone Teufel, Tatsuya Hiraoka, Kentaro Inui, Hitomi Yanaka, Takenobu Tokunaga
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26762v1

When it comes to generating vector representations of words, current language models are achieving high-quality results. However, what is not known is the extent to which knowledge about semantic relations is represented in the geometry of the semantic spaces created in this way. In order to answer this question, we study the relation geometry of such semantic spaces from three perspectives. We first examine whether words standing in a particular relation to a target word~(called relata) occupy the same region in semantic space, and whether the regions corresponding to different relations are distinct from each other. We then verify to what extent semantic spaces reflect certain well-known properties of relations, such as symmetry, asymmetry, and transitivity. Finally, we consider which information about the target words and relata is more important for relation geometry: their surface forms, or their contexts. We conduct experiments on six semantic relations using causal, masked, and diffusion language models. The results show that relata in asymmetric relations relatively clearly occupy a distinct region in semantic space. Asymmetric relations' properties are only moderately well encoded in the semantic space, yet better than those of symmetric ones. Furthermore, when considering the question which information source has the strongest impact on results amongst the models we evaluated, we find that lexical information tends to be more important for the causal language model, whereas contextual information is more important for the masked and diffusion language models. Our results empirically show that relation geometry is not equally well-represented for all relations in semantic space, suggesting that there is a difference in how well semantic relations might be learned from distributional information alone.

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### Metis: Memory Foundation Model

Authors: Zeyu Zhang, Ziliang Guo, Yihang Sun, Xichong Zhang, Xixuan Hao, Zehao Lin, Yang Zhang, Xiaoyan Zhao, Tong Shen, Bo Tang, Zhi-Qin John Xu, Junchi Yan et al.
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.CL, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26760v2

Recent advances in AI agents have increasingly internalized native capabilities into their underlying foundation models, giving rise to multimodal foundation models and large reasoning models. However, agent memory is still primarily implemented through external modules, leaving the native memory capability largely unexplored. In this paper, we take a first step toward this direction by introducing memory foundation models, which empower foundation models with native memory capabilities. We formalize native memory from two perspectives: a persistent and dynamically evolving memory state within the backbone, and native memory procedures that autonomously store and utilize information through model computation. We show that native memory offers advantages in architecture, end-to-end optimization, and efficiency. Based on this formulation, we propose Metis, the first prototype of memory foundation models. Metis introduces a new architecture that equips a foundation model with a native memory state, allowing historical information to be compressed into the model and accessed through memory attention. We construct large-scale memory-specific training data and introduce multiple optimization objectives to acquire these native memory procedures through mid-training. The online memory maintenance of Metis is gradient-free, and the memory update requires only a forward pass. At inference time, all learned model weights remain frozen, while the native memory states are autonomously transformed through standard forward computation. Through extensive experiments, we show that Metis exhibits native memory capabilities and further provide a detailed analysis of its strengths, limitations, and behaviors. To facilitate future research on memory foundation models, we release our project and model checkpoints.

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### Compactly supported radial basis functions as probability density functions

Authors: Sergio Díaz-Elbal, Andrei Martínez-Finkelshtein, Darío Ramos-López
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: math.ST, stat.ME, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26759v1

Compactly Supported Radial Basis Functions (CS-RBFs) are a fundamental tool in multivariate approximation theory. However, their use in statistics and probability modeling remains underexplored, having been used mainly to express covariance functions in Gaussian processes or as kernel functions. This work explores CS-RBFs as a novel parametric family of probability density functions, focusing in particular on Wendland $\mathscr{C}^2$ kernels. The primary contribution of this work is the derivation of analytical expressions for various statistical properties, such as moments and the cumulative distribution function, of CS-RBFs as univariate and conditional densities. The approach comprises two alternative scenarios: when the CS-RBF support lies entirely within the variable's domain (untruncated support) and when part of it is outside (truncated support). Mixture models employing CS-RBFs are also analyzed, and their main properties are detailed. Furthermore, we introduce an incremental learning algorithm for density estimation with CS-RBF mixture models, in which centers are determined using k-means and weights and shape parameters are optimized by stochastic gradient descent. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show that CS-RBF densities provide competitive results in terms of likelihood and model complexity in comparison with Gaussian mixture models. In addition, these CS-RBF densities allow the exact computation of key distributional properties in univariate and conditional settings.

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### StatePlay: State-Aware Game World Models for Mechanics-Consistent Generation

Authors: Zijun Lin, Zeqing Wang, Cheston Tan, Bihan Wen, Yeying Jin
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26754v1

Recent game world models can generate visually realistic and interactive environments conditioned on player actions. However, games are not defined by pixels alone; they are governed by explicit mechanics, namely state-dependent rules that control health reduction, skill activation, and game termination. These mechanics depend on precise internal states, such as health points, skill meters, and timers, which are tightly coupled with visual observations and determine how gameplay evolves. Without modeling these state dynamics, existing game world models may generate visually plausible rollouts but violate the underlying game rules. In this paper, we propose StatePlay, a novel state-aware game world model that jointly predicts visual content and game states to promote mechanics-consistent generation. StatePlay adopts a mixture-of-transformers (MoT)-style architecture that preserves specialized visual and state representations while enabling cross-modal interaction, allowing predicted states to guide frame generation. Each branch is further optimized with a distinct objective suited to its modality. Experiments show that StatePlay achieves an average normalized L1 distance below 0.06 for state prediction. Furthermore, compared with models without explicit state modeling, our method improves mechanics fidelity in generated game rollouts by 18.6%. Overall, our work highlights the importance of state-aware game world modeling and advances beyond pixel-level realism toward complete and mechanically faithful game generation.

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### CalTwin: Towards Calibrated, Shift-Robust Medical World Models via Fisher-Information Regularisation

Authors: Behraj Khan, Shabir Ahmad, Syed Ahmad Chan Bukhari, Tahir Qasim Syed
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26752v1

Medical world models aim to learn a latent state of patient or organ physiology and a transition function that forecasts how that state evolves under interventions, supporting downstream tasks from imaging-based diagnosis to digital-twin treatment planning. Two failure modes threaten the reliability of such models in clinical deployment: (i)~\emph{covariate shift}, because training data are fragmented across hospitals, scanners, and time, so the feature distribution seen by the latent-dynamics predictor differs across fragments and from the distribution at deployment; and (ii)~\emph{confidence misalignment}, because multi-step forecasts are often overconfident exactly where clinical risk is highest. We argue that both problems admit a unified treatment via a single lightweight regularisation objective, \textbf{CalTwin}, which combines a Fisher-Information-based shift penalty adapted from our prior work on fragmented covariate-shift remediation~\cite{khan2025mitigating,khan2025causal} with a Confidence Misalignment Penalty adapted from our prior work on calibrated vision-language classification~\cite{khan2025confidence}, applied here to a GRU-based medical world model's latent transition predictor. We derive the combined objective, establish which proof steps transfer from the classification setting without modification and which require adaptation, and evaluate it on the PhysioNet 2019 Sepsis Challenge, treating the two hospital systems as sequential training fragments and the unseen system as an out-of-distribution test. CalTwin reduces OOD next-step latent-state MSE by 9.1\% relative to the no-penalty baseline (FIM penalty alone accounts for 7.0\%); the ECE reduction from the Confidence Misalignment Penalty is real but small (0.7\% for CalTwin, 1.3\% for CMP alone).

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### Phoneme- vs. Character-Level Targets and Selective State-Space Models for Intracortical Brain-to-Text

Authors: Lucas Zamora Vera, Jose A. Gonzalez-Lopez
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, eess.SP
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26751v1

State-of-the-art intracortical brain-to-text systems pair a neural-sequence phone decoder with an external language model. Two design axes remain underexplored: whether selective state-space models (Mamba) improve on recurrent decoders, and how the output target (phonetic vs.\ character) interacts with that choice. On the public Brain-to-Text '25 benchmark, we study a controlled 2x2 grid (GRU vs.\ hybrid Mamba decoder; phonetic vs.\ character targets) trained with a CTC objective under one reproducible protocol. The recurrent baseline remains strongest: the best phonetic GRU reaches 12.62\% PER and 21.19\% WER, while the best textual GRU after LM rescoring reaches 13.39\% CER and 26.28\% WER. The Mamba hybrid is competitive but does not surpass it. Ablations isolate architectural contributions, and error analysis shows representation-dependent failures: articulatory-like phoneme confusions vs.\ lexical and word-boundary errors.

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### An Attention-Based Framework for Alzheimers Disease Classification Using Resting-State fMRI

Authors: Harshiddhi Pathak, Gowtham Reddy N, Mrinal Acharya, Manjunatha Mahadevappa
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: eess.IV, cs.AI, cs.HC, cs.LG, eess.SP
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26746v1

Accurate identification of Alzheimers disease (AD) using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) remains challenging due to the high dimensionality, noise, and complex inter-regional dependencies inherent in functional brain connectivity, which limit the effectiveness of traditional approaches based on handcrafted connectivity features or conventional machine learning models. In this work, we present an attention-based deep learning framework for Alzheimers disease classification that operates directly on rs-fMRI functional connectivity matrices by treating brain regions as tokens and employing a Transformer-inspired self-attention mechanism to model long-range and global functional dependencies across distributed brain networks. The proposed framework learns discriminative functional representations without reliance on manual feature engineering and is evaluated on a longitudinal cohort from the Alzheimers Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) comprising cognitively normal and Alzheimers disease subjects with multiple visits. A subject-wise evaluation protocol is adopted to prevent information leakage across visits, and class-weighted optimization is incorporated to address mild class imbalance. Experimental results for binary AD versus cognitively normal classification demonstrate that the proposed attention- based rs-fMRI model achieves an accuracy of 88.95% and a ROC-AUC of 0.90, along with a favorable precision-recall balance, highlighting the effectiveness of self-attention-driven functional connectivity modeling as a robust and interpretable approach for Alzheimers disease detection using resting-state fMRI.

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### Multimodal fusion of visual and morphometric features for avian bone classification

Authors: Nevio Dubbini, Lisa Yeomans, Marco Pavia, Ramazan Parmaksiz, Ayse Atas Hooglugt, Gabriele Gattiglia, Beatrice Demarchi
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26743v1

Artificial intelligence has shown considerable potential for archaeological applications, yet its use in zooarchaeology remains limited, particularly for the identification of avian skeletal remains. This study presents a proof-of-concept multimodal framework that integrates convolutional neural network-based image analysis with osteometric measurements for the classification of bird bones. Using a dataset of more than 10,000 images from multiple museum and research collections, two classification tasks were investigated: skeletal element identification and family-level taxonomic classification. Prior to classification, images were automatically segmented using a two-stage pipeline combining BiRefNet and SAM2. Visual features extracted with a pre-trained EfficientNet_V2_S backbone were fused with standardized morphometric data through a feature-level multimodal architecture. The model achieved 86% accuracy on the test set for bone-type classification, demonstrating reliable recognition of skeletal elements. Family-level classification proved more challenging, reaching 51% top-1 accuracy but 75% top-3 accuracy, indicating that correct taxa were frequently included among the most probable predictions. These results demonstrate the feasibility of combining visual and morphometric information within a unified deep-learning framework and establish a methodological baseline for future AI-assisted zooarchaeological identification. The approach contributes to ongoing efforts to develop scalable, interpretable, and archaeologically meaningful tools for the study of avian remains.

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### Zero-Shot Face-to-Speech Synthesis via Latent Space Adaptation of a Style-Diffusion TTS Model

Authors: Carlos Muñoz-Romero, Jose A. Gonzalez-Lopez
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: eess.AS, cs.AI, cs.SD
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26742v1

Zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) clones a voice from a short audio prompt, but this reliance on reference audio is a barrier when only visual information is available, e.g. for historical figures or video-game characters. In this work, we propose a Face-to-Speech (F2S) framework that predicts a plausible voice from a static facial image. A lightweight Face Adapter, together with soft-tuning of the face encoder's upper blocks, aligns face-recognition features with the style space of a frozen StyleTTS 2 model, kept frozen during training. We evaluate on held-out identities from LRS3, a large-scale audiovisual corpus of English TED-talk videos. The synthesized speech is highly natural (UTMOS 3.7-4.0, matching or exceeding the 3.61 of ground truth), face-to-voice retrieval is consistently above chance, and the generated voice is consistent with the target speaker. Without any retraining, an English-trained adapter also produces fluent Spanish speech, indicating that the face-to-style mapping is largely language-agnostic.

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### Domain adaptation for handwriting trajectory reconstruction from IMU sensors

Authors: Florent Imbert, Romain Tavenard, Yann Soullard, Eric Anquetil
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26736v1

Digital pens are commonly used to write on digital devices, providing the handwriting trace and enhancing human-computer interation. This study focuses on a digital pen equipped with kinematic sensors, allowing users to write on any surface while simultaneously preserving a digital trajectory of handwriting. This technology holds significant potential as a valuable educational tool, particularly in classrooms where it can facilitate the process of learning to write. A major issue is based on the difference in captured signals between adults and children. For similar handwriting trace, we have large differences in sensor signals due to differences in speed and confidence in the handwriting gesture of children. To address this, we investigate a domain adaptation approach to build a unified intermediate feature representation aimed at facilitating the trajectory reconstruction. We demonstrate the interest of domain adaptation methods in leveraging existing knowledge for application in different contexts. Specifically, we compare our domain adaptation approach with two other methods: training the model from scratch and fine-tuning the model.

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### Dual Inversion for Text-to-Image Diffusion Models: From Both Prompt and Noise Perspectives

Authors: Xiaolong Liu, Junjian Li, Yuan Xiao, Jiaqi Deng, Dayong Ye, Tianqing Zhu, Huan Huo
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI, cs.MM
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26735v1

Prompt inversion, as a typical reverse engineering technique, enables text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models to generate the desired target images without extensive prompt engineering. However, existing prompt inversion methods suffer from significant limitations: (1) gradient-based methods are unstable and uninterpretable, often resulting in generated images with severe artifacts; (2) gradient-free methods yield human-readable prompts but still fail to preserve visual fidelity due to the lack of fine-grained detail alignment. We contend that the limitations stem from treating prompt inversion as a sufficient condition for reverse engineering, ignoring the critical role of the latent noise that encodes structural information. Consequently, we propose Dualin (Dual inversion), a two-stage method that jointly recovers both the semantic prompt and latent noise of the target image. In the first stage, we integrate vision-language model, CLIP and large language model to invert a faithful, human-interpretable hard prompt. In the second stage, unconditional DDIM inversion reconstructs the exact latent noise of the target image, guaranteeing the consistency at the structural information level. Theoretically, we prove that the inverted noise enables flexible image editing without re-optimization. Extensive experiments on diverse datasets demonstrate that Dualin simultaneously generates high-quality inverted prompts and achieves state-of-the-art image fidelity. Additionally, Dualin can establish a robust foundation for the precise and controllable image editing.

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### Online Handwriting Trajectory Reconstruction from Kinematic Sensors using Temporal Convolutional Network

Authors: Wassim Swaileh, Florent Imbert, Yann Soullard, Romain Tavenard, Eric Anquetil
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.CV, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26733v1

Handwriting with digital pens is a common way to facilitate human-computer interaction through the use of Online Handwriting (OH) trajectory reconstruction. In this work, we focus on a digital pen equipped with sensors from which one wants to reconstruct the OH trajectory. Such a pen allows to write on any surface and to get the digital trace, which can help learning to write, by writing on paper, and can be useful for many other applications such as collaborative meetings, etc. In this paper, we introduce a novel processing pipeline that maps the sensor signals of the pen to the corresponding OH trajectory. Notably, in order to tackle the difference of sampling rates between the pen and the tablet (which provides ground truth information), our preprocessing pipeline relies on Dynamic Time Warping to align the signals. We introduce a dedicated neural network architecture, inspired by a Temporal Convolutional Network, to reconstruct the online trajectory from the pen sensor signals. Finally, we also present a new benchmark dataset on which our method is evaluated both qualitatively and quantitatively, showing a notable improvement over its most notable competitor.

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### CASIAL: Geometric Distortion Robust Image Watermarking

Authors: Yupeng Qiu, Han Fang, Ee-Chien Chang
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26729v1

Deep learning-based watermarking has shown strong robustness against non-geometric distortions, yet its performance under geometric transformations remains limited. Such transformations induce two fundamental failure modes: region removal, such as cropping or masking, which eliminates the information carried by removed pixels, and desynchronization, such as scaling or rotation, which misaligns pixel positions and disrupts decoding. We argue that achieving geometric robustness requires two essential properties: (1) global spread of the watermark message, ensuring resilience even when large regions are removed, and (2) geometry-invariant representations, enabling decoding to remain synchronized despite spatial transformations. Building on these insights, we propose CASIAL, a geometric distortion-robust watermarking framework with cover image-aware message spreading (CAS) strategy and invariance alignment learning (IAL) module. CAS tightly couples watermark bits with cover image features and distributes them adaptively across the entire image, enhancing per-pixel information capacity and robustness to region removal. IAL leverages spatial attention to capture cross-pixel dependencies and align perturbed features into a shared geometry-invariant representation space, mitigating failures due to desynchronization. Across six challenging geometric transformations, CASIAL achieves substantially stronger robustness than eleven prior baselines while preserving high visual quality. It also maintains competitive performance under six signal distortions and four photometric transformations. Notably, although trained only with white-box distortions, CASIAL also exhibits strong transfer robustness to unseen black-box distortions. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the broad robustness and superior visual quality of our method.

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### AtmosERC: Modeling Dialogue-Level Affective Atmosphere for Emotion Recognition in Conversation

Authors: Weijie Feng, Tongwei Zhang, Binbin Liu, Zhiyong Cheng
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.CL
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26726v1

Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) aims to predict utterance-level emotions in dialogues and has largely advanced through context-centric modeling. However, global context is a heterogeneous signal, and not all contextual information is equally relevant to emotion prediction. This paper focuses on the affect-oriented component of this signal, termed dialogue-level affective atmosphere, which captures a latent tendency commonly reflected in conversational emotion patterns. To estimate and exploit this tendency, we propose AtmosERC, a graph-based ERC framework that models each dialogue as a conversational graph over utterances and speakers. A relation-aware graph extractor filters and fuses heterogeneous graph signals to produce dialogue-level and speaker-conditioned affective priors. The resulting compact prior guides lightweight sequential emotion prediction and can also be verbalized into prompt-level cues for LLM-based ERC without modifying backbone models. Experiments on four ERC benchmarks show that AtmosERC improves lightweight ERC, enhances LLM-based ERC as a plug-in cue, and yields more stable predictions under local emotional deviations.

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### UrbanDS: A Graph-Guided LLM Multi-Agent System for Data-Intensive Urban Tasks

Authors: Zhilun Zhou, Jianghao Yu, Yuming Lin, yongjun yang, Sun Yongquan, Depeng Jin, Yong Li
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26724v2

Large language model (LLM) agents have been widely applied in automating data science tasks. However, existing methods typically rely on a limited set of provided datasets, and they face challenges in data-intensive scenarios that require discovering and leveraging relevant information from large-scale and heterogeneous data repositories. Urban tasks are representative examples of such scenarios, as urban data are not only large-scale and multi-sourced, but also exhibit complex spatial, temporal, and semantic relationships. To address these challenges, we propose UrbanDS, a graph-guided LLM multi-agent system for data-intensive urban tasks. We first construct a unified dataset graph to organize reusable dataset skills and the relationships among datasets. Specifically, we develop a Data Profiling Agent that constructs a skill for each dataset. Moreover, a Relation Agent identifies relationships among datasets and integrates these relationships into the dataset graph. At runtime, a Planner Agent retrieves task-relevant datasets from the graph and generates execution plans. Multiple Execution Agents then perform data processing and analysis, while their execution progress and intermediate results are shared through a common memory. Finally, a Report Agent synthesizes the experimental logs into a report, which can be further refined based on user feedback. To systematically evaluate the capability of agents in handling data-intensive urban scenarios, we further construct UrbanDS-Bench, an urban data science benchmark covering representative data analysis and modeling tasks. Experiments on both general and urban benchmarks demonstrate that UrbanDS consistently outperforms existing data science agents on data-intensive tasks. Furthermore, UrbanDS has been deployed on the urban operations platform of Dongxihu District, Wuhan, demonstrating its effectiveness in real-world urban applications.

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### UrbanDS: A Graph-Guided LLM Multi-Agent System for Data-Intensive Urban Tasks

Authors: Zhilun Zhou, Jianghao Yu, Yuming Lin, yongjun yang, Sun Yongquan, Depeng Jin, Yong Li
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26724v1

Large language model (LLM) agents have been widely applied in automating data science tasks. However, existing methods typically rely on a limited set of provided datasets, and they face challenges in data-intensive scenarios that require discovering and leveraging relevant information from large-scale and heterogeneous data repositories. Urban tasks are representative examples of such scenarios, as urban data are not only large-scale and multi-sourced, but also exhibit complex spatial, temporal, and semantic relationships. To address these challenges, we propose UrbanDS, a graph-guided LLM multi-agent system for data-intensive urban tasks. We first construct a unified dataset graph to organize reusable dataset skills and the relationships among datasets. Specifically, we develop a Data Profiling Agent that constructs a skill for each dataset. Moreover, a Relation Agent identifies relationships among datasets and integrates these relationships into the dataset graph. At runtime, a Planner Agent retrieves task-relevant datasets from the graph and generates execution plans. Multiple Execution Agents then perform data processing and analysis, while their execution progress and intermediate results are shared through a common memory. Finally, a Report Agent synthesizes the experimental logs into a report, which can be further refined based on user feedback. To systematically evaluate the capability of agents in handling data-intensive urban scenarios, we further construct UrbanDS-Bench, an urban data science benchmark covering representative data analysis and modeling tasks. Experiments on both general and urban benchmarks demonstrate that UrbanDS consistently outperforms existing data science agents on data-intensive tasks. Furthermore, UrbanDS has been deployed on the urban operations platform of Dongxihu District, Wuhan, demonstrating its effectiveness in real-world urban applications.

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### FARI: Robust One-Step Inversion for Watermarking in Diffusion Models

Authors: Jindong Yang, Han Fang, Weiming Zhang, Nenghai Yu, Kejiang Chen
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26723v1

Inversion-based watermarking is a promising approach to authenticate diffusion-generated images, yet practical use is bottlenecked by inversion that is both slow and error-prone. While the primary challenge in the watermarking setting is robustness against external distortions, existing approaches over-optimize internal truncation error, and because that error scales with the sampler step size, they are inherently confined to high-NFE (number of function evaluations) regimes that cannot meet the dual demands of speed and robustness. In this work, we have two key observations: (i) the inversion trajectory has markedly lower curvature than the forward generation path does, making it highly compressible and amenable to low-NFE approximation; and (ii) in inversion for watermark verification, the trade-off between speed and truncation error is less critical, since external distortions dominate the error. A faster inverter provides a dual benefit: it is not only more efficient, but it also enables end-to-end adversarial training to directly target robustness, a task that is computationally prohibitive for the original, lengthy inversion trajectories. Building on this, we propose \textbf{FARI} (\textbf{F}ast \textbf{A}symmetric \textbf{R}obust \textbf{I}nversion), a one-step inversion framework paired with lightweight adversarial LoRA fine-tuning of the denoiser for watermark extraction. While consolidation slightly increases internal error, FARI delivers large gains in both speed and robustness: with approximately 20 minutes of fine-tuning on a single NVIDIA RTX A6000 GPU, it surpasses 50-step DDIM inversion on watermark-verification robustness while dramatically reducing inference time. Code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/0xD009/FARI.

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### DREvo: Distilling Recalibrated Historical Experience for Harness Self-Evolution

Authors: Hanghui Guo, Weijie Shi, Zhangze Chen, Shengxiang Xu, Yishu Wang, Yimei Zhang, Wangze Ni, Jia Zhu, Shimin Di
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.MA, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26722v2

Harness plays a critical role in large language model agent performance, and building a high-performing harness requires substantial expert effort. Therefore, recent research has increasingly explored harness self-evolution, which iteratively proposes, evaluates, and improves harnesses using historical trial experience. However, accumulated historical experience does not always translate into stable search guidance, and performance often fluctuates substantially across evolution iterations, making it difficult to reliably discover high-performing harnesses under a limited evolution budget. We identify two limitations in how existing harness self-evolution methods leverage historical experience: (1) Lack of dynamic reassessment of whether historical experience remains valid for the current harness, and (2) Lack of explicit mechanisms for translating valid historical experience into actionable search directions. To address these limitations, we propose a new harness self-evolution method, named DREvo, which integrates function-level evidence anchoring, state-dependent evidence recalibration, and role-conditioned search intent distillation to determine which historical evidence remains valid and where the harness should evolve next. Under limited evolution budgets, DREvo exhibits smoother evolution trajectories, achieves the highest accuracy on all five benchmarks, and delivers average gains of 16.2% and 14.2% over the evaluated baselines on domain reasoning and agentic tasks, respectively.

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### DREvo: Distilling Recalibrated Historical Experience for Harness Self-Evolution

Authors: Hanghui Guo, Weijie Shi, Zhangze Chen, Shengxiang Xu, Yishu Wang, Yimei Zhang, Wangze Ni, Jia Zhu, Shimin Di
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.MA, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26722v1

Harness plays a critical role in large language model agent performance, and building a high-performing harness requires substantial expert effort. Therefore, recent research has increasingly explored harness self-evolution, which iteratively proposes, evaluates, and improves harnesses using historical trial experience. However, accumulated historical experience does not always translate into stable search guidance, and performance often fluctuates substantially across evolution iterations, making it difficult to reliably discover high-performing harnesses under a limited evolution budget. We identify two limitations in how existing harness self-evolution methods leverage historical experience: (1) Lack of dynamic reassessment of whether historical experience remains valid for the current harness, and (2) Lack of explicit mechanisms for translating valid historical experience into actionable search directions. To address these limitations, we propose a new harness self-evolution method, named DREvo, which integrates function-level evidence anchoring, state-dependent evidence recalibration, and role-conditioned search intent distillation to determine which historical evidence remains valid and where the harness should evolve next. Under limited evolution budgets, DREvo exhibits smoother evolution trajectories, achieves the highest accuracy on all five benchmarks, and delivers average gains of 16.2% and 14.2% over the evaluated baselines on domain reasoning and agentic tasks, respectively.

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### FreeShadow: Training-Free Shadow Removal via Illumination Transfer and Selective Content Preservation in Diffusion Models

Authors: Yinan Wang, Yan Huang, Yong Xu, Patrick Le Callet
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26715v1

Existing supervised and unsupervised shadow removal methods often suffer from limited generalization due to the insufficient diversity of available training datasets, while zero-shot methods tend to produce artifacts and require time-consuming test-time optimization. To address these issues, we propose FreeShadow, a training-free shadow removal method built upon pretrained diffusion models, which exploits diffusion priors for shadow removal without any training or optimization. For illumination recovery, we propose an illumination transfer attention (ITA), which re-weights the self-attention maps in diffusion model to transfer illumination cues from non-shadow to shadow regions. For content preservation, we analyze the effects of illumination variations on self-attention maps and latent high-frequency features in diffusion model, and selectively preserve illumination-invariant components to maintain content fidelity while suppressing residual shadows. We further propose local texture-preserving relighting (LTPR) to mitigate local texture misalignment caused by VAE compression. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves strong generalization and produces realistic shadow-free images.

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### PowerAtlas: Towards Electricity-Computing Co-Scheduling for Power Systems

Authors: Kaiwen Jiang, Siya Xu, Ziyue Zhu, Chao Yang, Anh Tuan Luu, Haoran Luo
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26710v1

The rapid growth of AI workloads is turning data centers into large-scale, volatile, yet spatiotemporally flexible grid loads, creating an urgent need for coordinated electricity-computing scheduling. Under stringent grid constraints, schedules from general-purpose large language models (LLMs) are often infeasible, causing line-flow violations and unserved load. We present PowerAtlas, an LLM-agent framework for electricity-computing co-scheduling that integrates historical instances, domain knowledge, and physical constraints to produce joint decisions satisfying both grid operational rules and the service-level agreements (SLAs) of computing tasks. Working with a provincial power utility in China, we built an experimental electricity-computing network and validated the decision loop on real data-center data; from de-identified operational data we further constructed ECBench, a benchmark of 2,000 scheduling instances with oracle-optimal solutions. Experiments across eleven LLMs demonstrate the effectiveness of PowerAtlas under realistic physical operating conditions, with consistent feasibility and cost gains across three open-weight backbones. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/JAVA-Jiang/PowerAtlas.

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### Mixture-of-experts for handwriting trajectory reconstruction from IMU sensors

Authors: Florent Imbert, Eric Anquetil, Yann Soullard, Romain Tavenard
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26708v1

The use of digital pens for online handwriting trajectory reconstruction is a prevalent method for human-computer interaction. In this study, we focus on a digital pen equipped with sensors where we aim at reconstructing the online handwriting trajectory. This pen enables writing on any surface and preserving the digital trace of handwriting. This type of pen could be used as an aid to learning to write in classroom. In this paper, we propose a new approach learning to finely reconstruct the touching trajectories while precisely analyzing the hovering part in order to position the next touching trace correctly. This relies on a Mixture-Of-Experts (MOE) approach. The first expert is dedicated for the pencil touch, and is named touching expert model. The second one is dedicated for the hovering pen trajectory, and is named hovering expert model. We improve on the learning of each of these experts based on additional context or specific examples. In addition we introduce a novel public benchmark dataset, to enable future research and comparisons in the field of handwriting reconstruction. The results demonstrates a significant enhancement compared to its primary competitors.

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### TPD: Temporal Prior Decoupling for Text-to-Video Diffusion Models

Authors: Taewon Kang, Matthias Zwicker
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26706v1

Text-to-video diffusion models generate temporally coherent content from natural language, yet when a prompt describes an early scene that persists while a new event emerges on top of it---such as "a tall sandcastle standing on a beach where a wave rushes in and washes it away"---generation frequently fails to realize the late-segment event in the corresponding frames. We identify this failure as Temporal Prior Suppression (TPS): the dominant prior of the early segment captures the cross-attention trajectory across the temporal axis and suppresses the guidance signal needed for late-segment realization, a competing tendency existing guidance mechanisms do not model. We introduce Temporal Prior Decoupling (TPD), a training-free framework that restores suppressed late-segment signals during diffusion sampling. TPD constructs a temporal counterfactual by conditioning on the early segment alone, and defines the discrepancy between the full-prompt and counterfactual trajectories as a suppressed signal direction. Rather than removing this direction as in prior subtractive projection methods, TPD restores it through a frame-selective lower-bound constraint resolved jointly over diffusion timestep and video frame, realizing the suppressed event in the late frames without disrupting early-segment coherence: where prior work enforces upper-bound feasibility to remove unwanted semantics, TPD enforces lower-bound feasibility to guarantee suppressed-signal contribution. TPD runs entirely within standard diffusion sampling without retraining, and is defined purely in classifier-free guidance space, making it backbone-agnostic by construction. Experiments show that TPD significantly improves late-concept realization while preserving temporal coherence and visual fidelity, and that the targeted suppression recurs across distinct text-to-video backbones.

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### Early Failure Prediction from Near-Anomaly Detection: A Proactive Approach

Authors: L{é}a Billet, Louise Trav{é}-Massuy{è}s, Elodie Chanthery, Alexandre Gaffet
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: stat.ML, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26704v2

Anomaly detection methods often have uncertain behavior with respect to samples near the distribution boundary, limiting their ability to anticipate future anomalies. This work introduces the concept of near-anomalies that, while not yet anomalous, lie close to the boundary and are likely to transition into anomalies in the near future. To address this, we propose an unsupervised method, named Christoffel-based ANomaly Anticipation for eaRly dIscovery (CANARI), which leverages the strong theoretical foundations of the Christoffel function to detect near-anomalies. The method is validated on industrial in-circuit testing data from printed circuit boards, with synthetically generated near-anomaly samples due to the lack of real-world data labeling. Experimental results show that CANARI outperforms the compared baselines that generally use a dual-threshold mechanism (one for anomalies and one for near-anomalies). It therefore provides a proactive solution for anticipating anomalies before they occur, offering a promising approach for resilience, predictive maintenance, and quality control.

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### Sequence-SOD: Bio-inspired Sequence-aware Spiking ObjectDetection for Event Cameras

Authors: Katharina Bendig, René Schuster, Didier Stricker
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26703v1

Event cameras follow a retina-inspired sensing principle, reporting local intensity changes asynchronously with hightemporal resolution and a wide dynamic range. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) complement these sparse event streams through brain-inspired dynamics, using sparse spikes and leaky membrane potentials to integrate information over time. However, many SNN object detectors process isolated event intervals with a single label and reset the network state after each prediction, thereby underusing temporal information in continuous event streams. We introduce Sequence-SOD, a sequence-aware SNN object detector that processes extended event sequences containing labels at multiple time points. Events are accumulated into short intervals, discretized into temporal steps, and fed sequentially to an SSD-style Spiking DenseNet while preserving membrane potentials across intervals within a sequence, so that detection is driven by an evolving neural state instead of independently reset input windows. On the Gen1 Automotive Detection Dataset, sequence-aware training improves mAP from 23.38 for single-interval training to 25.30 without augmentation and to 26.88 withevent-data augmentation. The model achieves a theoretical prediction frequency of 40 Hz. Training and evaluating SNN object detectors on extended event sequences improves their ability to exploit temporal cues while preserving the energy-efficiency benefits of sparse spiking computation. The results highlight sequence-aware training as a complementary direction to architectural improvements for event-based SNN detection.

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### Automated Multilabel Mpox Research Classification with Explainable Transformer Models

Authors: Tanjim Taharat Aurpa
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26700v1

The Mpox outbreak remains a serious public health issue, with the WHO (World Health Organization) reporting increasing cases in some regions. Research on Mpox is vital for several reasons, including vaccine development, diagnostic improvement, viral evolution studies, and preventing future outbreaks. However, the large amount of research being published makes it difficult to organize and analyze information efficiently. This study focuses on using multilabel classification to categorize 14590 Mpox research articles into key topics such as outbreaks, vaccination, and epidemiology. Among the different AI models tested, BERT performed the best, achieving 97.05% accuracy, 97.67% micro F1 score, and 96.46% macro F1 score. To better understand how the model makes decisions, SHAP was used to analyze significant word features and patterns. The results show that BERT can help automate the classification of Mpox research, making it easier for researchers, policymakers, and healthcare workers to quickly find relevant information, saving time and improving public health efforts.

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### Universality and Approximation Rates of Graph Neural Networks with Random Features

Authors: Lukas Gonon, Thilo Meyer-Brandis, Niklas Weber
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.LG, stat.ML
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26699v1

We investigate message-passing graph neural networks with random node features. Random node features are known to enhance the expressiveness of graph neural networks (GNNs) both theoretically and empirically. Here, we establish a novel universality result focusing on permutation-equivariant neural networks (PENNs), a class of GNNs built from feedforward neural network components that subsumes many prominent GNN architectures. We show that PENNs, combined with partially random node features, can approximate arbitrarily well in probability any measurable permutation-invariant or permutation-equivariant function on directed graphs of fixed size with multidimensional node and edge features. For $k$-times continuously differentiable functions, $k\geq 2$, we also derive upper bounds on the approximation rates, relating the complexity of the feedforward components of a PENN in terms of layer depth and number of nonzero weights to the desired approximation accuracy.

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### MPEcho: A Melody and Phoneme-Aware Generative Framework for Controllable Cover Song Generation

Authors: Wei-Jaw Lee, Hsuan-Yu Yeh, Ting-Yi Hu, Chih-Pin Tan, Fang-Duo Tsai, Yi-Hsuan Yang
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.SD, cs.AI, eess.AS
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26698v1

Cover song generation (CSG) should preserve the melodic and linguistic content of a reference song while recreating the remaining musical components. The state-of-the-art model SongEcho utilizes $F_0$ sequences and voiced/unvoiced (V/UV) tags for conditioning; however, implicit linguistic information from V/UV tags cannot guarantee lyric accuracy, leading to a high phoneme error rate (PER). Inspired by singing voice synthesis (SVS), we propose MPEcho, which integrates a phoneme encoder and a length regulator (LR) into the SongEcho framework. By providing explicit phoneme-level conditioning and precise temporal boundaries, MPEcho significantly reduces PER. To enable this, we developed Phonsa, a Whisper-based automatic transcription model that provides high-precision phoneme-level annotations for singing voices, overcoming the scarcity of high-quality audio-phoneme pairs. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of Phonsa for alignment and MPEcho for end-to-end CSG. The audio samples, code and weights can be accessed from https://lonian6.github.io/MPEcho.github.io/.

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### Visko Orbis 1.0: A Live Model for Real-Time Interactive Long Video Generation

Authors: Xiangbo Gao, Siyuan Yang, Ping He, Mingyang Wu, Yuheng Wu, Yushen Zuo, Jiongze Yu, Ryan Cui, Hongyuan Hua, Devin Ma, Xiao Jin, Yubo Ruan et al.
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26694v3

We present Visko Orbis 1.0, a Live Model for real-time, interactive long video generation. Users can change the prompt at any moment during generation, and the update becomes visible in real time. Visko Orbis 1.0 supports long-form text-to-video, image-to-video, and video continuation, with multilingual prompts and prompt switching while generation is in progress. A bounded multi-scale memory preserves subjects, scenes, and style across chunks, sustaining hour-scale rollouts without evident quality or color drift. The generator is factorized causally in time, matching the causal structure of physical dynamics, and is aligned with a latent world-model reward for predictive consistency. Built on a distilled chunk-wise streaming generator and a streaming video upscaler, Visko Orbis 1.0 delivers 4K video generation at 24 FPS in real time, using an optimized GPU serving engine. In quantitative evaluations, Visko Orbis 1.0 achieves the best DOVER aesthetic and technical scores and the best VideoAlign visual and motion quality, and leads three physical-plausibility protocols (VideoPhy-2, Physics-IQ, and VBench-2.0 Physics); in long-form Arena comparisons, it obtains the highest overall-preference and temporal-stability ratings among all the state-of-the-art real-time interactive video generation systems.

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### Visko Orbis 1.0: A Live Model for Real-Time Interactive Long Video Generation

Authors: Xiangbo Gao, Siyuan Yang, Ping He, Mingyang Wu, Yuheng Wu, Yushen Zuo, Jiongze Yu, Ryan Cui, Hongyuan Hua, Devin Ma, Xiao Jin, Yubo Yuan et al.
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26694v1

We present Visko Orbis 1.0, a Live Model for real-time, interactive long-video generation. Users can change the prompt at any moment during generation, and the update becomes visible in real time. Visko Orbis 1.0 supports long-form text-to-video, image-to-video, and video continuation, with multilingual prompts and prompt switching while generation is in progress. A bounded multi-scale memory preserves subjects, scenes, and style across chunks, sustaining hour-scale rollouts without evident quality or color drift. Built on a distilled chunk-wise streaming generator and a streaming video upscaler, Visko Orbis 1.0 delivers real-time 4K video generation at 24 FPS using an optimized GPU serving engine. In long-form Arena comparisons, Visko Orbis 1.0 obtains the highest overall-preference and temporal-stability ratings among state-of-the-art real-time interactive video-generation systems.

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### An Informativeness-based Clustered Federated Learning Method for Reliable Traffic Prediction in Managed Wi-Fi Networks

Authors: Luca Barbieri, Gianluca Fontanesi, Lorenzo Galati Giordano, Alfonso Fernandez Duran, Thorsten Wild
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: eess.SP, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26682v1

Centrally-managed Wi-Fi solutions are increasingly leveraging Distributed Artificial Intelligence (AI) to predict key operational statistics of Access Points (APs) and proactively optimize network performance. In this context, Clustered Federated Learning (CFL) represents a fitting methodology, enabling the generation of multiple AI models that account for diverse statistical properties of the APs data distribution. However, identifying informative clusters for grouping APs models remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a novel CFL tool integrating a two step clustering procedure. Initially, multiple clustering solutions are generated and filtered based on a minimum set of desired clustering criteria. Subsequently, if no solutions meet sufficient quality metrics, a global model is produced by aggregating all AP models. Otherwise, the final clustering solution is selected as the one that maximizes the informativeness (quantified via differential entropy) for the smallest cluster. Our results, focusing on a Wi-Fi traffic prediction problem, demonstrate that the developed CFL tool achieves the best predictive performance among all evaluated distributed strategies and the lowest communication and energy footprint among the clustered ones, exceeding the cost of single-model FL only in the regimes where it markedly improves accuracy.

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### Efficient Heteroscedastic Bayesian Optimization for Risk-Aware AutoRL

Authors: Mingxuan Che, Tsung-Yuan Tseng, Theresa Eimer, Marius Lindauer, Alexander von Rohr
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.LG, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26680v1

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown remarkable success across a wide range of complex tasks. However, RL outcomes can be highly stochastic, and both expected performance and variability often depend on hyperparameter (HP) configurations. We propose efficient and risk-averse heteroscedastic Bayesian Optimization (ERAHBO), a Bayesian optimization method that models both the mean and variance of learning outcomes as functions of the HP configurations. ERAHBO aims to identify HP configurations that achieve high average return while reducing variability across training runs, and it improves the sample efficiency of the HP optimization via adaptive re-sampling rather than a fixed budget per HP. Empirical evaluations across diverse RL algorithms and environments demonstrate that ERAHBO generally outperforms both risk-neutral and risk-averse baselines, delivering improved sample efficiency for risk-averse returns.

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### Scientific Knowledge Discovery in the Age of Large Language Models

Authors: Eleni Adamidi, Serafeim Chatzopoulos, Thanasis Vergoulis
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.DL, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.IR
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26670v1

The rapid growth of scholarly literature has made identifying relevant publications increasingly difficult, and conventional search systems still depend heavily on manually formulated queries and effortful manual inspection. Generative large language models (LLMs) offer a more flexible alternative, supporting literature retrieval and the screening of candidate studies against eligibility criteria. This chapter surveys 34 peer-reviewed papers applying generative LLMs to these two tasks, identified via a Boolean search over the OpenAIRE Graph (1,589 records screened to 34 inclusions). Reviewed studies are characterised by LLMs employed, model access and adaptation, prompting and architectural techniques, ground-truth sources, and evaluation metrics.

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### AgenticCANN: Automated Ascend C Operator Generation via Knowledge-Augmented Agentic Evolution

Authors: Junhao Qiu, Zidong Wang, Yansong Sun, Zhitong Ma, Ping Guo, Qingfu Zhang
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26661v3

Ascend C operator optimization is critical for NPU (Neural Processing Unit) inference performance but requires deep hardware expertise. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in automated CUDA kernel generation, the fundamentally different programming model of Ascend C introduces unique challenges that remain unexplored. In this paper, we propose AgenticCANN, a knowledge-augmented agentic evolution framework specifically tailored for automated Ascend C operator synthesis in low-corpus NPU environments. To overcome the severe platform knowledge deficit on unfamiliar hardware, AgenticCANN incorporates a knowledge-orchestrated generation system that delivers structured, multi-level domain insights across the development lifecycle to resolve the upstream feasibility bottleneck. Building on this foundation, it features a stage-adaptive agentic evolution strategy that dynamically aligns LLM interaction modes with specific generation and evolution phases, balancing high-exploration candidate discovery with high-convergence performance tuning. Extensive experiments on Huawei Ascend 910B across six operators spanning five pattern categories demonstrate that our method achieves 90 to 100 percent feasibility on elementwise and normalization operators, 56% on fusion operators, and up to 6.65$\times$ speedup on 1B Pangu model inference kernels. Further analysis reveals that knowledge injection monotonically improves feasibility from 57% to 86% on elementwise operators, demonstrating its general rather than operator-specific benefit.

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### AgenticCANN: Automated Ascend C Operator Generation via Knowledge-Augmented Agentic Evolution

Authors: Junhao Qiu, Zidong Wang, Yansong Sun, Zhitong Ma, Ping Guo, Qingfu Zhang
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26661v2

Ascend C operator optimization is critical for NPU (Neural Processing Unit) inference performance but requires deep hardware expertise. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in automated CUDA kernel generation, the fundamentally different programming model of Ascend C introduces unique challenges that remain unexplored. In this paper, we propose AgenticCANN, a knowledge-augmented agentic evolution framework specifically tailored for automated Ascend C operator synthesis in low-corpus NPU environments. To overcome the severe platform knowledge deficit on unfamiliar hardware, AgenticCANN incorporates a knowledge-orchestrated generation system that delivers structured, multi-level domain insights across the development lifecycle to resolve the upstream feasibility bottleneck. Building on this foundation, it features a stage-adaptive agentic evolution strategy that dynamically aligns LLM interaction modes with specific generation and evolution phases, balancing high-exploration candidate discovery with high-convergence performance tuning. Extensive experiments on Huawei Ascend 910B across six operators spanning five pattern categories demonstrate that our method achieves 90 to 100 percent feasibility on elementwise and normalization operators, 56% on fusion operators, and up to 6.65$\times$ speedup on 1B Pangu model inference kernels. Further analysis reveals that knowledge injection monotonically improves feasibility from 57% to 86% on elementwise operators, demonstrating its general rather than operator-specific benefit.

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### Enfold: Folding World Model Imagination into Predictive Representations for Ultra-Efficient Embodied Control

Authors: Weili Zeng, Yitong Xing, Fulong Liu, Chengqun Yang, Antao Xiang, Feng Tian, Jingnan Gao, Jisong Cai, Xin Wang, Xiaomin Wu, Yao Mu, Xiaokang Yang et al.
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.RO, cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26657v3

World generative models are typically used through what they produce: a rendered future, a video-conditioned action, or latent context computed by a costly generative branch. We argue that their more reusable asset is the computation that constructs a future. As a generator transforms a corrupted future into a coherent trajectory, its intermediate states organize appearance, spatial layout, and interaction across levels of abstraction. Can this future-generative computation be internalized in a representation inferred from the present alone? We present Enfold, which transfers this computation into a representation predicted from the current visual context and language instruction. During training, multi-level states exposed as the generator processes the observed future supervise a current-only encoder. The learned representation is fed back to condition future generation and is read by task heads without allowing task gradients to reshape the encoder. At deployment, action prediction no longer executes the generator. Across LIBERO, RoboTwin2.0, and real-robot tasks, Enfold supports strong control while reducing action latency by $3.7\times$ relative to Fast--WAM, Enfold-Flash reaches $10.1\times$. Representation analyses show that it suppresses nuisance variation and preferentially captures changes that emerge over longer horizons. When the current scene is altered by human intervention, both the generated continuation and the executed actions adapt, which is inconsistent with fixed trajectory replay. These results recast a world generator as a source of predictive control representations: its future need not be materialized at every step if its internal structure can be enfolded into the present.

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### Graph Is the Verifier: Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Interprocedural Vulnerability Detection

Authors: Yikun Li, Ting Zhang, Jiakun Liu, Jinfeng Jiang, Yuheng Yieh, Yixin Yang, Wen Bin Leow, Yide Yin, Yintong Huo, Eng Lieh Ouh, Lwin Khin Shar, David Lo
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.CR, cs.AI, cs.SE
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26656v1

Real-world vulnerabilities often span multiple functions, yet most learning-based detectors classify each function in isolation: on a sample of real CVEs, we find that 71.7% of vulnerable functions require evidence from outside the function to be classified correctly. Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) could close this gap by enabling a model to gather that evidence itself, but it lacks a reliable reward, since a reward defined on the final verdict alone can be obtained without performing any investigation. We propose VulAgentRL, an agentic RL framework for interprocedural vulnerability detection built on a Code Property Graph (CPG). The CPG serves two roles: at inference time the policy queries it for callers, callees, dataflow, and other queries, and at training time the same graph verifies the evidence the policy cites. Because every CPG node carries a persistent integer identifier, this verification is an exact comparison rather than a textual match, so the reward credits verdicts that are supported by evidence. We further initialize the policy by distilling teacher investigations, and show that this warm start is necessary, since RL cannot acquire tool-use behavior it never samples. Under a repository-level split that prevents leakage, VulAgentRL outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, including frontier models, on the strict pair-wise-correct metric while issuing fewer tool calls, and its advantage persists on an out-of-distribution corpus and under class imbalance.

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### Constitutional Midtraining: Content Presence Drives Alignment Gains

Authors: Desiree Cho, Cameron Tice, Bernie Hogan, Hunar Batra, Puria Radmard, Jun Zhao, Nigel Shadbolt
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CY, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26654v3

Post-training alignment is often shallow, eroding under fine-tuning. It remains untested as to whether constitutional midtraining interventions can produce durable alignment when cleanly isolated from post-training. We build a 394M-token constitutional corpus from Anthropic's Constitution and apply constitutional midtraining at 120B scale, where principled, values-based content is inserted into midtraining. A 2x2 design (curriculum ordering x deliberative reasoning) was used to produce four constitutionally midtrained conditions, plus a control, which were evaluated on self-generated and established benchmarks including alignment under pressure, value conflict resolution, blackmail, and emergent misalignment. All models were evaluated across three stages: post-midtraining, post-SFT, and post-benign fine-tuning. Constitutionally midtrained models outperformed the control on alignment generalization and durability, notably on blackmail: SFT instilled a blackmail propensity in all models, but constitutional midtraining blunted it, with the advantage surviving benign fine-tuning (-17.5pp). This durability did not extend to settings that required active resistance to in-context pressure or conflict, where the advantage attenuates after SFT. The presence of constitutional content at midtraining also mattered more than its structure, and constitutional midtraining incurred no capability cost, on average, at any stage (MMLU, ARC-Easy, piqa, GSM8K). A modest amount of constitutional content at midtraining could therefore yield broad, persistent alignment gains, offering a cheap, complementary addition to SFT-centered pipelines. Code, data, and models are available.

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### Constitutional Midtraining: Content Presence Drives Alignment Gains

Authors: Desiree Cho, Cameron Tice, Bernie Hogan, Hunar Batra, Puria Radmard, Jun Zhao, Nigel Shadbolt
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CY, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26654v2

Post-training alignment is often shallow, eroding under fine-tuning. It remains untested as to whether constitutional midtraining interventions can produce durable alignment when cleanly isolated from post-training. We build a 394M-token constitutional corpus from Anthropic's Constitution and apply constitutional midtraining at 120B scale, where principled, values-based content is inserted into midtraining. A 2x2 design (curriculum ordering x deliberative reasoning) was used to produce four constitutionally midtrained conditions, plus a control, which were evaluated on self-generated and established benchmarks including alignment under pressure, value conflict resolution, blackmail, and emergent misalignment. All models were evaluated across three stages: post-midtraining, post-SFT, and post-benign fine-tuning. Constitutionally midtrained models outperformed the control on alignment generalization and durability, notably on blackmail: SFT instilled a blackmail propensity in all models, but constitutional midtraining blunted it, with the advantage surviving benign fine-tuning (-17.5pp). This durability did not extend to settings that required active resistance to in-context pressure or conflict, where the advantage attenuates after SFT. The presence of constitutional content at midtraining also mattered more than its structure, and constitutional midtraining incurred no capability cost, on average, at any stage (MMLU, ARC-Easy, piqa, GSM8K). A modest amount of constitutional content at midtraining could therefore yield broad, persistent alignment gains, offering a cheap, complementary addition to SFT-centered pipelines. Code, data, and models are available.

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### AIGen: Automating AI Bill of Materials Generation Through Hybrid MLOps Integration

Authors: Federica Pepe, Daniele Bifolco, Costantino Martignetti, Aureliano D'Amici, Fabiano Izzo, Damian A. Tamburri, Massimiliano Di Penta
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26652v1

The responsible development and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) systems requires rigorous documentation of their constituent artifacts, e.g., datasets, model weights, training pipelines, and runtime dependencies. Although the Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) 3.0 standard introduced native support for AI and dataset profiles, practical tooling capable of generating standards-compliant AI Bills of Materials (AIBoMs) in an automated and extensible manner remains scarce. This paper presents AIGen, a modular AIBoM generator that produces machine-readable, interoperable inventories of AI system components that comply with the SPDX 3.0 AI profile. AIGen works on top of the MLflow MLOps framework and combines mining heuristics with Large Language Models to generate AIBoMs. A plugin interface allows practitioners to extend the tool with domain-specific collectors without modifying the core codebase, supporting heterogeneous AI frameworks such as Hugging Face, PyTorch, and TensorFlow. AIGen is designed to facilitate compliance with the European Union AI Act, the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, and ISO/IEC 42001, providing a concrete, reusable foundation for transparent, accountable AI supply chain governance. Tool URL: https://github.com/danielebifolco/AIGen Tool Video: https://youtu.be/\_nAbXDWfVL4

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### Physically Real-time Infrared Attack against Optical Flow Estimation Networks

Authors: Shen You, Wei Jiang, Jiarui Liu, Yijian Ye, Qiuzhen Lin, Xiangtao Li, Ka-Chun Wong
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26651v1

With the promising performance of deep neural networks on image-based tasks, different real-world applications such as autonomous driving and motion detection have become increasingly mature and relevant to human lives. In particular, Optical Flow Estimation Networks (OFENs), as upstream models, play a critical role in different domains. Its outputs are heavily assumed and adopted for different downstream tasks, and it is essential to test its robustness to prevent safety accidents. We present an approach for real-time attacks on OFENs in the physical world, leveraging infrared lights for their stealthiness. By generating a large number of Adversarial Examples in advance, our approach computes AEs in real time and dynamically displays them, which allows our method to facilitate precise and targeted attacks without modifying the victim system. Unlike previous digital-to-physical attack techniques, our method directly attacks victim models within the physical world, thereby overcoming the limitations associated with the ineffectiveness of AEs. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in compromising OFENs across diverse lighting conditions, varying object motion velocities, and different object placements, ultimately impairing the network's ability to accurately estimate optical flow.

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### The Sparsity Ceiling: Where Spiking Networks Can and Cannot Trade Activity for Energy

Authors: Zeyu Wang
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.NE, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26648v1

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are promoted as an energy-efficient substrate because sparse, event-driven activity replaces dense multiply-accumulates with cheap accumulates. We argue the energy dividend of sparsity is not a property of SNNs but of the task. Holding architecture fixed and swapping only the hidden unit (continuous vs. leaky-integrate-and-fire), plus a two-sided target-firing-rate probe, we measure how far activity can be pushed down before quality breaks. Low-load feed-forward perception sparsifies to 5% firing at no accuracy cost; a recurrent language model cannot go below ~50% -- the recurrent state must stay active to carry information. A spiking Transformer, by contrast, sparsifies freely to 2% (3 seeds) -- so the ceiling is a property of recurrent compression, not sequence modeling. Attention escapes the floor only by storing the full key-value cache, trading a firing floor for a memory wall: on neuromorphic hardware, recurrence and attention pay on different axes, neither escapes. We formalize the ceiling with an information-theoretic bound rho &gt;= H_b^{-1}(log2 M / H) and confirm its predictions: the floor rises with memory load, falls with state width, and (refuting a naive memory-only reading) rises with task difficulty. A layer-wise input floor further caps op reduction under dense input, isolating event-driven perception as where neuromorphic hardware wins.

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### Anchoring and Steering Diffusion: Enhancing the Faithfulness of Text-to-Image Generation at Inference Time

Authors: Xinyi Wang, Yuyang Huang, Yalin Su, Pengcheng Luan, Tao Zhang, Feiming Wei, Wenxian Yu
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26647v1

While text-to-image diffusion models achieve impressive visual quality, they frequently struggle to maintain precise alignment with complex compositional prompts. An effective strategy is to improve the inference process of diffusion models, thereby better leveraging their pretrained priors to address misalignment. Existing training-free methods can be divided into two categories. The first category focuses on improving the randomly sampled initial noise, either performing costly search over noise pools or manipulating sampled noise without ensuring reliable semantic injection. The second category focuses on improving the denoising trajectory, lacking explicit mechanisms to timely diagnose and correct semantic errors. we propose \textbf{AnchorSteer}, a training-free framework that exerts fine-grained control over \textbf{both initialization} and \textbf{the denoising trajectory}. AnchorSteer consists of two synergistic components: \textbf{Semantic Anchoring} replaces uninformative Gaussian noise with text-aligned initializations via CLIP-based prior extraction and a novel Latent-Prior Score Distillation Sampling (LP-SDS) objective. Specifically, LP-SDS distills CLIP visual priors into the knowledge distribution of diffusion models, mitigating the domain gap between CLIP-based priors and diffusion-based priors. \textbf{Reflective Steering} transforms passive denoising with an active Think--Erase--Retouch loop that enables mid-generation self-correction. It leverages VLM-based diagnosis to detect semantic deviations and performs targeted latent refinement to suppress erroneous content and recover missing attributes. Extensive experiments on GenEval and T2I-CompBench++ demonstrate that AnchorSteer consistently outperforms existing baselines in text--image alignment while preserving high visual quality.

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### Genie Sim PanoWorld: An Infinite Indoor 3D World Generation Pipeline via Panoramic Scene Modeling and Simulation

Authors: Yongxin Su, Linjie Hou, Feng Wang, Jialin Tang, Zhijun Li, Qian Wang, Maoqing Yao
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.CV
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26646v1

We address the problem of reconstructing a high-fidelity, freely navigable 3D scene from a single $360^\circ$ panorama, without per-scene optimization or multi-view capture. Existing methods either lack metric trajectory control, which hinders reliable downstream 3D reconstruction, or struggle with large disocclusions under long-range camera motion while requiring high-end multi-GPU servers.We present Genie Sim PanoWorld, a two-stage feed-forward pipeline that bridges generation and reconstruction via an explicit, trajectory-controllable panoramic video. A NavMesh-planned $\mathrm{SE}(3)$ roaming trajectory is injected into a latent video diffusion model through dense geometry-warped conditioning; long--short trajectory mixed training and a self-consistency objective based on shortcut models together yield high-fidelity video in four CFG-free denoising steps. A feed-forward panoramic reconstructor then lifts the generated video into a high-fidelity 3D Gaussian scene that supports real-time, free-viewpoint roaming and can be directly used as a simulation-ready asset for embodied AI applications. Experiments show that Genie Sim PanoWorld outperforms geometry-conditioned baselines in both panoramic video generation and downstream 3D reconstruction, while generalizing zero-shot to unseen indoor scenes.

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### FPSGen: Flexible Point Cloud Scene Generation with BEV-Supported Transport Flows

Authors: Wenzhe He, Meng Wang, JiaWei Qian, Jinfeng Xu, Ying Liu, Ruihui Li
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.CV, cs.AI
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26645v1

Existing point-based generative methods for outdoor scenes primarily focus on LiDAR-conditioned completion. During training, noisy point clouds are constructed by perturbing complete ground-truth scenes, whereas during inference, they are initialized by adding noise to duplicated partial scans. This train-inference mismatch inherits the sparsity and visibility bias of partial scans, leading to sparse distant regions and incomplete geometry in occluded areas. Moreover, the reliance on partial scans restricts generation when LiDAR observations are unavailable or replaced by layout cues. We present FPSGen, a flexible framework that constructs point sources independently of partial scans. FPSGen first predicts a bird's-eye-view (BEV) prior with density, height, and mask channels from the active cues. The density map is then sampled to form a BEV-supported point source, enabling both unconditional and conditioned initialization. A teacher-student approximate optimal transport scheme then uses teacher-predicted endpoints to learn a velocity field that induces straighter transport paths. By integrating BEV point source construction with path-straightening transport, FPSGen provides a unified framework for unconditional and flexible cue-conditioned scene generation. Extensive experiments show that FPSGen achieves state-of-the-art JSD and voxel IoU performance on SemanticKITTI completion while maintaining strong performance with a single point transport step. On KITTI-360 unconditional generation, it also achieves the best Coverage (COV) among the compared methods.

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### Rethinking Self-Evolution: A Constrained Exploration-Exploitation Process for Mitigating Skill Overfitting

Authors: Hongqiang Lin, Chao Liu, Xiaofan Bai, Xuan Jin, Yuhong Li, Nenggan Zheng, Xipeng Cao
Published: 2026-07-29
Categories: cs.AI, cs.LG
arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26643v2

Enabling large language model (LLM) agents to accumulate and reuse experience from past interactions remains a central challenge in real-world applications. A promising solution is to treat skills as trainable states and optimize them in the same way as model parameters in neural network training. However, data-driven skill optimization is prone to overfitting to the limited trajectories collected from real environments. Overexploiting these trajectories overfits the current batch, while unconstrained exploration causes regression on previously solved cases. This tension motivates a constrained search view of skill self-evolution, governed by an exploration--exploitation trade-off. We propose SkillBoost, a three-stage framework that mitigates both risks: structured exploitation localizes observed failures to editable skill components, prior-guided exploration draws on prior knowledge in the LLM to generate diverse repair candidates, and verified acceptance commits a candidate only when it improves performance within a regression bound. Experiments across 23 model--benchmark configurations show that SkillBoost achieves state-of-the-art performance while mitigating overfitting, outperforming both human-crafted and LLM-generated skills. Transfer experiments further show that optimized skills can be reused by other agents on similar tasks.

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